The Abnormal Is Not Courage

Painting by John William Waterhouse


The Abnormal Is Not Courage


The Poles rode out from Warsaw
against the German tanks on horses.
Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
A magnitude of beauty
that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day.
Question the bravery.
Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that.
Not at its best.
It was impossib1e, and with form.
They rode in sunlight, were mangled.
But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act.
Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public,
or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart:
the bounty of impulse, and the failure
to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act,
but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward
of the same quality accomplishment.
The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus.
But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear.
Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination.
And the exceeding.
Not the surprise.
The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture.
Not the exception.
The beauty that is of many days.
Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence,
of long accomplishment.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on American Poems