REMEMBERING
THE TRULY GREAT
A modern poet, Stephen Spender, has written a poem under the
title “I THINK CONTINUALLY OF THOSE WHO WERE TRULY GREAT’. He was born on 28th February
1909 at Kensington, United States and died on 16th July 1995, at
Westminster, in the United Kingdom.
Spender was a left-wing writer who worked as a propagandist
for the Republicans during the Civil War.
He held several prestigious posts as an academician in
England and the United States. He also worked as a literary journalist and was
co-editor of the magazine Horizon from 1939 to 1941 and of another
popular magazine Encounter from 1953 to 1966.
Spender’s poetry reflects the essential tragedy of the
human condition. By nature, he is a humanist who seeks social justice for the
underprivileged. He writes passionately but less obscurely than his contemporaries.
Spender’s natural endeavour is to unite poetry with beauty. As
was the fashion of the day, he uses current poetic symbols but without making
them incomprehensible.
Quite surprisingly, he changed his
original views about communism in 1950 and brought out an anti-Communist
collection of essays, The God That Failed, which upset the communists
but uplifted the capitalists.
In the poem under review, Spender uses
the symbols of fire and sun. Whereas fire represents the power to destroy,
purify, and rejuvenate, the sun symbolises life, learning, and light, besides inexhaustible
energy and determination. The truly
great men, says Spender, possess these eternal qualities of fire and sun and
use them to serve their respective societies. They never waver or slacken or
allow obstacles to neglect their goals. They do not let their personal needs to
suspend their self-imposed social tasks. Their ambitions and desires to serve
their societies remain unchanged.
Spender believes that
such truly great men should be continually remembered because they are a
perennial source of inspiration to others.
What follows is the full text of the
poem:
I THINK
continually of those who were truly great, /Who, from the womb, remembered the
soul’s history/Through corridors of light where the hours are suns/Endless and
singing. Whose lovely ambition/Was that their lips, still touched with fire, /Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot
in song. /And who hoarded from the Spring branches/The desires falling across
their bodies like blossoms.
What is
precious is never to forget/The essential delight of the blood drawn from
ageless springs/Breaking through rocks in worlds before earth, /Never to deny its
pleasure in the morning simple light/Nor Its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother/With noise and fog the
flowering of the spirit.
Near the
snow, near the sun, in the highest fields/See how these names are feted by the
waving grass/And by the streamers of white cloud/And whispers of wind in the
listening sky. /The names of those who in their lives fought for life/Who wore
at their hearts the fire’s centre. /Born of the sun they travelled a short
while towards the sun, / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
---------------
26th
October 2020 G.
R. Kanwal
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