“IF he’s 17, I’m 21,” these were Geoffrey Boycott’s comments on Shahid Afridi’s age when he had just begun playing cricket for Pakistan.

For some inexplicable reason I feel like coming up with a similar kind of reaction to the news item that “deep inside US Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s press briefings, poetry is hidden.” In fact, a book entitled Pieces of intelligence: the existentialist poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld, edited by a journalist, verse compiler and humorist (forget that part) Hart Seely has just been published.

According to Mr Seely, “there’s gold to be mined in Rumsfeld’s words.” To substantiate his observation, he quotes the following words (read poem) uttered by the secretary of state:


As we know,
There are known knowns,
There are things we know we know,
We also know
There are known unknowns,
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know,
But there are unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we know.


The news item, to impart verity to Mr Seely’s claim, goes on quoting some other linguistically inventive and contextually rich lines from the book, the title of one of which is ‘cheating woman’.


She said she had a question
And she asked three
I asked for an easy one
And she gave me a tough three.


I’m in awe (and shock). Being an ardent student of literature it’s my duty to analyze the above poetic pieces in order for posterity to understand how gold can be mined from seemingly political rhetoric. Let’s first try and get to the bottom of the content.

In my humble opinion, when Mr Rumsfeld talks of known knowns, he actually hints at something that’s known but has been kept unknown (probably by the Iraqi rogue government and its ilk). He follows it by stating that we know what we know, suggesting a strong investigative network that he and his colleagues head.

Then the sonorous poem drifts into the domain of known unknowns implying that he knows what certain people deem obscure from a commoner’s eyes (for instance moustached WMDs in Iraq, North Korea’s chinky nuclear programme and Iran’s turbaned as well as veiled energy reactors). This is a genius at work. Two chief elements that turn a work of art into a masterpiece are technical finesse and sincerity of thought. Mr Rumsfeld’s poem seems to work wonders on both counts.

Avoiding digression, let’s get back to analyzing the piece.

Elaborating upon the known unknowns, Mr Rumsfeld says: we know there are some things we don’t know. He has used a brilliant poetic tool, the ‘paradox’, here. Or perhaps ‘oxymoron’. Or probably ‘euphemism’. Well, whatever tool he has employed, Mr Rumsfeld succeeds in putting the message across.

Rounding off the masterpiece, the poet says there are unknown unknowns that we don’t know we know. It has become quite apparent here that he is now referring to French fries and other such products that are unknown unknowns and surreptitiously harming the American consumers. But they ‘do’ know the nocuousness of these unknowns. Crafty indeed. The poem could be readily compared with one of e.e. cummings’ great poems, “pity this busy monster manunkind not”.

Now let’s try and look for deeper meanings in the second piece “cheating woman”. The four-line poem (could be called a quartet if rhymed properly) begins by giving a description of a woman who promises to hurl just a single, easy query at Mr Rumsfeld but flings three difficult ones instead. This is more of a mystery poem than a complaining verse and therefore in league with John Keats’ ‘La belle dame sans merci’. It’s just that Mr Rumsfeld has, unlike Keats, not given a graphic description of the lady, but has rather allowed his reader’s imagination to run wild and erect his own image of the mysterious lady who asked three questions in lieu of the promised one.

His lady is not ‘full beautiful a faery’s child’ but appears to be a pen pusher. And that too a TV journalist. Lady non the less.

It’s the rhythm in the brevity of the poem that impresses the most. How many poets in this world have the innate ability to put rhythm into ostensibly colloquial lines, “she said she had a question/ and she asked three?” Notice the alliteration of the ‘sh’ sound. Then the poet describes his acquiescence to beauty.”I asked for an easy one/ and she gave me a tough three.” That is to say he himself tried to grab her attention and when he finally got that he was completely blown away. No, not by questions. There is a hidden meaning in ‘a tough three’. Those tough three could be a lethal combination of a set of lips and a wagging tongue. Or a set of eyes and a sniffy nose. Or, for that matter, a to-die-for combination of a thinking mind, articulate use of language and a beautiful face. Isn’t it ingenious?

Judging by the two pieces, poetry aficionados would like Mr Rumsfeld to keep up with the good work, so that the world could benefit from his intellectual side of politicking.