CARY-MORISON ODE

	April 27, 1999
	Robert Pinsky, the Poet Laureate of the United States, reads a poem about children and tragedy.

ROBERT PINSKY: For many people, the most memorable images we've been seeing on television or in the newspaper recently are the faces of small children. The faces of children who are refugees, or victims or survivors of shootings and bombings, recall the risk of bringing any life into the world. The faces make me think of the infant at the beginning of Ben Jonson's poem known as the "Cary-Morison Ode." During the terrible capture and sacking of the Roman city Saguntum, by Hannibals' forces, a woman went into labor and gave birth, according to the story Jonson tells. In this legend, the half-born infant, seeing the surrounding, immediate horror and bloodshed, chose to return to the womb. Here are the first lines of Jonson's poem: Brave infant of Saguntum, clear Thy coming forth in that great year, When the prodigious Hannibal did crown His rage, with razing your immortal town. Thou looking then about, Ere thou wert half got out, Wise child, didst hastily return, And mad'st thy mother's womb thine urn. How summed a circle didst thou leave mankind Of deepest lore, could we the centre find! Then Jonson meditates on the meaning of this myth: Did wiser nature draw thee back, From out the horror of that sack Where shame, faith, honour, and regard of right Lay trampled on; the deeds of death, and night, Urged, hurried forth, and hurled Upon the affrighted world: Sword, fire, and famine, with fell fury met; And all on utmost ruin set; As, could they but life's miseries foresee, No doubt all infants would return like thee? The grotesque, even savagely comic image of the infant who refuses to be born into the world he sees is an image that captures the despair we feel at the world's horrors as well as the fact that despite the despair we keep on striving, and in fact keep on bringing children into the world--and keep on trying, we hope, to do better by them.