Resumo de Aeneas at Washington

"Aeneas at Washington" is a thirty-nine-line poem in blank verse. It utilizes an occasional Alexandrine or six-beat line, very likely in oblique tribute to the hexameter line of the Latin poetic source, Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29–19 B.C.) for Allen Tate’s hero/speaker, Aeneas.
The poem opens with Aeneas in medias res, recounting an episode from Vergil’s epic. In this particular episode, Vergil borrows from a narrative technique used in one of his Homeric sources, the Odyssey (c. 800 B.C.). In that far more ancient epic, Homer, rather than directly relating to the audience Odysseus’ adventures on his return voyage, has Odysseus himself tell his hosts, the Phaiakians, the story of his travels. In the same way, Vergil, who is writing for a Roman audience to celebrate Imperial Roman values, has his hero, Aeneas, tell Queen Dido of Carthage the story of the night Troy finally fell to the Greek forces which had been besieging the city for nine years. So, too, Tate begins with Aeneas virtually in midsentence as he is describing the horribly bloody moment in which Neoptolemus, the son of the dead hero Achilles, mercilessly slaughters the Trojan king, Priam, and his queen, Hecuba, along with their children, as they huddle near the altar to Athena.
As the title informs the reader, however, while this Aeneas may be the man of whose exploits Vergil sang, those ancient times and places are far behind him now; he is instead in Washington, D.C., the capital of a modern, industrial state whose institutions are in many ways modeled on those of imperial Rome. If Tate brings Aeneas into the modern world, he nevertheless does not update him. That is to say, this Aeneas is the same hero found in the Aeneid, embodying and espousing the same value structure: "I bore me well," he says, "[a] true gentlemen, valorous in arms/ Disinterested and honourable." Details are missing, but this speaker is indeed the mythic hero whose devotion to family and duty is his foremost attribute, along with his acquiescence to the demands of destiny and the will of the gods.
If there is something vital missing from Tate’s hero, it is an upbeat attitude. For one thing, the poem is entirely in the past tense. Aeneas is looking back, true, but even the contemporary world is cast in terms that are past, as if some irrevocable closure has gripped the Republic. While the Aeneas who first encounters Dido in Vergil’s epic is bone-weary from his travails, in Tate’s hands Aeneas has become a world-weary, perhaps even cynical or skeptical figure. He is not the forward-looking hero who will bring his refugee followers to a new home in Italy; now he says that their "hunger" ultimately was fit for "breeding calculation/ And fixed triumphs" out of the "vigor of prophecy," as if the results were not worth the centuries-long promise and the effort.
In lines that seem to echo popular patriotic songs such as "America the Beautiful," one hears how Aeneas views those results in this later New World, America, itself the supposed flower of the same ancient Greco-Roman culture that bred Vergil and his epic hero. The "glowing fields of Troy" become "hemp ripening/ And tawny gold, the thickening Blue Grass," reminders of Tate’s native Kentucky, positive enough images surely; nevertheless, "the towers that men/ Contrive," rather than the towers of Ilium, are, one must imagine, the skyscrapers of commerce and smoke-stacks of industry, cluttering the skies.
Aeneas closes by relating how he stood once "far from home at nightfall/ By the Potomac" and, seeing the Capitol’s "great Dome" lit up at night and reflected in those waters, could no longer recognize "The city my blood had built"; instead, he thought of that older city, Troy, and "what we had built her for."

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