The words we heard on the hill
FORTHWRITE EXTRA: how the poetry of Amanda Gorman reached back through the ages to inspire her country anew
There were celebrities. There were ex-Presidents, vice presidents and, most of all, a new President. There were preachers and country singers, fine rhetoric and glamorous frocks. But everyone agrees who and what brought the house down at Joe Biden’s inauguration: Amanda Gorman and her poem, The Hill we Climb.
There are so many reasons to be awed, inspired and moved to tears by the 22-year-old’s oration. As that fades, there may be some pernickety critics who will analyse and take apart the lines. And so they should; I’m sure that’s what Ms Gorman would want. She is a young poet. She is still learning.
But I’m not here to offer a critique, much less criticism. What struck me about her performance was the way it reached back through the ages, to the very origins of poetry and the shared experience of words and stories.
These were words designed to be read out loud, to be expressed, to be performed. That is how poetry and storytelling began. Her flowing hand movements had something of the ancients about them: I felt I was listening to Homer, to Omar Khayyam, to the Beowulf poet.
Listen to the alliteration:
A country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free.
You hear a medieval court poet…
Listen to the incantations:
That even as we grieved, we grew.
That even as we hurt, we hoped.
That even as we tired, we tried
You hear the Bible: Ecclesiastes, who influenced Pete Seeger’s Turn, Turn, Turn and now influences his rightful heir.
And you hear rap, too
If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.
… the internal rhyme, the insistent rhythm, the way she lands on the beat.
It was incredible. And of all the changes we’ve see happen in the past 48 hours, let’s think about the change in the sound of the words of America.
President Trump was, and is, a formidable speaker. His cadence is quite unlike any other politician I’ve heard. His powerful use of the simplest adjectives he can lay his hands on is something students of language and persuasion will be studying for years.
But his default tone is mock and the moan, grievance and spite. We heard a new sound on that sunlit Washington day.
When poetry trumps tyranny
John Paul II addresses the crowds on his first mission to Poland, June 1979
General Jaruzelski, Poland’s last leader of the Soviet era
I thought of another occasion, another oration, watching Amanda Gorman at the inauguration.
They were finished, the European Communists, 12 years before the Berlin Wall fell. In 1979, they reluctantly agreed that the Polish Pope, Karol Józef Wojtyła, could visit his homeland, a passionately Catholic country despite the long years in thrall to the Soviet Union.
The conditions were strict. The Pontiff was not permitted to touch on anything remotely political, economic or social in his addresses.
He didn’t need to.
Karol was a poet as well as a priest. To a country who had heard nothing but the arid Newspeak of General Jaruzelski and his committee, the sound of traditional Polish, musical Polish, was itself a call to arms:
And I cry out from the depths of this millennium – let your Spirit descend and renew the face of the earth. The face of this land.
Shelley called poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To him, poetry had a public duty: you could call it patriotic, but could also call on it to hold the powerful to account. I think we acknowledged such a poet this week.