Sunday, April 1, 2018
A Structural View of the Ephesiaca
The Ephesiaca by Xenophon of Ephesus [1] has been long considered inferior to other Hellenistic novels or romances. In fact, early editors speculated that the extant text is not a finished work but a summary of a superior longer version. One critic arguing that main characters display significant growth and maturation [2] stands apart from the majority who find the chief interest of the work to be its action. Even those who translate Xenophon are tempted to condescension. One characterizes the book as "a specimen of penny dreadful literature” and another calls it the ancient version of a "rip-roaring action film." [3] They at least make it sound entertaining.
The fact is that ancient Greek prose fiction in general tends like folk tales to focus with single-minded concern on a narrative thread, with little description of settings and virtually no analysis or development of character. In the Ephesiaca the incidents are implausible and repetitive, the characters flat and unchanging, and the narration generally spare. The story does include an elaborate rhetorical show-piece: the wonderful ekphrasis on the canopy above the lovers’ marriage bed. The lush and luxurious texture of this passage, lit with an erotic glow, very like the art object it describes, only emphasizes the plainness of much of the story's prose.
For the most part the narration is unadorned and simple, proceeding rapidly from one incident to the next. Like Lazarillo de Tormes or the Chinese Water Margin it is episodic and paratactic in structure. Very little builds on what comes before or prepares for what follows. The story could be lengthened or shortened without damaging its pattern or meaning.
This is far, of course, from the qualities prized in modern novels. Yet these very attributes that underlie the book’s lack of appeal to many moderns may also be the basis for the pleasure its original audience felt when reading it. The primary motive for such a plot is aesthetic, the purely formal appeal of the pattern, similar to the pleasure the listener has in a Bach fugue or in certain works of abstract visual art. Even when viewing natural objects, such as the silhouettes of trees or the colors of a sunset, the human sensibility seeks satisfying unintentional structures. The author has set in motion a number of psychologically potent elements which then mutate and repeat in striking formal patterns. [4]
The entire plot might be schematically represented, but perhaps it will be sufficient to describe the first two books to establish the structure which remains largely fixed throughout. The hero of the Ephesiaca is introduced less as an individual than as a paragon of masculine excellence, extraordinary in beauty and character, justified in his arrogance. He is Man writ large. Almost like Gilgamesh whose powers required the counterbalance of Enkidu, Anthia then appears as his female counterpart, exemplifying the qualities most prized in women. The single cell has divided in two.
The two then lose their peace and happiness and fall into the hands of pirates upon which each receives an unwanted lover, their evil Doppelgängers in a sense, Corymbos for Habrocomes and Euxinos for Anthia. Ease has been replaced by its polar opposite suffering and the two leading protagonists has each attracted an antagonist.
In Book II a secondary doubling occurs on the axis of social class. The hero and heroine each receive a counterpart on a lower social level in Leucon and Rhode whose adventures parallel and support those of the leading players. Apsyrtos, the leader of the pirate gang, then provides a synthesis that envelops the pattern by taking Habrocomes, Anthia, Leucon, and Rhode into his custody. A new threat then appears as Aspyrtos’ iniquitous male authority is matched by his daughter Manto. Infatuated with Habrocomes, she denounces him when he fails to return her affection. Not only is he then tortured; Anthia is given to the same Manto who has her married to a poor goatherd.
Soon both escape their perils, but only temporarily, and so the story goes with further variations, playing with the author’s set of bipolar oppositions – male/female, pleasure/suffering, rich/poor – which proceed in a regular stylized pattern reminiscent of fractals until the happy conclusion. Yet since the incidents of the story do refer to recognizable human experience, they possess thematic resonance as well. In a work of art nothing is unintentional. The novel does present themes: in the most general way the culture’s male and female ideals, the instability of fortune, and the mysterious mixture of aggression and compassion that characterizes sexual relations. In Greek mythological terms, the story relays the chastening of arrogance by Eros, and the celebration of Isis, the embodiment of the Great Goddess.
The play of transformation in the Ephesiaca collects around several foci of the sort that Freud might have called cathexes. The anxiety and desire that enwraps love and death, pleasure and suffering renders these topics endlessly interesting to our species. This narrative allows the reader to contemplate the mutations of fortune in wonder and amazement. Individualized psychological studies or social analyses are not the only functions of fiction, nor are they necessarily the most sublime. Perhaps modern critics no longer share the taste that allowed earlier readers to relish formal play in fiction as they did in poetic meter. It may be that the sense of an orderly world that underlies the pleasure of viewing human experience as a delightfully kaleidoscopic marvel is rare in this belated age.
1. In English sometimes called the An Ephesian Tale. The author is, of course, to be distinguished from Socrates’ student, Xenophon of Athens. The question of the text being an epitome remains controversial today.
2. See Aldo Tagliabue, “The Ephesiaca as a Bildungsroman,” in Ancient Narrative, Vol. 10, 17–462.
3. Graham Anderson and Stephen Trzaskoma.
4. I am not wholly original in this reading. Earlier critics who have made structural analyses of the Ephesiaca include R. W. Garson (“The Faces of Love in Ephesiaca or Anthia and Habrocomes,” Museum Africum, 7, 47-55), David Konstan (Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres, Princeton U.P., Princeton), and J. R. Morgan in several studies, but especially “Travel in the Greek Novel: Function and Interpretation” in C. Adams and J. Roy’s Travel, Geography, and Culture in Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Near East, Leicester-Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society 10, Oxford, 139-160.
Every Reader's Donne
This is the tenth of a series of essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In this series I limit my focus to the discussion of only three or four of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes.
Texts of Donne’s poems are appended.
Since Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” almost a hundred years ago Donne’s literary stock has been high indeed. The anonymous 1595 painting of John Donne by shows a stylish young blade, beardless with a thin moustache, an extravagantly lacy shirt with an open collar, and a prodigiously huge hat. Donne, who was to be a grave divine, dean even of St. Paul’s, and a member of Parliament, here looks like nothing so much as a fashionable man-about-town. His contemporary, the writer and translator Richard Baker spoke of him in his youth as “not dissolute, but very neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses.”
His present literary authority may have seemed unlikely in the days of his youth. The son of a London Roman Catholic bourgeois, his background offered little likelihood of favor in high places. Indeed, his brother died while imprisoned for concealing a priest. He bounced around, gaining admittance to Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer and sailing with Sir Walter Raleigh. Looking for advantage, he served as secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, only to incur his employer’s anger by marrying his niece, whereupon he was fired and initially put in jail. Writing to his wife about his dismissal, he signed “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.” While he was freed soon after, he was in reduced circumstances for years while his wife bore child after child, twelve in sixteen years.
After his conversion to Anglicanism and his ordination as a priest, he wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets and his fortunes improved. He served as prolocutor to the king, sat in Parliament, and became a prestigious and popular prelate and chaplain to aristocrats. By the time of his death the public’s memory of the witty seduction poems of his youth had been overlaid with a newer celebrity based on energetic but wholly orthodox religious verses and such memorable meditations as that in which he declared “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed” features a dazzling display of wit, sufficiently risqué that the poem was denied a license. Excluded from his posthumous collected poems, it was published twenty-one years later. Though the sexes are figured as “foes,” and the lady may display a coquettish stand-offishness (what the troubadours called daunger), they are more profoundly at one in their pursuit of the heights of physical love. Donne sets the tone with the play on “labor” in the second line which leads directly to the erection joke – “tired of standing.” The motif returns in line 11 with his envy of the busk, the rigid center front piece of the corset, and again in line 24 with his saying she can set “flesh upright.” His body is only responding, of course, to the glories of hers which outdoes anything else in the natural world; indeed, it is divine because of her physicality, not in spite of it. The twenty-first century reader may find unpleasant his references to her body as a colony (in the oft-quoted line 27 “O my America, my new found land”) or, even more objectifying, as a mine. (l. 29) Yet he describes himself as in “bonds” (l. 30) though they paradoxically free him.
Though others may find an incompatibility between profane and divine love, between the physical and the spiritual, for Donne they are complementary.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys.
He is a marvelously natural lover to whom adornments such as jewelry can only detract from the worshipped body, for him a “mystic book.” (line 41) The concluding lines may be read as reflecting prelapsarian innocence and the wonderful reciprocity of the love he envisions or as the cynical selfish line of a clever and courtly libertine. Very likely they are both.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
In “The Sun Rising” Donne works some new variations on the old troubadour topos of the alba, the dawn-song in which the lover complains of daylight bringing to an end the idyll he had been enjoying in bed with his beloved. Donne immediately recharges this old motif by the use of vigorous, unmistakably colloquial language, providing the impression of sincerity arising from lived experience.
Similarly, the form is both old and new, conventional and innovative, with both rhyme and meter following well-defined but unpredictable patterns. Each stanza follows a rhyme scheme one quatrain short of a Shakespearean sonnet: ABBACDCDEE while the meter is iambic pentameter for lines three, four, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Line two is regularly shortened (and, in reading, slowed) to a dimeter, in the first two stanzas suggesting thoughtful inquiry and in the last, quiet wonder.
The poet indicates his values at the outset by treating the sun as a menial, annoyingly interfering with the all-important business of love-making. Yet he is not dismissed only to “chide late schoolboys,” but also to tend the king’s affairs, which in the lover’s view are as trivial as a child’s. Not merely human society from the lowest to the highest seems inconsequential to this lover, but even (one might have assumed as much from his high-handed address to the sun) such operations of nature as the ants prudent preparation for winter. The neo-Platonic justification for this amatory solipsism is provided in the couplet that concludes the first stanza. Love is eternal, outside of time; next to love’s glory, time is a ragged beggar.
The following stanza reinforces the hegemonic subjectivity that, for the lover, makes up his entire world. The sun vanishes when he closes his eyes, yet the entire world, his entire world, is ever–present in his lovers’ bed. Next to the delights of love all worldly honor seems inconsequential. The poet’s more-than- lordly position allows him to be condescending to the sun. The poem closes with a distinctly neo-Platonic geometric formula that considers the sphere to be the shape of perfection.
Even in his pose as a passionate lover, Donne uses philosophic justifications, most often neo-Platonic, to account for the strength of his desire. When he became an Anglican and a priest the center of his attention shifted from human to divine love while never denying the value and power of the former, and he became a celebrated preacher, drawing crowds to St. Paul’s as well as to Paul’s Cross, the al fresco pulpit nearby.
Remarkably, Donne managed to retain a comparable imaginative energy and sensuality in these religious poems. With “batter,” the first word of his Holy Sonnet XIV, he startles the reader with the ferocity of his passion. Once the reader understands the conceit, it grows only more monstrous. The poet imagines himself raped by God in a transport during which he is largely passive. The violence of the imagery is disturbing and unavoidable. The other governing metaphor of the poem is equally willing to flirt with masochism: the self as a city besieged by the divine, hoping to be captured. While these images are novel and likely to be shocking to many, Donne’s language is justified since the analogies of a rape or a city captured in war, while violent, are entirely consistent with the orthodox doctrine of salvation through grace. For Donne, the edgy rhetoric guarantees the reader’s attention and throws a new light on a familiar teaching.
He sounds as anxious for salvation as his younger self had been that the lady should undress. In praise of Donne Eliot had noted that for him the “disassociation of sensibility,” the separation of thought and feeling, did not exist. For Donne an idea was an experience and each emotion stirred ratiocination. While his every verse is grounded in concrete imagery of lived experience, it often uses the abstract concepts of neo-Platonism or Christian apologetics. For Donne the new discoveries of his day, the explorations of previously unknown regions, the latest in physics, alchemy and chemistry, all seemed to him rich with metaphorical possibilities. The fact is that, until the recent era of scientific specialization, men of letters and men of the cloth actually made scientific discoveries, among them Leibniz, Franklin, Goethe and Mendel. Over the centuries, the science may mutate and develop, but the emotional experiences never changes as though in the last analysis it is to those mutable and turbulent areas of consciousness that one must seek the most authentically lasting truths. Every poem of Donne’s is, though the poet’s craftsmanship, charged with the intensity of his intellect and no less of his heart.
"Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed"
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though they never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there:
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed time.
Off with that happy busk, whom I envy
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown's going off such beauteous state reveals
As when from flowery meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow.
Off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou Angel bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
They set out hairs, but these the flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind before, above, between, below.
Oh my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my Empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee.
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are as Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem
His earthly soul may covet theirs not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see revealed. Then since I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea this white linen hence.
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
XIV.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
Texts of Donne’s poems are appended.
Since Eliot’s essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” almost a hundred years ago Donne’s literary stock has been high indeed. The anonymous 1595 painting of John Donne by shows a stylish young blade, beardless with a thin moustache, an extravagantly lacy shirt with an open collar, and a prodigiously huge hat. Donne, who was to be a grave divine, dean even of St. Paul’s, and a member of Parliament, here looks like nothing so much as a fashionable man-about-town. His contemporary, the writer and translator Richard Baker spoke of him in his youth as “not dissolute, but very neat; a great visitor of Ladies, a great frequenter of Plays, a great writer of conceited Verses.”
His present literary authority may have seemed unlikely in the days of his youth. The son of a London Roman Catholic bourgeois, his background offered little likelihood of favor in high places. Indeed, his brother died while imprisoned for concealing a priest. He bounced around, gaining admittance to Lincoln’s Inn as a lawyer and sailing with Sir Walter Raleigh. Looking for advantage, he served as secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, only to incur his employer’s anger by marrying his niece, whereupon he was fired and initially put in jail. Writing to his wife about his dismissal, he signed “John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.” While he was freed soon after, he was in reduced circumstances for years while his wife bore child after child, twelve in sixteen years.
After his conversion to Anglicanism and his ordination as a priest, he wrote anti-Catholic pamphlets and his fortunes improved. He served as prolocutor to the king, sat in Parliament, and became a prestigious and popular prelate and chaplain to aristocrats. By the time of his death the public’s memory of the witty seduction poems of his youth had been overlaid with a newer celebrity based on energetic but wholly orthodox religious verses and such memorable meditations as that in which he declared “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed” features a dazzling display of wit, sufficiently risqué that the poem was denied a license. Excluded from his posthumous collected poems, it was published twenty-one years later. Though the sexes are figured as “foes,” and the lady may display a coquettish stand-offishness (what the troubadours called daunger), they are more profoundly at one in their pursuit of the heights of physical love. Donne sets the tone with the play on “labor” in the second line which leads directly to the erection joke – “tired of standing.” The motif returns in line 11 with his envy of the busk, the rigid center front piece of the corset, and again in line 24 with his saying she can set “flesh upright.” His body is only responding, of course, to the glories of hers which outdoes anything else in the natural world; indeed, it is divine because of her physicality, not in spite of it. The twenty-first century reader may find unpleasant his references to her body as a colony (in the oft-quoted line 27 “O my America, my new found land”) or, even more objectifying, as a mine. (l. 29) Yet he describes himself as in “bonds” (l. 30) though they paradoxically free him.
Though others may find an incompatibility between profane and divine love, between the physical and the spiritual, for Donne they are complementary.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys.
He is a marvelously natural lover to whom adornments such as jewelry can only detract from the worshipped body, for him a “mystic book.” (line 41) The concluding lines may be read as reflecting prelapsarian innocence and the wonderful reciprocity of the love he envisions or as the cynical selfish line of a clever and courtly libertine. Very likely they are both.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
In “The Sun Rising” Donne works some new variations on the old troubadour topos of the alba, the dawn-song in which the lover complains of daylight bringing to an end the idyll he had been enjoying in bed with his beloved. Donne immediately recharges this old motif by the use of vigorous, unmistakably colloquial language, providing the impression of sincerity arising from lived experience.
Similarly, the form is both old and new, conventional and innovative, with both rhyme and meter following well-defined but unpredictable patterns. Each stanza follows a rhyme scheme one quatrain short of a Shakespearean sonnet: ABBACDCDEE while the meter is iambic pentameter for lines three, four, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Line two is regularly shortened (and, in reading, slowed) to a dimeter, in the first two stanzas suggesting thoughtful inquiry and in the last, quiet wonder.
The poet indicates his values at the outset by treating the sun as a menial, annoyingly interfering with the all-important business of love-making. Yet he is not dismissed only to “chide late schoolboys,” but also to tend the king’s affairs, which in the lover’s view are as trivial as a child’s. Not merely human society from the lowest to the highest seems inconsequential to this lover, but even (one might have assumed as much from his high-handed address to the sun) such operations of nature as the ants prudent preparation for winter. The neo-Platonic justification for this amatory solipsism is provided in the couplet that concludes the first stanza. Love is eternal, outside of time; next to love’s glory, time is a ragged beggar.
The following stanza reinforces the hegemonic subjectivity that, for the lover, makes up his entire world. The sun vanishes when he closes his eyes, yet the entire world, his entire world, is ever–present in his lovers’ bed. Next to the delights of love all worldly honor seems inconsequential. The poet’s more-than- lordly position allows him to be condescending to the sun. The poem closes with a distinctly neo-Platonic geometric formula that considers the sphere to be the shape of perfection.
Even in his pose as a passionate lover, Donne uses philosophic justifications, most often neo-Platonic, to account for the strength of his desire. When he became an Anglican and a priest the center of his attention shifted from human to divine love while never denying the value and power of the former, and he became a celebrated preacher, drawing crowds to St. Paul’s as well as to Paul’s Cross, the al fresco pulpit nearby.
Remarkably, Donne managed to retain a comparable imaginative energy and sensuality in these religious poems. With “batter,” the first word of his Holy Sonnet XIV, he startles the reader with the ferocity of his passion. Once the reader understands the conceit, it grows only more monstrous. The poet imagines himself raped by God in a transport during which he is largely passive. The violence of the imagery is disturbing and unavoidable. The other governing metaphor of the poem is equally willing to flirt with masochism: the self as a city besieged by the divine, hoping to be captured. While these images are novel and likely to be shocking to many, Donne’s language is justified since the analogies of a rape or a city captured in war, while violent, are entirely consistent with the orthodox doctrine of salvation through grace. For Donne, the edgy rhetoric guarantees the reader’s attention and throws a new light on a familiar teaching.
He sounds as anxious for salvation as his younger self had been that the lady should undress. In praise of Donne Eliot had noted that for him the “disassociation of sensibility,” the separation of thought and feeling, did not exist. For Donne an idea was an experience and each emotion stirred ratiocination. While his every verse is grounded in concrete imagery of lived experience, it often uses the abstract concepts of neo-Platonism or Christian apologetics. For Donne the new discoveries of his day, the explorations of previously unknown regions, the latest in physics, alchemy and chemistry, all seemed to him rich with metaphorical possibilities. The fact is that, until the recent era of scientific specialization, men of letters and men of the cloth actually made scientific discoveries, among them Leibniz, Franklin, Goethe and Mendel. Over the centuries, the science may mutate and develop, but the emotional experiences never changes as though in the last analysis it is to those mutable and turbulent areas of consciousness that one must seek the most authentically lasting truths. Every poem of Donne’s is, though the poet’s craftsmanship, charged with the intensity of his intellect and no less of his heart.
"Elegy XIX: To His Mistris Going to Bed"
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though they never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there:
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now 'tis your bed time.
Off with that happy busk, whom I envy
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown's going off such beauteous state reveals
As when from flowery meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow.
Off with those shoes: and then safely tread
In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven's angels used to be
Received by men; thou Angel bring'st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these Angels from an evil sprite:
They set out hairs, but these the flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Behind before, above, between, below.
Oh my America, my new found land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my Empery,
How blessed am I in this discovering thee.
To enter in these bonds is to be free,
Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.
Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are as Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem
His earthly soul may covet theirs not them.
Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
Whom their imputed grace will dignify
Must see revealed. Then since I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea this white linen hence.
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first: why then
What need'st thou have more covering than a man.
The Sun Rising
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
XIV.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
"Nottamun Town"
“Nottamun Town” is a song of undoubted antiquity, dating at least from the late Middle Ages. With explicitly self-contradictory content, the lyrics challenge listeners’ assumptions in the most fundamental way. The surface it constructs, a shimmering blend of reality and unreality, is mirrored in the song’s elusive transformations over time. The available evidence suggests that the song had all but vanished in England by the eighteenth century, but it had crossed the Atlantic in the century before where it become established in a half dozen Southern states. Several broadside versions were published in New York in the nineteenth century, but the tune was not recorded until Cecil Sharp collected it from Jean Ritchie’s sister Una and cousin Sabrina in 1917. Ritchie later sang the song on many albums and through her renditions and those of other performers who had learned it through her (notably the Fairport Convention) it became reestablished in the U.K. Those influenced included some who deviated from the folk tradition. Dylan used Ritchie’s tune for “Masters of War.” Furthermore, on the holograph of “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” just below the line “I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken” Dylan wrote “Nottamun Town,” a clear reference to the line in Ritchie’s song “Ten thousand stood round me but I was alone.” [1] Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter recalled that the song’s underdetermination inspired them to use similarly mysterious imagery. [2]
Just what does that imagery signify? “Nottamun Town” may easily be characterized as nonsense poetry, but the term is imprecise. What is called nonsense poetry may be of three types. The words may follow the phonological and syntactic rules of a language yet introduce new, more or less suggestive, coinages in a generally intelligible setting. This is the sort well-known from “Jabberwocky” or “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Further dislocation from linguistic norms leads to a more radical form of nonsense verse that may approach gibberish such as one sees in magical formulae, Sioux lyric, scat-singing, and speaking in tongues. Some texts, however, including this song, include no neologisms, but rather employ ordinary language to subvert everyday logic. [3]
The theme of “Nottamun Town” is neither love nor death, but rather the nature of reality itself, or, at any rate, the capacity of language to describe it adequately. The paradoxical content of the song has struck many listeners as puzzling in spite of its resemblance to “O! Susannah,” Stephen Foster’s composed song, and nineteenth century children’s poems such as those by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
The sociological bias common to folklorists has led many critics, baffled by the song’s illogic, to suggest the relevance of a variety of historical circumstances. Among the ingenious proposals are the conventions of mummers’ performances, the turmoil of the English Civil War, and outbreaks of plague or ergotism. The very breadth of these suggestions indicates the slender evidence for any. The fact is that even if some social cataclysm accompanied the song’s composition, that event would shed little light on its continuing popularity over centuries in the American colonies among people lacking contact with Great Britain.
The theory concerning the song’s meaning that I find most useful is, oddly, the least likely of all. Charles Upton, a poet associated with the Beats who became a Sufi, maintains [3] that the song is a coded guide to the spiritual path he regards as sophia perennis. For him each of the specific figures is allegorical, each color is meaningful, and the whole is coherent and complete. This excerpt will be sufficient to direct those who, like me, find Upton’s hermeneutics provocative and ingenious though far from compelling as a whole.
“Nottamun” or “Nottingham” Town is the place of “naughting,” the town where we travel to become “not.” It thus corresponds with the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the town of the dead—not necessarily the physically dead, but those who are dead in this life—who, in the words of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) have “died before they are made to die.” As Omar Khayyam said, “Dawn is breaking and the caravan/ Starts for the Dawn of Nothing —O make haste!” But it is also, on the negative side, the land of those who are dead to the Spirit, the living dead who make up sense-bound “normal” humanity, now seen as they really are from the vantage point of that other world: hylic (material) man as witnessed from a psychic and potentially pneumatic standpoint.
Each of the seven stations of the spiritual Path is rendered, in “Nottamun Town,” as a polar opposition, whose synthesis opens the door to the next level. . .
I follow Upton only in part. Though his elaborate gloss on a simple song is admirably clever and almost justifiable, it is far too specific, tailored in detail to fit Upton’s largely preconceived vision. While it is true that the song triggers questions about fundamental assumptions taken for granted in everyday thought (for instance, it implies suspicion of dualism), only the enthusiast will find a detailed and specific spiritual ladder for the aspirant to ascend.
The song in fact belongs to a considerable tradition of nonsense literature, once directed toward a general audience, but which, in recent times has become associated in particular with children’s poetry. In “Farai un vers de dreit nien,” for example, William IX explicitly declares he will write about “nothing.” He explodes dualities by insisting he is neither happy nor sad, neither stranger nor native.
One function of such texts is to affirm the fundamentally irrational, ambiguous, or mysterious character of human thought processes, in William’s lyric illustrated by his love dilemma. There is a frisson of delight felt often by the very young in seeing self-contradictions and impossibilities boldly set forth; a similar pleasure, I suspect, underlies the popularity of magicians and, in American culture, special effects in films. Apart from this function as entertainment on the thematic level such celebration of paradox reminds the listener of how fragile the human cause-and-effect understanding of our lives can seem in the light of such consciousness-altering catalysts as art (including religion). Just as the viewer of a suspense film or a Greek tragedy enjoys imagining being in peril while safely enjoying an entertaining narrative (while knowing in the back of the mind that one is at all times in mortal peril) [4], the audience for “Nottamun Town” enjoys playing with epistemological doubt while to some degree recognizing its reality.
1. https://newtonexcelbach.com/2016/06/10/various-routes-to-and-from-nottamun-town/
2. See Blair Jackson's "An Interview About Songwriting and Inspiration," in Goin' Down The Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, 208-209.
3. I would not consider nonsense statements that seem to ignore natural law, such as one finds in myth, fairy tales, science fiction, “magic realism,” and elsewhere. The worlds imagined in such texts operate by laws, though they may differ from those of everyday lived reality.
3. In Folk Metaphysics. The relevant passage is available as well at www.sophiaperennis.com/discussion-forums/traditionalism-and-folklore/fair-nottamun-town-mystical-and-alchemical-symbolism-in-an-appalachian-folk-song/.
4. Behind this fear is the likelihood that the more or less enlightened viewer of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Silence of the Lambs realizes that in the end all is well because, in Pope’s words “Whatever is, is right.”
Nottamun Town as sung by Jean Ritchie
In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
I rode a grey horse, a mule roany mare,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
There wa'nt a hair on her be-what was coal black.
She stood so still, she threw me to the dirt,
She tore -a my hide and she bruised my shirt.
From saddle to stirrup I mounted again,
And on my ten toes I rode over the plain.
Met the King and the Queen and a company more,
A-riding behind and a-marching before
Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along.
They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay,
They talked all the while, not a word they did say,
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day.
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.
Just what does that imagery signify? “Nottamun Town” may easily be characterized as nonsense poetry, but the term is imprecise. What is called nonsense poetry may be of three types. The words may follow the phonological and syntactic rules of a language yet introduce new, more or less suggestive, coinages in a generally intelligible setting. This is the sort well-known from “Jabberwocky” or “The Pobble Who Has No Toes.” Further dislocation from linguistic norms leads to a more radical form of nonsense verse that may approach gibberish such as one sees in magical formulae, Sioux lyric, scat-singing, and speaking in tongues. Some texts, however, including this song, include no neologisms, but rather employ ordinary language to subvert everyday logic. [3]
The theme of “Nottamun Town” is neither love nor death, but rather the nature of reality itself, or, at any rate, the capacity of language to describe it adequately. The paradoxical content of the song has struck many listeners as puzzling in spite of its resemblance to “O! Susannah,” Stephen Foster’s composed song, and nineteenth century children’s poems such as those by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
The sociological bias common to folklorists has led many critics, baffled by the song’s illogic, to suggest the relevance of a variety of historical circumstances. Among the ingenious proposals are the conventions of mummers’ performances, the turmoil of the English Civil War, and outbreaks of plague or ergotism. The very breadth of these suggestions indicates the slender evidence for any. The fact is that even if some social cataclysm accompanied the song’s composition, that event would shed little light on its continuing popularity over centuries in the American colonies among people lacking contact with Great Britain.
The theory concerning the song’s meaning that I find most useful is, oddly, the least likely of all. Charles Upton, a poet associated with the Beats who became a Sufi, maintains [3] that the song is a coded guide to the spiritual path he regards as sophia perennis. For him each of the specific figures is allegorical, each color is meaningful, and the whole is coherent and complete. This excerpt will be sufficient to direct those who, like me, find Upton’s hermeneutics provocative and ingenious though far from compelling as a whole.
“Nottamun” or “Nottingham” Town is the place of “naughting,” the town where we travel to become “not.” It thus corresponds with the Sufi fana, or self-annihilation. It is the town of the dead—not necessarily the physically dead, but those who are dead in this life—who, in the words of Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) have “died before they are made to die.” As Omar Khayyam said, “Dawn is breaking and the caravan/ Starts for the Dawn of Nothing —O make haste!” But it is also, on the negative side, the land of those who are dead to the Spirit, the living dead who make up sense-bound “normal” humanity, now seen as they really are from the vantage point of that other world: hylic (material) man as witnessed from a psychic and potentially pneumatic standpoint.
Each of the seven stations of the spiritual Path is rendered, in “Nottamun Town,” as a polar opposition, whose synthesis opens the door to the next level. . .
I follow Upton only in part. Though his elaborate gloss on a simple song is admirably clever and almost justifiable, it is far too specific, tailored in detail to fit Upton’s largely preconceived vision. While it is true that the song triggers questions about fundamental assumptions taken for granted in everyday thought (for instance, it implies suspicion of dualism), only the enthusiast will find a detailed and specific spiritual ladder for the aspirant to ascend.
The song in fact belongs to a considerable tradition of nonsense literature, once directed toward a general audience, but which, in recent times has become associated in particular with children’s poetry. In “Farai un vers de dreit nien,” for example, William IX explicitly declares he will write about “nothing.” He explodes dualities by insisting he is neither happy nor sad, neither stranger nor native.
One function of such texts is to affirm the fundamentally irrational, ambiguous, or mysterious character of human thought processes, in William’s lyric illustrated by his love dilemma. There is a frisson of delight felt often by the very young in seeing self-contradictions and impossibilities boldly set forth; a similar pleasure, I suspect, underlies the popularity of magicians and, in American culture, special effects in films. Apart from this function as entertainment on the thematic level such celebration of paradox reminds the listener of how fragile the human cause-and-effect understanding of our lives can seem in the light of such consciousness-altering catalysts as art (including religion). Just as the viewer of a suspense film or a Greek tragedy enjoys imagining being in peril while safely enjoying an entertaining narrative (while knowing in the back of the mind that one is at all times in mortal peril) [4], the audience for “Nottamun Town” enjoys playing with epistemological doubt while to some degree recognizing its reality.
1. https://newtonexcelbach.com/2016/06/10/various-routes-to-and-from-nottamun-town/
2. See Blair Jackson's "An Interview About Songwriting and Inspiration," in Goin' Down The Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, 208-209.
3. I would not consider nonsense statements that seem to ignore natural law, such as one finds in myth, fairy tales, science fiction, “magic realism,” and elsewhere. The worlds imagined in such texts operate by laws, though they may differ from those of everyday lived reality.
3. In Folk Metaphysics. The relevant passage is available as well at www.sophiaperennis.com/discussion-forums/traditionalism-and-folklore/fair-nottamun-town-mystical-and-alchemical-symbolism-in-an-appalachian-folk-song/.
4. Behind this fear is the likelihood that the more or less enlightened viewer of Oedipus Rex, King Lear, or Silence of the Lambs realizes that in the end all is well because, in Pope’s words “Whatever is, is right.”
Nottamun Town as sung by Jean Ritchie
In fair Nottamun town, not a soul would look up,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
Not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down,
To show me the way to fair Nottamun town.
I rode a grey horse, a mule roany mare,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
Grey mane and grey tail, a green stripe down her back,
There wa'nt a hair on her be-what was coal black.
She stood so still, she threw me to the dirt,
She tore -a my hide and she bruised my shirt.
From saddle to stirrup I mounted again,
And on my ten toes I rode over the plain.
Met the King and the Queen and a company more,
A-riding behind and a-marching before
Came a stark-naked drummer a-beating a drum
With his heels in his bosom come marching along.
They laughed and they smiled, not a soul did look gay,
They talked all the while, not a word they did say,
I bought me a quart to drive gladness away
And to stifle the dust, for it rained the whole day.
Sat down on a hard, hot cold frozen stone,
Ten thousand stood round me, and yet I's alone.
Took my hat in my hand for to keep my head warm,
Ten thousand got drownded that never was born.
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