Striking a Root

What Vergil and Benjamin Myers Have Cultivated

Chandler Oklahoma, 2014, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

     “Now, when war’s long midwinter seems to freeze us
     And numb our living sources once for all, 
     That veteran of Virgil’s I recall
     Who made a kitchen-garden by the Galaesus
     On derelict land, and got the first of spring
     From airs and buds, the first fruits in the fall, 
     And lived at peace there, happy as a king. 
     Naming him for good luck, I see man’s native
     Stock is perennial, and our creative
     Winged seed can strike a root in anything.”
     —C. Day Lewis, “Dedicatory Stanzas”

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The little Rubicon, on the southern border of what was once Cisalpine Gaul, Gaul “this side of the Alps,” at times runs shallow and muddy and at other times collects in rippling green pools. Long ago when iron-rich mud slurried the waters red and earned the Rubicon its name, Julius Caesar cast his die and crossed from the northern bank to the southern, splashing only his greaves. We will cross from the south to the north. The land rises, grassy and fruitful, and suggests in its lineaments an ancient agricultural society. Vineyards lolling across hills give way to the lower fertile flood plains of the River Po which lays down nitrogen and iron in clay and silt; here Italians have grown wheat for thousands of years. Slowly the land rises again toward the Alps.

Ancient towns often nestled against rivers and made use of the surrounding country as farmland. Mantua rests snug against the Mincio, a tributary of the Po; they have tilled the earth here for four thousand years. In the 6^th century B.C., Ocnus the Etruscan renamed the preexisting settlement after his mother Manto, daughter of the prophet Tiresias. Despite its auspicious associations, the little town produced some pottery and some crops and was known for nothing for five more centuries. In the south senators convened and Rome became the seat of the peninsula, but the countryside just this side of the Alps remained strongly Gallic, even fighting with Hannibal against Rome. Finally, five years after he had marched from the Po to the Rubicon to Rome in 42 B.C., Julius Caesar granted citizenship to the inhabitants, probably to maintain Italian unity in his efforts to preserve Rome.

Yet nearly three decades before citizenship was granted to Cisalpine Gaul, Rome’s best-known poet was born there. Suetonius accounts:

Publius Vergilius Maro, a native of Mantua, had parents of humble origin, especially his father, who according to some was a potter, although the general opinion is that he was at first the hired man of a certain Magus, an attendant on the magistrates, later became his son-in‑law because of his diligence, and greatly increased his little property by buying up woodlands and raising bees. He was born in the first consul­ship of Gnaeus Pompeius the Great and Marcus Licinius Crassus, on the Ides of October, in a district called Andes, not far distant from Mantua. (Life of Vergil)

Such were the humble origins of a man whose name would become symbolic of poetry, of magic, and of the West. This man from the backwaters of Italy would become friend to Augustus and unite his countrymen around the emperor.

Looking to the body of Vergil’s work, we find that in his mind, Roman identity began in the countryside. Aeneas might function as the mythic Everyman, but a beekeeper is a hero better fit for everyday wear. As the beekeeper tends the bees, the laborer keeps society flourishing and at peace. In this it becomes apparent how a man born just this side of the Alps could write a work which helped to shape Rome’s imperial identity. That identity was rooted in love for a native country and cultivation of it. Oliver Lyne tells us, “In the Roman mind rural life and the moral life were easily identified. In addition there was a feeling that the original, the true Italian way of life (when things were so much better) was agricultural. There was even a temptation to talk of the affinity of rural life to the Golden Age.” When a person reads only the Aeneid, he often comes away thinking Aeneas and Caesar Augustus are great because Roman greatness was found in war— “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris....” But this is only a certain high point of the via romana, of Roman-ness. Earlier, in his Georgics, Vergil sings a different hero:

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For the Father of agriculture
Gave us a hard calling: he first decreed it an art
To work the fields, sent worries to sharpen our mortal wits 
And would not allow his realm to grow listless from lethargy. (I.121-124)

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T. S. Eliot would call this Vergil’s affirmation of the dignity of the farmer. Farming is an art, and a difficult art at that, requiring cunning beyond common sense, vigor, and strength to endure the whims of god and nature. Farming was Vergil’s first epic.

Virgil in the Campagna (1845) by Henri Delaborde, via Wikimedia Commons

He understood that just as Aeneas carried civilization across the sea, preserved from the ruins of Troy, farmers too were keepers of civilization. He continues:

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I’ve noticed seed long chosen and tested with utmost care
Fall off, if each year the largest
Be not hand-picked by human toil. For a law of nature
Makes all things go to bad, lose ground and fall away; 
Just as an oarsman, when he is sculling his skiff against 
The current, needs but relax the drive of his arms a little 
And the current will carry him headlong away downstream. (Georgics I.197-203)

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Like farms which require continual vigilance and tending lest they are overrun and fall to ruin, Rome and all civilizations must struggle day after day against decay. The natural order given to us in this life does not spur us on unhelped toward progress, and in Vergil’s work there is no place for a society which loses touch with the labor of their hands, or with the countryside where gods and nymphs and bards and shepherds dwell together. And what was true then is, I suspect, true today, apparent in our very word culture. Its root is Latin cultura, literally meaning ploughed land, but like our English word figuratively taking on the meaning culture, something which we tend and cultivate together.

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Imagine with me now the sometimes arid and brown, sometimes fertile and rippling green plains of Central Oklahoma. The western half of the state labors under drought or abnormally dry conditions, but the land around I-44 from Oklahoma City to Tulsa receives enough rainfall each year to support even a few loblolly pines amongst the bur and blackjack oaks. South of the interstate the town of Chandler sits on a sandstone hill above a wet valley fed by Bell Cow Creek. Down in the valley they grow the state’s staple crops—wheat, hay, cotton, peanuts, and soybeans—and in the higher pastureland they ranch angus cattle.

The town is proud of its history. On the main street, where some of the cobblestone buildings date back to the 19^th century, you’ll find the Pioneer Museum, and its caretaker, after telling you about that time Cherokee Bill robbed the Lincoln County Bank of $500, will ask if you believe in ghosts, as the museum is most assuredly haunted. Near the museum you’ll find a neighborhood pretty well kept up since 1900, when many of its oldest homes were built.

In one of those houses lives poet and professor Ben Myers with his wife and three children. Myers is an anomaly amongst poets. After college he moved back to the place where he was born and now lives in a house previously owned by his in-laws; he loves his children and is happily married to his high school sweetheart. He is not an alcoholic; he has never been divorced; and he did not move to either San Francisco or Paris to escape the tedium of ambiguously midwestern American life. On Sundays he goes to church. His life looks nothing like that of most poets for the past century (thank goodness), yet he is one of the best of our day—perhaps because besides possessing the requisite skill, he conceptualizes what it means to live a good life and to flourish in society much as Vergil did two thousand years ago. Like Vergil, the heart of his poetry has to do with the cultivation of culture.

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Myers’s two most recent books of poetry are Black Sunday and The Family Book of Martyrs. Both make thorough use of Vergilian themes. Black Sunday, primarily composed of sonnets, delves into Oklahoma’s agricultural and societal memories for the past century. Like the Eclogues, many are spoken by imagined dramatis personae, including Will, a farmer through whose voice Myers writes the anti-pastoral:

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Every farmer knows you carry what you lose
one season to the next. If hoppers eat your wheat, 
the corn stalks scorch to brittle bones, you use 
accounting tricks to make it come out neat. 
You carry loss in green-lined books, you haul
it in your hollowed stomach pit. You sit 
on the edge of your iron bed in iron dawn and pull
your ragged boots on, pick up your loss and get
to work. You carry loss like it’s a bucket full
of water you can’t spill, a lead pipe slung across your back. 
In bed, you rest it on your chest—the dull
weight flattens out your breath and makes your lungs go slack.
In twos, like heavy logs, you haul it with your wife, 
and carry it for all your God-given life. (“Will Tells How to Carry a Loss”)

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Much like the Georgics, Myers’s poem describes a farmer’s everyday work, though of course in a different attitude. The corn fields are not happy here, and the one guiding star for this farmer is found in the poem’s subtle pun—a farmer carries his loss as Christ carries the cross, “In twos, like heavy logs.” Despite the gloom, Myers is celebrating his agricultural society, bringing poems together to sing the praises of the farmer. Like Vergil, he makes his reader take note of the dignity of Everyman, who in Troy, Mantua, or Chandler has been given a hard calling to cultivate the world around him.

A subtler but no less significant similarity between these poets, ancient and contemporary, is a wish to cultivate time. Time sustains the Georgics. The farmer either two thousand years ago or today always works toward a future planting or harvest, sowing one crop and reaping another while the next field lies fallow. Cultivation, it seems, means to take what has been in order to prepare for a time to come. Myers’s most thoughtful discourse on time is found not in Black Sunday but in his Family Book of Martyrs. Here he presents the father rather than the farmer standing in the midst of time, taking what has come before through family, literature, the earth, and religion, so that he might look toward his children’s future.

That provides the book’s unity, but I am thinking particularly of the movement between a poem like “My Father on the Diving Board” toward the beginning of the collection, and “The Family Vacation” toward the end. The former is a memory, seemingly mundane, and just as it sounds. With all the minute particularity of love in remembrance, Myers writes in wonder of his father; then at the very end we are gifted a sudden religious plunge through a brief meditation on grace:

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His body browned from working in a heat
that blistered paint and cooked the summer grass
to needle sharp, my father climbed the rungs
of wet metal up to the fiberglass

cat’s tongue above the public swimming pool.
Chlorine singed my nose, dyed my sisters’ hair
from blond to seasick green, and horseflies bit
us as they swarmed the heat-thinned humid air.

But it was worth it all to see my father
dive. He, before the cancer wormed its way
out of his menthol smokes into his lungs,
pushed a shovel all week, then Saturday

would swim. He slowly backed until the board
dipped low and bowed up in the middle, then,
from toes tensed taut as ten piano strings,
the suntan oil gleaming on his skin,

flipped like a silver dollar in the air,
and plunged into the cooling cavity
to show how even weightless grace depends
on the unflinching force of gravity.

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That is the way of the book’s early poems—an unflinching plumb of familial memory, a hard look at the temporal, and the winking of eternity. Something of the poem reappears in “The Family Vacation”:

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A landlocked family at the beach, the sea
of grass behind us traded for the actual sea, 
we stare into the glaring blue, the sea
touched with eternity like Sunday afternoons. 

Each morning I witness our children wade 
into the endless deep, then afternoons
of Skee-Ball in the beach arcade, rolling 
the wooden ball into the neon lights.

The kids aren’t little anymore, teen-aged
or nearly. Gone are floaties for their arms
and duckie rings around their waists, but still
I watch them like I am the last lighthouse 

and they are little wooden ships with sails 
of silken children’s hair. My father walked
the bottom of the creek from side to side
before he’d let us jump from the raised bank. 

I cannot walk the ocean floor. I have
to trust the ocean with my kids but stay 
nearby and glance from one to one to one, 
like counting birds and always loosing count. 

At sundown I am fully spent. The sea
pants like a softly sleeping animal
curled in its cave of night. And then I dream
my long passed grandmother up from the sea

of grass she sleeps beneath. She’s come to tell 
me something, but her words are just the sound
of waves against the washing sand until 
I start to hear the voice inside the surf: 

They wade into the light, she says. Each thing 
that dies. The songs and poems, women and men, 
the boys and girls, the towns, the books, the thoughts. 
It all goes down into the blessed light. 

When morning washes up, pale grey and wet
before the heat burns in, we hit the beach
again. This time I stay a little closer 
still, but still the words inside the surf. 

The sea of grass, the sea of blazing water,
the sea of light. We all go in. We all 
go under. And the children that I watch 
turn slowly in the surf and watch me back. 

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In this poem we see what the eternal has given back to time. Here Myers is the father, and the world which had been wonderful, yet relatively simple, has turned strange. Time and grace are strange, giving and taking away. Myers seems to tell us that he tends to what is his only for a moment. He watches his children, who turn to watch him back.

The Family Book of Martyrs could be compared to the Aeneid in its structure. Myers is guided by Memory, the mother of the muses, through his cultural and familial past into the present day. Like the Aeneid, the book is framed through chiasmus. It begins and ends in the present, progressing through the past in between, and poems which occur at parallel points often reverse each other, as shown by the previous two. Likewise, in the book’s first poem, “The Orphans,” Myers’s children pretend that they have been orphaned in an airplane crash and must survive in a jungle, isolated from society but building up a little world in the desolation, while in the final poem, Myers imagines himself having died, standing in “a field full of fathers.” In both poems he assumes the role of observant ghost and through death contemplates what it is that a family cultivates, but the final poem reverses the first as he discovers that we are not, in fact, orphaned in this world after all. Others have gone before us and will come after us, all tending to this same humanity on this same earth. Myers’s book is deeply concerned with familial relations, and the poems, like people, speak to each other and take on meaning as individuals within the whole.

Ultimately, Vergil and Myers are connected through their preoccupation with culture—a culture not just of the living, but of the living, the dead, and those who are yet to come. Aeneas carries his father Anchises out of crumbling Troy while leading his son Ascanius by the hand, and in the Georgics, Vergil crafts a metaphor of an ideal society through the bees which, queen to common worker, are impelled by love to work well, each in its own office. Similarly, Myers tells us:

Tradition tells us that we are born into the rich web of an ordered creation, that we live not only as ourselves but as a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a father or mother, a parishioner, a citizen, a creature, a person living on a particular piece of earth. Through tradition, we discover who we are in relation to those who are around us, those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us. Tradition, though varied in its details and expression from place to place and time to time, thus connects the specificity of our time, place, and circumstance to a deeper current of permanence in all times and places. (“Tradition and Conservatism”)

Love impels Ben Myers to his wife and children, to his profession, and to his town, just as love impels him to poetry, and a tradition carried on the shoulders of those who went before him informs his love so that he might do his work well. In just the same way, Vergil conceived of Rome as founded on love and personifies it through the epic hero and the farmer both—a love for the land, a love for our fellow man, a love for our fathers, and a love for Rome—a love so holy he called it pietas, piety.

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I do wonder what Vergil would have to say if he saw the world we live in now. In his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Coleridge described the good work of a poet to be the lifting of the “film of familiarity” from our eyes so that we might see the “wonders of the world before us.” When we wonder, we begin to love, and when we love, we tend and cultivate. But today we are hardly granted even the familiar. Perhaps I feel the issue too keenly and hyperbolize. My father was an Army officer, and we moved once every two years or so—never anywhere particularly nice, but to a Kansas federal prison town, or to a central Louisiana swamp, or to North Carolina forestry land where the pines were barely allowed branches. And then bigger American cities all begin to look the same after a while—concrete box after concrete box, rectangular glass towers you might see in Seattle or San Antonio. When the whole country is open to you, it shrinks.

When I entered my twenties, I began to wonder what there was for me to cultivate—if I had ever belonged to anything and it belonged to me enough to sink my hands into and better it. I discovered that even if a person could never truly call one town home, each of us has been gifted a culture passed down from our ancestors to our grandparents to us, a culture which tells us what it means to be human and how to live together toward a good end. I discovered that home is both that which gives birth to us and that which we cultivate together.

To the man who drinks life’s ambrosia alone in the cubicle of individualism, Vergil, Ben Myers, and I have nothing to say. If you think that what has been passed down to you for your tending matters little, and Vergil has not convinced you otherwise, I don’t suppose I will. But to the harried woman wishing she had time for a walk with her neighbors today—to the children whose favorite adventure is the wilds of their backyard—to the priest, the artist, the politician, and the schoolteacher—to the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick-maker who spends three lovely longing minutes stargazing and wishing he knew why—to these people, Vergil has something to say. Mantua me genuit—Mantua gave me birth.