Silent in Siloam

In The White Goddess Robert Graves claims that poets have the power to know the future and also the power to recover the past, and in his poem, “The Fallen Tower of Siloam,” he speak obliquely of this power and rejects its use in practical affairs. Now, first, this tower. Jesus mentions it in a passage of Luke (13:2-4). Some people had approached him and related the execution of some insurgents by Pilate. They were trying to get his reaction. He said:

Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No: but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”

The fall of that tower appears to have been a fairly recent current event Jesus expected his audience to know about. Graves used this event to make quite another but, in an odd way, quite analogous point. Herewith the poem:

The Fallen Tower of Siloam

Should the building totter, run for an archway!
We were there already—already the collapse
Powdered the air with chalk, and shrieking
Of old men crushed under the fallen beams
Dwindled to comic yelps. How not terrible
When the event outran the alarm
And suddenly we were free—

Free to forget how grim it stood,
That tower, and what great fissures ran
Up the west wall, how rotten the under-pinning
At the south-eastern angle. Satire
Had whirled a gentle wind around it,
As if to buttress the worn masonry;
Yet we, waiting, had abstained from satire.

It behoved us, indeed, as poets
To be silent in Siloam, to foretell
No visible calamity. Though kings
Were crowned and gold coin minted still and horses
Still munched at nose-bags in the public streets,
All such sad emblems were to be condoned:
An old-wives’ tale, not ours.

A difficult poem with a hard message. It seems to me addressed to poets, not the public. “We were already there,” the poet says. The poet sees the future. For him the tower crumbled to powder before it did; the disaster already surrounded him before it came; he had no need for an architectural committee to asses the visible fissures, the failing foundation—or to mind the glib chatter that took a not-so-serious and therefore satirical note of these signs. Yes. It behooves the poet to be silent in Siloam—except to those who, like him, can smell the air as well. The rest, of course, are preoccupied with those seeking and gaining power, with banks printing money, and the media rechewing the endless cud. The poet is called to the worship of his Muse; it is a higher calling. Silent in Siloam. Hard words… But so are Jesus’ words, addressed to his listeners, suggesting that they repent—or else. What a hoary, almost offensive word that, repentance, in this day and age. And that rapid shift in meaning, there, in that passage, between two kinds of peril: difficult. Difficult like poetry.