By Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling
nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day
of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his living dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.

Ivan Ortiz writes:

A friend of mine recently introduced me to Sharon Olds via this remarkable poem that I’ve revisited several times in the last month.  I’ve also been reading a ton about the dramatic monologue lately for one of my papers and I’ve been thinking about the limits of sympathy.  This poem wouldn’t technically qualify as a dramatic monologue since Marcus Crassus doesn’t actually perform himself for us, but what I find so fascinating about it is its cautious tiptoeing around the form, the speaker terrified about her own ability to enter the understanding of this historical “other.”  But, it is the second of the speaker’s fears that I found most interesting:

It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other?

The wickedness of Crassus’ deed is not what frightens the speaker the most, it’s the thought of him realizing what he’d done just as he’d done it that is utterly terrifying.  I found this move by Olds so brilliant because it’s much too easy to read about this Roman general and mark him as savage or wicked or heartless; it would be easier, it seems, for Olds to write a dramatic monologue and to perform this wickedness, as Browning does so expertly. For Olds, though the cartoon wicked is more easily digested than to think of a person who has just crucified 6,000 as someone with even the slightest potential for sentiment or sympathy.  And, in a way, this poem performs a double refusal of sympathy: Marcus Crassus fails to admit “the wild terror of understanding the other” and so does the speaker.  I think this poem might be suggesting that the extreme limit of sympathy is not necessarily, as in the dramatic monologue, an exercise of getting closer to the other, but in bringing the other closer to us.