A Handful of Dust, A Handful of Light

**Detail highlighting the dust motes from “Støvkornenes dans i solstrålerne” (Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams, 1900)**
**By Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916)**
Oil on canvas, 70 cm × 59 cm
Ordrupgaard Museum. Photograph Public Domain.

Dust lingers in the ruins of empires, in the fading footprints of the past. It clings to the forgotten, settles upon the broken. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land declares “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” evoking a profound existential dread—the terror of insignificance, the finality of death in a world where nothing endures. Shelley’s Ozymandias presents the cruel irony that even the mightiest fall into dust, their ambitions erased by time. Shakespeare reinforces this democratic nature of mortality in Cymbeline, reminding us that: “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweepers, come to dust” (Act IV, Scene 2). The biblical refrain, “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19) serves as a humbling reminder of human mortality—our bodies fated to mingle with soil and ruin.

This narrative of dust as dissolution has dominated our cultural consciousness for millennia. Yet beneath this interpretation lies a profound irony: the very science that revealed our cosmic insignificance also offers us a path to transcendence.

As we began to understand the origins of matter itself, a counternarrative emerged. The spectrographic analysis of stars, the discovery of nucleosynthesis, and the mapping of elemental creation within stellar lifecycles revealed an unexpected truth: the dust of our being is not merely the residue of life lost but the particulate remnants of stars long dead.

This scientific revelation transforms our relationship with dust. No longer just the symbol of our inevitable decay, it becomes evidence of our cosmic lineage. In this expanded understanding, we are made of elements forged in stellar cores—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron—the ashes of ancient supernovae. As Carl Sagan elaborated: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.” (Cosmos, 1980)

The death of those stars gave birth to us. Thus, when our bodies return to dust, they are not returning to nothingness, but to the infinite. This is a poetic inversion of the traditional dread associated with dust. Instead of entropy as a reduction to meaninglessness, it becomes a return to something larger than the self.

Where Eliot shows us fear in dust, Carl Sagan tells us: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.” Lawrence M. Krauss echoes this sentiment: “Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded…. You are all stardust… the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron …. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.” (A Universe from Nothing, 2009)

The Paradox of Cosmic Fear

If one understands oneself as a finite being, bound to decay, dust is terrifying—it signifies loss. But if one understands oneself as an ephemeral expression of the universe, momentarily coalesced and destined to dissolve back into the great celestial flow, then there is no reason for fear. The end is not the end, but a return to origins.

So why does existential dread persist? Perhaps it is the ego’s reluctance to let go of selfhood. Perhaps it is the mind’s inability to accept that individual consciousness does not endure. Perhaps it is because dust, unlike stars, is silent. A ruined city, a forgotten name, a scattering of bones—all speak of oblivion, not grandeur.

As William Blake advised in The Proverbs of Hell, we “Drive [our] cart and [our] plow over the bones of the dead,” suggesting our instinctive fear of becoming that which is trampled and forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges captures this anxiety when he writes that “time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river”—we are both the eroder and the eroded, the dust-maker and the dust.

Yet, as a poem once attributed to Emily Dickinson but now considered of uncertain authorship reminds us: “Ashes denote that fire was; / Revere the grayest pile / For the departed creature’s sake / That hovered there awhile.” Dust does not truly vanish. It transforms.

Yet if the erasure of self is what we fear, we must ask: is selfhood truly lost, or merely transformed? If dust dissolves, does it vanish—or does it scatter into something greater?

From Dust to Light: The Redemption of Stardust

Yet if we understand dust not as an annihilation of self but as the very fabric of renewal, the fear dissolves. The metaphor itself must be rewritten: From dust we are made, from stardust we are formed. To dust we return, to the stars we return.

Walt Whitman intuited this cycle when he wrote: “I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.” (Song of Myself, LII) His biological understanding of transformation prefigures our cosmic one—matter recycled through systems larger than ourselves.

If the metaphor itself shifts, then the meaning shifts with it. We do not fall into dust; we rise into radiance. We do not vanish into the void; we dissolve into the cosmos, as much a part of the next great supernova as we once were of the last. Even in knowing that we return to the stars, a quiet unease remains: what of the self? If I dissolve into light, is there still an “I”?

This cosmic transformation demands a new poetic language—one that recasts the traditional imagery of dust not as a symbol of loss but as a promise of renewal. If we are to truly grasp this shift in understanding, we must reimagine the very metaphors through which we comprehend our mortality. In the spirit of this reframing, I offer these verses that trace our journey from stardust to dust and back again:

From dust we are made—
Not of earth, but embered light,
Forged in stellar furnace bright,
A whisper of stars in the cosmic shade.

To dust we return—
Not to silence, not to loss,
But scattered bright across the gloss
Of galaxies that twist and burn.

Fear not the handful of dust—
It is not death, nor mere decay,
But embers cast upon the way,
To rise once more in cosmic trust.

Thus, the fear in Eliot’s handful of dust dissolves when we see it not as an end, but as a beginning of something else. In the vast cosmic cycle, there is no finality—only motion, only transformation. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam gestures toward this understanding when it speaks of being “Star-scatter’d on the Grass”—our elements returning to the cosmos from which they came. If all that we are, all that we love, all that we create ultimately returns to the stars, is that not immortality?

The Choice of Understanding

We return to the beginning, as dust does. The words of Genesis remind us: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

Yet now, having traced the journey of dust from earth to stars, we hear these words anew. Through the narrow human lens, we interpret them as a grim certainty—dust as ruin, silence, and the erasure of memory. We see only decay, the dissolution of self, the inevitable fading of all things into oblivion.

But through the enlightened cosmic lens, we recognize a deeper truth. Dust is not an end, but a transformation. It is not absence, but renewal. It is potential, energy, and the foundation of new worlds.

As Jorge Luis Borges reflects in We Are the Time:

“We are the time. We are the famous
metaphor from Heraclitus the Obscure.
We are the water, not the hard diamond,
the one that is lost, not the one that stands still.
We are the river and we are that Greek
who looks himself in the river.”

Borges, invoking Heraclitus’ ever-flowing river, offers a vision of existence as movement, dissolution, and renewal. We are not fixed, immutable beings; we are the water, ever-changing, ever-returning to the whole. If we are dust, then we are not the dust that settles, but the dust that travels—the dust that, like the stars, finds itself scattered only to be reshaped into something new.

To understand this is to grasp something beyond the immediate and the visible. It is to move past fear into recognition: that what was once bound into form returns to the vastness, not in loss, but in continuation. That what dissolves is not diminished but remade, part of a cycle stretching beyond human time. What Yeats called “a terrible beauty” is born in this transformation—terrible in its finality, beautiful in its cosmic potential.

Perhaps it is our task, then, to choose how we understand our own dust—not as the extinguishing of life, but as its return to the great fire from which it came. In this cosmic understanding, we are not merely dust returning to dust, but light returning to light—briefly kindled, then scattered again, not into oblivion, but into reunion with the luminous whole from which we emerged.

Context and influences inspiring the essay

Schadenfreude and the Politics of Resentment: A Society Unmoored

The author reflects on a troubling societal trend where individuals derive joy from others’ misfortunes, particularly amidst widespread economic inequality. Instead of advocating for fairness, many focus on undermining those with minor advantages while overlooking systemic issues that favor the ultra-wealthy. Historical concepts like Nietzsche’s ressentiment underline this destructive mindset. The piece illustrates this with a union example, where members aimed to diminish benefits for others instead of promoting broader equity. The author emphasizes the need to redirect resentment towards addressing inequality, fostering solidarity rather than division, and calls for reclaiming virtues like justice and compassion in the face of collective suffering.

Throughout my life, I have encountered individuals and groups who seem to lack not only a moral and ethical compass but even a basic sense of self-interest. When they witness others losing an advantage—whether in employment, social standing, or opportunity—they do not respond with sympathy or concern but instead with unrestrained joy, reveling in another’s misfortune. Rather than advocating for fairness or seeking to improve society or their own standing, they take solace in the suffering of others, as though deprivation itself were a form of justice.

This perverse celebration of the misfortune of others becomes even more striking when we consider the actual distribution of power and wealth in our society. While workers resent each other’s minor advantages, America’s top 12 billionaires have amassed over $2 trillion in wealth—an increase of 193% since early 2020. The displacement of legitimate economic anxiety onto fellow workers, rather than the rigged systems enabling such extreme concentration of wealth, exemplifies how resentment is weaponized against collective interests. Instead of questioning the forces that have hollowed out the middle class, many find misplaced satisfaction in seeing others fall.

This phenomenon is not new. Philosophers and historians have long observed the destructive power of ressentiment—a term Nietzsche used to describe the corrosive, festering resentment of those who feel powerless, who, unable to elevate themselves, seek instead to bring others down (Nietzsche, 1887/1989, p. 36). The weaker spirit, he argued, does not strive toward greatness but seeks revenge against those who embody what it cannot attain. In our current dystopian era, where the richest 1% now control 54% of all stock market wealth—up from 40% in 2002—this sense of powerlessness has fertile ground in which to grow. Rather than demanding fairness or aspiring to something greater, many find solace in celebrating the stripping away the rights and relative advantages of others, while the true beneficiaries of systemic inequality remain untouched.

When the slide into the current era began, I began to see this corruption of the spirit play out in the most mundane of settings. Decades ago, in the workplace, I encountered a revealing example of the mindset that prioritizes resentment over solidarity. Our office had only a limited number of private offices and computers, with the former assigned to attorneys based on job classification and the latter distributed by seniority across all employees, including attorneys and investigators within the collective bargaining unit. When discussions arose about relocating to a new office space, the union sought input from the membership on concerns to bring forward to management. At the time—which was years before I became a supervisor—I was the local union steward.

To my astonishment, a significant number of members advocated for the union to ask management to eliminate private offices for all non-managers in the new space simply because not all job classifications had been granted them. Their logic baffled me. Rather than seeking to extend a benefit to more workers, they focused on stripping it from other bargaining unit members, as though incremental improvements in working conditions for some created intolerable working conditions for others.

Fortunately, I was able to argue—successfully—that this approach was entirely backward. Instead of resenting those who had obtained an improved working condition, we should advocate for an expansion of the working condition rather than its elimination. The rational course was to request that more job classifications be made eligible for offices, using objective criteria related to job duties and their similarities to those that already warranted offices. While we were ultimately unsuccessful in securing additional offices, we did succeed in shifting the mindset of the membership. What began as an impulse to strip others of their advantage out of frustration became, upon reflection, a collective effort to push for broader equity. We may not have won the tangible benefit, but we avoided the far greater loss of allowing ourselves to be divided by shortsightedness and resentment.

And yet, this very same ugly impulse now dominates our national discourse. The cruel celebration of public servants losing their livelihoods becomes even more troubling when viewed against economic realities. While many Americans cheer the human pain that the elimination of government positions and the middle-class existence which such positions enabled, the ultra-wealthy’s share of national wealth has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Even more striking, as the oligarchs’ wealth share has nearly quadrupled since 1953, their share of total taxes has remained virtually unchanged. Yet rather than questioning this dramatic shift in resources, many find satisfaction in seeing their neighbors lose healthcare benefits and perhaps even their homes.

This misdirection of resentment has particularly pernicious effects along racial lines—an all-too-familiar pattern in American history. While the median Black family holds just 12.7% of the wealth of the typical white family, and 28% of Black households have zero or negative wealth, political entrepreneurs channel economic anxieties into racial antagonism rather than solidarity. The very communities that could benefit most from collective action are instead pushed toward celebrating each other’s losses rather than confronting the systemic structures that perpetuate their deprivation.

Even those who remain employed in federal service are subjected to arbitrary and senseless disruptions, yet their plight is met not with sympathy but with open derision. Some are forced to return to offices that lack the space to accommodate them, while others are ordered to relocate across the country to similarly ill-equipped workplaces—an absurdity greeted with applause rather than outrage. The schadenfreude is both bizarre and troubling, driven not by principle but by petty resentment: If I had to go back, so should they. I was never allowed to work from home, so why should they? I doubt they were even efficient in the first place.

These justifications are not arguments but thinly veiled expressions of bitterness, exposing a society conditioned to revel in the suffering of others rather than demand justice, fairness, or rational policy. Worse still, there is little recognition that these actions—these firings, transfers, program terminations, and other disruptions—whether arbitrary, capricious, cruel, irrational, intentional, or, at times, unfortunate yet necessary—inflict real harm on individuals with families and loved ones, embedded in communities not unlike our own.

This kind of envy serves only the interests of those who seek to keep us divided, distracting us from the real issues that demand our attention. Understanding the true scale of inequality—where most Americans’ wealth is tied to their homes while the top 1% controls over half of all stock market wealth—can help redirect resentment toward productive change. Rather than celebrating when others lose benefits or job security, we must recognize how the concentration of wealth and power benefits from our division.

This lesson has been articulated time and again by thinkers from across traditions. Aristotle’s concept of megalopsychia—the great-souled person—stood in contrast to those driven by pettiness and envy, emphasizing instead the nobility of advocating for the common good (See Book IV of the Nicomachean Ethics). In the Christian tradition, agape—a selfless, communal love—demands that one’s neighbor be uplifted, not torn down (1 Corinthians 13:4–7).

Yet in modern America, these lessons are too often ignored in favor of a corrosive, zero-sum mentality that pits the powerless against one another rather than against the forces that perpetuate their economic insecurity and often economic suffering. A society where 26-28% of Black and Latino households have negative wealth, while billionaires added over $2 trillion to their fortunes during a global pandemic, has deep structural issues to address. Yet instead of confronting these systemic challenges, we have allowed ourselves to be divided, finding hollow satisfaction in our neighbors’ misfortunes rather than building the solidarity needed for meaningful change.

This is the moral failure of our time—not just the overt corruption of those in power, but the willing embrace of cruelty by so many in the public. A nation that delights in its own suffering, that views the suffering of its neighbors as a victory rather than a tragedy, is one that has lost its way. The challenge before us is not merely political but fundamentally ethical: to resist the temptation of resentment and to reclaim the higher virtues of solidarity, justice, and shared human dignity.

Yes, there is a legitimate argument for addressing the national debt and curbing government spending. And yes, when Congress engages this issue in a constitutionally sound manner, it may result in job losses in the public sector. Such decisions, if undertaken with deliberation and fairness, may at times be necessary. However, what we have witnessed thus far is not a measured fiscal policy but a reckless, chaotic purge—carried out without regard for Constitutional norms, the rule of law, economic stability, or human impact. Even where reductions in government employment may be warranted, they should never be occasions for celebration, nor should they serve as fuel for the schadenfreude and politics of resentment that have become disturbingly and consistently prevalent.

Would that we had the wisdom to see it.

References

Aristotle, and Terence Irwin. Nicomachean Ethics. 2019. 3rd ed., Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019, https://www.perlego.com/book/4620092.

Nietzsche, F. (1989). On the Genealogy of Morals (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1887).

LSE Inequalities. (2025, January 2). Ten facts about wealth inequality in the USA. London School of Economics and Political Science. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/inequalities/2025/01/02/ten-facts-about-wealth-inequality-in-the-usa/

Tomorrow: The Response to a Republic in Crisis

A Republic does not fall in a day, nor is it restored in one.

Today was the reckoning—the recognition of what we have lost, the indictment of our failures. But reckoning alone is not enough. If the Republic is to endure, we must turn from despair to restoration.

Tomorrow is that turn.

It is not a promise that the Republic will be saved. It is a challenge: that we must choose to save it. Not by rhetoric, not by grievance, not by empty nostalgia, but by reclaiming reason, morality, and purpose—by remembering what the Republic was meant to be.

What shall we make of tomorrow? That choice is ours.

A reading of the D.S. Yarab’s essay “Tomorrow”

TOMORROW

What shall we make of tomorrow?

If Today is the reckoning, then Tomorrow must be the response. But where does restoration begin? Not in speeches, nor in promises, nor in the empty rituals of politics. It begins in the only place it can—within ourselves.

A Republic cannot be saved by its institutions alone. Laws, constitutions, courts, elections—these are but scaffolding. They do not stand without a foundation, and that foundation is the people. If the people are unmoored, if they are ruled by grievance, by appetite, by fear, then no law will save them, no leader will redeem them. If the people themselves are lost, then the Republic is lost with them.

We have been taught to believe that we are powerless, that history is something done to us rather than something we shape. But this is a falsehood. The truth is that the fate of a nation is not determined by its rulers alone—it is determined by its citizens, by what they accept, by what they demand, by what they are willing to stand for.

If we are to restore reason, we must reclaim the habits of thought that we have abandoned. We must question, we must listen, we must doubt, we must seek to understand before we seek to judge.

If we are to restore morality, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard than those we condemn. We must not mistake vengeance for justice, or self-righteousness for virtue. We must remember that morality is not merely a tool to wield against our enemies but a mirror in which we must see ourselves.

If we are to restore purpose, we must remember that liberty is not the right to do as we please but the responsibility to govern ourselves, to live not as individuals alone but as a people. We must choose to build rather than to destroy, to create rather than to consume, to serve rather than to rule.

But we cannot restore what we do not understand.

Education: The Foundation of Restoration

We must educate ourselves—not with propaganda, not with the comforting lies of factional loyalty, but with truth. Real education is neither indoctrination nor mere vocational training. It is the development of the mind, the sharpening of judgment, the capacity to distinguish the essential from the trivial, the real from the false. It is learning to think.

The founders of this Republic, despite their flaws and contradictions, understood that knowledge was the safeguard of freedom. Jefferson wrote that “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Franklin warned that democracy was always one step from tyranny if the people lacked the wisdom to guard it. Washington, in his farewell address, cautioned against faction and the corruption of reason by unchecked ambition.

Yet today, we have forsaken the intellectual inheritance of the Republic. We do not educate for wisdom—we educate for compliance. We do not seek understanding—we seek affirmation. We do not debate—we shout. We do not learn—we consume.

A people who will not think for themselves will be ruled by those who think only of themselves.

If we are to reclaim the Republic, we must first reclaim ourselves. We must read not to confirm what we already believe, but to challenge it. We must seek facts, not slogans. We must recognize that learning is not a passive act but an active responsibility, that ignorance is not an excuse but a failure.

We must resist the seduction of easy answers.

We must understand what we have lost.

The Spirit of the Republic

The Republic was never meant to be an empire. It was never meant to be a mere tax revolt. It was never meant to be a vessel for ideology, oligarchy, or faction.

It was an idea. A radical, fragile, difficult idea: that a free people could and should govern themselves—not by force, not by wealth, not by divine right, but by reason and consent.

This idea has been betrayed, not by one party, not by one movement, but by all who have sought power for its own sake, who have turned democracy into a game of conquest, who have mistaken governance for domination.

The Republic was meant to be a living thing, a constant dialogue, a place where principles could be tested against reality, where reason could temper passion, where justice could stand apart from vengeance.

But we have let it become something else.

We have let it become a battleground for competing tribes, each seeking to impose its will rather than to govern in common cause. We have allowed it to be captured—by interests, by ideologues, by oligarchs, and finally by would be tyrants who have no stake in the future of the people they claim to serve.

We have mistaken cynicism for wisdom. We have mistaken manipulation for leadership. We have mistaken spectacle for governance.

But the Republic is not yet lost.

If we understand what has been taken, we can take it back.

If we remember what the Republic was meant to be—not a possession, not a weapon, not an empire, but an ideal—we can begin the work of restoring it.

Not through empty gestures. Not through rage or grievance. But through the slow, difficult work of becoming a people worthy of self-governance again.

The road to restoration is not a single act, nor a single moment. It is a thousand small choices, made every day, by each of us.

What shall we make of tomorrow?

That choice is ours.

An Essay About the State of the Republic Entitled “TODAY”

A Reading of D.S. Yarab’s essay “TODAY”

TODAY

We are a nation without reason.
We are a nation without morals.
We are a nation without purpose.

We have failed our inheritance.
We have failed our promise.
We have failed our future.

Once, we were a people who sought wisdom in the governance of reason, who fashioned our republic in the crucible of Enlightenment thought. We held that truth could be discerned, that knowledge was the safeguard against tyranny, that free inquiry was the antidote to superstition. Yet, we have cast aside the intellect of our forebears, bartering reason for the cheap currency of factional dogma, of ignorance parading as virtue.

Once, we understood that a republic, to endure, must be anchored in moral responsibility. The city upon a hill was not merely a boast—it was a charge, a demand, an expectation. Yet, we have allowed that moral vision to fragment, perverted into empty postures of righteousness, where sectarian division supplants shared virtue, and the sacred call to justice is drowned in the clamor of self-interest.

Once, we were a people of purpose, our liberties not mere indulgences but the instruments of human dignity and national strength. We were called to the defense of freedom, not merely for ourselves but for those who would follow. Yet, today, our purpose dissolves in the tide of complacency, our freedoms bartered for fleeting comforts, our equality abandoned to the rising chorus of cynicism and despair.

All factions—left, right, and center—have forsaken the principles that once defined us. Each has wrapped itself in the illusion of virtue while kneeling at the altar of Mammon. We claim fidelity to truth, but we scorn reason when it contradicts our desires. We speak of morality, yet we wield it as a weapon rather than a compass. We invoke purpose, but only as rhetoric to mask our pursuit of power and comfort.

And so we arrive at Today.

If we are honest—if we strip away our illusions and stand before the bar of judgment without recourse to excuse, evasion, or self-justification—we must confess: we are all complicit. No single faction bears this burden alone, nor can any claim the mantle of righteousness. We, the people, have chosen indulgence over discipline, grievance over responsibility, spectacle over substance. And in that choosing, we have undone the Republic.

But we are not bound to our ruin.

We must restore reason.
We must restore morality.
We must restore purpose.

To do so, we must abandon the golden idols who are unworthy to serve us, the oligarchs who plunder us, the ideologies that subvert reason. We must cast aside the anger, the bitterness, the division that have led us to forsake one another, that have severed us from our future and our purpose. If we are to be a people again—if we are to reclaim the inheritance we have squandered—we must choose anew. Not comfort, not grievance, not self-interest. We must choose to be worthy of the Republic, or else surrender to its final dissolution.

If we continue on our present course, where do we go?

If we have abandoned reason, morality, and purpose, what remains?

It is no longer a question of mere decline but of transformation. A Republic that ceases to be a Republic does not simply fade into irrelevance; it becomes something else, something unrecognizable to those who once believed in its founding principles. Have we already crossed that threshold? Have we slipped, not merely toward decay, but into authoritarianism?

The signs are unmistakable. A government that no longer serves its people but instead entrenches power. A citizenry that, weary of self-governance, willingly submits to rule by force or deception. A society that exalts spectacle over substance, division over unity, and vengeance over justice. These are the hallmarks of a nation no longer free in spirit, even if it still pretends to be free in form.

Authoritarianism does not always come with the fanfare of a coup or the boot of the oppressor; more often, it arrives in whispers, in the slow erosion of rights once taken for granted, in the willing abdication of responsibility by a people who have lost the will to govern themselves. It arrives when power, unchecked, ceases to be accountable. When the institutions meant to preserve liberty instead secure their own perpetuity. When law becomes a weapon, wielded not for justice but for control.

If we have not yet fallen fully into authoritarianism, then we are on its precipice. A people who no longer hold their leaders accountable, who no longer value reason, morality, or purpose, will find themselves ruled—not by wisdom, not by justice, but by those who know only how to command and demand obedience.

And so, we face a choice.

Do we accept this slow descent into tyranny, consoling ourselves with the illusion that we are still free, so long as we are comfortable? Do we resign ourselves to the idea that the Republic was always doomed, that we are powerless to reclaim it?

Or do we resist?

To resist is not merely to oppose a party or a faction. It is not to trade one demagogue for another. True resistance is the restoration of the very things we have abandoned: reason, morality, and purpose. It is the rejection of fear and cynicism, the refusal to accept the inevitability of our own undoing.

It is to say, as those before us have said in darker times: not yet, not now, not here.

Today is the reckoning.

What shall we make of tomorrow?

The Symbolism of the Golden Plow in Literature

From William Blake’s *Jerusalem*, Chapter 3

How old is the literary tradition of the golden plow? This question arose unexpectedly while I was working my way through William Blake’s Jerusalem, where I encountered these striking lines:

They Plow’d in tears, the trumpets sounded before the golden Plow And the voices of the Living Creatures were heard in the clouds of heaven … (Blake, 1988, p. 205)

As often happens in literary exploration, the evocative image of the golden plow immediately diverted me from my primary task of continuing to read and understand Jerusalem. The golden plow, I realized, resonates deeply in our cultural consciousness, appearing not only in poetry but also in modern contexts—such as the Golden Plow Award, the highest honor presented to a sitting member of Congress by the American Farm Bureau.

The reasons for the golden plow’s enduring power as a poetic device are clear: the plow itself is a universal symbol of labor, cultivation, and renewal—an instrument that transforms barren soil into fertile ground, embodying humanity’s intimate connection with nature and the cycles of life. By portraying this familiar tool as golden, poets imbue it with sacred significance, elevating it from the mundane to the divine. Gold has long been associated with divinity, purity, and incorruptibility. In this sense, the golden plow often becomes not merely a tool of agriculture but a metaphor for spiritual or moral transformation, where the act of plowing symbolizes preparing the soul or society for renewal and growth.

This striking image led me to investigate its earliest literary appearances, which brought me to Herodotus’s Histories (late 5th century BC). In Book Four, he recounts the Scythian origin myth:

According to the Scythians, theirs is the youngest of nations, and it came into existence in the following way. The first man born in this land, when it was still uninhabited, was named Targitaos. They say that the parents of this Targitaos were Zeus and the daughter of the River Borysthenes, though that does not sound credible to me. Nevertheless, that is their claim. From such stock, then came Targitaos, and to him were born three sons: Lipoxais, Arpoxais, and the youngest of them, Colaxais. While they reigned, certain objects made of gold fell from the sky: they were a plow, a yoke, a battle-axe, and a cup. When these objects came to rest on Scythian ground, they were seen first by the eldest son, who, wanting to take them up, approached where they lay. But as he came near them, the gold caught on fire, so he left them there; and when the second son approached, the same thing happened. Thus the burning gold drove both of them away; but when the third and youngest son approached, the fire stopped burning and went out, so he carried the gold home, and the elder brothers reacted to this event by agreeing to surrender the entire kingdom to the youngest. (Herodotus, 2007, pp. 283–284)

While the specifically golden plow appears rarely in classical and medieval literature, the plow itself features prominently as a powerful symbol. In Virgil’s Georgics, the unadorned plow serves as both a practical tool and metaphor for poetic creation:

It must also be said what tools are the weapons of the hardy rustics,
without which neither could crops be sown nor harvests rise:
the plowshare and the heavy timber of the curved plow,
the slow-moving wagons of the Eleusinian mother,
the threshing boards, the sledges, and the rakes with uneven weight. (Virgil, 1846, Georgics I, lines 160–162, trans. by author)

Although Virgil’s plow is neither golden nor even gilded, its role as both a practical tool and poetic metaphor anticipates later literary uses of the golden plow as a symbol of sacred labor and creation.

The Jewish and Christian traditions, drawing upon their holy books, provided writers throughout the ages with rich sources of plowing imagery for metaphorical and allegorical purposes. Consider Luke 9:62, where commitment to discipleship is illustrated through the image of putting one’s hand to the plow; Amos 9:13, where the plowman overtaking the reaper symbolizes divine abundance and the promise of restoration; and Isaiah 2:4, where the transformation of swords into plowshares symbolizes divine peace. In these texts, the plow consistently signifies renewal, moral preparation, and divine purpose. This deep reservoir of symbolic meaning helps us understand the significance of Blake’s golden plow in Jerusalem.

In both Blake’s visionary poem and Herodotus’s historical narrative, the golden plow stands as a transformative symbol. For Blake, it is likely part of a cosmic act of redemption, accompanied by trumpets and celestial voices. For Herodotus, it conveys legitimacy and divine sanction within the founding myth of a nation. In each case, the golden plow bridges the earthly and the divine, elevating labor and effort to the realm of the sacred. This enduring image, rich with cultural and poetic imagination, invites reflection on how humanity’s most basic acts—plowing, cultivating, laboring—can become acts of profound spiritual significance.

That the symbol persists into our own time through awards like the Golden Plow Award suggests its continuing resonance with fundamental human values of cultivation, transformation, and excellence. Yet I wonder: might there be an even earlier literary reference to this powerful symbol than Herodotus’s account? Readers who know of earlier appearances are invited to share their findings.

References

Blake, W. (1988). The complete poetry & prose of William Blake (D. Erdman, Ed.; H. Bloom, Commentary). Anchor Books.

Ginsberg Project. (2024, October 14). William Blake – from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – 14. Retrieved December 13, 2024, from https://allenginsberg.org/2024/10/oct14/ The Ginsberg Project has an interesting discussion of the Jerusalem extract which is the object of this post.

Herodotus. (2007). The landmark Herodotus: The histories (R. B. Strassler, Ed.; A. L. Purvis, Trans.; R. Thomas, Introduction). Pantheon Books.

Krisak, L. (2006). [Review of the book Virgil’s Georgics: A New Verse Translation, by J. Lembke]. Translation and Literature, 15(1), 111–113. Edinburgh University Press.

Lincoln, B. (2014). Once again “The Scythian” myth of origins (Herodotus 4.5–10). Nordlit, 33, 19–34.

The Jerusalem Bible: Reader’s Edition. (1968). Doubleday & Company.

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro). (1846). Georgica [Georgics], Book I, lines 160–162 (Hachette ed.). Translated by the author. Wikisource. Retrieved December 9, 2024, from https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Georgica_(Hachette)/Liber_I

Virgil. (2005). Virgil’s Georgics (J. Lembke, Trans.). Yale University Press.