Santayana's Missing Stanzas

In the summer of 1985, I picked up this book (The Modern Library's Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Conrad Aiken) because I was attracted by its deep blue cover and the red rectangle at its center. Once I opened it, I discovered that the book's beauty went far beyond the cover: for the collection included strong poets I had never before encountered (Aiken himself, but also Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Trumbull Stickney, and Hart Crane among others). I soon found myself luxuriating in its pages whenever I had the chance and continued to do so for several months. One group of poems in particular held my attention, in part because they perplexed me to no end: George Santayana's Odes.

Frankly, I could not make sense of them, for they did not seem to me to relate at all to his thinking as I had understood it to that point.

I was (and remain) a great admirer of Santayana. I began to read him during my junior year in college (1980-81) and, after graduation, continued to read him apace. What I admired about him was his naturalism, skepticism, aestheticism, and appreciation for the religious imagination. Given those characteristics of his thought, I could not seem to recognize the Santayana I encountered in the Odes--though, in retrospect, I can see better today (thirty years on) how this group of poems relates to his work as a whole. Indeed, lately I have come to agree with George Howgate that "the poet in Santayana is perhaps his deepest, most ineradicable self" (see The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition, edited by William G. Holzberger, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979, 23). As a consequence, I am of the opinion that his philosophical work ought to be read through the lens of his poetry and not vice versa (as I had done).

When I initially read the first ode, the question with which it opens shocked me: for Santayana anticipates that a god will "choose" the poet to worship him "from afar, with inward gladness,/At sunset and at sunrise, in some Persian/Garden of roses" or, failing that, in some Greek or Roman setting beneath a "myrtle/Hallowed by Venus." Given Santayana's appreciation for classical antiquity, the latter context was not a complete surprise; but Iranian religion? Indeed, the allusions to Iran continue throughout the poem: "A silken soft divan, a woven carpet/Rich, many-coloured;" "Chanting the ditty an Arabian captive/Sang to Darius." Santayana confessed to longing for a god to arrive and transport him to "a chamber in an eastern tower" where he might repose and "dream awhile, and ease a little/The soul long stifled and the straitened spirit,/Tasting new pleasures in a far-off country/Sacred to beauty." For an American in 1985, it was difficult to think of Iran as a country "sacred to beauty." Of course, that was because, like most Americans then (and now), I knew next to nothing about Iran.

I remember shaking my head in complete confusion as I read and re-read those lines; eventually, I would simply bury them deep in my psyche.

The second ode was just as scandalous as, in it, Santayana took his generation of Americans to task for talking of freedom while enslaved to riches. I knew only too well that my generation was no different than his and I sympathized with the poet's disgust--and, yet, I was torn. At twenty-five, it seemed not unreasonable to me that wealth could be honestly acquired and commanded for good. At fifty-four, I don't deny that possibility, but I wonder how often it is put into practice.

The second ode also ended curiously: with the poet imploring Nature to grant him not riches but "what is needful:--" and, there, the ode ends.

I have since learned that the second ode does not, in fact, end with that line. Aiken chose to truncate it without notice to the reader of his anthology and without explanation. The remaining stanzas are as follows:

A staunch heart, nobly calm, averse to evil,
The windy sky for breath, the sea, the mountain,
A well-born, gentle friend, his spirit's brother,
Ever beside him.

What would you gain, ye seekers, with your striving,
Or what vast Babel raise you on your shoulders?
You multiply distresses, and your children
Surely will curse you.

O leave them rather friendlier gods, and fairer
Orchards and temples, and a freer bosom!
What better comfort have we, or what other
Profit in living,

Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature,
Awhile upon her bounty and her beauty,
And hand her torch of gladness to the ages
Following after?

She hath not made us, like her other children,
Merely for peopling of her spacious kingdoms,
Beasts of the wild, or insects of the summer,
Breeding and dying,

But also that we might, half-knowing, worship
The deathless beauty of her guiding vision,
And learn to love, in all things mortal, only
What is eternal.

[The Complete Poems, 140-141].

Santayana knew Conrad Aiken at Harvard and even formed a poetry reading group with him in 1910-1911. The odes discussed here (along with three others, forming a group of five) were first published in 1894 in Sonnets and Other Verses, Santayana's first book (see The Complete Poems, 43). He was, at the time, teaching in Harvard's philosophy department. Aiken's Modern Library anthology was published in 1944; the same collection of poems, however, had appeared in England in 1922 as a sort of "missionary effort" to acquaint the British public with contemporary American poetry. I could speculate as to Conrad Aiken's reasons for shortening the second ode, but I'll leave such speculation to others.

Ode III contains a critique of European colonization of the "New World" that was at least a century ahead of its time and adumbrates the theme of mankind as a kind of blight upon the earth, living on borrowed time.

Ode IV, steeped in agrarian imagery, sounds a more conciliatory note--if human beings would only learn to live in harmony with nature she has much to teach them.

Ode V is a love song to the Mediterranean whose beauty the poet declaims as "the eternal/Solace of mortals." Albert Camus would have approved.

I must confess that I have come to cherish these five odes by Santayana and read them regularly as a kind of secular scripture. The first ode no longer affronts me as it did three decades ago--indeed, I share his longing for respite in a "far-off country/Sacred to beauty." His criticisms of human greed and "vulgar/Circle of troubles" (Ode III) strike me as wholly appropriate.

I also hear his call: Lift the great ploughshare, clear the stones and brambles,/Plant it the deeper, with thy foot upon it,/Uprooting all the flowering weeds that bring not/Food to thy children.

Patience is good for man and beast, and labour/Hardens to sorrow and the frost of winter,/Turn then, again, in the brave hope of harvest,/Singing to heaven. (Ode IV).