Inauguration Day is the day in the United States when poetry and politics combine. The tradition of poets speaking their words at Inaugurations is long and telling. The choice of poet tells us a bit about the new President’s outlook, heart and sensibilities. Or so we’d like to think. I look forward to hearing Elizabeth Alexander’s poem later today (UK time) and I wish her well on what must be an important and scary moment in her own life.
But as we have all come to know, Mr. Obama has no trouble finding beautiful words of his own. He is known to be an avid reader of poetry and has even admitted to writing and even publishing a couple of his own poems in the early 1980’s. Of course I’m not so naive as to imagine that Barack writes all his own speeches. But the choice of speech writer is important as well, and no matter who writes the words, it gives me great hope to hear him choose to say such poetic statements as:
What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in
our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal
not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.
As a person who has chosen to live her adult life outside of her native country, and especially as one who came to political awareness during what I call “the age of assassinations,” it is not surprising that my personal relationship with the US is complicated and volatile. The past eight years has made it especially so. But I will be glued to my television today as I watch Barack Obama take his oath. I will be getting all dressed up to attend the Democrats Abroad “Inaugural Ball.” And I know I will be doing it all with a lump in my throat and a prayer that this hope that so many of us have newly found now in the midst of a world full of danger and threat, will not be a hope dashed.
Comparisons between Obama and Kennedy are everywhere. I’d rather not look too closely at those similarities. They are too dangerous, too unstable. But as I was thinking about poetry and the presidency, I realized that although I always knew that Robert Frost spoke at JFK’s Inauguration, I never knew what poem he read. Shame on me. And as it turns out, he didn’t read one at all. Although he had written a poem especially for the occasion, the sun’s glare was too bright that day for him to see the paper it had been written on. So instead he spoke a poem from memory, one he had written before, but one which was just as inspirational a choice. I thought I’d share it with you now:
The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
— Robert Frost
Good luck President Obama. Good luck to us all.
Sadly I shall be tucked up in my bed when this is going on, but I hope it’s wonderful.
I love the poem.
What did you think of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem? I thought it was stunning and her diction was memorizing.
Enjoy the ball!
Sue, I was so diappointed with the poem read at today’s inauguration that I went back and read this Frost. Then, I read your blog. You always speak directly to my heart, in your poems and in your blogs.
Your friend, Mary
What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.
Wonderful.
I thought Elizabeth Alexander’s poem was simple and lovely.
Let us know how the ball goes.
I watched it in a tapas bar in Swindon…when he spoke about his Dad not being able to eat in certain restaurants it really hit home just how much the world has changed for the better. With all the crap that’s going on at the moment it is easy to forget that some things have got better 🙂
C x