POETRY // The Happy Uncertain Worried Feeling
by Joshua Mehigan
EXCERPT //
You may have noticed that poets fall by and large into the category of people who simply cannot be happy. There is a whole critical taxonomy of poetic dissatisfaction, which is no less extensive in time and space than humanity is. The complaints and lamentations of warriors, shepherds, and monarchs, verse satire from Menippus of Gadara to Vince Staples of North Long Beach, dirges, invective, blues, political and protest poetry—it is never hard to find a good reason to complain, if only you open your eyes and look. And when a majority or an especially vocal faction starts beaming and smarming about a new era, you can be sure that no true poet will stand for it. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote “The Lie” in 1592 at about the start of the English high Renaissance.1 Shane McCrae wrote “Imagine the Day” on November 6, 2020, the first day that U.S. election returns finally showed a definitive Democratic victory. Both poets stare into the distance at implied hope, but each also stands a little aside from the usual expectations concerning his given historical moment, which in either case is widely considered a moment of progress, or even rebirth.
Raleigh wrote “The Lie” a half-century after the belated arrival to England of the continental movement now known as the Renaissance. The evidence of Raleigh’s poems is that he brought little cheerful expectation to that historical moment, however people now like to characterize it. More and more, history supports his doubts. Present-day scholars very reasonably say “Early Modern” instead of “Renaissance” because, as it’s often put, it wasn’t a renaissance for everyone—not for slaves, indentured servants, smiths and fishmongers, disabled and mentally ill people, beggars, or others lacking wealth or the titles of potentates, who, as Raleigh says, “live / Acting by others’ action.” But for all its gratifying bile, and despite the chutzpah it took Raleigh to wire up this little device and leave it for his fellow courtiers and sometime-friend Elizabeth I, it is probably smart to resist reading “The Lie” as Raleigh’s defense of those the Early Modern period left behind.
Probably the poem speaks first for Raleigh, sick to death of the duplicity and malevolent bullshit he had endured daily, close up, for a decade, from the most powerful leaders and institutions of his day. Raleigh had just turned forty. After an unapproved marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, he was in and out of the Tower. Around that time, too, don’t forget, Raleigh was likely to have been ruminating over the disappointments of his career as a mercenary colonialist and legally sanctioned pirate—poor Raleigh, no buyers for the seized Irish land awarded him for his role in the utterly bloodthirsty suppression of rebellions there. On the other hand, truth is truth and a poet’s hypocrisy and ruthless ambition don’t necessarily invalidate the claims of the poem, lucky for Raleigh. In order for this poem to make you nod slowly with your eyebrows up, you do not need to imagine a fully integrated or heroically anachronistic self behind it. “The Lie” may not be what anyone today thinks of as Truth to Power, but it’s an important small step in the imperfect humanist enterprise it points to, which is ongoing. Raleigh, maybe Raleigh’s Best Self, descried a truth, captured it, and, with his agreeably bitter understanding and his choice of human details and language, gave it an emotional weight that, even now, might empower anyone, as truths tend to.
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