Fair is my love that feeds among the lilies,
The lilies growing in that pleasant garden,
Where cupid’s mount, that well-beloved hill is,
And where the little god himself is warden.
See where my love sits in the bed of spices,
Beset all round with camphor, myrrh and roses,
And interlaced with curious devices,
Which her from all the world apart incloses.
BARTHOLOMEW GRIFFIN.
There is no description here; but the lady’s beauty and attractiveness are none the less effectively rendered by implication. There is, to begin with, the versification—how luscious in its melodiousness! The lady, to whom these lines refer, must be as sleekly undulous as they. In the next place, she lives among lilies, in a pleasant garden, on a mount that is Cupid’s, bedded in spicery. All these are images highly agreeable in themselves and further significant in being, quite frankly and manifestly, sexual symbols. Often the best way of expressing the nature of one thing is by talking about another.
But, might we her sweet breast, Love’s Eden, see:
On those snow mountlets apples be,
May cure those mischiefs wrought by the forbidden tree.
Her hands are soft as swanny down, and much
More white; whose temperate warmth is such,
As when ripe gold and quickening sunbeams inly touch.
Ye sirens of the groves, who, perched on high,
Tune guttural sweets, air-ministrels, why
From your bough-cradles, rocked with wind, to her d’ye fly?
Thou art silver-voiced, teeth-pearled, thy head’s gold-thatched;
Nature’s reviver, Flora’s patched
(Though tricked in May’s new raiment) when with thee she’s matched.
EDWARD BENLOWES.
I serve a mistress whiter than the snow,
Straighter than cedar, brighter than the glass,
Finer in trip and swifter than the roe,
More pleasant than the field of flowering grass;
More gladsome to my withering hopes that fade
Than winter’s sun, or summer’s cooling shade.
Sweeter than swelling grape of ripest wine,
Softer than feathers of the fairest swan,
Smoother than jet, more stately than the pine,
Fresher than poplar, smaller than my span,
Clearer than beauty’s fiery-pointed beam,
Or icy crust of crystal’s frozen stream.
Yet is she curster than the bear by kind,
And harder hearted than the aged oak,
More glib than oil, more fickle than the wind,
Stiffer than steel, no sooner bent but broke.
Lo thus my service is a lasting sore;
Yet will I serve, although I die therefore.
Nonsense
Come on, ye critics, find one fault who dares;
For read it backwards, like a witch’s prayers,
’Twill read as well; throw not away your jests
On solid nonsense that abides all tests.
Wit, like tierce-claret, when ’t begin to pall,
Neglected lies and ’s of no use at all;
But, in its full perfection of decay,
Turns vinegar, and comes again in play. . . .
As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Sooner than those who cannot swim at all,
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.
Thou writ’st below even thy own natural parts,
And with acquired dullness and new arts
Of studied nonsense tak’st kind readers’ hearts.
CHARLES SACKVILLE, EARL OF DORSET.
It was a famous anecdote about the author of these lines that called forth from Dr. Johnson one of his most admirably Johnsonian, one, also, of his most depressing remarks. “On the night before the battle, he is said to have composed the celebrated song, ‘To all you Ladies now on Land,’ with equal tranquillity of mind and promptitude of wit. Seldom any splendid story is wholly true. I have heard from the late Earl of Orrery that Lord Buckhurst had been employed a week upon it.”
Dorset’s conception of an artistic badness so extreme that it comes round, full circle—or, rather, full spiral—and turns into a kind of goodness on another plane, is subtle and profound. It serves to explain our delight in such works as “Irene Iddesleigh,” and why we like the papier mâché furniture of 1850.
Obscurity in Poetry
Who says that fiction only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purpling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veiled, while he that reads divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
GEORGE HERBERT.
Across three centuries George Herbert’s questions address themselves (how pertinently!) to us.
Obscurity in poetry is by no means always to be avoided. Shakespeare, for example, is one of the most difficult of authors. He often writes obscurely, for the good reason that he often has subtle and uncommon thoughts to put into words. So have some of the poets writing obscurely at the present time. Most, however, have not. Their thoughts and the way they see the world, are commonplace; only their syntax is extraordinary. Almost all the contents of the “advanced” reviews are just “Mary had a little lamb” translated into Hebrew and written in cipher. Re-Englished and decoded, they astonish the reader by their silliness. Catching the sense at two removes, or ten, he is annoyed to find that it is either nonsense or platitude.
Magic
Trinitas, deitas, unitas æterna,
Majestas, potestas, pietas superna.
Sol, lumen et numen, cacumen semita,
Lapis, mons, petra, fons, flumen, pons et vita.
Tu sator, creator, amator, redemptor, salvator, luxque perpetua,
Tu tutor et decor, tu candor, tu splendor et odor quo vivunt mortua.
Tu vertex et apex, regum rex, legum lex et vindex, tu lux angelica.
Quem clamant, adorant, quem laudant, quem cantant, quem amant agmina cœlica.
Tu theos et heros, dives flos, vivens ros, rege nos, salva nos, perduc nos ad tronos superos et vera gaudia.
Tu decus et virtus, tu justus et verus, tu sanctus et bonus, tu rectus et summus Dominus, tibi sit gloria.
NOTKER BALBULUS.
Amara tanta tyri pastos sycalos sycalire
cellivoli scarras polili posylique lyvarras.
MAGIC SPELL, 12TH CENTURY.
Horse and hattock,
Horse and go,
Horse and pelatis, Ho, ho!
SPELL USED BY WITCHES WHEN
MOUNTING THEIR BROOMSTICKS.
ἔριφος ὲς γάλ’ ἔπετον,
(A kid, I fell into milk.)
ORPHIC FORMULA.
Intrinsically magical, spells are loud with what is, for us, a compelling music. Their phrases are thrillingly obscure with shadowed meanings and mysterious allusions. Their strange words set the imagination working. Spells, in short, are poetry, and their authors, the magicians, poets. The thing is psychologically inevitable. If words had not first moved him, how could man have come to believe that they would move things? And is it likely that he would set out to move things by means of incantations which left him unmoved? But words which move are poetry. Magicians, I repeat, are always poets.
Poetry justifies belief in magic. In an anthropomorphic world belief in the efficacy of abracadabra is imposed by simple logic. “I know by experience that words have power over me. The external world is, by definition, of the same nature as myself. Therefore words must have power over the external world.” The syllogism is unanswerably sound. Only when we have ceased to believe that the macrocosm is a large-scale model of ourselves, does the argument lose its force. To-day we know, at any rate in our more rational moments, that magic is effective only on ourselves. We employ spells to move, not matter, but our own emotions.
All literature is a mixture, in varying proportions, of magic and science. Text-books are almost unadulteratedly scientific. (I say “almost” advisedly. For text-books are not all alike. Some are thoroughly legible. Others do not permit themselves to be read. The legible ones are those whose authors have contrived to introduce into their exposition a leavening of magic. They have known how to combine words in such a way that the phrases penetrate the understanding and remain there, rumbling with a memorable noise.) At the other end of the scale we find writings like Joyce’s “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” or like Nashe’s “Have with you to Saffron Walden,” or like some of the later poems of Mallarmé, or like certain passages in Sterne and Virginia Woolf—writings in which the principal, sometimes almost the sole, ingredient is magic. The great bulk of literature is a compromise lying between the two extremes.
(A Head comes up with ears of corn, and she combs them into her lap.)
Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear you make the golden beard to weep.
Fair maiden, white and red,
Comb me smooth and stroke my head,
And thou shalt have some cockell-bread.
(A second Head comes up full of gold, which she combs into her lap.)
Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear thou make the golden beard to weep.
Fair maid, white and red,
Comb me smooth and stroke my head,
And every hair a sheaf shall be,
And every sheaf a golden tree.
GEORGE PEELE.
Magicians are always poets, but not always very good poets. Professionals can generally improve upon their workmanship. Witness this lovely spell from “The Old Wives Tale.” Peele is the master of most excellent Elizabethan sound-magic and past-master of what I may call that “magic of irrelevance,” which is produced by the introduction into one context of ideas and images which seem to belong to another. Thus, the golden beard weeps. The reward for combing the hair is to be (for no apparent reason) some cockell bread—a substance whose most curious mode of manufacture is described by John Aubrey. Finally, every hair is to be a sheaf and every sheaf a golden tree. Though not a spell, the song and soliloquy with which the same author’s “David and Bethsabe” opens is no less magical, and with a similar magic.
Bethsabe, bathing, sings, then speaks:
Hot sun, cool fire, tempered with sweet air,
Black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair;
Shine, sun; burn, fire; breathe, air, and ease me;
Black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me;
Shadow, my sweet nurse, keep me from burning,
Make not my glad cause cause of mourning.
Let not my beauty’s fire
Inflame unstaid desire,
Nor pierce any bright eye
That wandereth lightly.
Come, gentle Zephyr, trickt with those perfumes
That erst in Eden sweetened Adam’s
