S3 Ep The American Dream

Network Sting: MSW Media

Martin: Hello and welcome to the third season of The Martin Sheen Podcast with yours truly, Martin Sheen, of course. And I’m delighted to be back hosting this podcast pilgrimage where the destination is still and always will be the journey itself. Along the way, I plan to share stories and personal memories of some of the many people, places, and events that have helped to shape my lifelong happy and continuing struggle as an artist and a man to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. I also hope to explore poetry as a powerful form of expression and communication by proxy, as it were, and how poetry is such a vital and necessary component of our spirituality and our public discourse. And from time to time, I’ll invite friends, fellow actors, poets, scholars, and family members to join our pilgrimage and discuss what inspires their artistic journey. And so, friends, let us continue.

Martin: This episode is full of literary works, speeches and poems by American authors and American public figures. A letter to America, if you will. The country we love, the one we criticize, and the one we know can always be better. The one we are dreaming of. So happy. 250th birthday America, you don’t look any worse for the wear.

Martin: I turn now to a poem that we are actually more familiar with as a song. America the Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates.

O beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain America, America, God shed his grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea O beautiful for pilgrim feet whose stern impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness. America, America, God mend thine every flaw Confirm thy soul in self-control thy liberty in law

O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life America, America may God thy gold refine Till all success be nobleness and every gain divine. O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears. America. America, God shed his grace on thee and crowned thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.

Kathryn Lee Bates was an author and poet. Educated at Wesley College, she made the most of the new opportunities that were available to women after the American Civil war, and in 1890 traveled to England, where she attended Oxford University to further her education. Later she returned to Wesley, where she rose to full professor of English literature. She originally jotted down her poem America the Beautiful in the summer of 1893 while teaching at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In 1901, it was revised and included in her book America the Beautiful and Other Poems. She was born August 12, 1859, in Falmouth, Massachusetts. She died on March 28, 1929, in Wesley, Massachusetts. Katherine Lee Bates was 69 years old.

Consider This, Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 12, 1804. But what every school child may not know is that Hamilton’s son Philip died in a duel three years earlier at the exact same location. Like founding father, like son.

We continue with a powerful poem The Shadow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

I said unto myself, if I were dead, what would befall these children? What would be their fate who now are looking up to me for help and furtherance? Their lives, I said, would be a volume wherein I have read but the first chapters and no longer see to read the rest of their dear history. So full of beauty and so full of dread Be comforted. The world is very old. And generations pass as they have passed, A troop of shadows moving with the sun. Thousands of times has the old tale been told. The world belongs to those who come the last. They will find hope and strength as we have done. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator. He is known for his style of lyric poetry, presenting stories of mythology and legend, such as the Song of Hiawatha and The Village Blacksmith. He was born on February 27, 1807 in Portland, Maine, and died on March 24, 1882 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was 75 years old.

Martin: Hear now a selection of the poem the Song of the Stone Wall by Helen Keller.

Come walk with me and I will tell what I have read. In this scroll of stone I will spell out this writing on hill in meadow. It is a chronicle wrought by praying workmen, the forefathers of our nation. Leagues upon leagues of sealed history Awaiting an interpreter. This is New England’s tapestry of stone, alive with memories that throb and quiver at the core of the ages as the prophecies of old at the heart of God’s word. The walls have many things to tell me and the days are long. I come and listen. My hand is upon the stones and the tale I fain would hear Is of the men who built the walls and of the God who made the stones and the workers. With searching feet I walk beside the wall. I plunge and stumble over the fallen stones. I follow the windings of the wall over the heaving hill down by the meadow brook beyond the scented field by the marsh where rushes grow on. I trudge through pine woods, fragrant and cool, and emerge amid clustered pools and by rolling acres of rye. The wall is builded of fieldstones great and small, tumbled about by frost and storm, shaped and polished by ice and rain and sun, some flattened, grooved, and chiseled by the inscrutable sculpture of the weather, some with clefts and rough edges harsh to the touch. Gracious time has glorified the wall and covered the historian stones with a mantle of green. Sunbeams flit and waver in the rifts, vanish and reappear, linger and sleep, conquer with radiance. The obdurate angles filter between the naked rents and wind bleached jags. I understand the triumph and the truth wrought into these walls of rugged stone. They are a miracle of patient hands. They are a victory of suffering, a paean of pain. All pangs of death, all cries of birth, are in the mute moss covered stones. They are eloquent to my hands. Oh, beautiful blind stones, inarticulate and dumb. In the deep gloom of their hearts there is a gleam of the primeval sun, which looked upon them when they were begotten. So in the heart of man shines forever a beam from the everlasting Son of God. Rude and unresponsive are the stones, yet in them divine things lie concealed. I hear their imprisoned chant.

Written in 1910, the Song of the Stone Wall was one of the many epic poems by Helen Keller, and what makes it truly unusual is her use of free verse, especially at a time when the majority of poetry was rhyming. Keller was an author publishing over 14 books. She was a political activist as well as a disabilities rights advocate. She was also a founding member of the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. She was born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. She died June 1, 1968, in eastern Connecticut. Helen Keller was 87 years old, and her final resting place is in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.

Martin: We’re going to take a little break here but I assure you there’s much more to come. Stay tuned.

Martin: And we’re back.

Martin: Consider This founding father George Washington gave the shortest inauguration speech in American history of on March 4, 1793. It was only 133 words long. President William Henry Harrison gave the longest, at 8,443 words, on March 4, 1841, on a cold and blustery day in Washington, D.C. he died one month later of a severe cold. Brevity has its own merits and health benefits as well.

Martin: I Am Waiting By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up, and I’m waiting for A rebirth of wonder. And I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail. And I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic Western frontier. And I’m waiting for the American eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and. And I’m waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead. And I’m waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy. And I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments. And I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for the Second Coming. And I’m waiting for a religious revival to sweep through the state of Arizona. And I’m waiting for the grapes of Wrath to be stored. And I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American. And I’m waiting to see God on television piped into church altars if only they can find the right channel to tune in on. And I’m waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer. And I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder. I am waiting for my number to be called. And I’m waiting for the Salvation army to take over. And I’m waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth, without taxes. And I’m waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the Earth as theirs. And I’m waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody. And I’m waiting for linnets and planets to fall like rain. And I’m waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again In a new rebirth of wonder. And I’m waiting for the great divide to be crossed. And I’m anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered by an obscure general practitioner. And I’m waiting for the storms of life to be over. And I’m waiting to set sail for happiness. And I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and TV rights sold in advance to the natives. And I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the lost continent In a new rebirth of wonder. And I’m waiting for the day that maketh all things clear. And I’m awaiting retribution for what America did to Tom Sawyer. And I’m waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence. And I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower. And I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at the final disarmament conference. In a new rebirth of wonder. I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood. And I am waiting for the green mornings to come again. Youth’s dumb green fields come back again. And I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter. And I am waiting to write the great indelible poem. And I am waiting for the last long careless rapture. And I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian urn to catch each other up, at last and embrace. And I am awaiting, perpetually and forever, a renaissance of wonder.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter and social activist. He garnered much acclaim for his poetry collection entitled the Coney Island of the Mind. In 1953, he co founded the renowned City Lights booksellers and publishers in San Francisco. And although he published and supported the beat poets, he never considered himself one of them. He was born on March 14, 1919 in Yonkers, New York. He died February 22, 2012, in San Francisco, California. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was 101 years old.

Martin: We now present President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural speech, delivered on March 4, 1865.

At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office. There is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends is as well known to the public as to myself. And it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all with high hope for the future. no prediction in regard to it is ventured. on the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it. All sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war, seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war. But one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came. One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves. Not distributed generally over the Union but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which is already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and as a result, less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask adjust God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. But let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. Quote Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both north and south this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him. Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. And as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Martin: I invite you to delve further into the works of the poets I shared with you. You and I hope you seek out writers and poets whose work speaks to your hearts and minds with the power to inspire your life. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard here, please subscribe to my podcast The Martin Sheen Podcast with your host, yours truly, Martin Sheen, of course, wherever you find your podcasts, yeah, I still have to say that. You can find a complete list of the poets and titles of their poems that I’ve chosen at our website, themartensheenpodcast.com

I want to thank the people who make this podcast possible. Our producer and research assistant, Renee Estevez, whose explanation of the Internet really gets me thinking, What’s for lunch? And our sound engineer and editor, Bruce Greenspan, the man behind these rich and seamless recordings with the much-deserved nickname the Sound Surgeon. And I especially want to thank you, our listeners, for joining me.

And so, friends, we part with the prayer from Tagore.

We are called to lift up this nation and all its people to that place where the heart is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come out from the depths of truth and tireless striving stretches its arms, towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sands of dead habit, where the mind is led forward by Thee, into ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom. Dear Father, let our country awake. Amen.

Renee: The Martin Sheen Podcast all rights reserved. No part of this podcast may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form within without prior written consent of the author and TE Productions.

The poem “I Am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from Coney island of The Mind, copyright 1955, is included in this podcast with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.