Category: Literature

Poems can be an expression of faith (e.g. R. S. Thomas) or political attitudes (e.g. so many of the 1930 poets such as W. H. Auden and Ruthven Todd – see below) as well as touching many other emotions.  I remember at school having to learn a certain number of lines of poetry off by heart.  I had just come across my mother’s text book from Rhodes University (1931-34) Twentieth Century Poetry: an Anthology chosen by Harold Munro.  Needless to say, there were copious poems by the poets of the Great War and so in the style of the late 1960s epithet “Make love, not War”, I choose to learn Wilfred Owens’ Dulce et decorum est for my English Oral.  Oh! What a rebel I was!

A few years ago, while helping the late Pat Ellis at one of her Charity Book Sales for Cathedral funds held in large shopping malls, I came across a Penguin Modern Classic, Poetry of the Thirties introduced and edited by Robin Skelton.  It cost me all of R12 and those who remember Pat will know that she insisted on receiving the full amount!

Among the well-known poets such as Auden, Betjeman, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis et al there were quite a few poets I had never heard of including Ruthven Todd.  One of his poems attracted my attention.  It was entitled “Dictator” and written in 1938 I presumed it was speaking about Franco of Spain.  So as an “anti-fascist rebel” (see above), I started studying it.

I have often bought poetry books and read them and thought, “That’s nice,” and left it at that.  I realised I needed to spend time with a poem, not just find a few good metaphors and move on.  I remember my UNISA English lecturer going through a poem with us when I was doing English II in my BA-degree. We responded with amazement that he could see so much more than we could in the poem.  He re-assured us that it was not because he was brilliant but simply that he had read the poem many times, looking for and finding the important lines.  He also read what others had said about it and then put it all into his own words.  So that is what I have decided to do with “Dictator” by Ruthven Todd.  Most of these ideas are my own but with a bit of extra help from google.  It is not meant to be a definitive exposition of the poem but rather a personal exercise in reading and trying to understand more of the poem than a simple surface reading of it.

Dictator               by Ruthven Todd (1938)
From a strange land among the hills, the tall man
Came; who was a cobbler and a rebel at the start
Till he saw power ahead and keenly fought
To seize it; crushed out his comrades then.
His brittle eyes could well outstare the eagle
And the young followed him with cheers and praise
Until, at last, all that they knew – his nights, his days,
His deeds and face were parcel of a fable.

Now in the neat white house that is his home
He rules the flowers and birds just like a king,
And, Napoleon by the sundial, sees his fame
Spread though the garden to the heap of dung;
“All that I do is history,” he loudly cries
Seeing in his shadow his romantic size.

Structure: This poem is in sonnet form being 14 lines long.  However, it is not in iambic pentameter format and its rhyming scheme is ABBA ABBA CDCDEE so it is a neither a true Petrarchan (usually ABBA ABBA CDCDCD) or Shakespearian sonnet (usually ABAB CDCD EFEF GG).  The octet part is Petrarchan while the sextet resembles the Shakespearian form with the rhyming couplet at the end tying up what went before.  There is a distinct break and change of direction between the octet and the sextet.

Message of the Poem: It seems to be telling the reader that politicians in their seeking of power crush those who are both friends and foe.  Young supporters cheer him on and refuse to see his faults and weaknesses; the stories about him become the sole source of who he is.  In the final six lines, a complete change of feeling, where his insignificance (now only ruling “the flowers and the birds”) is shown but he starts believing his own fables “All that I do is history”.  His power is merely the sun’s shadow made to look long and large so that even someone short like Napoleon (or Franco) appears tall.

Some questions on use of words and images which I need to explore more:

1. Why ‘Strange ‘ land?  Perhaps the poet is contrasting the strangeness of the rural areas (…among the hills) with the urban – where power normally is found
2. Why ‘Tall’ man? I think the poet is contrast the Dictator’s actual height with the shadow appearing tall in the sextet.  Interestingly, Napoleon (1.68m), Hitler (1.75m) and Franco (1.63m) were all fairly short men.
3. Why ‘a cobbler’?  Cobblers in fairy stories were usually normally poor but hardworking individuals and also fairy stories were frequently the ‘victim’ of the evil villains.
4. Why are his eyes ‘brittle’?  Brittle dictionary definition is ‘hard but likely to break’.  Dictatorships are often brittle.  Here the Dictator could outstare the eagle, the symbol of government in many countries at that time.   
5. Why does the poet use the image of ‘parcel of a fable’?  – Perhaps they were all part of a ‘package deal’ but not real (a fable), or is it perhaps that the truth/reality is wrapped up so the onlooker cannot see what it contains and all they see is “a fable.”
6. Why ‘neat white house’?  Napoleon’s house in St Helena was white and neat.  White is also a sign of purity.  Notice how the dictator is now in a house and no longer in a palace. 
7. Why does the poet uses the word ‘Neat’ to describe the house of exile?  It implies that the overthrow of the dictator is ‘done and dusted’ – thus all neatly packaged up.  Neat also indicates efficiency.  The dictator is no longer in control of the nation but merely his exile-home.  Dictators were reputed to get a nation to run efficiently.   We were always told in history classes how Mussolini got the trains to run on time in Italy.
8. Why does the poet use the word romantic?  The poet use ‘romantic’ to imply that all the dictator can see is his own “idealised view of reality”, which is a dictionary definition of romantic.

If I were to give a simple one sentence meaning of this poem I would say:  Leaders who seize power as dictators are filled with hot-air. They have ideals but do not have awareness of the reality of a situation.

I saw a comment in a blog in 2012 where the blogger, who had supported Obama in 2008, felt that Obama had done nothing of what he had promised to do.  As the Blogger says: “The Idea of Obama is more powerful than the Reality of Obama has ever been.”  So too with dictators the idea is more powerful than the reality.   Or is that, with dictators, ‘threat’ rather than ‘idea’?

As I said above, this might be a completely wrong interpretation of this poem.  If you think so, why don’t you make a comment below.

I was recently asked if I would like to contribute to a special edition of St Margaret’s Times dealing with memories. I suppose if I thought about it, I have so many little episodes worth recalling. But usually these memories need a cue of some sort to get them going. Without that it is hard to creatively recall some special event. So I submitted this short piece, blending what I had been reading at the time (poems by R. S. Thomas) with an event that this poem reminded me of.

The East End Cross
Above the choir stalls on the liturgical east end of St Margaret’s is a large wall-mounted blank cross.  It was placed there during the rectorship of Bishop John Carter and at that time I was a lay-minister and served as a parish councillor and therefore I was involved in the decision to ask for a faculty for the design and the placement of this cross.

I was reminded of this a few weeks ago.  I was listening to the live-streamed service from Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford.  The preacher began her sermon quoting from a poem by the Welsh Anglican priest and poet, R. S. Thomas.  My immediate response was to try and find the poem in my small volume of selected verses by R. S. Thomas.  I couldn’t find that poem but did find one entitled In Church which attracted my attention and gave me a few hours of joy as I analysed its use of metaphors, similes and under-stated theology.  It was the last few lines that ‘shocked’ me.  Thomas, as the narrator speaks of seeking God in the silence of the empty church and he ends:

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

On the first reading of these lines, I was shocked that a man-of-God, a priest, should believe that his faith was ‘empty’ and that Christ was not there to answer his questions.  But then I remembered that cross on the East wall at St Margaret’s and Bishop John’s comments as we discussed its placement.  Bishop John said that he intentionally asked the architect to design a cross without the body of Christ on it.  In many churches and cathedrals, we see the crosses behind the altar with a corpus on it but Bishop John said that a cross showing the suffering of Jesus on the cross should hang above the pulpit. ‘We preach Christ crucified,’ he said, ‘but celebrate the Risen Christ at the altar and so that cross should be bare.’ This is what makes those last two lines of R. S. Thomas’s poem into a paradox.  When we are feeling down, and who isn’t during lock down when we cannot be In Church the way Thomas speaks about, then the cross might appear to us to be empty or ‘untenanted’ but it is ‘untenanted’ because of Easter, because of the resurrection of Christ who is with us all the time wherever we are.  So be encouraged as you worship, not In Church but perhaps at home, that Christ has risen and Christ will answer your question of faith.