I found Alice Meynell in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. The Oxford verse series indexes by poem number, rather than page. So if you look in the back for Meynell’s “I am the Way,” you find it referenced as number 32, meaning the thirty-second poem in the volume rather than, as you’d expect from a lifetime of index use, that it is on page 32. But as it happens, “I am the Way” is both poem number 32 and found on page 32. I noticed that as I flipped though Yeats’s book and it fortunately struck me as portentous as portent gets on a sitting-around-reading afternoon. Otherwise, I might never have given Meynell the reading she deserves.

“I am the Way” is a fine introduction. She was a devout convert to Catholicism and known in her time as an enterprising publisher and renowned as an essayist. These days, she’s better known (only slightly better as few have ever heard or read her name) for her poetry. It is more likely that Yeats’s contemporary readers, even readers already drawn to the Oxford verse series, would know her prose. That speaks to the smashing power of her prose more than diminishes her verse; she was in the conversation as a possible Poet Laureate after the death of Tennyson and again after the death of Alfred Austin, though the position was never offered.

My wife and I once had drinks with NYT bestselling fantasy author Steven Brust. He talked about being “famulous,” a confabulation of fabulous and famous. He spent most of his life—grocery shopping, dining out, walking through museums—as anonymously as the rest of us. But whenever he wanted to feel famous, he would walk into a sci-fi/fantasy convention and get mobbed like a Beatle. Then he’d leave and go back to regular life as a regular guy. It was the best of both worlds; fame and adoration on tap. Meynell wasn’t quite a regular gal with a regular life. She was a publicly respected figure. Among poetry fans she was a great deal more. Not quite the bifurcated existence Brust revels in, but she was a star in different circles for different reasons. So, she worked with her husband. He promoted and produced Catholic journalism where she stuck to literary and social criticism. Among poets she was revered. She was, notes Alex Wong in his editor’s introduction to the collection Alice Meynell: Selected Poems and Essays, as the Inkling Charles Williams wrote, “‘the Catholic versifier, critic and protector of poets.”

It’s fitting that Yeats would begin with a devotional. The title is easily recognizable as John 14:6, to which she responds with an affirmation or acquiescence in the first line. She is confident in not knowing. She has faith that following is a goal in itself, even though she isn’t certain of the end. The persona accepts herself as a creature caught in time, “of process,” and incapable of knowing outcomes. For her it is the process—the way—that is salvation whether there is “repose” or not.

I am the Way
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

Thou art the way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see—
I. Child of process—if there lies
An end for me,
Full of repose, full of replies.

I’ll not reproach
The road that winds, my feet that err.
Access, approach
Art Thou, Time, Way, and Wayfarer.

The final stanza is clever. Are “Access” and “approach” commands or boons granted to those willing to follow? Kimberly Kristine Rodda, in her thesis, “Doubtful Forms: Uncertain Belief in Victorian Women’s Writing,” notes that with “my feet that err,” she sets up the reader to overly stress the second syllable in “Wayfarer,” where to fit the form, stress should land on the third. The poet teases: We stumble on a path, but that’s okay. The proper metric way is laid before us if we see fit and faithfully follow.

The way, the idea that salvation is found in doing, occurs again in a shorter poem.

Via, et Veritas, et Vita

“You never attained to Him.” “If to attain
Be to abide, then that may be.”
“Endless the way, followed with how much pain!”
“The way was He.”

The poems appear sequentially in the 1913 edition of Collected Poems of Alice Meynell. I don’t know how much involvement she had in the layout, but I’m operating under the assumption that the second serves as exclamation point to the first: “You shoulda!”

I read through Meynell’s Wikipedia page, her mini-bio by the excellent anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation, her Britannica page, and Kimberly Kristine Rodda’s thesis and others before I got to Alex Wong’s introduction. Had I started with Wong, I would have read his admonition that “Meynell” rhymes with “fennel.” It was too late when I encountered it. Her name formed in my mental sound studio as “May-knell,” the shape of the word set over the course of an afternoon’s reading, and so it shall remain despite late findings. I could have mentioned “fennel” to you at the outset, but saved it till here around the middle to see what happens. Maybe you can course correct. I don’t think you can.

Both Wong and Poetry Foundation mention that Meynell had a bohemian upbringing, but neither offers much by way of how-so other than to tell us she grew up mostly in Italy, which seems evidence of an Italian upbringing. Her mother was an artist and musician and her father was the a scion of serial illegitimacy a couple of generations gone from a Jamaican plantation and distantly related to Elizabeth Barret Browning. Her father was also close friends with Charles Dickens, who’s said to have had a tremendous crush on her mom. I don’t know that any of that qualifies as bohemian.

She seems to have had a bohemian side as an adult. Like mom and dad, she had writerly friends. She counted among them D.H. Lawrence, Mrs. Browning and her husband, and Harriet Monroe, to name a few. She modeled for John Singer Sargent, which certainly sound salacious, even though I’ve found nothing suggesting it was. Wong prefaces a list including the poet Coventry Patmore, the poets/novelists George Meredith and Katherine Tynan, and the poet Agnes Tobin with “literary friends (or admirers, in more than one sense).” That sounds like it means what I think it sounds like, but evidence runs contrary.

Patmore was a problem. He became enchanted with Alice and then jealous of her husband. No affair occurred and the Meynells ended their friendship with the man. George Meredith had a crush, much like Dickens for her mother, but it was a playful one. “Admirer” is apt in his case. Memoirs, including one written by their daughter Viola, describe the Meynells as committed, chaste, vocally Catholic, literary salon folks with eight children, seven of whom survived past infancy. Theirs was a happy marriage.

Of the lost child, she wrote this touching work.

Maternity

One wept whose only child was dead,
New-born, ten years ago.
“Weep not; he is in bliss,” they said.
She answered, “Even so.

“Ten years ago was born in pain
A child, not now forlorn.
But oh, ten years ago, in vain,
A mother, a mother was born.”

“Renouncement” speaks of a potential scandal. Nine years before marrying Wilfrid Meynell, Alice fell in love with Father Augustus Dignam, the priest who ministered her catechism and received her into the Church. That’s sort of back to front. You usually hear about affairs with clergy as someone is on the way out rather than in. I can’t speak to whether her feelings were reciprocated, only that the relationship was reportedly never consummated. That may mean a torrid affair stopped short, there were letters, they exchanged glances, or it was entirely one sided. In any case, nothing but a poem came of it.

Meynell wrote “Renouncement” shortly after her 1968 conversion. She was wise enough to leave it out of her early collections, only publishing after twenty years passed. Reading, you get the sense that her renouncement is of her feeling for the priest, not the priest himself; that the “thee” in the opening line references her love for the man rather than the man.

Wong writes of the final sextet:

“a technical marvel of poetic movement, convincingly expressive of the struggle of conscious willpower to cope with the flooding power of what cannot always be kept at bay… as if she were repeating and prolonging the thought, excusing her dreaming self as much as possible while postponing the dream for as long as possible.”

It is said to be her most anthologized poem.

Renouncement

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—
The thought of thee—and in the blue Heaven’s height,
And in the dearest passage of song.
Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng
This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright;
But it must never, never come in sight;
I must stop short of thee the whole day long.
But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away,—
With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathering to thy heart.

I come across poets I’ve never heard of regularly. Finding on that I hope to return to often is a treat. I haven’t read beyond one of Meynell’s essays, so there’s that pile of happy reading realized as well. And I found her because I’m silly enough to giggle at the 32 page/index thing. Being goofy pays off every now and again. Felix Culpa.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

A copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

I’ve never heard of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. I’ve read about him. Until earlier this week I knew he was a Dutch painter of repute, but little more. But I’ve only read about him; never heard his name spoken, so I’ve no idea how his name is pronounced. Wikipedia tells me it’s “BROY-gɘl,” but it also says “also” and then “BROO- gɘl.” You got two, you got none. I doubt the man wandered Flanders mouse-like, answering to a handful of first syllable variations so long as the caller followed with a shwa’d “gel.” At some point he declared a preference.

I read it as rhyming with “frugal,” not that I come across the name that often. I don’t know how W.H. Auden pronounced the name in 1938. He was in Brussels touring a museum that was then known as the Palais des beaux arts. The poet was struck by at least three, so he thought, of Bruegel’s paintings—Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census of Bethlehem, and The Massacre of the Innocents—then on display. Nearly sixty years after Auden’s visit, experts would determine that Icarus was in fact a copy by an unknown artist of a lost Bruegel, but Auden died thinking he’d seen the real deal and, given the man’s penchant for rewriting even some of his better works, thank goodness such knowledge didn’t set him to fiddling with the poem inspired by his visit: “Musée de Beaux Arts.”

To be fair, he fiddled a bit. The museum known as the Musée de beaux arts was called the Palais des beaux arts in 1939. It was under the title “Palais des Beaux Arts” that the poem first appeared in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing and again in the 1940 collection, Another Time. When the museum became the Musée de beaux arts after WWII, Auden or his publishers fiddled and Palais, having become Musée in fact, did so in print; the poem was retitled “Musée de Beaux Arts” as we know it now. The museum continued in flux. 2020 brought about yet another name change, this time to Musée Oldmasters, oddly enough using the Anglicized term “oldmasters” instead of “vieux maîtres.” Auden died without knowing about this either, so we receive the poem as it was after the first minor fiddling.

To recap: This week’s poem is by Auden, based on two paintings by a variably pronounced painter, a third formerly ascribed to the painter of the other two but now known to be painted by someone unknown, and titled and re-titled after the fashion of an indecisive art gallery. “Musée de Beaux Arts” stands apart from most of Auden’s other great works. He was a formalist, renowned for sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and the like. In “Musée,” he plays against that well earned reputation. He indulges in free verse, sets rhythm with abbreviated lines and caesura, slips in playful language. It’s not what you expect from him, but it is effective.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the only painting named by Auden, but it is the two unnamed that he addresses first. The writer Scott Horton did a bit of museum display detective work and was good enough to share in his 2008 Harpers article, “Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts.” He confirms Census and Massacre shared the gallery with Icarus and matches Bruegel’s scenes Auden’s to verse.

Both of Bruegel’s confirmed paintings depict Biblical scenes in contemporary—16th century Flanders for him—settings. In The Census at Bethlehem, people go about their day unaware that Mary and Joseph are among them, ignorant of the momentous happenings in their midst. As Auden writes (the full poem is below) “…how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Children play in the snow. The extraordinary appears ordinary. Bruegel paints them as the others. There are no halos or shafts of light identifying the Holy Family.

In the second stanza, Auden considers The Massacre of the Innocents. Of the “miraculous birth”, he writes that children slaughtered by Herod’s men “did not specially want it to happen.” It’s a horrible moment in history, but one suffered specifically. Dogs still play.

Icarus takes us out of Flanders and into the classical past. Icarus drowns in the bottom right corner with his legs kicking above the water’s surface. A ploughman misses the mythical event as he watches his furrows. A shepherd and his dog look up the mountain, possibly on guard against immediate danger from predators. A ship in full sail continues in obeyance of orders or in the interest of commerce past the fallen legend. Many sources tell me that we are to see indifference. Man is a selfish creature who doesn’t look beyond his immediate needs. I don’t know that I agree. Rather, not all great events get to be selfish. Despite them, families must eat. The wolves must be kept from the door. Per Wikipedia, there’s a Dutch saying: “And the farmer continued to plough…” We have our own to pick from: “Life goes on,” or “Needs must,” among others.

Run of the mill needs are stubborn. Call it The Fall or biology, we are shackled with needs. No grandeur or horror will change that. The quotidian will insert itself. Struggles don’t fade because something awsome is happeneing over the hill.

There’s a new Auden biography by Peter Ackroyd, titled simply Auden. Ackroyd’s been chasing Harold Bloom for years now, trying to usurp the latter as our most prolific literary biographer and critic. Despite the breadth of subjects, he’s damned on point as he takes them. It should shock no one that I’m particularly fond of his Ezra Pound and His World (1980). I haven’t picked up Auden, but I’ve been mightily teased to do so by Joseph Epstein’s review in National Review, “The Lofty, Lonely Life of W.H. Auden.”

Auden was a slob. Sorry to wallow in the gossipy muck, but he did in actual muck. From Epstein, and so by extention from Ackroyd, on the places the poet lived: “Tennessee Williams remarked of another that it was ‘fantastically sordid, . . . with beer cans and newspapers all about the floor,’” and “his friend, the composer Nicolas Nabokov, noted ‘the permanent stink of cat piss.’” Piles of papers were everywhere; stains covered carpets and walls. One landlord successfully sued to recoup the cost of cleaning and repair. There’s more about his shaggy clothes, lack of underwear, and inattention to orderly living.

Apparently Ackroyd goes on about the poet’s face. I don’t know if that’s fair. Maybe it was poor living and neglect that left him wrinkled and cracked or maybe it was genetics. In either case, he looked rough. There were clefts where wrinkles appear as expected, and running against the grain, sharp scar like fissures made mock-perpendicular charges. His was not an enviable visage. Again from Epstein: “The painter David Hockney asked, ‘If that’s his face, what must his scrotum look like?’”

It was the Epstein article that caused me to reread “Musée des Beaux Arts.” He listed it among the few poems of Auden’s he thinks “pass the test of being intrinsically interesting and memorable.” It struck me after reading the article that the poet of the poem about the insistence of mundane life in the presence of great and momentous events wrote great poetic works—I have a higher opinion of Auden the Epstein expresses—while refusing to attend basic hygienic practices, immune to such insistence.

Musée des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

December 1938

Aside: Is it now settled that Van Gough was Van Gogh, and so “Van Goff,” all along?

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

***

Elinor Waylie, née Hoyt, was born in Sommerville, New Jersey. My experience with New Jersey folks tells me that she would have described herself as “From off Exit 17.” It’s possible she was closer to Exit 13 or, if you use I-78 instead of I-287, maybe Exit 29. Michigan folks do the hand thing and New Jersey-ites (Jersians?) have Exits.

She was born to a well-to-do and prominent family that was likely to look down on other prominent families when it came down to it because one of theirs, Elinor’s grandfather, was governor of Pennsylvania. Still more prominent families probably looked down on them in turn as politicians are vulgar and real wealth sees clear to control, rather than be, elected officials. Political success requires propriety. Her family had a history of courting public perception.

Her father moved the family to Washington, DC in 1897 when Elinor was twelve or thirteen. In 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt would appoint him to the position of Solicitor General of the United States. He was an impressive figure and sent his oldest daughter, Elinor, to Holton Arms, a Bethesda, MD girls school where she studied and mingled with the daughters of other impressive people. Holton Arms counts Jaquiline Kennedy Onassis and Julia Louis-Dreyfus as alumnae. Elinor Wylie was, per the excellent unnamed biographers at Poetry Foundation, “trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife…”

Back in the early 1960s, my mother went to Georgetown Visitation; a Catholic girls school not terribly far from Holton Arms. Mom didn’t have much patience for Holton Arms girls. She and her friends dated Landon and Gonzaga high school boys. Some of their dates’ friends asked girls from Holton Arms out and they would all end up at the same dance. She thought Holton girls should stick to dating St. Albans guys and keep all the smugness contained. There was one particular Holton Arms student she referred to as a “hussy.”

If I may continue the elipsed quote about Elinor from above by the excellent Poetry Foundation biographers, “…but she rebelled against that destiny and became notorious, in her time, for her multiple marriages and affairs.”

Mom’s time in high school came sixty years after Wylie’s and to my knowledge she never heard of the poet, but I feel confidence in the ways of tribal prejudice. I suspect Mom would nod knowingly about a rival school graduate. Elinor was a hussy.

This is a series about poetry, so I’m going to tear away from scandal for a moment to discuss some of Wylie’s work. Between 1921 and her death in 1928, she published four books of poetry and four novels and sold well in both genres. She’s an obscure figure in poetry now—there are nods to a recent rediscovery of her work among feminist critics so maybe a resurgence is underway, but I’ve noticed a habit of biographers to claim [X] is all the rage among [ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE Y] to build up a forgotten personal favorite—but was celebrated in her time. She hung out with Sinclair Lewis and Jon Dos Passos. If there was a Studio 54 in her time, she would pass right by the doorman.

My opinion is that she has some remarkable poetry, but there’s a lot that’s off. She hit early. Her first published collection, 1921’s Nets to Catch the Wind, was and is widely hailed as her best (all of this week’s selections are from that book, full text at Project Gutenberg.) I’ll start with one I don’t like because the poems I think fail all fail for the same reasons while those that succeed pull differing dazzling tricks from all manner of hats.

Village Mystery
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

The woman in the pointed hood
And cloak blue-gray like a pigeon’s wing,
Whose orchard climbs to the balsam-wood,
Has done a cruel thing.

To her back door-step came a ghost,
A girl who had been ten years dead,
She stood by the granite hitching-post
And begged for a piece of bread.

Now why should I, who walk alone,
Who am ironical and proud,
Turn, when a woman casts a stone
At a beggar in a shroud?

I saw the dead girl cringe and whine,
And cower in the weeping air–
But, oh, she was no kin of mine,
And so I did not care!

There’s nothing wrong with the craftsmanship. Her stresses hit predictably. My problem is that this poem feels perfunctory. The capricious turn at the end is unearned. It’s a story removed from the poet’s life, which is not uncommon with her work. Swaths are fantastical or semi-so. This one dresses up as allegory but doesn’t deliver. It leaves me thinking the poem serves no purpose other than satisfying the author’s apparent want to seem mysterious.

Escape

When foxes eat the last gold grape,
And the last white antelope is killed,
I shall stop fighting and escape
Into a little house I’ll build.

But first I’ll shrink to fairy size,
With a whisper no one understands,
Making blind moons of all your eyes,
And muddy roads of all your hands.

And you may grope for me in vain
In hollows under the mangrove root,
Or where, in apple-scented rain,
The silver wasp-nests hang like fruit.

I could say a lot of the same about “Escape” as I did about “Village Mystery,” but I think this one works. The truth is I like and dislike it on alternate readings. As of the last, I was positive. Simple rhymes and portentious animals set a fairy-tale tone and the idea of running away is adolescent. It’s a wish from a teenager’s diary until the charmingly malicious last line.

And then, from nowhere comes “Wild Peaches.” It’s a bit long for this space so I’ll give the first and last of four parts.

from Wild Peaches

1

When the world turns completely upside down
You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore
Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore;
We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town.
You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown
Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color.
Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor,
We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown.

The winter will be short, the summer long,
The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot,
Tasting of cider and of scuppernong;
All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all.
The squirrels in their silver fur will fall
Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot.

In researching Wylie, I’ve read that she is an inheritor of Donne and the metaphysical poets. I’ve read her devotion to Shelley and Keats shines through. There’s none of that in “Wild Peaches.” Here she has the sharp economy of language you’d expect from a modern devotee of Imagism and an earnest adherance to Victorian form. Who does that? Maybe Thomas Hardy, but he wrote as Victoriana faded and Modernism emerged. Who does that anachronistically? It’s wonderful.

The sections I left out follow in tone with the first. Autumn frosts lie upon the grass and April pours the colours of the shell upon the hills. The fourth section takes a turn that should be dark but for the pleasure her persona takes in what unfolds.

There’s a great deal of her work I haven’t read, but I feel confident in calling this her triumph.

4

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.

I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray,
Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meager sheaves;
That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath,
Summer, so much too beautiful to stay,
Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves,
And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Wylie’s sister Constance married well and became Constance, Baroness von Stumm, wife of Baron Ferdinand Carl von Stumm. Her parents should have relished the social coup, but there were four other children. Brother Henry became an artist: not so bad. Sister Nancy became a romance novelist which isn’t scandalous per se, but an awful lot of those folks use pen names for a reason. Brother Morton married Eustace Bankead, sister of the famous actress Tallulah Bankhead. He later divorced her. Then he married her again. Then he divorced her. Then they remarried. Finally, a third divorce.

Elinor, as the oldest, made it clear from the get go that all would not be as her parents hoped for their family. At twenty years old, she eloped with a poet, or wanna-be poet son of a rear-admiral, named Philip Simmons Hichborn. She was miserable. Wikipedia says that during her marriage to Philip, “She also found herself being stalked by Horace Wylie, ‘a Washington lawyer with a wife and three children’, who ‘was 17 years older than Elinor. He stalked her for years, appearing wherever she was.’” That doesn’t sound like a promising beginning to a love story, but after four unhappy years with her first husband, she left him and their son to run off with the still married Horace. The press went wild and the families would have nothing to do with the two adulterers so Elinor and Horace ran off to England and hid out under the name “Waring.” Philip killed himself two years later.

Horace was able to secure a divorce and, with Philip dead, the couple married in 1916, six years after running off together. By then, the thrill was gone. Elinor was hanging out with the artsy set—Dos Passos, et al. One of her new friends took an interest in her amateur poetry. That man, William Rose Benét, became husband number three. That marraige didn’t work either so they separated and she moved back to England to live with another guy. At some point she started writing love letters to poor long-since cast off Horace.

On a 1928 Christmas visit to Benét, say the Poetry FOundation folk, “she asked Benet for a glass of water; when he returned with it, as Karen Stein recounted in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, ‘she walked toward him, murmured, “Is that all it is?,” and fell to the floor, dead of a stroke.’”

I didn’t expect to be as impressed by her work or that I’d enjoy the voyeur’s “tut-tut” as I have. She charmed me.

This last is her most anthologized, so probably best-known, work. Here you see Shelley.

Velvet Shoes

Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.

I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow’s milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.

We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.

We shall walk in velvet shoes:
Wherever we go
Silence will fall like dews
On white silence below.
We shall walk in the snow.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Before JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf, there was William Morris’s King Gandolf. Before Tolkien wrote about the horse Shadowfax, Morris wrote about the horse Silverfax. Morris introduced both of the latters in his just-under-the-wire-not-posthumous 1896 novel, The Well at the World’s End. Tolkien didn’t steal. Theft in literature is generally more interesting than something that direct, but neither Gand-whatever nor whatever-fax were properly owned to begin with. Tolkien was doubtlessly inspired by Morris’s popular book, but both authors took names from Norse and Icelandic myth. They heard the same stories.

Plugged in fans and obsessives—I say that lovingly—of the genre credit Morris as one of the fathers of modern High Fantasy. Tolkien takes all the laurels, and deservedly so, for standing on earlier shoulders and leaping as high into the air as possible. Two of those shoulders were Morris’s; David Byrne shoulders.

These days, Morris is best known for textiles and design. He was a vocal socialist; important enough that those who take interest in the development of socialism, at least in England, have been at work on his Wikipedia page. Among the signs of ardents tinkering: his mother is described as “descended from a wealthy bourgeois family.” As an artist and artisan, he catered to what most outside of the struggle session green room call the middle and upper classes. His furniture was, and maybe still is, in St. James Palace and the Duke of Westminster’s Eaton Hall. Per the biographer Fiona MacCarthy, he decried such work as “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.” But minister on he did, soldiering his way to increasing an already solid inherited fortune.

He took what was functional and added beauty. That doesn’t sound like much of a revolution, but he lived in post-Industrial Revolution England. Function held sway. His patterns, busy to modern tastes, adorned rugs, wallpaper, and book covers. Through his printing operation, the Kelmscott Press, he published the intricate Kelmscott Chaucer, a collection of Chaucer’s work decorated with Morris’s typography, layout, borders, and illumination and with illustrations by his partner and frequent collaborator Edward Burne-Jones. The two men worked on the volume on weekends together over the course of four years. Yeats called it “the most beautiful of all printed books.”

During his lifetime, there were those who knew him as a socialist. He’d tell any audience willing to listen all about his political and economic leanings. There were others who knew him as a designer. He was quite the name among those in the market. Primarily, he was known as a poet. As hard as it would be for one of his contemporaries to believe, he’s almost forgotten in that role now. This was the man Victoria offered the Laureate position after the death of Tennyson.

We prefer short lyrics these days. He went long. Here’s one of his few quick ones.

Pomona
William Morris (1834-1896)

I am the ancient Apple-Queen,
As once I was so am I now.
For evermore a hope unseen,
Betwixt the blossom and the bough.

Ah, where’s the river’s hidden Gold!
And where the windy grave of Troy?
Yet come I as I came of old,
From out the heart of Summer’s joy.

From that you get that he can be whimsical and you’d be correct in extrapolating that he works in traditional meter with rhyme. The bulk of his output was more involved. He wrote long, epic works, often Arthurian themed.

Below is an excerpt from one of his most popular works, “The Haystack in the Floods,” from his 1858 book The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems. The poem is set in withdrawal from the Battle of Poitiers during the Hundred Years War. Sir Robert de Marny, the only historical figure in the poem, though one whose manner of death is fictionalized by Morris, and his mistress Jehane are traveling with a small contingent when set upon and captured by the Frenchman Godmar and his men.

from The Haystack in the Floods

Along the dripping leafless woods,
The stirrup touching either shoe,
She rode astride as troopers do;
With kirtle kilted to her knee,
To which the mus splashed wretchedly:
And the wet dripped from every tree
Upon her head and heavy hair,
And on her eyelids broad and fair;
The tears and rain an down her face.
By fits and starts they rode apace,
And very often was his place
Far off from her; he had to ride
Ahead, to see what might betide
When the roads crossed; and sometimes, when
There rose a murmuring from his men,
Had to turn back with promises;
Ah me! She had but little ease;
And often for pure doubt and dread
She sobbed, made giddy in the head
By swift riding; while, for cold,
Her slender fingers scarce could hold
The wet reins; yea, and scarcely, too,
She felt the foot within her shoe
Against the stirrup: all for this,
To part at last without a kiss
Beside the haystack in the floods.

Godmar offers to spare Robert’s life if Jehane agrees to be his concubine. She refuses. Robert is killed and she faces a short life in prison before death by drowning in the Seine. It’s about true love and sacrifice; Poetic and Romantic and ideal in ways Morris’s own love life was not.

He was an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and, at least initially, great friends with the movement’s most famous painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1857, Morris met and was smitten with Jane Burden. Rossetti, at the same time, asked her to model for him, a phrase I assume carried more meaning in this instance than others. Morris married her. Rossetti continued to paint her.

Thanks to Rossetti, her face is immortal. He had many models, but if I were to say “She’s the woman besides his sister that he painted over and over again,” a passing fan of his would know who I meant. In his work she is Aurelia, Lady Lilith, Beatrice, Pandora, and more. The model and artist traveled together, attended events, and dined together. At one point Rossetti moved in with the couple. People talked. Whatever estrangements and tensions between Rossetti and Morris existed, this apparent affair was an accepted fact of life. Morris may have had a friend too, but one he cozied to after his wife’s modeling proved less a passing thing.

Aglaia Coronio and Morris wrote letters to each other. It’s assumed more, but there’s not more than suspicion. In fact there’s not much more than appearances and suspicion behind the Rossetti and Burden affair. Burden once said she never loved her husband. Even so, we speculate that she did love Rossetti. The Pre-Raphaelites were so much more circumspect than the Bloomsbury Group.

The Kelmscott Chaucer was only one expression of Morris’s fascination with Geoffrey Chaucer. He incorporated scenes from The Canterbury Tales into designs for furniture and murals. As a poetic homage, he wrote “The Earthly Paradise,” a single work with a prologue and, as described by The Norton Anthology of Poetry, “twenty-four tales on classical and medieval—especially Norse—subjects.”

These are the third and fourth stanzas from the poem’s six stanza dedication. It’s woeful, sung by a poet “born out of my due time” but he doesn’t despair. These aren’t futile lines.

from The Earthly Paradise

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let me sing of names rememberéd,
Because they, living not, can ne’er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

I include this last poem because something about it struck me. It doesn’t fit in sound with other entries in the collection in which I found it: the same 1891 book, Poems By the Way which included the above “Pomona.” The stresses are compressed and rapid. The vocabulary is anachronistic, as are the contractions. It put me in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hopkins used Anglo-Saxon poetic devices; fierce alliteration, stresses measured per line rather than per place, and hard consonants for emphasis. That seems similar to what Morris does in “The Day of Days.” Hopkins was an obscure figure, contemporary with Morris but for all intents and purposes unknown until posthumous publication in 1918, well after Morris passed. It’s possible that Morris read Hopkins’ work, but unlikely. Did Morris find in his Norse research threads of the same poetics Hopkins found in his Anglo-Saxon dives? Instead of influence from one to the other, could Morris have tapped the same older Germanic root as Hopkins as Tolkien tapped the same Norse roots as Morris found his Gandalf? Am I imagining things?

I can’t say, but it struck me.

The Day of Days

Each eve earth falleth down the dark,
As though its hope were o’er;
Yet lurks the sun when day is done
Behind to-morrow’s door.

Grey grows the dawn while men-folk sleep,
Unseen spreads on the light,
Till the thrush sings to the coloured things,
And earth forgets the night.

No otherwise wends on our Hope:
E’en as a tale that’s told
Are fair lives lost, and all the cost
Of wise and true and bold.

We’ve toiled and failed; we spake the word;
None hearkened; dumb we lie;
Our Hope is dead, the seed we spread
Fell o’er the earth to die.

What’s this? For joy our hearts stand still,
And life is loved and dear,
The lost and found the Cause hath crowned,
The Day of Days is here.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

You still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

There’s a photograph of Leonora Speyer where she looks to be in her early twenties. She was born to some wealth. I can’t tell if her her family was idly comfortable or extravagantly rich. Her father, who died six months before her birth, was Count Ferdinand von Stosch originally of Monze, later of Washington, DC. There’s not much on her in the typical poet biography places and scant to zip on her father. He fought for the Union side in the Civil War, settled in Washington, and died at around forty years old; no information about rank or deeds or cause of death. He immigrated in the 1840s or 50s, so he was a kid when he came. That’s about it. Otherwise he’s an addendum to the bio of the daughter he never met.

An AI search–so take it or leave it–reports the photo is from some time in the 1890s, which I’d already assumed. Leonora showed an early proclivity for music and led a public life. She gave her first public performance in Washington at age ten: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. One source tells me she and her mother sailed for the continent in 1899, when Leonora was sixteen, to continue her musical studies in Brussels. Another tells me she debuted with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age seventeen. It’s possible they went back for a visit, but I can’t find record of it. As best I can tell, she and her mother stayed abroad, first in Brussels and then in Paris with another violin teacher, until 1891 or 92.

Maybe they went back and forth, maybe she was seventeen when they left, maybe she was sixteen in Boston. No matter the details of her precociousness, Leonora was talented. She was a force on the piano as well as the violin, but there came a time to specialize. Whether she had a preference or felt she had a greater talent for violin is unclear to me, but she chose pure string violin over string/percussion piano in the end. Encyclopedia.com tells me she’d played the violin since her “chin was firm enough to hold it.” Having seen the photograph of her in her early twenties, my first though: “That must have been very, very, very, very early.” It’s not a flattering picture.

It’s hard to argue with a photograph, but you can chip away at veracity with lighting, shadows, and angle. Her second husband, Edgar Speyer, commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint a portrait of his wife. Sargent completed the work in 1907. It was to become iconic. Edgar ran the British arm of his family’s international financial business and helped put together financing for and did some overseeing of the construction of what became the London Underground. Ties to the family firm’s Frankfurt branch became problematic. In 1915, his naturalized citizen status was revoked and rather than live under wartime suspicion, the family left for New York. By this point, neuritis in Leonora’s shoulder had put an end to public concerts, but she still played salons. The couple bought a pair of homes in Washington Square and built in between, merging the two into a massive eleven-bedroom mansion with an immense music hall. Theirs was a popular place, as Emily E Hogstad writes at Interlude, “Debussy, Elgar, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and countless others visited the Speyers’ famous music room.” They held small concerts by world famous and rising musicians and composers. Gracing a wall of the hall was Sargent’s roughly six by three foot Lady Speyer, the talented, keen, and ever present patron-host. There’s nothing immoderate about her jaw in the painting.

Her friend Kahlil Gibran gives us four views of Leonora. He made several sketches of her but the one I’m referring to is a single piece with four images, Rushmore-like, each a variation of expression, done in charcoal. The leftmost shows her in profile. A prominent bump on her nose, and I suspect from the other sketches that the nose is exaggerated a bit, recalls antiquity; a face on a coin; she’s the noble lady. The next, at three quarters, is soft with compassion and concern. Moving right, the third stares ahead, a woman in full. The final, again in three quarters carrying on the suggested turning motion, strikes farseeing and dreamy.

That’s my interpretation. Gibran may have intended aspects of her life rather than of her personality. I’ll insist on the Roman nose profile representing nobility, but by the others Gibran may have meant one to symbolize mother, another musician, and the third the poet she became after neuritis took away the possibility of regular concert performances. The different views and turns of head cast more doubt on the 1890s photo. I’m wryly open to the thought that having expanded on the nose for Rome he softened the jaw across the range for his friend, mumbling about balancing the ledger as rationalization. It’s more likely that 1890s were a cruel time to be photographed.

There’s one last, and it’s beautiful. It’s a touched up photograph I came across on surfing websites. Whether the touch ups were recent computer washes or older paint brush accents on the original, I’ve no idea. There was a period where it was in vogue to have painters finish photos for a portrait-like appearance, but judging from her age in the picture, that practice’s time had passed. She’s older here than in the others–maybe sixty. The clothes, what we’d consider dowdy now but were likely fashionable at the time, help. The British series Midsomer Murders is based on a series of novels by Caroline Graham. They’re well-written and entertaining afternoon passers, but one line from her first book struck me as brilliant. Describing a wiry old woman putting on a raincoat, Graham writes, “She flapped into a Burberry.” It’s concise: elderly energy in the service of venturing out while unselfconciously bundled in frumpiness. That’s the first thing I thought of on seeing the picture. Second, there’s an archetype that pops up in British Science Fiction, notably in 1980s and 90s comic books, of a luminous homeless woman, shabby in her antiquated clothes. A segment of modern audiences equate that look with wisdom. I’m sure that figures into my impression, but on looking at this picture taken before the urban fantasy archetype popped up, I wonder at whether the archetype was distilled by genre writers or was just laying around waiting to be noticed.

Of course, her get up wasn’t frumpy at the time. The immediate thought on seeing a beautiful older woman is that she must have been gorgeous when she was younger. That’s not fair. I’m not certain it’s correct either. People fell in love with the woman in the touched up photo. She conducted crowds with music. She scorned a first husband, lost a second. She played and when she couldn’t she wrote. She taught poetry at Columbia University, served as president of the Poetry Society of America, and talked shop with Amy Lowell. She launched musical careers. Whatever she was or wasn’t but for taut skin doesn’t matter. There’s nobility, mother, concern, musician, poet, dreamer, teacher, and matter of fact acceptance. It’s a good picture. Optimistic.

Below is the opening section of the title work from her 1926 collection Fiddler’s Farewell, for which she won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. There’s sadness and optimism and acceptance throughout and for all the promise of the precocious musician, it was written by the seasoned woman who turned to poetry.

from Fiddler’s Farewell
Leonora Speyer (1872-1956)

Fold now the song within the songster.
Small sturdy one,
Roistering down the centuries,
Drunk with the fiddlers’ fingers,
(Never a dearth of these,
The living crowding where the dead have been),
Pure promiscuous dandled violin!

Cæsar of sound, my songs in passing, cry,
Morituri te salutamus!—and passing, die.

Fold now the song away.
Close the lid down
Upon the gradual dismay
Of disconcerted singing,
Unloose the fingers’ clinging
That has so lost its cunning,
Turn from the faltering renown,
Fame of the little town
After the flag-hung city;
Deny the ruin pity!
Pity? Yes, for the failing song
That like a droughty stream

Crawls, drips
Over an arid land,
(Yet deep enough to drown)—
O violin that slips
From the relinquishing hand,
Brown brightness hid—
Let fall the incurious lid.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Why are you still at work? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

“We mourn, but with the qualification that, after all, his life was a revel in the felicities of language.”
– Robert Frost from his introduction to King Jasper by Edwin Arlington Robinson

When Edwin Arlington Robinson won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1922, I imagine it was a fine day of congratulations and warm feelings from all the other poets. For three years prior, there had been what we now call the Special Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but that’s retconning. That was then known as the Columbia Prize, and stood apart. Harriet Monroe, writing in celebration of Robinson’s laurels threw in, “Four years ago, when the Poetry Society of America gave its first annual five hundred dollars to Sara Teasdale’s Love Songs, the award, being made in conjunction with the Pulitzer prizes, was falsely attributed to the same origin.” The Columbia put five hundred dollars in the winner’s pocket. The Pulitzer was worth one thousand. Neither was chump change in 1922, but double is considered by most who make their living in verse to be better.

Not that a true poet would ever consider something so crass as money, but on those odd occasions when the subject came up in conversation, it must have been nice knowing, for those of a zero-sum view, that there was more to be contested than had been before. When the second Pulitzer was awarded to Edna St Vincent Millay in 1923 and the third to Robert Frost, I assume along with standard jealousies the warm feelings continued.

In 1925, Robinson won his second Pulitzer. In the audience of the poetry place where all the poets hang out, I imagine heartfelt applause on hearing, because EA, as he didn’t like the name Edwin, was a kinda dour guy but he wasn’t offensive. Maybe he was a little dark, but he was witty dark, not depressing dark. Still, as the crowd dispersed to cocktails and cliques coalesced, jocular between swigs, “You know, there are other poets out there.”

Follow with Amy Lowell in 1926 and Leonora Speyer in 1927. Come 1928, it’s Robinson again. Even Frost, who hadn’t yet won his second, third, or fourth Pulitzer and so was still on the proletarian side, would have been a bit up in arms. The new and immediately prestigious prize so far ran one for EA, two for the rest, one for EA, two for the rest, one for EA. Betting EA versus the field wasn’t a bad play. All the other poets got together in one of their poet places and presented Robinson with an ultimatum: Either EA stop winning Pulitzer Prizes or they’ll tell everyone that his parents wanted a girl and, milquetoast on his male emergence, didn’t name him until he was six months old and when they did, drew “Edwin” from a hat and pinned Arlington on because the stranger they’d just met who physically pulled the name slip was from Arlington, Massachusetts. EA didn’t win any more Pulitzers and the name thing got out anyway, but everybody left the negotiations back in the comfort of those warm feelings from earlier days.

At least that’s what I like to think happened. The wanted-a-girl thing is real. He hated his name. Other poets respected Robinson for his skill, but also because his was the age of “Make it new!” and while everybody was scrambling in various directions to poke and prod the limits of verse, he went a scant backwards and still managed to innovate. Robinson reverted to older forms in relation to the age. He didn’t like a lot of the popular liberties. Per the excellent Poetry Foundation anonymous biographers, Robert Gilbert wrote, “All his life Robinson strenuously objected to free verse, replying once when asked if he wrote it, ‘No, I write badly enough as it is.’” But he went forward with many of his contemporaries in dropping outdated poetic cant for a more straightforward diction. Poets had been at that to some degree at least as far back as Wordsworth, but the idea was suddenly front, center, and reinvigorated with writers like Frost full steam ahead on sound and sense and conversational rhythm. In fact, Robinson’s talent for New England folksiness maybe was a bit much for Frost, as Professor Nancy Carol Joyner writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “Biographers of both poets report that Frost was extremely jealous of Robinson but the reverse was not true.”

Robinson’s charm lies in narrative. He was a great fan of the English poet George Crabbe (1754-1832), whose narrative poetry focused on common people and daily lives. Crabbe wrote in the time of the immortal insult, “silly girls who read novels,” and poetry ceded story to the longer prose. He was a throwback, married to heroic couplets like a… I can’t write “Pope revivalist” referring to Alexander Pope because people will think I meant “Papal revivalist” as if he was one of Dan Brown’s Opus Dei heirophants. He wrote in heroic couplets like Alexander Pope. As a surgeon, Crabbe spoke to folks across the social spectrum and either used their stories and fragments, or saw that there was worth in stories from other than courtesans and set to heroic meter, underlined the point.

Funnily, Crabbe published his first poem anonymously. It was a morality verse about the evils of alcohol. Later he’d write “Sir Eustace Grey,” one of his most celebrated works. “Sir Eustace Grey” presents the hallucinations of a mad man in a mad house and does it so convincingly, it’s widely believed that Crabbe wrote under the influence of opium, a habit he’s known to have picked up some fifteen or so years after his “drinking is bad” poem.

I don’t think I’ve read Crabbe, certainly not in an intentional way, so this is as conveyed by The Cambridge Guide to Literature In English: he imagined a parson perusing records of births, marriages, and deaths and with this vehicle in mind, wrote The Parish Register, a collection of interrelated stories set to verse. Clearly Robinson was impressed. The latter man took from the former the conceit of a community in which he could weave tales and through which he could pepper characters. He didn’t pick up the couplets, but both Crabbe and Robinson took from their predecessors what most of their contemporaries left fallow.

George Crabbe
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

Most of Robinson’s better known poems take place in Tilbury Town, a fictional community as a backdrop for vignettes; a device like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Hardy’s Wessex. Few poems mention Tilbury specifically. We’re to assume that this is around the corner or downtown and one denizen may know the other as all presume to share a common atmosphere.

At least two of these poems obliquely appear to be about his brothers. I know he had two. If there are other brothers out there I can’t find mention nor can I find confirmation that there were just the pat three boys. In any case, of the known, Dean was the oldest, Herman the middle, and EA the youngest.

Herman married Emma Löehen Shepherd, upsetting EA as he was in love with her despite an awkward difference in age. EA skipped the wedding and did some petulant poem writing. Things went poorly for Herman professionally, he drank, his wife and kids left him, and nineteen years after the wedding he died of tuberculosis.

Probably Robinson’s best known poem, “Richard Cory,” is about a wealthy man who outwardly has everything a man could want in life. And then he kills himself. The obvious intimation is that, despite appearances, we never know what troubles haunt a man. Emma claimed the poem was about her husband. Herman wasn’t rich, but he had everything EA wanted in Emma, so goes the interpretation.

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

The older brother Dean was a medical doctor who self-medicated for neuralgia, became an addict, and died as result of an overdose, possibly suicidal. The poem “How Annandale Went Out,” is told by a witness to euthanasia, possibly in defense of his complicity in a trial setting. This isn’t as vague an analogy to a brother as “Richard Cory.” The question isn’t whether it’s about Dean. The question is, is the witness representing EA in his guilt at not stepping in to prevent his brother’s decline and death? Or is the poem told from Dean’s point of view, a witness to his own suicide attempting to explain himself?

How Annandale Went Out

“They called it Annandale—and I was there
To flourish, to find words, and to attend:
Liar, physician, hypocrite, and friend,
I watched him; and the sight was not so fair
As one or two that I have seen elsewhere:
An apparatus not for me to mend—
A wreck, with hell between him and the end,
Remained of Annandale; and I was there.

“I knew the ruin as I knew the man;
So put the two together, if you can,
Remembering the worst you know of me.
Now view yourself as I was, on the spot—
With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?
Like this… You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.”

Teddy Roosevelt’s son, Kermit, picked up and loved Robinson’s collection, Children of the Night, and passed it on to his father. Teddy loved the book and invited the poet to the White House. EA turned the invitation down. He was a poor poet and didn’t have the money for White House audience clothes. In response, the President set Robinson up with a well-paying job with the Customs Office with the understanding that he continue to work “with a view to helping American letters.” Roosevelt went further by convincing Scribner’s to print a second edition of Children of the Night and even reviewing it glowingly himself in the pages of Outlook magazine. I don’t know of another poet who’s received both a literal and figurative Presidential imprimatur.

With the end of Teddy’s term came the end of EA’s soundingly make work government job. He went back home to Gardiner, Maine as, after the death of Herman, did Emma. He was still smitten and started proposing. Two refusals were enough to convince him there was no prospect so he left for New York to be a drunken Bohemian for a while and hang out with other poets and artists. He’d head out of town, reside at various artists’ colonies for a spell and then wander back to New York. As I mentioned before, he wasn’t the most charismatic guy in the world, but there must have been something to his dark humor as, per Wikipedia, at these colonies, “several women made him the object of their devoted attention.” I’m sure his fame helped.

He had a lengthy relationship with Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones. Theirs was a loose affair. They spent time together at MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, separated, and took up again on the next mutual visit. He called her Sparhawk and, from Wikipedia, “She described him as a charming, sensitive, and emotionally grounded man with high moral values.” Also from Wikipedia, “They had a relationship that the poet D. H. Tracy described as ‘courtly, quiet, and intense.’” I mention her because her name was Sparhawk and that’s kind of cool, but also because their artist colonies seem so genteel. From my 21^st century perch the phrase is tainted by visions of white haired women with too many scarves marveling at how artistically arty they are or nightmarish hippie communes with acid babies and undrivable school buses rusting on berms. I blame Joan Didion.

In addition to the Tilbury Town folk, Robinson wrote Arthurian romances. His final Pulitzer was awarded for his 1927 release, Tristam, which was certainly his most popular book and possibly the last book-length original poem to be a bestseller.

Today’s final poem is autobiographical, so completes a trio of works about the known Robinson brothers. The man wasn’t comfortable in his time, a bit of an Arthurian courtier in Yankee New England. He liked the old forms.

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

Housekeeping: Someone named Jackson Hinkle is causing trouble in Iran. Apparently, he’s an influencer who took a trip to Tehran to shout “Down with USA” from stage at an IRGC approved rally. At least one Congressman has called for Hinkle’s arrest upon his return to America. If there is no arrest, keep an eye on these pages. Fonda laid groundwork. If Hinkle can go to another country we’re in military conflict with and cheer for our defeat, I think we might be able to do something about Ezra Pound’s public image. Pound was guilty as hell. He got on Italian radio and cheered on Mussolini while saying all manner of bad things about the US. Times change. Aid and comfort doesn’t move the needle like it used to. There are legalities to check into. We aren’t in a declared war, for instance, but there are bombs bombing. Lawyers cost money. Maybe an exploratory Pro-Pound Go-Fund Me? Again, keep an eye on these pages.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

I’ve seen a flurry of tweets suggesting we’re on the precipice of sporting autocracy because no red card awarded in the World Cup had ever been overturned before yesterday. That’s not quite true. For starters, the upsetting violation of norms they’re referring to, the ruling on USMNT striker Folarin Balogun’s red from last Friday’s game against Bosnia Herzegovina, didn’t happen quite the way it’s being bandied as having done. The red card stands. The suspension is postponed until after the World Cup. Secondly, it’s not unprecedented. Manuel Francisco dos Santos, mononymed in the Brazilian tradition as Garrincha, was sent of in a 1962 semi-final against Chile but, after some testimony and cross examining of officials in an appeal, had his one game suspension commuted until after the tournament. This was not an inconsequential decision. Pele was sidelined early in the tournament. The additional loss of Garrincha, who won both player of the tournament and the Golden Boot for most goals, probably would have given the trophy to Czechoslovakia. But that was a while ago. The game has changed. Rules have changed.

Four players carded before the tournament have had their suspensions deferred or revoked so as not to coincide with this year’s World Cup. Argentina’s Nicolas Otamendi, Ecuador’s Moises Caicedo, and Qatar’s Tarek Salman were all set to miss one or two group games. After the bans were given, FIFA amended it’s rules. This doesn’t seem to be a case of FIFA acting on behalf of any one specific player. The organization wanted strong squads for their big to-do and these three were beneficiaries. Seperately, special intervention seems to have been made on Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo’s behalf. In qualifying he elbowed an Irishman in the face off-ball, got an immediate yellow, and after consulting replay, it was upgraded to a red. A later infractions board decided his offense was egregious enough to deserve a three game ban. In the end, he served a one game suspension in a warm up with Armenia and the other two hover over him to be forgiven assuming he plays nice during a probationary period. Fishy, but too much is made of Renaldo in relation to Balogun. None of the other suspensions quite parallel.

Balogun’s happened during the tournament. I like to think of the World Cup Finals as existing on its own. Injuries can’t be waved away so those creep in, but as can be controlled, everybody involved should start fresh and fully armed if we’re to decide the best national team in the world. Ban a guy for psychotic attacks or intentionally trying to break someone’s leg in the run up, but otherwise let all the teams come in with a clean sheet. The tournament should be decided by what happens in the course of the tournament. That should include consequences meted out to rule breakers. I don’t like the idea of postponing punishment for actions that affected the discrete outcome until after a champion is decided. Ledgers should be balanced, equilibrium maintained within the event.

The Balogun decision “has set a dangerous precedent,” according to Mark Ogden, ESPN’s Senior writer on World Cup and European soccer. “What happens if Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé receives a red card in the games to come? Will they also be given disciplinary immunity?” Since there is an appeals process of some sort in every league at every level, we know the answer. Were Ogden’s scenario to come, the player or team would appeal and those to whom they appeal would rule. There was a first appeal in the English Premier League, a first in the Bundesliga, and a first in Serie A. All three are still going concerns. It’s an oddity that anyone might think that only during their most celebrated and cherished extravaganza, FIFA would deny a mechanism to right mistakes.

This is why Mark Ogden gets the big bucks (I hope) and fancy title. FIFA does deny a mechanism to right mistakes. That surprised me. In the World Cup, there is no allowed post game reversal after a red card decision is given. There are, however, rules governing what a referee can look at during a game when reviewing a play to see if a red card should have been given.

There was no call on the Balogun foul at first. Either an on-field assistant or one of the VAR officials alerted the head referee to the incident. It’s in his discretion to review video. Here are the relevant parameters from the organization that codifies rules for FIFA, the International Football Association Board:

“The VAR can ‘check’ the footage in normal speed and/or in slow motion but, in general, slow motion replays should only be used for facts, e.g. position of offence/player, point of contact for physical offences and handball, ball out of play (including goal/no goal); normal speed should be used for the ‘intensity’ of an offence or to decide if it was a handball offence.”

Ogden quotes former Premier League referee Andy Davies, “only slo-mo and still pictures were presented to the referee.” I have my assumptions, but I am not privy to why it was decided that stills and slow motion are allowed only as supporting evidence. I bet there were debates and deliberations. I’m certain the final decision was not arrived at without consideration. What we have with Balogun is a technical violation.

FIFA isn’t saying it wasn’t a foul. They have a procedure for reviewing and ruling missed calls on the field and in this case they used stills and videos despite that being prohibited under the circumstances. Nit pickers and rule pedants unite. This one’s for you. Our man wasn’t given his Miranda warning.

That should end it. We should be done with the matter, but Trump is involved. The charge exploding on X, and I’m sure elsewhere, is that Trump strong armed FIFA and now everything reeks of illegitimacy. It’s been reported that US officials say Trump called only to ask about the rules, why the US player was suspended, and that FIFA assured him the ruling was already under review. Reports from those covering FIFA have corroboration from that body. Immediately after last Friday’s game, FIFA said there would be no appeal so, this is but one reason on a long list, I don’t put much faith in what FIFA says. Besides, it’s what both sides have to say.

Trump may or may not have asked them to review the red card situation. There was definitely a conversation on the matter between him and FIFA head Gianni Infantino. But did Trump ask Infantino to take any action? Axios White House reporter Mark Caputo quotes one of his sources as saying “If Trump had put his thumb on the scale and achieved this result, he would have a field day bragging about it.” That’s certainly funny and probably true. If the only reason the matter was investigated was because of pressure from the White House, there’s a hell of a scandal brewing.

To my knowledge, no one is questioning that, as Davies is quoted as saying by Ogden, only stills and slow motion were shown to the referee and that it was stills and slow motion on which he relied to make the call. In the end, the post game FIFA appeal or review got it right. FIFA says it was in the process of reviewing the situation despite their earlier statement that there would be no appeal. I hope that’s true. If not, FIFA has a review process it ignored. Does it never review unless prompted? Does it only sometimes review? Worse case: did it review and do nothing?

That would be a scandal. That would mean bias against the US and/or who knows how many other nations. If FIFA was not in the process of review, I hope Trump said something. Had it been an English player wrongly suspended, would he have gotten reprieve? Kier isn’t lighting a fire under anyone. Not every nation has a leader uncooth enough to stick up for them. Saying the process was already under review knowing that the card was given in violation of process saves FIFA another black eye and avoids questions about bias against any particular team.

My fear is that this affects our game tonight. How will those referees react? No one likes to be overruled no matter that they were right or wrong or agree with the heirarchical organization structure they’re part of. Even though the crew tonight is not the same one that officiated last Friday, they’re referees. Is there solidarity among the ranks? I figure there are three possible mindsets tonight’s refs have: They put impartiality front and center to reassure fans and showcase the integrity of the game. They misappropriate that urge for impartiality and, though not on purpose, call unfairly against Belgium to show that they are not biased against the US because of the perceived comeuppance. They crucify the US and even if we get out of this we’re hobbled by vindictive yellows.

Game’s at 7:00. Here’s to hope.

***

As to whether a foul should have been called against Balogun in the first place? I don’t think so. Per Ogden, Davies thought the call was incorrect, too. Here’s the rule from IFAB:

“Any player who lunges at an opponent in challenging for the ball from the front, from the side or from behind using one or both legs, with excessive force or endangers the safety of an opponent is guilty of serious foul play.”

I don’t think he lunged or challenged.

This guy has the video (click the tweet to get his full argument):

Happy 250. I don’t guess many need POETS Day encouragement, but Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s the Semiquincentennial. How blessed are we as a nation that this falls on a weekend?

They pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor.

***

Thomas Campion (1567-1620) tried to squish English poetry into Hellenic meter. He wasn’t alone. Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney eyed the same goal. The latter two gave it up for iambic pentameter. Campion beat onward in a doomed campaign.

Classical rhythms don’t work in English. Listen to a romance language speaker. They inherited cadence from the Romans, and they from the Greeks. Syllable to syllable, they’re even. For all the stereotypes about spicy Spaniards and hot Latin lovers, their pitch and speed may vary from sentence to sentence and god knows there are arms in motion, but the actual speech is flat, practically monotone. They have their accentual moments, but those are not the rule. They stretch syllables. There are drawn out and compact vowels, but not much happening on the Y axis. English is bouncy.

Homer’s dactylic hexameter can be mirrored by an English dactylic hexameter, but Robert Fitzgerald, he of the great Iliad and Odyssey translations, found it constraining. In order to match the feel of Ancient Greek verse he took liberties. Homer’s dactylic foot was a long syllable followed by two shorts. The English dactyl is composed of a stress followed by two unstressed. It mirrors the Greek in form but the substitution is imperfect. Fitzgerald opted for some dactyls and some iambs and aimed for five or six stresses per line.

Arthur Golding rendered Ovid’s quantitative verse in iambic pentameter. Rolfe Humphries did the same. Both threw in feminine endings: that last unstressed syllable making pentameter plus one. You’d think it harder to match a foreign meter when translating someone else’s work than when composing an original. Golding and Humphries were bound by an existing concept and narrative. If the original work was about butterflies in the grass, they couldn’t change it to yaks in the grass because yaks scanned better. You could do that if there was no parent text. Spenser probably thought that way, as probably did Sidney. Both threw in the towel and went Chaucer’s iambic way. Campion soldiered on, but his poems presented as quantitative still fall into English stressed verse. He claimed otherwise, but reading aloud shows them prone to the ups and downs of our Germanic influence.

Homer’s Epic Hexameter, also called or Heroic Hexameter, isn’t the only Classical meter. Catullus and Sappho often wrote in Phalaecian hendecasyllable. This is an eleven syllable line which, using “–” for long and “u” for short, follows the pattern – – – u u – u – u – u. The English version substitutes stressed for long and unstressed for short, in line with the treatment Epic received. Our poets consider hendecasyllable vexing; technically difficult.

Attempts at bending hendecasyllablic works to English yoke are less known than translations of the great epics of Greek and Roman literature, but pretty much everything is less known than the Iliad and the Aeneid. They do exist. One by Alfred Lord Tennyson, in what poet Peter Kline called a “virtuosic show-off and a rebuke of ‘indolent reviewers,’” may be the most famous offering.

Hendecasyllabics
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Irresponsible, indolent reviewers,
Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem
All composed in a metre of Catullus,
All in quantity, careful of my motion,
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him,
Lest I fall unawares before the people,
Waking laughter in indolent reviewers.
Should I flounder awhile without a tumble
Thro’ this metrification of Catullus,
They should speak to me not without a welcome,
All that chorus of indolent reviewers.
Hard, hard, hard it is, only not to tumble,
So fantastical is the dainty meter.
Wherefore slight me not wholly, nor believe me
Too presumptuous, indolent reviewers.
O blatant Magazines, regard me rather—
Since I blush to belaud myself a moment—
As some rare little rose, a piece of inmost
Horticultural art, or half-coquette-like
Maiden, not to be greeted unbenignly.

Mapping the line brings a question. Hendecasyllable, as described by the Poetry Foundation: “typically a spondee or trochee, a choriamb, and two iambs, the second of which has an additional syllable at the end.” Using the previous symbols but with “–“ as stressed and “u” as unstressed, that means either [– –] or [– u] then [– u u –], [u –], [u –], and a stand alone [u]. This highlights a problem I have with diagramming, for lack of a better word, in metric feet. Why is there a choriamb?

I don’t mean “Why is there a choriamb in this line?” I mean “Why does a choriamb exist?” Instead of a single foot of [– u u –], why don’t we have two feet: a trochee [– u] and an iamb [u –]. It’s not uncommon for trochees to precede iambs. It’s an accepted practice to begin a traditional iambic pentameter sonnet with a trochee as the first foot and then complete the line with four iambs. No one—no one I’ve read—says such a sonnet begins with a choriamb followed by three iambic feet for a tetrameter line in an otherwise pentameter poem.

Hendecasyllablic reflects a syllable count, so foot number doesn’t matter in the above. But in a hypothetical, when one person says a line begins with an amphibranch [u – u] followed by an iamb [u –] another will correct by calling it an iamb [u –] followed by and anapest [u u –]. It’s u – u u – no matter how you parse it. This shouldn’t matter, but I find myself trying to divine patterns where there are none and see one person being dismissive of another’s scan when both are right. It should be a loose diagnostic, but there’s no reason to introduce unecessaries that confuse. When fringe subjectivity is already baked in, a chimera like the choriamb muddies. Ditch it. The metric foot system works; it just needs tidying. Forgive the frustrated diversion.

Towards that tidiness I was very happy on finding a description of Phalaecian hendecasyllable as an eleven syllable line with stresses on syllables 1, 4, 6, 8, and 10. It’s a simpler and more elegant explanation that doesn’t glue feet together for no reason. I was less happy when I realized that the Poetry Foundation stressed syllables 2 and 3 and left 4 unstressed. The very delicate and technically demanding was looking to be pretty flexible. That there are variations and disagreements about early stresses doesn’t make it less problematic; so I’m told and tempted to believe given the esteem in which successful examples in English are given. But, still.

It gets lost in his grandfatherly plain spokenness, but Robert Frost was a formidable craftsman. He played on sentiment and that’s what the public latched onto, but he was a student and innovator of form. Below is his go at hendecasyllablic poetry. It’s superficially a poem about searching for truth, but he knew his Tennyson. The first line’s reference to “Others” who “taunt” echos Tennyson’s indolent reviewers. He’s doing a little showing off himself.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

In English, we naturally speak in iambs. We say “the HOUSE” with stress on the second syllable. We speak in trochee, too, though not as often. “THE house” stresses the first syllable and implies specificity. Poets want to guide us through a rhythm, but we’re habitual. Start us on iambs and we’ll carry on. Start us on trochees, and we may pause, revert to iambs, or carry on. In either case, once you’re in the middle of a rise and fall accentually we’re lost in troughs and crests and don’t care where we started so long as we keep on as we’re going. The hecadecasyllabic poet has to guide the reader through multiple changes in the roll of the language while making it seem natural.

It’s easy to fall into trochees all the way or try and “cheat” by starting with a preposition to take stress over its two word subject. Frost avoids pitfalls and easy ways all the while taunting his critics who say he has no depth. It’s a poem about looking deeper for something that may or may not be there. “Maybe you’re right, maybe you missed it, maybe you’re not as worldly as you think you are,” he implies and ends the poem on a relativistic note about truth. There’s no doubting his other message.

It’s an attractive pattern because many great works, continental as well as classical, are written in the style.

This is the meter of Dante’s Divine Comedy, usually translated in English as blank verse or iambic pentameter with or without terza rima. It’s the meter of Petrarch. Like Dante, his work is almost exclusively iambic pentameter in English. The other Dante, Dante Gabrielle Rossetti, similarly treated the hendecasyllables of Calvalcanti. Pound rendered Cavalcanti in free verse, maybe governed by the same philosophy as obtained when he translated Li Bai from Chinese: that where there is no workable equivalent, re-imagine the work in available terms as best match the spirit of the original. Pound did try his hand at the classic pattern in his own Canzones, loosely blending free verse and hendecasyllabic in a way makes me think I should have written loosely instead. Over and over, when presented with hendecasyllablic, our poets demur.

My favorite English example comes from Swinburne. There’s no hint beyond the title that he’s showing off though I think his is more perfect than either of the above. Read aloud, it works both inflected and in a wistful monotone. It shouldn’t surprise. Swinburne was known as a masochist. I imagine meticulous suffering over a difficult poetic task was right up his alley.

Hendecasyllabics
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Americans get a lot of flak for calling the World Cup game soccer. Jabs come for a variety of reasons. A nearly forgotten charge implied arrogance: how dare we abrogate the name “football” for our domestic favorite when there are so many other games—rugby, Australian Rules, soccer, Gaelic—under the umbrella. That one never landed. We call ourselves Americans at Mexican and Canadian expense so we aren’t about to get the vapors over a ball game. Now the world calls soccer “football” so that one’s more or less forgotten.

An odd new front paints “soccer,” our preferred term, as an Americanism; as an abomination spread by Yanks and maintained despite an otherwise global conformation to “football.” The claim that everybody else is down with “football” is specious, but put that aside. This one doesn’t land either. We’re the only ones measuring by an inch arbitrarily defined as roughly the length of three barley grains rather than using the scientific metric measurements which arbitrarily define a meter as one ten millionth of the distance from the pole to the midway point of the planet we happen to be on which only coincidentally approximates the comfortable yard. But put that aside, too. “Soccer” was the preferred English term until pretty recently.

The shift came mid 1970s, smack in the worst of crumbling empire malaise and right before their Thatcher pick-me-up. There wasn’t a whole lot of cultural confidence over there. England was a mess. John moved to New York, Paul to Scotland, and Ringo split time between London and LA. Only George, the quiet one, remained reliably in England. Like George, the English found themselves suddenly not on top of the world. Best blend in and keep their collective head down, avoid making waves, and if the continent says football, do what’s needed to fit in.

To be clear, “soccer” is an English invention, both game and word. Bobby Charleton, who slew a dragon for Manchester United and was the hero of England’s 1966 World Cup Winning “side,” titled his first memoir My Soccer Life and nobody batted an eye. This wasn’t a Sorcerer’s Stone concession to the American audience. There wasn’t My Football Life on one side of the Atlantic and Soccer on the other. As I’m writing, there’s a first edition copy of Pelham Books London release in decent condition available for £25 on eBay.

For all the scholastic magistry and Evelyn Waugh mystique Oxford University has amassed since Henry II hinted that University of Paris expats should come home, goofy students are goofy students the world over. For reasons that have nothing to do with being poncy, faddish aspiring scholars went through a phase in the late 1800s where they dropped a final syllable and tacked on an “-er” in its place. The trend turned Rugby Football into “ruggers.” There’s a colonial remnant of the fashion floating around college campuses in the US. If you’ve ever called a keg party a “kegger,” you’re among the afflicted and part of the great link tying scion Lords chasing a second with Iowa State marketing majors playing beer pong at the Sigma Nu house.

English public school sports clubs got together and codified a set of football rules for competition. That set of rules came to be known as Association Football until the Oxford kids got hold, shortened “Association” to “socc” and did the “-er” trick. There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that an Oxford student and captain of the English national team, Charles Wreford-Brown (who’s Wikipedia page features a starch collared photograph of the man suited for the cover of a box of licorice cough drops), coined the word. I’ve read that some early pronunciations hilariously kept association’s sibilance and said it as “sosser.” I like to think a Latin teaching tradition put a stop to that.

Any assault on American usage of “soccer” has to reckon with Americans’ use of “football.” The word already means something here so that meaning has to be ridiculed and stripped to make way if the colonizing English are going to have us fall in line. The thrust of the attack is that in our football, the foot barely makes contact with the ball. “More like handball!” or some such refrain. That kinda works on Americans because our class divisions were never institutionalized in a sumptuary tradition. We’re not on the lookout for that kind of thing. I don’t know why the British buy it.

Before ruffly collars made the scene, the rich and landed jousted and played something akin to polo. If you couldn’t afford to join the horsey set, you played your games on foot. We came to call sports you play on horseback “equestrian.” We came to call sports you play on foot “football.” So goes the tradition. Rich people played running games too and no one calls tennis football. There are exceptions, but the general meaning was formed and it had nothing whatsoever to do with what body part strikes a ball. It’s about locomotion. Proto-sociologist Frederick Morton Eden (famed author of 1797’s 700 page smash hit The State of the Poor) wrote in the 1820s about a chaotic Perthshire game pitting married men against bachelors. He observed tackling, running with the ball, and throwing the ball to one another. The goal was to “hang” the ball, which meant putting it through a hoop. The one rule he specified was that “no person was allowed to kick it.” They called the game football. That’s because they played on foot.

There’s no etymology written by anyone without chip grease on their drunken fingers putting “soccer”’s origins anywhere beyond the Pale, though efforts at banishing the word are underway right at the line. Ireland’s governing soccer body is called the Football Association of Ireland, but Gaelic football is more popular. “Soccer” was and, though dwindling, is the common term for… soccer on the Emerald Isle. Australia changed its governing body’s name, swapping “soccer” for “football,” in 2005. New Zealand followed suit in 2006. That’s officialdom. The people are recalcitrant. The march toward “football” is underway, but where is the English outrage at all the other nations who do or mostly do as we do? Why aren’t they mad at Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, or Japan? Why is it just this game? They don’t get mad when I say “trunk” instead of “boot.” Steve Martin pointed out that the damned French have a different word for everything. Why aren’t the British getting arrested for Tweeting mean things about the French?

British folks and Americans familiar with mustache wax get upset because we call the Brits’ favored football variant “soccer.” That was their way right up until the end of the Apollo program. Our way has always been to call our most popular domestic football variant by the umbrella term “football” and to hell with all the rest in the category. We carry on the British tradition of referring to Association Football as Soccer. We keep the flame that they have abandoned in favor of the American way. It’s cultural appropriation: calling your most popular domestic football variant by the categorical term instead of by its specific name is our thing. “Soccer” is British. It’s “Football” that’s the Americanism.

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

In a 1579 letter from Edmund Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, Spenser brings up an organization he’d been invited to join by “Master Sidney and Master Dyer.” The Masters were Sir Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer, a pair of Elizabethan courtiers who acted as agents and soldiers abroad for Her Majesty. Sidney, at least, would be shocked that he’s remembered as a poet rather than envoy or governor. The organization was called The Areopagus, and it’s fairer to call it the proposed organization as it’s not known whether it ever made it past planning. No meetings are recorded.

Sydney may have been inspired in conceiving his literary club by the Wilton Circle, a literary circle of which Spenser is confirmed to have been a member, founded and led by Philip’s sister Mary Sydney and run by Sir Walter Ralegh’s half brother (possibly Humphrey Gilbert, though I haven’t found a site willing to lift whomever out of Ralegh’s shadow with more than “half-brother.”) The Wilton Circle is described by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust as “the most important and influential literary circle in English history.” The Authorship Trust’s mission, depending on your disposition, is “just asking questions” regarding the authorship of plays ascribed to William Shakespeare, or a they’re bunch of conspiracy nuts on a snipe hunt. It’s also possible that Mary’s Wilton Circle postdated Sydney’s idea for the Areopagus. I can’t find minutes.

In either cases, poet’s circles abounded in the minds of Sidneys. Philip’s goal was to advance quantitative verse in English poetry. Thomas Campion (1567-1620) was playing around with the same thing at the time so he wasn’t a lone voice in the woods. It’s an awkward ask of our stress filled language, but the quantitative poets wanted poetic feet measured in syllable length reliant on long and short vowel sounds. Admiration for classical poetry in Latin and Greek fueled their attempts.

I like to think there was an Areopagus with an assembly but the focus is on Sydney and Spenser at the table. In my head there’s impassioned debate with leather bound books laid open, quills and ink pots set at each place like dinnerware, anachronistic scrolls for some reason, and everyone’s wearing heavy clothes and drinks red wine from metal cups. Late into the night and early into the morning they press this form and that until they in the end ashamed and humbled, yell “To hell with it!”, throw away the quantitative verse scheme and get on as we know they did: Spenser amazes with decidedly non-quantitative iambic pentameter in The Faerie Queene and his Spenserean stanza, and Sydney develops the English sonnet, taking from Petrarch and the Italians. Chaucer set the iambic course, Marlowe, Shakespeare (“Not so fast!” say the Authorship Trust), and Milton cemented iambic pentameter in the English tradition. Spenser and Sidney were its midwives at a time when direction was uncertain. No matter what their quantitative sympathies, both men did the honorable thing in the end. Pace Campion: Thank you, gentlemen.

Sydney’s poetry was passed around for friendly or courtly enjoyment. He never published in his lifetime. His sister, Mary of the verifiable circle, gathered and edited his poetry after his death. His great work is a series of one hundred and eight sonnets called Astrophil and Stella (sometimes spelled Astrophel and Stella) written to Lady Warwick, Penelope Rich, nee Devereux. A marriage was planned between twelve-year-old Penelope and twenty-year-old Philip. There was a lot of planning and hopes as both families saw benefits from the union but before nuptials were performed Sidney’s prospective father-in-law Walter Devereux died of dysentery. The arrangement fell to the side. By reports, Philip didn’t mind. He understood the dynastic nature of the pairing and she was just a kid he had nothing in common with. He married Frances Walsingham, Countess of Clanricarde (who would marry a Devereux after Sydney died.) Penelope married Robert Rich, 1^st Earl of Warwick. Over the years and subsequent meetings, he fell in love with her. She wasn’t a kid anymore.

Philip was a celebrated courtier and history tells he took to heart all the virtues extolled by such. There’s a mention in the series of a stolen kiss, but that may be wish casting. He stayed true to his wife and she to her husband, though it’s said she was miserable. The sonnets are a great pining; one of poetry’s celebrated could have beens.

I
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn’d brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart, and write.”

The second sonnet is the saddest to me. In explaining, he rebukes himself. The entirety—the pairing, the arrangement, the dysentery—was beyond his control. Had he been immediately smitten, things would have ended the same way. He didn’t see her as he should have. She was revealed gradually.

II

Not at first sight, nor with a dribbèd shot,
Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed:
But known worth did in mine of time proceed,
Till by degrees it had full conquest got.
I saw, and liked; I liked, but lovèd not;
I loved, but straight did not what love decreed:
At length to love’s decrees I, forced, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partial lot.
Now even that footstep of lost liberty
Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite
I call it praise to suffer tyranny;
And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make myself believe that all is well,
While with a feeling skill I paint my hell.

Was there ever a good time to be from Moscow? Was there a Golden Age?

Queen Elizabeth appointed Sidney Governor of Flushing, a harbor town in Zeeland, where he was to support Dutch Protestants against the Spanish. He was shot during a cavalry charge in the Battle of Zutphen. I can’t tell if he ordered the charge or not. He held the rank General of the Horse, which sounds lofty and in charge, but there may have been loftier personages present. The shot itself wasn’t deadly; he took a ball to the leg. Twenty-six days later, he succumbed to gangrene and died at the age of thirty-one.

His funeral procession through London was “the most elaborate ever staged,” according to Wikipedia. Over one hundred and twenty members of the Worshipful Company of Grocers were in attendance. Reading that sent me down a rabbit-hole, but I’ve emerged knowing the importance of royally-chartered livery companies and that a courtier such as Sidney was greatly honored to have been in membership.

After “the most elaborate ever staged,” Wikipedia mentions that the funeral almost bankrupted his father-in-law. That doesn’t sound like a sudden outpouring of emotion by the populace. There are also stories about his death that strike a skeptic: His leg was unarmored where he was shot because he spotted a soldier under him without that specific piece of armor and gave his so his inferior was better protected. What bad luck? Another hagiographic stretch has a dying Philip refusing water because another wounded man needs it more. Because that was it. The one canteen in camp.

They built him up a little.

XLVII

What, have I thus betrayed my liberty?
Can those black beams such burning marks engrave
In my free side? or am I born a slave,
Whose neck becomes such yoke of tyranny?
Or want I sense to feel my misery?
Or sprite, disdain of such disdain to have?
Who for long faith, though daily help I crave,
May get no alms but scorn of beggary.
Virtue, awake! Beauty but beauty is;
I may, I must, I can, I will, I do
Leave following that which it is gain to miss.
Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to,
Unkind, I love you not! O me, that eye
Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie!

“Soft, but here she comes,” predates Shakespeare’s (“Ahem!” – TSAT) Romeo and Juliet’s “But soft, What light by yonder window breaks?” Astrophil was probably written in the early 1580s, and obviously before 1586 (unless there’s a Sidney’s Authorship Trust out there that would like to chime in.) No matter, Mary published her brother’s work in 1591. Romeo and Juliet was probably written between 1591 and 1595. “Soft” may have been a common “hush.” Still, we know Shakespeare read Sidney. Maybe he inspired one of the most famous lines in drama.

Back to building up Sidney: He didn’t need building up. From age eighteen he was an agent and advisor to the Queen. He fell in and out of favor, but that was the case with everyone Elizabeth noticed. One story in particular demonstrates his nobility.

William I of Orange met with Sidney to discuss the possibility of a Protestant League. Sidney more than impressed the Prince. William offered his daughter’s hand. Holland and Zeeland were the offered dowry. He wouldn’t be monarchy, but the courtier would have his own court, if minor league. He felt the move would be an affront to Elizabeth. I’m sure justified fear of the Queen’s wrath played a part in his decision to refuse, but offered a kingdom, he deferred to his oath. He was an impressive guy.

Next is the last poem of the series.

CVIII

When sorrow (using mine own fire’s might)
Melts down his lead into my boiling breast;
Through that dark furnace to my heart oppressed
There shines a joy from thee, my only light;
But soon as thought of thee breeds my delight,
And my young soul flutters to thee his nest,
Most rude despair, my daily unbidden guest,
Clips straight my wings, straight wraps me in his night,
And makes me then bow down my head and say,
“Ah, what doth Phoebus’ gold that wretch avail
Whom iron doors do keep from use of day?”
So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevail,
That in my woes for thee thou art my joy,
And in my joys for thee my only annoy.

Mary reportedly exercised a light hand editing and it’s assumed that the sequence is in an order determined by Philip. CVIII has the feel of a poem written to be the finale. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a fine poem. I feel like he mustered emotion; it weighed on him how to end just so. I like CVI. I wish he’d ended there, winding down.

CVI

O absent presence, Stella is not here;
False flattering hope, that with so fair a face
Bare me in hand, that in this orphan place
Stella, I say my Stella, should appear.
What say’st thou now? Where is that dainty cheer
Thou told’st mine eyes should help their famished case?
But thou art gone, now that self-felt disgrace
Doth make me most to wish thy comfort near.
But here I do store of fair ladies meet,
Who may with charm of conversation sweet
Make in my heavy mould new thoughts to grow:
Sure they prevail as much with me, as he
That bade his friend, but then new maimed, to be
Merry with him, and not think of his woe.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

TGIF is POETS for those without initiative. Make it happen. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Wallace Stevens started late. His first poetry collection held an impressive, by debut poetry collection standards, eighty five titles, but when the book, Harmonium, was published in 1923, its author was in his early forties. He’d had time to backlog.

I covered Stevens’s morning routine—composing in his head as he walked to his office at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company—in this space three years ago. In Harmonium, he wrestles with how he should see the world. Should he be grounded in the rational or loose in the imagination? The question is posed piecemeal and never resolved.

I remember when Donna Tartt’s A Secret History came out. My mother’s kitchen table review was that it’s a great book, but she put all she’s ever learned and considered into it and she won’t have anything else to say for five to ten years. That was in 1992. Tartt’s second book came out in 2002. Stevens spends a great deal of energy trying to sort himself. He wrote sparingly through the 20s, not writing regularly again until 1933 and not publishing another bound volume until Ideas of Order in 1936. Harmonium received harsh reviews. Mark Van Doren dismissed him from the genre by writing in The Nation, per Wikipedia, that Stevens’ wit “is tentative, perverse, and superfine; and it will never be popular.” There were nice things written too, but the negatives weighed on him. Maybe he, like Tartt in Mom’s pinning, spent his store. Maybe the critics brushed him back. Maybe he had to reconcile vers libre with actuary tables.

Reception wasn’t all bad. Van Doren was an influential guy, but I’d trade three of his rookies for one of Harriet Monroe’s base cards. Her approval was paramount. In the incunabular days of Poetry, she wrote, per Wikipedia:

“[T]here was never a more flavorously original poetic personality than the author of this book. If one seeks sheer beauty of sound, phrase, rhythm, packed with prismatically colored ideas by a mind at once wise and whimsical, one should open one’s eyes and ears, sharpen one’s wits, widen one’s sympathies to include rare and exquisite aspects of life, and then run for this volume of iridescent poems.”

That should have buoyed him. He should have also been inured to charges of nonsense. He’s famously hard to decipher, threads his poems with an idiosyncratic symbolism and teases those who tried to put together a key, and prizes sound and fluidity over communication. He knew he was being problematic.

Edmund Wilson wrote of Stevens, “Even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well.” I don’t know that readers of this first book came so disposed to indulge though he certainly earned trust over a career. Stevens kept his notebook scribblings. Some of those aphorisms and begun thoughts were published as the section “Adagia” in the posthumous collection Open Posthumous in 1957. Among them: “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully,” and “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”

That should be liberating; license to read for the joy of sound. He mocks the code breakers’ claims that in his poetry blue signals imagination and red reality, but then right there on the pages, repeated for all to see, is blue heralding imagination and red meaning reality. Instead of liberation, we get humility. Approach the poems knowing something is meant, but not necessarily something comprehensible. Most have straightforward elements while hinting there is more. Is there? Sometimes yes. I think. Maybe always. Have fun with it.

The Plot against the Giant
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker, I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la … le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

There is everything innocent about the above poem, but if you were ever a middle school boy, you’ve already giggled at three women trading plans to bring down something large. Read that Stevens hid erotic meaning in some of his poems—“never inadvertently crude,” his friend Marianne Moore wrote of him, leaving me to wonder if she meant he was occasionally advertently crude—and know that sometimes his poems are just a cigar, and you’re left wondering who’s the dirty one? Is it the poet? Am I being puerile? Get to the line with “labials” and “gutturals” and I’m off the rails. I’m not imagining things. The nuns can’t have been right.

“The Place of Solitaires” is safely said to be about the aims of Stevens’s idealized poet. He’s to stir the imagination. He tells us this without reference to blue, which has to infuriate the code breakers. Green, which is mentioned, purportedly means “the physical.” No matter the color scheme, he prizes motion. Ideas don’t stand still. If my reading is correct, the poet’s goal is better served conveying images and concepts in transition to give a sense of the whole rather than trying to render a moment in precision. A poem is not a photograph and requires a mindset to compose.

The Place of the Solitaires

Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

There’s a longer poem, broken into six Roman numeralled parts, called “The Comedian as the Letter C,” in the middle of Harmonium. It’s about Crispin, a poet searching for his place. He starts in Bordeaux, travels to the Yucatan, Florida, and ends up in North Carolina. In the early 1900s there was a school of poetry known as Local Color. Stevens wasn’t much of a fan. Locality Writers felt it was important to tie themselves to a region. It wasn’t just poets. William Faulkner is a prime example. “Comedian” is the poet rejecting that he’s tied to his place and in his travels, finding that there isn’t a place. At the same time, he considers his figurative place as a member of society. There are obvious parallels between Crispin and Stevens, the poet and insurance man. He lives in the imagination and in reality. To which, if either, does he belong?

He doesn’t satisfy himself with an answer, but claims advantages to not knowing. He’s not lost in the imagination or bound to reality. He can exist in either and see both from an outside perspective.

It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.

Romantic notions can grow stale, but he was in and out. There were no Pevensies yet to compare himself to, but withdrawing to reality left a longing and a quickening. Lucy longed to return to Narnia, loving it with an intensity she may not have had she stayed. Did those without quotidian lives allow the fantastic to fade? For Stevens, the place of solitaires retained a sense of risk.

All dreams are vexing. Let them be expunged.
But let the rabbit run, the cock declaim.

In Part VI, Crispin settles and has a family. His travels are done, Byronic shirts and waistcoats put away. Is he still a poet?

Because he built a cabin who once planned
Loquacious columns by the ructive sea?

The question nags.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

Harmonium is not all existential struggle. Far from it. Even in his ennui he’s playful. Louis Untermeyer called him “childish.” Gorham Munson dubbed him “a dandy.” That stuck. Twenty years later Yvor Winters argued that dandy didn’t cover it. He suggested “hedonist.” I think Stevens was funny.

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is just that. Some were funny, like the above. Some flippant. Others sublime or reverent. The next is numinous if you went to a thesaurus looking for a synonym for “sublime” but with a shade towards mystery.

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

He loved to mention birds; palm trees too, but birds. There are peacocks, grackles, toucans, hawks, falcons, and flamingos. Obviously, blackbirds. That’s from a quick flip back through. There are more. He gets on a phoenix kick in his later work, but not yet in Harmonium. I have no idea what the code breakers make of all that.

There is no resolution to his predicament at the end of the book. He doesn’t know how to go forward. He eventually figured out a path, but whether he went back to writing having resolved his dilemma or having made peace with its nagging, I don’t know.

Stevens ends Harmonium with his mind set one way, a moment later set another, and again.

The Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Welcome once again to POETS Day, where we usher in Henry Ford’s greatest creation – the weekend – a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Life’s too short for work, and nobody’s gonna notice if you hoof it mid-afternoon.

***

TS Eliot titled the third of his Four Quartets “The Dry Salvages” after a rock formation off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing village and seaside retreat where the St. Louis based Eliot family spent their summers when the poet was a boy. Dry Salvages derives from an original French name for the formation transformed by time, mishearings, and local accent. Eliot tells us in a parenthetical preceding the poem, “presumably les trois sauvages,” Anglicized over time but, he instructs, “pronounced to rhyme with assuages,” so not as yet a fully English subject.

As with all of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” manages competing images presenting a theme. There’s a great deal going on and a great many ways to spend a thousand words on an aspect without touching on any number of other aspects. In this poem, the opening and recurrent image is that of water. The river is present, flowing, perceptible action. The sea is unknowable depths. Water rises from the sea, rains and forms oceans and back to the sea. The sea is the past and the future. We cannot know which or guess at more than the surface. The river is with us, changing in the moment. It is present. The idea permeates.

This poem deals with transition and our perception of it. “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, considers the cycle binding past, future, and present, that we are trapped in change, “Desire itself is movement,” a stillness central to the circular cycle of time and motion is the incomprehensible begotten God, and our hoped-for ecstasies or perceptions of the divine. In the second, “East Coker,” Eliot presents generational cycles, shows that as men we are limited to experience what time allows, and concludes that to be near God we must live every moment in concentration, though no revelation is guaranteed. A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us? What of a plumber or farmer who makes possible the generational churning? How are they to attain communion?

In answer, Eliot invokes Krishna, Mary, and Jesus.

In the epic Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna asks Krishna what he must do in battle to be victorious. Russell Elliott Murphy, in his Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot, explains that in the ancient Sanskrit text, Krishna responds “Think of me,” because “the teaching is that one becomes one with ’whatever sphere of being / The mind of man may be intent [on] / At the time of death.’” With that in mind, Eliot plays with Heraclitus’s observation that “No man steps in the same river twice,” to introduce the idea that we are forever lost, or possibly dying moment to moment. With every change we are a different person. What we were ceases to be. I am not the same person I was when I began this thought because now I am a person who has begun this thought.

As with the two poems before, the third section of “The Dry Salvages” takes place in a train or a subway. In this incarnation, the train ride, in a few lines described as an ocean voyage, is the fixed present in a never ending journey from past to future, a transition from what you were to what you will be.

from Part III of The Dry Salvages
TS Eliot (1888-1965)

You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station.
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think “the past is finished”
Or “the future is before us.”

We were never in the past. We remember it, but we are not the person who was anymore. We will never be in the future. That is for someone who remembers us, but is more. No matter how we struggle, we’re forever of the moment, bracketed by a past and a future that we, as we are, cannot be a part of. We’re reminded of the limitations spelled out in “Burnt Norton,” that we are trapped by time. We’re analogous to generations as spoken to in “East Coker.” We are neither our ancestor nor our progeny. We are here.

Let me be a goofy fan for a moment: “That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here,” is, to me, among his most memorable lines. He uses “that” instead of “the” in the line “You are not the same people who left that station.” It’s a nice touch. There’s a distance implied. A person who just left might say “the station.” “The” connects as it is specific—the one known to the speaker—where “that” suggests a station observed. The person who was there is in the past, the present can only look back. Eliot is in the details.

Another passage that stands out, this one from Part II, laying the ground for the section above:

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the later a partial fallacy,
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

All the struggles and adaptations, the leaps forward and retreats, the dead ends explored, all of the mechanics of natural selection led to man as we are now and enlivened with niche beasts our populated world. Everyone knows that the process is ongoing but we don’t consider that we’ll one day be primitive. Or if we do, as an “of course” set in a distant and ignorable future. But here we are on the train.

In answer to the main question: The plumber and the farmer must live in the moment. The average person possessed of the same need for meaning and communion as the saint but lacking the drive or pressed with competing priorities should attend to their role in the pattern. Being only in the present, attend to the present; each personal incarnation at a time in its time; do his part to make the past and anticipate the future.

Eliot ends the poem in Part V with,

For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realized;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

Eliot recalls Part IV of “Burnt Norton” where the speaker asks if man rejects God and sets himself as supreme, will “Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?” If man is the end all be all, what happens when man is gone? Does the universe cease? Will yew roots—the yew stands as a symbol of the churchyard—grow downward towards your grave? If so, by what power? By what will once yours is gone? How well thought out is your blasphemy?

Here, the yew presages a sort of immortality. Eliot insists there is something greater if we cleave to it. Like Arjuna, we will be victorious. We take part in the cycle as one man in generations and one being in a divine plan. Fixed in the present, our part is forever now.

The primary appeal to Mary comes in Part IV, which is a short prayer for safety for those at sea. The appeal is presaged in Part II in the passage below with the reference to Jesus as “the calamitous annunciation,” the occasion of the eternal in contact with time and our salvation. In the six stanzas leading to the lines including “superficial notions of evolution,” man’s lot is described as “In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,” and “forever bailing.” He is adrift and in a struggle he will not see end.

Here, Eliot shows he is a master of form. Man is part of a pattern, a working greater than himself. He can’t always see that. His life is short and the pattern weaves long. Eliot gives us this plight in these six stanzas set as a modified sestina. Classically, a sestina has six stanzas of six lines each with the final word of each line repeating as the last word of a different line in the next stanza cascading to a set pattern. In Eliot’s sestina, the last words of each first line rhyme rather than repeat, as is so with second lines, third, etc. without cascading. There’s no recognizing a pattern from looking at a single stanza. To do so requires a long view. The form embodies the thematic assertion. It’s poetry.

from Part II of The Dry Salvages

Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there and end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?

There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable-
And therefore the fittest for renunciation.

There is the final addition, the failing
Pride or resentment at failing powers,
The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,
In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,
The silent listening to the undeniable
Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.

Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind’s tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.

We have to think of them as forever bailing,
Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.

This is not an Evangelical poem, but it is inescapably Christian as it is an attempt to comprehend great mysteries by one raised in a Christian tradition. Murphy writes “Suffice it to say, for Eliot at least, those values and beliefs, when the inform any work of literature, do so not in order to indoctrinate or proselytize the prospective reader but because they form a part of the author’s actual life experience.” All must be considered from Eliot’s perspective. So death in a moment is not absolution from individual responsibility. That he warned us off with “superficial notions of evolution” as “a means of disowning the past.” Death is a curtain we cannot pass back through, a metaphor for a barrier. In that light, there is clarification. We are not the person we were a moment ago but we are not reborn sinless and pure. We are the creator writ small of both and all past and all coming momentary accumulations of our experiences. We are in need of salvation.

CS Lewis used the Tao as a stand in for a shared morality (let Eastern philosophers, hacky sack mystics, and Lewis scholars unite and mob me for the simplicity.) He was making a point arrived at through Christianity, but one he felt should be shared and could be similarly embraced by those of any faith. As a laurel, he reached outside his faith for a word to show the concept was not exclusive. So does Eliot pull Krishna. In that sense, it may be Evangelical, if at a slant. It is a reasoning process.

For the full text of the poem, click here.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Will was a ready-made friend assembled off-site and brought in as a palliative by my parents. Mom and Dad made us move. There was no consultation. The new house wasn’t that far from the old neighborhood from their perspective, but they had a Buick. I knew the distance by a twelve-year-old’s bicycle reckoning. My old friends were a crow’s fly mile away now but there were obstacles. Cahaba Road’s ups and downs, Montclair’s traffic, and a well perimetered country club enforced isolation. All my friends were there and I was stuck here. Will’s dad used to work with my dad and lived a few blocks away from our new place. They signed us up for the same soccer team.

It worked. Will was, and is, a good guy. I’m friends with his older brother Kevin, too. That last part wasn’t the case until much later. Kevin didn’t take to me at first. That wasn’t my fault. Our school went grades five through twelve. Kevin was a high school senior and Will and I were in sixth and seventh grade, respectively. Kevin had spent the summer tuning, buffing, and otherwise worshiping his powder-blue late sixties Mustang. The car was a showpiece, but in a muscular way, and would have ushered in a new age of Kevin high school ascendancy as he drove past the lower lot, slowly circled past main entrance, and eased into a reserved senior parking place. But his mom told him he had to drive me and Will to school with him every morning. We didn’t figure in the triumph.

The first morning he picked me up, I was told to get in the back with Will. Kevin glared at us. “I don’t hear a fucking word out of you two. Got it?” and Blaupunkt-ed The Producers’ “She Shelia” to crisp ear-shattering eleven. That was our morning every day for a month.“I don’t want to…” and Blaupunkt Producers followed by “Piece by Piece” by The Tubes. The woofers thumped my braces. We only lived a mile and a half from school so I never found out what mixed tape magic followed at the three spot.

Come early October, I bailed and decided to skateboard for the rest of the year. As a result, I met a ton of older kids. Damn near every student en route to school would slow and ask if I wanted a ride. I was in seventh grade, but a minute’s worth of vagabond travel a day in this or that upperclassman’s car in the morning and seniors would pass by me and my friends in the halls with a “Hey, Ben.” I was known by older kids. I felt cool. I also picked up on schedules and knew when to thank for but refuse a ride because “it’s a nice day” if there was a better chance of hitching along with Jenny of the tight sweaters and large chest. She had blond hair and a comfy red BMW 318i. There was a spell where she dated a fellow senior who drove a cherry red late sixties Mustang—not quite the equal of Kevin’s—and he was covetous, I guess, because on mornings when he drove her to school they’d zip right by. She’d wave as they passed. That’s something. I endured their short affair and slipped back into accepting the kindness of less attractive strangers. I was thrilled when they broke up. She ended up at Harvard. Her kid and mine have been in a few plays together. Unbelievably nice person.

Outside of situations where having a younger brother and his dork friend spoiled a summer’s worth of garage work and distracted from acid washed sunglasses, Kevin was a pretty good guy to hang around with. The summer following our move to the neighborhood, I went off to camp with Will and another guy named Will from the other end of the street. Kevin was one of the councilors. The three of us would sign up for all Kevin-led trips and activities because he treated us like lieutenants.

Near the end of the month long session, you’d go off in groups of ten to twenty with three or four councilors for a two night, three day delve into the woods, in one direction or another, to cook hot dogs on the end of a stick and maybe put your arm around a girl’s shoulders by the camp fire. Kevin led a hike to a waterfall, a trickle, really—we were expecting some grand Niagara-like wall of noise and spray the way they talked it up—dropping nine or ten feet into an icy cold swimming hole. Somehow, he arranged it so the Wills and I got horses. We needed to ride up ahead and scout or some nonsense. I don’t know how he conned the administration, but we had four saddled and two packed. Will, Will, and I did almost all of the unnecessary galloping across open spaces.

One night I almost kissed a girl named Heather. Her friend, a girl named Mickey who smoked, told me Heather liked me and I should give it a try. I did put my arm around her at the campfire and we decided to go together for the remainder of the term until we all went home, which was maybe four days.

As an aide-de-camp-councilor, I helped screw together the scaffold to set over the fire. On that, we set metal grills for burgers and steaks at night and iron skillets for messy eggs and bacon in the morning. My proximity to power impressed Heather. It was a good gig.

One morning, Kevin, who is now a chef in adulthood, made a spectacular amount of bacon and a resulting spectacular amount of grease. After he pulled bacon and set it in buffet pans, he poured a half a pot of coffee in to the smoldering skillet, making a few pops and a lot of steam. Everyone but Heather and me was off fighting about line-cutting at the folding table buffet. He called us over, pulled us into conspiracy. “You want to try this.”

He tossed a bit of butter in and stirred. Next, he pulled a bag of white bread from the mess box, took a few pieces and passed it to us. We all dipped and ate. Heather didn’t like it. There were cracks that would have shown had we not gone our separate ways. Kevin called it red eye gravy and I thought he invented it.

More than a few red eye recipes claim to be original or authentic. I don’t believe there’s an original recipe. Cooks deglaze with liquid. A pan sauce made from coffee and grease was inevitable and doubtless discovered on every trail and through every pass since Sufi monks invented jitters in the 15^th Century, or whatever other story of the first brewed coffee is ascendant of a moment.

Camp Mountain Lake went to hell a few years after I left. The place shut down and was abandoned. A Facebook page popped up so old campers were able to trade snapshots from endless summers. A few intrepid alums explored the old site and posted archaeological pics of overgrown cabins and barely recognizable boathouses. Someone bought it a few years ago, redid and repaired the place, and reopened as a glamping compound. Hipsters got it.

Below is red eye gravy made at home by older people with air conditioners. Full stop. Hipster takeover of my former camp is coincidental and not to be extended metaphorically to besmirch the recipe.

Gentrified Camp Mountain Lake Red-Eye Gravy

• 1 shallot, minced

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced

• 8 oz. Pancetta, diced

• handful flat leaf parsley, chopped

• 2 cups coffee, or more as needed

• chicken stock, if needed

• unsalted butter, as needed

• flour, all-purpose is fine

• optional: some heat – pepper flakes, cayenne, Tabasco, habanero – whatever you like and however much you choose

Finely chop the shallot, garlic, and parsley.

Set a skillet over medium-high heat. Get it good and hot, add pancetta and make grease.

Cook the pancetta until it’s ready to eat. If you’re not a frequent pancetta cooker, it doesn’t take much. You’re basically browning cubes of bacon so firm it up and let it develop some darker colors—a little char is nice. Add the shallot, and continue, stirring everything around now and then for thirty seconds. Add the garlic and continue stirring for thirty more. Pour in the coffee, let half or so boil away. Sometimes I add chicken stock if the coffee is too astringent, sometimes I don’t. Make that call yourself. Throw in the parsley and whatever heat, if any, you prefer. I used a pinch of cayenne and added a pinch more after tasting at the end.

I’ve gotten lazy with roux and that’s made a difference in my life. I used to fret over ratio, wonder if this or that calls for toasted flour, and overall make like I’m fete-ing Cajun royalty rather than trying to get whatever’s in front of me to stick to the back of a metal soup spoon. Now I put a few pats of butter on a cutting board, pour a little flour over it, and mash it with my thumb. It’s a little more involved than I make it sound. There’s pinching with one or two other fingers, but that’s about it.

I don’t care how much pseudo-roux I make as long as it’s enough. Take a few chips or flakes of roux and whisk it in. Repeat until it looks thick enough. After that, taste for salt and pepper and serve.

This was great over chicken thighs but not terribly photogenic. Here it is in glory with a polenta cake.

Upscale campfire grub. Yell “Come and get it!” and dance a chuckwagon cookie jig while dressed like Fred Astaire.

The work week’s nearly over; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Maxwell Bodenheim didn’t end well. There’s a sense in here and there bios that he was doing just fine, a near toast of a borough, and then things went south. That’s not quite right. He started south. Somewhere in between, he made a name of himself. That there was a high point is tribute to his talents, and given my assessment, the disposition of time allowing for his inconsistent deployment of those talents. He wasn’t a good guy: cantankerous, woman beating, and salacious. That last I forgive.

Maxwell Bodenheim didn’t begin well. He was born in Hermanville, Mississippi, far left of geographical state center, about where Louisiana’s laces would droop, but not near enough the river to expect growth. It was a timber yard with a railroad stop and an Episcopal church. His family moved to Chicago when he was seven or eight where he discovered and delighted in trouble.

Booted from high school, he joined the army, punched an officer, went AWOL, and spent a year in military prison. Once out, he did some migrant work before heading back to Chicago. I’m not sure when he started writing poetry, but around this time he got noticed. His work was picked up by Poetry, included in anthologies with big names like TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, palled around with writers Ben Hecht and Sherwood Anderson, and pinned his name to the eruption of artistic energy known as the Chicago Renaissance.

In the mid 1920s he moved to New York, Greenwich Village in particular. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties he picked up the nickname “Bogey.” As a New Yorker, he dubbed himself “The King of Greenwich Village Bohemians.” There was no recreation or shedding of his past on taking a new title. He was an ass as Bogey and kept on being an ass as Bohemian Royalty. Wikipedia preserves a quote from a 2012 John Strausbaugh Chisler article where the critic writes of Bodenheim’s “haughty, insulting demeanor, and his habit of trying to steal other men’s women right under their noses, got him regularly socked on the jaw and thrown out of bars, soirees and the fauxhemian revels at Webster Hall.”

He fell in love with Minna Schein with whom he had a son and bopped around Chicago, New York, England, and Hollywood. Whether he stole her and got socked for his trouble, I don’t know, but the couple married in 1918. That same year Minna and Myself, his first book of poetry and the one from which all of this week’s selections come, was published. He’d publish eight more plus an anthology and I suppose I should slip in that wrote thirteen novels as well. This early poetry is uneven.

Here are the first two numbered stanzas from the opening poem.

from Minna
Maxwell Bodenheim (1892-1954)

I

Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with still-born touch.
With little whips of dead words
Silence cuts your lips to a keener red.
Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,
And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.
Night will soon whisk away this room
But you are already invisible.

II

Your cheeks are spent diminuendos
Sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips.
Your eyes are gossamer coquettes
Ringed with the sparkling breath of dead loves.
Your body strays into lanterns of form
Strewing the night within this room….
The light dies; you are still
And spill the frolicing night of your heart
Over the darkness about you, making it pale.

He dives into one metaphor and then another without coming up for air so we have twilight pushing with fingers that are pregnant but have still-born touch. Dead words cut with silence and lips run red and hand protect dead from dark but it doesn’t matter because you’re beyond light. It’s exhausting but impressive if you can pull it off. He comes up winning more often that not, even if it’s tinged by eagerness, as if he’d decided a poet rapid fires imagery and having decided, presses on no matter. There’s not a lot of gear shifting, and when there is, rather than enjoy the moment, I’m exasperated with him for not doing so when he should have at other points.

There are XXVII sections of “Minna,” all a but few of them stand alone stanzas like the above. That length and density make ripe for cliches and recycled poetisms. It’s got a “morning glory face” and its kin, but he generally impresses with, if not originality, original deployment of those cliches even if he speeds—relentlessly—through leaving no opportunity to scrutinize syntax. Not all his metaphors follow logically, but they’re catchy. He not a great poet, but manages more often than not to be enjoyable. On paper.

His novel Replenishing Jessica made headlines as far off as France and Britain. He and his publisher were hit with an obscenity charge that the government couldn’t make stick, so he carried danger as an upsetter and panache as a giant slayer. Bodenheim attracted ardent female fans. One cast-off tried suicide. A second succeeded. A third succeeded and blessed the yellow press by being found with Bodenheim’s picture in her hand. A fourth was killed in a subway accident. Melpomene or Thalia, tragedy or comedy, decreed the love letters he’d written to her be scattered about the train car. Bogey was solid copy. He and Minna didn’t divorce until 1938, so this all happened with her suffering (I assume) at home.

He could be charming.

Change

I came upon a maiden
Blowing rose petals in the air
And catching them, as they fell,
Upon quick fingertips
Her laugh fell lighter than the petals
And dropped little gestures upon my forehead.
I gave her sadness and she blew it up
As she had blown the rose petals:
And it almost seemed joy as her fingers caught it.
But I was only a wanderer plaited with dust,
Who gave her new petals to play with.

I haven’t seen any accusations that he beat any of his three wives other than the last. She prostituted herself and he didn’t like that. I accept that there’s a time in every wife beater’s career when he first lands a punch, but think it’s fair to assume if he hit one, he probably hit the others.

After Jazz age fame Bodenheim became a sot, drenched in alcoholism and reduced to selling scribbled poems for drinks. There’s a sub-genre of anecdote where literary minded sorts pass through Greenwich Village, get annoyed by a transient in a bar, and after telling the guy off are remonstrated by locals: “Do you have any idea who that was?” He was already begging when he met his second wife, Grace. His last novel came out in 1933 and he didn’t publish a bound collection of poetry between 1930 and 1942. There’s mention of odd jobs and inconsistent publication in magazines and newspapers, inclusion in a few anti-fascist and socialist anthologies, but his primary occupation seems to have been stringing drinks together as best he could, all the while insisting on his dignity, his defiance, and refusal to “bootlick.”

After Grace suffered with cancer and died, he met and married Ruth. She was nearly thirty years younger than he was so probably more adaptable to living in parks and flophouses as they did. She, as mentioned, brought in old fashioned money while he panhandled and scribbled. One inspired innovation: he’d sit on a sidewalk with a sign that said “Blind” around his neck.

This next poem was written in 1918, so he’s not referencing his blind beggar scam. It doesn’t carry any foreshadowing, qualify as a coincidence, or rise to irony. Seeing it knowing what he’d come to pokes at me, makes me wonder about when paths diverge and whether we are all of what we do or are we what we are when we are. That ponderousness is nearly supported by the text. Meta is as something else does.

Blind

Blinder than oak-trees in the wind
Endlessly weaving sighs into a poem
To sight,
He sits, the light of one pale purple lantern
Seeping into his dream-hollowed face,
Like floating, transparent words
Pale with unuttered meanings.
He mends a flute and sighs as though
Its shadow leaned heavily upon his heart
And told him things his dead eyes could not grasp.

Another poem that’s poignant in retrospect.

Poet-Vagabond Grown

The dust of many roads has been my grey wine.
Surprised beech-trees have bowed
With me, to the plodding morning
Humming tunes frail as webs of dead perfume,
To his love in golden silks, the departed moon.
Maidens like rose-flooded statues
Have bathed me in the wine of their silence.

But now I walk on, alone.
And only after watching many evenings,
Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light,
To persuade myself that I am young.

In 1954, he and Ruth made friends with a dishwasher named Charlie Weinberg, who let them spend a night in his apartment. Bodenheim woke up to find either Ruth and Charlie having sex or Charlie raping Ruth. Regardless of which, he objected and consequently was shot and killed by Weinberg who turned on Ruth and stabbed her repeatedly until she died. “I ought to get a medal,” he later said. “I killed two communists.”

His poetry changed over time. The short declaritories of Minna and Myself gave way to longer spindly poems, tetrameter to the eye but lacking meter, single columned free verse indented after short jabs. I don’t have access to any of his vagrant work, but Paul Maher Jr., in his 2019 Please Kill Me article about a 1951 meeting between Bondenheim and Jack Kerouac, writes of Bondenheim,

“He saw no beauty sufficient enough to distill into sonnet form. ‘[B]eauty,’ he explained to Hecht, ‘has become a wounded ignored vagabond; truth dodges wearily through a host of figures pretending to be truth; and imagination is a ghost flirting with tantalizing memories.’”

I can’t help but imagine they were bleak.

Tough Poets Press is making a go of reviving interest in the guy with reprints of a couple of novels and a collection of essays. Project Gutenberg has a few of his works available, but that’s museum curation. He’s largely forgotten. His son, possibly in part out of deserved pique at being named Solbert, kept a distance, was embarrassed by his father’s Bohemian life and disastrous reputation, and died six years after Maxwell.

There’s not much left. He a had a talent for image and metaphor that, with a little discipline, could have made something memorable. Instead, he drank and pissed it all away. Didn’t even get a Mickey Rourke movie out of it.

Death

I shall walk down the road.
I shall turn and feel upon my feet
The kisses of Death, like scented rain.
For Death is a black slave with little silver birds
Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.
He will tell me, his voice like jewels
Dropped into a satin bag,
How he has tip-toed after me down the road,
His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me.
Then he will graze me with his hands
And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds
Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

Ezra Pound was a very good poet but not a master versifier. I think he knew that. “Major Poet” is a term reserved for the greats who define their time and turn swaths of contemporaries into satellites. Yeats is a Major Poet, as is Eliot. “Minor Poet” sounds dismissive, though it’s not. Don’t mistake Minor for bad or run of the mill. Bad or run of the mill poets are called poets. A Minor Poet merits consideration enough have status conferred, to have demonstrated excellence if not tremendous influence.

In his essay “What Is Minor Poetry?,” Eliot picks out Robert Herrick, noting that he shows no “continuous conscientious purpose.” Herrick “is more the purely natural and un-self-conscious man, writing his poems as the fancy seizes him,” and it being Eliot writing, assumes we see and will make our own “gathering his rosebuds as he may” crack. Auden was more pragmatic, declaring that Major Poets have college courses devoted to their work and their work alone while Minor Poets do not. Auden would have made the rosebud joke.

Pound is considered a Major Poet, though as a testament to the fullness of critical criteria. Line for line or poem for poem, he doesn’t compare to his friends Yeats or Eliot. He’s not as fluid in his verse, but he’s dense. His lines are saturated with references and allusion. He’s distinguished by influence, as a man who set a course and guided the development of the art. As an editor, promoter, and anthologist, he did more to shape Modern Poetry than, probably, anyone else of his era. He was blessed with an ear, an eye, and confidence. He looked at The Waste Land, Ulysses, poems by Frost, by HD, Cummings, William Carlos Williams, gave his thoughts on what did and didn’t work, and relied on the genius of the editee to fix the issue. He treated his own work the same, but fixing was a struggle. He spotted flaws he didn’t know how to correct. It must have been maddening.

Frustration set him globetrotting. Pound was born in a small town called Hailey in the Idaho Territory. His family were frontier types with postal appointments, General Land Office, and front-line civic minded organizational interests expected in pioneering hagiographies. His mother wanted to enjoy the results rather than the credit for civilizing and took Ezra East. His father found a job in Philadelphia and there they settled.

He was not without literary stimulation at home. He met William Carlos Williams at U Penn. The two became friends and mutually respected professional contemporaries. I’m not sure under what circumstances he met Hilda Doolittle. She was a classics minded student at Bryn Mawr and he was just returned to Philadelphia from a post graduate program in New York. In any case, he fell for her. For the next few years he pursued an MA in Romance languages, sailed on grants to Spain and France to study jesters and troubadours, and, all the while, publishing here and there, trying on styles, attempting poetic revivals, and pressing himself. America fueled his friend Williams. He saw opportunity to define a national poetics independent of Europe. Pound didn’t want that. The thrill was transforming and advancing the old by making from it something new. He saw America as vulgar, not pretty enough to dance with.

As he writes in the first poem below, he tried America and gave it up at thirty-one though that would men 1916. By that time he’d been living in London for two years, having bounced from Gibraltar to Venice and points between. I assume at the age of thirty-one there was a decision or shift in his thinking that represented a split. He was an American spending time in Europe one day and the next he was an ex-pat. In 1920, he’d decide London constrained him. Paris would later do the same. He may or may not have tired of Rapallo. The US government arrested him for treason after WWII and constrained him less subtly than predominant regional artistic attitudes had, so Rapallo didn’t get a chance for him to tire of it. Prison, St. Elizabeth’s mental ward, and eventual pardon led back to Rapallo and harmlessness, but he was an old man by then, less prone to wandering or running.

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Contacts and Life) is Pound’s farewell to England. That’s the new title. Originally it was Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts) but in the 1950 he wrote to his publisher: “Note inversion in subtitle of Mauberley, NOT Life and Contacts but the actual order of the subject matter.” Contacts inform the life, I suppose. “Mauberley” is presented as one poem, though it’s divided into eighteen shorter poems. A great deal has been made of who is speaking when. Mauberley is a failed poet. According to whom you listen, Mauberley is Pound; Mauberley is an aspect of Pound; Mauberley is an independent character resembling Pound only because he served as vehicle for Pound’s concerns. And on and on. Maybe he was Elizabeth I or Francis Bacon. It’s made more confusing by shifts in perspective from one poem or group of poems to the next.

I’m codifying and invoking what I’ll call going forward “Graves’s Maxim,” paraphrased from Robert Graves’s “The Why of the Weather” as “Since no one knows the why of the weather, every poor fool is licensed to try to explain it.” So, my two cents: Mauberley is an aspect of Pound, one which he’s shedding. At times he writes in reflection with regret, at times as an invigorated poet hoping, and at times as an observer. There’s nothing repellent to Pound in the observer or revitalized innovator. It’s the concrete he’s got problems with. The past, the one that happened, didn’t live up. So he distances himself. He gives the past a name and leaves him behind.

The poem was published in 1920, announcing the second of his geographical fixes. Having left the States, he’d done what he could do in England. The Continent, where his troubadours played, held promise.

The cycle begins with a primer from the observer recounting Pound leaving tawdry American origins as prelude to his tawdry English present.

E.P. Ode Pour L’Election de son Seplulchre
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start–

No, hardly, but seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;

Idmen gar toi panth, hos eni troie
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.

His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.

Unaffected by “the march of events,”
He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentuniesme
de son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem.

The following poems decry modern London. It’s a crass, commercial time. Men no longer venerate the classical.

The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.

There’s further commentary on the Pre-Raphealites, popular writers, and drivers of taste.

It’s tempting to mock Pound’s “It’s not me! It’s you!” outbursts at the world for not appreciating his genius, so I do. He’s too precious by half in almost every venture, but he’s daring—damned admirably daring—and possessed of faith that he’s doing something worth doing. I don’t know if his frequent successes fuel his conviction that his failures are not his own, “but for a better audience.” What is clear from his career is that personal fame was not his prime motivation. Certainly he had an outsized ego, but so much of his energy burned promoting what he loved and admired more than for himself. He’s the editor behind The Waste Land, the letter writer insisting Harriet Monroe print Ford, Aldington, and Frost, the fixer bundling clothes for the Joyce children and begging donations for that family so the father can keep writing. He knows what has merit, far better than us. Why don’t we see that? Why do we vex him?

“Envoi (1919)” reveals the poet Mauberley (or not depending on the critic.) The poem is heavy handed in evoking an English lyrical tradition going back to the Elizabethans. It’s peppered with “hadst” and “thou” and critically, references Edmund Waller’s (1606-1687) poem “Song: Go Lovely Rose,” singling that work out from his body by referencing Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who put the poem to song (It sound like an evening with an elderly aunt if you’re curious).

In the poem, Waller argues a shy girl should come out and be seen, that beauty passes, time takes its toll, and her youth is not to be wasted in hiding.

from Song: Go Lovely Rose

Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

It’s a “seize the day” seduction piece in the vein of Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” but once removed. The speaker is giving advice to a younger man in pursuit of the shy girl. After the above, Waller gets pointed.

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

I’m assuming the suitor didn’t use that part. In short, engage the world and share your beauty or it was never beauty at all. You live only once.

Pound divided poets. On one hand, there were those in whom he noted an “Epicurean receptivity, a certain aloofness, an observation of contacts and auditions.” In others he saw engagement, “kinship to the vital universe.” (Those quotes highlighted by Vincent Miller in his excellent “Mauberley and His Critics.”) Pound prized the latter, but he knew himself. There was too much of the former in him. He was the Imagist. More than most Pound valued “the thing,” a frozen moment. He was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.

“Envoi (1919)” is in ironic contrast with Waller. Where he calls to bid her come out and live while she can, Pound/Mauberley asks to immortalize her “in magic amber laid.” He’s to make a museum piece of her, trade her vitality for permanence. Done strait faced it’s an assessment of Pound’s faults thus far, of the Mauberley failings he wants to leave behind.

The italics are Pounds and I can’t begin to tell the conflicting opinions as to why he did so. It certainly signals something and the poem is a turning point, though it would be without slant. Some say it announces a speaker distinct from the rest of the poem while others tell me it’s definitely Pound, Mauberley, or written as some outside exemplar or cautionary tale. Feel free to exercise license and explain it.

Envoi (1919)

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.

The poem immediately after is titled “Mauberley” and carries the subtitle “1920” to signal a break from what culminated in the preceeding, marked 1919. It begins with the epigraph, “Vacuos exercet in aera morsus,” a line from the Aeneid that translates to “He deals empty bites into the air,” describing dogs chasing elusive deer. Versions of that futility recur in later poems. The Mauberley character gives up, or is in the process of giving up, his ambitions. Pound compares his course as trading attempts at Renaissance etchings to drudge in “Messalina”: flat copies suited for coins—“medallions” becomes the term.

As the cycle goes on, there’s failed love, “social inconsequence,” and escape to Pacific isolation where the poet dies.

Throughout there are references to The Odyssey. There’s the recurring assertion that Flaubert is the speaker’s Penelope, that the literary home and ultimate artistic destination is Europe. In one of the poems decrying the state of England, “Siena Mi Fe’; Disfecemi Maremma,” Pound enlists the poet Lionel Johnson, who died after a fall in a pub, to recall Elpenor, who fell from Circe’s roof and died unnoticed, assumed to have stayed on Circe’s island but later encountered in Hades where he implored Odysseus to go back and give him burial rights. The hero and crew did so and marked Elpenor’s grave with an oar.

And so did Pound to Mauberley, the aspect that continued to haunt his work despite his attempts to exorcize it. Ending the penultimate poem:

Coracle of Pacific voyages,
The unforcasted beach;
Then on an oar
Read this:

“I was
And I no more exist;
Here drifted
An hedonist.”

The final poem has been interpreted as a last failure of the Mauberley persona. Others have it as Pound assessing his career to date. I think it’s Pound doubling down on intentions. It’s defiance. I’m not alone in this. Titled “Medallion” after the lifeless works of Mauberley, he points to Luini whose body of work is considered passable but for the standout “Head of a Girl.” There’s a reference to rising Venus as represented in Reinach’s art history book, Apollo. Exquisite detail, metallic, masterwork.

In his later works Pound ties Aphrodite to topaz. I can’t find a referent. The connection seems to be an invention for his own mythology but it’s one he put to use in the The Cantos and, I’m told, Homage to Sexstus Propertius. Below is its first appearance.

Medallion

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.

The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.

Honey-red, closing the face-oval,
A basket-work of braids which seem as if they were
Spun in King Minos’ hall
From metal, or intractable amber;

The face-oval beneath the glaze,
Bright in its sauve bounding-line, as,
Beneath half-watt rays,
The eyes turn topaz.

The cold, hard, precise image warms and the eyes show life. It was that there are “eyes” and not “eye” that first clued me towards this poem as Pound gathering power than Mauberley tilting at windmills. Medallions—cameos in my mind—are flat profiles. Earlier Pound writes of Mauberley trying to “convey the relation / Of eye-lid and cheek-bone.” Not “eye-lids” or “cheekbones.” I presumed the subjects were in profile so the mention of eyes in the final stanza of the whole is dramatic. I may be wrong about this. Pound may have envisioned full frontal or three quarter medallions.

If that’s the case and I am wrong, the last line is still a wonder. The eyes are infused with desire, alive. If I’m right, the last verb “turn” carries meaning in addition to “are infused with.” There is action in the image. It’s turning towards us, sparked to life by it’s author.

Pound won’t let go; apotheosis intact. His failures buried, he still has the mission. He will go to Europe, learn, pay homage, and keep plying. “Real Imagism has never been tried.”

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly finito; barely a few hours left. What are you doing? You’re not getting anything done between now and quitting time. Cut out and stop pretending. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

from Fire
Dorothy Wellesley (1889-1956)

(‘Does not our life consist of the four elements?’
—Shakespeare)

The great stone hearth has gone.
An oblong electric tube is set in the wall
Like a cheap jewel.
Men converge no more to fire,
Men are on with the isolation:
The pride of science stands, and the final desolation.

No smoke, no danger, you tell me with veneration:
Much dies with the fire, young man,
More than one generation:
Man has known fire more than one generation.

That’s a tremendous opening. Yeats came across Dorothy Wellesley’s poetry in 1935 while putting together The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935 and had to meet her. According to Kieth Alldritt in his W.B. Yeats: The Man and the Milieu, the great poet was overcome: “My eyes filled with tears. I read in excitement that was more delightful because it showed that I had not lost my understanding of poetry.” Yeats further honored her with commentary in the Oxford Modern Verse introduction, writing “I knew nothing of her until a few months ago I read the opening passage in Horses, delighted by its changes in pace, abrupt assertion then a long sweeping line, by its vocabulary modern and precise.”

It wasn’t to be a long friendship. Yeats died in 1939, but in the short four intervening years, the two became friends and poetic sounding boards. Maybe more. I have no evidence of an affair, but you pick things up. They were “very” close. He made several trips to Wellesley’s Sussex home, Penns in the Rocks. Pointing towards one conclusion: Yeats’s wife Georgie remained at their Dublin Home, Riversdale. She was well aware of what he’d gotten up to on others of his unaccompanied trips, writing to him in a letter, “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.” Towards the other: Wellesley, or “Dottie” to the close, shared Penns in the Rocks with her lover Hilda Matheson. I have no idea how modern these Moderns were but when he died in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera, Georgie and Yeats’s final mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald, were bedside, holding his hands. That night, wife and lover took turns holding vigil with Dottie and Matheson.

Before Yeats and Matheson, Wellesley was one of Vita Sackville-West’s flings, which is a far too flippant way of describing a relationship I know only the bare details of, but Sackville-West keeps turning up. As a kid I was told by a friend’s grandmother that her own Bohemian mother, so my friend’s great, once shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart. “Once shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart” is one of those phrases that you don’t notice you’ve heard three or four times until you’ve heard it six or seven times and by then it’s too late to accurately judge ubiquity. I heard it enough times to first think it was a jazz-age version of “my uncle was at Woodstock” before deciding it was a euphemism for lesbianism; not to be taken seriously. It turns out, per Bhamwiki, my friend’s great-grandmother shared an apartment with Amelia Earhart in Abington, Pennsylvania. Now I have no idea what to think.

I’d like to float as a competing euphemism “Gardened with Vita-Sackville West.” From the anonymous biographer at Poetry Foundation:

“A founding member of the National Trust’s garden committee, Sackville-West wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer and was awarded a Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society. She died of cancer at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where the gardens she created with her husband, writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, remain open to the public, preserved by the National Trust.”

The Sackville-West affair I know most about was with Mary Campbell, Roy Campbell’s wife. It seems that Mary felt rapturous while Vita saw it more as a dalliance. Wellesley, a passionate gardener herself according to the biography written by her granddaughter, Jane Wellesley, seemed to have held expectations more in concert. Their relationship was consequent enough that Wellesley left her husband and children to carry on.

The two women remained involved from roughly 1922 through 1932. There’s guesswork in those dates, but Wellesley was separated in 1922, Sackville-West dedicated her epic, The Land, to Wellesley in 1926, and it appears there was only a short spell between breaking up (though they remained friends) with Sackville-West and taking up with Matheson. That pair I’m told were together for the last eight years of Matheson’s life which ended in 1940. They were on again-off-again or had an understanding as Sackville-West was gardening with Virginia Woolf around that time as well. Very modern.

“Fire” is the first of her poems as arranged by Yeats in Oxford Modern. He gave her a surprising fifteen pages in the original format. For comparison, TS Eliot got twelve. Pound got six. He only gave himself nine. I’m not implying favoritism. It was the poetry that drew him to her. This wasn’t a case of him being smitten and that coloring his professional judgment.

The opening, as I mentioned, is tremendous. It’s a long poem; six of her fifteen pages. As Yeats wrote, she changes pace. I’ll defer to Yeats, but not all the pace changes are welcome. The following I like alone:

Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker,
Blood, and bread, and taper,
Meat, and wheat, and light,
Along with Jones the draper
The wife finds these in little shops
On the right of the undertaker.

Not as an aside or break in the outset’s tone. And then she nails what should have been the ending:

Send him with torches, blaze the pyre,
Far from town and street:
Burn his body on the shore
Where Earth, Air, and Water meet,
As all poets know,
As all dead men know.

But continues with a non-aphorism in aphorism’s clothes.

Death’s the first and everlasting,
Life the lean time and the fasting,
Birth the end and everlasting,
Whether we will or no.

I’m forced to pause and adopt a more sonorous voice. I didn’t want to do that.

I think Aspects of History has an excerpt from Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit, that biography written by the granddaughter. If it isn’t an excerpt, then they have an entertaining teaser for the book written by the author. Jane Wellseley shares a note and tales from her grandmother’s drop of-a-hat trip to Persia. It’s a charming history. With a few companions the ladies saw sites, braved bandit lands, always on the lookout for desert flowers.

Dottie left the group before the last leg and flew out on her own. Virginia Woolf, who never flew herself, asked her to write about the experience. Jane—which sounds overly familiar but the page is awash in “Wellesley” so forgive the intimacy—shares from Dottie’s response.

“Then came the Caspian. I looked slap down into those green depths & into all that caviar. I got hungry. I thought: this has been for years the place of my dreams, the land between the old caravan routes, & the empire of Trebizond, & here on the map you’ve put your finger & said: ‘I wish I were there.’”

Like Yeats before with her poetry, I’m delighted by her prose.

Again, this next is taken from a longer poem. I don’t have a date on this, but I don’t think I’m taking much risk in saying she wrote it after her Persian trip.

from Asian Desert

Here she has no heart,
Lies not as the earth in other lands
With her limbs apart.

Here strongly the sap is outwrung,
Here the memory divine
Of an old woman is mine
So old she was never young.

Ah, but see, is she not beautiful?
Hank of stone, wrinkle of rock,
Pared, seared, stark with age?
Is she not tenderer far than what she allures
Man on his pilgrimage?

Such were rail routes that the journey to Tehran took Wellesley and Sackville-West through Moscow, where they visited Lenin’s tomb.

from Lenin

Greedy of detail I saw,
In those two minutes allowed,
The man was not wax, as they said,
But a corpse, for a thumb nail was black,
The thing was Lenin.

Then a woman beside me cried
With a strange voice, foreign, loud.
And I, who fear not life nor death, and those who have died
Only a little, was inwardly shaken with fear,
For I stood in the presence of God;
The voice I heard was the voice of all generations
Acclaiming new faiths, horrible, beautiful faiths;
I knew that the woman wailed as women wailed long ago
For Christ was a wax man too,
When they carried him down to the grave.

Jane tells us they stayed at the British Mission in Moscow, and right after that writes, “‘Look here,’ she said to Vita, ‘I believe people are watching us and listening to what we say. I don’t think we ought to talk.’”

Was Wellesley worried that Soviets were listening, or that in the British Mission, artists were watched—Bloomsbury affiliation bestowing protection and drawing suspicion—for communist sympathies? I don’t know. They were very modern.

I just got an email from my son’s college informing parents that our little darlings have to be out of the dorms by May, 9. That went quickly. Tempis fugit, carpe diem, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

Honestly, that really snuck up on me. Freshman year: Almost down.

In the mean time, do that last one. Happy POETS Day.

First, a little verse.

***

I read about poets lives a good deal, and have decided that a lot of literary immortality is born from not having any idea what you’re doing on any front—politics, relationships, plain ole human decency—and making a ton of noise while you try to figure it out.

Not all, but many. Mild mannered insurance agent Wallace Stevens threw a punch at Hemingway. Pound blathered on about passports, clothing drives, new, new, new, and economic fantasy. The upright TS Eliot kept well within the rails when not tearing hundreds year old poetic tradition to pieces and filling the void with continuum-compliant fixes. He may have been the messiest of the lot. It’s seamless energy. Even in tubercular throes, Keats, Dunbar, Praed, and Lawrence produced poetry, sent out letters, remained exhibitionist observers. From one thing to another, promiscuous passions, stardom, hermitage; there is either a singularity of focus in the moment frequent to literary success or a conspiracy of biographers leading me to believe so. And the energy needs focus. One thing succeeds, fails, or finishes. What’s next?

The great Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid was a fascist in the 1920s when everybody who was a loud and proud fascist or a loud and proud anti-fascist thought Roy Campbell was the opposite and got into public spats with him. But MacDiarmid was too much a political gypsy, so left fascism behind for Communism. The local Scots variant wasn’t sufficient and so, having had a taste, moved on to Stalinism. I don’t know the order or the particulars other than that in the 1930s he was kicked out of the Communist Party of Great Britain twice, at least once for being too nationalist, and kicked out of the Scottish Nationalist Party, even as a founding member of its predecessor organization, the National Party of Scotland, for being too communist. Bygones happened somewhere along the line as he stood for Parliament in 1945 under the SNP banner and 1964 as CPGB.

I think it’s wrong to read MacDiarmid as a steady conscience not fitting quite into so bouncing between parties. He was mercurial. In a given span he’s throwing bombs in both directions. One of his biographers, Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch of Glasgow University, is quoted in a 2010 Sunday Times article under the headline “Hugh MacDiarmid: I’d prefer Nazi rule,” as saying “MacDiarmid seemed to just fire off ideas and antagonisms without thinking them through.” His daughter-in-law and literary executor, Deirdre Grieve, is quoted in the same article: “I think he entertained almost every ideal it was possible to entertain at one point or another.” Just Hugh being Hugh.

I came upon something that I had to read twice, do a few searches, and then read those searches twice. George Orwell put MacDiarmid’s name to MI5 as someone to watch for Soviet sympathies. This was in 1949. Orwell was no fan of the Soviets and listed several he feared might be open to giving whatever the British condemnatory equivalent of “aid and comfort” to the enemy is. I don’t know what MacDiarmid was up to, but it’s eyebrow raising to read that the author of 1984 thought a little monitoring prudent.

Once you know a guy is into totalitarian politics, it’s hard to pin anything as his focus. Politics saturates the whole. But, he was a poet. Maybe first and foremost, though a nationalist poet who saw his work as a vehicle for a Scottish literary renascence, breaking away from the oppressive English, and elevating the pretty much dead Lallan (Lowland) language. Politics.

The problem, or obstacle, was the indifference of the Scots. There wasn’t a single language to revive so much as a passel of dialects. It was all Creole and no French, with none of the shoots a clear true heir. Poor MacDiarmid had to scrabble together whatever he could from his Lowland upbringing, scour John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, and impose familiar (English) grammar on the result. He lived on the island of Whalsey in the Shetlands from 1933 to 1945, and I’m sure he must have made friends who’d give him an honest answer, but per Wikipedia, “Local legend has it that he asked about Whalsay words and some of the Whalsay folk made up fantastical words that did not exist.”

Michael Glover’s “Thistle & thorns” (The New Criterion, March 1994) is one of the more entertaining articles I’ve read on any subject. He takes MacDiarmid down a host of pegs but it’s clear Glover respects the man a great deal as a poet. It’s a kindly takedown, as if he pulled MacDiarmid aside and said “Have you thought about what you’re doing? Do you see how this looks?” From the article:

“The prophet, sad to say, was not honored in his own country. MacDiarmid’s Scots readers, English speakers to a man, were perplexed. Who owned this synthetic language, this tissue of willful obscurities? they asked. And what were they to do with it? MacDiarmid sighed and rent his shirt. For if there was one nation that MacDiarmid had an even greater contempt for than the English, it was undoubtedly his own: that people of his who deemed ‘their ignorance their glory’; who had willingly accepted the terms of slavery that the English had handed down to them; and who had no capacity to think anything other than their own ‘dour provincial thochts.’”

There’s no hatred like that reserved for the most likely ally. Back to politics: Leninists hate Trotskyites hate Stalinists, Right-Libertarians hate Consequitialist Libertarians, Jacobins hate all in time, and Orwell turned in Soviet types. So the Scots earned MacDiarmid’s scorn. More so did those who made a fetish over Robert Burns. To be clear, he loved Burns. But you don’t get Burns. Not like he did.

His most famous work is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, a two-thousand six hundred and eighty-five line epic about a man walking home from the pub, thinking about the world. It’s a patchwork of styles and subjects; those ranging from the writings of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Isadora Duncan and a union strike, and, all this per Wikipedia, “develops and consciously parodies compositional techniques used by poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.” It’s a well respected and praised work. I’ve read bits here and there. It’s a mess if you try to wring out every meaning. It’s the authors Esperanto so there’s no one reader that gets it without a glossary, but there’s music. There’s no denying the sound.

Here’s an excerpt where he gives what for to Burns fans.

from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)

You canna gang to a Burns supper even
Wi’oot some wizened scrunt o’ a knock-knee
Chinee turns roon to say, “Him Haggis—velly goot!”
And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.

No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote
But misapplied is a’body’s property,
And gin there was his like alive the day
They’d be the last a kennin’ haund to gie—

Croose London Scotties wi’ their braw shirt fronts
And a’ their fancy freen’s, rejoicin’
That similah gatherings in Timbuctoo,
Bagdad—and Hell, nae doot—are voicin’

Burns’ sentiments o’ universal love,
In pidgin’ English or in wild-fowl Scots,
And toastin’ ane wha’s nocht to them but an
Excuse for faitherin’ Genius wi’ their thochts.

His real name was Christopher Murray Grieve. Hugh MacDiarmid was a pen name. For those keeping score, he used a fake name and a fake language, both evoking a nostalgic Scottish tradition, in order to reassert a muscular Scots literature. It’s absurd, but it kinda worked. Again, he was a very talented poet.

It’s possible for all the barbs and pokes of the Glover article to land and for the following, from the excellent unsung biographers who toil at Poetry Foundation, to be true.

“C. M. Grieve, best known under his pseudonym Hugh MacDiarmid, is credited with effecting a Scottish literary revolution which restored an indigenous Scots literature and has been acknowledged as the greatest poet that his country has produced since Robert Burns. As a writer, political theorist, revolutionary, prophet, and multifaceted personality, he was a man to be reckoned with, even by those who did not agree that he was one of Great Britain’s major poets. Ian Hamilton wrote that MacDiarmid made enemies largely because ‘he makes his own rules, contemns categories, cracks open water-tight compartments, bestraddles disciplines, scorns social, cultural, and academic cliques and claques, and affirms . . . that it is not failure but low aim that is criminal.’”

Once more for those keeping score, that’s “prophet” twice, and from different sources.

The Norton Anthology of the English Language, Vol II, footnotes an explanation for the next poem.

“This is one of a series of four lyrics titles Au Clair de la Lune (“By the light of the moon”). MacDiarmid has written of it: ‘The first two lines of “Moonstruck” mean: “When the world is dozed like a top at the height of its spin, that the light-looking crow of a body, the moon…” I can think of no English equivalent which can bring out the complicated sense of that description of the moon, at once insubstantial and disreputable looking, radiant and yet dark with sinister influences.”

It also has a footnote defining “peerieweerie” as “Diminished to a mere thread of sound.” I am charmed and will be using the word.

Moonstruck

When the warl’s couped soon’ as a peerie
That licht-lookin’ craw o’ a body, the moon,
Sits on the fower cross-win’s
Peerin’ a’ roon’.

She’s seen me—she’s seen me—an’ straucht
Loupit clean on the quick o’my hert.
The quhither o’ cauld gowd’s fairly
Gi’en me a stert.

An’ the roarin’ o’ oceans noo’
Is peerieweerie to me:
Thunner’s a tinklin’ bell: an’ Time
Whud’s like a flee.

MacDiarmid butted heads frequently and publicly with Edwin Muir who believed that if Scotland were to have a national literature, it should be English, as speakers of almost every dialect knew English as well, to one degree or another. His 1938 Scott and Scotland drew ire from most quarters, but he was right that if there was a commonality to be expressed, the language was secondary to expressing it and English was already in place for the Scots. Glover is frank on the point:

“…the humiliations suffered by the native languages of Scotland…began in earnest much earlier; earlier even than the uniting of the two crowns of England and Scotland in 1603.”

The Geneva Bible was the Bible of service in Scotland since 1579. It was translated into English, not Scots. When James I united the crown, he moved his court South. Court and church were creatures of the English language, and Scots in all its forms diminished.

In addition to Muir, MacDiarmid found new ground for battling Campbell; their Fascist dyspepsia launched a new conflict over MacDiarmid’s brand of Lallans he dubbed “Synthetic Scots.” Campbell was having none of it. He was born in South Africa, but to Scottish parents and carried second generation zeal for the old country. To him, the manufacturing was too much to overlook. There’s a poem Campbell wrote to mock the whole endeavour, but I can’t find a single stanza online or at the library. From the title, I suspect it’s amazing: “Ska-hawtch Wha Hae! A Likkle wee poom i’th’ Aulde Teashoppe Pidgin Brogue, Lallands or Butter-Scotch (Wi’ apooligees to MockDiarmid).”

MacDiarmid carried on the fight until one day he didn’t. He may have been unable to think of an “English equivalent which can bring out the complicated sense of that description of the moon,” but he was having trouble with everything else. For all his passion and the aid of the Jamieson Dictionary, the assembled Scots vocabulary was too small. It was limiting. So he started writing in English.

I can find no recorded apostasy. One day he railed against those who didn’t join his crusade, the next he abandoned it. I can’t find anything from Muir’ side either, though I’m sure there must have been something written somewhere. Maybe they thought, “Take the win.” He joined their side, no point in berating him for agreeing.

A last from Glover:

“And, true to his own estimation, that vituperative nature which held him in its thrall also caused him to give birth to much that was clumsy, ugly, ill-formed; to be silly, pedantic, naïve, and absurdly pretentious. And yet, amidst all this bluster, there is still some great poetry to be reckoned with.”

From Fascist, to damn Hitler, to at least the Nazis aren’t English, from preserving a heritage, to embracing a broader expression. All on a dime and all full steam. He’s a tremendous English poet for a rebellious Scot.

In the Children’s Hospital

“Does it matter? Losing your legs?”
Siegfried Sassoon

Now let the legless boy show the great lady
How well he can manage his crutches.
It doesn’t matter though the Sister objects,
“He’s not used to them yet,” when such is
The will of the Princess. Come, Tommy,
Try a few desperate steps through the ward.
Then the hand of Royalty will pat your head
And life suddenly cease to be hard.
For a couple of legs are surely no miss
When the loss leads to such an honour as this!
One knows, when one sees how jealous the rest
Of the children are, it’s been all for the best!—
But would the sound of your sticks on the floor
Thundered in her skull for evermore!

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

The work week’s nearly done and you’re spending these last few hours doing what exactly? Trying to look busy? Surreptitiously scanning restaurant reviews? Checking game times? Texting your friends about restaurants and game times? Cut it out and cut out. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

***

I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introduction reader if the introduction is relatively short or obscenely long. My theory is that I might as well read a short one and that a long one indicates something in the book requiring the long introduction; something I might otherwise miss. My experience shows mid-length ones to be fumbling, fawning, and filled with ten dollar praise of the sort grad students fuss out over beloved former teachers. If I like the book, I’ll read those after. It’s a slapdash theory, but it’s served me and I’m fixed in my habits.

Christian Lorentzen wrote the Introduction to the NYRB Classic edition of Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis, and I’m a little ticked off at him. He’s funny and drops some whispered-about biographical info, though he’s writing about Amis and the info is about infidelity so it was loud whispering to begin with, but entertaining. I’m not going to work out the chronology, but Harper’s claims Lorentzen as a contributor, as do the London Review of Books and others. This intro is a small sample size, but I’m content to dub him one of the good guys and read what I come upon in the future. Still, he ticked me off. I’m pretty sure he gave away the ending of the book.

Not so terribly that I won’t read. I’m pretty, not totally, sure he spoiled it. Lorentzen gives a who’s who of the characters, outlines the conflict central to the plot, and then tells us the ending is “genuinely shocking.” But given the build up as explained there’s only one genuinely shocking ending. If he’s pulled a feint and one of the mains out of nowhere joins the priesthood, reveals himself as the Lindbergh baby, grows a trunk: fine. The ending isn’t spoiled. But given where the story, by his touching on it tells, is going… Dammit.

He didn’t put me off the book. Lucky him, Amis is funny; a wiz writing internal dialogue and contrasting it with behavior contrary but in line with social harmony—snide thoughts behind spoken niceties, etc.

If I hadn’t read the introduction, I might have skipped straight to chapter one. If I’d done that I’d have torted myself twice. First, by not having the wherewithal to tut-tut the dedication, “To Mavis and Geoff Nicholson.” Lorentzen gave me the dirt on that: “Geoff was his former student, and Mavis his mistress. Amis led a complicated life.” Second, I wouldn’t have been baffled by the epigraph:

Where shall I go when I go where I go?

Go, gentle maid, go lead the apes in hell.

He leaves it there uncredited. It’s actually two quotes. The novel’s working title was Song of the Wanderer, and “Where shall I go…” is a pull from the lyrics of a 1926 or 27 Neil Moret song, “Song of the Wanderer (Where Shall I Go?)” made famous at various times by a list of people, none of which I’ve never heard of. That was easy enough to find. Bafflement came from the second part. Even now that I’ve read all about the whens and wheres, I can’t make satisfactory sense of why.

WorldHistory.net was extremely helpful, and I should highlight and thank them as they were the source informing me of the existence of most of the instances I’m referencing in this piece. They say, “The obsolete phrase to lead apes in hell expresses the fancied consequence of dying a spinster.” There was shame in spinsterhood. It’s a squandering of resources or some such, but the phrase was meant as a threat: “Get married, have children, or face the consequences.” From what I’ve gathered searching around the web, mothers led their children in heaven. That was the foundational obsolete saying. It doesn’t seem diametrical to me, but apes and hell are antonymical enough. Enough, it proves, to catch on and make a short run of common parlance. “You’ll go blind.”

The first known written occurrence of the phrase comes from the great trendsetter, George Gascoigne (~1539-1577), author of the first original English poem in blank verse. His “apes in hell” comes to us via prose, in his A Hundreth sundrie Flowres bounde vp in one small Poesie (1573.) The book is a monster with no theme as far as I can tell from the table of contents and as much random reading as I could tolerate using the archive.org flipbook viewer (not much). It’s got prose, poetry, translations, fiction, and essays. The apes appear in a section called “A pleasant discourse of the adventures of Master F.I.” in an episode where F.I. is adjudicating what seems to be a divorce or annulment proceeding pressed by a husband against his wife of twenty-one years, Lady Pergo. For seven years of marriage she wouldn’t “yéeld vnto his iust desires,” seven more she “spent in séeking to recouer his lost loue.” The final seven they didn’t have much to say to each other. She pled with F.I.,

“Nowe, of you worthy Gouernour I would be most glad to heare this question decided, remembring that ther was no difference in the times betwene vs: and surely, vnles your iudgement helpe me, I am afraide my marriage wilbe marred, and I may goe lead Apes in hell.”

I wrote “seems to be a divorce or annulment proceeding” but it’s also possible this is a farce and she’s suing her husband for performance. I’ll update if I find a more tolerable way to read on. The salient take away is that the phrase “lead apes in hell” was in use in 1573.

Fake Shakespeare confirms that the phrase wasn’t just a one off by Gascoigne then repeated by his admirers. In the 1605 play The London Prodigall, once attributed to William Shakespeare but on consideration not, the author lets on that “apes” was a proverb, and an old one at that.

from The London Prodigall from 1605
Fake William Shakespeare (probably not 1564-1616)

– Lancelot. What is it folly to loue Charitie?
– Maister Weathercocks. No mistake me not syr Lancelot,
But tis an old prouerbe, and you know it well,
That women dying maides, lead apes in hell.
– Lancelot. Thats a foolish prouerbe, and a false.

Actual Shakespeare used the phrase in dialogue twice. First, in or around 1591.

from The Taming of the Shrew
@realWilliamShakespeare (1564-1616)

Katherine: What, will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband,
I must dance barefoot on her wedding day
And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell.
Talk not to me. I will go sit and weep
Till I can find occasion of revenge.

Again, in or around 1599.

from Much Ado About Nothing

Leonato: You may light on a husband that hath no
beard.
Beatrice: What should I do with him? Dress him in my
apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman?
He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he
that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is
more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less
than a man, I am not for him. Therefore I will even
take sixpence in earnest of the bearherd, and lead
his apes into hell.

Sir John Davies wins. He included the phrase in his poetic dialogue “A Contention Betwixt a Wife, a Widdow, and a Maide.” In either 1601 or 1602, the poem was performed at the house of Richard Cecil in from of Her Royal Majesty Elizabeth I, The Virgin Queen. If I’ve got it right, Davies wrote knowing she would be in the audience. I have to buy a finer hat to tip.

He was a favorite of the queen. In 1598, a fellow lawyer made him mad over some slight so he hired two goons with swords to follow him into an Inns of Court dining hall and glower away anyone who’d stop him from trouncing his offender with a cudgel. That got him disbarred for a while. A year later he dedicated a poem to Elizabeth. She un-disbarred him, or leaned on those who did, and set him up for a seat in Parliament to boot. He was risking a good bit setting a wife and widow on a defender of maidenhood in this work.

It’s a long poem, but this excerpt gives the sense: the maid claims innocence and purity, the wife lives in the hoped for moment, and the widow reaps rewards. They’re all snippy with each other.

II. A Contention
Betwixt a Wife, a Widdow, and a Maide
Sir John Davies (1569-1626)

Maid. The maid is ever fresh, like morne in May:
Wife. The wife with all her beames is beautified,
Like to high noone, the glory of the day:
Widow. The widow, like a milde, sweet, euen-tide.

Wife. An office well supplide is like the wife.
Widow. The widow, like a gainfull office voide:
Maid. But maids are like contentment in this life,
Which al the world haue sought, but none enioid:

Go wife to Dunmow, and demaund your flitch.
Widow. Goe gentle maide, goe leade the Apes in hell.
Wife. Goe widow make some younger brother rich,
And then take thought and die, and all is well.

Of course there’s fawning subtext meant to flatter Herself. Davies was daring, not foolish. He included bits like the below before getting to the apes above.

Wife. Why marriage is an honourable state.
Widow. And widdow-hood is a reuerend degree:
Maid. But maidenhead, that will admit no mate,
Like maiestie itselfe must sacred be.

And of course, as it would be genuinely shocking if she didn’t, the Maid gets the long speech closing the disagreement before the kumbaya final stanzas.

Maid. Not Maids? To spotlesse maids this gift is giuen,
To liue in incorruption from their birth;
And what is that but to inherit heauen
Euen while they dwell vpon the spotted earth?

The perfectest of all created things,
The purest gold, that suffers no allay;
The sweetest flower that on th’ earths bosome springs,
The pearle vnbord, whose price no price can pay:

The Christall Glasse that will no venome hold,
The mirror wherein Angels loue to looke,
Dianaes bathing Fountaine cleere and cold,
Beauties fresh Rose, and vertues liuing booke.

Of loue and fortune both, the Mistresse borne,
The soueraigne spirit that will be thrall to none;
The spotlesse garment that was neuer worne,
The Princely Eagle that still flyes alone.

She sees the world, yet her cleere thought doth take
No such deepe print as to be chang’d thereby;
As when we see the burning fire doth make,
No such impression as doth burne the eye.

In short, you find out the strangest things by virtue of reading introductions to books. It’s a good practice.

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the summer of 1818, John Keats and his friend Charles Armitage Brown went on a walking tour of Scotland. It looks like the pair covered somewhere between six hundred to six hundred and fifty miles over forty-four days, so about fifteen miles a day, give or take and accounting for weather.

Keats wrote a series of letters about the journey to his consumptive brother Thomas, unable to travel with what they didn’t know at the time was his last bout with tuberculosis. He brings his brother along in these letters. It’s endearing. He’s colloquial and considerate. Reading, you get the sense he really did “Wish you were here.” You also get the sense that he was entertaining a bedridden friend, and further, the sense that his audience enjoyed laughing at small frustrations.

There’s a great deal about lovely views, divine salt water baths, and all the joys that make for good travel brouchuring, but Keats peppers it with amusing observations; little asides he would give were Thomas along.

He and Brown came upon the Duke of Argyle’s “modern magnificent” seat on a day when a band played, a little serendipity adding music to the grey stone Inverary Castle by “lovely” Loch Fyne and surrounding dark, old woods. To Thomas:

“I must say I enjoyed two or three common tunes—but nothing could stifle the horrors of a solo on the Bag-pipe—I thought the Beast would never have done.—Yet was I doomed to hear another.”

There were rough nights and coarse meals; all the minor bitches travelers log. I was very glad to read they took a long road miles out of their way rather than pay what they considered an unfair toll for the comparison Keats made.

“—but the expense is 7 Guineas and those rather extorted.—Staffa you see is a fashionable place and therefore every one concerned with it either in this town or the Island are what you call up. ’Tis like paying sixpence for an apple at the playhouse.”

Or $22.39 for a popcorn bucket at an AMC. Some things never change.

What I believe to be the first letter to Thomas from tour, dated July 17, 1818, recounts steam boats, purple mountains, pink clouds, a deceptive sign promising breakfast without informing that said breakfast was fifteen miles away, and the banks of the Clyde. Almost perfect:

“—I have just been bathing in Loch Fyne a salt water Lake opposite the Windows,—quite pat and fresh but for the cursed Gad flies—damn ’em they have been at me ever since I left the Swan and two necks.”1

After that line, he offers a fourteen stanza poem. It’s doggerel and unpolished, but suited to bring a smile to a bedridden brother. There was no title. Where it appears it is often given the working title “Gadfly.”

Gadfly
John Keats (1795-1821)

All gentle folks who owe a grudge
To any living thing
Open your ears and stay your trudge
Whilst I in dudgeon sing.

The Gadfly he hath stung me sore—
O may he ne’er sting you!
But we have many a horrid bore
He may sting black and blue.

Has any here an old grey Mare
With three legs all her store,
O put it to her Buttocks bare
And straight she’ll run on four.

So far, good fun. He gets mean in the next section. As to why, I need help.

In The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1850-1830, Paul Johnson writes about “one of the most memorable dinner parties in the history of English literature.” The party itself doesn’t seem all that memorable to me. There’s drunken foolishness, it’s peopled with luminaries, and there’s some awkwardness made more awkward by the mentioned drunken foolishness, but there’s nothing epochal in the telling. The telling itself is interesting. Johnson contrasts how Keats relays the story immediately and then months after.

On December 28, 1817, Keats met William Wordsworth for the first time. The older poet was visiting London and the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon was keen to introduce the young up and coming poet to the great man. Both were invited to dinner, along with Charles Lamb and Thomas Monkhouse, a merchant and cousin of Wordsworth’s wife Mary. Others joined as the day went on: an engraver named Landseer and Joseph Ritchie, famous for his travels. They discussed Voltaire, toasted Newton, and recited Milton. Good times.

At the time, Wordsworth was under appointment from his landlord and friend William Lowther, second Earl of Lonsdale, as Collector of Stamps for Westmoreland, a job Johnson notes, “was by no means a sinecure.” He earned roughly £200 a year, but there was a great deal of work to be done. His duties put him in frequent correspondence with his superior, John Kingston, Commissioner of Stamp Duties in London, a fan. Kingston heard of the dinner, knew Haydon, and asked if the painter might make him an in person introduction to Wordsworth. Haydon agreed and Kingston was set to come join the group after dinner, which I take to mean lunch as it’s mentioned the gathering continued into supper.

Lamb got obliterated. In a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats singles him out as “tipsy,” but he’s soft-pedaling. Kingston didn’t fit in. He was in over his head trying to join the conversation. Johnson says he asked Wordsworth if he thought Milton was a genius. It was a stupid question, given the company—like asking a bunch of football coaches if they found the forward pass useful—but he asked from respect and interest. Lamb called him a “silly fellow” and asked “will you allow me to look at your phrenological development?”

At this point, Wordsworth had been introduced to Kingston but without honorifics, so hadn’t connected that this Kingston was the Kingston, Lord of All Postage, for whom he worked. When Kingston told Wordsworth that he’d enjoyed their correspondence, Wordsworth was at a loss. “With me, sir?” he asked. There was some confused back and forth until Kingston made clear, “I am the Commissioner of Stamps.” Johnson writes,

“There was, said Haydon, ‘a dead silence,’ broken by Lamb’s repeated ‘Do let me have another look at that gentleman’s organs.’ At that point, Haydon recorded, ‘Keats and I hurried Lamb into the painting-room, shut the door, and gave way to inextinguishable laughter.’ Kingston was huffy and, at first, ‘Irreconcilable,’ and Wordsworth had to humor him as best he could. But he was persuaded to stay to supper, during which, at intervals, could be heard Lamb’s voice from the next room: ‘Who is that fellow? Allow me to see his organs once more.’”

That’s the story as it comes to us from Haydon. In a letter to George and Thomas a week after the Sunday dinner, Keats gives the briefest coverage: there was a dinner, Lamb was tipsy, here’s who was there. He tells his brothers that he and Wordsworth made plans for lunch the next Thursday but weather was an issue. All seemed well between the two.

By mid-summer, Wordsworth was fodder for quick jotted mocking.

Has any here a Lawyer suit
Of Seventeen-Forty-Three,
Take Lawyer’s nose and put it to ‘t
And you the end will see.

Is there a Man in Parliament
Dum[b-] founder’d in his speech,
O let his neighbour make a rent
And put one in his breech.

O Lowther how much better thou
Hadst figur’d t’other day
When to the folks thou mad’st a bow
And hadst no more to say.

If lucky Gadfly had but ta’en
His seat upon thine A—e
And put thee to a little pain
To save thee from a worse.

Better than Southey it had been,
Better than Mr. D—,
Better than Wordsworth too, I ween,
Better than Mr. V—.

If we move forward to February 21, 1818, we find another mention of Wordsworth in a letter to George and Thomas. It’s a roundup letter: Sorry I haven’t written lately, went to the British Gallery, Haydon’s essays are in translation to Italian, Reynolds got a leech treatment, thrushes and blackbirds are out, reading Voltaire and Gibbons, new Byron coming out, Ditto new Scott. Then there’s,

“I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, Vanity, and bigotry. Yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.”

There’s no explanation. It’s unclear whether Wordsworth offended him or if he felt others mistakenly took offense to his manner or deeds. It’s a curious little enigma. On to “have not yet read Shelley’s Poem,” “Your affectionate brother, John.”

Johnson makes no mention of that letter. He skips ahead to an attempt by Keats to visit Wordsworth en route to his summer walking tour with Brown. On June 27, he asks about Wordsworth of a waiter at his hotel and is told that the poet is off canvasing the countryside on behalf of his friend the Earl’s family members, the Lowthers, due for election. Keats is offended. A Romantic poet, any poet, is above politics. Wordsworth is betraying a spirit. He was already suspect as holder of a government position, but he was electioneering. He rained down on Robert Southey in the Gadfly poem for holding a position in government too, even though that position was Poet Laureate. How much more vulgar must Wordsworth pressing hands seem?

He makes a call at the Wordsworths’ the next day, but has to settle for leaving a note “and stuck it up over what I knew must be [Dorothy] Wordsworth’s portrait.” There doesn’t seem to be any record of what the note contained. I think I’m supposed to infer a sneer in placing the note on Dorothy’s portrait. I’m not certain why. He fired off a “Lord Wordsworth” letter to Thomas right away.

He also told a different version of the dinner going forward. In the knew telling, Wordsworth was obsequious towards Kingston, a toady ignoring or brushing away the other guests. Keats either let anger warp memory or embraced a soothing slander. The poem letter came after some time to ruminate.

Again, from Johnson:

“Three weeks later, still disgusted by Wordsworth’s flaunting of the radical orthodoxy, he wrote a set of vulgar verses, much concerned with buttocks and arses, mocking Wordsworth, Southey, the Lowthers and, for good measure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vandittart.”

After he got a few angry stanzas out of his system, it’s back to standards: making fun of girls who read too many novels—the “What is up with airplane food?” of 1818.

Forgive me pray good people all
For deviating so—
In spirit sure I had a call—
And now I on will go.

Has any here a daughter fair
Too fond of reading novels,
Too apt to fall in love with care
And charming Mister Lovels,

O put a Gadfly to that thing
She keeps so white and pert—
I mean the finger for the ring,
And it will breed a wort.

Has any here a pious spouse
Who seven times a day
Scolds as King David pray’d, to chouse
And have her holy way—

O let a Gadfly’s little sting
Persuade her sacred tongue
That noises are a common thing,
But that her bell has rung.

And as this is the summon bo-
num of all conquering,
I leave withouten wordes mo
The Gadfly’s little sting.

“The first point to be grasped,” Johnson tells us, “is that the romantic movement produced heightened sensibilities, felt (even if unconsciously) at every level of society.” Johnson’s a brilliant historian, so when he goes on to say that the early 1800s saw a sudden awakening to income inequality, a keen sympathy for the impoverished, and a disgust at resignation regarding both, I believe him.

“...it is necessary to pause and examine why it is that John Keats, not a man much interested in politics, rather one who reflected the prevailing notions of his friends, should feel so depressed by Wordsworth’s allegiance and why the latter should have committed himself so wholeheartedly to upholding the government. Why did these poets of different generations—Wordsworth was now 48—but of similar sensibilities… find themselves on opposite sides of the great political divide which then severed Britain and indeed the whole of Europe?”

His interest is in cultural shifts. He needs to see everything in light of a larger picture. I’m nosy. I want the smaller story. What elicited the “egotism, Vanity, and bigotry” claim?

[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Mago Barca was Carthaginian, brother to Hannibal the elephant guy. Mago really liked to crucify people. He was the type of guy who would wake up on a Wednesday and ask himself, “How many people can I crucify today?” and then get up on Thursday and say, “I can beat that.” He was energetic. They named an island port town after him.

As a benefit of the Punic Wars, the Romans had control of Hispania. Carthage was completely delended and control of the island we now call Menorca, where Mago’s namesake city sat, fell to enterprising pirates preying on the sudden uptick in commercial voyages between the Italian and newly Roman Iberian peninsulas. Rome sacked the pirates and took over. Then… It seems like everybody got a turn in charge: Vandals, Caliphate of Cordoba, Count of Barcelona, Crown of Aragon, Kingdom of Mallorca, Aragon again, Crown of Castille. Along the way it got picked over by Turks and Barbary slave raiders. In 1708, British and Dutch forces under Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI wrested control during the War of Spanish Succession. Menorca went to the Brits, along with Gibralter, in the Treaty of Utrecht.

Words change over time. Indo-European “Patre” becomes the Germanic cum English “Father.” The “p” elides to “f” as the puh sound is close to the fuh sound and the “t” isn’t that far off from “th.” You say potato, I say fathato. Somehow a Mediterranean Island port named for Mago became known as Mahon. I kinda get that particular change, but it happened whether I do or don’t. In its current inception it’s called Maó, a Catalan change over from the British name, Port Mahon, on the island of Minorca (or Menorca, depending on who is being pedantic.) It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from Majorca, where the great poet Robert Graves taught British people they could escape to a vacation paradise and have inconsequential sex with multiple women if you tell the ladies that they’re your muses. Tourists flock to the place.

If John Byng had known about the Robert Graves sex ploy, he might have engaged.

He didn’t. Byng was the admiral tasked with defending the then-British-controlled island from the insidious French in the mid 18^th century. One day he saw a French force, decided it was overwhelming, and retreated. He was court martialed and executed for his decision. Farther reaching consequences followed.

Imagine being a mildly prosperous islander with a couple of cows. It’s 1756. You speak Spanish but you’re okay with British rule; they keep the peace, more or less. The last thing you’re worried about is Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately spring to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy.) But Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, lands avec a beaucoup of soldiers, takes over your island, and for some reason kills your cows.

“Why did you turn my back yard into a slaughter house?” you might ask the soldiers.

“We didn’t,” they’d reply. “We turned it into an abattoir. That’s Gallic. More sophisticated than your slaughter thing.”

“Well, I want to lodge a complaint.”

“I get it,” says the soldier, dripping in a mixture of English and bovine blood. “But there are a lot of cows on this island and I’m pressed for time. We can talk about this at tonight’s salon.”

“Why are you killing cows at all? This doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve got my orders.”

“I’m going to report this to Byng!”

“Good luck with that.”

If you’re looking for an explanation for why cows were killed, I don’t have one. But the French did it, and they went about their duties vigorously. A mandated four day work week doesn’t mean there’s less work to be done. It means there’s more pressure.

If your sympathy is with the suddenly cowless burgeoning middle class islander, you haven’t looked far enough ahead. Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy,) ordered a feast in celebration of his conquest of Menorca at its capital city, Port of Mahon. Your sympathy should be with the chef.

That poor man was probably excited initially. A celebration dinner is a chef’s bread and butter, so to speak. There were all manner of birds to be stuffed into pies. He must have been so happy. But you see the looming issue.

He was French and he was a chef. Consider his mindset.

Pork Chops: That gets cream sauce.

Lamb: Cream sauce.

Asparagus: Cream sauce.

It’s cream sauce all the way down.

I assume he had a staff, but I also assume he had access to a few soldiers willing to trade gossip for a nip of wine or a drumstick on the sly. I’m sure that a few guards attending to the needs of Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy) hung around the kitchen. He probably said something like “I need some dairy,” and the soldiers who killed all those cows for some reason start looking at the ground or into the sky and mumbling about why they can’t help with dairy because the guys tasked with burning the bodies of dead Englishmen are really short handed and maybe they should help out with pyre building.

I hate mayonnaise. I hate it desperately. I think it’s vile. My wife thinks it’s evil, a distinction without much difference as we both agree on the letters if not the order. Despite myself, I have to credit the unknown chef of Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind but the great or great-great nephew of that guy.) He pulled off one of the greatest improvisations in culinary history.

With no cream to be had he threw together eggs, oil, some lemon, probably a bit of salt and pepper, and made Armond de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (not the one that immediately springs to mind, but the great or great-great nephew of that guy,) happy.

My tastes aside, the stuff is ubiquitous. I don’t order a turkey and Swiss on wheat. I order a turkey and Swiss on wheat with no mayo because the presence of that demon condiment is assumed. Dammit.

So that’s mayonnaise. It takes its name from a pirate booty swapping base of a port city named for a serial crucifier and was first served as wafts of burning British bodies permeated the air. Enjoy your sandwich.

[A version of this article appeared in Ordinary Times on October 4, 2021]