From poetry to prose

It is a rich irony that the true audacity of President Obama’s inaugural address was its dampening of hope. Having campaigned under a banner emblazoned with the slogan ‘Yes We Can’, the 44th President’s first act of government was to administer a stiff dose of realism. He had been expected, with good reason, to emulate the sonorous rhetoric of Lincoln. But the presiding spirit of this speech was George Washington, who spoke in his own first inaugural address in 1789 of his ‘great anxieties’ and ‘the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me’.

One of the most striking passages of President Obama’s speech was his invocation of the text Washington ordered to be read to desolate American revolutionaries camping in the cold in 1776: ‘Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].’