Mugwump of the Final Hour

Cartoon of Secretary of State James G. Blaine in the 1884 presidential election.

“You taught me language, and my profit on't

Is I know how to curse.”

—Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest I.ii.366–68

"mugwump of the final hour"—John Ashbery

Cursing becomes a cannibal

Self, I know, but would not have it so,

Who gaze upon a wider world

Which though improved in countless ways

Is the prime source of my dismay:

Like all my kin I live on human flesh

And cannot help it—unhappy

Vegetarian trapped in a universe of meat—

The scene of upright apes' deceit,

And all in all not what I wish.

And so I curse, knowing that things can—

And likely will—get worse. Words told in ancient times,

Shakya Gautama wrote some lines—

He was a Scythian trooper, like me,

But unlike me believed that he could see

A route by which to elude time's web.

It came to him beneath a tree

To which he'd fled from Darius the Great

King of kings and master of his state,

Who’d overthrown a magus named Gaumata.**

You call this “nonsense history”?

And so it is—but made of words, must be,

Since cursing's also made of words,

And lies are curses, too—if they matter!

*John Ashbery, "Alcove" (London Review of Books; Planisphere [2009]), appears to be referring to spring, but with him you never know! Two can play at that game, however, and I impute no agenda to it.

**So says the ancient Greek historian Κτησίᾱς (Ctesias) in his Indica, who also reports one-legged people there with feet so big they could serve as sunshades or umbrellas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctesias). See, too, the reference to the Magian Smerdis (the alleged imposter Gaumata, or Bardiya) in Jorge Luis Borges's narrative "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

Monday, November 17, 2025