Upon Nothing

Aphra Behn based some of the most baudy characters in her plays on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, whom she knew because they were both among the most notable figures of the court of Charles II. Wilmot was, in a court of outrageous hooligans, perhaps the most perverse of them all.

Yet, I am reminded of Salieri's complaint, that God should have chosen to give such talent to such an childish reprehensible fool as Mozart. (At least such a rephrehensible fool as the movie version of Mozart.) For Wilmot's talent as a wordsmith is great, and although most of his poetry will not find its way into this blog for reasons of taste, the ease with which he worked his ideas into verse is astonishing. It clearly was a gift from God, an ill used gift from God most of the time, but still a gift.

I think he was (at least sporadically) aware both of the source of his gift and also of the incongruous use he made of it. The following is a lovely piece of metaphysics, with slight hints at theological undertones. I love the satyric way that he has Nothing and Something interacting. Much was made of his deathbed conversion; it provided a text for evangelistic writing for at least two hundred years. And yet it is not entirely clear that it was anything more than another game that Wilmot played. That we won't know for sure until we meet him, if we do.


UPON NOTHING

Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade,
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made,
And (well fixt) art alone of ending not afraid.

Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive Nothing something straight begot,
Then all proceeded from the great united--What.

Something the general attribute of all,
Sever'd from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguish'd fall.

Yet something did thy mighty pow'r command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness's hand,
Snatched men, beasts, birds, fire, air and land.

Matter, the wickedest off-spring of thy race,
By Form assisted, flew from thy embrace,
And rebel Light obscured thy reverend dusky face.

With Form and Matter, Time and Place did join,
Body, thy foe, with thee did leagues combine,
To spoil thy peaceful realm, and ruin all thy line.

But turn-coat Time assists the foe in vain,
And, bribed by thee, asists thy short-lived reign,
And to thy hungry womb drives back thy slaves again.

Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Didst thou not stand to point their dull philosophies?

The great man's gratitude to his best friend,
King's promises, whore's vows, towards thee they bend,
Flow swiftly into thee, and in the never end.

Love In Fantastic Triumph Sate

Aphra Behn wrote in the days just after Shakespeare. She was, by all accounts, not your average woman.

As a Tory she staunchly defended the King, against the Parliament. She believed in kings in the abstract sense. Which king it happened to be made little difference. He could be a good king or a bad king, a wise king or a foolish king. In fact this particular king was neither good nor wise, as Aphra Behn would learn. Charles II perfectly fit his epitaph, written by his close friend John Wilmot the Earl of Rochester:

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

The fact that Rochester wrote and passed this "epitaph" around the court long before Charles II actually died is evidence of how little even his closest friends thought of him.

But Aphra Behn was a Tory.

At nineteen she married a Dutch man, thus gaining her name and probably some of the language. When she was 26 her husband died. At that time England was in a war with the Dutch, and Charles II sent Behn to Belgium to act as a military spy. Men tend to spy in one way, women in another. She became the mistress of one of the royal family, one who was working on the military strategy. Thus she became privy to all of the Dutch military secrets, which she then passed along to the court of Charles II. To be blunt, Charles II made her a prostitute in order to gain an advantage in the war.

To add insult to that injury, he never bothered to pay her. She had to borrow money to return to England, and when he still refused to pay her she was thrown into debtor's prison. Rochester had been right, Charles II was a king "Whose word no man relies on."



SONG

Love in fantastic triumph sate
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed
For whom fresh pains he did create
And strange tyrannic power showed.
From thy bright eyes he took his fires,
Which round about in sport he hurled;
But 'twas from mine he took desires
Enough to undo the amorous world.

From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his pride and cruelty;
From me his languishments and fears,
And every killing dart from thee.
Thus thou and I the god have armed
And set him up a deity;
But my poor heart alone is harmed
Whilst thine the victore is, and free.

O Captain! My Captain! Rise Up And Hear The Bells!

The Revolution was fought to procure "freedom" for the inhabitants of America. But it was eighty years before that freedom was extended to a very large segment of the American population.

Somehow much of the white population was content to live in the freedom that we had gained, but felt no need to see that freedom made universal. Really that isn't much different than the Church, is it? Don't we all to often get comfortable in our own freedom but feel little need to see that freedom made universal? If the apathy of the majority of Americans in our first eighty years seems pathetic (and it does!) then what of our own apathy?

One man and one woman were unable to get comfortable with that apathy. Abraham Lincoln spent the greatest part of his life working for the abolition of slavery. (I know textbooks today gloss over this.) Fearing that their "freedom" to own slaves was in jeopardy, seven states seceded when Lincoln was elected. Within a month of his entering office there were eleven states in the Confederacy. They were fighting for their "freedom." But Lincoln and the north had a different vision of what "freedom" really means.

That vision had come in large part from a remarkable book written in tiny chapters and published serially in a magazine. In UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, Harriet Beecher Stowe taught the imagination of the nation to feel the evil of American slavery from the inside. Without her monumental work, it is doubtful that Abraham Lincoln could have been elected. Everyone knew that electing Lincoln would mean war, and few wanted that! But Uncle Tom's Cabin electrified such a great portion of the voting public that he was. And when the war started, Stowe's book pressed countless Union men into volunteering for the army.

Without her book, the war would likely not have happened. And given that it began, without her book the north would very likely have lost. The United States would no longer be united; we would now be at least two separate countries. And slavery would have persisted in America indefinitely. Just as Thomas Paine was the "Father Of The Revolution," Harriet Beecher Stowe was the "Mother Of The Civil War." Each of them accomplished these enormous feats through their words! Through their words they altered the imaginations of a whole nation. They made us what we are.

When he met her Abraham Lincoln greeted her with the words, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." Had she not known the righteousness of her cause those words could have drowned her!

But unlike Thomas Paine's diatribes, Stowe's book led to sincere contemplation, to soul searching on the part of the nation. He sought to engender overarching pride; she to humble us to repentance. He enflamed selfish rage; she indignation at injustice.

The war proceeded. Over 600,000 died. Slavery was abolished. The union was preserved and the Confederacy disbanded. But four weeks before the war ended, Abraham Lincoln was shot. The end was well in sight. It was all but certain. But he never saw it.

Suddenly this great nation, newly restored to wholeness, far from healed of the evils of slavery, full of anger and resentment on both sides; suddenly this great nation was without its leader. Could the union be preserved without him? Would the south in fact become in reality what it already was by fiat, a group of free states among all the other free states? The thought that the war she had caused might have been for nothing must have terrified Stowe!

Walt Whitman well captures the lostness that both the north and the south must have felt at hearing of Lincoln's death.




O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red.
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up−for you the flag is hung−for you the bugle trills,
For you the bouquets and ribboned wreaths−for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.




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The Sunshine Patriot

In the year leading up to the American Revolution there were many opinions among the people as to what the status of the colonies should be. A slowly growing number favored independence, but at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence it was far from unanimous. In fact loyalty to the English Crown was still high in many people's hearts. So many had been born there, or their parents had. To be loyal to the Crown was to be a patriot. To be disloyal was to be a traitor. And nobody wants to be a traitor.

And this was a religious land. To fight against the king whom God had placed over us was not only traitorous, many thought it blasphemous.

In order for the revolutionary conspirators to gain the public sympathy, and the public rifles, they had to wage a war of words before and during the Revolution. This war of words was not intended to defeat the Red Coats, but rather to win over the colonists themselves. Before you can win a war, you need to enlist an army. And to do that, they needed to convince the people that it was not treasonous or blasphemous to fight against the king. They had to flip the moral tables that existed in people's minds; they had to redefine everything: authority, rights, despotism, treason, Providence and liberty all had to be reworked in the people's minds.

In his famous series of pamphlets, The Crisis, Thomas Paine undertook this project. By the end of the series the American understanding of itself and its world and its God had radically changed. It has been said that Thomas Paine started the Revolution. It could also be said that he won it.

America won her independence. But what did she lose in the process? After the war we were never inclined to look back, to ask ourselves if freedom and liberty and brotherhood truly were what the propagandists had told us they were. We only knew we had won. Suddenly there were no more loyalists to the crown. Everyone was on the same side now. It was the winning side. We had the ball and we were going to run with it, no looking back.

I sometimes wonder how wise that was.

Below is the beginning of Thomas Paine's first pamphlet in the series, The Crisis. The first word he works to redefine in the public imagination is the word "Patriot."



"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated."


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The Shot Heard Round The World

Sixty-three years after the signing of the Declaration, sixty-four years after the Revolution began, a monument was put up near a bridge that Paul Revere had ridden over on his historic messenger ride. His ride began in the evening of the 18th of April; Emerson's poem commemorates the events that it caused on the 19th.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
--Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee

Accepts, But Does Not Clutch The Crown

As Americans we are not really big on dates. There are only two that we really tend to remember.

One is coming up in a few days. We all know that on the fourth of July, in 1776, our forefathers signed a document that declared our land to be free from the rule of England. It took another seven years of war to make that declaration of independence accepted by England and the rest of the world.

But that document did not begin the war. The Revolution as we call it. In fact that war began more than a year earlier. And whether we all recognize it or not, all Americans know the date that war started. We don't always think of it as the beginning our our separation from England, we don't always think of it as the beginning of a war, but that is what it was.

We don't necessarily remember it from history class in high school. We remember it from a poem.

"Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the _______________ in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year."

Every American knows that date. I don't even have to print it for Americans. But for the rest of the world, the blank line in the verse above should read: "On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;".

We remember it far less for the sake of Paul Revere, who rode forth on that date, than we do for the sake of the poem that made that silversmith/messenger/political radical famous.

We all know the poem that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to commemorate Paul Revere's ride far better than we know Paul Revere himself.

But how many of us know that "Paul Revere's Ride" was not a poem by itself? It was in fact originally entitled "The Landlord's Tale"? It was actually the first tale in a series of tales that Longfellow wrote in imitation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Longfellow hoped to become the "Chaucer" of the American language. He was, he hoped, writing America's Iliad, her Canterbury Tales, her Pentateuch. He saw a new world dawning, and he wanted to be remembered in one hundred centuries who had first given this new world its voice.

So he wrote "Tales Of A Wayside Inn." Like the Canterbury Tales, many people meet in an inn and agree to swap tales. The inkeeper is forced to go first, and his is the famous "Paul Revere's Ride." Many others follow, and like Chaucer there are interludes between orators. It is a great sequence. Not Chaucer; not the voice of a new world. But still a great sequence.

I love the introduction to the poet, one of the cast of characters in the inn's tale swapping that evening.

This is from "The Prologue," and anyone who has read Chaucer will immediately recognize how much even this little fragment is an immitation of the Canterbury Tales. Yet it is new and fresh in Longfellow's voice.



A Poet, too, was there, whose verse
Was tender, musical, and terse;
The inspiration, the delight,
The gleam, the glory, the swift flight,
Of thoughts so sudden, that they seem
The revelations of a dream,
All these were his; but with them came
No envy of another's fame;
He did not find his sleep less sweet
For music in some neighboring street,
Nor rustling hear in every breeze
The laurels of Miltiades.
Honour and blessings on his head
While living, good report when dead,
Who, not too eager for renown,
Accepts, but does not clutch, the crown!

Fly To Some Lone Lovely Dell

Having read a great deal of the poetry of Harley Coleridge and Sara Coleridge, I have been eager to read some of the poetry of Derwent Coleridge, the third of the three children of STC who lived. (There was another, a brother, who died very young.)

A friend is looking for his poems on my behalf, hopefully saved somewhere sometime. Some few were published in newspapers, but they do not seem ever to have been collected. Likely there are many more that were never published. And were those newspapers saved? I don't yet know.

Here is the first that I have found. It is a youthful venture, a pining for that one true love who would make his world complete. It comes from Derwent's scrapbook, called a commonplace book. Being there, in a commonplace book, there is little reason to think it original. He may have written it from his mother-wit. It seems more likely that it was his own translation of another poem. It could also be a poem one of his friends wrote, that struck a chord in Derwent, thus he wrote it down. His comment after the poem, leads me to think that it was not an original composition; if it had been his he would likely have incorporated the comment into the poem itself. I lean toward the likelihood that it is his own translation of an older poem. After all, he loved languages and translation; by the end of his life he had mastered 14 different languages.

Yet, whether his own original work or a translation, it has a ring to it remeniscent of his father's work. And in it we hear a voice that very likely is Derwent's own. To me (and perhaps only to me) it is exciting to hear that voice.



What is that darling wish, that fondest theme
My daily vision and my nightly dream?
A Maid who free from Interest’s sordid rules
(Pride’s selfish mandates, kept by gaping fools)
Would seek for naught in me but me myself
Careless of rank, or rank’s supporter pelf,
Guileless her soul, and beautiful her face
Her form all elegance, her motions grace,
Soothing her love, for sorrow’s wounds a cure,
Warm as mine own, as smiling infants pure.
With her to fly to some lone lovely dell
The world forsake and there forever dwell . . .

. . . I never saw a Mary (Oh! shall I ever see a Mary) who combining intellect, mildness and beauty, might be my companion, my soother and my love−No−In my imagination I have pictured such a being and in my imagination alone must she exist.


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Unwritable Words

In keeping with the idea of yesterdays post, here is a tidbit that strikes me as humorous.

English speakers have long used a sort of clicking sound that we make by putting the tip of our tongues to the roof of our mouths just behind our front teeth. Then we suck in our breath ever so slightly, making a longer version of a click.

In the singular (one click) it can express exasperation or dissappointment. In the double, it means dissaproval. In this sense (double) we often use it ironically, signalling mock dissaproval.

Well, we use it so often that authors have had to invent a way to spell it. At some point, someone decided that it sounds kind of like a mixture of the letters "t," "s," and "k." I think the "k" should have been a "ch," but nobody asked me.

So, we see sometimes in the conversation in books, that somebody says, "tsk." Or, "tsk, tsk."

Great, so we are finding ways to write unwritable words. If only it stopped there.

But readers try to sound out what they see on paper. And when they see "tsk" some have been rather at a loss as to how to pronounce this word. After all, we are all told that all English words have vowels. So some vowel must be missing.

So readers (rather a lot of them) have invented a vowel to put in the word. And enough of them have independently chosen to insert an "i" that we have now a new word. "Tisk." Or, "tisk, tisk." And then they go and use that word in ordinary speech. "John just won't listen to his mother. Tisk, tisk."

Thus, through trying to spell unspellable words, and then trying to read them back, English has gained a new word that never was.

Our language is really out of our control. That is not bad, it is merely amusing.


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Ain't You Learnt Them Letters?

Help me, help me, help me!

I am looking for a story that I used when I was teaching American Literature. I'm 98% sure that it was by Zora Neale Hurston. But I can't remember the name.

Unfortunately I read it to the class; I didn't assign them to read it. If I had assigned it, then I would have the record of the assignment in the handouts I prepared for each class. But no, I didn't assign it. I read it to them. No record. Bah!

I'm 94% sure that it is from her anthropology days, travelling the south. 6% chance it is a purely fictional short story. At least I'm positive it is short, else I wouldn't have read it in class.

The gist of the story is that a girl goes to school to learn her letters. Her papa is none too impressed. One day he asks her to take dictation as he narrates a letter. He gets a few sentences in and she is writing. Then he says something like "And then (here he makes a popping sound with his tongue). . . " He waits for her to write it down. She doesn't. "Well, aren't you going to write that down?" "I can't." "You can't? Ain't you learnt them letters yet?"

You get the idea. He wants her to write what he says, but she can only write things that fit into 26 letters. Tongue clicking just don't fit nowhere. And when you think about it, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of distinct tongue and/or lip clicks and vibrations that have clear meanings and even subtle inferences. They are words by any definition, just not writable ones in English.

I love the story because it is so true. Far more of our language (as used, not as given in the dictionary) is unwritable in our 26 letters than most of us take time to realize. And yet few of us take the time to be dissatisfied with it.

So, if anyone remembers the name of the story, I'd be most obliged. I had intended to post it today, but it isn't on my bookshelf.

Consanguinity: Just Call Them A Blessing

I have a linguistic question for anyone who can help.

Any decent language has special terms for all the members of one's family. In English we recognize only a very few of these. Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. So far so good.

Cousin (Is that a boy cousin or a girl cousin? Is it on the mother's side or the father's? Is it your father's sister's child, or your father's brother's child?) Cousin is not much of a word. Too ambiguous. To differentiate these necessary distinctions would require eight different words for cousin. And we need them. As soon as you say, "So and so is my cousin," someone will ask, "On which side?"

So the word cousin is pretty weak, but that is as far as English will go. After that we just get into the muddle of kinds of cousin. My cousin's children are my cousins-once-removed. To my children they are second-cousins. OK, so they are second cousins on which-which side?

English is a little lacking in consanguinity language. One would think that we would have cared, at some point, to come up with words for our relatives. But we only cared to the extent of cousins, because we weren't allowed to marry them. Unless we wanted to, and then it was alright. Our Anglo/American history is full of cousin marriages, both in royalty and in the ghetto. But that is a different subject.

I just want linguistic differentiation to make clear who is who in relation to whom.

And in these days of mulitple marriages, no amount of linguistics can keep up. Now we hear, "He is my step-cousin's mother's second husband's step son by his third wife." I don't want special words for that!

But this question is not merely linguistic. As of fifteen minutes ago I find that my ex-wife (I've had only one too many) is pregnant by her second husband after me. So, her previous kids are mine (some by genetics, some by my adoption of them). Now I want to know, what will her new children be to me? Not my children, granted. Not even second-step-twice-removed-on-the-mother's-ex-husband's-side type children. Then what?

One thing I do know. If a new child will keep her distracted long enough to let my children grow up in peace, then I'll call all the new children she can bear a blessing from the Lord!