Poetry and History
The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow referred
to
The poem reads in part: ``He said to his
friend, `If the British march/ By land or sea from the town tonight,/ Hang
a lantern aloft in the belfry arch/ Of the North Church tower as a signal
light, --/ One, if by land, and two, if by sea;/ And I on the opposite shore
will be/ Ready to ride and spread the alarm/ Through every Middlesex village
and farm,/ For the country-folk to be up and to
arm.”
On the next day, the first battle of the War
of American Independence began at
These are poems that for many years were found
in American grade-school textbooks -- and one wonders how many generations
of Americans (and Filipinos who were taught with American textbooks) received
from Longfellow’s ``Paul Revere’s Ride” or Emerson’s
``Concord Hymn” their first impressions of the American Revolution.
``The poets have familiarized more people
with history than have the historians,” concedes historian Barbara Tuchman,
who cites as an example Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ``Charge of the Light Brigade”
as a piece that ``captures that combination of the glorious and the ridiculous
which was a nineteenth-century cavalry charge against cannon.” The charge
of the light brigade is probably the only thing that most people remember
of the Crimean War.
Sometimes, the poets have given history a
push, Mrs. Tuchman continues. Rudyard Kipling did it in 1899, she says,
``with his bidding `Take up the White Man’s Burden,’ addressed to Americans,
who, being plunged into involuntary imperialism by Admiral Dewey’s adventure
at
The poem advises the Americans, ``Send forth
the best you breed/ To wait in heavy harness,/ On fluttered folk and wild
--/ Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/ Half-devil and half-child.”
Mrs. Tuchman relates: ``The advice, published
in a two-page spread in McClure’s Magazine, was quoted across the country
in a week and quickly reconciled most Americans to the expenditure of bullets, brutality and trickery that soon proved
necessary to implement it.”
Interestingly enough, few Filipinos have
read ``Take up the White Man’s Burden” -- and fewer still are aware that
the poem had been inspired by the fall of Spanish Philippines to the
It seems that the educated Filipino learns
from poetry almost nothing of our own history. Perhaps this is because so
few of our poems deal with historical events -- and these few are either unknown
to or regarded poorly by textbook writers and editors. On the other hand,
we are perfectly willing to inflict on our students the epic poem Florante at Laura, a moro-moro
which takes place -- believe it or not -- in
But apart from having few poems on historical
events, we have few poets who wrote for young people -- unlike Longfellow,
who wrote ``Paul Revere’s Ride” specifically for
children. His opening lines read, ``Listen, my children and you shall hear/
Of the