Perhaps it’s age but I find growing satisfaction in resolution. I like stories that conclude satisfyingly, often ending where they started, with the distance covered in between being the important part. I feel the same way about most music. You can keep the dissonance, chords that leave you hanging. I’ve grown more aware of cycles. Not cosmic. More prosaic than that – the migration of birds, the hustle of squirrels in the fall, kids returning to school. There’s a Scriptural subtext to Bill Coyle’s “Autumn” (The God of This World to His Prophet, 2006):  “Harvest time. The circle is complete. Time to crush the ripened fruit for wine. Time to grind the gathered grain for bread.   “Tru to form, the geese pass overhead, Giving us the ‘V for Victory’ sign Even as they beat their long retreat.”   When he was seven years old (he is now thirty-nine), I took my oldest son to a nature preserve near Albany, N.Y., where the rangers were leading a twilight walk into the marshes to witness the spectacle of frog courtship. The frogs were Hyla crucifer, peepers the size of postage stamps with a pattern of ill-defined crosses on their backs. In April, males serenade females – a more reliable gauge of spring’s imminence than the return of the robins. At that latitude, spring returns incrementally.   We carried flashlights, fifteen or twenty of us, and approached the booming in the night. Though tiny, peepers en masse, thousands of them, are almost deafening. Even when we shined our lights on them, to watch their throats balloon as they called, they ignored us. Everyone laughed, out of amusement and astonishment.   Then another, more raucous sound began, impossibly, to drown out the peepers. It was past sunset, black without the flashlights. Directly overhead, flying no more than 25 feet off the ground, a flock of Canada geese honked like drunken saxophonists. In the dark, I felt privileged, disoriented and a little scared (the combined volume of frogs and birds was overwhelming). The darkness and the noise created an illusion of closeness, as though we were indoors, and again everyone, kids and grownups, laughed.   In Walden, Thoreau described “the circling groping clangor of some solitary goose.” Multiply that by dozens, and add the steady basso of the peepers. His journal is filled with references to frogs, including the genus Hyla, but he made relatively few observations of geese. Concord, Mass., is at the same latitude as Albany. On April 30, 1852, he followed the sound of the peepers and noted:   “It seemed to be a note of alarm. I caught one – It proved to be two coupled. They remained together in my hand. This sound has connexion with their loves probably.”   The bachelor Thoreau on the sex life of amphibians: “their loves probably.”

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate living in Venice. Across its roughly eight-hundred lines the speaker gives the impression of fleeing something left unstated – not a scandal or crime but his unsatisfactory self. In the sixth and final section he writes: “Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say, / I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life, / A frangible and transparent failure.” The Italian can be translated: “I made a complete mess of it.” This indulgence in self-disgust continues:  “My efforts at their best are negatives: A poor attempt not to hurt anyone, A goal which, in the very nature of things, Is ludicrous because impossible. Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses, Ducts and arterial sluices of my body . . .”   Here, Hecht makes an inspired transition:   “. . . As through those gutters of which Swift once wrote: ‘Sweepings from Butcher Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.’”   Those are the concluding lines of “A Description of a City Shower,” a pastoral parody and my favorite among all of Swift’s poems, first published in The Tatler in October 1710. Pat Rogers in his edition of The Complete Poems (Yale University Press, 1983) tells us it was also Swift’s favorite. The final three rhyming lines are inspired. An early edition of the poem was subtitled an “imitation of Virgil’s Georg[ics].” Nearly as good as the passage quoted by Hecht are the lines leading up to them:   “Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow, And bear their trophies with them as they go:    Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell    What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell. They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,     From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,    And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.”

On August 23, 1939, Hitler and Stalin agreed to the secret non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans invaded Poland from the west nine days later, on September 1, 1939. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later.  In one of those curious historical coincidences, on September 2, 1939, Whittaker Chambers, then working as a writer-editor for Time magazine, met with assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle at his home in Washington, D.C. Chambers revealed his own background as part of the Soviet spy network, which included officials within the Roosevelt administration. He named names: Alger Hiss, among others. Berle was skeptical. He reported Chambers’ revelations to the president, who dismissed them. Berle then shared what he had heard with the FBI, who interviewed Chambers in March 1940, and again in 1942 and 1945. The FBI took no action. In Witness (1952), called by Hilton Kramer "one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American -- and one of the best written, too," Chambers describes what happened next:   “I had had to hurry from my office at Time magazine to the airport to catch the six o’clock flight for Washington. I fastened my safety belt, chewed my gum, lay back and closed my eyes. The great plane took off into the serene evening sky of September 2, 1939.   “On the plains of Poland, at the same moment, a new day was awakening the Polish nation to terror and insane distress as cavalry tried to turn back, with lance and rifle, a new force in the history of war and men—the German Panzer divisions.   “In Moscow, a few days before, Stalin, with a tigerish grin, and a more reserved Ribbentrop, had signed the pact that made Nazism and Communism allies. By the same scratch of the pen, Stalin had unloosed upon mankind, for the second time in two decades, the horror of world war."      Chambers had worked as a spy for the Soviet Union from 1932 until 1938, when he broke with communism. On August 3, 1948, Chambers testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He described the spy network at work in the late 1930s, including Hiss’ role. Though the statute of limitations on espionage had expired, in his second trial Hiss was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms in federal prison and eventually served three and a half years.   For further context, I suggest reading Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (Basic Books, 2017), concentrating on Chap. 19, “The Dead,” pages 463-499. Hanson tallies the carnage suffered by every nation. Poland stands out:   “[B]y war’s end, Poland would suffer between 5.6 and 5.8 million dead, the highest percentage of fatalities (over 16 percent) of a prewar population of any participant of World War II.”   Part of the explanation for the slaughter is that Poland capitulated, though never surrendered, to both the Third Reich and the Soviet Union in little more than a month. Between September 1 and October 6, 1939, the country suffered some sixty-six thousand fatalities. “Poland alone,” Hanson writes, “lost more of its citizens than all the Western European nations, Britain, and the United States combined.” He continues:   “Poland was the laboratory of Nazi barbarism, given that it was the site of over 450 German extermination, concentration, labor, and prisoner-of-war camps. It was both the first country attacked by Hitler and the first to have its citizens—both Jews and Slavs—targeted for mass extinction. . . The Holocaust accounted for the greatest number of Polish deaths, given that the prewar Jewish community of Poland—10 percent of the population—was the largest in the world at somewhere around 3.5 million persons. Scarcely over a hundred thousand Polish Jews survived the German extermination efforts. The six most infamous extermination camps of the Holocaust—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were all in Poland.”   In praise of the Poles, Hanson writes: “Polish resistance fighters usually fought the Nazi occupation in a far more muscular fashion than their Western European counterparts, provoking a commensurately fearsome German response.”

Eccentricity in books is a tricky quality. It can be charming and inspire lifelong devotion. Take Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book I discovered in my freshman year. I redundantly keep three copies on the shelves nearest my desk. Tristram Shandy is another endlessly readable eccentricity. Among the less successful are Ronald Firbank’s novels, which I have tried hard to love for many years but always find tedious. Daniel Mark Epstein has written a poem, “A Dream,” about acquiring a copy of the most eccentric and readable work of literary – not criticism, not scholarship, perhaps love letter – I know, Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature (1938):  “Someone learned of my collector’s interest In the finer points of this autographed edition, The March of Literature: From Confucius’ Day to Our Own. I read it first at twenty-one, Then passed it on to one friend, then another, Several copies lost and found in bookstores Now abandoned to the online trade. I wanted a clean one with the author’s name Written in his graceful hand, a book he’d held As he held the pen that wrote the heavy book That sums up all he’d read and learned In a lifelong lover’s quarrel with literature, As much as any man could ever know In one life of four thousand years of books In ten languages, works he knew by heart.”   I read it at nineteen or twenty after reading for the first time The Good Soldier for a class.  In his introduction to The March of Literature, Ford describes himself as “an old man mad about writing,” and the book as “an attempt to induce a larger and always larger number of my fellows to taste the pleasure that comes from always more and more reading.” In a volume of more than eight-hundred pages you expect lapses, omissions and misguided judgments. I find it easy to forgive Ford, for reasons obvious in the sampler that follows:   A third of the way through the book, in the middle of a digression on the English border ballads, Ford inserts a three-page digression-within-a-digression based on his Great War experience: “The writer happens to have been present at what you might call a poplar recension of folksong during several weeks in the fall of 1916. His regiment having spent a disproportionate time in the trenches during the First Battle of the Somme, it was given a long fatigue to do at a long distance from the trenches, so that they might at once rest their weary bones and get some exercise.”   Here Ford writes of his friend and collaborator Joseph Conrad’s short story “Youth”: “The language is again so low-keyed, so of the vernacular, so just, so fluid that when you read you have again no sense of reading.”   Here is Ford’s moving tribute to Dr. Johnson, a man with whom he must have felt substantial literary and personal kinship: “But ten years’ rest and the getting into his head of a conversational rhythm and a vocabulary comprehensible to most of the cultivated men of his day had on Johnson the effect of evolving a style that was at once sufficiently learned to save his face and sufficiently actual to let us read his Lives of the Poets with pleasure even in these anti-Latinistic days. It is a work that, had there been no Boswell, must have been a resounding monument to this great man. As it is, it stands almost forgotten like an Aztec temple lost in South American [sic] undergrowths. It is a great pity.”   Ford nicely characterizes the best of eighteenth-century English prose: “In Gibbon we come upon a figure very different in timber from any of the other eighteenth century littérateurs, save only Richardson – and Johnson, if you can persuade yourself to think of him as a writer and not merely as a dancing bear, growling numbers in and out.”   Ford suggests we look at works of literature on both the macro and micro scales, comparing the latter to music: “It is to be remembered that a passage of good prose is a work of art absolute in itself and with no more dependence on its contents than is a fugue of Bach, a minuet of Mozart, or the writing for piano of Debussy.” Ford then quotes a passage about storks, of all things, from Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the paragraph here marked with the number three. Ford writes: “And I am prepared to leave it to the taste of my readers who may decide each for himself whether a passage of flawless prose gains or loses when the subject treated is one of universal interest.”   The March of Literature is no dry textbook. It’s inimitably Ford’s work, as eccentrically personal as DNA. It ought to be academic but reads like inspired conversation.

The Battle of Malvern Hill was fought near Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy, on July 1, 1862. Not as well remembered as Antietam or Gettysburg, it was the last of the Seven Days Battles in the Peninsula Campaign, and prompted Confederate General Daniel H. Hill to say: “It was not war -- it was murder.” Union artillery from its position on the hilltop slaughtered General Robert E. Lee’s troops. Confederate casualties in one day of fighting totaled some 5,550; Union, about 3,000. In a grim twist, Union General George B. McClellan and his forces, despite the victory, retreated to Harrison’s Landing on the James River and Richmond remained securely behind Confederate lines until the war was nearly concluded, almost three years later.  Herman Melville’s “Malvern Hill” was included in his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). The poem is a dialogue between a Union soldier and the elm trees standing on the battlefield. It is notably unromantic and unconsoling: “Ah wilds of woe!” The speaker asks, “Does Malvern Wood / Bethink itself, and muse and brood?” The trees reply with the italicized stanza at the end of the poem:   “We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.”   R.L. Barth titles a four-line epigram, collected in Deeply Dug In (2003), with an unattributed quotation lifted from Melville’s poem: “Leaves must be green in spring”:   “Malvern elms, limbs sap-filled and leaves green, Spring an easy consolation; However, where may they turn, who’ve known a jungle Blasted by defoliation?”   Barth writes as a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. He refers to the decade-long use by American forces of chemical defoliants, the most widely known being Agent Orange. The goal was to strip trees of foliage to prevent the enemy from concealing supplies and encampments. Traditionally, spring is a consolation for another winter endured, a rebirth of nature and hope, and green is its color. Barth’s jungle is “blasted,” denuded, without “easy consolation.”   In his Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce, a Civil War veteran severely wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, defined war as: “a by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light.”