Saturday 10 January 2009

Illinois Governor Blagojevich and the Battle of the Poets

I'd be glad to know what others make of this use of poetry, noted in today's Guardian article.

1 comment:

  1. I saw Liam Clancy read the final few lines of Tennyson's Ulysses on RTE a while back, in a documentary of his life. The Clancy brothers and Tommy Makem, the Bard of Armagh, where the poets and musicians who Robert Zimmerman, better known of course as Bob, Bob Dylan, first learned from in New York. He was spellbinding, just reading it, in an anecdote about his Christian Brother teacher who spotted his talented for recital and told him to go into showbiz. The rest, as they say, is History.

    And in the annals of legal speeches, your man in Illinois could do worse than having a gander a youthful Liam in early sixties black and white, reciting Robert Emmet's Speech from the dock, to see if he can pick up any tips on how to make a text that will live beyond the grave.

    "I have nothing to say which can alter your predetermination, not that it would become me to say with any view to the mitigation of that Sentence which you are here to pronounce, and by which I must abide. But I have that to say which interests me more than life, and which you have laboured, as was necessarily your office in the present circumstances of this oppressed country...

    When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port—when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes, who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field in defence of their country and of virtue, this is my hope—I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me..

    I appeal to the immaculate God—I swear by the Throne of Heaven, before which I must shortly appear—by the blood of the murdered patriots who have gone before me—that my conduct has been, through all this peril, and through all my purposes, governed only by the convictions which I have uttered, and by no other view than that of the emancipation of my country from the superinhuman oppression under which she has so long and too patiently travailed..

    I who fear not to approach the Omnipotent Judge to answer for the conduct of my whole life, am I to be appalled and falsified by a mere remnant of mortality here?

    ...

    Let no man dare, when I am dead, to charge me with dishonour; let no man attaint my memory by believing that I could have engaged in any cause but that of my country’s liberty and independence...

    f the spirits of the illustrious dead participate in the concerns and cares of those who were dear to them in this transitory life, O! ever dear and venerated shade of my departed father, look down with scrutiny upon the conduct of your suffering son, and see if I have, even for a moment, deviated from those principles of morality and patriotism which it was your care to instil into my youthful mind, and for which I am now about to offer up my life. My lords, you seem impatient for the sacrifice. The blood for which you thirst is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim [the soldiery filled and surrounded the Sessions House]—it circulates warmly and unruffled through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are now bent to destroy, for purposes so grievous that they cry to heaven...

    have but one request to ask at my departure from this world; it is—THE CHARITY OF ITS SILENCE. Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my name remain uninscribed, until other times and other men can do justice to my character. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done...

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