A Lost World of Allusion

The poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is appended to this essay.

Just as our every utterance Is a recombination based on an inventory of possibilities formed of all the speech we have heard, every literary text arises from the vast database of all preceding texts. Unlike the largely self-contained messages of non-aesthetic discourse, the interconnections in poetry, fiction, and drama – allusions, sources, and influences – enrich meaning, creating outgoing waves of significance the critic may pursue very nearly without limit. Though sometimes such intertextuality functions as display or ornament, it also allows for the expression of subtle and complex thought, including that which seems paradoxical, ambivalent, or mysterious, the very sort of material which aesthetic texts can uniquely well express. In the current era, unlike previous periods, even educated people are often incompetent at decoding relevant sources and influences and understanding the implications of devices such as quotation, allusion, homage, and parody. The loss of this secondary elaboration of meaning has impoverished the semantic field of virtually all poetry, but the principle applies in particular to poetry of the past, and most of all to highly conventional works.

Nicholas Breton’s poem “Phyllida and Corydon” is an example of a work that would mean far less to the average reader today than when it was composed due to the loss of the ability to perceive its intertextual relations. Breton was a popular poet and fiction writer in the Elizabethan Age, but his works were rapidly forgotten thereafter. (Often authors of what might be generally if informally regarded as the second rank -- such ratings are never demonstrable -- demonstrate more clearly than the geniuses of an age the taste of the time.) The poet’s practice reflects the norms of his period. Socially positioned in the haute bourgeoisie with a family that was affluent, though not aristocratic, he had an eye toward pleasing the taste of the nobility. [1] He strove to suit, however, not only courtiers but the general reader of the day for whom he wrote numerous religious works, a substantial body of poetry, and twenty-two prose publications.

On the rare occasions when Breton is remembered today, it is usually because of his love lyrics, especially those in the pastoral style, several of which have been set to music. Breton’s pastoral lyric “Phyllida and Corydon” has impeccable courtly credentials, having been originally presented as part of an “Honourable Entertainment Given to the Queen’s Majesty in Progress at Elvetham in Hampshire, by the Right Honourable the Earl of Hertford in 1591.” [2] Thus the reader may expect courtly and learned associations as well as popular ones.

With three explicit mentions of the month of May in the opening stanza, Breton invokes some of the oldest memories of humankind. Surely festivals celebrating the return of warm weather have been celebrated in the northern hemisphere since palaeolithic times. Breton was certainly aware of the rural maypoles in his own day as well as the medieval reverdie tradition. This sophisticated lyric thus has exceedingly deep archaic roots expressing delight at the marvelous fruitfulness of the earth and associating it with romance between a man and a woman.

Literary allusions in the poem are broad and deep. Corydon’s name is derived from the Greek for lark, a bird with significant associations in poetry. The lark is often praised in poetry for the beauty of its soaring flight and complex song, [3] which during the Middle Ages had appeared in both devotional religious poetry and secular love lyrics. Though Breton is unlikely to have been familiar with this specific poem, Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (“When I see the lark beat his wings”) can represent the bird’s medieval connotations. In Bernart the persona’s lovelorn depression is contrasted with the high-flying bird, rising and falling “per la doussor c’al cor li val” (“for the sweetness that comes to its heart”).

The primary role of Corydon’s name, however is simply to establish a link to the pastoral tradition. As a pastoral name, Corydon has a most distinguished pedigree, appearing in Theocritus and Vergil as well as in Spenser. [4] Pastoralism, since Theocritus wrote in Alexandria, has been an urban, one might say artificial and “romantic,” view of rural characters. Identifying lovers with shepherds and other country folk and conflating their passion with the general regeneration of life to which people have paid homage throughout history. In the Middle Ages the Classical pastoral tradition survived and developed into the pastourelle. [5] While the peasants danced around country maypoles, their social betters amused themselves by imitation in a quaintly cute and modish manner typified by Marie Antoinette going about her Hameau in an elegantly contrived shepherdess costume.

Phyllida is no less burdened with association. The name, a variation of Phyllis, meaning “greenery” or “covered with leaves” is like Corydon a conventional pastoral name, appearing in Vergil, Horace, Propertius, and Ovid, as well as in the medieval Carmina Burana, . [6] The story in Ovid of her betrayal by Demophon pointedly reinforces the reservations of the woman in Breton.

There is no end to tracing the expanding circles of meaning, but I will conclude here with one comment on what seems a meaningful lexical choice. The second stanza opens with a vague declaration: “Much ado there was.” Modern readers will associate the word with Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in which the primary association of the word is all the fuss that arises about love-making. Here “ado” is euphemistic, similar perhaps to the modern expression “a little something something,” with a similarly jocular tone.

Among the semantic elements introduced by intertextual processes is the fundamental assent to life that marks the welcoming of spring and the delights of love in a cyclically renewed world in the references to May Day, reinforced by both names (birds and plants being part of nature) which also link this poem to the pastoral tradition, thereby suggesting its sophisticated literariness. Further Corydon is associated with earlier examples of love longing and Phyllida with betrayal, while I read “ado” as contributing to a sly high-spirited sexuality. The smooth meters and melodious rhymes reinforce the playful, joyful aspect of love.

Even a college textbook would probably provide notes on very few of these associations, yet the original audience might reasonably be expected to appreciate them to one degree or another. Furthermore, the very literary conventions that might irritate a twenty-first century reader delighted the listener in 1591. In addition to their semantic contribution, the intertextuality is decorative, providing a polished surface that invokes the authority of the Greek and Latin classics as well as secular popular custom and prior uses of the language. Readers enjoy their own competence in a relish of the familiar while the allusions render the themes more precisely, expressing at once the urgency of desire and the prudential reservations about risking oneself in love, the push and pull of ego out of which human relations are woven.

The ability of an audience to respond to such clues, to understand, though perhaps unconsciously, the connotations of every part of the poem is here a major portion of it signification. A reader, having recovered at least a part of this largely lost world of allusion, may return to the poem with greater appreciation of the joys and dangers of love and of the unique ability of the literary text to embody the contradictions of the most deeply human of experiences.


1. His stepfather was the poet and critic George Gascoigne who composed a great body of work, including extravagant rhetorical paeans to Queen Elizabeth.

2. It was then entitled “The Ploughman’s Song,” but when published in England’s Helicon, 1600, it was called “Phillida and Corydon.”

3. As Eliot correctly maintained in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” each new contribution to the ocean of words affects all earlier works. A brief mention of a few poems employing lark imagery that follow Breton’s may be suggestive. The name appears also in the popular collection The Passionate Pilgrim published shortly after “Phyllida and Corydon.” In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, published almost ten years after Breton’s poem, the lark is a figure of joyous flight to heights of sublimity, and in Milton’s “L’Allegro” the lark’s role is similar. For Milton the bird is the first of a catalogue of “unreprovéd pleasures free.” In Shelley’s “To a Skylark” the bird is the image of the poet. For Hopkins in “The Sea and the Skylark” the sense of jouissance associated with the lark is spiritual. In “the Caged Skylark” the bird represents the human soul.

4. Theocritus Idyll IV, Vergil Eclogues II, Spenser The Fairie Queen Bk. VI, Canto X.

5. Though early pastourelles typically concern the encounter of a country woman with a knight, the genre came to include many narratives in which both man and woman were rural folk. In Occitan the parallel convention is called pastorelas. In another development of medieval pastoralism Neidhart von Reuental wrote what critics call höfische Dorfpoesie (“courtly village poetry”).

6. Vergil in Eclogues 3, 5, 7, and 10; Horace Odes 2.4 and 4.11; Propertius IV.8; Ovid Heroides II; in the Carmina Burana “Phyllis and Flora.”



Phyllida and Corydon

In the merry month of May,
In a morn by break of day,
With a troop of damsels playing
Forth I rode, forsooth, a-maying,
When anon by a woodside,
Where as May was in his pride,
I espied, all alone,
Phyllida and Corydon.

Much ado there was, God wot!
He would love, and she would not:
She said, never man was true;
He says, none was false to you.
He said, he had loved her long:
She says, Love should have no wrong.

Corydon would kiss her then,
She says, maids must kiss no men,
Till they do for good and all.
Then she made the shepherd call
All the heavens to witness, truth
Never loved a truer youth.
Thus with many a pretty oath,
Yea, and nay, and faith and troth!--
Such as silly shepherds use
When they will not love abuse;
Love, which had been long deluded,
Was with kisses sweet concluded:
And Phyllida, with garlands gay,
Was made the lady of the May.

Why Read Poetry?

This essay is a draft of an introduction to Every Reader’s Poets, a book of criticism for the common reader, nine chapters for which have been posted at this site.


The thought of what America,
The thought of what America,
The thought of what America would be like
If the Classics had a wide circulation . . .
Oh well!
It troubles my sleep.

“Cantico del Sole” Ezra Pound



     Why read poetry? Perhaps this brief introduction may demonstrate in some small way the power of words. Though they are nothing but symbolic patterns on a page, the reader, having scanned those codes in black and white, will likely find that something has changed. Potentially a mind, but also (or instead) it may possibly be the slightest of alterations arising from a passing wind of laughter or of fear, a sniff of the sublime, a spark of enlightenment. We know nothing whatever apart from our perceptions, and art records human states of consciousness more precisely than any other artifact. We are signaling to each other on this journey, and knowing what to make of our fellow travelers is really the only way to know even oneself.
     While a good many Americans today write poetry, fewer read it. Though it is the golden age of the open mike and the community poetry reading, with far more venues offering regular poetry events than ever before, I fear that the general familiarity with what were once confidently labeled great writers has declined to the vanishing point. Poetry plays an ever-decreasing role in secondary and higher education. Even English majors who devour high heaps of fiction and criticism manage to remain largely innocent of poetry these days, particularly the poetry of the past. The old area requirements for literary scholars – Old English, Middle English, Elizabethan, Restoration, and the like -- have withered. When J. M. Dent founded the Everyman series over a hundred years ago for people like himself who appreciated literature whether or not they had a university degree or a bank account, there was a market for such an idea. When Virginia Woolf addressed her essays to the “common reader,” such a creature still existed. At about the same time in the United States The Harvard Universal Classics, “Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf,” appeared. Shortly thereafter, literature became available to all with the exceedingly cheap little blue books – many cost a nickel -- from the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas which included, among many other titles, Plato, Goethe, booklets on philosophy by Will Durant, socialist and atheist tracts, and sex information titles. A few decades later Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler put together a classier package: The Great Books of the Western World and the Encyclopedia Brittanica Company knew it would find plenty of readers in the great breadth of the American middle class. A body of culture, ethnocentric and biased indeed, but rich and rewarding nonetheless, was then shared by most educated people. “High culture” exerted a gravitational pull on even the mass media with the production of original dramas and even opera on television. Even those unexposed to Shakespeare, Verdi, and Rembrandt felt certain that such icons must hold something worthwhile and deserving of respect.
     Now, however, the direction of influence has largely reversed as public radio and television strive for more of People magazine’s demographic through covering rock ‘n’ roll and the latest HBO series. Intellectuals feel they must wear baseball caps and sound like the guy next door. The closest approach to a shared culture in America is the utterly commodified television shows, movies, and music made to appeal to hoi polloi but also patronized by people who, in the past, would have, in the past, at least given a nod to “high culture.”
     If poetry is worth reading, then, many intelligent readers will benefit from an introduction or a re-introduction to at least a few highlights of the canon. In offering these essays my goal is to supply that need. Criticism can be highly technical with as much jargon and as many subspecialties as physics. Why should the general public take any interest in acquiring such expertise when poets are not expected to master computer programming, entomology, or realms of mathematics beyond what is needed to calculate taxes?
     One would, of course, be quite right to emphasize the many practical functional ends for reading. It is true that in the consumption of poetry one practices the general intellectual skills of taking in information, processing it, and generating original ideas in reaction. These abilities are indispensable for any cognitive labor. In the Victorian Age, students were all drilled in very demanding poetry, couched in the complex grammatical systems of ancient Latin and Greek, whatever their vocational goals might be. The future banker, general, businessman, and bureaucrat all translated passages of Shakespeare into Latin and puzzled over the mysteries of the Greek particle while they were yet in secondary school. The theory was, of course, that in doing so they were performing mental calisthenics so demanding that the requirements of any future career would be simple by comparison. This may have been carrying matters a bit too far.
     Still, the ability to consume difficult texts rapidly, and even more the ability to speak and write elegantly does provide an advantage for the verbally competent which is so great as to be even unfair. A fluent speaker will be persuasive and a proficient writer will carry the day in virtually any setting. People’s intelligence is judged, often, it may be, unfairly, by their verbal skills just as they may be judged on appearance, so one who wishes to get ahead can do no better than to cultivate superlative ability with language. This is not entirely a matter of the rhetorical surface; the good writer is likely to be the effective reasoner as well. In part because American students never learn logic or philosophy, writing class is by default the sole place where one learns how to make one’s ideas convincing to others.
     Magisterially, we ignore all that. There are even more compelling reasons for reading poetry.
     One reason, surprisingly, is biological. The owners of even the most domestic of house cats may see their sweet lap-sitter turn to a merciless killer at the first opportunity. Pussy may seem possessed by unaccustomed excitement, she may suddenly appear with a slightly bloody little corpse or leap into the air to seize a bird in mid-flight. When the cat acts like a cat, even a vegan pet owner can hardly resist feeling admiration at the efficiency of the animal’s skills and the grace of its movements. Similarly, the sight of a hummingbird hovering at a flower or the coordinated action of a thousand ants in a colony inspires most viewers with awe and a sense of beauty. Each of these animals is practicing its highest evolutionary skills, the activities that its DNA is programmed to perform with dazzling exhilarating competence.
     As human beings our most highly developed evolutionary skill is the manipulation of symbols. Language is only the most sophisticated symbolic system our species employs, and poetry is the most concentrated form of linguistic code. Poetry carries a heavier weight of signification per word or line than any other form of discourse. Thus in reading poetry we are exercising our nature to a paramount degree.
     This is the reason we experience pleasure in poetry, and pleasure, though still not quite respectable, has been a chief end of art since prehistoric times. People construct and consume works of art to pass the time in pleasant play. Tribal people tell each other stories to transmit culture, to be sure, but also for the same reason that other people listened to Jack Benny on the radio, for simple amusement. Such pleasure ranges widely, from a laugh at a Louis C. K. punch line or a shiver of anxiety at a paragraph of Stephen King through the sentimental comedy of Trollope and Dickens or a frisson of sympathetic sexual energy upon hearing a blues song, to what we think of as the heights of the sublime in the Oresteia or a late Beethoven quartet.
     In perhaps the most hackneyed and misleading formula of all literary criticism, Horace declared that poetry should provide not only pleasure but instruction, which is to say useful knowledge. Just what sort of knowledge can arise from literature is often unclear. On the vulgar level, and sometimes among the sophisticated as well, a notion persists that artists are somehow wiser, more insightful than the general run of humanity and that we readers might benefit from their valuable insights cleverly encoded in their work. A highly humane English professor of my acquaintance never lost the faith that familiarity with poetry would render all the world more humane. To him the widely-read person would inevitably treat lovers and enemies alike in a more enlightened fashion and perhaps even lead society as a whole to a more sensible political regime. Alas, this cannot be, if only because the artist is not privy to any insights unavailable to the rest of us. The poet’s exceptional skill is not in ethics or politics but only in the use of language and the construction of objets d’art made of words.
     Yet we do learn a great deal from reading. Some of what we learn has nothing whatever to do with the nature of art whereas other insights might be available from non-aesthetic sources. For instance, the historian might study Beowulf for evidence of Old English legal codes, or a military strategist might analyze battles in the Iliad. Such information has nothing necessarily literary about it. Yet one traditional element of literary texts, indeed it might seem the most significant judging from high school classes (and many in university), is theme, what the text implies about lived experience. We benefit from such thematic exposition not because the author is more perspicacious than ourselves, but because the text provides another viewpoint, another take on reality, another world-view. Simply understanding deeply how a situation can look to others broadens an individual’s vision by a sort of imaginative triangulation.
     Every work implies a set of assumptions about history, psychology, and philosophy. Just as we all live inside of history, every text is also inscribed with the circumstances of its creation. The author’s own political views are in the end irrelevant; what matters is what is implied on the page. A macho writer is likely, in fact, to reveal more about the social role of women than a more progressive one. Furthermore, every text concerns human attitudes or actions and thus must carry information about how the mind operates; in fact, virtually every piece of writing reflects on the writer as well as the personae portrayed. Finally, every work also conveys traces of a philosophic worldview. (Indeed, even the less heavily weighted utterances of everyday life do the same in a more dilute way.)
     Yet, whatever value one may place on the insights of littérateurs, we have as well other disciplines for investigating those realms: history, economics, and political science for investigating social structures, psychology and neurology for the mind, and philosophy and theology for the ultimate questions. Art is unique, however, in its capacity, far greater than other forms of discourse, to represent the authentic face of human consciousness. By arising from one subjectivity and appealing to another, poetry, fiction, and drama can fully delineate the affective aspect of mind, which often dominates our own lived experience. The universal pursuit of pleasure and aversion to pain is likewise fully rendered in imaginative literature.
     Equally importantly, only the aesthetic text can by design provide insight into the irrational (and far more of our thinking is irrational than we allow ourselves to suppose) bases for thought. Often conflicted, especially when dealing with the most significant issues of human life such as love and aggression, the mind is best represented by fiction and poetry which are uniquely equipped to investigate the ambivalent and the paradoxical. Finally, art has since its appearance forty thousand years ago, been associated with religion, broadly conceived as concern with Ultimate Reality. Though theology may offer some insights about the human perception of the divine, psychology about love, and medicine about death, the most meaningful impressions are those without the pretense of objectivity. Indeed, though art can offer only another subjectivity, the fact is that subjectivity is all we can ever know.

Two Brief Notes on Daphnis and Chloe

I quote from Moses Hadas’ translation in the old Doubleday Anchor paperback Three Greek Romances with its charming cover by Diana Klemin.

     Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe is the most popular of the Hellenistic romances and, in the opinion of many, the finest. The story, translated into French by Jacques Amyot in 1559, inititated a revival of the pastoral romance genre, influencing Honoré d'Urfé, Torquato Tasso, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In more recent times the work inspired paintings by Boucher in the 18th century, Gleyre in the 19th century, illustrations by Klimt and lithographs by Chagall in the 20th, as well as an opera by Offenbach and a ballet by Ravel.
     This interest and my own is founded on the narrative’s presentation of the powers of love. Under the mythological symbols of Eros, Pan, and the Nymphs, the intensity of human sexuality, what D. H. Lawrence much closer to our own age would have called its divinity, is presented with power and subtlety. Similar to the Pervigilium Veneris in its wonderful belated passion, the story is perhaps primarily a paean to life conceived as the reproductive power of nature. Yet at the same time as he recognizes the glorious but undifferentiated song of the creation’s renewal, the writer never slights the human element, with its burden of free will and an almost modern share of self-consciousness and self-contradiction.

1.
     The opening ekphrasis of a work of art supposedly displayed in the Lesbos grove of the Nymphs, a place itself of surpassing beauty, full of tree and flowers and watered by a fructifying stream. There, the author relates, he saw “fairest sight” he had ever seen, not the landscape but rather “the painted picture of a tale of love.” He claims that “an interpreter of the picture” detailed its story to him which he then set down. Thus, in a way, the supposed painting is an illustration of his narration; while in another his story is a partial depiction from a very human perspective, of the élan vital observable throughout the biological world.
     For the picture includes much more than a highly distilled version of the courtship of Daphnis and Chloe in its depiction of “young lovers pledging to one another.” The first image is of women in childbed and others tending infants, not ordinarily considered erotic situations, though they are rapidly enfolded in a grander scheme of fertility as sheep and shepherd are introduced until it is not entirely clear who is tending whom. All are united in a coherent mutually invigorating and passionately warm net of relationships.
     In front of the backdrop, though, in the human realm, one sees not only the lovers, but also “pirates” and “invaders.” These in fact are mentioned immediately before Longus assures the reader, “all these scenes spoke of love.” Intruders who impede the course of love are comparable to Catullus’ grumbling old men or the lauzengiers and gilos who out of jealousy or malice present obstacles to the troubadour’s affairs. Without conflict there can be no drama and therefore, from Greek New Comedy times through the most recent Hollywood romantic comedy, some force must separate the man and woman. When they overcome and can join together, the happy ending has arrived.
     Yet the figure of a pirate has a further significance in Longus. At the close of Book I Daphnis suffers the prolonged frustration of having admired Chloe’s naked body yet still not having sex with her. Far from a generalized Ovidian lovesickness, Daphnis is simply experiencing intrusively urgent sexual desire. He considers this state of suffering to be worse than the ordeal of his capture by pirates. “His soul,” one reads, “was still tarrying with the pirates,” who alarm him less than his beautiful beloved “for he was young, and a rustic, and so far ignorant of the piratical ways of love.”
     This final phrase, unique in the book, suggests not that he is dwelling on his adventure among the pirates, but rather that his experience of being on love is similar, that love is necessarily in some way piratical, which is to say selfish and domineering. The idea may seem out of place in a love story in which the leading characters are both impossibly naïve. Both are portrayed as child-like in their innocence and thus “pure” in their love. The primary view of love in Daphnis and Chloe is extravagantly unselfish; Daphnis, after all, recoils from initiating sexual intercourse for fear of hurting Chloe. Nature stands in the background, with its undoubtedly necessary, beautiful, and “right” drive to reproduce. This small dark grace note tempers the celebration of love, reminding readers that passion can make one miserable as well as elated and suggesting the many love relations which are less ideally mutual than Daphnis and Chloe’s in which one partner (or both) actually seeks to govern the other.
     The pirates in the story thus represent both the impediments love often encounters as well as the potential within love for a selfish desire to possess.

2.
     Only a few pages short of the end of Book I (1.30.6) is a scene in which Daphnis crosses a stream while escaping his pursuers. Not only are the pirates weighed down by their armor; Daphnis hitches a ride as “securely as if he were riding in a wagon” by seizing the horns of two cows heading across. This fanciful image is vivid and memorable in itself, but it also serves to introduce an odd digression.
     The author relates by the way as an interesting fact that cattle can swim better than people, but then in place of returning to his story, he continues to elaborate the point, conceding that waterfowl are even more at ease in the water and adding a second exception -- “and, of course, fish” – as though he were being scrupulous about facts in a natural history treatise. Not willing to drop the theme even at that, he notes that “an ox is never in danger of drowning, unless his hoofs become softened in the water and drop off.” This surely sounds as though it has roots in some ancient authority, though I have not traced it. With a flourish Longus then concludes the passage by noting that the animal’s swimming skills are proven by the many locations named Oxford (in Greek Βόσπορος) in the world.
     The passage stands out for its singularity but also because, though it has no relevance to the larger story, the author with a sort of lavish liberality not only raises the topic but then extends it. He possesses a sort of grand vision of the sort that tends to appear toward the end of an age in which every detail is worthy of examination since all are of equal significance. I am reminded of Athenaeus’ diners who never hesitate to spin off into a discussion of anything whatever, or of Robert Burton’s essays, or of the unpredictable, stream-like flow of conversation in a social group or of reminiscence on a page of Proust. Longus here is leisurely and learned and quaint, a collector of curious lore like a provincial Victorian cleric erudite in Greek and Latin but assigned a church among farmers, who keeps his erudition active by expounding as an amateur on local antiquities or butterflies or varieties of moss.
     I would be hard put to justify this passage in terms of the efficient design of the story’s aesthetic structure, but I, for one, welcome it as a reader. In the end it does contribute toward an understanding of the author’s sensibility, civilized and sophisticated, omnivorously curious, and friendly to all learning. I am reminded of a professor with whom I studied in graduate school who never prepared a lecture, but simply took off from the text under discussion and flew about with the freest of association from Sumer to situation comedies to Milton leaving some students nonplussed. It is because of him that my own advanced study, this note, for example, seemed to me plausible, yet he was not to everyone’s taste.