The State of the Quotation

I was feeling a little under the weather on Wednesday and actually went home in the afternoon and went to bed. After an invalid's supper I drifted in and out of sentience, reading and rereading the same two pages of a book about 40 times, until my wife at 9 o'clock roused my attentions to the "State of the Union" speech. I thought it a pretty fair forensic performance, though amazingly brief; and I was puzzled that President Bush had not even mentioned Social Security or any other domestic issues. When I commented on this to Joan, she pointed out, as kindly as possible under the circumstances, that I had in fact been asleep for all but the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes.

I have to say that those sutured segments formed a rhetorically varied, perfectly coherent, indeed seamless effusion of self-congratulation concerning the conduct and outcome of the Iraqi election and the American role therein. I was reasonably alert as the President thus began his peroration: "As Franklin Roosevelt once remarked, 'Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.' "

Now my disagreements with President Bush appear to be rather different from those of many of my colleagues, founded as they are in his pronunciation of the word "nuclear". Politicians are simply going to have to try harder if they really want to sew up the all-important English Professor vote. And worse than peccant phonology is phony philology. In the first place the sentiment that "Each age is a dream that is dying / Or one that is coming to birth" forms the concluding two lines of the immortal "Ode" of Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) — a poem that I, and most people of my age with a high school education, can recite by heart. It makes some sense in its context (a praise of poets and poetry), but as a free-floating apothegm it approximates the profundity of "All soup is either split-pea soup or some other kind of soup."

O'Shaughnessy's "Ode" is conspicuous for the competence of its meter. Indeed, it was one of the poems I chose last semester for an extracurricular seminar on "Poems That Sing Songs" for the undergraduate "Ex Libris" Club. From the prosodic point of view it's the best line in the "State of the Union" speech. For a Republican speechwriter to attribute it to a defunct Democrat seems rather bizarre, but I suppose if you are setting out to dismantle the guy's Social Security program, you need to throw him a compensatory oratorical bone.

Next, consider the verb "remark." FDR is supposed to have "once remarked" that "Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth." Whatever else this claim deserves, it merits the acknowledgement of its pretension. To remark means to comment upon, or to speak in an offhand manner. It does not mean to make vatic utterance. As God Almighty once remarked, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain," and as Hamlet once remarked, "To be or not to be, that is the question!"

While I was disappointed that neither David Brooks nor Mark Shields raised any of these pressing philological matters in their rather flaccid analysis of the speech, I was now wide awake and pinning all my hopes on the Democrats' rebuttal, to be undertaken by the Far West tag-team of Senator Harry Reid and Representative Nancy Pelosi. Though once again I faced literary disappointment, there are hopeful signs to report. The Democrats have discovered "values." Indeed they have discovered God! Naturally I flatter myself that my weekly columns have played some role here. I learned that Senator Reid hails from a place called "Searchlight." Searchlight is just a little place, apparently, but in Searchlight values lie thick on the ground. They blow around the streets like tumbleweeds. And they are values based in "faith!" Ms. Pelosi for her part went so far as to mention the G-word. As she finally remarked, "May God continue to bless the United States of America!" At least I think that was what she remarked. The New York Times, reporting on the Democratic rebuttal, excised her God-talk, and I am having to quote from memory. So of course it might have actually been Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy. Or George W. Bush? John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.