Then and Now
The gallery faces return: I name their names,
These powers invading dreams, who being dead
Are more alive, because of what they mean,
Than all the living, ignorant of need.
King Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere
And a whole mythos for a Holy Grail;
Achilles’ wrath, thoughts of Troy—being there
As Helen causes human towers to fall.
These figures rise up now, condemn the now:
Our unheroic age of buttons pressed,
Humans depressed, and reasons which all show
Pride in packaging our powerlessness.
Deserving what we have: society’s
A eunuch posing with unbuttoned flies.
James Sale has had over 50 books published, most recently, “Mapping Motivation for Top Performing Teams” (Routledge, 2021). He has been nominated by The Hong Kong Review for the 2022 Pushcart Prize for poetry, has won first prize in The Society of Classical Poets 2017 annual competition, and performed in New York in 2019. He is a regular contributor to The Epoch Times. His most recent poetry collection is DoorWay. For more information about the author, and about his Dante project, visit https://englishcantos.home.blog. To subscribe to his brief, free and monthly poetry newsletter, contact him at [email protected].
James this is a masterful piercing of the veil of the modern cultural scene in this unheroic age and referral back to those times truly to be valued and studied. Great work!
Thanks Roy – first out again! Appreciate your kind and encouraging remarks. Of course, it’s one thing writing about heroes in war, but another being one oneself – and serving in the forces as you have. But we all have to serve in our own way – or more exactly, the way we feel called: even writers can be heroes, perhaps! Let’s not forget Alexander the Great’s reaction to news when he considered the highest possible outcome would be that Homer would come back from the dead!
A delightful allegory! Just love it
Really pleased, Jenna – to love poetry is great indeed, and to love this particular example of it rejoices me greatly!
What a devastating comment on the degradation of modern society, and how the cultural memory of what once was rises up in dreams to haunt the speaker. I am especially taken with the first quatrain, which creates a powerful interplay of dreams and reality, life and death. knowledge and ignorance, and our crying need for meaning.
The second quatrain gives a mini-catalogue of figures and myths from our heroic past. The mention of Achilles’ wrath, Helen’s fatal and fateful beauty, and the Grail legend give the lie to any critique of this poem as merely nostalgic or sentimental — the myths of the West are packed with suffering, bloodshed, and conflict. But they are also about Western identity and self-respect and a willingness to fight even to the death.
And this remembrance leads to the third quatrain, where the summoned-up figures allow us to judge and condemn the gutless cowardice and degeneracy that exist now, in a Western world flooded with lies, corruption and alien vermin. And that last closing couplet, about a society that is “A eunuch posing with unbuttoned flies” is a real slap in the face, if you as a reader haven’t yet gotten the point.
Sometimes a sonnet can be as painful as a kick in the solar plexus.
Thanks Joe – love your response to the poem! Poetry certainly should ‘move’ us, and it’s great for me to know this has – very grateful for your insightful commentary.
James, I love the way you draw upon the lessons from literary legends to create a powerful sonnet on the sorry and sick state of society today. I would be giggling at the image in the closing couplet if the words weren’t so damningly and horrifically true. Instead they have cut me to the quick with a painful jolt into a reality that seems as far from real as I can imagine. A wake up call indeed!
Thanks Susan – glad you got that giggle! But jolt too!
Oh, James, this excellent sonnet broke my heart. I feel like we are in a war trying to salvage all we can of the glories of Western civilization even as we are under being infiltrated, colonized and brainwashed by those who hate not only our culture but who have gone to war with History itself. The Arthurian and Trojan legends represent so much of a past which is not only glorious but essential. I feel as if I’m watching the burning of the Library at Alexandria in real time and powerless to stop it.
The burning of the Library of Alexandria is itself a powerful image, Brian, and add to it the Iconoclasts of the Byzantine empire, together with the Reformers and Puritans of the C16th and C17th, and we have near perfect depictions of the malevolent fundamentalists who are arising today under the guise of some utopian madness or other. So much learning lost – as ignorance masquerades as spirituality. Yes, weep we must – and still continue to fight for what is right! Thank you.
And, of course, the Chinese communists in the course of the Cultural Revolution and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution — especially anything associated with religion.
Love this. The last line is a great image, but what really struck me was, “Pride in packaging our powerlessness,” giving us three strong stresses with the alliterative syllables, while having the weak ‘-ing’ and ‘-less’ in the stressed positions, mimicking the theme of the line itself—or at least so it seemed to me. A devastating critique, indeed.
ABB — that is a very sharp reading. I would not call the whole line a Molossus strictly, since in classical metrics the Molossus is three long syllables, but in English we might say it produces a Molossic effect: a sequence of 3 heavy stresses, reinforced by the plosive alliteration — Pride / pack- / pow-.
And yes, the beauty of your point is that the emphatic surface is undercut by the weak endings: -ing, -less, -ness. So the line becomes metrically and phonetically ironic: it sounds forceful whilst articulating helplessness. The pride is all in the packaging – and metrically it falls away. In other words, it’s fictive and it’s also mimetic!
I too think this an excellent poetical commentary on our sad present and its
total lack of character. Just the last two lines, which are wonderful, are aggravating my grammatical police. Wouldn’t it be more grammatical to say society’s/
eunuchs posing with unbuttoned flies or, barring that, unbuttoned fly referring to the single eunuch? Or maybe I just don’t know enough about eunuchs.
Hi jd, thanks for your response and for raising this. It may be worth clarifying that “society’s” here is not the possessive but the contracted form of “society is”—exactly as in expressions such as “life’s too short” or “England’s won.” The enjambment delays that recognition by a fraction of a second, which I rather like because it momentarily unsettles the reader before the metaphor lands. While we’re on the subject of grammar, some readers might also wonder whether it should be “an eunuch.” Historically, that form was indeed common, but modern English follows pronunciation rather than spelling: because eunuch begins with the consonantal “yoo” sound, standard usage is “a eunuch,” just as we write a university, a European and a eulogy. Poetry certainly allows us to bend grammar when the poem requires it—but in this case, the grammar is actually doing exactly what I intended.
I share your sentiments, James, and have recently completed a poem about “then and now” as well. I read and hear about some of the horrors going on in Great Britain and I often think of you. Thank you for such an excellent sonnet which gives poetic voice to what we all know and feel!
Dear Theresa – thank you so much. Look forward to reading your own poem on this topic. Yes, horrors are going on in the UK – most horrible of all is the subtle (and not so subtle) erosions of our freedoms and our speech. There is something very totalitarian about our current government – we are almost lost. But, of course, as I believe in hope, and as I also subscribe to the old adage, The darkest hour is just before the dawn, then maybe some glittering salvation awaits us.
This is a powerful poem that packs its punch right from the very first quatrain, describing the legendary dead as more alive than the living. You maintain that energy and leave us with a stunning and fitting image in the final couplet. I could not think of a better description for our age, but I also see signs of it coming mercifully to an end.
Thanks Adam – and I pray you are right!
condemn the now – great line, Sir James.
I’d write more, but I must press other buttons to keep the lights on over here.
Keep the lights on Michael – it’s vital! And thanks.
Yes, a very powerful commentary that says so much in so condensed a space/ The magic of the sonnet.
Thanks Tom – yes, the sonnet is a magical form, possibly my favourite of all English (though of course derived from the Italian) forms. It packs a punch – and for those who want something bigger, then there’s always the series of them!
Yes, we need to be reading and re-reading Homer and Mallory! And if Mallory via the Boy’s King Arthur with Wyeth’s wonderful illustrations, so be it.
Good advice Nathan – totally agree.