Even most native speakers of English don’t realize how many of our commonest clichés–phrases you hear verbatim in venues as diverse as a gabfest on The View, an Elvis Presley song, or a political debate in Wolf Blitzer’s urgently-named “The Situation Room”–were actually invented by 18th and 19th-century British poets.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Marv Albert on ESPN describing a triple play? Not exactly. It’s the justly famous first line of John Keats’ pastoral poem Endymion (1818) about a shepherd lad loved by the moon goddess Selene. “Fools rush in.” Elvis, right? The first three words, maybe. But the entire pearl–“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”–actually hails from Alexander Pope’s brilliant 1711 poetic treatise An Essay on Criticism. And who first warned us “A little learning is a dangerous thing?” Einstein? George Washington? Sorry. Pope, once again. From the very same poem–and to think he was only 23 when he scribbled these sterling epigrams that stubbornly cling to our lips nearly 300 years later.
But what about that ubiquitous ornithological metaphor we all bandy about so freely? You know–the albatross, inextricably wrapped around some poor wretch’s hapless neck? Surely dead bird imagery is too macabre, too contemporary to have crawled out of some centuries-old British poem–right?
Not if the poet is the opium-addicted mystic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the poem is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798). With his surreal tale, Coleridge unwittingly gave us the perfect proxy for President Obama, entangled in his own personal albatross–the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
When Obama signed the bill into law on March 23, 2010, with the stroke of a pen he became the doomed sailor in Coleridge’s supernatural, foreboding poem. Little did the President know at the time that his pen was the equivalent of the cross-bow with which Coleridge’s mariner killed the fated albatross. (Word to the wise: be careful what you lobby for. Word to the foolish: ignore the word to the wise.)
Since its first publication, scholars have debated endlessly the symbolism and significance of Coleridge’s strange metaphysical bird poem. Let’s leave those lofty academic indulgences to those who enjoy lofty academic indulgences. For our humbler terrestrial purposes, we’ll concentrate on the storyline of this saga of a man on a most unusual extended speaking tour.
The poem narrates how an old sailor–the eponymous mariner–newly returned from a long voyage, stops one of three guests just as they are about to enter a wedding reception for their next of kin. The “grey-beard loon” (as the apprehensive apprehended guest addresses the sailor) detains the guest, stopping him with his “skinny hand” and “glittering eye.” He then proceeds to recount a long twisted tale of a sea junket gone terribly wrong–in which the mariner kills an albatross with his cross-bow, sees all 200 of his shipmates mysteriously drop dead (“With heavy thump, a lifeless lump, They dropped down one by one.”), before his ship is ultimately ferried back to land by a phantom crew of spirits. Not your typical Carnival Cruise Line experience by a long shot.
Even though the guest is now late for the wedding ceremony and the ensuing festivities, he is either too transfixed or too terrified of upsetting his interlocutor not to heed the sailor’s expansive tale. What the wedding guest learns is that the mariner is compelled to repeat his somber story, passing “from land to land” to teach it “at an uncertain hour.” The mariner knows “the man who must hear me” as soon as he sees his face. The unfortunate recipient of the mariner’s loquacity this time just happened to be the poor wedding guest. One can only imagine how the bride and groom received his excuse for his tardiness. (“The sailor told you what?“)
In 2010 America, “the grey-beard loon” is President Obama. His doomed shipmates are the myriad Democrats who voted for Obamacare, many of whom are destined to go down with the ship this November “with heavy thump.” The albatross which Obama slew with his cross-bow was the will of the American people, who still by a great preponderance oppose this gargantuan, immorally-imposed orgy of entitlement spending.
Obama now wears the heavy bird of Obamacare around his neck, struggling mightily with cheap diaphanous $250 bribes to extricate himself–as he did in his latest June 8th town hall in Wheaton Maryland.
It remains to be seen at what town hall and on whom our Mariner President next lays his “skinny hand.” But just like Coleridge’s mad sailor, Obama is now doomed to keep traversing the country in a valiant but vain delirium of words, repeating his ever-luster-losing fairy tale of the benefits of his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act–i.e., the large. white, rank and festering lifeless bird draped around his neck.
Coleridge said it much more eloquently:
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns;
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
Keep teaching us your tale, Mariner Obama. But be aware–just like Coleridge’s wedding guest–average Americans recognize the crazed eye of a grey-beard loon who’s been out at sea far, far too long. And they think your health care bill is–well–for the birds.
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