Metrical Variation in a Lyric by Thomas Wyatt

 

 

Alas, Madam, for Stealing of a Kiss

Sir Thomas Wyatt

 

Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss

Have I so much your mind there offended?

Have I then done so grievously amiss

That by no means it may be amended?

 

Then revenge you, and the next way is this:

Another kiss shall have my life ended,

For to my mouth the first my heart did suck;

The next shall clean out of my breast it pluck.

 

 

 

     The difference between vers libre and metered forms is often exaggerated; it is never more than a matter of degree.  The freest of free verse has inevitably in English stress accents which will sometimes affect the reader’s impression.  On the other hand, the most rigorous of prosodists cannot make a pentameter of perfectly matching iambs as both ictus and remiss may have several levels of stress.  Considerations of pitch, duration, alliteration, and assonance complicate the picture further. 

     The significant question for writers who adopt any level of sonic organization in poetry is whether the sound effects contribute to the poem’s effect, whatever that might be.  While readers would differ from one another only in detail in a line’s scansion, far less consensus is probable about aesthetic effects.  One critic’s account of reactions might be inconsistent with another’s, yet over time a degree of common responses is likely to emerge.

     Metrical effects range from undeniable to vanishingly subtle, but they constitute a major part of the music of poetry.  Even a brief and simple lyric with what seems a transparent theme can prove elusive under close reading.  A brief, song-like lyric by Thomas Wyatt “Alas, madam, for stealing of a kiss” may seem direct and explicit in form, its meter a straightforward iambic pentameter and its rhyme-scheme a simple abab abcc.  The alternate rhymes concluding with a couplet makes the poem resemble in part a truncated English sonnet.

     The first line establishes a clear pattern as it begins with three strong and clearly iambic feet.  Yet any reader will perceive that the “of” in the fourth foot receives less emphasis than the other stressed syllables (the second, fourth, sixth, and tenth), speeding the line’s conclusion and thus enacting the furtive and hasty theft of a kiss. 

     The same fourth foot is disturbed in the second line.  Whereas “of” in the first was weak enough to make “-ing of” a pyrrhic, this time the rhythm is reversed and the fourth foot (“there of-“) is a trochee, as is the fifth (“-fended”).  This arrangement not only continues the sense of something out of order, amiss, while drawing greater attention to the offense with the emphasis on the word “there” and the highlighting of the key syllable of “offended.”

     The same pattern of irregularity, sounding something like syncopation, recurs in the third line with the pyrrhic fourth foot, and then in the fourth where the reader finds yet another pyrrhic as the fourth foot (“be a-“) and a trochee as the fifth (“-mended”) as in line two.  Thus the stanza is tied into a tight package while at the same time the cadences indicate continued instability.

     The second stanza opens dramatically with a more irregular line which might be read as opening with two trochees (“Then revenge you”) followed by a pyrrhic (“and the”) only to recover the rhythm with two concluding iambs (“next way is this”).  The drumbeat continues for three more iambs in line 6 (“another kiss shall have my life”) which the ends in another reversal, the trochaic fifth foot (“ended”). 

     Resolution come with the final couplet.  The seventh line is a unambiguous iambic pentameter as though confidently setting forth a harmonization of the man’s and woman’s wishes (“For to my mouth the first my heart did suck”) with the new rhyme word, the harsh and unpleasant-sounding “suck.”  The final line begins with two regular feet followed by a pyrrhic (“out of”) which skips forward in a little rapid hop toward the two final iambs (“my breast it pluck”) and the grating final sound.  That concluding rhyme settles the matter but its croak suggests that all may not be solved. 

     The poem’s claim is clearly a rhetorical one, meant to impress the woman with a witty display indicating the author’s courtly savoir-faire, yet he dies in the end, victim of his heart’s exiting his body.  In literal terms, his second kiss would be his last, but it is unlikely that his ambitions were to halt so soon.  The ingenious verbal show is, of course, not for the lady alone, but for the court and today's reader as well, containing perhaps a bit of self-satire by the lover who does not realize he has promised his own extinction as a sign of devotion.  In the end it is a charming little game in which, at least in the seducer’s game book, she will grant a second kiss and a third and both can then wonder at his continued survival as love-making proceeds.

     This metrical variation is only a portion of the sonic structure of the poem, what Pound called melopoeia.  Apart from the metrical control suggested by this analysis, Wyatt also deploys rhyme to heighten both melody and meaning.  Thus “kiss” is paired with “amiss,” since the act is viewed as a trespass, and then settled by chiming with “this,” the proposed solution to the offense.  The rhyming of “offended” with “amended” imply a possible remedy to answer the complaint which is then resolved through the speaker’s theatrical pretense of a demise with “ended.”  He uses alliteration, for instance in the repeated uses of the letter m in the first four lines all associated with the  beloved (including the punning “amiss”). 

     In addition, apart from  the sound patterns, issues of source arise, first of all from the fact that the verse is based on Serafino Aquilano’s poem beginning “Incolpa donna amor se troppo io uolsi,” and instances of both Wyatt’s following his original and deviating from it are significant.  Petrarchans do not provide the sole influence.  The image of the heart rising during a kiss, for instance, is a trope familiar from the Greek Anthology.

     Even this small, apparently casual lyric, part of a sophisticated court’s play between the sexes, couched in a simple meter, not so distant from conversation, derives its effects from complex structures of sound, sense, and thought.  All must be unified or else, for good reason, jarring, with every element serving the reproduction of a moment of imagined consciousness: a person might have once felt this way.  Meter plays the role of a steady background beat against which every variation is perceptible and significant.  The poet need not, of course, be conscious of the means by which the poem works; an accomplished writer can often work from intuition like a skilled jazz soloist while for the reader or listener as well, the effects need not be understood to work well.

  

The Voluptuous Salammbô! With a Cast of Thousands!

 

 

poster for Grieco's The Loves of Salammbo (1960) 

     Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) resembles nothing so much as a ‘fifties Biblical or Classical epic, amounting to the verbal equivalent of a Technicolor, wide-screen spectacular with a cast of thousands, exotic sets and costumes, and a good share of sex and violence [1].  Just as such films focused on characters dressed in elaborate and strange apparel set in scenes of faraway times and places, Flaubert’s historical novel offers the reader exceedingly detailed descriptions of exotic clothing, jewelry, and even cosmetics.  Like a Cecil B. DeMille feature, Salammbô alternates warfare and torture with erotic excitement and love-longing, so as never to lack some appeal to the back-brain. 

     The author’s habitual obsession with precise concrete delineation of every scene, his famous pursuit of le mot juste, here is combined with the prodigious research with which he prepared to write the novel.  The reader of Salammbô, even with a good knowledge of French, might likely be slowed by the vocabulary for military units, maneuvers, siege engines, and the like.  (Latin scholars may recall a similar demand on readers of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.)  This fact, as well as the occurrence of numerous out-of-the-way terms for gems, fabrics, and the like, can make the text difficult.  Footnotes would often help.  One suspects that Flaubert was loathe to waste a single fact from his notes, as though the use of many obsolete, foreign, or otherwise out-of-the-way words would strengthen the substance, gravitas, and beauty in his story.

     After Madame Bovary, which had been meant as an uncompromisingly realistic portrayal with verisimilitude as its chief value, but which brought the author an obscenity trial (at which he was acquitted), he chose to direct his gaze to the past.  Just as Hedy Lamarr could be sexy in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), under the protection of the story’s antiquity and, in that case, Biblical authority, Salammbô can fascinate men in the novel with less danger of legal action.  Such exotic women had been popular in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) as well as in visual art.  Though putatively representing antiquity the rather languid view of the past seen in pre-Raphaelite paintings or those by Lawrence Alma-Tadema or John William Waterhouse has more of a scent of nineteenth century Romanticism and, ultimately, Decadence than their medieval and classical models.  Artists who depicted Flaubert’s own invention, Salammbô herself, included Victor Prové (1893), Alphonse Mucha (1896), Desiré Maurice Ferrary (1899), and Henri Adrien Tanoux (1921) [2].

     While erotic elements are surely critically important for the book’s popularity, violence, just as in the movies, runs a close second.  To some the most boring stretches of Flaubert’s narration, battle sequences stretch on for page after page with few single combats and a great many compilations of nations of mercenaries, units of various sorts, slingers, archers, cavalry and the like, as though the book might be used to train officers in strategy.  But while such large-scale violence might at times be tiresome, the periodic massacres of prisoners and the recurring scenes of torture and mutilation are more disturbing.  In fact both violence and steaming sexuality are more nakedly presented in than in Bovary, but in the later novel a wash of ancient history makes the sensational more acceptable.

     Though aesthetic value is unprovable, Flaubert’s reputation as a stylist, reinforced very likely by the reader’s own experience, is sufficient to suggest that each passage is cunningly crafted to accomplish its effects.  The cinematic parallel would be, perhaps, the mature Eisenstein of Ivan the Terrible in which every frame is artfully composed, a standard that few would suggest DeMille ever even sought to achieve.  The attention here is not to the actual complexity of a work of art, but the maker’s level of intention.  Whereas Flaubert was hoping to do something new and to  compose a novel of lasting value, based on its formal qualities alone, most Hollywood filmmakers seek to adhere to convention and have little ambition more far=reaching than to sell tickets upon the picture’s release. 

     Virtually all critics would agree that Flaubert’s prose is beautiful, and their expositions of this point are readily available.  In many passages the rhythm of Flaubert’s hypnotic periodic phrasing and the melodious sound of his descriptions is foregrounded even if a passage contains little specific information, like this.

 

     They were not Libyans from the area of Carthage who had long made up the third army, but rather nomads from the plateau of Barca, bandits from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derné, some from Phazzana and Marmarique.  They had gone over the desert drinking from brackish wells amid the bones of camels.  The Zuaèces, adorned with ostrich feathers, had come on quadrigæ, Garamantes, veiled with black masks, arrived on their painted mounts, others were riding asses, onagers, zebras, and buffalo.  Some among them pulled the rood of their boat-shaped with their families and their idols.  There were Ammonians with limbs wrinkled by the water of their hot springs, Atarantians who curse the sun, Troglodytes who inter their dead laughing under tree branches, and the hideous Ausians who eat grasshoppers; the Achyrmachides, who eat lice, and the Gysantes, painted with vermilion, who eat monkeys. [3]

 

     Surely there is meant to be something incantatory in this list of place names.  The exotic customs, none of which, of course, play any role in the plot, far from reinforcing the historic verisimilitude, are curiosities, reminiscent of the dog-headed men in Pliny or the immense aspidochelone of the Physiologus.  Whether or not the reader is susceptible to Flaubert’s calculated cadences, the list of nationalities, all of which are likely unknown to the reader, in fact makes the narration not more “real,” but considerably more fanciful.  Still Flaubert’s self-consciously meticulous style is undeniable, but here its appeal is based neither on authenticity nor on painting an imaginable picture, but rather on the appeal of the unfamiliar and the charm of sound alone, as in  magic formulae. 

     The other characteristic that most fundamentally marks the contrast between Salammbô and a spectacular Hollywood epic is more objectively demonstrable.  Mid-twentieth century American movies made for a mass audience will present an unambiguous moral universe, with clearly demarcated heroes and villains and a strong tendency toward retributive justice.  The audience is cheering for one side because it is represented as fundamentally right whereas its opponents are not.  There is no room for doubt. 

     In Salammbô on the other hand, while the reader identifies with the heroine emotionally, there seems little to choose between the rulers of Carthage and their barbarian mercenaries.  Each side is engaged in corrupt power struggles [4].  The motivation that stands apart is the erotic bond between Matho and Salammbô.  Even there Matho's passion seems a weakness, contributing to the great fighter’s downfall, and Salammbô’s death at the end makes her a pathetic rather than an admirable character.  The reader is impressed with the power of these portraits, but has no wish to emulate them. 

     This pose of thematic indifference, a reluctance to delineate moral judgements or other conclusions about lived experience, is axiomatic in Flaubert’s realism.  To impose value judgements would be for him to compromise the representation of reality itself.  As Flaubert put it “stupidity consists of wanting to come to conclusions” [5].  For him true realism must be, like science, objective. 

     Far from  accidental, this distinction illustrates one of the principal characteristics distinguishing popular from “high art,” called in various contexts elite, courtly, or learned.  Every imagined portrayal of reality satisfies some reader expectations while challenging or twisting others.  Works consumed by a mass audience, both tribal or folk art without a known creator and modern commercial productions like movies, television shows, and potboilers, tend to confirm consumers’ anticipations and artistic conventions, while those with a smaller yet more sophisticated readership will more often deny expected ideas and point out problems, contradictions, and  mysteries.  The former serves the social function of confirming and perpetuating group values and customs, whereas the latter opens the way for change and allows for uncertainty. 

     Thus Salammbô may be read, just as a DeMille epic would be viewed, for its more sensational elements of sex and violence; it may be considered for its success in creating a world of the past through the accumulation of detail, or it may be contemplated simply as an aesthetic object, a series of melodious sentences. 

 

 

1.  A number of films have, in fact, been based on Flaubert’s novel, including Arturo Ambrosio’s Salammbo (1911), Domenico Gaido’s Salambo (1914), Réda Ait’s Salambo (1916), Pierre Marodon’s  Salammbô (1925), Sergio Grieco’s The Loves of Salammbô (1960), and Jacques Perconte’s Salammbô (2022).  The predominance of early titles and the fact that all the cinematic versions were made in Europe suggests that the reputation of Flaubert’ novel lingered into the twentieth century.  There are in addition operas by y Modest Mussorgsky, (1865, unfinished), Ernest Reyer (1890), and Philippe Fénelon (1992).  More recently Barney B. Johnson composed an opera-ballet on the theme.

2.  An exhibition in the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rouen in 2021 collected many such works for an exhibit called "Salammbô: Fureurs! Passion! Éléphants!"  The costumes described in the novel are said to have influenced French fashion, particularly the use of veils, cloaks, and mantles.  In an odd legacy of the book the area, today a part of Tunis, called Le Kram in 1921 changed it s name to Salammbo after the discovery there of Carthaginian archaeological remains.

3.  Ce n'étaient pas les Libyens des environs de Carthage; depuis longtemps ils composaient la troisième armée; mais les nomades du plateau de Barca, les bandits du cap Phiscus et du promontoire de Derné, ceux du Phazzana et de la Marmarique. Ils avaient traversé le désert en buvant aux puits saumâtres maçonnés avec des ossements de chameau; les Zuaèces, couverts de plumes d'autruche, étaient venus sur des quadriges; les Garamantes, masqués d'un voile noir, assis en arrière sur leurs cavales peintes; d'autres sur des ânes, sur des onagres, sur des zèbres, sur des buffles; et quelques-uns traînaient, avec leurs familles et leurs idoles, le toit de leur cabane en forme de chaloupe. Il y avait des Ammoniens aux membres ridés par l'eau chaude des fontaines; des Atarantes, qui maudissent le soleil; des Troglodytes, qui enterrent en riant leurs morts sous des branches d'arbre; et les hideux Auséens, qui mangent des sauterelles; les Achyrmachides, qui mangent des poux, et les Gysantes, peints de vermillon, qui mangent des singes. (From Chapter 12)

4.  Some characters are more attractive than others.  Spendius, for instance, the former slave, is depicted as more venal than either Matho or Hamilcar.  Yet these distinctions do not guide the narrative or shape a definitive theme. 

5.  Letter to Louis Bouilhet of September 4,1850.  “L’ineptie consiste à vouloir conclure.”  Later in the letter the sentiment is repeated: “Oui, la bêtise consiste à vouloir conclure.”

War

 

 

     War –what is it good for?  Absolutely nothin’!

                                            The Temptations, 1969

      Somebody please stop that war now.

    Jimmy Cliff, 1969

 

     So then why is it that wars have never ceased throughout human history and around the world?  Every day brings news from Gaza and the Ukraine of the suffering and waste caused by war, the toll in pain disability, and dearth, the rapid senseless destruction of what had been built brick by brick, the reinforcement of the most ignorant prejudices and absurd rivalries.  We scarcely hear of other armed conflicts which just now include fighting in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.  For as long as written documents have existed, not only have people fought to the death, but valor in battle has been the most highly praised quality of men.  Patriotism has generally been lauded as a paramount value, its only competition being piety, with which it is often conflated.  I used to pass a Catholic school with the phrase “pro deo et patria” over the door, as though the young scholars were to absorb this lesson even before opening a book of grammar or mathematics.  To some it seems nationalism and piety are not merely compatible, but are virtually identical, as though Christ had not been undeniably and consistently pacifist.  Nationalism, by definition a tribal sort of sentiment dependent almost entirely on the chance of birth, is considered an absolute value.  Dissent during wartime is very nearly treason. 

     The acceptance and even more the celebration  of something as horrific as war implies deep-seated motives.  The aggression reflected in fighting is one of the most fundamental human drives, equal to sexuality in its power to influence action.  To kill another person is surely the most extreme way of exerting power, and the experience is applicable to nations as well as to individuals.  Whether Freud’s specific formulation of Eros and Thanatos is accurate in detail, one cannot deny that life is lived in the tension between love and hate, altruism and selfishness, cooperation and competition.

          In traditional societies the balance may be straightforward.  The individual must observe strict laws when dealing with an in-group while mandating no such standards in dealings with outsiders.  It is perhaps inevitable when resources are insufficient for people to fight over food, water, and land, but such conflict is today wholly unnecessary.  Current technology in both agriculture and manufacturing might afford everyone on earth a good standard of living were it  not for the selfishness that manifests in politics.  During the Irish potato famine, large amounts of food were still exported from the country as landlord’s profits took precedence over starving tenants.  Amartya Sen has demonstrated that all modern famines are caused not by limits in the food supply, as had happened regularly in the past, but are due to poor people’s inability to pay. 

     Violence itself will never vanish, but one would think that the large-scale savagery of war, in which an entire nation adopts the attack on others as its chief priority, might be eliminated.  After all, on the individual level, it is rare for a stronger neighbor to make off with a householder’s possessions, and, if such a thing occurs, the victim has legal recourse.  Since such arrangements have long been in place in civil societies, it is difficult to see why they would not be possible internationally.

     Should that criminal neighbor commit assault as well as theft, immediate resistance is justified.  Though Christ counseled turning the other cheek, people’s instincts urge them to fight, and such action would be all  but universally approved as moral.  If fighting in self-defense is acceptable, surely the same prerogative is available to nation states.  A similar rationale applies when a government is so exceedingly oppressive that its rule amounts to institutional violence.  The citizens of such a tyranny have the right to rise in revolution to overthrow their masters.  Invasion by another country, then, and extreme injustice in one’s own are the sole justifications for war. 

     Some combatants, whatever their ideology, are motivated by an attraction to the experience of deadly games.  The thrill of danger, the heightened nervous excitement of a frontline soldier, can be to some pleasurable and, indeed, even addictive.  Some find a sort of ecstasy in killing, a taste that might serve one well in a life and death struggle, but which is inappropriate in all other settings.

 

Some for love of slaughter in imagination,

learning later  . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter

                        Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”

 

Those who are conscripted have no choice but to defend themselves as best they can and, in the end, the reluctant combatant is as likely as a more enthusiastic comrade to behave bravely under fire.  Such conditions, by focusing the consciousness on survival, reduce other distinctions to triviality and foster the closest relationships among people thrown together in extreme conditions by chance.  Such experiences are often among the most profound of a person’s life and, when losg past, may be regarded with nostalgia.  Fifty years after his service in WWII my father maintained contact with men who had been in his unit in France and Germany.  The intensity of wartime experience burns its traces into the brain of veterans, creating bonds between comrades and eliciting acts of valor and sacrifice from many ordinary people.

     Apart from the bonds formed under fire, of course, even a strongly anti-war stance cannot in justice deny the altruism of all veterans and the particular admiration due to wartime acts of courage.  For anyone who is not inherently bloodthirsty, the prospect of spending long periods in harm’s way, of delaying whatever one’s life goals may have been, usually suffering grueling material conditions even apart from constant danger, represents considerable hardship.  Since the call to arms is socially generated, the recompense must also come from society at large, and soldiers have, since antiquity, been lauded by their communities and awarded pensions and other compensation. 

     This social gratitude does not alter the fact that war, particularly modern war, is in general destructive to all combatants.  Everyone suffers, but positive consequences may follow the pain: the American Revolution overthrew control by a feudal regime, the Civil War ended American slavery, WWII defeated fascist aggression, and the Vietnamese finally ousted their foreign invaders.  Yet none of these victories was absolute.  Free from King George, Americans oppressed slave and native people, more than a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, racism still permeates this country, Stalinist expansion replaced the Nazis in Eastern Europe, and North Vietnam gave little voice to the fighters of the National Liberation Front.  So who can do the moral accounting to determine whether a certain quantum of gain is worth the flow of blood?

     One cannot avoid attempting such calculation, inaccurate thought it may be.  All but pacifists accept that, unfortunate, even paradoxical, as it is, at times violence reduces violence.  The reckoning of when that is true is, however, a matter of opinion.  If a mass shooter is felled in the act of attacking others, who would criticize the gunman who brought an end to the killing with one final death?  A slave who turns on his tormentor and kills him would seem to most justified.  A Guatemalan who takes up arms against the massive institutional violence of an oppressive system has my support.  Yet, in dealings between nations, the imperative is rarely so clear.  I had no doubts, during the Vietnam War that the US had no right to be in Southeast Asia at all and that I would certainly not allow myself to be drafted.  On the other hand, I think that, had I been young in 1941, I would have felt that stopping fascism was imperative even if the cost be high.  Yet I will concede that thoughtful people differed about both these judgements, and I respect both those who conscientiously objected to military service in WWII and those who fought in Vietnam, believing themselves to be not imperialists, but defenders of the local population. 

     Neville Chamberlain is mentioned today most often to condemn his appeasement of Hitler but he spoke the truth when he said that “in war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.”  Still, this statement ignores the possibility that there are circumstances in which one would be an even greater loser by failing to fight.  All anyone can do is to treat war as a highly undesirable last resort, yet judging when a given war is a “good” one must remain controversial. 

    

     

Nie Wieder Krieg! (Never Again War!) Kaethe Kollwitz

Semantic Instability in Manon Lescaut

 

Quoted passages are my own translations with the original French provided in endnotes.

 

     The Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut has proven a popular favorite.  Reprinted hundreds of times, Manon is as well the subject of no less than six operas, three of which (Auber, Puccini, Massenet) remain in the repertoire.  Once sufficiently transgressive to be censored, the text is now taught as an exemplar of classic prose style. 

     Surely the principal appeal of the story is the emotional intensity of its characters.  The narrative’s energy derives from the immoderate love of the Chevalier de Grieux, conceived at first seeing his beloved  and never thereafter flagging and the attachment of Manon to a life of luxury which she pursues constantly, only to die when it seems beyond her reach.  Today readers are likely to interpret their behavior as self-destructively addictive.  Yet such a reading is surely at least in part anachronistic.  Though this sort of psychological analysis is not directly derived from the text, several inconsistent interpretations of their affair are suggested, leaving the question of the meaning of the sad story of the Chevalier de Grieux and his beloved Manon at once overdetermined (with multiple explanations) and underdetermined (with none clearly victorious over the others).  At different points in the narration the action is variously described in terms of Christian morality, a question of sensibility, a predetermined fate, and a matter of social class.

     The author as well as his main character being clerics, it is unsurprising that Christian morality plays a role.  To encourage improvements in morals had been a standard justification for literature for centuries.   The frame narrator justifies his story in the “Avis de l’Auteur” as “a terrifying example of the force of the passions” [1].  He hopes his work will serve for the purpose of “moral instruction” [2].  Furthermore, the narration ends with the Chevalier’s apparent reform and return to his family and to a more regular life in less ethically perilous waters.  After that, presumably, nothing happens worthy of note.  One might read all the novel’s suffering as the consequence of moral lapses.  Manon is consistently a loose woman, albeit one with considerable good-natured charm and, apparently, a certain genuine attachment to the Chevalier, while he, by cohabiting with her while unmarried, brings disaster after disaster upon himself and falls into not only defying his father and lying, but theft as well and even murder.

     This didacticism, though, is no stronger than either the Abbé’s or the Chevalier’s consistency to their vows.  In fact, Manon Lescaut is a novel of sensibility, a genre that generally celebrates access to emotions and the development of strong feelings.  Though fainting is more characteristic of women than men in late eighteenth century life and literature, the Chevalier’s swoon when he hears of Manon’s faithlessness from his father is testament to his emotional sensitivity.  He thinks well of himself and even Manon, with her thoroughly predictable disappearances and betrayals, seems more absurd and childish than malicious.  To her sexuality is natural and its use inevitable.  For him reform, dull and eventless in  comparison to the wild swings of fortune during his affair with Manon, is still possible, while she must die.  The author’s protestations of moral purpose resemble those of Defoe and Richardson and even the medieval Pearl-poet who in Cleanness who provides a lurid account of goings-on in Sodom likewise in the service of moral instruction.

     An even broader, though shallower, approach is suggested by the Chevalier himself when he reflects on his problems and decides all is due to fate, to “those specific blows of fate attached to the ruin of a wretch from which virtue cannot defend a person and which wisdom cannot foresee.” [3]  The only response is then passivity.  “Let us leave our fortune in the care of heaven” [4].  This serves primarily as an excuse when the Chevalier feels like dodging a sense of his own responsibility for his difficulties.  It is as well the attitude Manon expresses when she first enters the story and says of her plight, “It seems to have been the will of Heaven, since there was no way to avoid it.” [5] 

     Quite often his decision-making is governed neither by Christian dictates nor some irresistible ἀνάγκη, but rather by the standards of aristocratic behavior, the prizing of honor that results from good breeding.  Class is linked to morality at the outset when the frame narrator notes that he addresses people “of a certain order of spirit and good breeding” [6].  Tiberge appeals to his honor in attempting to reform him [7].  He sees Manon’s brother as “a brutal man with no principles of honor” [7], and the Chevalier regularly evaluates his own behavior by considering what is expected of members of his class. 

     Should one’s acts be governed by Christian (or secular) moral dictates?  Is extravagant love a sign of a noble sensitivity?  Is every event inevitable and predetermined?  Each of these options is raised but not settled in the novel.  This shifting among interpretations of behavior arises not from sloppiness, however, but from precision.   Since the Chevalier himself (and some might suspect also his creator) vacillated among the alternatives of simple resignation, Christian ambitions, and the desire to act honorably, all the while drawn ever further downstream by an overwhelming erotic passion, it is surely right to include all these elements in his representation.  There is no more certainty in the world of the Chevalier de Grieux than in that of his author or one of his readers.  Just like the fictional character, all people respond to a variety of registers of value, acting now for an ethical reason, then in an effort to impress, again with religious principles in mind, and sometimes – not necessarily due to weakness or foolishness -- simply submitting to experience.  The Chevalier is no more inconsistent than we are.

 

 

 

1.  “Un exemple terrible de la force des passions,” page 32, line 17 in the 2016 Flammarion edition edited by Hélêne Bernard.  Other references to destiny are found on pages 18, 45, 82, 100, 221.

2.  “Instruction des mœrs” p. 32, ll. 30-31.

3.  “Je la lui représentai comme un de ces coups particuliers du destin qui s’attache a la ruine d’un misérable, et dont il est aussi impossible a la vertu de se défendre qu’il l’a été a la sagesse de les prévoir.” p. 82, ll.  1306-1309.

4.  “Laissons au ciel le soin de notre fortune.” P. 198, ll. 1912-1913. 

5.  “C’était apparemment la volonté de Ciel, puisqu’il ne lui laissait nul moyen de l’éviter” p. 44, ll. 244-245.

6.  “Personnes d’un certain ordre d’esprit et de politesse,” p. 32, ll. 37-38. 

7.  P. 86, l. 1427.

8.  “C’était un homme brutale et sans principes d’honneur,” p. 74, l. 1077.

Hazard Yet Forward

 

 

Seton arms, originally only the tressured crescents, is here quartered to include alliances through marriage

 

     I have little enthusiasm for tracing genealogy.  Back four or five generations, the research becomes ever more challenging, yet the rewards shrink since the findings have little discernable relation to one’s own life.  Our ancestors multiply by the factor of two (that is, doubling) every generation.  Everyone has heard the story first told in the thirteenth century by Ibn Khallikan of how the inventor of chess asked as his reward to be given one grain of rice for the first square on the game board, two for the second, four for the third, then eight and so on, resulting, to the king’s surprise in a greater quantity than the entire world produces. 

     The same mathematics, of course, apply to everyone’s number of direct ancestors.  This means that, were one to look a thousand years in the past, estimating three generations per century, we each are descended from a number of people that can be calculated by raising two to the thirtieth power, a number over a billion, over a  thousand times the earth’s population at the time.  Now, this number is not in fact accurate due to the fact that people have very often, particularly in the past, married first cousins with shared grandparents, thereby obliging some individuals to fill multiple slots in the family tree, but the general point is clear.   Tracing only direct patrilineal descent simplifies the matter immensely, though, of course, one is equally closely related to the great crowds of their spouses and their spouses’ families. 

     I have several relatives intrigued by family history who have told me that people with my surname have passed in and out of Scots history for centuries some of whom were given a tartan and a coat of arms.  Now I know that a few generations back, my patrilineal ancestors were homesteaders and I rather suspect that the Seatons (or Setons, Seytons, Seetons) who came to America in the seventeenth century left more memories of want than castles behind in the old country.  There can be little doubt that, going back several hundred years, most everyone’s forebears were for the most part peasants or farm laborers. 

     Yet I rather like the doughty fire-spouting wyvern that tops the ducal coronet on the Seton arms and I find the slogan attached to the coat of arms suggestive and appealing.  “Hazard yet forward,” though certainly a war cry in origin, and likely originally meant to indicate enthusiastic support for the king, expresses a sentiment sufficiently general to provide buoyant encouragement in many settings more pleasant than the battlefield.  I like the airy sound of it, the spirit willingly accepting an uncertain outcome, the progress into an uncharted future, the greeny optimism.  It reminds me of the Yiddish paper, the Forward, and of the use of “Adelante!” in Cuba and other Latin countries. 

     In these cases the anticipated future is a positive change, but of course we hazard yet forward every day without the pleasant expectation of likely progress in the long term.  After all, we are all riding time’s conveyor belt, though for us the end is not manufacture but instead deterioration and eventual disassembly.  This fact cannot be changed, only one’s attitude is in part voluntary.  So, if a wistful feeling of regret at the transitory character of things of this world is unavoidable, it is fruitless (and seems in fact ridiculous when not pitiful) to lament the universal limits of human life.  Every morning when a person rises, it is to “hazard yet forward,” and a failure of this spirit is what the medieval church condemned as acedia, condemned by Aquinas as a flight from God.  Today it would be labeled depression, the psychiatric epidemic of our time.   

     The word hazard, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was originally used in Spain and may well have Arabic antecedents.  It was the name of a game played with dice which has survived into modern times but was first recorded in English in 1300.  Within a hundred years the meaning had expanded to apply to any risk or chance, and by the time of the Renaissance the word implied a negative outcome: “risk of loss or harm, peril, jeopardy.”    

     Shakespeare regularly employs the word hazard in the second of these senses, referring not to a danger but to any chance, a meaning that now sounds slightly literary, perhaps its most dramatic use leans toward the third.  Richard III, when he sees he is doomed at the Battle of Bosworth Field, yet remains resolute, declaring to Catesby, “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die.”

     “Hazard yet forward” as the motto of evolution reverts to more positive expectations both within and beyond the human sphere.  While evolution need not move toward greater complexity, it always serves to better equip an organism for survival and reproduction.  Always striving to pursue incremental improvements seems the habit of our DNA.  Random variation through natural selection is responsible for the magnificent perfection of all organisms, including humanity.  One present product of this immense and fabulously complex process is, of course, our present speculations, these words materializing on my screen. 

     Even more fundamentally, there is chance in all things, even, as the quantum physicists tell us, at the very base of material existence.   Without this unpredictability, we would inhabit an entirely mechanistic universe in which all of history was implied by circumstances at the time of the Big Bang.  When Einstein wrote to Max Born that “the Old One” does not play at dice, he did not consider the possibility that God is dice, that his nature is a wide-open roll, realized and refigured as every instant passes.  Indeed, dice have been used by people since prehistoric times and their first use was not gambling and recreation but divination, like other chance operations: the flight of birds, the cracking of a tortoise shell, the reading of entrails, the I Ching and the Ifa oracle. 

     Perhaps we might all become devotees of a neo-pagan cult of Tyche (Τύχη), called Fortuna by the Romans, the goddess of chance.  In his description of Argos Pausanias notes a temple of Fortuna in which he says Palamedes dedicated the dice he had invented.  Originally associated chiefly with good luck, Tyche was depicted with a cornucopia and often a gubernaculum or ship’s rudder, which might suggest either a hope for safety in sea voyages or perhaps simply the steering of events.  By Hellenistic times her governance had spread to all events, both welcome and feared, and Polybius at the outset of his histories concedes control of all men’s affairs to her.  In spite of his sympathy for Christianity, Constantine built a temple to Tyche (which Julian later spurned) in Constantinople.  Have we today any better understanding of our destiny?  Any better way to predict the future?  Her rule, it seems, continues.

     We cannot foresee a single day, but, whatever our experiences, we are each likely to find ourselves eventually in the position of Byrhtwold in “The Battle of Maldon,” aware of a bitter doom that cannot be dodged.  May we at that time be as unbowed as that antique hero who declared, “the mind must be tougher, keener the heart, the spirit stronger, as our strength fades.”  When only self-possession remains, fortitude is the sole dignity left us, a final challenge to hazard yet forward. 

 

 

The family history research has been conducted by my sister Mary Frances Wallner and my cousin Carol  Ann Seaton. 

The passage from Pausanias is found his Description of Greece (or Traveling Around Greece, Ἑλλάδος Περιήγησις) 2.20.3.

Polybius’ comment is found in his Histories (Ἱστορίαι) 1.4.

In the original Old English the quotation from the ”Battle of Maldon” reads "Hiġe sceal þē heardra,     heorte þē cēnre,/  mōd sceal þē māre     þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”

 

Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”

Sulpicia

 

     Sulpicia’s poems may be read in the original with English translation and notes on the Perseus site at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0071.  Other translations are available at https://people.uncw.edu/deagona/lit/Sulpicia.pdf (by Lee Pearcy) and https://www.classicscorner.org/translation (by seventeen-year-old Sarah Freeman).

 

 

     When discussing Sulpicia, consideration of her gender is inescapable due to the simple fact that very little survives of women’s writing from the ancient Roman world.  A good many texts which we know once existed have vanished: Cornelia’s letters, Agrippina’s memoirs, Hortensia’s speeches, poems by Catullus’ Clodia, even a later Sulpicia whom Martial praised, all these are lost [1].  It is therefore no wonder that the mere fact of a competent female Latin poet has attracted considerable interest, particularly in recent decades. 

     Her obscurity was long compounded by the fact that her elegies were folded into the Corpus Tibullianum, which includes texts by poets other than Tibullus [2].  The six poems now considered to be Sulpicia’s follow a group of five on the same love relationship called the “Garland of Sulpicia” or the Cerinthus-Sulpicia cycle, the authorship of which is uncertain.  One might write a meaningful study of the interference of non-aesthetic elements into literary evaluation by charting critics’ reactions to the Sulpicia poems once their female authorship had been accepted.  Some critics found the poems weak, with sexist critics using terms with gender associations such as naïve and emotional, while feminist readers found the poems asserting their own feminism.  Those who, consciously or not, think little of female writers are slow to recognize Sulpicia’s debts to earlier elegiac conventions while more sympathetic readers consider her allusions and literary debts substantial and sophisticated.  The present intention is largely descriptive, acknowledging the issue of gender in a context of Roman patriarchy but then proceeding without value assumptions either positive or negative from a woman as writer.

    Most love poetry – one need only think of the blues – deals with difficulties or disappointment in romance.  The first of the poems attributed to Sulpicia (Tibullus 3.13) instead expresses fulfilment.  In the opening phrase “love has finally come” (Tandem venit amor) the relationship seems accomplished and mutually satisfying.  The poet has, it seems, like Sappho, invoked the goddess of love, but here her success seems explicit.  The obstacle is only others, those who might not approve of the couple, the sort of meddlers called “serveriorum” and “malus” in Catullus 5 and “curioso” in Catullus 7, like unsympathetic parents in New Comedy and Romeo and Juliet or the “jealous ones” of Occitanian verse. 

     The tension of individual desire in a context of social conventions is present throughout this verse from the first line’s mention of pudor to her later concern at busybodies reading her love notes and the final declaration that she is glad to sin (pecasse), having found a satisfyingly mutual relationship signified by the closing phrase suggesting both lovers are worthy (“cum digno digna fuisse ferar”).  Poetry and the goddess have contributed to the temporary triumph at least of a personal love which brings an island of joy in a less than ideal world.

     The threats to a love relationship become specific in the second lyric 3.14 (or Sulpicia 2) in which the lover’s uncle insists she spend her birthday on his country estate when she would prefer to be with her beloved in Rome.  While the birthday poem (or γενεθλιακόν) was a recognized genre [3], it is here, rather than a celebration, a lament about the interfering uncle [4]. 

   In this case the poet’s intrusive relative is a prominent Roman, Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus, a general and author (whose works are lost) and a significant patron of the arts like Maecenas.  He was particularly close with Tibullus and the poet known as Lygdamus, though he knew Horace and Ovid as well.  A powerful man, his authority over Sulpicia is unquestioned.  Yet she resists the excursion, preferring Cerinthus’ company and saying that the country estate Is cold (frigidus) and too rural (agro), unfit for a girl (puella).  The more conventional Latin praise of the rural life evident in, for instance, Martial 10.47 or Horace’s  Epode 2, is altogether lacking;  Sulpicia’s preference is for the city.

     The third poem, a pendant to the second,  indicates that Sulpicia’s wishes prevailed and she is able to observe her birthday with her lover.  The tone is especially intimate as the elegy is cast in the form of a letter to Cerinthus.

     The fourth reveals a different obstacle to love: Cerinthus is spending time with a courtesan.  The ambiguities about propriety in the first poem return here to describe a frivolous infidelity on the part of her beloved.  She pretends it is her family’s concern about reputation rather than her own jealousy that makes her angry.  She suggests that she deserves better as the daughter (filia Servi) of Servius Sulpicius Rufus the distinguished jurist, a student of Cicero when young and consul in maturity.  Invective similar to that used in iambic poems appears here in phrases like “obscure bed” (ignoto toro)  and “whore” (scortum), yet Sulpicia maintains her pose of superior composure, resisting being put into an absurd (inepta) situation.  Her anger nonetheless betrays her passion.

     In the fifth poem Sulpicia is ailing and wonders whether recovery would be worth it, since Cerinthus is behaving in a thoughtless manner.  Thoughts of suicide enter her mind as lovesickness complicates a physical illness.  She appeals to her lover as a petitioner, just as countless courtly love poems address the woman in a similar manner.

     The final poem associated with Sulpicia finds her again complaining of inattention, but blaming herself, suggesting the ruminations occasioned by the anxiety of love.  She regrets having pressed Cerinthus, fearing that she has alienated his affection further in taking a standoffish approach, what the troubadours were to call daunger.

     Considered together, Sulpicia’s poems present the reader with a picture of a love relationship consistent with elegiac conventions which anticipates the love poetry of the High Middle Ages.  While one of her poems seems to celebrate love’s fulfilment, frustration -- with her uncle, her lover, and herself -- is the more common theme.  Far from writing about lust, Sulpicia is primarily concerned with a mutually affectionate relationship, and repeatedly expresses anxiety about her lover’s emotional commitment, only to question her own gambits in trying to retain his devotion.  Some would regard this delicacy, along with the social limitations suggested by her uncle’s authority over her and her lover’s option of a purchased sexual partner, as indicative of her femininity, but such judgements have no effect on evaluation nor do they constitute a protest against ancient Roman patriarchal values. 

     If the judgement of Kirby Flower Smith in calling her an “amateur” whose primary gift is “simplicity” and who “writes from a full heart” is prejudiced, Ezra Pound’s claim that to translate her forty lines would be worth ten years of one’s life is at least hyperbolic [5].  As a woman writer of love elegies, she is neither a naïve imitator of male models nor is she a standard bearer for women’s rights.  The six poems attributed to Sulpicia constitute a satisfying pocket drama, complicated by the tensions between insistent passionate love on the one hand and limitations in one’s society and in one’s partner or oneself on the other. 

 

 

 

 

1.  They are known only because they are mentioned in other people’s writing: see Cicero Brutus 58.211,  Tacitus (Annals 4.53.3) and Pliny (Naturalis historia 7.46) for Agrippina, Valerius Maximus (8.3.3) and Quintilian (De institutione oratorio 1.1.4-8) for Hortensia.  A scholiast quotes two iambic lines of the later Sulpicia (sometimes called the satirist) in a manuscript known only from a citation in a fifteenth century edition of Juvenal.  Martial praises her in 10.35.

 

2.  They had long been known as Tibullus 3.13-3.18, but are today  sometimes identified as Sulpicia 1-6. 

 

3.  Among Latin examples of the genre are Tibullus 1.7, and 2.2, Propertius 3.10, Ovid, Prop. III 10, Ov. Tr. III 13, V 5, Pers. 2, Mart. VII 21, 22, 23, IX 52, 53, and X 24.

 

4.  An uncle is similarly an obstacle to love in Horace Odes 3.12.

 

5.  For Smith, see The Elegies of Albius Tibullus (1913). Pound’s comment is in “Horace,” in The Criterion 9 (1929-1930), reprinted in Arion 9 (1970). 

Those Curious Collective Nouns

 

     The examples here are largely, but not entirely, included in Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.  Like Lipton, I do not use the Middle English since entertainment rather than philology or literary criticism is my goal. 

 

     We commonly use collective nouns: a bunch of keys, a row of houses, a group of lakes.  The majority of such terms are readily transferable in reference; one might equally speak of a bunch of flowers, a row of beans, or a group of actors.  Some are narrower in usage, including many which have to do with animals: a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions.   There are herds of various beasts, but all are plant-eating mammals.  Pack may be used of other animals, but is strongly associated with wolves, and pride is used exclusively of lions.  Certain of the collective nouns are similarly specific to a certain species, but in addition seem unusually artful, sometimes a bit precious.  The best-known of this class is probably “a murder of crows,” which seems quaint enough to be suspicious.

     Many of these collective nouns refer to animals, and they strike the reader as self-consciously clever because many were indeed invented as a special fanciful vocabulary in the late Middle Ages.  Familiarity with these neologisms was then an index of how au courant a courtly pretender might prove to be.  Though all words have a sort of poetry, especially for readers who know their etymologies, these terms, mostly to do with hunting, were from the first showpieces, meant to impress and amuse.

     James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks (1968) listed many of this special variety of collective nouns, bringing widespread publicity to a somewhat obscure linguistic phenomenon and demonstrating that the imaginative appeal of these neologisms had survived the centuries.  Though I saw the book everywhere back then, I never read it, taking it for a novelty gift, presenting these overly cutesy terms with quaintly old-fashioned illustrations.  I thereby missed until today reading Lipton’s well-informed introduction which provides a satisfying explanatory background.

     Often applying a new meaning to an existing word (“a prickle of porcupines” or “a skulk of foxes”), these morsels of wit were recorded in “courtesy books,” manuals laying down the rules for genteel behavior and sometimes in specific lists of “terms of venery,” a word rarely used today and easily confuised with its exact homograph which in fact has an altogether different meaning and origin.  One “venery” is derived from Latin venari, “to hunt,” the source as well of the English term venison, which once referred to the flesh of any large animal.  (The other venery, with roots in Venus, the goddess of love is the one Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he advised his [illegitimate] son, “rarely use venery but for health or offspring.”)

     Since the reliefs of royal hunts in Assyria and Egypt, nobles whose business was war had whiled away months of peace by practicing their equestrian and archery skills in hunting.  (Compare the brandishing of firearms by today's neo-fascists.)  Killing beasts is a mark of power as is killing people, but in time the bloody pastime of hunting had acquired an aesthetic dimension.  One was to behave with savoir faire even in butchery.  In Gottfried’s Tristan when King Mark first encounters the hero, he is impressed by two of Tristan’s accomplishments.  He notes that Tristan uses “words polished and well-chosen,” and is besides such a skilled and innovative practitioner in cutting up a deer that the king immediately offers to make him master of the hunt.  Both skills prove him “courtois.”

     Manuals began to appear to teach aristocrats and those who wished to be aristocratic the prized qualities of cultivation, elegance, and sophistication.  Best-known of such volumes was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) which defined the ideals of behavior that marked a true nobleman, including skill at loving women, playing music, making witty conversation, dressing well, and a host of other “aesthetic” accomplishments.  Castiglione was far from the first to compose such a self-help guide.  The earliest in England is the Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles, also known as the Liber Urbani, which appeared circa 1200.  The “terms of venery,” of which a few, including a special vocabulary for animal droppings, had been printed earlier, for instance in William Twiti’s L'Art de vénerie (1328), gained popularity with The Book of St Albans (ca. 1452).  This volume, which contained essays on hawking and heraldry as well as hunting, included seventy collective nouns.  This book anticipated Emily Post in that it was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Berners.  Later writers copied and expanded her list and in 1595 Gervase Markham republished the St. Albans book with his own comments as The Gentleman's Academie, in 1595, bringing its content a new audience.

     The terms of venery and associated collective nouns illustrate several significant aspects of what might be called linguistic sociology.  They exemplify the employment of words not in common usage to establish a subculture, in this case the feudal ruling class, the nobility.  Just as inner city youth use a distinctive jargon, scholars ornament their monographs with currently fashionable academic jargon, and military people signal their vocation with a special argot, courtiers made lexical choices that testified to their identity as cultivated members of the ruling class.

     Apart from this social function, the terms are witty after the manner of other artful uses of language, such as riddles, jokes, and poetry.  Some suggest similes.  A pod of seals is so named due to the resemblance between a group of animals, especially when slumbering on the beach, and a pod of peas.  A group of whales is a gam, the word used as well for a social encounter of two ships in the open sea.  A “siege of herons” is so named because of the animals’ patient observation of shallow waters watching for prey.

     Many sorts of metonymy are represented.  A “slate of candidates” is current yet today, though few are aware that it was first used because of politicians’ names being displayed on slates in front of town halls. 

     Some are so familiar that they make little impression.  We know a “swarm of bees” “host of angels.”  Mysteries may yet linger about even well-known expressions.  “Bevy” is first recorded in the fifteenth century describing either quails or women, apparently derived from French bevée, perhaps from the birds frequenting ponds and the ladies drinking parties.  A "school of fish” may be a corruption of “shoal” (=shallows) or may have independently arisen from school meaning classroom.   

     Sometimes the word has shifted in sound or become obsolete so that its origin is not evident, as in “a clowder of cats” said to derive from the word cluster.  “A singular of boars” oddly contradicts itself, as the French sanglier is derived from Latin singularis porcus, a lone hog, used for a solitary individual wild boar.  A “kindle of kittens” sounds very cute with its source in the Middle English kindlen, to give birth and “covey of partridges” from the Latin cubare, to lie down, describing nesting habits. 

     The sound of doves strikes many as sounding sad.  This is the source not only of the name “mourning dove” but of the collective “a dule of doves” from the French deuil (lamenting).  Similarly, a “murmuration of starlings” refers to the sound made by the swarming of the birds.  Hair-splitting definitions were sometimes propounded.  While a “committee of vultures” is at rest, a “kettle” of them is in flight, and a “wake” of them is feeding. 

     Among the amusing social terms, describing people rather than animals, are the unimaginative doctrine of doctors and school of clerks and the somewhat more amusing “sentence of judges” and “draught of bottlers.”  Others are more pointedly satirical: a “superfluity of nuns," an “impatience of wives,” and a “disworship of Scots,” not to mention the strong but clumsy “abominable sight of monks.”  One might speak also of “a riffraff of knaves,” “a squat of daubers” (those who repair hedgerows and fences), a “diligence of messengers” (from which the coach called a diligence derives its name), and a “skulk of thieves” (a collective they share with foxes).  Perhaps the funniest, though it is somewhat obscure is an “incredibility of cuckolds.”

     Lipton quotes an exchange from Sir Nigel, a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle set in the fourteenth century that imagines the social context in which these terms of venery were significant.  A certain experienced knight, Sir John, quizzes Nigel on his knowledge of this special vocabulary, telling him that “no man of gentle birth” would fail to know these terms, but that “none can say that they know [them] all.”

      Finally, the modern enjoyment in resurrecting these words indicates a taste for the curious and antiquarian similar to that of over-educated Victorian clergymen, people who do rubbings of old gravestones, even the proprietor who calls his store Ye Olde Something Shoppe. The popularity of Lipton’s book in the ‘sixties suggests that era’s sympathy for unfettered imagination.  And what other motive might there be for you, dear reader, to have spent a few moments with this brief disquisition?  The wits of over half a millennium ago are, it seems, entertaining still.