'This Made One of Them Thoughtful'

Were it possible to distill our last century into nineteen lines of blank verse and close it with a bitter, O. Henry-like denouement, it might be Anthony Hecht’s “The Ceremony of Innocence” (The Darkness and the Light, 2001): 

“He was taken from his cell, stripped, blindfolded,

And marched to a noisy room that smelled of sweat.

Someone stamped on his toes; his scream was stopped

By a lemon violently pushed between his teeth

And sealed with friction tape behind his head.

His arms were tied, the blindfold was removed

So he could see his tormentors, and they could see

The so-much-longed-for terror in his eyes.

And one of them said, ‘The best part of it all

Is that you won't even be able to pray.’

When they were done with him, two hours later,

They learned that they had murdered the wrong man

And this made one of them thoughtful. Some years after,

He quietly severed connections with the others

Moved to a different city, took holy orders,

And devoted himself to serving God and the poor,

While the intended victim continued to live

On a walled estate, sentried around the clock

By a youthful, cell phone-linked praetorian guard.”

 

Sound familiar? Readers of Koestler know the scene depicted in the opening lines, as do those familiar with the fates of Babel, Mandelstam and Bonhoeffer, among millions of others. Hecht gives his poem a title borrowed from Yeats. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” he suggests, as it was in 1919. Readers have complained that the poem’s ending seems tacked on, an after-thought of cheap irony. But isn’t human destiny capricious? Doesn’t it often strain credulity? Don’t bad people sometimes repent? Don’t the wrong people die every day?