'Thou still hast thy fun'

From the shelves of the High School Library of HCDC, I found a book, “The Philippines: Democracy in Asia,” by Prof. Salvador Roxas Gonzalez, who joined the Opposition when former President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law, wrote in the celebrated Opposition paper WE FORUM, was imprisoned by Marcos and placed under house arrest for three years.

In Chapter XII of the book, he wrote an “Ode to a Corrupt Politician (with apologies to Shelley) which, to my unlettered literary mind, is classic, meaning its message borderless and its lessons timeless.

The poem was written half a century ago, but remains as relevant as before. “Believe it or not,” Prof. Gonzalez said, “I wrote this…poem, in Cambridge in 1959, paraphrasing the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ which was written by that Oxford poet Shelley. There were at that time corrupt politicians in the Philippines, there still are. We hope someday this breed will disappear. Then the Filipinos will see the light of day, as Rizal too hoped.”

I don’t know how Prof. Gonzalez got it wrong, but the “Ode to a Nightingale” is not Shelley’s opus but John Keats’. What he paraphrased instead must be Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” whose first lines ran thus:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Still, the mistake is no matter. It does not distract the reader from understanding the message the poem tries to communicate.