“Poetry makes nothing happen.”

That’s what W.H. Auden said, in his great eulogy for W.B. Yeats. It’s what I thought as I sat down to write this, after the horror of last week, and what that horror told us about ourselves, as Americans, and the darkness we have summoned, the dead end where we have arrived.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was heartbreaking to me. Yes. Before any consideration of my opinion of his work or of anything he ever said—before politics altogether—I was profoundly sad.

He was a young man with a wife and two small children whose lives are irrevocably altered, scarred forever by his murder, which happened in front of them. It happened in front of all of us, drenching our social media feeds with his spurting blood. At a basic human level it all just bludgeons the heart.

And I am sad for our country. Charlie Kirk believed—and proved by the way he lived his life—that ideas can change America, that sharing your ideas and making a case for them to your fellow citizens still matters in this nation. He was murdered while he was speaking, sitting under a tent that proclaimed his invitation to other speakers to join in the clash of opinions, and counter him: “Prove Me Wrong,” it said. I can’t think of anything more all-American than that.

Speech isn’t violence. Violence is violence. To me, the long academic project to elide that distinction is unpersuasive at a fundamental level, and justifies a politics of illiberalism inconsistent with my understanding of, and my hope for, our Constitution and our country.

I know my own words here may hurt or dismay or even infuriate you. That is not my intention. This platform and others like it offer all of us the opportunity to share our views with each other, and if we don’t do that honestly—then, honestly, what’s the point? It was once the hope of the world that social media would raise up all our voices into a celestial, discordant choir of free speech, a great, cacophonous conversation that would naturally shape a better, more democratic future for all. How foolish that hope seems now. How corrupt are the Tech Lords of the Algorithms, who so quickly realized they could make far more money off stoking and manipulating our primal rage, fear, jealousy and resentment than they would by facilitating the exchange of our ideas—and thus weaponized their platforms against us. Damn them all.

Still, I believe in my soul in that cacophonous conversation. Perhaps that is because I was raised in one: ten brothers and sisters and my father and mother loud around the dinner table every night; all voluble and opinionated, all bonded by a love no argument could ever break. So in that spirit, a bit more of my honest opinion on the work of Charlie Kirk, which I came to know, not deeply but frequently, through social media over the last couple of years.

I believe many of his ideas were wrong, and some downright vile. He seemed willfully uninformed about the reality of many people’s lives—especially the lives of Black Americans. He seemed cruel towards trans people, and many others. And he seemed to me to be debating a cartoon version, a straw-man version, of the Democratic Party and of American liberalism in general. I also do not recognize in his right-wing militancy the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as I understand it. Those are my opinions. I’m sure Charlie Kirk would have had a lot to say about them, had we ever met. And I would have welcomed that conversation.

But he’s been murdered. Like Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband. And so many others. The litany of political violence in our time is long and relentless; killings and arsons and shootings and hate spill forth from our days. The vicious spiral accelerates.

And poetry, of course, cannot stop it. It can do nothing, as Auden declared.

Poetry isn’t action. It’s a kind of vision, full of risk and hallucinatory intensity. Sometimes, poetry perceives our common life more acutely than any other form of human inquiry. Poets see that violence is a mirror. Bloodshed tells us who we are more than any speech or book or law can. Yeats himself looked at Ireland, and the world, in the wake of World War I, and recognized the new age dawning:

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

Yeats wrote those lines in 1919. They seem truer every day that passes now in our America.

But there is another kind of poetic vision. Its claim is that love is real, that the human soul is a miracle of the universe, capable of attaining, if only in glimpses, the sublime. We are ourselves the only and the greatest resource of restoration in these dark days.

That’s really what Auden meant. Yes—poetry fails to make stuff happen. But it sometimes accomplishes a harder goal: It can reveal the truth of love. Or, as Auden put it at the end of his eulogy for Yeats, in a call to poets everywhere to do this kind of work:

“In the deserts of the heart,

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.”

Our poem this week is of this nature. It’s one of the greatest poems I know; a visionary poem, a kind of prayer. It’s by Derek Walcott, the great Caribbean poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.

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by Derek Walcott

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Then all the nations of birds lifted together

The huge net of the shadows of this earth

in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,

stitching and crossing it. They lifted up

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,

the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,

the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—

the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,

only this passage of phantasmal light

that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

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And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,

what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes

that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing

the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes

of a child fluttering to sleep;

it was the light

that you will see at evening on the side of a hill

in yellow October, and no one hearing knew

what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,

the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough

such an immense, soundless and high concern

for the fields and the cities where the birds belong,

except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,

something brighter than pity for the wingless ones

below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,

and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices

above all change, betrayals of falling suns,

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.