Were those injured in the Charge of the Light Brigade cared for by the Lady with the Lamp?

Back in our school days, the texts we read for the English classes often had essays by, or about, people who had made some serious mark on history.  Thus, we read about Florence Nightingale--the Lady with the Lamp--and her untiring contributions to treat the sick and the wounded and how she became the patron saint of nursing.

When growing up, and pretty much throughout my life, every so often my father, or his uncle, quoted from memory something from Shakespeare or Tennyson.

What connects the first paragraph on Florence Nightingale with the second on Tennyson?

Making those connections has always been what the life of an academic has been all about.  Years ago, I watched a few episodes of James Burke's Connections and loved the way he tied the stories together.  The world is one amazing set of interconnections. The tangled webs we weave, indeed. Living now as we do with the world wide web, we ought to easily understand that compared to when we were kids, right?

In my classes, too, I try my best to convey to students that understanding even a tiny, tiny bit of this world is not accomplished by merely studying a bunch of courses in any one single formal academic discipline.  Instead, we need to take courses in different disciplines and, more importantly, think through the connections.  And the way I teach, well, it is all about integrative learning where I am constantly highlighting to them the connections to poetry or science or anything else.  To me, there is simply no other way of learning

But, of course, all these are considered to be old-fashioned ideas--even the integrated curriculum that was in the place in the Honors Program was slowly and systematically dismantled because faculty and students saw no value in such an integrated learning.  But, I continue to march along to my own drum beat!

Anyway, real life events are no different with connections in plenty.  Events do not happen in isolation. Case in point: how the Lady with the Lamp and Tennyson come together.  In Crimea.

One of Tennyson's poems, which we did not read back in the school days, but I have heard it recited more than once, was The charge of the light brigade.  One often recited verse from that is this one:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

To understand a poem like this means we have to dig deeper into the context that triggered Tennyson to write about it.  The tangled world wide web and Wikipedia make it so simple: "about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War."

The Crimean War.

Aha, you say, because Crimea is so much in the news these days.

It was also during this Crimean War that Florence Nightingale became that famous Lady with the Lamp:

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith,^[9] and fifteen Catholic nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning)^[10] were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

It is that same Crimea that is now the scene of intense geopolitics.

Of course, there is also that other famous Crimean connection: The Yalta Conference.

The question remains, however, on what we learnt, if anything at all, from such previous entanglements in the web that the world is.  I suspect we did not, and we humans rarely do.  Which is why ought not to be surprised when history repeats itself.

What we regret most are the chances we never took!

Every once in a rare while, we come across gems at the least expected places.  We are out looking for something, perhaps even trivial is the pursuit, when there is that mother lode.  A treasure chest seemingly waiting for somebody, anybody, and it happened to be us.

That kind of serendipity occurs not often in our lives, but when they do, we ought to know to hold on to that gem.

In my case, it was a television sitcom, and a re-run at that, which I was watching when I heard a few lines of a poem being recited.  Those couple of lines spoke to me, which is what we expect from good poetry.

I couldn't wait to get to Google and search for those lines.  It turned out that the sitcom character had quoted from the final stanza of Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.  Well, I give you more than what I heard recited:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I wish us all well with the chances that we take, and may we never have to regret the chances we didn't, and don't, take!

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers

My high school teachers perhaps made my life more prosaic--literally, as in they did not do enough to help me understand and appreciate poetry.

The English teacher certainly didn't help the cause by stinging my cheeks with his slaps!

Which is why every once in a while I now have to take it upon myself to read a poem and figure things out for myself at, what I hope is, the middle phase of my life.

Or, I pop in, every once in a while, at a poetry reading to listen to poems.  Poems are, I have come to realize, meant to be listened to as somebody with wonderful diction read/recited.  In fact, I am even ready to proclaim that merely reading a poem does it great disservice--a poem is for the ear and not for the eye.  Perhaps that is why it was also possible for many brilliant blind poets across the cultures.  Or how the poetry of the vedas made it possible for an unwritten transmission over the years.

But, then poetry these days is so much of free verse that I end up getting rather annoyed.  I am merely continuing on with my neo-traditionalism even in poetry appreciation, eh!

There is something a lot more magical in the old-style poems.  Like in Tennyson's line, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers," which is the title of this post as well.  Ah, only those wonderful poets know how to condense profound ideas into a couple of words!

As much as I relished reading it, "Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers" definitely seems like a poem that will be fantastic if a poet or a thespian were to recite it. 

The knowledge couplets from the poem are simply a treasure:

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore,
And the individual withers, and the world is more and more.

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast,
Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

Intellectuals and the pseudo-guys like me profess to pursuing knowledge, ultimately it is wisdom that rocks!  It is a world of a difference between knowledge and wisdom, more than the difference that exists between information and knowledge.

The best anti-intellectual argument that I have ever come across (even though I didn't agree with it entirely) was  this scathing essay by Robert Nozick, which I first read it more than a decade ago.  Since then, I have encountered way too many arrogant pseudo-intellectuals more than wise ones and, hence, appreciate Nozick even more :)

Maybe it is the mere "knowing" and an attitude of know-it-all, sans any wisdom, that irks people?  The anti-intellectual emotions do not mean anti-wisdom? And, hence, even anti-intellectual poems and verses like this one by Auden?

To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word 'Intellectual' suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife

Nothing like beating up on intellectuals, eh, and that too the pretentious ones!

But, wait, is knowledge even a necessary condition for wisdom?

No money, no respect? Even from family?

The verse I have borrowed from this blog reminds us that things now are not all that different from a long time ago.  Am not sure whether this is a good thing or otherwise!

यावद्वित्तोपार्जनसक्तः
    तावन्निजपरिवारो रक्तः ।
पश्चाज्जर्जरभूते देहे
    वार्तां कोऽपि न पृच्छति गेहे ॥

- भजगोविन्द स्तोत्र

As long as you are earning money,
your family loves you.
When you stop earning and the body becomes weak,
no one in the house want to hear about you.

- Bhajagovinda Stotra

As a kid growing up in a fairly traditional/religious family, I recall memorizing the "Bhajagovindam" verses that were rendered as music by the late MS Subbulakshmi.  But, I don't recall reading along with a translation of what those Sanskrit words meant.  So, it was more a rote memorization of 1,200 year old verses by Adi Shankara!

There was a great uncle, "RM"--a mixed-bag like all of us--who was at ease in quoting many of these ancient words of wisdom.  Well, he could quote and recite--from an understanding, not mere memorization--verses from Sanskrit, Tamil, and English.  Dad too does that to quite an extent.  I suppose there has been quite a generational shift since then.  Yet again, I am reminded of Tennyson's "knowledge comes, wisdom lingers."