Dr. Metablog

Lucasta

 

 

 

It's Sir Richard Lovelace, born in 1617, perhaps in his late 'teens or early 20s (he survived only to the age of 40), but mature enough to have grown a splendid crop of rich black hair. Over his left shoulder is a motto that reads "prodesse non praeesse" which means something like "to be useful rather than to rule (or lead)." Of Lovelace, a contemporary said that he was "the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld; a person also of innate modesty, virtue and courtly deportment, which made him... much admired and adored by the female sex."

 

Not only was he handsome and sexy, but Sir Richard was also a soldier in the English civil war, a playwright, and an accomplished poet. One of his superlative lyrics is the famous and oft-anthologized "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars."  It's only twelve lines, but what superb lines they are! Quite a triumph, it is, to embody an entire aristocratic caste and a system of values in a single short poem!

 

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,

         That from the nunnery

Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind

         To war and arms I fly.

 

True, a new mistress now I chase,

         The first foe in the field;

And with a stronger faith embrace

         A sword, a horse, a shield.

 

Yet this inconstancy is such

         As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Dear) so much,

         Lov’d I not Honour more.

The "plot" of the lyric is simple: the "speaker" leaves his beloved in order to "fly" to battle (he fought, naturally, on the royalist side). He loves "honor" more than he loves his mistress. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, honor has a multiplier effect on his love. And yet, although honor enhances love, honor is always primary, love subordinate. It's a curious kind of love lyric in which a suitor says to his beloved, I like you, but only second best.

What is "honor" for Lovelace?  It's a word with a spectrum of meanings -- nobility of soul, magnanimity, scorn of meanness, reputation, privilege of rank or birth, even chastity or virginity. But none of these possibilities seem to specifically apply in this poem.  For Lovelace and his Lucasta, honor is military. It is something won on the battlefield. About this he is uncompromising: the "new mistress" he will now "embrace" is "a sword, a horse, a shield" -- "war and arms." Not the "arms" of a lover, but weapons. 

A cynical being might therefore rewrite the last two lines of the lyric thusly: "I could not love thee (Dear) so much,/ Lov'd I not warfare more." Flat, imperfect poetry, but the parody is perhaps what the demystified poem actually asserts. Make war, not love.

What sort of war?

The primary weapons in the battles of the 1640s were mortar, cannon, musket, caliver, carbine, harquebus, and pistol. Sword, horse and shield had not entirely disappeared. Edge weapons were still in use, and the horse would remain the primary engine of war until it was supplanted in the twentieth century by internal combustion vehicles. But it would have been suicidal folly to go into 1640s battle with Lovelace's museum of weaponry. For "honor" and for the benefit of Lucasta, Lovelace evokes a romantic nostalgic world of tilt and tourney. Single combat, knight versus knight, hot horse against horse.

Lovelace imagines himself glorious in single combat, his mistress's favor (handkerchief or scarf) streaming from his helmet. It would not be so glorious to be mutilated by a cannon lugged into place by a base pioner. 

Lovelace easily conflates love, which is a private emotion, with military honor, which is clearly a public achievement. Very public, indeed, which is what led Baruch Spinoza, Lovelace's younger contemporary, to note that "honor" is not intrinsic, not an act of personal realization, but rather "a slavish subordination to the opinion of others." 

"I could not love the (Dear) so much,

    Lov'd I not a slavish subordination to the opinion of others more."

The rewrite has a different ring.

Spinoza: 

 

Shakespeare at Work: the Oxymoron

The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz."  But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in literary and also human life.  Life is a mingled yarn, is it not?  Both fair and foul, sometimes in the same moment; sweet sorrow. Because Shakespeare tried to convey the complexity of things, he employed oxymorons  throughout his career -- in simple straightforward formulas at the early plays, but in his maturity in innovative and sometimes startlingly beautiful ways.

The oxymoron has a long pedigree. It may go as far back as to a classical trope called the adynaton, or collection of impossibilities. There is a treasure-trove of oxymora in Alain of Lisle's thirteenth-century poem (or, more exactly, prosimetron) De Planctu Naturae in which "amor" is described as "pax odio, fraudique fides, spes juncta timor... mistus cum ratione furor,/ Naufragium dulce, pondus leve (peace in hatred, faith in fraud, hope joined to fear, madness mixed with reason, sweet shipwreck, light heaviness); there is a similar passage, from the same century, in Guillaime de Lorris extremely popular Romaunt of the Rose that begins "Love is a hateful peace and loving hate."

The oxymoron was given new life and vitality by Petrarch, whose sufferings for young Laura famously caused him to freeze in summer and burn in winter. Many sonneteers, continental and English, were indebted to Petrarch, among them Thomas Watson, a poet who flourished in the years of Shakespeare's adolescence. One of Watson's poems, which contained the lines "Love is a sour delight, a sugared grief/ A living death, and ever-dying life" lay behind young Romeo's modish and easily parodied oxymoron-rich rhetoric: "O brawling love, o loving hate,/ O heavy lightness, serious vanity,/ Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,/ Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health.... " Romeo was so besotted by his own rhetoric that Juliet couldn't resist a joke at his expense: "You kiss by the book." Romeo in 1595 owes a lot to Will in 1580.

Shakespeare knew that Romeo indulged too much of a good thing. Half a decade later, in All's Well That Ends Well, Helena imagined her perjured promiscuous lover Bertram at the French court dancing attendance on the ladies in a series of tired oxymora: "his humble ambition, proud humility,/ His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,/ His faith, his sweet disaster."  In these lines, Helana, and Shakespeare as well, repudiated fashionable oxymoronic couplings. On the other hand, it is not love but hatred and anger that give rise to Timon's oxymorons. For him, the loathed Athenians, those "smiling smooth detested parasites, are "courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears."  

In Hamlet, Claudius's insincere but brilliantly accomplished oxymorons camouflage his sin. He has

             as 'twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole

taken Gertrude as his wife. The pairing of "auspicious" (the root meaning of which is looking to the heavens to prognosticate by the flight of birds) with "dropping" is especially wonderful.

Claudius's "delight and dole" were anticipated by Richard II's rhetorical theatricality upon his return to England:

As a long-parted mother with her child
Plays fondly with her tears and smiles in meeting,
So, weeping, smiling, greet I thee, my earth.

And there's the "wholesome iniquity" of the bawdy house in Pericles -- a play in which calm comes in the form of "litigious peace."

In King Lear, a play about, among other subjects  a "precious unprized" daughter, there is a submerged but stunning oxymoron when (in Edgar's words) Gloucester is at last released from his suffering: "his flaw'd heart.../ 'Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly." "Burst smilingly" is a phrase which the younger Shakespeare could not reach; nor could any other poet before or since.

"What Wondrous Life is This I Lead"

"Now for my life," the doctor* boasted, "it is a miracle of [eighty] years, which to relate, were not a history but a piece of poetry." Sir Thomas didn't know the half of it; if his life was a miracle, then mine is a hundred times more so. Yesterday the miracles started first thing in the morning when I drove (I own a horseless carriage -- a circumstance Sir T. couldn't possibly have imagined) to our spanking new hospital to have my innards inspected. The MRI doughnut deployed a couple of teslas worth of magnetism to spin my protons into images, a process which, though incomprehensible to me, is a heck of a lot less agonizing than extracting the information from my personal body with scalpel and stand-by sponge, and is significantly more informative than inspecting my urine, which is what a seventeenth-century doctor like Browne would have done. Later, I took a short walk to the local bank to take care of business and moved some, well, not exactly money but virtual or magic money from one account to another. Back home, I conversed by cell to NGP who was on the road to Virginia in a horseless carriage of his own. Inasmuch as he was behind the wheel, we skipped the face time feature. Nevertheless the long-distance mobile communication experience was plenty miraculous. The climax of my day was a walk to a neighborhood theater where Angela Hewitt blessed us with an exquisitely rendered performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations. She was in a zone; I was riveted. Is it more wondrous that Bach composed the Variations, that Ms. Hewitt performed them with such delicate power, or that the concert took place right around the corner, almost at my doorstep?  After the Bach, the day being now almost over, along came still another miraculous moment when I watched, supine in my own bed, in real time, the last minutes of an NBA game beamed in from Boston, Massachusetts, two thousand miles to the east, and almost at the Atlantic Ocean. It was an excellent game -- a stunning win for the Brooklyn Nets, and an equally remarkable triumph for my pixel-rich widescreen TV. It was a long day and a varied one, and I was beat, so while snuggling a-bed with the lady friend (an intimacy that is not only a miracle but a piece of poetry to boot), I instructed Alexa to give us a little opera. Alexa complied and chose WQXR in NYC, and for a drowsy hour we were grateful operavores.

No question but that my day was comprised of a series of miracles, each one more incredible than the other.

Nor do I even bother to tally daily miracles so commonplace that we cease to notice them: water in (both cold and hot) and waste out, electricity, central heating and A/C, refrigeration, natural gas to cook by, big bright cheerful windows, etc.

"What wondrous life is this I lead."

*Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, first published 1644.

Mr. Mitchell

I don't know why, but after 66 years I found myself thinking about my first English teacher at EHHS, Mr. Stephen Mitchell . Here's what I can recall. Mr. Mitchell was a lazy guy. I remember that on many a day he would give us busy work assignments, take up his New York Times, rest his feet in the lower drawer of his desk, and read, while the class occupied itself doing who knows what.  In retrospect, Mr. Mitchell was probably a classic burnt-out case.  Perhaps he had been young and enthusiastic at one time, but in 1952, he needed desperately to retire. 

I remember also that in his class we read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  His instructional technique: he taught us some vocabulary, such as "onomatopoeia" and "personification." Then one student after another was asked to take a stanza and search it for examples of onomatopoeia or personification or perhaps metaphor and also to identify iambic tetrameter or iambic trimeter.

Of the romance of the Rime, we knew nothing and learned nothing.  

All the while, Mr. Mitchell's feet never left the drawer.

In retrospect, I wonder whether he might not have been a WW2 veteran, not quite recovered from the trauma.

Old Age, Poetry, Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that I discovered poetry. My comic-book, super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa; I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had already memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In addition, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and enrolled in a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was love sonnets and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now can acknowledge to be the finest poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. As an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future that I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what?  "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the home for old kings. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he resigns the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless, I'm moved by the resilience, the perseverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It has lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male privilege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism.

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. As an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future that I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what?  "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the home for old kings. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he resigns the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless, I'm moved by the resilience, the perseverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It has lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male privilege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism.

"Hurrah for the Pumpkin Pie"

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and here am I in a nostalgic mood, harking back to those songs that we sang in the PS 217 "assembly" in the 40s and 50s of the last millennium. With Miss Georgia Keiselbach at the piano, we marched, in size places, decorated in white shirts and green ties, into the school auditorium and warbled our dear little hearts out every Thursday at 10:00 am.

I remember very well the stirring but perplexing Thanksgiving hymn that began 

We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing;
He chastens and hastens His will to make known.
The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing.
Sing praises to His Name; He forgets not His own.

Looking backward, I admit that I understood the first line of the stanza but was pretty much boggled by what came next. "Chasten" and "hasten" make a wonderful internal rhyme, but who does He hasten and how exactly does He chasten?  A syntactical mystery for sure. Were we expected to believe that the Great Signifier in the Sky "chastens and hastens" His own will?  Why in the world should he be asked to do so?

Nor did I grasp the meaning of third line, because I didn't recognize that "the wicked oppressing" meant "the oppressing wicked" or more precisely "the wicked who are oppressing someone." But who were they "oppressing"? Apparently, the "distressing", that is, the people who are distressed. And who, to be more specific, were the innocent distressed who were being oppressed. Us?  Our teachers? Let me now confess that I sang then and remember at this moment the line as "now cease us from distressing", thinking that we, the pupils, must have been the "wicked" and that it was our now enlightened task to cease from oppressing the distressed. I read the line as a provocation to guilt, even though I knew that I myself, third-grader, had never oppressed anyone.

Nor was I the only confused 10-year-old, because BB, my PS 217 classmate and consultant on our assemblies, remembered the line as "The wicked oppressing now seize us from distressing" -- a sentence which is way beyond my parsing skills.

Of the last line of the quatrain, I grasped "Sing praises to his name" but "He forgets not His own" opened another can of confused worms. I construed "His own" to be shorthand for "his own name." But what kind of Lord forgets his own name?  As BB, equally misled, says, 'it's god, just three letters; how hard is that?"

The hymn goes on for another four puzzling stanzas, though to tell truth, I don't remember whether they were required of us PS 217 choristers. I for one am retrospectively pleased that we omitted the stanza that included the lines "We praise thee, O God, our Redeemer, Creator,/ In grateful devotion our tribute we bring" which surely seemed even then a trifle too theological. 

Despite the fact that I was mostly clueless, I rather enjoyed belting out the hymn's anapests. It's a joyous, rollicking piece of music. Whether it was appropriate for a public school in the heart of immigrant Brooklyn is another question. But hey, it was the 50s, before we all became so multicultural.

Nevertheless, out of spirit of curiosity, and because it's now so easy even for us lazybones to investigate such questions, I turned once again to wikipedia and typed in "We gather together." Warning: surprise in store.

It's a Christian hymn (of course) written in 1597 by one Adrianus Valerius to celebrate the victory in the Battle of Turnhout, a turning point in the Dutch Protestant war of liberation against Spanish Catholic domination. It first appeared in print in a 1626 collection of Dutch folk and patriotic songs but didn't find its way to the New World until 1903 and became popular only in 1935 when it was included in the "national hymnal of the Methodist-Episcopal Church." During World War II, which was entering its last phase when I was a kindergartner in PS 217, the hymn became popular because "'the wicked oppressing' was understood to refer to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan." Which is, I suppose, how an anti-Catholic Protestant hymn came to be included in our curriculum. After all, it was out of such strange and unpredictable meldings and divagations that Brooklyn/American culture was formed.   

"We gather together" was not our only Thanksgiving song. We also sang the entirely unobjectionable 

          Over the river, and through the wood,

          To Grandmother's house we go;

          The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh

          Through the white and drifted snow - oh.

I found this song lovely but otherworldly, because my own particular grandmother lived not over the river but in a tiny third-floor walk-up on distinctly unpastoral Coney Island Avenue, where there was an occasional tired horse, pulling a vegetable wagon, but there were few sleighs.

But as it turns out, "Over the river" too has a history.  

   

That's a portrait of its author, Lydia Maria Child. She looks rather forbidding, as though she might have taught sixth grade at PS 217, but on further investigation she turns out to have been a radical and revolutionary woman to whose accomplishments I wish we had been introduced. Born in 1802, she started her writing career with the novel Hobomok which depicts and approves of the marriage of an Indian man and a white woman. It caused a small scandal. In 1833, she published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans which proposed the immediate emancipation of slaves, arguing that slavery was as harmful to slave-owners as to the enslaved. It was the first anti-slavery book printed in America. Ms. Child was also an early advocate of women's rights and spoke favorably of sexual passion. Of course she was ostracized from polite society. In 1844, she published the small innocuous poem for which she is remembered, which concludes "Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done?/Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!" -- a sentiment to which there can be no possible objection or dissent.

Shakespeare Gets Going

Setting aside the suspicion that The First Part of Henry the Sixth is a collaborative work or perhaps even a "prequel" to Parts Two and Three, the play can be read as if its first few lines were the earliest example of Shakespeare's playwriting. If so, then, what can be learned, right there at the very beginning, by looking closely at Act one, scene one, line one? 

Here's the first considerable speech in the play -- just about the very moment, let us imagine, in which Mr. W. S.'s "rough and all-unable" goose quill touched paper. Thirty-seven or thirty-eight astonishing plays lie in the future. 

The adventure begins as Gloucester eulogizes the recently-deceased Henry V. The speech is not brilliant, not accomplished; in fact, it's just plain vanilla ordinary. But it's a seed, a kernel.   

Gloucester:   England ne'er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command:

His brandish'd sword did blind men with his beams:

His arms spread wider that a dragon's wings;

His sparking eyes, replete with wrathful fire

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than mid-day sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech:

He ne'er lift up his hand but conquered. 

A reader or playgoer would have to be superbly insightful to predict that this Shakespeare would become the Shakespeare. This opening speech is a a mighty flat piece of rhetoric.

It's formulaic  -- simply a litany or list. First comes an item, a noun (virtue, sword, arms, eyes, deeds) which is then amplified by a hyperbolic qualifier (beams, wings, fire, sun). It's open-ended; it could go on indefinitely. But because it's so much a formula, there's no surprise--there's no mystery or excitement about where Gloucester is heading.

Moreover, for each element in the list, there's a congruence between the unit of thought and the unit of verse. The sentiment of each of the first four items on the list is exactly contained in a five-beat, ten-syllable line of verse--a pedestrian procedure which Shakespeare would soon transcend. And finally, there's an excess of old-fashioned, traditional alliteration: "His Brandish'd sward did Blind me with his Beams" "affects the letter" and browbeats the brain with the letter B. It goes almost without saying that there's nothing in this speech that is particular (Elizabethans would say peculiar) to either Gloucester or Henry. This is Anyduke reciting sentences about Anyking.

But then something truly amazing occurs.  Although it looks as though Gloucester is gathering his strength and his breath for a speech that might go on for forty lines and which would celebrate many more of the late kings's amazing attributes, he suddenly changes plans and truncates his intention:  "What should I say?  his deeds exceed all speech."

Gloucester seems to have run out of rhetorical gas. He is frustrated because he simply doesn't have the words. He throws in the rhetorical towel, so to speak. He surrenders. And he's right to do so, because at this early moment neither he nor Shakespeare has the power to generate a language that is equal to Henry's deeds. Better to stop speaking if you are utterly unable to say what you want to say.

Yet what is the task of such a playwright as Shakespeare?

It is not to do exactly what Gloucester admits that he cannot do? -- to find the words that are commensurate with the deed -- as Shakespeare certainly will when he returns to Henry in the 1598 play which concludes and climaxes this sequence of eight history plays. In a decade, Shakespeare will move from the pathos of "What shall I say?" to a rich eloquence that is up to the task.

"What shall I say?" is therefore an important question -- the most important question of all, in fact -- and the playwright asks it right here at the outset. Readers can watch and learn as Shakespeare little by little, in play after play, gradually invents a rhetorical style in which speech not only equals but eventually comes to exceed all deeds.  

The Cheese Stands Alone

Certainly in the 1940s and perhaps in later decades, first-graders all over America were taught an "activity" based on a song called "The Farmer in the Dell." Older readers of this blague, if they are courageous enough to delve into long-forgotten and repressed pockets of the past, might dare to summon up the memory. 

Here's the game:  Ten young waifs, divided equally by gender, formed a circle holding hands around the Chosen One who was designated the "farmer." The gamins (and gamines) sang the following song:

The farmer in the dell,

The farmer in the dell.

Heigh-ho the derry-o,

The farmer in the dell.

While they sang, the "farmer" walked around the inside of the circle and chose a partner from the circle of children. Then the tune was repeated with the key word altered:  

The farmer takes a wife,

The farmer takes a wife,

Heigh-ho the derry-o

The farmer takes a wife.

The "wife" then joined him inside the circle, and the plot thickened. Now they sang:   

"The wife takes a child,

The wife takes a child;

Heigh-ho the derry-o

The wife takes a child."

And so on down and down the great chain of being. 

"The child takes a nurse...

"The nurse takes a cow...

"The cow takes a dog...

"The dog takes a cat...

"The cat takes a mouse..."

And finally, when all the players have been chosen but one, the game ended on the following exclusionary note:

"The cheese stands alone.

The cheese stands alone.

Heigh-ho the derry-o,

The cheese stands alone."

What was the point of this weird game? Why was it included in the "curriculum?"  Even seventy years later, it seems to be not fun but gratuitous cruelty. The most popular, the handsomest boy picks the most alluring young lady, and then choices are made in order of status. The game seems to have been devised to reinforce a hierarchical social structure. It was unAmerican, neither democratic or egalitarian. In retrospect, the game was triumphalist with regard to the farmer and his wife and harsh as all get out to the mouse and the cheese. If literary critics were to get their hands on this verse, they would be forced to notice the tragic pattern -- marriage at the outset followed by inevitable decline into isolation and soul-death.

Needless to say, I myself identify not with the prosperous farmer and his vivacious wife, but with the lumpish cheese. Velveeta it probably was, a big shapeless orange block of it, because no fancy aristocratic European cheeses were known to those of us who grew up in the 1940s PS 217 schoolyard. A sad cheese, inanimate, excluded from society, unchosen, least loved. Does the entire history of poetry offer a more mournful note than "the cheese stands alone?" Poor poor pitiful solitary neglected cheese. 

In recompense (it's too late for an apology) let us remember, three quarters of a century later, that cheeses have feelings too.

And for the curious, a "dell" is "a small valley in a forest, tucked away from the rest of civilization." At the corner of Newkirk and Coney Island Avenue, where PS 217 was to be found, there were, trust me, no wooded dells. Concrete sidewalks, chain-link fences, yes. Dells no. Delis, but no dells.     

"Jumping the Broom"

In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, it is reported that the woman who is eventually revealed to be Estella's mother was married "over the broomstick (as we say), to a tramping man." Dickens offers no explanation for "over the broomstick," apparently assuming that it was a concept with which his readers were familiar. There is in fact a long tradition of 'jumping the broom" to certify informally a marriage sanctioned neither by state or church. It was practiced in west Africa where it symbolized the sweeping away of the old life and of a leap into the new world of fertility and increase. "Jumping the broom" was also a frequent practice in southern American slave culture where legal marriage was prohibited. The custom was a feature of ancient Celtic societies, especially among the Welsh and the Picts. As practiced by the Picts, broom jumping neither predicted nor solicited fertility.  

"The Lost Chord"

Insomnia once again -- a nightly affliction, a family trait. Perhaps we lack a gene that lets others sleep from dusk to dawn. Have I noted here that I want my tombstone inscribed with the motto, just beneath my name and dates, "No More Insomnia, Forever."

During the wakeful nights, I've taken to listening to old-time radio. My favorite: WHRO out of Norfolk, Virginia. Last night, I heard some tenor from the 1920s (perhaps John McCormack) in a scratchy recording (tuba for bass) wail or warble "The Lost Chord"-- quite the 3 am treat it was. A flood of memories arose, because "The Lost Chord" was one of the songs that we learned during the PS 217 assembly back there in Flatbush in the 1950s. I recalled with some amusement that our determined "music specialist," Miss Georgia Keiselbach, a big lumbering woman with a trained contralto voice, tried gamely to inculcate an anguished mid-Victorian quasi religious parlor song into the minds of a roomful of fidgety 10-year-olds. Quite an experience. I was entranced by Sir Arthur Sullivan's melody, but I have to admit that the lyric was incomprehensible to me then and is still quite a challenge to this day.

So I investigated. Onto the internet, which, fortunately, works very well at 4 am.

The words to "The Lost Chord" are by Adelaide Anne Procter, after Tennyson apparently the most popular poet of her day, although I must confess that I had never heard of her even though I'm supposed to know something about nineteenth-century English literature.  

Here's Ms. Procter's fervid poem: 

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music 
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav'n
I shall hear that grand Amen.

I'll paraphrase (even though I know that paraphrase is not a nice thing to do to a poem): in a reverie at the organ the poet experiences something grand that is aesthetic, transcendent, ineffable, and fleeting. The "lost chord divine" -- note the Miltonic deployment of adjectives -- stands for the hope or wish or belief that there is such a place as heaven and that it's a place where weariness, fever, pain, sorrow, perplexity, strife, and discord are superseded by the "infinite calm" and "perfect peace" of the "grand Amen."  A not unusual or extraordinary nineteenth-century sentiment where the hunt for the disappearing god was frequently mediated by art -- in this particular case by the art of music. 

As long as I'm reducing the poem to its paraphraseable meaning, I might also add that Procter, like many poets before and after her, has conflated religious and sexual longing. I derive this meaning, inaccessible to the roomful of quavering sopranos of which I was one, and very likely unsuspected by Miss Keiselbach herself, from the vocabulary of passion in which the poem is couched: "crimson," "touch," "lay" "love," "trembled."  And from the sentence, "It came from the soul of the organ,/  And entered into mine," where it might be argued, slightly frivolously, that any line of poetry that contains "came" "organ" and "entered" has got to be about a symbolic sexual encounter. Especially when the ambiguous word "mine" can denote either "my soul" or "my organ." So in this extravagant reading, in which it is once again clearly demonstrated that you can take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy, "The Lost Chord" is not only about the search for "perfect peace" but also for the perfect orgasm which will provide infinite calm to the poetess when she "dies" -- a word which is itself a Victorian euphemism for sexual climax. The lost chord is the big O (and I don't mean Oscar R.)

Just for fun of it let me also adduce a couple of sentences from the wikipedia article on Adelaide Anne Procter: "Modern critics argue that Procter's work is significant for what it reveals about how Victorian women otherwise repressed feelings." "One critic suggests that Procter may have been a lesbian and in love with Matilda Hays; other critics have called Procter's relationship with Hays 'emotionally intense.'" "Procter became engaged in 1858. The identity of Procter's fiancé remains unknown, and the proposed marriage never took place." "In 1851, Procter converted to Roman Catholicism." "Procter never married. She became unhealthy, possibly due to her charity work, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 38." I'll let my loyal readers connect the dots.  

"The Lost Chord" is a fine song and deserves to be revived. On YouTube, you can listen to a remarkably accomplished version by Enrico Caruso. Which you can access to at any time, even in the midst of a long insomniac night.

"Maestro to the Pit"

Several times a year, we attend the opera -- that is, we wander over to the Metropolitan Opera widescreen HD broadcasts at our local movie theater. Last week, it was Dvorak's Rusalka --overproduced, over-costumed, a mighty silly story, but nevertheless glorious. Sung in Czech. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but then I never do expect to do so, even when the opera is sung in a language with which I'm supposed to be on speaking terms. But it's not the libretto which we savor, it's the music. 

Nevertheless at each performance there's a solemn  moment when language moves front and center. It comes after the preliminary fol-de-rol and acknowledgements and interviews and trailers-for-next-month's performance are finally dispensed with. Now, at long last, the camera locates the head-setted director, who sits at huge intimidating console of buttons and knobs and switches and lights. And now here they come, the words of magic and enchantment: "maestro to the pit."

In that pithy, incantatory sentence is encapsulated all the ritual power of language. It's a hieratic moment. After such a magnificent statement, everything else is anticlimax (linguistically speaking).

Freed by these words, the shamanic conductor heretofore invisible, steps up, turns his back to the audience and faces the orchestra, brandishes his baton, and initiates the business of the day. 

"Maestro to the pit."  I love the idea that the generic term for conductor is "maestro." I love the quasi-oxymoronic juxtaposition of "maestro" and "pit."  In fact, I love the word "pit" in this context. Not a hole in the ground, nor the pit of hell, nor a place in which to chuck pieces of dismembered bodies. No, an orchestra pit, which is a horse of an entirely different color. Good thing it's not the custom to say "conductor to the podium." How flat, how banal, how unsacral. No dignity, no grandeur, no poetry.

No, it's "maestro to the pit." And let it always be so.

And by the way, I make a pretty good barbecue sauce, and I'm proud to say that my spare ribs are semi-famous. Let the word go forth, that now and forever, whenever I'm called to the grill, it's going to be "maestro to the pit."

My Teachers: James Hutton (1902-1980)

The most erudite man that I ever encountered in my own person was James Hutton, a professor of classics when I was an undergraduate at Cornell back there in the 1950s. Professor Hutton bristled with knowledge -- nor is this my opinion only, but one that is well attested by his international reputation and by the list of his writings. Hutton wrote two enormous books (800 pages each!!) that won him his scholarly spurs: The Greek Anthology in Italy (1935) and The Greek Anthology in France and in the Latin Writers of the Netherlands to the Year 1800 (1946). I encountered Professor Hutton in 1958 when, callow and poorly educated, I enrolled in a Latin course called "Terence and Catullus" (of which more later). But first, for those curious readers out there in bloglandia who are on tenterhooks, painfully stretched like new wool and are wondering what the heck is the "Greek Anthology" about which James Hutton composed his pair of magna opera and around which his life centered -- turn we now to the pages of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

In brief, the Anthologia Graeca is a collection of poems, mostly epigrams, that had a complicated ancient history, but originated perhaps with an anthology complied by Meleager of Gadara in the first century BCE, which brought together works by many ancients including Archilochus, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Simonides (all big names in their time). There were a series of early editions that do not survive but an authoritative version was made by Constantine Cephalas in the 10th century. "Cephalas appended a number of other collections: homoerotic verse collected by Straton of Sardis in the 2nd century AD; a collection of  Christian epigrams found in churches; a collection of satirical and convivial epigrams collected by Diogenianus as well as Christodorus's description of statues in the Byzantine gymnasium of Zeuxippos; and a collection of inscriptions from a temple in Cyzicus." And then in 1300 or thereabouts Maximus Planudes brought together an edition which became standard, which, while adding some poems, also deleted or bowdlerized many of those that offended his puritanical Christian sensibilities. Planudes' anthology was the only one known to Western Europe for many centuries; manuscript transmission was superseded when an edition based on his work was printed in 1494.

There's a lot more but that's enough information for us to understand the area which James Hutton worked. Professor Hutton knew the anthology backwards and forwards and made it his business to trace its considerable influence through the Latin and vernacular poetry of late antiquity and the medieval and renaissance worlds. Quite an endeavor, in my opinion.  

Hutton was a Scotsman, born in Airth, son of a sea captain, though from where I sat (in a small seminar room in Goldwin Smith Hall!!), it was impossible to imagine that he had ever been a child or even a young man. He came to the US early in life and there was not a trace of Scotland in his speech. Hutton entered Cornell as a freshman in 1920, received three degrees there, stayed on to teach, and retired in 1973. According to his Cornell obituary, he was a life-long bachelor. For most of his adulthood, he lived with his mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Hutton, and he shared a house for many years with Professor Lane Cooper, his teacher and another bachelor Cornell classicist. After the death of his mother and of Cooper, he continued to live at 123 Roberts Place with his cousin/housekeeper, Mrs. Margaret Green. Perhaps he was a delightful presence among his friends, but to my eyes he was a pale, tall, gaunt, dry-as-a stick, bony man devoid of humor or juice. Born only two years before my own father, he seemed to be generations older.  

Now a few words about Terence and Catullus, the twin subjects of my 1958 Latin classroom experience. 

Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) was Roman playwright possibly of Berber origin but certainly originally a north African slave. Brought to Rome and freed, he wrote six comedies, adapted from Greek originals, of which we students of Professor Hutton plowed through three: Andria (166 BC); The Self-Tormentor (163 BC) and the Adelphi (160 BC). Terence drowned on a trip to Greece, age 25. His must have been a marvelously romantic life, even though much curtailed. Too bad we know only its barest outline.

Here's the title page to the first "modern" edition of Terence's works (1496)

In Terence's plays, young noblemen dally with prostitutes or mistresses even as their fathers insist that they marry more respectable ladies. Plots, often contrived by the dull hero's wily slave, fail to come to fruition because the conspirators are carelessly overheard. Sometimes apparently unrelated women (one rich, the other poor), turn out to be sisters. Sham marriages and double-dealing are frequent. It is not uncommon that sons discover by accident, in the last scene of the play, the identities of their biological fathers. When there are plans to destroy female infants, the girls are rescued and raised secretly, only to come forward as beauties at a critical juncture of the plot. Young noblemen are prone to breaking into the houses of pimps to carry off the girls they love. Generally, plays end with multiple and suitable marriages, the old folks outwitted and the youngsters carrying the day. Slaves are freed.

Meanwhile, characters coin memorable aphorisms in succinct, elegant Latin. Everyone knows "Homo sum, nihil a me alienum puto"  -- I am a man, nothing human is alien to me.  But also quot homines tot sententiae: suus cuique mos -- So many men, as many opinions; to each his own way. And "fortis fortuna adiuvat" --  fortune favors the brave.  And "nullumst iam dictum quod nos dictum sit prius" --nothing new is said that has not been said before. And "amantium irae amoris integratio est" -- lover's quarrels are the renewal of love.

But with all these comic goings-on and witty sayings, there was not one moment that I can remember when Professor James Hutton laughed or smiled or indicated in the least that the plays were clever or amusing. Instead, we discussed grammatical questions with much emphasis on the differences between second century and first century Latin. Dry as dust, it was. The opportunity to find the common humanity of ancient Romans and 1950s Cornellians was missed, even shirked.

Terence's louche and lively plots must have posed a problem for Professor Hutton; Catullus of Verona, a poet of love and sex and bawdy, could only have caused even more of a difficulty. In the edition in which we read Catullus, a drab gray book which must have dated from the early part of the century, certain of the more scabrous poems were omitted but, in a moment of confused prudery, printed -- in a smaller font --in an appendix. I suspect that they were also bowdlerized. Some of the words that Catullus used in his freer verse were not to be found in our dictionary, which had also been cleansed. And in a translation that I consulted (was it the Loeb?) the offending poems did appear, but only in Italian. Was the idea that if anyone could read Italian he must be sophisticated enough to deal with Catullan pornography. Perhaps my readers think that I'm fantasizing or imagining this half-hearted censorship, but it's as true as true. Swear.

Even after all these years, two of Catullus's poems stay in my mind. The best, the most frequently republished and the most influential is known to classicists as Catullus 5. It's a remarkable poem. Here's the Latin, which is not difficult.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus

Rumoresque senum severiorum

omnes unius aestimemus assis.

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux

Nox est perpetua una dormienda

da mi basia mille, deinde centum

dein mille altera, dein secunda centum

deinde com milia multa fecerimus

conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, 

aut ne quis malus invidere possitor

cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

And here's a translation. "Let us live, my Lesbia, and love. The gossipings of stern old men let us value at just one penny.  Suns may set and rise again, but us, when once the brief light has set, night is one perpetual sleep. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred, then when we have counted up many thousands, let us shake [the abacus] lest some evil man be envious when he knows how many kisses there were." That is to say, Let us keep on making love no matter what the old envious guys think. (Lesbia has nothing to do with lesbians; it's just code for the name of the married woman with whom Catullus was sleeping.)  

I have no recollection of any discussion of this peach of a poem in 1958. Perhaps we talked about the ingenious lux/Nox juxtaposition, but I am sure we didn't touch on either the boasted adultery or the joys of sex. We were still in the last gasp of Victoriana. We were pre-Beatles, pre-Kennedy, pre-readily available contraceptives. Some things were not to be discussed. 

The other poem that stands in my memory is Catullus 61, a joyous epithalamion (or marriage song) which celebrates, with great gusto, the wedding of Vinia and Manlius. It is sensual and almost hypnotic. It's frankness about sexual pleasure pleased me in 1958, when such things were rare. Still pleases me.

But what about the omitted poems, the ones too "coarse" for our tender eyes and ears?  How would James Hutton have dealt with them. Not at all, of course. But now, censorship and self-censorship and propriety eased, we can read the poem that begins Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo. which I can now translate as "I will fuck you in the ass and then fuck you in the face." And goes on from there. Not part of the 1958 curriculum. In Professor Hutton's class, we were more comfortable discussing a synezis of the genitive than any exercise of the genitalia.

But I wonder, now, about, James Hutton, at home after a hard day of declining and conjugating, at dinner with his mother and his bachelor roommate. What did Professor Hutton think about Catullus's "paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo".

This I know: whether repelled or offended or secretly sympathetic, he certainly did not share his feelings with his students. 

Reposted: "Crosspatch, / Draw the Latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this brilliant piece of poetry:  

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more complexity than first meets the eye.  

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman"-- is at work, spinning; in the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage-- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element--"patch"-- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy." But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meagre living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton; her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is solicited to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in." What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt,-- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin!  Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

Lola on Romeo and Juliet

The granddaughter, Lola, age 6 and a bit, has been reading to me -- a child's version of Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets distresses her. "Why do they have to fight. Why can't they just talk about it?  Why don't they use their words?"

"I Love a Tall Girl"

I never "got" T. S. Eliot. When I first became serious about poetry and "intellectual" stuff, in the 50s, Eliot was the presiding grand khan of English literature. Because Eliot liked Donne, my teachers liked Donne. Because Eliot was down on Milton, my teachers were down on Milton. Eliot had pronounced that "a dissociation of thought and feeling" occurred in the later seventeenth century, and we all tried to interpret literature in the light of that putative, imaginary divorce. Eliot discovered that Shakespeare's Hamlet was a failure because it lacked an 'objective correlative." We were enjoined to wonder exactly where that OC had gone. Nevertheless, I thought Hamlet was an exciting success and still do. So do many discerning readers.

To me, Eliot's criticism was mysterious and his poetry was incomprehensible, unmusical and occasionally repellent. "The Waste Land," his masterpiece, was to me obscurantist, pretentious, show-offy and shallow. And yet I was unquestionably an outlier. I studied the "Four Quartets" for weeks under the able direction of a serious teacher and scholar, Arthur Mizener, but in the end there was nothing there for me. My own insufficiency?  Perhaps.

I could not get around Eliot's public positions ("I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics"). To me, these views were fringe, absurd, reactionary, borderline fascist. Eliot was puritanical about sex, looked down his Brahmin nose at people not of his class (see the Sweeney poems) and couldn't abide Jews.    

When I taught a course called "History of Poetry in English," which I did for many years, I would skip from the undeniably great poets of the World War I generation (Brooke, Rosenberg, Sassoon, Thomas, Owen, Graves, Hardy) right to Yeats and Frost, leaving Eliot in the deep lurch, possibly to the consternation of my more sophisticated students.

So it gives me great pleasure to say that I've finally found a poem by the old pretender that tickles me. It celebrates his second wife, whom he married in 1957 when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty, and remained unpublished until it just now appeared in the second volume of the new Johns Hopkins edition. It's not exactly juicy, but it seems to be honest and forthright:

I love a tall girl.

When we lie in bed

She on her back and I stretched upon her,

And our middle parts are busy with each other,

My toes play with her toes and my tongue with her tongue,

And all the parts are happy.

Because she is a tall girl.

To me, this brief lyric is worth forty Quartets.

More New Orleans Dialogue

At a restaurant at the corner of Jena and Freret, the over-tattooed waitress, acknowledging our appreciation of the greens, fennel and kumquat salad, said, memorably, "People do not understand the beauty of the kumquat."  An excellent instance of found poetry. And all the more brilliant in context, because I myself once asserted that "kumquat" is the most obscene-sounding word in the English language. 

Edward and Edna

Edward Thomas died at the battle of Arras, in France, in April of 1917. He was thirty-nine years old.  

In this picture, he looks intense, suspicious, soulful, possibly even poetic, -- but not the suffering-soul-kind of poet. When he joined the military, he transformed himself into the stereotype of an officer. The new "look" was not a success, in my opinion.

Before he went off to the war, Edward Thomas conducted a flirtation and possibly an affair but more probably what they called in those inhibited days a "romantic friendship" with Edna Clarke Hall. She was a beautiful, intelligent woman, an artist. Here she is looking positively post-Pre-Raphaelite.

 

And here again -- youthful, delicate and glowing.

After Edward died, his wife Helen, herself a gifted, attractive and certainly long-suffering woman,  wrote to Edna. "Why wasn't I beautiful to Edward? Oh, I did so long for your beauty not to take it from him, not take but give, to have hair & eyes & mouth & that something else....  I remember you so clearly standing for all I longed to have to give him."

I am moved by Helen's grief and also by her generosity.

Edna Clarke Hall died at age 100 in 1979. 

Sonnet for My Father

I did not know that Edward Thomas sometimes made use of the entries in his journal as the raw material for his poetry.

His practice is not unique. Ben Jonson boasted that he wrote all his poems in prose first, then re-wrote them into verse.

So I decided to try an experiment. I took a blog post, written some years ago, called What My Father Ate. For ease of reference, I reproduce it here.

 

"Sardines, by the tinful. Herrings, canned, either in wine sauce or in tomato sauce. Whitefish. Lima beans which came into the house dried but which were soaked to plump up, then boiled and mashed (but not for me, if I could possibly avoid them). Potatoes in any form, but usually mashed and buttered. No chicken or lamb chops, but lots of tongue. (When I left home, I vowed never to eat tongue again, and I've kept the faith.) Chopped chicken liver. Steak, when we could afford it. Roast pork with applesauce. Delicatessen meats -- salami, baloney, corned beef, frankfurters. Baked beans, courtesy of Heinz. Apples, right down to the stem. Chocolate in any form, but especially white chocolate. Halvah, a particular favorite. Dates and figs, dried. Black radishes and onions, covered with gribbinis. Tschav, borsht with huge helpings of sour cream. Corn on the cob. No alcohol, nary a drop. On hot days, no beer, but instead iced tea or iced coffee. Cheese, either Velveeta or swiss. Good bread -- pumpernickel or rye. Crumb cake direct  from Ebinger's Bakery. Bacon and two eggs, sunnyside up or soft-boiled. Cream o' Wheat. Swee-Touch-Nee tea. On Sunday morning, bagels and rolls, warm from the oven, eaten while reading the Times (25 cents) and the Eagle (10 cents). Ice cream, the more exotic the flavor the better."

And then I turned it into a sonnet, with these results.

 

Fragrant, oily iridescent sardines,     

Herring by the tinful, gefilte fish;

Lima beans, soaked, boiled, mashed and then buttered

Crowding the flesh to the edge of the dish.

Salami, baloney, baked beans, and tongue.

Chopped chicken liver, calf liver with bacon,

Corned beef, frankfurters slathered with mustard

Pastrami -- and anything delicatessen.

Roast pork with applesauce, roasted potatoes.

Black radish, gribbinis, onions, and rye bread,

Cheese -- cream,  Velveeta or Swiss --  on a bagel.

On Sundays, Ebinger’s crumb cake instead.

Apples, core and all, gnawed  down to the stem.

The flesh, the seeds, the skin – all gone just like him.

 

Doesn't seem to work for me. I guess you have to be a poet, which I obviously am not. Or perhaps there's a problem with the raw material. 

A New Biography of Edward Thomas

I've just finished a genuinely wonderful new biography by Matthew Hollis called Now All Roads Lead to France, a Life of Edward Thomas. I'm dazzled, and glad to be so. The book is carefully and comprehensively researched, literate, sensible, and compassionate. Its author is confident enough not to overwhelm the poor reader with pounds of extraneous detail. I'm not easily rivetted, but this biography was truly rivetting. Thank you, Matthew Hollis.

I'm a longtime Edward Thomas enthusiast. Thomas learned how to employ the language really used by men more successfully than some of his highly-regarded predecessors. I didn't know much about Thomas's life, and therefore hadn't realized (though I might have guessed had I been more astute) how much Thomas had learned from Robert Frost. The two became inseparable friends during Frost's English years and spent hours and hours together, neglecting their wives and families but talking poetry and poetic language. Clearly, they cross-fertilized.

In fact, if you listen closely, you can hear overtones of Frost in Thomas's best-known poem.

Yes, I remember Adlestrop --
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop -- only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The first line of the poem is so casual and demotic that it sounds like what later came to be called "found poetry." I'm glad to know that there is an actual Adlestrop up there in the Cotswolds, though surely Thomas was well aware that "Adlestrop" sounds as though it were invented by the Ministry of Silly Names.

The poem is a latter-day pastoral which contrasts the hiss of industrial steam with the with perennial birdsong and cloudlets. A brief ecstatic revelation.  

My all-time favorite poem by Thomas is this blank-verse masterpiece:

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Although understated and matter-of-fact, it's a moving, emotional story. The conversation between poet and ploughman is framed by the lovers, who enter the wood, attend to their pleasure, and then emerge. The poet is at first flippant and even jokes about losing a limb. But he is soon taught that there's nothing amusing about the end of an peaceful era. "Everything/ Would have been different.  For it would have been/ Another world." In these two lines, I hear gas attacks, trench warfare, dysentery.  and catastrophic casualties (including Thomas's own). The ploughman is more optimistic and hopeful, but he proved to be mistaken.

How Rupert Brooke Died

From a mosquito bite to his lip. 

Rupert Brooke was an immensely talented young poet, best known today for the hyper-nationalistic World War I sonnet, "The Soldier." He lived for just twenty-eight years and his death was a tragedy for letters.

It's easy to be skeptical about the mosquito. I've been in the company of these insects many times, and I've never been bitten on the lip. Mosquitoes seem to avoid the mouth area -- at least, they avoid my mouth. But then, I don't know anything about the habits of eastern Mediterranean mosquitoes.

Brooke was a sub-lieutenant with Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve; the mosquito attack took place while his ship was anchored in the Aegean. He developed an abscess and sepsis and as a result was transferred to a French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin. He died at 4:46 pm on 24 April, 1915 and was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros.

An unlikely death-- as odd and irregular as that of Aeschylus (struck on the head by a tortoise dropped by an eagle), or Isadora Duncan (strangled by a scarf entangled in the wheels of a motor-car). Or the unfortunate composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who, while conducting in the traditional manner by beating time with staff, accidentally knocked his own foot, causing an abscess which became gangrenous and fatal. Alas, no antibiotics in 1687. 

My guess is that if Brooke had not been bitten and had survived Gallipoli (where his ship was headed), the "pure and elevated patriotism" displayed in "The Soldier" might have become less enthusiastic. Brooke  might have evolved in a direction similar to that of his jaded-about-warfare contemporaries Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfrid Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, and Edward Thomas. But we'll never know.

Life: Boon or Thorn?

The most widely-known as well as the most notorious poem of the second half of the twentieth century is Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse."  For those of you who don't know the poem by heart, here it is in its brief and startling entirety.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in the turn

  By fools in old style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern,

  And half at one another's throats.

Man adds on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

  And don't have any kids yourself.

Pessimistic?  Jaded?  Angry?  Yes, I think it's fair to call it so. And let's also add, unsubtle with a vengeance.

Larkin is hyperbolically illogical. It can't be true that every generation is more deranged than the one that preceded it. When were the good times? A few generations ago? In the Dark Ages? In antiquity?  No, in Larkin's view, it's been all downhill, all the time. No doubt those early primates were already fucking up their kids when they came down from the trees and started to walk upright on the savannah. "There's only one piece of roasted rhinoceros left. You take it. I don't mind being hungry."

Despite its dyspepsia and illogicality, "This Be the Verse" is a curiously lovable poem. Whenever I've heard it read or recited, audiences react not with horror but with amusement. The poem's misanthropy is so absolute and its language so blunt that it can't help but provoke tittering.

The laughter arises because the poem doesn't earn its pessimism. It's too fluent and too easy -- unlike, say, King Lear, where the sublunary world is rank with incest, betrayal, and murder. After three thousand lines and five full horrific acts, Shakespeare earns the standing to conclude that life is miserable and that "humanity must perforce/ Prey on itself, like monsters of the deep." So it is in Oedipus, where the events lend credibility to the difficult apercu that it's best not to be born at all, next best to die very young.

While Shakespeare and Sophocles are philosophically serious, Larkin is merely flip. There's a monumental disproportion between his gloom and the light-verse vessel in which his gloom is contained. And so arises the off-kilter comedy.

It's a whiny poem. "Poor poor pitiful me. I had a difficult mommy." 

If "This Be the Verse" is in fact the most popular poem of the last fifty years, it supersedes Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." What a remarkable devolution! While Frost endures, Larkin abhors.

I doubt whether Larkin had "Stopping by Woods" in mind, but he certainly glosses Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem" -- the poem from which he drew his title. Stevenson's performance is charming, gentle, self-effacing, and modest. 

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die.

And laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson praises the adventurous life lived well and brought to completion. Death may end it all but it also closes the circle. There is no completion, no circles in Larkin, where natural processes are crudely truncated: "don't have any kids yourself."

"This Be the Verse" is a hilarious and wonderful piece of joking, but its victimology is unsettling. It's tempting to claim that it satirizes its own pessimism, but, I'm sorry to say, it does not. Larkin loves to wallow in his own gloom.

Here's another Victorian variation on the thema Larkiniana.

Is life a thorn?

Then count it not a whit.

Man is well done with it.

As soon as he's born,

He should all means assay

To put the plague away.

Pessimistic, yes. But Colonel Fairfax, even-handed, also entertains the possibility that life might be a boon (which, as we all know, is true at least some of the time). 

Vegetable Love

As a rule, I'm as fickle as the legendary varying flag, but just now I have made a firm unwavering commitment. My absolutely most favorite line of poetry -- are you ready now, readers -- is (drumroll)l: "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."

Is that poetry or what? It's teasingly inexplicit yet at the same time very, very suggestive.

I first encountered the line in a mid-1950s doo-wopper by The Clovers (later famous for "Love Potion Number Nine") called "Lovey Dovey."

Well, you're the cutest thing that I did ever see
I really love your peaches, want to shake your tree.
Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time
Lovey dovey, I can't get you out of my mind.

The line's subversive sexuality penetrated even our twin-bed, Eisenhower-era, Ozzie-and-Harriet world.

Peaches/trees has a complicated history. Wikipedia tracks it to a song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches/ You'd better stop shaking my tree,” but I'd be willing to bet the orchard that Irving did not invent but borrowed the line, probably from something bluesy. Berlin's peaches warn us off, but Bessie Smith's 1923 peaches are both active and abundant: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be." Bessie was the kind of gal whose peaches would be given away by the basketful. Blind Lemon Jefferson's 1929 peaches, on the other hand, are proprietary: ("you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me/ I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). Ah yes, we must all be faithful to just a single source of fruit.

I'd wager that the peaches have appeared in fifty or a hundred songs in the last century.

The line floats from song to song, but wherever it settles, it's always suggestive of sexual desires and needs. Even when peaches are forbidden fruit, they're also ripe and luscious oozers of juice. Shake that tree properly and they fall into right into your mouth. 

Andrew Marvell would have loved "If you really want my peaches, gotta shake my tree."  Here's his witty mid-seventeenth century version of the trope. It's in a stanza from his best poem, "The Garden."

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

Marvell's garden is not for strolling and smelling. It's a garden in which the fruits attack the "speaker" in an active, science-fictiony way. No nibbling here. Instead, "The luscious clusters of the vine,/Upon my mouth do crush their wine." "Luscious clusters... crush" is one sensous mouth-filling phrase. And those fine fruits, "the nectarine and curious (curious =s unusual, not investigative) peach" require no shaking whatsoever. These fruits are animatronic.

Marvell's "Garden" is as good a version of pomological love as Irving Berlin's -- without even taking into account the brilliant and accomplished iambic tetrameter couplets.

Youth and Age -- Tennyson's Ulysses

It wasn't until I reached college that discovered poetry. My comic-book super-hero and baseball-infused brain was until then, poetry-wise, an almost complete tabula rasa. I say "almost" because at eight or nine eight years old I had memorized two great classics of American literature: "Casey at the Bat" and also the poem by Grantland Rice about Tinkers, Evers, and Chance. In additon, I knew the ubiquitous stercoraceous distich the first line of which is "Here I sit, broken-hearted" and a related gnomic verse that begins, "No matter how much you wiggle and dance." Then in 1956 I left Flatbush for higher education and took a course in English Literature. The rest, as they say, is history. It was sonnets and love poems of any kind, and rich luscious liquid poems by Marlowe and Keats and Hopkins that entranced me. The more intellectual poems were too taxing for my immature head. Lycidas, which I now know to be the best poem in the language, was utterly impenetrable for at least a decade, although I admit that I immediately responded to its music: "With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves." 

One of my teachers sagely observed that certain poets and certain poems were for youth, some for maturity, and some for old age. "You may no longer like then what you like now." Which has come to pass. And as an example of poetry for the latter years, he adduced Tennyson's "Ulysses." "This poem may not mean much to you now, but it will some day, if you live long enough." I remember that I was much taken with the touchstone line "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy" but I thought that "Ulysses" was far too much about a really old guy trying to cheer himself up and I did not see it holding a place in any future I could envision. 

Well, folks, I've now arrived at the so-called golden years, or, more properly, the endgame, or extra innings (which in some sports is called sudden death) and guess what? "Ulysses" has returned, front and center, exactly as was predicted 50+ years ago. It's right on target. 

Tennyson's Ulysses is Homer's adventurer a generation older, kinging it in Ithaca, but bored, unchallenged, and unstimulated. "It little profits that an idle king,/ By this still hearth, among these barren crags,/ Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole/ Unequal laws unto a savage race,/ That hoard and sleep, and feed,/ And know not me."

To put it vulgarly, Ulysses plans to bust out of the old folks home. He's been a warrior, a hero, and a roving explorer. He "cannot rest from travel." He needs to search "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." He leaves Penelope, and he leaves the government of Ithaca to his bureaucratically-minded  son Telemachus. The last lines of the poem, the leave-taking, are most stirring:  

                           Come, my friends

"Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides,

And though we are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Yes, I know -- the diction is a little antiquated and artificial, the urge to get away a trifle too vehement. But nevertheless I'm moved by the resilience, the perserverance. Though tear-inducing, the poem is anything but lachrymose. And it's accepting: "that which we are, we are."

It's lately become the fashion to interpret "Ulysses" as a poem about capitalism and imperialism. In this reading, Ulysses is just another white male, off to conquer and colonialize The Alien Other. Or to see it as a poem about male priviliege: he's a bad husband, abandoning the family. Or to conceive the poem as a structure of ironies, in which Ulysses doesn't realize that he undermines his own suppositions. There's a tad of truth in these arguments, as there always is, because Tennyson was caught up in a Victorian striving that he didn't fully or consciously assimilate. But frankly, I feel sorry for readers who can't hear the verve and excitement in Ulysses's expansive view of things. 

Moreover, it turns out that Tennyson was absolutely correct to proclaim that there is a time in life when "not to yield" is an act of daily heroism. 

Reposted: Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. Therefore it's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed backup quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has transformed into the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive faux-aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance. "Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will notice the echo of the initial phrase of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world." Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved; he is duked.

6.  Why the aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking? The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis.  It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and yet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one of many reasons for its continued popularity. 

Plastic Flowers

Our property adjoins the old West Bradford cemetery. The two- or three-acre plot of ground is the most visible remnant of the dairy, sheep and apple community of  West Bradford, which was hacked out of the steep slopes above the Connecticut river in the first part of the nineteenth century, peaked before the Civil War, and then went into decline more than a century and a half ago. West Bradford lost its post office address in the 1920s and its schoolhouse (if word-of-mouth can be trusted) before W W II. We still have a few sheep and horses and some beef cattle but also an ever-increasing number of commuters who head down I-91 for their employment in Lebanon or Hanover. 

The history of West Bradford can be read in the cemetery's gravestones. There must two hundred of them. The oldest are made of local slate and are only a foot or eighteen inches in height; these date from the 1820s. One or two of them feature lugubrious, stunted iconic weeping willows which rain and wind have rendered barely visible. The markers that date from the end of the nineteenth century are larger, made of marble that was quarried thirty miles to the west of us, and reflect the area's growing prosperity. They're laconic  -- just name and dates -- and entirely bereft of adornment or decoration. They celebrate the Baldwins and Cunninghams and Lows and Tebbetses who cleared these hilly fields with horses and oxen and who left behind all those massive and beautiful stone walls that snake and twist their way through lands that are once again deeply forested. There are women buried here who have been denied even the brief immortality that a grave marker affords: a man's name and dates and the notation "his wife" or sometimes even "his wives."

Quarter-size headstones, numerous and unincised, attest to unbaptized infants.

There's a new part of the cemetery, still in use, which to my eyes is less sturdy and more frivolous -- an emblem of a culture in decline. Just because it's possible to laser a prancing reindeer onto a granite headstone doesn't mean that it's a good idea to do so. How all those long-bearded and puritanical Emersons and Pipers would have railed against such trifling?

A few years ago, one of our local Thurstons erected a pink granite stone with a plastic cross epoxyed to its surface. The cross, it was said, was to be a perpetual lantern -- lit until the end of time by some sort of device that gathered energy during the day and discharged it at night. "Oh no," I thought the first few times that I came home late at night and was greeted by a ruby and unwinking polysterene crucifix, "how ugly, how tacky, how out-of-keeping." Fortunately, the perpetual light only lasted a year or so before extinguishing itself for good. 

I rather enjoy having a cemetery is nearby. "Quiet neighbors," as they say here. Our house lies halfway between the cemetery and the pond. It's satisfying to be flanked by crucial symbols of life and death. My only quarrel is that occasionally a visitor to the cemetery, perhaps a decayed descendant of one of the pioneers, will pitch an old vase or some sun-faded plastic flowers onto our land. I don't so much mind picking up a few pieces of trash as I object to my property being used as someone's rubbish heap. It's disrespectful. But any person who would think to commemorate his mother with polycarbonate or acrylic geraniums will generally not be the most mannerly or ecologically sensitive of souls. 

One day, many years ago, I was sitting on the cemetery's split-rail fence with D., a local farmer. We were chatting about the weather and such. He suddenly swung around and pointed to one of the headstones: "That's the boy that died of eating the crayons."

To honor both the visitors and the inhabitants of the West Bradford cemetery, I've composed a country-and-western quatrain. 

Remember me in marble and in granite;

     Remember me with rose and lilies brave;

Remember me in sunshine and in shadow

    But don't put plastic flowers on my grave.

The Love Song of Gov. Mark Sanford (in his own 'eamailed' [sic] words).

                                                                           -I-

 

You were basking

in what seems a great spot.

 

I am most jealous

of  your salad

under the palm trees.

 

I do not want to raise expectations

about feelings

and things.

 

You are special

and unique

and fabulous

in a whole host of ways.

 

I will write you a longer note

with a few more profound thoughts

tomorrow

or

Wednesday.

 

It won't be worthy of bedside placement.

 

                                                           -II-

 

I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up.

There is something wonderful

about listening to country music playing in the cab,

the air conditioner running,

the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background

the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness

of trees and marsh,

the day breaking

and vibrant pink becoming alive in the morning clouds.

And getting to build something with each scoop

of dirt.

 

It is admittedly weird.

 

                                                                    -III-

 

Do you really comprehend

how beautiful your smile is?

Have you been told lately

how warm your eyes, and how they softly glow

with the special nature of your soul?

 

The rarest of all commodities in this world is love.

You already had

a full tank of love

in the emotional bank account.

 

Since our first meeting there in  the wind-swept

somewhat open air

dance spot in Punta del Este,

I felt that you had that same rare attribute.

 

You have a level of sophistication that is so

fitting

with your beauty.

 

You have the ability to give magnificently gentle kisses.

I love the curves of your hips.

I love your tan lines.

 

You have a particular grace and calm that I adore.

In the faded glow of night's light

that we spoke of

at the steakhouse.

 

                                             -IV-

This soul-mate feel

I alluded to

is real.

 

How this lightning strike snuck up on us

I am still not sure.

 

My heart wants to get on a plane tonight to be in your loving arms.

My head says how do we put the genius back in the bottle

 

The bottom line is two fold.

----------------------------------------------------

(Words by South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford with the assistance of Maria Belen Chapur;   poetastical typography by Vivian de St. Vrain.) 

Nick and the Candlestick

Sylvia Plath's "Nick and the Candlestick," a scalpel of a poem, is exasperating in its details but crystal clear in "plot" and feeling. Here it is in its entirety. Read it through; don't be alarmed if it seems impenetrable or opaque; it's not. Or not entirely so.

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Here''s the story in simple outline: the candlestick-bearing poet enters a dark bedroom in which she finds rugs on the wall, an aquarium, and her sleeping infant -- the "Nick" of  the title. The poem's import: simply that the world may be dangerous and hostile, but is redeemed by the child. It's a simple tale in a traditional form ("dramatic monologue") but its language and imagery are startling, intense, even revolutionary. The poem's governing idea is not unusual, but it is conveyed with magnificent electric imagery and emotion.

Some lines are clear, others entirely mysterious. A line-by-line commentary follows.

"I am a miner." For the purposes of the fiction, the poet bluntly transforms herself into a miner and explorer. The space into which she enters is a bedroom, which in terms of the metaphor, is cast both as a mine and a cave. What minerals will the miner extract?  Both the rich and rare (a ruby) and the poisonous (mercury).  

"The light burns blue."  The candle that she carries is nearly extinguished (or, alternatively, there is a gas heater in the room).

"Waxy stalactites drip and thicken." Candle drippings, in the poet's imagination, become stalactites; we are in a cave. But she holds a candle as it would be employed in worship. It is through the agency of the candle that religion (specifically Roman Catholicism) enters the poem. 

"Tears/ The earthen womb/ Exudes from its dead boredom." The room, the mine, the cave, is now figured as a womb. Tears/womb extends and transforms candle/cave. The series of terms  "room" (implied) "mine," "cave," "womb") is the metaphorical center of the poem -- the "spaces" that will be evoked in the poem's next to last sentence. The womb is the previous home of "Nick," who is also a babe of larger meaning in the climax of the poem.  

The phrase "from its dead boredom" is not clear, at least to me. It's tempting to say that the poet transfers her own emotion onto the wax/stalactite/tear -- so that "the womb is crying just as I am" -- but nevertheless the phrase "dead boredom" is too personal and vague to communicate perspicuously. The room/cave/womb, at this point in the poem, seems to be infertile ("dead") and un-engaging. But that will change.

"Black bat airs/ Wrap me, raggy shawls,/ Cold homicides." I understand why the poet encounters bats in her cave, and it makes sense that she defines her own clothes as a tattered shawl. It is also clear that the room into which she has entered is dangerous and inhospitable. The syntax of the sentence is less than clear. Does the phrase "cold homicides" stand in apposition to "airs?" Who are these "cold homicides?" A "homicide" can be a murderer or a victim of murder or even an abstraction. In what sense can a poet be "wrapped" in "cold homicides?" 

"They weld to me like plums." The least explicable line in the poem. "They" seems to refer to "black bat airs" -- but how airs can "weld like plums" is beyond me. In the same way way that plums weld to me?  What way is that?

"Old cave of calcium/ Icicles, old echoer." Calcium icicles are clearly the stalactites and a cave is certainly a place of echoes. But "old? Once again, tired, unproductive, never fertile, but possibly also "old" in the sense of familiar, as in "old friend."

"Even the newts are white,/ Those holy Joes." The stalactite-dominated cave with its calcium icicles is drained of color. So too are the newts, or salamanders, which ought to be red. Newts are traditionally associated with fire, but not here. In Christian symbolism, they stand for faith, because, in the legends, they survive the fiery passions of disbelief. Why are they "holy Joes?" The only meaning of "holy Joe" with which I am familiar is "military chaplain," which isn't pertinent. But "Joe" is significant, because Joe or Joseph is the absent father of the baby in the barn. But why is there a salamander in the room, unless it lives in some sort of aquarium or terrarium?

"And the fish, the fish---/Christ! They are panes of ice,/ A vice of knives,/A piranha religion, drinking/ Its first communion out of my live toes." Not just a newt in this room/cave/womb, but fish as well. Fish, of course, are the pre-eminent symbol of Christianity -- the Greek word ixthos, fish, signifying Jesus Christ theos ouk soter (god and savior). But these fish, like the salamander, are anything but redemptive. On the contrary, they stand for a "piranha religion" and a sacrament not of communion but consumption -- with the poet herself, or perhaps only her toes, the sacrifice.

These lines bring to conclusion the first part of the poem, which does not offer any good news. But then begins the second movement of the poem, which is of a more optimistic character.

"The candle/ Gulps and recovers its small altitude,/ Its yellows hearten." Well, that's encouraging. The candle was almost extinguished, and with its return comes a bit of color, at last. And perhaps some cheer. 

"O love, how did you get here?/  O embryo/ Remembering, even in sleep,/Your crossed position."  How, my child, did you find yourself in such a cold and inhospitable universe. The baby is newly arrived, his legs still crossed as they were in the womb -- "crossed," being, of course, an obvious reference to "the cross."

"The blood blooms clean/ In you, ruby." No original sin in this jewel of a child.

"The pain/ You wake to is not yours." It is the world's pain to which the innocent child must gradually accommodate -- but not yet, and not in this poem..

"Love, love,/ I have hung our cave with roses./ With soft rugs----/ The last of Victoriana."  The room is momentarily figured as a better world -- a pre-modern world. It's comfortable, blooming; a room in strong contrast to the colorless, cold cave of the first movement of the poem.

"Let the stars/ Plummet to their dark address,/ Let the mercuric/ Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well," "Let" has the force of "even if." Even if the world ends, even if the earth is polluted and poisoned, the poet exclaims,  

"You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious." You, Nick, my infant child who makes the world whole, are the "one solid," the only palpable reality, which the spaces (vacuities, caves, rooms, emptinesses of all sort) lean upon. And finally, at last,

."You are the baby in the barn."  You, my own newborn infant, are the baby in the barn. Which is to say, you, not Him. You, not Jesus, are my savior. As we've seen, the poem is not traditionally reverent. The baby in the barn is stripped of religious mystery. The poet has already made clear her feeling about Christianity -- it's a "piranha religion." But the "baby in the barn" -- Jesus in the manger -- that's another thing. This barn-born baby (barn, not cave) is a universal, trans-religious symbol of rebirth, of hope. "You are the baby in the barn" invests meaning in Everyinfant. It repudiates the claim to special importance of any particular child, even the god/man of theology. The poet rejects Christianity in favor of a universal human and natural relationship (parent-child) that underlies and precedes all religion.   

It's a poem that travels a great distance in a handful of lines.  Brilliant, isn't it?

More on Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric. The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America: "I was born by the river, in a little tent."  Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam outsiders: "Just like the river, I've been running ever since."  The third stanza, now shifted to an urban location, refers specifically to the insult of segregation (shortly before writing the song, Cooke had been barred from a Shreveport hotel): "I go to the movies and I go downtown;/ Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around." The second stanza is surprisingly confessional for a man who had started his career in gospel and had sung lead for the Soul Stirrers;  it's about loss of faith. "I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky." Nevertheless, despite all the reasons for losing heart, including the lack of support from brothers of different political factions, Sam retains an uncompromisIng optimism: he will "carry on, yes I will." The song is a miniature allegory of a triumph over separation and persecution. It celebrates endurance, perseverance, fortitude in the face of long odds.No wonder that Barack Obama adapted Cooke's affirmative "Yes I will" into "Yes we can."

Sam Cooke himself didn't get to the promised land; he was shot, under "mysterious circumstances" in December of 1964. "A Change is Gonna Come" was released posthumously.

It's Been a Long Time Coming

I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite -- or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music -- one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s. Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle: "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." The big O's citation is to the refrain of Sam Cooke's great anthem, "A Change is Gonna Come": "It's been a long time coming/ But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will." 

Those who know their Sam Cooke will appreciate Obama's sentence. To the Cooke-innocent, the "change" is a new administration and new policies. To the Cooke-knowledgeable, the "change" to which Obama refers is a tectonic shift in American racial politics.   

So I'm reproducing Sam Cooke's lyric right here.  If you're one of my coevals, you probably know the song by heart. If you don't know it, you should. If you're curious, you can see and hear Sam and Otis Redding and a host of others sing the song on You Tube. Here's the lyric.  It's one great, inspiring song. 

"I was born by the river in a little tent

And just like the river I've been running ever since.

It's been a long time coming.

But I know a change is gonna come.

It's been too hard living, and I'm afraid to die.

I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky.

(refrain)

I go to the movie and I go downtown

Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around.

(refrain)

I go to my brother, I say help me please,

But he winds up knocking me down on my bended knees.

(refrain)

There's been times that I thought I couldn't last long,

But now I think I'm able to carry on.

It's been a long time coming,

But I know a change is gonna come, o yes it will."

Talk about the ability to say a lot in a little.  O yeah!

Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop. It's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables: doo wop, wop, wop. In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl. Return we now to the pages of history: in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (a good example: the unnamed quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process: Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization. "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has become the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?" "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance."Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears). Some will recall the opening sentence of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672): "As I walked through the wilderness of this world."  Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory. Not religiously, but in a worldly way. He is not saved;  he is duked.

6.  What is the significance of aggressive "nothing can stop me now?" What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking?  The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated. Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indignities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis. It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy. Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess. The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian: "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and ayet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought. However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric; in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one reason for its continued popularity.