Our beloved poets and their double lives

THE contrasting images of the “garden” and the “citadel”, first expressed in Greek thought, actually reflect a universal human condition. The “garden” is where childhood memories cling to nature, parental love and limitless fond indulgence. Contrarily, the “citadel” is where ambitions replace love, and calculations of pelf and profit overtake unquestioning indulgence. In the “garden”, there is repose; in the “citadel”, war.

Many of the poets we love is because of the time they spent in the garden and not in the citadel. When in the citadel, these very sublime people harboured violent politics that buzzed around them. They lived different lives: in the “citadel”, they advocated force to crush enemies, and as poets in the “garden”, there was none of that; only nature, longing and romance.

For example, William Butler Yeats, Charles Dickens and Ezra Pound had strong views on politics, often of the violent sort. Dickens in the garden wrote about “sweet compassion for the poor”, but in the citadel he saw Hindus as “tigerous villains” needing “extermination”. Yeats supported the fascist ‘Blue Shirts’ and Ezra Pound hated the Jews and rooted for Mussolini and Hitler. He saw virtues in the Ku Klux Klan too.

Yet, when Yeats turned to poetry, there is not a trace of his politics nor of his partisanship with the blue shirts. Instead, in his poem ‘An Irishman Airman Foresees his Death’, he wrote: “I know I shall meet my fate, Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard, I do not love.” Further, “The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind.” The citadel, now just a waste.

In Ezra Pound, too, we find a sorrowful condemnation of how we transact our lives in the citadel. In ‘Ione, Dead the Long Year’, the following lines ring out: “Empty are the ways, Empty are the ways of this land, And the flowers, Bend over with heavy heads. They bend in vain. Empty are the ways of this land.” The flowers here are the pliant, gentle “garden” and the “ways of the land” rule the “citadel” of ambitions.

John Milton enthusiastically supported the overthrow and execution of Charles I. This same man, whose calculated hate was evident in politics, gives no hint of that when in the near musical ‘L’Allegro’, he lyricises: “There on beds of Violets blew, And fresh blown roses washt in dew,… To live with her and live with thee, In unreproved pleasures free; To hear the Lark begin his flight, And singing startle the dull night.”

Lord Byron’s continental fame for his fierce endorsement of Greek and Italian nationalists is widely known. He even joined a secret society of radicals for this cause, but his poetry carried a heady garden scent. At those times, he turned his back on the citadel and wrote soft lines like: “There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is rapture on the lonely shore,… I love not man the less but Nature more…”

What could be more ironical than William Wordsworth’s life. He is widely read in classrooms for his poem on daffodils where clouds and flowers meet in happy harmony. Yet, in the citadel, he opposed the extension of voting rights in Britain’s pursuit of the Great Reforms. This Act of 1832 aimed to rid politics of “rotten boroughs” and extend franchise to the working class. Worse, he also supported slavery.

In 1838, Wordsworth wrote to William Gladstone: “Many applications are made to me to sign the Petition… in favour of immediate abolition of Negro apprenticeship. I refuse to do so, and I am sure I shall never regret that resolution.” He not only overlooked the violence embedded in slavery, but even saw some good in it. Still, this did not keep him from writing about daffodils while wandering around Lake Ullswater’s shores.

Such instances can be multiplied. Stephen Spender was once a Spanish Civil War supporter and a member of the Communist Party, but in ‘The Pylons’, his best-known poem, he regrets how his idyllic rural “emerald country” was being ruined by industrialisation and greed. He bemoaned the loss of beauty: “Over these small hills, they have built the concrete… Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.”

Pablo Neruda, Chile’s most cherished poet, was partisan in the Spanish Civil War and was even accused of endorsing Stalin. His most remembered verses, though, were about love, nature and the sensuality of the garden. Recall here his everlasting line: “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.” In contrast, his poems against Standard Oil and profiteers were stiff, and reeked of the citadel.

Karl Marx left the garden of his youth for the citadel in his mature years. When he was young, he wrote verses full of overripe love and longing. Sample the following: “Look into those eyes so bright, Deeper than the floor of Heaven, Clearer than the sun’s own beaming light.” Later, when in the citadel, he called his verses “idealistic” and “fuzzy”. Marx never returned to the garden.

Yes, Ayatollah Khomeini, too, wandered in the garden. His verses unsettle our views of the man we thought we knew. In the ‘Wine of Love’, he evocatively wrote: “Don’t consort with a wandering dervish, but if you ever do, Never ask him about wisdom, philosophy, scripture, or sayings of the prophet. I am drunk with the wine of thy love, so from such a drunkard, Don’t ask for the sober counsel of a man of the world.”

The “man of the world” is the man in the citadel but it is the garden that offers reprieve. Without the magic of verse, the world would clearly be much worse!

— The writer taught sociology at JNU