Those Protestant-types among us will likely not remember any significance about this day in relation to the aforementioned saints, two shoemaker brothers named Crispin and Crispian; that is unless the Protestant-type in question has ever seen Shakespeare's Henry V and heard the rousing "St.Crispin's Day speech" given by King Henry to his vastly-outnumbered men just prior to the Battle of Agincourt.
This day is called the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall live this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say, 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:' Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.' Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, But he'll remember with advantages What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, Familiar in his mouth as household words, Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester, Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered. This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be rememberèd; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile This day shall gentle his condition: And gentlemen in England, now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. (4.3.43)
What a speech! I remember reading and hearing it when I was in Yancy's class at TJC, some 19 years back. I actually hear the words in my head as they were read then, and still feel the crescendo in Kenneth Branagh's delivery when he gets to the "We few, we happy few" lines. There is nothing in my real life that I can point to in any way that is similar to some amazing victory at Agincourt, but this speech still energizes me. I think that's why I wanted to try to teach English in the first place--it is not English or Writing that I wanted to pass on, but the experience that reading great writing gives.
The Enigma We Answer by Living
Einstein didn't speak as a child waiting till a sentence formed and emerged full-blown from his head.
I do the thing, he later wrote, which nature drives me to do. Does a fish know the water in which he swims?
This came up in conversation with a man I met by chance, friend of a friend of a friend,
who passed through town carrying three specimen boxes of insects he'd collected in the Grand Canyon
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees, one for butterflies and skippers, each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,
tiny morphologic differences revealing how adaptation happened over time. The deeper down
he hiked, the older the rock and the younger the strategy for living in that place.
And in my dining room the universe found its way into this man bent on cataloguing each innovation,
though he knows it will all disappear the labels, the skippers, the canyon. We agreed then, the old friends and the new,
that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart from the whole, as if we'd sprung from an idea out in space, rather than emerging
from the sequenced larval mess of creation that binds us with the others, all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet
that's made us want to name each thing and try to tell its story against the vanishing.
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
