poetry

“Of Master and of Slave”: words speakable once again

They’re not only potentially speakable once again, either. In May 2026, the immediate aftermath of the United States Supreme Court’s eradication of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they are being actively spoken in one Southern legislature after another. Most of the legislators speaking happen also to belong to the political party that was once the party of Abraham Lincoln. History rhymes, sometimes. It’s ironic.

It has to be, because rhyme itself is an irony originating in the discovery that even after a word is spoken it’s capable of changing its mind half a line later and meaning something else. Try listening half a line later, for instance, to the line below from a nineteenth-century poem (Ernest Dowson’s “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae”) which includes the words “I have forgot much.” Down among those words, of course, it hasn’t forgotten a word. At that, in the aftermath of the nineteenth century it will help you remember even more words, because this time the line about forgetting will come scrolling by for a second time, this one on a soundtrack.

In 1939, the year the track was laid, it sang a politicized nineteenth-century quickstep whose words then gave way to women’s voices vocalizing only a slow Woo ah. That whited-out libretto was projected from a reel filmed in a nineteenth-century font projected from right to left, and ever since then it has been unscrolling from the nineteenth century back to us. But now, in 2026, the reel may have rereached its 1939 beginning.

At any rate, what we hear now seems to sound once again like beginning’s genre, the commandment. It may say I am that I am; it does say Tolle, lege: take up and read. Then, adding a new register to itself by unreeling filmstock from the lab, it says:

I am reel as I have been scroll. I command you from this day backward. From here, my order of operations will begin on the side facing away from the light. It will be from right to left; from time present to time past; from ending in light to beginning once more in darkness. 

 

One who wraps the napery of his couch / About him

The serious nineteenth-century man of letters William Cullen Bryant was the author of “Thanatopsis,” a serious poem whose title translates from Greek as “contemplation of death.” It concludes with a serious moral, namely:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join   
The innumerable caravan, which moves   
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take   
His chamber in the silent halls of death,   
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,   
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed   
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,   
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch   
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
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“So live, that” translates mostly to “So live in such a way that.”
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And yes, there is such a word as “napery.” Seriously, look it up.
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Commercial appeal:

thou wast not born for death. Printed on a small surface, a poem addressed to a bird told the bird so. But then the bird entered the past tense, leaving the poem behind in the present. Said the poem to itself, silently: “Fled is that music.”

Afterward, on a large surface, these other words were printed:

“cheese-box”

Head-Phone

Watcher-of-the-Silent-Places

Quote:

Silently, on their paper, for the time that was then being, they were a promise of something not on the paper: unsilence. But they were nouns, not verbs. They were a promise that could be but not be made. Listen in again, a century later, and confirm: promised unsilence has failed to descend over the Port-of-Missing-Men. The promise’s  typographical manifestation, this decor of quotation marks and hyphens and capital letters, is a written language, not a spoken language. Just above its surface, the air is still still.