Sen. Ben Cardin, Rep. Jamie Raskin and Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Election Night 2016.
On November 8th, Jamie Raskin was elected to Congress representing Maryland’s 8th District.
Not only is Jamie a gifted legislator, he is a teacher and a contributor to Teaching with Heart.
In his reflection, Jamie describes how when his mother died, he turned for solace to W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”
He also writes how this poem speaks to the possibilities of education, and the hope that “through language we might find a little more justice, a little more freedom, and a lot more understanding of the world.”
A hope well worth reaching for.
My mother, Barbara Raskin, was a novelist, a journalist, an English professor, and a writer’s writer, and when she died in 1999, there was only one poem that gave me any solace at all: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The key passage for me was:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
The consolations of this poem for people grieving the loss of a writer are plain. It assures us that the ruthless executioner of all living beings—time—is in love with language and will be gentle with people who have lived by the magic and music of words. None of us can escape death, but language may make us immortal—or at least imperishable in the hearts and minds of others.
As a teacher, I have also come to think of this poem as a touchstone in the classroom. Outside of the classroom, we live by laws and power, wealth and property, inequality and injustice, all the hard realities that life so methodically teaches us on our own. In the classroom, there is a chance, just a chance, that together we will live by the rules of language, which are universal, and explore the possibilities of education, which are infinite and boundless. Through language we might find a little more justice, a little more freedom, and a lot more understanding of the world.
— Jamie Raskin
Congressman, Maryland, 8th Congressional District
College Professor of Constitutional Law
Takoma Park, Maryland
From “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems. . .
Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
— W. H. Auden
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