The Sunday Poem

Be truly great

This week’s poem is very special to me. It was one of my father’s favorites; he would often quote it, sometimes recite it. My brother Jim read it at his funeral in 1982 (Daddy died too young).

The picture is of the December 11, 1941, front page of The DePaulia, the college newspaper of DePaul University in Chicago; my dad was editor of the paper that year. Four days after Peal Harbor, he wrote the unsigned piece, “Youth and War.” It’s a young man’s response to the great events of that week—a deeply religious and passionate young man who was a gifted writer, although perhaps a little too enamored with his own ideas and writing (a fault about which I might know something myself).

But it’s not my dad’s writing that I’m focusing on now, in connection with today’s poem. It’s his passion.

If we’re lucky, when we are kids, we see our fathers as bigger than life, and that feeling may never really go away, even as we ourselves come to understand the inevitable struggles and compromises and failures of grown-up lives. In my case, I never got to know my dad as a man, and so he will always be a great figure to me, but in a distant and dim sort of way, the way of all childhood memories.

His passion abides. Daddy was a man extravagant in so many of his passions. He loved argument. Our dinner table was a field of battle: every night, loud, dynamic and idealistic verbal combat over politics, moral questions, history, law, literature, sports—you name it, we fought over it. Still do, every Thanksgiving. (I credit whatever success I have had as a broadcaster to that dinner table; you had to get in, make your point with concision and impact, and get out quickly). As his ten children grew and started bringing home high school and then college friends, my dad delighted in drawing them into the mix, too, and taking them on. It was the 1960s and 70s; things were tense between the generations. But Daddy had the gift of provoking thought, not enmity in his arguments; of disagreeing without being disagreeable; of making friends, if not converts.

He loved our country. Not long after Pearl Harbor and that editorial in the college paper, he joined the Army. After a couple of years, he ended up as a paratrooper in the 11th Airborne Division, fought in the Philippines and Okinawa, and then served in the occupation of Japan. He never talked about the combat he’d seen. Later, he opposed the Vietnam War. Passionately.

He was quietly devout. You would not know how deep his faith went, he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. But I have never seen anyone pray more intensely than Daddy did after he received Holy Communion.

And he loved our mom, of course. The sheer number of us is testament to that. I remember once we were all out to dinner, all twelve of us including our parents, and some wiseacre with a few too many in him came up and said to Daddy, “Hey pal, you need some help with the bill?” My father grunted a “No thanks.” So then this guy says, “Catholic, huh?” Daddy turned and looked right at him, paused for an uncomfortable moment, and said in a steely voice, “I love my wife.” Mother beamed; she was so charmed by that, she mentioned it for years.

Daddy was a great man. That’s my point here. He wasn’t famous. But he was a great man. We are all summoned to greatness in our lives, and our challenge is to find whatever that means for us, and overcome as best we can our fears and failures, and give ourselves greatly to the tasks that life brings us, whether in our families, among our friends, in our communities. For our nation.

We must meet this perilous moment in the life of our beloved country. We must find our greatness now; we must be truly great for her.

That’s the title of this week’s poem: “The Truly Great.” It’s by the 20th Century English poet Stephen Spender. What I love about it is that Spender understands that greatness in life isn’t material or martial or political success or prominence. It’s passion. That passion is always there in each and every one of us, and it is what we must bring to this fight to save America.

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The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

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What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

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Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.