The rebellious Antigone comes to bury her dishonored brother.
The controversy surrounding the remains of the first Marathon Bomber is revealing Boston, Cambridge, and other Massachusetts communities as not quite as enlightened as denizens of that liberal region of the country would like the rest of the world to think: “dust to dust” is time-honored, but officials in Massachusetts are kicking up a lot of it in denying a simple spot to a soul whose fate now belongs to God, not them.
The cowardly bombing attack, it seems, was not at act against reason, America, or humanity, but against Boston, and now the provincial fury has carried over to Boston’s mayor and Cambridge’s top official refusing burial rites, calling to mind Sophocles’ Antigone—Boston dust is too soul-precious to cover the dust of a fled soul.
We understand the tears and anger felt throughout Boston and the Massachusetts Commonwealth.
But we also note tribalism rearing its ugly head.
This debate over dust recalls Rupert Brooke’s famous poem, “The Soldier.”
Rupert Brooke was part of the Dymock Poets in England (with Robert Frost, an unknown poet then visiting England to get known—and it worked) and this marks the 100th anniversary of a group nearly forgotten, perhaps due to Ezra Pound’s over-loud reputation. The Dymock Poets thought little of Pound and he even less of them. Pound challenged one of them to a duel.
The Imagists, an even smaller clique than the Dymock Poets, prevailed as “true” Modernists, even though Frost—not a joiner, but part of the Dymocks—was making poetry sound more like speech and the Dymocks, like the Imagists, presented themselves as the new thing after the Georgians.
The Dymock Poets lost members to the First World War (the Imagists lost T.E. Hulme) and Frost soon left for America to make it big as a “New” England poet.
But back to dust and tribalism:
Is it tribalism when the tribe is as big as the British Empire?
The Soldier—Rupert Brooke
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
