THE POEM

She Walks in Beauty
By Lord Byron

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

PRE-MEMORIZATION

The “trad-girl” meme is exactly that: a meme. Humble, blonde, faithful, healthy, with a kind heart and simple needs... trad-girl is dead. Or rather, walking dead.

The psychology that once produced trad girls is a psychology of adherence to the dominant culture. The dominant culture is no longer something beautiful, but a bastardized Dionysian cult that ecstasies in uglification. The sort of women who would once have become trad girls instead become party girls, career women, feminists, cat ladies and single mothers. These are the remnants of tradition.

That is not to say there are not still good women out there. It is only to say that with pop-culture leading girls into the gutter, Nationalists might have better luck searching among the counter-culture. I know I did.

That is why I chose “She Walks in Beauty” by the English poet Lord Byron. The girl Byron describes therein is no trad girl—no blonde-haired bible-thumper in a floral dress. Rather, his raven-haired beauty wears a spangled mourning gown as black as a cloudless night, and the virtues she embodies are serenity, eloquence, and grace. She is an unconventional beauty, and one I wanted to know more about.

And I suppose I did gain that knowledge, but I also gained something else. Something that ought to benefit a man in all his relationships with women: be they with trad-girl, doomer-girl, or buried-fiber-optic-cable gf.

POST-MEMORIZATION

“She Walks in Beauty” is written in a rigorous iambic tetrameter, only departing from the pattern for a trochaic inversion at the word “meet” in line 4 (at least in my scansion of it). The poem is composed of 3 stanzas of 6 lines each, with a rhyme scheme of ABABAB. As with other well-structured poems in this series so far, it was an easy one to memorize.

As beauty plays such a central role in the poem, the question I asked myself as I memorized it was “where does her beauty come from?” Despite mentions of eyes and smiles and cheeks and brows, a close reading reveals that none of these are the actual objects of beauty, only its signs. In truth, her beauty is what meets in her eyes. Her beauty is what waves in her hair. Her beauty is in the “days in goodness spent” of which her smiles seem to tell. The beauty Byron writes about is an internal beauty, manifesting outwardly.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this internal beauty, is the balancing act behind it. Her aspect belies “all that’s best of dark and bright”. “One shade the more, one ray the less” threatens to upset the balance. And yet, hers is a mind “at peace with all below”.

It was at this point that a dormant guilt within me finally gnawed its way to the surface, as I realized that the source of all the beauty in Byron’s night-clad girl, was in her inner peace. And despite the eloquence of my bi-hourly rants about the Juden, I suspect that my own dear one might find such discourse tedious at times.

Woman is not made, like man, to contain multitudes. She must have certainty. In a man, conflict transmutes eventually to strength. But in a woman, conflict knocks body and spirit out of phase. And beauty, which does not reside in parts, but in the harmony between them, flees.

Is nature’s contract between the sexes not clear on this point? Is man strong not to shelter his loved ones against conflict? Why stop at physical conflict, then, when mental conflict also disgraces a body?

I have hated those who shrink and contort themselves in fear of uncomfortable truths. And against a self-professed enemy, or a fellow truth-seeker, I see no reason to hold anything back. Then truth is a weapon. But a man does not wield a weapon against his wife.

That is not to say that one must lie. By her faithfulness a woman earns her guardian. Only do not strive against this faith to give her knowledge. Some knowledge is as good as torture for her. A far greater gift to her than knowledge, are commands. To obey plain and simple rules is simple joy, and a constant affirmation of her faith.

I have seen how well even a “rebellious” girl responds to clear expectations. And I have seen how often she asks for validation of her decisions. Anything a man can do to ease a woman’s burden of choice will be welcomed. A man may be hesitant to curb his own freedom, but a woman’s freedom is in her flexibility. One can count on her to display her contortionist nature as soon as the possibility of a more secure environment opens up to her. Be always the one to provide it.

My own greatest mistake has been a tendency to volunteer my reasoning. I realize now that a man should never reason with a woman if he can avoid it. The very act of sharing reasoning demands a woman to exercise her judgement and forces upon her a share of responsibility. If a woman asks to see your reasoning, do not be fooled. The only reason she seeks is a reason to trust. So address the real concern. Do not hold up the intricate tapestry where you weighed the many forces in this world against one another. That is irrelevant. Rather, direct her attention to some more direct sign by which she may augment her faith in you. An honorable man will have a lifetime of conduct from which to draw such examples.

The world is full of conflict. Man evolved in it. It is his succor and his strength. But woman evolved in man’s shadow, and conflict only wounds and weakens her. Insofar as he loves a woman, it is up to man to safeguard her “mind at peace with all below”, for this is the stone on which all her happiness and beauty stands or falls. This is this beautiful night in which she walks.

NEXT WEEK

For the next poem I will be revisiting Kipling for another Nationalist classic “The Beginnings”, aka “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon.”

I’m moving across the country this week, so I will have much time to memorize but little time to write. I therefore aim to publish Sunday 8/16.

Edit 8/15: The move is going well, but not as planned. Delaying next article to Sunday 8/23.

THE POEM:

'Out, Out—’
By Robert Frost

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

PRE-MEMORIZATION:

For this week, I wanted to memorize a tragic poem. My reasoning is something I discussed in my presentation at the Nationalist Media Conference. Modern tastes prefer happy endings, so it may seem strange to many that tragedy was once so popular in the West. Even Aristotle thought it odd enough to merit explanation, and in his analysis he determined that the negativity of tragedy helps to purge negative emotions from the audience. This is where we get the word “catharsis”, which in its literal sense means to purge or cleanse.

Perhaps more sensible to modern ears is the “Hurt Delay” theory of Angus Fletcher1, which basically states that exposing yourself to artificial negative stimuli (like Greek tragedy) may help your brain lay a sort of neural groundwork for processing similar negative circumstances in the future.

In light of these theories, I have begun to suspect that there is an evolutionary benefit to enjoying tragedy. By which I mean, human societies that did not enjoy tragedy, were less likely to survive. How much more beneficial, then, to amplify these effects by deep memorization of tragic material?

For this purpose, Robert Frost’s “Out, Out—” seemed like a perfect contender. It is the story of a boy killed in a freak accident, and of the underwhelming (but understandable) way his family responds to his death. It is very tragic. For my purposes, it might even have been too tragic.

POST-MEMORIZATION:

“Out, Out—” is written in a loose, non-rhyming iambic pentameter. Little ornamentations scattered throughout the poem help make it both more memorable and more pleasant: “Sweet-scented stuff…” (alliteration), and “Under the sunset…” (assonance). Frost sets up a rising sense of anticipation of the accident in the first part of the poem, climaxing with the incident itself halfway through, with all the follows dealing with the boy’s death. The greatest moment of the poem are its last lines, where the power of meter is paramount.

Notice how “dead” occurs in the unstressed beat? It’s hard to actually say it that way. Just as it does in the poem as a whole, death occurs unexpectedly. And in line with the point the poem makes, the rhythm immediately returns to a more natural pattern with “turned to their affairs.”

Now, has memorization of this poem been “cathartic” for me? Has it prepared my brain to process catastrophe? That’s hard to say. I didn’t have the fortune of being so misfortunate this week. But in the process of memorizing the poem, it occurred to me that there is a crucial difference between the tragic story in this poem, and a theatrical tragedy. In the latter, the story exists to couch human misery in a meaningful narrative. The story in “Out, Out—” does the opposite. Everything from the five mountain ranges to his sister’s apron are mentioned for the sole purpose of cutting the ordinary short—of making the boy’s death seem even more pointless.

The death was accidental and blameless. There’s no takeaway, no lesson. There’s no “Well you shouldn’t have surprised your brother by saying supper so loud!” No. The point is people sometimes die for no reason at all. And the only sensible human response to this is to move on. It is the tragedy of all tragedies, and there may be nothing very cathartic about it at all.

Or so it seems. The jury is still out on this one. I will say, that having memorized the poem, I see myself vividly in the boy. I see myself making the same “rueful laugh”. I see myself swinging toward my family, holding up “the hand”. I see myself puffing out my last conscious breath as the doctor lays me down. And I see the world leaving me behind, turning to the affairs of the living.

There might be enough there. Enough so that, if some meaningless misfortune befalls me, the words of this poem might resurface, and offer comfort. I haven’t solved anything here. I don’t have an answer to the emptiness. But I do get the sense, having already memorized my lines, I just might slip more comfortably into a tragic role.

NEXT WEEK:

For next week, I will be memorizing Lord Byron’s “She Walks In Beauty”, the quintessential “tfw no goth gf” poem.

(article to be posted 8/2/26)

THE POEM:

The Song of Wandering Aengus
By William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

PRE-MEMORIZATION

I chose this poem for no other reason than that I liked it. From the first time I read it, I knew it would be a favorite of mine. No deep analysis was needed. The sense of longing it conveys is clear and palpable.

Its author, William Butler Yeats, was a man who well knew longing. Much has been made of his infatuation with actor and activist Maud Gonne, who did over the course of a lifetime reject him. As interesting of a character as the lady Gonne was, she is today known less for her own accomplishments, than for her decisive role as Yeats’ muse. A significant fraction of Yeats’ poetry is directly inspired by his unrequited love for this unattainable woman, and this poem is clearly one of those.

The poem is told from the perspective Aengus himself, the Irish god of Love. One night, in an agitated state of mind, Aengus decides to goes fishing. The trout he catches transforms into some kind of otherworldly beauty, who calls him hither, only to disappear. Into the weariness of old age we see Aengus chasing this “glimmering girl”, dreaming of what he will do in some, perhaps, impossible future together, with his faerie waifu.

I found it a sad poem. One that ends without any closure, making no attempt to sweeten the bitterness it imparts. I did not expect the poem to become a source of hope.

POST-MEMORIZATION

The Song of Wandering Aengus is written in strict Iambic Tetrameter. It has an end-rhyme scheme of ABCB. All this very standard sort of structure lent itself well to memorization.

In the process of memorization, I discovered a few less obvious structural elements. The most notable of these is the astonishing number of repeated words: hazel, fire/flame, berry, moth, silver, floor, apple, calling by name, lands, and time makes ten. Apart from aiding memorization, this repetition imparts a sense of concreteness to a poem one might otherwise expect to have employed a more dreamlike atmosphere. But if Aengus’ experience was a dream, it was a very vivid one. The repetition also contributes, I think, to a building sense of insistence, like repeating affirmations to oneself in the mirror, climaxing in the determined and desperate line “I WILL find out where she has gone.”

One such repetitions I found of particular significance: the fire in Aengus’ head in the first stanza, and the fire he turns to blow aflame in the second stanza. This connection seems quite intentional. After all, there’s many ways Yeats could have described Aengus’ mental agitation without recalling fire. And that’s when I noticed a third reference to fire, in the final line of the final stanza: “the golden apples of the SUN”

From head, to cooking fire, to sun. There is a progression of magnitude here. But what is the significance of fire in this poem? A key is given in the line “She faded through the brightening air.” Light usually helps us to see, but with the arrival of the morning sun, the glimmering girl fades away. I find these burning lights to represent the world we share with others, while the moon and stars represent the solipsistic world of dreams and ideas.

What began as a late-night snack for Aengus turned into a beauty beyond his wildest dreams, but that treasure couldn’t be conveyed into the light of day. Only the profound emptiness of its absence was retained, thus motivating a lifelong (or perhaps eternal) quest to bring that dream into reality. A fitting sort of longing for both artist and activist.

To know of great beauty is a great burden. It blackens all else by comparison. The nationalist is cognizant, through his rigorous study of history and Asian cartoons, of worlds far more beautiful than our own. Worlds that once existed, or exist to some degree somewhere else, and therefore imply strongly that they could or should exist here and now.

Who is so desperate to lighten his burden that he would unsee such beauty? Who would willingly forget? There are all sorts of things in this world to live for. There are people living for the next iPhone release. There are people living for the next Marvel movie. And then there are people living to make real the beauty in their heart. God grant me the greater discontent!

Now that this poem is emblazoned in the halls of my memory, carved on the walls of my ribcage where my heart can’t help but always see it, it seems no sad poem. I share in Aengus’ weary optimism. We WILL find out where she has gone. And she will be ours in day as well as night.

NEXT WEEK:

Next week I will be memorizing “Out, Out-” by Robert Frost. This is a poem about a tragic death, and a family’s underwhelming response. (article to be posted 7/25/26)

THE POEM:

The Glory of the Garden
by Rudyard Kipling (1911)

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye. 

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,
You’ll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all,
The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks. 

And there you’ll see the gardeners, the men and ’Prentice boys
Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words. 
 
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come. 

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:—“Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives. 

There’s not a pair of legs so thin, there’s not a head so thick,
There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one. 

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden. 

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

PRE-MEMORIZATION:

Why begin the In Memory Project with this particular poem? Partly for its straightforwardness. Partly for its blunt advocacy of a very nationalist-friendly sort of collectivism. It paints a perfect contrast against contemporary poetry’s obsession with cryptic vagueness and self-indulgent individualism. Kipling is easy for ordinary people to understand and appreciate, and at this time I believe such poets to be far more valuable to society than those poets who can only be understood by other poets.

This is also a very structured poem, with a highly consistent iambic heptameter meter and an AABB rhyme scheme. Such rigorous structure lends itself to quick and easy memorization. Most poets today have abandoned such rigid structure in favor of, I suppose, a more natural flow of expression. And perhaps they have gained that. But it is certain that such gain came at a cost to memorability.

I was not expecting to find great depth in this poem. I saw that it used gardening as a metaphor for arguing why people should work hard for the sake of society. I liked that. I have often thought gardening metaphors indispensable for explaining nationalism to people.

I thought I quite agreed with the poem’s content and intentions. And then I memorized it.

POST-MEMORIZATION

The first thing I noticed as I began memorizing this deceptively simple poem, is just how much technical skill was actually embedded therein—little things that add to the experience of the poem, even if you don’t catch them at first. Notice, for instance, the way “statues” at the beginning of line 3 builds on the end-rhyme of the previous two lines’ “views” and “avenues”. Notice the frequent re-use of key words, such as “lawns”, “hands”, “borders”, and “slugs”. Notice the prevalence of contrasts, such as the “thick laurels” on the “thin red wall”, the “cold-frames” with the “hot houses”, and the “legs so thin” vs the “head so thick”. Notice how the many stanzas which end with a “glory of the garden” line dip into archaic, biblical-sounding language (abideth, occupieth, glorifieth), and notice how each of these INDIVIDUAL stanzas thus mirror the structure of the poem as a WHOLE, whose final stanza centers on a biblical reference, and likens the gardener’s work to an act of prayer.

Kipling is not the first poet to utilize such techniques in his poetry. Practically all poets are aware of and make use of such techniques. But what was extraordinary to me is the sheer density of these techniques in this poem. It really seems like every word is connected to every other. That not a one is replaceable, nor out of place. It makes the poem feel less like a linear strand of yarn, and more like a length of intricately woven cloth.

It also made it a cinch to memorize. This poem is about twice the length I would normally try to memorize in a week. And yet I found it quicker and easier to memorize than many shorter poems.

Now, there is another thing I discovered while memorizing this poem. Something which has, I believe, planted the seeds for a rather transformative effect on my character. Despite my overall agreement with the poem, after some time I realized there was a part of the poem’s call-to-action which I had a hard time accepting. Indeed, I thought that as admirable as the sentiments in the poem were, they didn’t really apply to myself.

A part of myself had decided that the poem was only applicable in the context of a “government for the people”. That since our government is effectively run by a foreign interest group, it would be silly of us to strive under this illegitimate regime with the same candor that we would rightly give to a more legitimate one.

But on closer inspection, this is PRECISELY what the poem is asking us to do. Does Kipling not also call out the nobility of his day for failing to do their civic obligations? Does he not admonish them against their useless singing and sitting in the shade? Is it not implicit in the fact of the poem’s being written, that Kipling must have felt that some people need to be reminded of their duty?

Kipling is quite clear on the causal relationship. He does not say that a country’s pre-existing glory creates obligations in us. Rather, Kipling says that doing one’s duty is what makes a country glorious in the first place.

What really drove the point home for me was the 6th stanza. Specifically:

“...There’s not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,

But it can find some needful job that’s crying to be done...”

In those lines we find Kipling’s concept of duty: identify demand, and supply it. That sounds like the cold economic talk of a libertarian, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s only what you make of it.

You can recognize that whites need unbiased lawyers to support us, and become one. You can recognize that modern health is garbage, and start an active club to help people in your area get fit. You can recognize that modern art sucks, and try to create that art the Western spirit truly hungers for.

There’s all kinds of expertise and innovation that could serve and glorify our people and one day, again, our country. And the fact that things have gotten as bad as they are, just means there’s now more need than ever. Now is not the time to check out of society. Now is the time to acquire from society what we need, and put it to good use.

Now is the time to tend to the garden.

It is always the time to tend to the garden.

NEXT WEEK:

Next week I will be memorizing “The Song of Wandering Aengus” by W.B. Yeats. This is a poem about longing for an unattainable girl who calls to you from another dimension.

(Article to be posted 7/19/26)

About a month ago, I had the honor of presenting at the 2026 Nationalist Media Conference. The topic of my presentation might seem strange for an art conference, but it is exceptionally powerful: “Memory”.

As succinctly as possible, my presentation argues rote memorization of great works (poetry, speeches, scripture) imparts tremendous benefits to an individual. Not just to one’s writing skills, but to one’s creativity, critical thinking, emotional resilience, and overall effectiveness as a person. This premise is supported by the importance classical education placed on early-life memorization of what we now consider college-level texts.

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I will never forget the sense of power I felt during my first attempt to memorize a poem. It was so striking, my first thought was “I’ve been using poetry wrong this whole time!” My second thought was, “I can’t be the first person to discover this!” ‘Lo and behold, I was not. A quick google search revealed bloggers and scientists the world over, touting the benefits of memorizing poetry, lamenting in unison modern education’s distaste for the practice.

One strong voice for memorization was a man named John Basinger. John is best known as the community college professor who memorized all 10,565 lines of Paradise Lost, mostly on the treadmill. Of this monumental achievement which took him over 9 years, John said “It is a cathedral I carry around in my mind, a place that I can enter and walk around at will.” It is my solemn desire to follow in John’s footsteps, and build just such a cathedral in my own mind.

In a strange sort of coincidence, John passed away the day before I delivered my presentation. In honor of John, and as a testimony to my belief in the power of literary memorization, I am beginning a project to help illustrate that power to as many people as possible. I call it the “In Memory” Project or IMP.

Over the next 30 weeks I intend to memorize 30 poems, and write 30 articles, sharing my impressions of each poem before and after memorization. It is my hope that this “demonstration by doing”, will transmit the magic of memory more effectively than either oral presentation or expository writing have accomplished to date.

And not only will I be taking suggestions in the comments for future weeks (poets of Substack, feel free to recommend your own work), but at the end of each article, I will share the name of the poem to be memorized for next week, so motivated readers can follow along, and memorize those same poems in unity with myself and others. So that all of us can learn and share our experiences together.

In the same spirit of togetherness, please watch some of the other great presentations given at the Nationalist Media Conference. Such as Trevor Raein’s “Narrative and Worldview”, or Tonitrvs’ “Linguistic Nationalism”, or Aidan MacMillan’s “The Transmission of Fire”.

The poem I am memorizing for next week (article to be posted Sunday July 12th) is Rudyard Kipling’s “The Glory of the Garden”.

(It’s not too early to suggest future poems in the comments.)

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Here is a classic poem that speaks directly to a core Nationalist principle: Love.

Bond and Free
by Robert Frost

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about—
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Commentary:

Love is not the domain of the left. It is a word with much power, owed largely to its use by the religious, and therefore, a word desirable to control. For that reason, "Love" has been pried from the grasp of its rightful owners by sheer force of leftist delusion and repetition. It is refreshing, therefore, to hear the word used accurately, by a poet who knew that the true embodiment of Love is the Nationalist.

Frost's poem presents two ways of life which, while not opposed, certainly find themselves in disagreement. "Love", Frost says "has earth to which she clings", while "Thought", has "a pair of dauntless wings". Like the Nationalist, Love leaves noticeable scars (“a printed trace”) on the world by refusing to be moved from her choice plot of land, i.e., "straining in the world's embrace".

"Thought", by contrast, is free to move not only horizontally, but vertically. So he travels through space, seeing things that "Love", in her stubbornness, could never see. And for most of the poem we are led to believe that the poet sees "Thought" as superior to "Love". But Frost is not so simple.

"Thought" for Frost, bears a free but gloomy existence, lived out alone in the far reaches of the realms of night. And he can not stay there, but must often return to earth, bearing the foul stench of reentry as the price of his whimsy.

By contrast, "Love", Frost says, may possess all the beauty that was already around her, not having hungered for anything beyond. "Thought" might have access to a greater diversity of beauties, and these might grant a great deal of perspective—"His gains in heaven are what they are"—but nothing eclipses the faithful intimacy that exists between "Love" and her land.

In truth, if you're reading this article, you're probably a denizen of "Thought". You're probably the sort who learned to love your culture by loving some other culture, or loving the way your culture used to be. You might even wish to effect some fundamental change in your culture.

And yet, what do we denizens of “Thought” conclude from roaming the interstellar gloom? What became our purpose? What do we do during the day, when our feet are planted on the ground, our wings folded, our eyes facing forward?

Cling. Cling to the earth.

It takes both, you see. Some who stay home and some who venture far. This is the enlightened form of Love that the religious speak of. The "Love", shall we say, of "Thought". This abstract, but no less real, Love, is characterized by the recognition that living things have different roles to play in Nature, and that we can respect one another, even as our roles put us into conflict. And yet “Love” and “Thought” are not really in conflict. Both are united against the 21st Century colloquial definition of Love:

Love - The capacity or willingness to convince oneself that things initially perceived as revolting are, in fact, beautiful and restorative. Ex. “Wowee zowee, those BDSM diaper-play enthusiasts at the pride parade sure were brave and stunning!”

How we ended up here, from an initial position of “Love is protecting what you care about”, is a real (((mystery))) to me.

But hey, words change. *raises glass* In the name of Love, may the left make continuous use of their diapers.

The Courage to Be New
by Robert Frost

I hear the world reciting
The mistakes of ancient men,
The brutality and fighting
They will never have again.

Heartbroken and disabled
In body and in mind
They renew talk of the fabled
Federation of Mankind.

But they're blessed with the acumen
To suspect the human trait
Was not the basest human
That made them militate.

They will tell you more as soon as
You tell them what to do
With their ever breaking newness
And their courage to be new.

Commentary:

Poetry has a tendency to be a rather self-aggrandizing affair. Isn't it refreshing, then, to hear a poet voice disdain for the self-important? Truly a novel idea!

There are people in this world who will heap endless praise on the act of “being different”, long before you go on to tell them what “different” actually entailed. To hold such a view, and hold it seriously, is to possess such a tremendous disregard for all known history, that literally anything anyone else can come up with seems preferable. Does that sound ridiculous? It is a very natural position for the ignorant to hold. And it is precisely this kind of back-blind, forward-charging, radically-accepting “progressiveness” that Frost lampoons in this poem.

To attempt to “be new" takes courage—there's no doubt about that. Even a Trigglypuff has a kind of courage, and Frost affords that compliment to her(?) willingly. Everywhere else, he is merciless to the progressive spirit. He paints the progressive as an effete let-them-eat-cake aristocrat who will "never have again" the barbarous fighting of the unenlightened past. He calls them "disabled in body and in mind" as they call for world government to enforce brotherhood between nations. And though he might seem to compliment their "acumen" in the third stanza, he is really only calling them unprincipled. The progressive, Frost says, flips from anti-war to pro-war as you might flip a light-switch. You need only tell them that this particular war is "The War to End All Wars™" and they will gladly (send someone else to) fight it. An effective shorthand is to simply call the enemy “fascist”.

Frost's most damning criticism of the progressive concerns their "ever breaking newness". In other words, that for all their bluster, they don't even succeed at being new. They just end up doing as they're told, and thinking they’re rebels the whole time. Newness for newness' sake is probably the least original idea ever conceived. It is only a slight exaggeration to say it is the guiding philosophy of every person you've never heard of. The fact is, it takes more than courage to be truly new. If you go about it simply for the sake of ‘being different’, you are almost guaranteed to fall into the same pattern as a million other aimless, uninformed individuals.

True newness does exist, and Frost is no enemy of it. He was an odd duck himself, and one who succeeded at bringing something into the world both unprecedented and lasting. He would surely nod his head in agreement with what I tell you now—that true newness begins, more often than not, with conformity. It begins with the study of history. It begins with observation of nature. It begins with practicing a skill to the point of mastery. It begins with appreciation of the divine.

Embrace tradition. That is the best thing you can do if you wish to change the world. Do you think it is a loving heart that desires to change a world it doesn't even understand? Only once you understand the world are you given the keys to improve it. Only then you will know where you stand. What makes a man lost, after all, is not a lack of destination, but ignorance of his current location.

-The Oven Bird-
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

—

The nationalist knows at once who the bird is. There are other bearers of bad news in this world, but none look back on the past with such a crippling sense of nostalgia as he.

Knowledge of the past grants many boons, including a deeper perspective of oneself and a better-informed vision for the future. But the past is also a burden; we are made bigger by it, but also heavier. The individualist sidesteps this burden by cutting ties with the past, but for the nationalist to do the same would be to cut himself in two. He must take ownership of the past, for better or worse.

The individualist, whose faith in the future hangs on the tenuous idea that the present is the pinnacle of history, must downplay the good, and exaggerate the bad. And if he points out our tendency to see the past through rose-tinted lenses, he is right to warn us. Perhaps the ovenbird erases the spring rains from his memory when he waxes nostalgic on "sunny days a moment overcast". But the existence of a bias does not mean that its opposite is always true. Right now, the truth is certainly as the Oven-bird sees it: yesterday was lovelier than today. The present is a husk of its former self, a walking corpse sucked dry of all its life-force. All but the little bit it needs to keep trudging along for one more day.

The ovenbird’s present is the half-shriveled leaves of mid-summer. Which, though we might call it the height of the year in terms of heat, is not the time of greatest color or beauty. Spring's youthfulness and daring are gone by mid-summer, and the lack of newness and the wealth of wear-and-tear disclose that life can not continue in this way forever. Decline is imminent. The ovenbird perceives decline in the old leaves and the count of flowers incomparable to his memories of spring. He would have to be blind not to see, in any direction, signs of the approaching ugly fall.

Or perhaps not merely fall, but "that other fall we call the fall". This line surely references the mythical "Fall of man": the punitive expulsion of humanity's progenitors (Adam and Eve) from a state of natural innocence (Eden), to our current state of exponentially-increasing complexity and cunning. Unlike the ovenbird's fall, which he will likely live to see turn back to spring, Man's fall seems to operate on the order of millennia. Even if we zoom in to speak of the rise and fall of empires, we're speaking in terms of centuries, of multiples of lifetimes. Whatever perspective you take, most mens' lives are spent entirely in a single cultural season. We can be forgiven, perhaps, for taking the turning of the seasons even more personally than the ovenbird himself.

Which brings us to the central question of the piece, the question that the ovenbird "frames in all but words". What shall we make of our "diminished thing"? Is the ovenbird foolish to lament the loss of spring, and to dread the onset of fall? He does, in a way, stand at a kind of high-point in the year, after all. Would it not be wiser to judge summer by its own virtues, rather than the values of spring? Must we downgrade summer in the mind to a mere precursor of misery-to-come?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the poem is this: the imagery that most characterizes spring to the ovenbird, "when pear and cherry bloom went down in showers," was also a kind of fall. A beautiful fall, of pink and white petals, but a fall all the same. Why should we look back fondly on one fall and look forward soberly to another? Is this not just the wheel of the seasons turning?

If you have an answer to the ovenbird’s question, I'd like to hear it in the comments, but this is mine: Whatever the ovenbird might do, spring will come again. The forces that govern the coming and going of spring are beyond his capacity to influence. But whether the same can be said for humanity is less clear. If men decide that another Golden Age is not worth working towards, or lose sight of what precisely made the Age so Golden, perhaps spring, for man, will never come.