Three Poems of Protest – Analysis and Commentary

THREE POEMS OF PROTEST – ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY

One of the important roles of those who write—they don’t have to be professional writers—is political commentary.

By “politics” we mean human activity by which power is acquired, used, abused (sometimes), and distributed in society.

Because politics is about power and its exercise, political commentary often takes the form of protest and assumes manifold styles, including poetry.

Protest poetry is a critical response to political reality. When adverse positions are put forward and red lines drawn, the protest turns into resistance, and when the political reality is constructed as oppression, the protest and resistance may be understood as a liberation struggle.

Some poems of protest resonate throughout history. We look at three examples: 

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King Jr.

Pag-Ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa by Andres Bonifacio

Wilfred Owen’s poem based on his wartime ordeal, for example, shows us a jaded view of the type of war conducted on an industrial scale and harnessing modern technology. 

Martin Luther King Jr. and Andres Bonifacio ask us to contemplate poems of resistance—the former declaims against racial discrimination, the latter against colonial oppression. 

Bonifacio’s revolutionary resistance is unmistakably a liberation struggle.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

The closing line in Latin is from Horace’s Odes, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”

We are told that before the Great War, Horace’s epithet graced the tombstones of fallen soldiers. Today, it is a rallying cry of ironical anti-war protest.

All war is barbaric, surely, but we ask ourselves why it is a poem based on the wartime experience of a World War I soldier that compels us to reevaluate the claim that war is glorious and to conclude that it is not. Could it be because of the industrial scale of this war together with the impersonal and devastating application of modern technology?

The lurid account of the unfortunate man dying from gas poisoning speaks for itself about the inexpressible horror of war. If words paint a picture, to invert the aphorism, this poem serves as a consummate illustration.

“If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / …My friend, you would not tell with such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie”—Owen tells us that it would be obscene to superimpose any claims of heroic glory over and against this soldier’s gruesome death. Death under these wretched circumstances is inglorious.

I HAVE A DREAM by Martin Luther King Jr.

Excerpt of a speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., August 28, 1963

…even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification”—one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” (Isaiah 40:4-5)

See: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

—Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” is a speech, not a poem, but it uses figurative language and various literary devices so that at least parts of the speech qualify as a prose poem.

This particular excerpt from the speech consists of a series of parallelisms for rhetorical effect.

The metaphorical language is compelling—“the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression.”

Travelling back to 1963 is to enter a world of Jim Crow laws, American style apartheid, systemic racial abuse, and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Although it is a world that no longer exists, racism maintains as a pervasive undercurrent throughout U.S. society.

Given the fraught race relations of 1963, the dream King imagines is Arcadian—“the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

King appeals to the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, documents of sacral significance to Americans. He invokes texts that resonate with them.

At least one line has become a staple of U.S. civic education to the point that it has become an integral part of the nation’s ideological foundation: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 

It is an aspiration that has been quoted countless times since.

Has King’s idyllic vision been attained? I would say—unequivocally—no.

Is it a realistic aspiration? After all, tribalism is deeply embedded in human nature. By “tribes” we mean social groups that are bounded so that they discriminate against outsiders. Tribalism in our attitudes and behaviors is our evolutionary heritage.

Racial identity is one major element that defines tribal membership. To rise beyond the tribalism of racial identity requires us to embrace a more encompassing and inclusive ideology. We are not there yet.

PAG-IBIG SA TINUBUANG LUPA ni Andres Bonifacio

Aling pag-ibig pa ang hihigit kaya

Sa pagka-dalisay at pagka-dakila

Gaya ng pag-ibig sa tinubuang lupa?

Aling pag-ibig pa? Wala na nga, wala.

Pagpupuring lubos ang nagiging hangad

Sa bayan ng taong may dangal na ingat,

Umawit, tumula, kumatha’t at sumulat,

Kalakhan din nila’y isinisiwalat.

Walang mahalagang hindi inihandog

Ng may pusong mahal sa Bayang nagkupkop,

Dugo, yaman, dunong, katiisa’t pagod,

Buhay ma’y abuting magkalagot-lagot.

Bakit? Ano itong sakdal ng laki

Na hinahandugan ng buong pagkasi

Na sa lalong mahal nakapangyayari

At ginugulan ng buhay na iwi?

Ay! Ito’y ang Inang Bayan tinubuan,

Siya’y ina’t tangi na kinamulatan

Ng kawili-wiling liwanag ng araw

Na nagbibigay init sa lunong katawan.

Kalakip din nito’y pag-ibig sa Bayan

Ang lahat ng lalong sa gunita’y mahal

Mula sa masaya’t gasong kasanggulan

Hanggang sa katawan ay mapasa-libingan.

Sa kaba ng abang mawalay sa Bayan!

Gunita ma’y laging sakbibi ng lumbay

Walang ala-ala’t inaasam-asam

Kundi ang makita’ng lupang tinubuan.

Pati na’ng magdusa’t sampung kamatayan

Waring masarap kung dahil sa Bayan

At lalong mahirap, O! himalang bagay,

Lalong pag-irog pa ang sa kanya’y alay.

Kung ang bayang ito’y nasa panganib

At siya ay dapat na ipagtangkilik,

Ang anak, asawa, magulang, kapatid

Isang tawag niya’y tatalikdang pilit.

Hayo na nga kayo, kayong ngang buhay

Sa pag-asang lubos ng kaginhawahan

At walang tinamo kundi kapaitan,

Kaya nga’t ibigin ang naaabang bayan.

Kayong nalagasan ng bunga’t bulaklak

Kahoy niyaring buhay na nilant sukat,

Ng bala-balakit makapal na hirap,

Muling manariwa’t sa baya’y lumiyag.

Ipahandog-handog ang buong pag-ibig

Hanggang sa may dugo’y ubusang itigis

Kung sa pagtatanggol, buhay ay mailit,

Ito’y kapalaran at tunay na langit.

Text is based on this source:

http://malacanang.gov.ph/7050-andres-bonifacios-pag-ibig-sa-tinubuang-lupa/

—“Andres Bonifacio’s ‘Pag-Ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa,’” Malacañan Palace Presidential Museum and Library

The poem is signed by Andres Bonifacio with the pen name, Agapito Bagumbayan or Agap-Ito Bagumbayan, signified by A. I. B.

Note: “nilant” in stanza 11 is a typo. Corrected, “nilanta’t.” See:

http://www.kasaysayan-kkk.info/kalayaan-the-katipunan-newspaper/andres-bonifacio-pagibig-sa-tinubuang-bayan-c-march-1896/andres-bonifacio-pagibig-sa-tinubuang-bayan-google-sites-pages?tmpl=%2Fsystem%2Fapp%2Ftemplates%2Fprint%2F&showPrintDialog=1

—Andres Bonifacio, “Pagibig sa Tinubuang Bayan,” google.sites.pages

The English translation of Andres Bonifacio’ equivalent of Jose Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” offers revealing insight into the Great Plebian’s revolutionary fervor so characteristically nineteenth-century and his willingness to die for the cause.

Posted here is a selective version of the poem, 12 stanzas. The full version of the poem is 28 stanzas long.

Because the poem, stanza by stanza, is similar in sentiment and style throughout, a sample of 12 stanzas in my opinion is sufficient to convey the content of the entire text.

Below I offer my English translation of the 12-stanza version. My translation is not intended not to be literal or literary. The objective of my translation is to express in English what I believe to be the most felicitous version of the meaning of the author, which isn’t always translated literally.

LOVE FOR ONE’S HOMELAND by Andres Bonifacio

Original language Tagalog

Translated by Gonzalinho da Costa

What love is greater,

Purer, or nobler

Than love for one’s homeland?

What, indeed? Nothing, nothing else.

Praiseworthy are the aspirations

For the nation of those who honorably remember,

Sing, and acclaim in poetry, art, and writing—

Extolling greatness thereby.

Nothing is more precious than the gift

Offered by the heart that loves one’s adoptive country—

Blood, wealth, knowledge, longsuffering, and effort,

Even life that reaches its broken end.

Why do you find fault with me

For having been given the gift

Of overpowering love

To spend it on the lives of the people?

Ah! Motherland from which we spring,

Only because of her did I grow in knowledge

And enlightenment, delightful,

Which fires the weakened body.

Enclosed with the love for one’s country

Are all our precious memories—

Beginning with the joy and mischief of a child

Until the body passes on to the grave.

Fear of those who keep watch exiled from their country!

Memories always cradled in grief,

No other thought or deep longing

Than to see their homeland.

Even though you suffer and die ten times over,

It would be sweet to do so for the nation,

And when it is more difficult, Oh! Miracle,

The love is deeper because it is given in sacrifice.

If this country is in danger

And it must be protected,

Children, spouse, parents, siblings—

All are renounced resolutely when the nation calls.

Let us go, we who draw life

From our overflowing hope of solace

But who have tasted only bitterness—

This is why we should love our country under bondage.

You who have shed fruits and flowers,

Wood that gave life, dried out and measured

By difficult, bulky obstacles,

Rejuvenated by your love of the people.

Give away your love entirely

To the point that your blood is poured out and emptied.

If in defense of our homeland, we lose our lives,

It is our destiny and true beatitude.

Bonifacio wrote this poem in the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century. The author expresses in hyperbole his devotion to his homeland. Deep feelings underlie his all-consuming goal of attaining independent nationhood, as he understood it.

Translating this text into English is difficult for two reasons: first, it isn’t colloquial Tagalog; and second, it’s over one hundred years old.

Some expressions haven’t been translated according to their literal meaning. “Nagbibigay init sa lunong katawan,” for example, means “to give heat to the weakened body.” It’s a metaphor.

Another example—the expression “gasong kasanggulan” literally means “restlessness of babies.” A more nuanced interpretation is, “ito ang pagiging magulo o magaslaw ng isang bata noong sya ay sanggol pa”—that is, the mischievous or restless behavior of a child when they are still toddlers.

See: https://brainly.ph/question/856025

—“Ano ang kahulugan ng gasong kasanggulan?” Brainly, August 26, 2017

“You who have shed fruits and flowers, / Wood that gave life, dried out and measured / By difficult, bulky obstacles, / Rejuvenated by your love of the people”—admittedly, the English translation of the second-to-last stanza comes across awkwardly, but Bonifacio uses mixed metaphors in the original vernacular.

New York graffiti, 2014

Adrienne Rich, American Skeptic

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is discussed at this link:

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2018/12/adrienne-rich.html  

Adrienne Rich, 1970s

Sylvia Plath, Poster Child of Confessional Poetry

SYLVIA PLATH, POSTER CHILD OF CONFESSIONAL POETRY

Whoever encounters Sylvia Plath, most likely in the classroom, will at first be struck by the power and intensity of her poetry. Plath devours the reader’s attention with the same frenzied energy with which she throws out her despairing, violent words.

Robert Pinsky’s description encapsulates the luridly visceral quality of her poetry.

“Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath

—“Sylvia Plath,” Poetry Magazine

Plath’s capacity to draw you into her interior bubble is one reason why she is very influential as a poet.

It wouldn’t be reason enough, however, to include her among the ten greatest women poets.

Once we recover from the shock of watching her furious poetry machine at work and survey her littered universe, we are able to step back and examine her poetry in context. By “context” we mean circumstances that are not only psychological and biographical but also sociological and historical. In this context her broad significance and unmistakable influence is apparent.

Plath is an American poet in the same sense that Whitman or Dickinson is American. Emergent literary figures of their time and place, Whitman’s and Dickinson’s appearance coincided with a major turning point in history, when America was coming into its own as a colonial and world power. 

Whitman sought to mythologize himself, that is, his poetic persona, as an embodiment of the American democratic ideal. 

Dickinson emerged as the highly original, enduringly popular American woman of letters who defined U.S. national identity at a time when the country was still very much a cultural colony of Western Europe. She created poetry that was distinctively American.

Although Plath did not originate Confessional Poetry—this honor goes to Robert Lowell—she is one of its most notable representatives. All lyric poetry is to some degree confessional, that is, it expresses private sentiments and experiences, including self-revelations. However, Lowell and company took the confessional mode one step further. Often in frank, uninhibited fashion they laid bare material that would discomfit and embarrass the reader, including content that probably should have remained inside the closet. 

Plath was a product of her time and place. She matured as a poet in the conservative—we might even say repressed—white middle-class postwar New England of the 1950s. Her confessional poetry can be understood as a reaction against straitlaced social constraints.

In this respect Plath is a twentieth-century Dickinson who defined American cultural identity. At one point Hollywood even saw fit to make a movie about her, Sylvia (2003).

However, her contribution to cultural history is not only local. Plath is the product of a long cultural trajectory in the West that witnessed the disintegration of the unifying worldview of Christian civilization and the rise of ideological liberalism, which practically replaced it. 

Marked individualism, so manifest in American poetry, traces back to Renaissance Humanism. 

Subsequently, the French Revolution was the political expression of growing individualism.

Modernism beginning in the nineteenth century coincided with the disintegration of the Western worldview, resulting in alienation.

Individualism and alienation are very much defining attributes of Plath’s poetry. Her work thus evinces the sociological and historical heritage of the West.

An important aspect of Plath’s poetry is that it is readily interpreted according to a feminist framework. Poetry Magazine, for example, relates:

“Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath

As a feminist opus, Plath’s poetry exerts significant influence on American society and the larger world. Because feminism is here to stay, so is Plath.

Why did we choose Sylvia Plath and not Ann Sexton? They are very similar.

Plath edges out Sexton for trivial reasons. To begin with, we are more familiar with the work of Plath.

Morbidly, we would say that the drama of Plath’s life makes her a somewhat more compelling subject. Plath suffered from bipolar disorder, tragically committing suicide at 30 years old. Sexton committed suicide at 45.

One of Plath’s most famous poems is Ariel. We will comment on this poem to examine how Plath’s poetry achieves its peculiar effects and why the poem is described as Confessional.

ARIEL by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue  

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,  

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to  

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye  

Berries cast dark  

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,  

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.  

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.  

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive  

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

At first pass, without any information about the background of the poem, we are caught up by the power of the words. “God’s lioness”—an image of power, ferocity, voraciousness, and death—curiously, it is female. When the juice of berries is likened to blood—“Black sweet blood mouthfuls”—the poem turns macabre. Immediately following is this startling exclamation—“Something else / Hauls me through air— / Thighs, hair; / Flakes from my heels.”

Once we access the biographical details of this poem, it yields itself to plausible and more meaningful interpretation. “Ariel” is the name of the horse Plath liked riding at Devonshire, England, during the period when she was not yet separated from her husband. She wrote this poem on October 27, her birthday, about three months before her suicide, when she was living separately in London with their two children.

Plath reveals her suicidal intent in the poem. Curiously, her anticipation of self-inflicted death is both liberating and sinister. As the “arrow” that “flies” into the dawn, she aims at a “red eye,” a “cauldron.” Both images of death are threatening. Riding into the sun, Plath is “Godiva”—the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat who, naked astride a horse trotting through the streets of Coventry, liberated her tenants from the onerous taxes imposed by her husband. Death and freedom thus converge according to some dark contradiction.

Revelatory biographical connections between Plath’s life and the text of “Ariel” distinguish the poem as Confessional.

Another Plath masterpiece, Tulips, is similar to Ariel. Both poems call upon the power of vivid language. Their interpretation yields a harvest when the poem has been sown with biographical information.

TULIPS by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.  

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.  

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.  

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses  

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff  

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,  

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.  

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,  

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;  

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat  

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.  

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley  

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books  

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.  

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them  

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.  

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe  

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.  

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,  

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,  

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.  

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,  

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow  

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,  

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.  

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.  

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river  

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.  

They concentrate my attention, that was happy  

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;  

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,  

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0

“The tulips are too excitable”—the very first line pulls us into the fraught world of the poet.

By the end of the first stanza, because of references to nurses and surgeons, we know where we are—in a hospital bed.

As we step through the poem, we readily pick off images of personal torment—her head is an unblinking eye, her body a smooth, hard pebble, the smiles of her husband and child in the photo are sharp hooks snagging her skin.

Sixth stanza, tulips again, blood red like her wounds. The flowers suffocate her, she complains, because they compete for her oxygen. Devouring African cats, they stretch their mouths wide open.

To say that the entire poem is emotionally distraught is an understatement. We might title this work, “Hieronymus Bosch at the Hospital” or “Edvard Munch Wakes Up in Hell.”

Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, tells us that Plath wrote this poem in March 1961 after she had suffered a miscarriage and had to be hospitalized for an appendectomy.

See: https://rukhaya.com/poetry-analysis-sylvia-plaths-tulips/

—Rukhaya MK, “Poetry Analysis: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips,’” October 2, 2014

Tulips by Sylvia Plath—twentieth-century angst on steroids.

Sylvia Plath, undated photo