“In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” asked Bertolt Brecht in 1939. The answer, of course, is yes: “There will also be singing / Of the dark times.” Why has poetry been so important in periods of political defeat?
This is a question I thought about often during Donald Trump’s first presidency, and which comes up again now. It was common then for people to say we were living in dark times, as it no doubt will be in the months and years to come. I had my own reasons for thinking about this: I was writing a PhD about political disillusionment after the English Civil War (1642–49) and how it led people to seek refuge in poetry. At the same time, I was teaching in a prison in New Jersey, an experience that led me to think about literature’s relationship to despair in a practical way. I wondered, as I wrote my syllabus each semester, which texts would speak to my students without depressing them.
One day, I brought into class the opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost:
Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into our world . . .
I explained how the poem’s rhythm works by alternating between stressed and unstressed syllables. Then I asked the class to read it aloud with me: “Of MAN’S first DIS-o-BE-dience AND the FRUIT.” After we did this, one of the students — I’ll call him Mark — put up his hand.
The first line can be read disobediently, Mark said. I asked him to say more. To make the rhythm work, he explained, “disobedience” must have four syllables, but it could also have five: dis-o-be-di-ence. The reader must choose to obey. This was a brilliant insight: a choice at the beginning of Milton’s epic between obedience and disobedience, order and rebellion. Mark had recognized the poem’s major themes after only seeing the smallest fragment of it.
Milton wrote Paradise Lost at a dark time in his own life. Halfway through, the poet…
Auteur: Orlando Reade
