The 12th Anniversary of Ken Kronberg’s Death
This Thursday, April 11, is the 12th anniversary of Ken Kronberg's death by suicide, his response to brutal attacks by Lyndon LaRouche and the tiny handful of vicious individuals then clustered about Lyn.
This year, as I remember Ken, his life and death, I am also able to report that the man who killed Ken is dead too. Lyn died recently at the age of 96; Ken made it to 58, dying just a week before his 59th birthday.
I can trust to God's justice; certainly in this world Ken didn't get much.
However, perhaps Lyn began receiving his just deserts while still alive; as one of my close friends (also a former member of the org) has pointed out, being Lyn was perhaps punishment enough. He was bitter, enraged, and insecure. He acted hateful in a way that only desperately unhappy people do.
I haven't thought too much about Lyn's death, and I think the many former members with whom I'm in touch haven't thought about it much either. I realized when he died that he had ceased to exist for me a long time ago. Ken was ever-present, but Lyn was gone. After Ken's death, I attacked LaRouche, spoke about him, wrote about him, sued him, and all that—but at a certain point I stopped.
To remember Ken now, I am reproducing a bunch of Keats poems, each one of which had some connection to Ken and the work he did teaching children and adults poetry and about poetry. The poems are in no particular order; three of them evoke Classical Greece and the other two evoke the seasons, or a season.
Also, here I have embedded some music that was played at Ken's funeral. You may remember it. It's Beethoven's variations on Hail the Conquering Hero from Handel's Judas Maccabeus
Poems for Ken
On the Grasshopper and the Cricket
By John Keats, 1816
The Poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s—he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
By John Keats, 1819
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
By John Keats, 1817
My spirit is too weak—mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—
A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.
[note on Elgin Marbles: Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, removed from the Parthenon and other temples on the Acropolis of Athens about half their marble friezes and brought them back to England, ultimately selling them to the British Museum, where they remain, although the government of Greece has been campaigning for their return for many years.]
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
By John Keats, 1816
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
[Note on Chapman’s translation of Homer: George Chapman (1559-1634) was an English poet, dramatist, and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. He certainly knew Shakespeare and collaborated with Ben Jonson and John Marston on the play Eastward Ho!]
To Autumn
By John Keats 1819
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.