Lift Not Thy Hands To It

It is said that the inspiration for the famous poem, Kubla Khan, came to Coleridge in a dream. In­spiration at this original level doesn’t seem to figure in my own dreams, but for once, during sleep, a bit of old verse came to mind with astonishing clarity.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khay­yam has been in my library for a long time, but its pages haven’t been opened for five or six years. Like most people of my generation I have read its rebellious and sometimes outrageously disre­spectful lines with a sense of half-shocked enjoyment, but I have never troubled to commit the verses to memory. This made it all the more surprising when, in a dream the other night, one of the quatrains came to me with the accuracy of someone reading the words as writ:

And that inverted Bowl we call
The Sky
Where under crawling coop’t we live
and die,
Lift not thy hands to It for help—
for It
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.

The poetry faded only to be replaced by a clear suggestion that Omar’s words be paraphrased to emphasize an important point of the libertarian philosophy.

Upon awakening, a rather dim view was taken of this fanciful poetic venture. Ordinarily, it would have been dismissed as an­other of those dream-ideas that seem so brilliantly wonderful until daylight exposes their emptiness.

However, with time to spare that same afternoon on a nonstop flight from New York to Los Angeles — and with pen and paper in hand — I toyed with the idea.

Having no poetic inclinations at all, and knowing nothing of quat­rain construction and the de­mands of meter and scansion, the best achieved was this:

And that agency — Force — we call
the State
Where under induced is less Love
than Hate,
Lift not thy hands to It for help,
for It
Bestows only from Its Compulsive Take.

 
My friend, Ralph Bradford, is a poet; so the above was half jokingly explained to him in a letter and the question posed —what can you invent? His reply:

“… You have now given me something to worry over. Just about the hardest thing in the world of letters is to paraphrase good verse without parodying it. This we must not do, and to avoid it isn’t easy!

“The quatrain in question (Number 72 in some versions, Number 52 in the one from which you took it) is rendered two or three different ways by Fitzgerald in his several editions — but I like the translation you quoted. To make it say what you want and still keep the form and meter will be difficult but not, I think, im­possible. Your ‘Compulsive Take’ is a good phrase — but, unfortun­ately, ‘take’ is not a permissible rhyme with ‘State’ and ‘Hate.’

“The only way I can manage a thing like this is to employ the same method I use in writing verse of my own — namely, write it over and over, trying out different rhymes until it ‘jells.’ In writing something original, I often aban­don not only rhymes, but rhyme schemes; but in this case that can’t be done. We are in the liter­ary strait jacket imposed by the quatrains themselves.”

He enclosed a number of quat­rains which he called “the result of some experimenting.” Here they are:

1.

And that Compulsive Force of which
you prate,
The ever-growing, ever-grasping
State,
It cannot give a penny it has not
Filched from your private pocket
soon or late.

2.

And would you lift your hands for
mercy’s sake
To the Compulsive State, for it to
 make
Your lot more easy? Then you ask
in vain —
It only gives that which it first must
take.

3.

And would you seek your labors to
abate
By asking succor from the Welfare
State?
It cannot give a dime it has not first
Taken from you, its appetite to sate.

4.

And that enormous Agency we call
The State, whereunder men may
walk or crawl
(In freedom or dependence)—
it must take
Before it gives you anything at all!

5.

And are you then so weak and
self-forsaken
You turn for succor to the vast but
shaken
And barren branches of the State?
Beware!
It cannot give a thing it has not
taken!

 
Five ways of expressing the same idea, all within what Ralph Bradford calls the “literary strait jacket” of an Omar quatrain! To me his Number 5 reads best, but it’s a matter of choice. Other lib­ertarians undoubtedly have their own way of expressing this theme.

A book, an essay, a lecture, a quatrain, even a dream — anything that helps one realize the final futility of the State as a source of prosperity or succor — is all to the good. ‘Tis a step toward free­ing the individual from organized plunder.