Sunday Pages: "Magna Est Veritas"

A poem by Coventry Patmore

Dear Reader,

Having written these “Sunday Pages” for two years, I have already shared a lot of the poems I love and know by heart. Others that I love and know by heart, meanwhile, are too new, and thus cannot be reproduced here because of copyright laws—which means no one will be stopping in the woods on a snowy evening on these pages until 2063.

A few weeks ago, during my little hiatus, I flipped through my dog-eared copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse, looking for something new—or, more accurately, something old that is new to me—to run on Sunday. I came across this poem by the wonderfully-named Coventry Patmore, which is not a shade of purple nail polish, but an actual British poet of the mid-19th century. (His full name is Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore, which I believe are the four houses at Hogwarts’ rival wizard school.)

I never took Latin, but even I could divine that the title, “Magna est Veritas,” means something like “Mighty is the Truth.” Reading the poem 145 years after Patmore jotted it down, I had the odd sensation that it was written just for me: a writer taking a little break as the world burst into flames—and as all the traitors and liars were unmasked.

It goes like this:

Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

As it turns out, the title is the first half of a Latin phrase: magna est veritas et praevalebit, which means exactly what my man Coventry writes in the poem’s penultimate line.

The lie shall rot. Does it not look like the world’s most egregious and consequential liars are rotting away before our eyes? Trump’s brain is moldy tapioca pudding. Putin’s head bloats and his hands tremble and his leg drags as he walks, his necrotic body swaddled in a grotesquely expensive coat. Lavrov has aged ten years in the last four weeks. Maggots appear to have begun feasting on the putrefying corpse of Steve Bannon months ago. Are we sure Rupert Murdoch isn’t a vampire? The zombie apocalypse is real!

This is why, as I sit me down half a world away from where Russian soldiers are blowing up children, I feel hopeful: Putin’s unvarnished evil has awoken the consciousness of the free world, and put the traitors on notice. Covid could not penetrate the Fox News zombie bubble, but the war in Ukraine has, so much so that slithery traitors like Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise felt the need to wear the Ukrainian flag on their lapels during the State of the Union. That the free world is resolutely united in opposition to the atrocities being perpetrated in Europe has to mean something, right?

Easy for me to say, I realize, five thousand miles away from besieged Mariupol. But I refuse to believe, or to accept, that good will not triumph over evil. It will, it shall, it must.

Praevalebimus!

---

Photo credit: Patmore’s wife Emily, the model for his book Angel in the House, portrait by John Everett Millais.