Photo of recently torn down Christopher Columbus Statue

Poetry on the Tearing Down of Christopher Columbus and Other Statues

The Society

June 20, 2020

Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Poetry

18 Comments

18 Responses

1. 

   Mike Bryant June 20, 2020

   Joe T,
   In small town America, we’re still hunting and fishing, going to high school football games and little league. We stand for the Flag and kneel only to God. When the radicals come to town, they get so bored that they soon move back to the big cities. Your poem is perfectly wrought and absolutely true in that we will all have to pick sides. I just read that a large part of rural Oregon is pushing to secede and join Idaho. I think that is what many states will eventually have to do. Why should conservatives pay for the madness? Maybe we’ll end up with two countries. The USA Conservative and the USA Wacko. Then people can vote with their feet. Of course I pray for a return to sanity.

   Reply
2. 

   Mike Bryant June 20, 2020

   Evan,
   Your poem is truthful and hard-hitting. In being so clueless about history, they’re bound to repeat it. This site is like a light in the darkness.

   Reply
3. 

   Susan Jarvis Bryant June 20, 2020

   These two topical, spot-on, creative yet informative poems afford the reader more honesty than any MSM article, such is the duplicity of the world today. My heartfelt thanks to both of you.

   Reply
4. 

   Margaret Coats June 20, 2020

   Joe, this is one of your best!

   Evan, you’ve erected a lasting statue to Columbus. Let me place beside it an older one by an English poet. Columbus was arrested and taken back to Spain in fetters in 1500 because of complaints from both Spaniards and native Americans. After investigation in Spain he was freed but his position as territorial governor was taken away. The poet speaks for Columbus preparing for his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502.

   COLUMBUS TO HIS FETTERS
   by Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907)

   Ye solemn fetters, that I love to keep
   An iron proof of man’s injustice here,
   Until such day as, laid within my bier,
   Ye shall surround me in my final sleep.

   Each link is the reward they made me reap
   For some hard link of thought, for some slow year
   Of patient struggle; what they made me wear
   For a new world across the appalling deep.

   I feel a pang of pleasure at your sight,
   A thrill of that excruciating joy
   Which He felt once, beneath the Roman rod,

   And keep you now to show how kings requite,
   To teach Success what woes are its alloy,
   And chain me through eternity to God.

   Reply
5. 

   Evan Mantyk June 20, 2020

   Thank you to the Bryants for your kind words.

   Margaret, what a wonderful poem! I was unaware of its existence and shall add it to the Columbus poems I sometimes give my students (which include Joaquin Miller’s famous “Columbus” poem and “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue”).

   Reply
6. 

   Joe Tessitore June 20, 2020

   Thank you Margaret, Susan and Mike very much.

   Reply
7. 

   Damian Robin June 21, 2020

   Thank you for these three noble poems.

   They show finely how alive the sonnet is and how it is developing for new needs. The first traditional vessel (though with rhyme and line length adaptations) into storms towards a new, spiritually-linked world.

   Reply
   • 

     Margaret Coats June 22, 2020

     Yes, Damian, these poems are pushing the limits of the sonnet. I had noted that Evan Mantyk’s “Christopher Columbus” is the only hexameter couplet sonnet I have ever seen, with a volta at line 13, where sonnet critic John Fuller says it should be for the English or Shakespearean sonnet. Now that you mention it, Joe Tessitore’s “Juneteenth” is a trimeter poem of 14 lines with English rhyme scheme in the octave and Italian rhyme scheme in the sestet, if sonnet critics here at SCP allow me to use sonnet terms about the poem. And Cal the Wise almost wrote a rare square sonnet in “At Golden Gate Park.” If he had added two more lines, there would be 14 lines of 14 syllables each. Maybe he could still do it.

     Reply
8. 

   Joseph S. Salemi June 21, 2020

   Christopher Colombus, Admiral of the Spanish Fleet, is and will always be infinitely superior to the nameless street-scum who are destroying his statues.

   Reply
9. 

   Dave Whippman June 23, 2020

   Topical and hard-hitting. The BLM crowd and their allies won’t be happy until they’ve done a Khmer Rouge on us and all history has been erased. I hope your poems help in the fightback.

   Reply
10. 

    Lew Icarus Bede June 23, 2020

    First off, I think that Mr. Salemi is correct about Christopher Columbus. I do think the admiral was admirable. My favourite poem on him is Barlow’s epic Columbiad. Here are some thoughts on Barlow’s poem from an unpublished essay of mine on Romanticism [Forgive misspellings.]:

    Another writer, who, like Crabbe, was unwilling to give up sense, was the American poet Joel Barlow, who, in addition to being an American minister to France, had been a school teacher, a store manager, a newspaper editor, a chaplain in the army, and a failed lawyer. In his frequently overlooked production The Columbiad, he transformed an earlier work, The Vision of Columbus, into a vast panorama of America. Barlow begins his epic with Vergil in the background, “Arma virumque cano,” but with similar confidence and boldness.
    “I sing the Mariner who first unfurl’d
    An eastern banner o’er the western world,
    And taught mankind where future empires lay
    In these fair confines of descending day…”
    We soon learn that this Mariner, Christopher Columbus, has come to a sad state indeed, one that the Romantics frequently liked to indulge in:
    “Slaves, kings, adventurers, envious of his name,
    Enjoy’d his labours and purloin’d his fame,
    And gave the Viceroy, from his high seat hurl’d,
    Chains for a crown, a prison for a world.
    Long overwhelm’d in woes, and sickening there,
    He met the slow still march of black despair,
    Sought the last refuge from his hopeless doom,
    And wish’d from thankless men a peaceful tomb…”
    that is,
    “Till vision’d ages, opening on his eyes,
    Cheer’d his sad soul, and bade new nations rise;
    He saw the Atlantic heaven with light o’ercast,
    And Freedom crown his glorious work at last.”

    What Barlow invokes is the power of Freedom:
    “Almighty Freedom! give my venturous song
    The force, the charm that to thy voice belong…”
    for he accepted the dictum of William Lisle Bowles, “The cause of Freedom is the cause of God”; the Homeric invocation is not enough for him.
    “Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,
    Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee.”
    And though Barlow’s verse may not rise to Homer’s dynamic, or Vergil’s compressed, dactylic hexameters, it does attain a high degree of artistic force. Even in Columbus’ plight, Barlow’s language is finely-tuned and picturesque:
    “Night held on old Castile her silent reign,
    Her half orb’d moon declining to the main;
    O’er Valladolid’s regal turrets hazed
    The drizzly fogs from dull Pisuerga raised;
    Whose hovering sheets, along the welkin driven,
    Thinn’d the pale stars, and shut the eye from heaven.
    Cold-hearted Ferdinand his pillow prest,
    Nor dream’d of those his mandates robb’d of rest,
    Of him who gemm’d his crown, who stretched his reign
    To those that weigh’d the tenfold poise of Spain;
    Who now beneath his tower indungeoned lies,
    Sweats the chill sod and breathes inclement skies.”

    Columbus, who is in despair and in prison, is shown a series of extraordinary views of the Americas. In the beginning, the Americas are described by “mountains, rivers, lakes, soil, and some of the natural productions.” One example, amidst the rich descriptions of various rushing rivers, that of the Great Lakes, suffices to show Barlow’s adept handling of natural description:
    “Now where the lakes, those midland oceans, lie,
    Columbus turn’d his heaven-illumined eye.
    Ontario’s banks, unable to retain
    The five great Caspians from the distant main,
    Burst with the ponderous mass, and forceful whirl’d
    His Laurence forth, to balance thus the world.
    Above bold Erie’s wave sublimely stood,
    Look’d o’er the cliff, and heaved his headlong flood;
    Where dread Niagara bluffs high his brow,
    And frown defiance to the world below.
    White clouds of mist expanding o’er him play,
    That tinge their skirts in all the beams of day;
    Pleased Iris wantons in perpetual pride,
    And bends her rainbows o’er the dashing tide.
    Far glimmering in the north, bleak Huron runs,
    Clear Michigan reflects a thousand suns,
    And bason’d high, on earth’s broad bosom gay,
    The bright Superior silvers down the day.”

    In the extensive use of personification, the placing of striking, emphatic verbs and nouns, the subtle and overt uses of alliteration, and mythological forays, Barlow models Homer. The following passage near the end of “Book One” reveals another element of Barlow’s style, its lushness:
    “But warmer suns, that southern zones emblaze,
    A cool thin umbrage o’er their woodlands raise;
    Florida’s shores their blooms around him spread.
    And Georgian hills erect their shady head;
    Whose flowery shrubs regale the passing air
    With all the untasted fragrance of the year.
    Beneath tall trees, dispersed in loose array,
    The rice-grown lawns their humble garb display;
    The infant maize, unconscious of its worth,
    Points the green spire and bends the foliage forth;
    In various forms unbidden harvests rise,
    And blooming life repays the genial skies.

    Where Mexic hills the breezy gulph defend,
    Spontaneous groves with richer burdens bend.
    Anana’s stalk its shaggy honors yields,
    Acassia’s flowers perfume a thousand fields,
    Their cluster’d dates the mast-like palms unfold,
    The spreading orange waves a load of gold,
    Connubial vines o’ertop the larch they climb,
    Long-lived olive mocks the moth of time,
    Pomona’s pride, that old Granada claims,
    Here smiles and reddens in diviner flames;
    Pimento, citron scent the sky serene,
    While woolly clusters fringe the cotton’s green,
    The sturdy fig, the frail deciduous cane
    And foodful cocoa fan the sultry plain.”

    In the richness of some of his descriptions, one could say he was Keatsian, but that is certainly a misnomer, since he is obviously preKeatsian. Unfortunately, Barlow’s The Columbiad, America’s most accomplished epic, albeit a disjointed work, is undeservedly relegated to an unreadable status, by critics who haven’t the stamina for grandeur or the stomach for gravel. Still, its broad canvas is a refreshing alternative to much of the Romantic canon.

    Reply
11. 

    El Edwi Escubar June 23, 2020

    1. Seven years ago, Mr. Mantyk told me he was related to the Taino, which I believe adds a dimension to his poem.

    2. Back then, after having read a translation of Christopher Columbus’ journal, I wrote the following prose-poem.

    C. C. Note on the Taino
    by El Edwi Escubar

    “It was October 12th, in 1492, when we arrived at a small island. Presently we saw some naked people, and decided to, in an armed boat, go to the shore and leave the sea. We took the royal standard, banners, F and Y.

    On landing, we observed some fruit trees, very green, and lots of water too beneath the azure sky. I, C. C., claimed possession of the island X for king and queen of Spain, as was my duty.

    I gave them red caps and beads to place around their necks, and many other things, which gave them pleasure, so that we might be friends, for I knew that with trinkets they’d be more easily converted to our holy faith. It truly was a marvel to observe.

    They afterwards came up to us in the ship’s boats where we were, swimming, bringing parrots, cotton threads in skeins, and darts, which we exchanged for beads and bells. In fine, they took, and gave the things that they possessed with good will. It appeared to me they were themselves quite poor in everything. They were buck-naked, yes, as when their mothers bore them; mostly youths, made well, with very handsome countenances and physiques.

    Their hair is short and coarse, almost like horsetail hairs. Their skin, between those dark and light, is brownish pink, which they paint black or white or red. They neither care nor know of armor, for I showed them swords, and they caressed them by the blade and cut themselves through err. They have no iron, although they have darts to spray, some with a fish’s tooth displayed. They should be good as servants, for they are intelligent and take
    in quickly what is said to them. They also would be Christians easily. The only beasts I saw were parrots.”

    From this brief sketch one can see why Christopher Columbus is hated by the Social Justice Communists. Of course, from this New Millennial perspective there are thoughts of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) that I do not appreciate as well, for example, the pressing idea of servitude in that time, which could be found everywhere on the Globe.

    Reply
12. 

    Cal Wes Ubideer June 24, 2020

    Despite Ms. Coats’ interesting suggestion of Mr. Ubideer “adding two more lines” to write a square sonnet, “At Golden Gate Park” was meant to be a dodeca—a dozen lines of iambic heptameter. If Mr. Ubideer had wanted to make a square poem, he would undoubtedly have used a bilding [sic], a Postmodernist structure invented by Uwe Carl Diebes—a poem of 12 x 12 lines in interlocking terza rima, i. e., a poem of 144 syllables.

    But, and here is the part of Ms. Coats’ comment that is most interesting, “these poems are pushing the limits of the sonnet”; for that is the main reason for similar structures, like the bilding and the tennos. It was also the reason for other structures, such as a Postmodernist American sonnet.

    Reply
    • 

      Margaret Coats June 25, 2020

      If you return here, please tell me the rhyme scheme of the bilding, as you have said more about it here than Mr. Bede did in the 31 Sonnets Essay. Is it ababcbcdcdad (with a rounding strategy for close) or ababcbcdcdxd (unrhymed line to signal closure)? Also, is there an example for the reading public? Perhaps my search engine could not find one because it presents the poem but does not mention the form name. Thanks!

      Reply
13. 

    Lew Icarus Bede June 26, 2020

    In my many years of writing, no one has asked me about the bilding. No one. Not Richard Wilbur, not Dana Gioia; and no one here @ SCP, until June 25, 2020, when the talented Margaret Coats did. I had not thought anyone was really interested in new poetic structures, and had thought our generation was interested in only free verse, antipoetry, prose-poetry, and, for the traditionalists, the iambic pentameter, [here @ SCP, the sonnet] followed by loose tetrameters.

    How the Bilding Came About

    My poetic life has been in search of a line. It has only been since this last decade that I have settled in to the ballad’s iambic heptameter, s being natural to the language, and hefty enough to deal with great swaths…of events, of people, of intellectual heights, etc. It is not perfect. But it is where I am. My only solace is that no other writer in English, or in any language, has achieved it—though we of this World have tried.

    In that sense, Poetry is perpetually in crisis/evolution; though no more so than archaeology, architecture, art, aviation, biology, business, chemistry, economics, engineering, film, geography, history, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, philosophy, physics, politics, religion, technology, etc.

    After teenage inclinations of iambic tetrameter and the English sonnet, I began to study literature and writing at the University of Washington in Seattle, from the Middle Ages and Italianates, like Chaucer, to the Modernists, like Williams and Pound. All along the way I was searching for a poetic line.

    When I was stationed in Germany in the late 1970s, the search for a line became for me almost manic. I tried everything I could think of, from a seventeen syllable haiku-like line with a Williams backdrop to interlocking terza rima, from sixteen syllable unrhymed octets to a whole panoply of sonnets and sonnet-built structures. After all, Chaucer himself brings the Italian line into English, and it is well established here @ SCP.

    Living in Germany, away from America, and studying the German mind (Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, etc.) led me to the bilding. There, in a Bau-Haus mood, I wanted a square. (Das) Bild in German means picture, including associations with photograph, painting, illustration, portrait, scene, drawing, and sight. I wanted the bilding to be a flash, an insight, a glimpse, as if one was taking a picture with a camera. In short, I wanted a modern form for a modern time.

    But the bilding evolved, just as so many of my structures have evolved. At the beginning, when I was in an anti-metrical phase, there were twelve syllables in each line—meter be damned. It was very mathematical and abstract. It was more visual than aural, unlike the tennos, which is more aural than visual. Of course, historically, this all does come out of Dante, via Shelley, with Wallace Stevens in the background.

    Ms. Coats is right on target, when she noted both the “rounding”, anti-sonnet/anti-iambic-pentameter, squaring strategy, which I used, often with a Fibonacci split (89/55), and an open rhyme to launch into a lengthier poem, here occasionally using a Fibonacci split (144/89), etc.

    An Example

    Most readers here @ SCP will not be interested in this, but I will share it with Ms. Coats, who, like my wife and I, home-schooled our children, my wife a brilliant scholar in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, inter alia. My kids, when young, read the Bible entire in Hebrew and Greek, and read works from Homer to Caesar in Greek and Latin.

    Edwe Bleca Ruís

    On The Ruins of a Spaniard
    “Of these I found myself liking most, for reasons I can’t determine, “On the Ruins of a Spaniard.”
    —John Rosenwald

    Raúl de Cwesibe is a writer whose work I have come to know fairly well. I suppose it is hardly too much to say, from the get-go, however, that his oeuvre is flawed throughout: his lines jingle as often as Chaucer’s, he uses rhyme like a Spenserean sot, he is more addicted to sonnets than even a lovelorn Shakespeare, his utilization of esoteric knowledge is worse than Donne’s; his didacticism competes with that of Dryden, Pope, and Samuel Johnson; his use of alliteration is worse than Poe’s or Tennyson’s; his poems are as unpopular as those of Dickinson or Hopkins in their lifetimes; and he can be as mind-numbing as T. S. Eliot or as idiotic as Pound. However, with all that in mind, there are some poems of his I find interesting; take, for instance, an example from the second decade of the 21st century AD: On the Ruins of a Spaniard. It follows:
    On the Ruins of a Spaniard,
    Who Presently Is Called a Siglo de Oro Poet,
    Near Which Lies His Family’s Estate:
    Look Well On His Heredity.

    Your print upon the earth was tenuous, and yet
    one still can find some lettered words to indicate
    that you were once alive. I will not soon forget
    those fields that yielded bread, your family’s estate,
    a respite from your many travels from Seville,
    to Córdoba, to Salamanca, drawn by fate,
    off to Valladolid, and Monterrey, God’s will,
    itself a small town lost in time and northern Spain.
    You moved along 6th longitude, that parallel
    that crosses many rivers to the western drain
    of the Atlantic. O, your tears no longer wet
    those places that you shun, Francisco de Medrano.

    Here is a poem whose title immediately begs for clarification, On the Ruins of a Spaniard, Who Presently is Called a Siglo de Oro Poet, Near Which Lies His Family’s Estate: Look Well on His Heredity. It is an allusion to a sonnet written by Francisco de Medrano (1570-1607), to whom Cwesibe addresses this apostrophe. Cwesibe obviously is playing off of Medrano’s title in his title, with a pun on the name of the Medrano family estate embedded in an allusion to Shelley’s Ozymandias within a sentence. Medrano’s poem too bears seeing, which seems to be one of Cwesibe’s ulterior purposes. It likewise follows:

    Soneto XXVI
    A las ruinas de Itálica,
    que ahora llaman Sevilla la Vieja,
    junto de las cuales está
    su heredamiento Mirarbueno
    Estos de pan llevar campos ahora,
    fueron un tiempo Itálica. Este llano
    fue templo. Aquí a Teodosio, allí a Trajano
    puso estatuas su patria vencedora.
    En este cerco fueron Lamia y Flora
    llama y admiración del vulgo vano;
    en este cerco el luchador profano
    del aplauso esperó la voz sonora.
    ¡Cómo feneció todo, ay!; mas erguidas,
    a pesar de fortuna y tiempo, vemos
    estas y aquellas piedras combatidas.
    Pues si vencen la edad y los estremos
    del mal, piedras calladas y sufridas,
    suframos, Amarilis, y callemos.
    Medrano’s sonnet is a real gem. His language in A las ruinas de Italica… is remarkable
    because it is so pure, echoically beautiful and rhetorically refined. I am impressed by his rhymes,
    his allusions, his rhythms, his alliteration, his assonance, and his Horatian constructions, all done
    with a surety of expertise and a sympathy of expression. His time-worn theme! is uniquely his,
    his voice is individual and communal, and his diction is sonorous and soothing. The opening line
    of the sestet is as surprising and complex as its final line is unexpected and simple. I suspect that
    Cwesibe would agree with me on much, if not most, of what I’ve averred.
    Now, what do I find interesting about Cwesibe’s, obviously derivative, poem? First off, it is not a sonnet; it is what I have heard Cwesibe refer to as a bilding (Why he calls it that you would have to ask him.) with a rhyme scheme ababcbcdcdad that differs with Medrano’s Italian [i.e., Spanish] sonnet’s rhyme scheme abbaabbacdcdcd. Structurally, Medrano uses two quartets connected thematically and tonally with two tercets in the common octave/sestet configuration; Cwesibe uses three quartets, though the first two are interconnected grammatically. As is common in both English and Spanish, Cwesibe, in his lines, accents his last syllables, while Medrano accents the penultimate ones. Cwesibe uses an iambic hexameter or twelve syllables per line, while Medrano uses the loose, endecasílabo line. Cwesibe uses 100 words to Medrano’s 86, while Medrano uses 180 syllables to Cwesibe’s 145. Of course, there are more structural comparisons that can be made here, but that suffices.
    It is interesting to note what each writer notes. Both writers refer to the Spain of around 1600: Medrona writes about his family’s fields, and so too does Cwesibe, but from a distance of four centuries and thousands of miles away, and via Medrano’s poem. Medrano poetically notices statues to Theodosius and Trajan, the worshiping of Lamia and Flora, the crumbling stones that remind him of Spain’s past. Cwesibe points out places Medrano had been in his life, some unknown in the great scheme of things, and how Medrano and they “hover” around the 6th longitude, a striking and unique generalization, the specific type of which I have never seen in any sonnet. In the second quartet, Cwesibe seems to savor the names of the Spanish towns and cities, all in Spanish but for the anglicized Seville. I also find his mentioning of the Atlantic Ocean, right next to the final, emotionally-charged conclusion, fortuitous.
    The central theme, the passing of time, is looked at in differing ways, but also similarly. Both writers think of the passing of people, Medrano mentions famous figures and gods, him and his love Amarilis, while Cwesibe thinks about the passing of Medrano, whose name fills the end of his poem, breaking there, not the meter but, the hexameter, with an extra syllable o, which nicely echoes the earlier O. In both writers I find a heart-felt, serious contemplation of mortality; but whereas Cwesibe’s poem is, properly speaking, an elegy, predominantly in the second person to a dead person, Medrano’s poem to his love looks at the past, the present, and the future.

    Reply
14. 

    Raúl de Cwesibe June 26, 2020

    Here is Francisco de Medrano’s poem retyped for greater clarity:

    Sonnet XXVI
    A las ruinas de Itálica,
    que ahora llaman Sevilla la Vieja,
    junto de las cuales está
    su heredamiento Mirarbueno

    Estos de pan llevar campos ahora,
    fueron un tiempo Itálica. Este llano
    fue templo. Aquí a Teodosio, allí a Trajano
    puso estatuas patria vencedora.

    En este cerco fueron Lamia y Flora
    llama y admiración del vulgo vano,
    en este cerco el luchador profano
    del aplauso esperó la voz sonora.

    Cómo feneció todo, ay; mas erguidas,
    a pesar de fortuna y tiempo, vemos
    estas y aquellas piedras combatidas.

    Pues si vencen la edad y los estremos
    de mal, piedras calladas y sufridas,
    suframos, Amarilis, y callemos.

    Reply
15. 

    Margaret Coats June 26, 2020

    Thank you for the most informative explanation of the bilding and its origin. The elegiac example is so beautifully done that I wonder at the lack of interest in the form. The lines do not break, as can happen when poets writing in English go beyond pentameter. And these lines clearly take their places as integral to a well-crafted structure; there is not a hint of prose poetry crammed into a structure built as an afterthought. I see what you mean in speaking of a poetic career in search of a line. You have found a line and a lyric form to accommodate it. The poem offers a touching picture of Medrano, just as you describe the bilding’s purpose of taking a portrait with a camera. And it is not a still picture, but a snapshot of Medrano on the move. Quite an accomplishment. Thanks as well for giving a clearer version of Medrano’s Spanish sonnet.

    Hope you and your well-educated family are all fruitfully and profitably occupied.

    Reply
16. 

    Lorraine Achee July 1, 2020

    History

    “History is the witness of the times,
    the torch of truth, the life of memory,
    the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.” Cicero

    Tear down all the statues, change all the names,
    History exists, as yours or mine,
    If you don’t like it so set it in flames,
    You would deprive the truth for all mankind.
    What point is it to supplant a story?
    But with someone’s ideas of fairness,
    Will somehow increase another’s fury,
    And serve to increase hate and awareness.
    Disband or defund our men in blue,
    Those people who would die to protect us,
    Because of the bad apples, just a few,
    Yes, so blame all of them, nevertheless.

    If this is the new normal so be it,
    Don’t know if I like it, I must admit!

    Reply

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