In the back of our fourth-grade "reader" at P. S. 217, there was an appendix containing proverbs and other jots of wisdom. Most of these were commonplaces: "look before you leap"; "a stitch in time saves nine"; "empty barrels make the most noise." Many of these gnomic bits mystified me. For example:
For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike.
When you are the anvil, bear.
When you are the hammer, strike.
I had no idea what an anvil was (now I own a beauty!!) but I understood that it was something to beat with a hammer. For what purpose? I had no clue? But I was a moderately progressive youth and I couldn't grasp why we anvils were being urged to "bear." It seemed like a reactionary idea then and still seems so now. Way too passive, I thought. Why shouldn't the anvils join together and form a united front against the hammers, or whatever capitalist oligarch controlled the hammers? Why did my grandparents come to America if not to free themselves from the perpetual anvilhood of sorry Ukraine?
Moreover, I completely missed the mark on "strike," which I interpreted to mean "go on strike." An easy mistake, because the only other meaning I knew of strike was the "three strikes and you're out" of basebalI. Even naif me knew that baseball had nothing to do with anvils and hammers or fourth-grade readers.
The poem was therefore incoherent. Endure and suffer when you're an anvil, but get on the picket line when you're a hammer.
Why couldn't anvil and hammer unite and resist their oppressors together?
I should also confess that anvil and hammer fused and mingled in my youthful brain with a Phillies shortstop of the period named Granville Hamner.
Leave a Reply