Three Times Ten Million Thoughts

Carl Sandburg’s “The Four Brothers” is a fantastic poem that may actually be longer than the requirement for this blog… Found here, it is an incredibly lengthy work covering the events of World War II from the sidelong view of The Four Brothers—The United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia. This work stays true to Sandburg’s traditional form of prose-poetry with run-on sentences so long that they leave you winded and stuck in Albania and an insight on the human condition that leaves you speechless on top of it all.

While I’m admittedly biased in the area of Sandburg’s poetry (seeing as I kind of adore everything he’s ever written that I’ve read…), it’s still safe to say that he’s outdone himself with this particular piece. His point is clear, if not necessarily concise, and finds itself twisted into the identifying diction of a man that spent years people-watching, but I digress.

While projecting his pride for the countries that fought for a world that would know only peace, Mr. Sandburg also makes quite evident his feelings for their reign. Words like “gibbering” and “God’s great dustpan” leave a bit to be desired in his railing description of Russia’s great Romanoff family, and so, too, with Germany’s Hohenzollerns. His description of Adolf Hitler as a “half-cracked one-armed child of the German kings”, “a child born with his head wrong-shaped,/ The blood of rotted kings in his veins” is also fairly indicative of his feelings on the matter. Why call Hitler—a mass murderer, a man whose name is so well-known and feared that even children scorn it—a child if not to make a point? Why use the phrasing “blood of rotted kings” if not to make a point?

Exactly. No matter how subversively and keenly the great poet finds himself manipulating the words in his works, the message remains; the only way to end the madness was war. “There is only one way now” Sandburg wrote in what is assuredly one of my favorite stanzas of the piece, “only the way of the red tubes and the great price”. War was the only way out, so far had the world let Hitler go—a man driven mad by his ancestry and ambition, a man that spilt blood for a cause he deemed worthy, and The Four Brothers deemed terrible.

Now don’t hear me saying that Sandburg is condoning Hitler—he isn’t. There is no praise of the Kaiser that “will go onto God’s great dustpan”, but rather a leveling of the playing field, as he recognizes that the Four Brothers were, in objective terms, no better.

“The killing gangs are on the way”.

The Four Brothers did as their people wished, as they deemed right in the eyes of “God [who] is a god of the People. / And the God who made the world … is the God of bleeding France and bleeding Russia; / This is the God of the people of Britain and America”. They did what “three times ten million men” asked them to do, they avenged the lives lost and fought for the tortured, but they killed too, in what they thought was right.

I give kudos to Sandburg for pointing that out. 

A People's Rights Rant

So… The Age of Innocence and A Doll’s House, written by Edith Wharton and Henrik Ibsen respectively, are interesting to say the least. Both are well-crafted in their intent and their execution, in their social criticism and the reactions of their respective societies. These two authors were both certainly aware of what they wanted to say and of how the world around them would react—otherwise the works themselves wouldn’t have been written. And reading them, I find myself asking a question: have we really changed all that much?

Now, before you get on your high horse and lecture me on the improvement of women’s rights and all that, before you call me a raging feminist and completely dismiss my opinions, let me finish; women’s rights have come an incredible distance from the time that Wharton and Ibsen wrote their works. A great deal more women have a great deal more respect and opportunity and future—I get that. The United States alone has come a long way, and the world as a whole has taken a huge step forward, but overall, gender expectations and roles are still very similar.

Women are still the cooks, the cleaners, the ones responsible for their children; men are still the providers, the hunters, the head of the household—which is fine, but not all that different. Yes, women are able to be more independent, but no, men weren’t the only source of that problem. We are still expected to get married, to stay innocent, to bear children and be “good”—which is, again, fine, but not all that different.

Even disregarding women, thought, the roles of men have changed very little in the grand scheme of things. As previously mentioned, men are expected to provide for their families—it is both a necessity and a weight that they can neither fight off nor run from if they are to have a family. Society, as a whole, regards men as the champions of the home and the outside world—they don’t have a choice, it seems, to be anything but strong and independent. This sort of mentality is, within reason, not a terrible one. If they want to, there is absolutely no reason for a man to not be the head of the household, to be the breadwinner, and to be responsible for finances; the issue comes, instead, when the expectations are forced to extremes.

But disregarding my own social commentary, there is plenty to be said for Wharton and Ibsen’s books on the subject of gender roles. Archer describes May Wayland as a “darling” who “doesn’t even guess what it [the opera] is all about” (Wharton 4), while Torvald and Nora both refer to her as Torvald’s “little skylark” (Ibsen 12). Torvald rants on about the expectation of men to be the providers and instilled with good morals, while Archer recounts and fantasizes about “teaching” May—a phrase which holds a double meaning in-and-of itself. And while these two writers had astounding timing, hitting it off right as the revolution of human rights began, both were faced with considerable trials and judgments and protests.

In 2013, writings of the same general topic don’t receive as much public scrutiny, but the fact of the matter is that there is still backlash, instead of being judged as “out of place” because it goes against moral standing, they are judged for their independence and dubbed “tenacious” or “too feminist” (notice that books written on such topics typically don’t involve men’s rights—it’s almost always women). So really, at the core of it, has much changed?