A song for our times

But it was not always that way. A thousand years ago, and a thousand years before that, poets were the superheroes of their day. Knights might win honor on the tournament ground and warriors might triumph on the battlefield, but it was the poet who kept those honors alive by entertaining the court in the Great Hall in front of the fire, recounting the exploits of the knight and warrior, or whoever else he chose to honor.

No doubt great deeds were performed on the field of Troy, but the warriors didn’t write about them. If it hadn’t been for Homer, we wouldn’t know the history of Troy, and if it weren’t for Virgil, we wouldn’t know the history of Rome.

What poets said was important, and what Mr. Yeats said was so important to Mr. Achebe that he wrote a novel to expand on Mr. Yeats’ poem:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ...”

If we were accustomed nowadays to sit in a Great Hall and a poet intoned those lines after the evening meal, every man present would drink deeply, stare into the fire and think that the gods had truly inspired this bard.

Doesn’t it ring true? Paul Krugman, NY Times’ editorialist and recent Nobel Laureate in economics, recently referred to this poem, supposing the falconer to be Treasury Secretary Paulson, the falcon the world economy and anarchy, in the form of a world depression, about to cover the earth.

In Mr. Achebe’s case the great disaster was the coming of the white man and his destruction of the stable, native cultures he found in Africa. Whites, in the form of missionaries and government representatives, thought themselves so superior to the locals that they treated them like children, or animals. They despised the religions, the culture and the government they found there and ran roughshod over all, leaving anarchy in their wake.

In our day, we have been trampled by investment bankers and adventurers who resisted any form of governmental restraint and then, when their house of cards collapsed around them, had no shame in pleading with that despised government to bail them out. And our two senators picked up their buckets and bailed with gusto.

Read the poem again. Perhaps in a year or two a contemporary poet will write the verse that will inform future generations of our disaster.

Willis Cook is a retired electrical engineer who was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He lives on Varner Road in Franklin County.