"What are patterns for?"
Amy Lowell and Heather Cox Richardson on the hidden power of patterns
Have you noticed how a small detail can stick in your memory for decades? I’m thinking, again, of two things from my college classes.
First, my freshman English professor, a published poet, casually called a book character “just a shop clerk”. Later, I was that very thing for a few years and I still can’t get rid of the word “just”.
Another thing that has stayed with me is Amy Lowell’s exquisite poem, “Patterns”. It’s about a woman who is handed a note saying that her husband-to-be has died fighting in World War I. The poem ends with, “Christ! What are patterns for?”
For years I’ve tried to discover what she means by “patterns”. I’m sure it’s bigger than “designs” or “habits”, although their effects appear in the poem. Perhaps she means war itself.
Today, In our present national crisis, I’m noticing the word “pattern” again.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote a week ago,
[I}t appears a pattern is emerging in which Democratic-led states are suing the administration while officials from Republican-led states, which are even harder hit by Trump’s cuts than their Democratic-led counterparts, are asking Trump directly for help or exceptions.
I searched Richardson’s writings for another example of patterns in American history. A reviewer of her latest book, wrote early last year,
Democracy Awakening mentions Russiagate, Charlottesville, Trump’s first impeachment, Covid, the 2020 election interference, and January 6. These bewildering events during the Trump years, Richardson argues, reflect a broader pattern in the history of the American political right. It was a power grab like that of the enslavers before the Civil War.
“Like today’s Republicans,” Richardson writes, “as southern enslavers lost support, they entrenched themselves in the states, then took over the machinery of the federal government and the Supreme Court.
“The MAGA Republicans appear to be on track to accomplish what the Confederates could not: the rejection of the Declaration of Independence, replacing it with the Confederates’ hierarchical vision.”
In 1961 when I read Amy Lowell’s poem, my older relatives were still talking about World War II and some were still passionate about the 1956 Hungarian uprising. And some of my own classmates would soon find themselves in Vietnam.
At the time, I didn’t understand the “patterns” in Lowell’s last line. Now, today, they clearly signify to me a power half hidden that will take over if ignored, and must be resisted.
I also see now that Amy Lowell’s poem must be read not with a beginning and an end, but as a round. Just as my generation followed my parents’, and is followed by my children’s, the last line in “Patterns” must be followed by the beautiful first ones:
I walk down the garden-paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, …
I guess I'm seeing the Republicans (Trump MAGA Republicans) repeating patterns of racist and elitist behaviors. Those behaviors are as ugly now as they were in the past. Perhaps even more dangerous now.
Patterns seem to be alive and always altering, a moving mandala within a labyrinth... unfolding . We must pay even greater attention . Thank you for this reminder.