Lately, I’ve
been revisiting the collected works of my favorite poet,
the Irish laureate W.B. Yeats, and as always find myself
mesmerized by his mastery of order and form and his meditative
profundity. The American poet and critic Randall Jarrell
once said that “A good poet is someone who manages,
in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be
struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two
dozen times and he is great.” Yeats has been luminously
charred by poetic lightning more times than I can count.
One poem that
has stayed with me over the years and continues to resonate
is “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” a masterpiece
composed in a style known as ottava rima, a form
catering to reminiscence and reflection with a long history
in Italian and English verse. Yeats is studying the portraits
of his friends that hang in the Gallery and recalling
the qualities that made each one memorable, even extraordinary.
Three in particular stand out: Kevin O’Higgins,
Ireland’s first minister of justice, assassinated
by an IRA bullet; Yeats’ benefactress and collaborator
Lady Augusta Gregory; and John Synge, the most famous
and controversial playwright of the Irish literary renaissance
of the early 20th century.
We might say
that O’Higgins personified courage and patriotism;
Lady Gregory, generosity of spirit; and Synge, the fearless
creative temperament — in Yeats’ words, a
triumvirate representing “Irish history in their
lineaments.” All three, for Yeats, were exemplars
of moral heroism and high intelligence, truly splendid
people, of whom he writes:
These were
the qualities that Yeats felt made life bearable, that
gave hope and sustenance to the troubled and dispossessed
mind of contemporary man living in an increasingly desolate
and broken world. Friendship with good and intelligent
people, people of courage, generosity, and creative spirit,
was the perfume of existence in a malodorous era.
This is something
I can well understand since my own friends — those
steadfast souls who struggle for clarity of insight and
are concerned for the health of the wider community —
are few but cherished. They are better than I am but make
me better than I was. I ask myself what this handful of
admirable people have in common and conclude that the
attributes they share are easy to identify and enumerate.
They try not
to commit harm. Although they may not be doctors, they
have internalized the Hippocratic Oath. They will put
themselves in harm’s way to counter and mitigate
harm to others. They eschew violence. In matters of public
policy — for example, considerations of public health,
economic realities, political questions, and environmental
factors — they do not act or pronounce without first
analyzing the relevant issues dispassionately. They are
capable of arriving at resolutions that may thwart or
neutralize their wishes or emotional bent by going where
the evidence appears to lead, not where their desires
may take them. They are capable of change. They are influenced
by derivable facts, not by theories and myths.
This is another
way of saying that they believe in the existence of truth
— not your truth or my truth, not group truth or
ideological truth, but discernible truth — unlike
that first postmodernist Pontius Pilate who washed his
hands of the whole matter. At the same time, they know
that no human being enjoys a divine lien on truth, but
that by the honest exertion of their efforts, they can
arrive at what we may call credible verisimilitude.
I admire these
people because they think as individuals, because they
seek objective evidence that can confirm or disconfirm
the positions they adopt, because they are committed to
upholding, in the words of John Locke, “life, liberty,
and estate,” which informed the American Declaration
of Independence, and because they are trustworthy and
do not betray their friends — or their principles.
They are the remnant of better times. I do not name them,
but they know who they are.
Paying tribute
to nobility of soul, so rare a phenomenon in our current
time, we would all do well to continue visiting and revisiting
our own Municipal Gallery housing the likenesses of those
with whom we wish to maintain a relation of intellectual
intimacy and ethical kinship, people whose moral axioms
are almost vascular and whose intelligence transcends
specific talents and segmented expertise. We are blessed
in knowing such people, who justify the struggle for cultural
sanity and personal integrity. As Yeats attested in the
concluding couplet of his great and moving poem:
