The Ankle Bracelet: An Ancient Tamil Narrative

 

 

     Every visitor to Parnassus looking up and beyond catches a glimpse of misty mountains, whole ranges in fact fading into the distance promising glories too great for a lifetime, while the trekker hears that further yet beyond are fabled range upon range rarely entered even by the footloose.  Who can know the languages to appreciate the Persian Shahnameh, the Kievan Rus Tale of Igor’s Campaign, the Malinke Epic of Sundiata, or the Epic of Siri, in Tulu language from old Mysore?   Yet even a glance or a day-stroll into these unknown realms is salutary for the reader who wishes to come to know literature in general.

     I came upon the Shilappadikakaram (The Ankle Bracelet) [1] in a chance encounter, as a remaindered volume of which I was entirely ignorant, knowing of Tamil only that it was spoken in the south of India and in Sri Lanka.  Upon the most superficial inquiry I learned that this poem, dated to about the fifth century C. E. is only one of Tamil’s “Five Great Epics.”  These epics in turn were a portion of the vast literary compendium known as The Eighteen Greater Texts which included as well the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Idylls.  Then follow the so-called Eighteen Lesser Texts as well as countless other works, and we are still in the period in which Beowulf had yet to find its written form.  

     The poems deep roots in orality and performance are most evident in the recurring formulae.  Kannaki (at age eleven) ”had the graces of a golden liana” (4).  She is not, however, unique, as a few lines later we encounter a whole troupe (5) “lithe as golden lianas.”  A reader may tire of hearing of all the lovely women wearing “shining bracelets,” with “collyrium-painted” eyes, putting musk in their hair and patterns of sandalwood paste on their breasts.  King Shenguttuvan is called “the king, whose army is invincible,” the king, before whom all lances tremble” and “the king, whose army, vast as the ocean.” [2] The use of such conventional phrases and epithets occurs throughout. 

     These set phrases define significant elements of culture, beginning with the view of beauty for women and power for monarchs as the most prominent signs of excellence.  Yet, just as Homeric set formulae define practices of sacrifice and of hospitality, the Tamil poem sets forth expected standards of behavior.  For instance, Kannaki complains of Kovalan’s death as though her grief results from her inability to perform the ordinary practices of her day, saying, “In my husband’s absence, I could not distribute presents to good men, honor Brahmins, welcome saintly monks, or receive friends, as is done in all noble homes.” (107)  Here the final words make it clear that she is simply detailing what was expected of all respectable people. 

     In the most general sense the patterns of language construct a particular ambiance setting the tone of the story rather like a production designer might do for a film.  In the Shilappadikaram a luxurious, richly woven tapestry of aestheticism underlies every scene.   When vassals approach Shenguttuvan, the list of their tribute goes on for ten lines, including millet, garlic, “creepers in bloom,” tigers, lions, elephants, “deer with their fawns,” wildcats, and “sweet-spoken parrots.” (156)  The mere length of the list is an index to the king’s might.

     Preparation for the feast of Indra, the most regal of deities, in Puhār is grandly magnificent, recalling descriptions of tournaments in medieval European romances.  The viewing stands are “studded with emeralds and brilliants, and had pillars of coral.”  Elaborate embroideries are hung about as well as elephant tusks, and strings of pearls.  Gold vases are set out and “metal lamps shaped like girls” along with “golden flags, feather fans, scented paste, and fragrant flower festoons.”  A “thousand and eight kings” bring “on their heads “jars filled with the sacred water, scented with fresh pollen.” (22-3)  Such passages may be considered like cinematic special effects, simulating for all the most spectacular scenes in a manner reminiscent of extravagant film scenes from Intolerance to Ben-Hur.

     The splendor of such displays is matched by the poet’s reveling in sensual experience in less public scenes.  The description of the music to accompany Madhāvi’s performance is so technical and precise, it could only have been written for connoisseurs.  The description of the dancer’s dressing to please Kovalan alone implies a taste for opulence.  She washes her hair with “oil mixed with ten kinds of astringents, five spices, and a blend of thirty-two pungent herbs.  She dried it in the smoke of incense and anointed each tress with heavy musk paste.”  Madhavi proceeds to adorn herself with foot make-up and a fabulous array of jewelry -- gold, coral, and gemstones – until “within her elaborate love-chamber, she offered Kovalan pleasures ever renewed.”  (28-9)

     In fact the most intense and consistent notes of the poem’s sensuality are sexual.  Kovalan is identified with Kama, the personification of desire as well as Krishna, the lover of Radha and the gopis. [3]  Their relations are clothed in hyperbolic rhetoric implying that she derives her beauty from the gods.  “The limbless god of love gave up his bow to make your dark eyebrows  -. . . Shiva lost his crow n when the moon became your pale forehead . . .Indra their king gave up his double-trident thunderbolt, that you waist might be wrought from its steel . . . Murugan, six-faced god of War, gave up his fiery arrowheads so that your long eyes with their blood-red inner corners might frighten away the dark clouds of your hair.”  (7)  “On the bed, strewn with broken garlands, the lovers spent sweet, pleasure-filled days in close embrace.” (8)  In European literature this pinnacle of exalted jouissance is approached perhaps by Gottfried’s Tristan and Iseult during their first night together on shipboard.    

    In springtime “the celebrated god of Love, with Spring, his gracious friend, ruled the fertile Tamil land,” heralded by spring’s “messenger, the south wind,” and “the cuckoo, bugler of the great army of Eros.” (46-7)  “The breeze gently caressed many a lotus-eyed woman lying voluptuously against the strong chest of her lord.” (16)  And, later: “A soft breeze from the hills wafted the odor of wild and garden jasmine, of mayilai, of blue water lilies, and of the aphrodisiac purple lotus . . .” (23)  That seductive wind, like Europe’s west wind Zephyr, signals the annual resurrection of nature with the violent associations of the “army” image for the moment subdued.  Yet the readers will find that this pair of lovers, like Tristan and Isolde, is headed for disaster.   What had seemed an idealized love is followed by immense suffering -- his infidelity, his death, and the general destruction that follows.  One is impossible without the other.  Just as in the world at large, life and death, joy and pain, are inextricably linked.

     For the ecstasy of lovers like Kovalan and Kannaki is inevitably fractured by anxiety and ultimately by death.  Indeed the eroticism of the Shilappadikakaram is profoundly problematized from the start.  The lyric sequences that divide the narrative are, for the most part songs of love but they are far from untroubled.  In what Danielou titles an “Ode to the Kaveri” the river is figured as a “fish-eyed beauty” who is asked not to lament if the monarch “courts” “the lovely Ganges or “marries” the Virgin of the southern tip of the subcontinent, the Kanya Kumari.  The servant girl then sings of the distress caused by deceptive seducers who take advantage of their mistresses.  This reminder of duplicity is succeeded by a song that warns that Death might be concealed “in a young girl’s form.” The motif is repeated with “cruel Death, disguised as a young girl,” 

 

 . . .conches from the sea,

bruised by the shameless waves,

Are thrown upon the beach and crash

Upon sand-castles that our girls have built.  (34)

 

 

The motif of the ruined sand-castles returns, explicitly identified as sexual assault.

                                  . . . . a male sea rapes

The sandy castles that we girls construct,

And eyes, sharp as spears, on full-moon faces,

shed bitterest regret’s too tardy tears.      (41)

 

     The Shilappadikakaram is traditionally attributed to a ruler turned Jain monk Ilango Adigal whose name is first mentioned in a prologue appended to the poem considerably after its first appearance.  However that may be, though the poem includes many Hindu (and some Buddhist) references, its primary orientation seems to be a syncretistic Jainism.  The depiction in the poem of a simultaneously creative and destructive love recalls the Jain teaching of a sort of profound skepticism associated with the many-sidedness doctrine, suggesting the vulnerability of a single view.  In a broader sense, it also recalls the frequent representation of Hindu deities in forms multiplying in bipolar oppositions: a beneficent and a malevolent aspect, a male and female form.  Not only are both genuine; they are in a real sense identical, two sides of the same experience.  The human sensations of joy and suffering do not exist from a higher perspective. 

     In my admittedly uninformed reading of South Asian literature, this poem leads on the one hand toward the other Tamil writings to capture a fuller vision of India’s deep south.  On the other it suggests parallels with other cultural manifestations in that vast country such as with the marvelous erotic carvings of Khajuraho.  The Shilappadikakaram is, however, in itself, and read with little aid other than the minimal introduction provided by Danielou, a lovely poem, achingly lyrical, representing a rounded view of the joy and suffering of human experience.  The paradoxes of the poem are the paradoxes of life.   

 

 

 

1.      1.  So-called in Alain Danielou’s though Silappatikāram is more commonly used today.  The photographs Danielou’s partner Raymond Burnier took of the temples in Khajuraho did much to publicize the site.  The translator’s expertise in Indian music as well as languages and his literary sensibilities produced a useful and readable edition, though R. Parthasarathy's 1993 English translation is more scholarly and, as it was reprinted in 2004 by Penguin Books, more easily available.

 

2.      2.  See pages 4 and 5 for the phrases associated with female beauty and pages 161, 166, and 167 for praise of the king.

 

3.      3.  See pages 9 and 106.  According to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (Fourth Adhyya, Fourth Brahmana), human beings are made of desire. 

Misunderstandings of Travel [Waugh, Byron, Chatwin]

 

 

     Incidents of my own experience which are illustrative of the general principle here may be found inter alia in the following posts: “Hitchhiking in Algeria” (September 2010), “A Reading in Kathmandu” (November 2009), “Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria” (March 2011), “Festival in Ogwa” [Nigeria](January 2011), “Sacred Space as Sideshow” [Prague] (February 2010).

 

 

     The fine savor of travel often involves the pleasant acquisition of new knowledge.  Away from home one cannot avoid learning about other people’s history, art, cuisine, politics, and taste, in short, the wide variety of ways to be human.  All travel encourages receptive senses, even a stroll around the town next door, but the further afield one wanders, the wider one’s eyes are likely to open, and the more new data the traveler will process. 

     There is no smooth transition from naivete to cosmopolitan sophistication.  The traveler is in the position of a small child and feels a similar exhilaration and frustration born of occupying a world largely mysterious, learning daily, but with codes only sketchily known, A necessary concomitant of spending time in such realms of half-knowledge, of speculation and outright mystery, is that a good share of one’s conclusions prove more or less wrong, while others can never be satisfactorily tested and must remain hypothetical, and a good share of the world remains cryptic.  

     With or without guides and translators, the strangeness of being in strange places is enhanced by confusion over customs and values and most of all by imperfect mastery of other languages on the part of both foreigner and native.  This lack of understanding magnifies the irreducible distance between one consciousness and another.  The tolerance and acceptance a drifter must adopt when stranded in a tropical village where the road ends are perhaps the basis for the only workable attitude toward life, considering that everyone is always dealing with insufficient information.  Submission is sometimes all that one has. 

     Whereas earlier travel writers had emphasized the picturesque or the sublime in landscape or dramatic history or exotic in folkways, the great twentieth century English travel writers – Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Bruce Chatwin – excelled at capturing the absurd, the accidental, the inexplicable in the center of the everyday.  Each presents the persona of a well-meaning innocent, cast about by circumstances, observing unstable chains of cause and effect which seem puzzling, inscrutable, and generally faintly hostile.   One ordinarily thinks of traveler’s enlightenment arising due to new information, the acquisition of which allows new insights about both others and one’s own habitual attitudes.  It not uncommonly happens that a complementary view will not supplant one’s preconception, but rather will come to seem equally true or will simply cast an experience as inexplicable. 

     A few examples may clarify this distinctly modern vision which focuses specifically on what is not seen, what is unknown.  Evelyn Waugh’s Labels (1930) describes a show he attended in Port Said, Egypt. 

 

Attendants were going about selling nuts, mineral waters, coffee, and hubble-bubbles . . . the doctor warned me that if I smoked one of these I would be bound to catch some frightful disease; I did so, however, without ill effects . . . we found ourselves in the middle of a hugely popular comic turn: two Egyptians in European costume were doing cross-talk . . . It was, of course, wholly unintelligible to us; now and then they smacked each other, so I have no doubt it was very much the same as an English music hall turn . . . their place was taken by a very pretty little white girl in a ballet dress: she cannot have been more than ten or twelve years old; she danced a Charleston . . . Then there were some Japanese jugglers, and then an interminable comic turn done by the whole company . . . After this a Negro of magnificent physique appeared.  First he thrust a dozen or so knitting-needles through his cheeks . . . It was while he was doing this that a fight began . . . The man on my right, a grave Egyptian with a knowledge of English, with whom I had had some conversation, suddenly stood up, and leaning across all three of us, struck down with his umbrella a resounding blow on top of one of the fighting heads . . . “What is the fight about –” I asked him.  “Fight?” he said, “Who has been fighting?”

 

The opening act of Egyptians mimicking Europeans suggests an unbridged cultural divide, yet the rest of the vaudeville seems ambitiously transnational, the sort of broad entertainment that might amuse anyone anywhere.  But just as the spectacle seems intelligible, the fight and then its resolution both occur without the slightest cause.  Then the “grave Egyptian” denies that it occurred at all.  Waugh (and his reader) can only look on in bemusement, murmuring perhaps with Puck “What fools these mortals be!” 

     There are multifarious trail-heads through the semantic field of unknowing in this incident.  Waugh, for instance, mentions his use of a public water-pipe in spite of being warned by a doctor.  He does not apparently even consider if the advice may be sound, or what the threatened disease may be, except that it is likely to be “frightful.”  Here the foreign setting allows Waugh to express the feeling many have, even in a semi-scientific society, that health is a matter of fate.  One hazards on forward until felled.  And by surviving unharmed to tell his story, the author becomes a sort of comic hero, turning the tragic emotions of pity and fear on their heads as all is well for the moment at any rate.  The reader feels blessed like the impetuous traveler and can reflect with some composure on that strange scene, the ever-varied procession  of humanity. 

     In The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron describes a Turkoman encampment in northern Afghanistan.  As the men are working somewhere else, the women all flee, while their dogs attack.  Once the dogs are subdued, the following scene occurs.

 

 I approached a mother and two children.  They fled into a kibitka, and I turned to a younger woman of magnificent carriage who was clasping a baby.  Placing it behind a wattle screen, she grabbed a pole, traced a circle in the dust in front of it, and came at me like a mediaeval knight.  Her face was screwed up with anger, and there was something in the tone of her denunciations that made me uncomfortable, as if I had been meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence.  The two old witches chuckled at the scene.  But our guard, a new one who had joined us at Andkhoi, was ashamed, and said that Afghanistan was like that.  He had on a sophisticated Western mackintosh, and was always taking snuff from a silver-mounted gourd with a ruby on its lip.

 

     The reader relishes Byron’s image of the lady of stately mien delicately setting her infant “behind a wattle screen” that she might free her limbs to express herself, undeterred by the fact that she is not understood.  He reacts with the lovely understatement of the faux innocent observer, saying he senses a subtle “something” in her “tone’ that made him “uncomfortable” when she is charging like a knight, apparently raging and hopping in hostility.

     The guide introduces another twist.  In contrast to the woman’s wary defensiveness before an outsider he is a slavish adherent of his partial and distorted notion of European ways.  One would, I think, have to look a long time in London before spotting another such rubied snuff-box even among the dandies.  He is like the cartoon savage in a loincloth and a top hat.  If this individual is not as world-wise as he may fancy himself, the reader may naturally turn to questioning the admittedly shaky authority of the writer, perhaps even of his own vision.

     In Byron’s anecdote the narrator, his guide, and most of the women in the camp are uneasy, cautious and defensive, unsure what their encounter may.  One might well understand Byron’s uncertainty about how to behave in an unfamiliar situation, the general anxiety about the sudden appearance of a mysterious stranger, and Andkhoi’s distress at seeing his employers treated disrespectfully.  The most unaccountable actions are performed by the “woman with magnificent carriage” who is as well the only decisive individual on the scene.  Here is figured the unbridgeable gap that separates each consciousness from all others, regardless of culture.  Just why does Byron feel the discomfort he attributes to his in some sense “meanly taking advantage of her man’s absence”?  Is it in any way related to his appreciation of her figure?

     Bruce Chatwin‘s experience during a coup in Benin was nothing short of Kafkaesque.  After being swept off the street “for your own proper protection,” he is denounced as a mercenary by a corporal with bad breath.

 

     He held up my fountain pen.  “What?”

     “A pen,” I said.

     What for?”

     “To write with.”

     “A gun?”

     “Not a gun.”

     “Yes, a gun!”

    

His bad cop interrogator is then replaced by a comparatively urbane functionary who seeks to reassure his prisoner, saying “Calm yourself, monsieur.  You do not understand.  In his country one understands nothing,” before marching him back to his cell.  Eventually a sort of hearing on his case is held.

 

A young zealot started mouthing anti-capitalist formulae until he was silenced by the colonel in charge.  The colonel then asked a few perfunctory questions, wearily apologized for the inconvenience, signed my pass, and hoped I would continue to enjoy my holiday in the People’s Republic.

      Chatwin’s story may be read as a cautionary warning against the blindness induced by ideology.  The willful unknowing produced by the desire to toe the government line allows a man to see a fountain pen yet call it a gun.  Yet the man who releases hum seems to subscribe to the exact same way of thinking and yet casually releases him.  The reader is willing to believe that the writer might have been arbitrarily killed.  Why did things turn out as they did?  No one knows.  Would there be any difference at all between the putative Marxism of this ruling party and a Western-allied dictator, or a third who cultivates a simple cult of personality? 

     In each of these incidents the observer is European and the scene before him is distinctly Other (though the pattern occurs as well, of course, in the observations of cultivated non-European writers) [2].  This sets in motion a peculiar dialectic in which on the one hand the writer implies the ethnocentric notion that other cultures are inscrutable, ridiculous, or childish.  At the same time the attitude confesses parochial ignorance since every custom must have a reason.  The implications spread from that point indefinitely: one side is more rich and powerful, yet the other may possess some greater wisdom, the one is on home ground and thus secure, the visitor at a loss, and so on into the speculative night.   All this from some unexceptional not-knowing.

     But in the most general terms, the author in each of these scenes does not know what to make of the spectacle before his eyes, so what is the reader to think?  Chatwin’s persecutor perhaps could see a weapon in a fountain pen, but why did Waughs’s interlocutor say he saw no fight?  In order to more placidly enjoy his evening out?  In Byron’s story the same events cause the “old witches” to laugh, the young woman to rage in fury, and the writer to scratch his head.  Does a “real” meaning exist?

     The Pyrrhonic skeptics of late antiquity felt that they could make use of such uncertainty and achieve peace of mind through acknowledging their ignorance, leading first to silence, but then to serenity and perhaps even to pleasure. [1]  Followers of the meditative via negativa such as the pseudo-Dionysius and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing have conjured deity out of purest no-thought.   And Bloom would make mis-reading a source of creative change. 

     The twentieth century offered new renditions of this paradoxical enlightening darkness.  In Sartre’s Nausea (1938) Roquentin reflects on the roots of a chestnut tree.  His experience is confined to the present moment, and he concludes “faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence . . . That root with its color, shape, its congealed movement, was beneath all explanation.”  A few years later in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus provided another memorable illumination sparked by ignorance.

 

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man' s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.

 

     This metaphysical occlusion of meaning is only the broadest initial reading of such misunderstandings of travel.  Whether such reflections are recorded in a journal or a book or whether they simply vanish like sparkles of sunlight on a stream, the trip will eventually end.  The traveler may then return with a livelier sense of the extent to which we all are finding our way about the darkness whether in our own home or in Timbuktu.  With the right spirit we can enjoy our bumbling as a kind of sport or gallant act in defiance of the unknown and make as much of our not-knowing as our knowing.  What more is there to travel?  What more to reading?  To life?

 

 

 

1.      1.  See Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica, Book 14.

2.      2.  Recognizing the utility of the outside perspective, in the eighteenth century a series of books by Europeans in the pose of non-Europeans were published including Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721), Poullain de Saint-Foix’s Lettres d’une Turque à Paris (1730), d'Argens’ Lettres chinoises (1741), Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747), Beckford’s Vathek, and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759).

Subjectivity in Edward Young

 

 

     Among the trends in English poetry identified as “pre-Romantic” are the rural and nature poets (notably Dyer and Thomson), the archaic or folk-oriented (Burns, Chatterton, Macpherson), the out-and-out visionary (Smart, Blake), and the “graveyard school” (associated with Gray, Cowper, and Young).  While hardly mutually exclusive, each of these points toward a significant Romantic vector, all suggesting deviation from the neo-Classical theory associated with Dryden, Pope, and Johnson.  Among the most influential of the writers pointing new directions for English poetry was Edward Young.

     Young’s The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night-Thoughts, the first portion of which was published in 1742, was immensely popular in the U. K. and hardly less on the Continent, particularly in Germany.  When Young later published a collected works [1], the author was identified not by name, but as “the Author of the Night-Thoughts.”  A new edition in 1797 included illustrations by William Blake [2]. 

     The popularity of his poem made Young particularly authoritative [3] and his essay “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759) allows the reader to juxtapose Young’s theoretical ideas with his poetic practice.  This analysis both in theory and practice clarifies Young’s contribution to the old dispute about whether poets are born or created by training. [4]  

     The primary theme of Young’s essay is the value of originality, revealed by the title and reinforced throughout.  Assuming then a partisan position in the dispute which in France had been called the querelle des anciens et des modernes and in England the Battle of the Books [5], Young insists on his preference for original compositions as opposed to those shaped by the imitation of classics.  He even suggests that moderns may outdo the classics, though he modestly stops short of claiming that they have already, noting that “the modern powers are equal to those before them” yet “modern performance in general is deplorably short.”  He begins his argument with the sensible observation that “human souls, through all periods, are equal.”  [6]  Within each “soul” must be an innate god-given capacity for genius which alone is capable of shaping great art. 

     Young’s notion of genius is considerably mystified, as his use of terms such as vigor igneus and caelestis origo signifies.  Genius, he says, partakes of the divine and “raises his structure by means invisible.”  His notion is not far distant from older ideas of a muse or god of poetry.  Genius, he declares is a surprise even to its possessor who must “contract full intimacy with the stranger within [himself].”  Genius in his view not only makes a great writer; it makes also a virtuous man.  Yet unfortunately Genius explains poetry no more than the “Great Man” theory explains history.  Even Boileau in the very first stanza of his prescriptive manual had declared that a would-be poet born without “Genius” would work in vain.   Genius seems to amount to little more than an afterthought inferred from the poem’s perceived excellence.

     Apart from failing itself to be an original concept, Genius always begs the question since it is already assumed in the author of a work deserving of praise.  The genius may access the profundities of the mind of man: “its bounds are unknown, as those of the creation.”  This bright promise, however, is hedged with hazard.  The innovative poet may find no audience, since “all eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road.”  “the more remote your path from the highway, the more reputable.”  Genius, Young claims, is most likely to be condemned when he has soared highest and gone out of sight of the common reader.  Thus the greater the poet the lesser his reputation.

     One looks, then, to the first installment of Night-Thoughts in search of an example of the novelty the author recommended so highly.  The blank verse form is familiar enough.  Probably the most common meter in English poetry since the sixteenth century, unrhymed iambic pentameter had been the choice of Milton in Paradise Lost, Dryden’s All for Love, and Thomson’s The Seasons.  The personifications that meet the reader in the first lines – Nature, Sleep, Fortune – are thoroughly in the neo-Classical manner as are artificial epithets like “downy pinion” for wing.  His theology is likewise quite orthodox, resisting, though at times with difficulty, the latititudinarianism and deism of his age. 

     What, then, if neither form nor content is innovative, made the author feel he was taking a new literary turn?   In a brief Preface, Young provides the answer: “As the occasion of this Poem was real, not fictitious, so the method pursued in it, was rather imposed, by what spontaneously arose in the Author's mind, on that occasion, than meditated, or designed.”  Here Young takes a stand against Boileau’s clear emphasis on conscious craft. 

 

Gently make haste, of Labour not afraid;

A hundred times consider what you've said:

Polish, repolish, every Colour lay,

And sometimes add; but oft'ner take away.

'Tis not enough, when swarming Faults are writ,

That here and there are scattered Sparks of Wit;

Each Object must be fix'd in the due place,

And diff'ring parts have Corresponding Grace:

'Till, by a curious Art dispos'd, we find

One perfect whole, of all the pieces join'd.

Keep your subject close, in all you say;

Nor for a sounding Sentence ever stray. [7]

 

Whereas Boileau privileges first of all discerning taste, proportion, and unity, a sort of elegant tidiness, allowing some appeal to the intellectual pleasures implied by “Wit,” Young claims that his poem is itself a thing of nature, “real, not fictitious,” and, as a result, is subject not to “meditation” or “design,” but must be governed wholly “by what spontaneously arose in the Author’s mind.” 

   By saying the poem is “real,” of course, what Young means is that he has attempted to convey in words his own subjectivity, accurately reflecting his own experience, just as Wordsworth had outlined using similar language in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  The fogginess of the concept of Genius in the “Conjectures” appears then in a new light.  If access to the sublime is subjectively determined, a natural occurrence, arriving “spontaneously,” obedience to literary rules becomes irrelevant, and analysis is fruitless.  Subjectivity is for him self-justifying. 

     The privilege Young accords subjectivity in theory is suggested in the use of the word “conjectures” in the title which couches his conclusion appropriately in the essai’s language of supposition.  Young’s self-denigrating opening describes the essay as “miscellaneous in its nature, somewhat licentious in its conduct; and, perhaps, not overimportant in its end.”  “Though I despair of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age, and care’s incumbent cloud . . .yet will I hazard some conjectures.”  Though he foregrounds the modesty topos, Young reserves some chance of gravitas, hoping that his observations may “strike the careless wanderer after amusement only, with useful awe.”  A twenty-first century modern may be struck by the assumption that a reader seeking idle entertainment would read a treatise on poetics in the first place, but Young here seizes a bit of high moral ground that places him within the traditional European view of the ends of art as to delight and to instruct. 

     Although Young recognizes that poets may be mistaken, misleading, or simply incompetent, he prescribes no way to discern true Genius and thus separate the sublime from the worthless.  He maintains that one must “leap” to reach new ground but, “by that leap, if genius is wanting, we break our necks.”  While truly original works will “engross” the reader, they may also “prejudice” and “intimidate.”  Young suggests that there may be a purely aesthetic criterion in that the reader will enjoy the work of the gifted with greater pleasure.  Art is, he says, “a delicious garden of intellectual fruits and flowers” affording many beneficial effects: a “respite from care;” it “rescues us from sloth and sensuality,” defending against “the langours of old age.” 

     The Christianity that defined Young’s profession obliges him to add a traditional extra-literary touchstone: moral improvement.  “Wit, indeed, however brilliant,” he says, “should not be permitted to gaze self-enamored on its useless charms” but should “like the first Brutus, it should sacrifice its most darling offspring to the sacred interests of virtue, and real service of mankind.“  This is surely equivalent to the “useful awe” he had also cited to justify poetry.  Yet the appeal of Young’s verse is surely in his vulnerability rather than his faith.  His anxiety not his piety wins our attention because it is more likely to   resemble our own state of mind. 

     Perhaps his faith in subjectivity is the most contemporary element in Young’s thought.  The very idea of the subjective realm had evolved from bare Cartesian dualism to both a bugaboo and an ideal by the eighteenth century.  After Young’s time, however, a good share of lyric poetry has, to one extent or another, shared this self-dramatizing subjectivity in subsequent years.  Since Shelley fell upon the thorns of life, a wide variety of poets from effusive Romantics through decadent aesthetes to Beats, Confessionals, and beyond a passionate expressiveness is considered by many the poet’s Helicon.  The undertone in these later days is evident in grassroots poetry readings where self-expression holds sway.  Even apart from literature, the process is advanced in this age by the proliferation of self-help and mystic notions that encourage the cultivation of individual subjectivities.   

 

 

1.1   1.  The Works of the Author of the Night-Thoughts (1762).

 

2.      2.  Blake painted 537 watercolor designs for the project of which 150 were chosen and engraved.  When sales of the expensive volume proved disappointing, publication halted including only 43 of Blake’s engravings.  The association with Blake has gained Young many of his modern readers.

 

3.      3.  Though Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” had appeared in 1721, Young’s poem was followed by Robert Blair’s “The Grave” (1743), Thomas Warton’s “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1747), and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), and a good many other poems with a “graveyard” tone.  Young himself remained sufficiently well-known several generations later that in the prefatory essay to an 1853 edition of Night-Thoughts the Rev. George Gilfillan comments “It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that ‘everyone knows.’”

 

4.      4.  For a careful history of the idea, see William Ringler, “Poeta Nascitur Non Fit: Some Notes on the History of an Aphorism,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941).  A miscellany of figures has figured in the discussions of the issue with writers like Philip Sidney, Coleridge, Robert Graves, and Mary Oliver maintaining that poets are born to their role and, on the other side, Horace, Jonson, and Pope.

 

5.      5.  Following Swift’s usage in the prolegomenon to his A Tale of a Tub.

 

6.      6.  he logic would continue with the realization that people of all countries are equally gifted, a sensible corollary that some resist even today.

 

7.      7.  The Art of Poetry, Canto 1, 171-182 Soames and Dryden’s version.