Convention and Innovation in Stephen Duck’s “The Thresher’s Labour”

 

     Anticipations of Romantic values and literary practices occur throughout the eighteenth century.  Many critics have traced the origins of specific Romantic values in the cults of sentiment and the sublime, the “graveyard school,” and the burgeoning interest in the concept of natural genius and an interest in the works of the archaic, uneducated, and “primitive” writers. This latter development was reflected in greater attention to early poets as well as ballads and other folk materials resulting in the publication of Percy’s Reliques (1765) as well as the frauds of Macpherson’s Ossian (1761) and Chatterton’s Rowley (1777).  This interest led also to the recognition of a number of uneducated working class poets regarded as “natural geniuses,” among them Mary Collier (whose first publication was in 1739), Henry Jones (1746), Mary Leapor (1748), James Woodhouse (1764), Ann Yearsley (1785), John Frederick Bryant (1787), and a good many others.  During the time when writers learned rules of neo-Classical composition adapted from Boileau by Dryden and Pope, some readers sought something different and found support for the idea of untutored art by citing the authority of a Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit (the poet is born, not made).

     Pastoral and georgic poetry might seem to pose a particular problem of decorum since agricultural work is associated with poverty and ignorance and the poetic art with urban sophistication.  Hesiod enjoyed enormous prestige from his position next to Homer but his Works and Days was clearly not a courtly document but included folk traditions and details of actual husbandry.  Likewise the sophisticated urbanite Theocritus may have adapted some language he had heard actually used by herdsmen, but they surely did not sing in the epic dactylic hexameter that he used.  In the English Renaissance the authoritative George Puttenham characterized “Eglogues” as “shepheardly talke” which “in base and humble stile by maner of Dialogue, vttered the priuate and fami∣liar talke of the meanest sort of men, as shepheards, heywards and such like.” [1]  Yet he also maintains, with a lofty embrace of contradictions characteristic of him to claim that such poems were in fact sophisticated symbolic artifices.  Their true focus was not after all “to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication” but rather “under the vaile of homely persons to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters” even “to enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour.” [2]

     For Thomas Tickell in the early eighteenth century the pastoral is in fact defined by its fantastic unreality.  Pastoral poetry “transports us into a kind of Fairy Land. . . An Author, that would amuse himself by writing Pastorals, should form in his Fancy a Rural Scene of perfect Ease and Tranquility, where Innocence, Simplicity and Joy abound. It is not enough that he write about the Country; he must give us what is agreeable in that Scene, and hide what is wretched.” [3]

     Addison in his preface to Dryden’s Virgil similarly had no doubt that “the precepts of husbandry are not to be delivered with the simplicity of a plowman, but with the address of a poet.” “The low phrases and turns of art that are adapted to husbandry,” should not “have any place in such a work as the Georgic, which is not to appear in the natural simplicity and nakedness of its subject, but in the pleasantest dress that poetry can bestow on it.”  Rather than realism, Addison called for “pomp” and “dignity,” avoiding “meanness” and “letting his subject debase his style.”  “Nothing which is a phrase or saying in common talk, should be admitted in to a serious poem; because it takes off from the solemnity of the expression and gives it too great a turn of familiarity.”  For Addison, Virgil “breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness.”

     All the same Addison was open-minded enough in some moods to admit that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures.” He recognized his own “particular Delight in hearing the Songs and Fables that are come from Father to Son, and are most in Vogue among the common People,” noting that “it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted and approved by a Multitude, tho' they are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratify the Mind of Man.”  He makes good on this general enthusiasm with a detailed appreciation of “Chevy Chase.” [4]  He came to include Homer, Pindar, and Shakespeare among the “great natural Genius's that were never disciplined and broken by Rules of Art.” [5]

     Interest in contemporary untutored “natural” authors enjoyed a vogue from the mid-eighteenth century on, supported by readers’ growing curiosity and appreciation and the willingness of some to exchange literary refinement for homely vigor.  The issue was under witty and spirited discussion as early as 1714 when Gay published his “Six Pastorals” as The Shepherd's Week with a preface ridiculing the artificiality of pastoral conventions.  He promised that his poem would be a “right simple eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus,” unlike the productions of “certain young men of insipid delicacy.”  “It is my purpose, gentle reader, to set before thee, as it were a picture, or rather lively land- scape of thy own country, just as thou mightest see it, didest thou take a walk into the fields at the proper season.” [6]  Gay then proceeded with richly artificial rhetorical poems ornamented with allusions both ancient and modern with as little reference to actual farmworkers as any of his predecessors.   

     The fact is, of course, that Gay lacked the experience to write as an authentic rustic.  Among the most celebrated of the “natural” writers who did actually belong to the working-class who benefited from this trend was Stephen Duck, the agricultural worker whose most well-known poem today is “The Thresher’s Labour.” [7]  Even before his own publication of Poems on Several Occasions (1736), as many as ten pirated editions of Poems on Several Subjects (1730) appeared, signaling the public’s eager curiosity.  His oddity was highlighted on the title page which not only prominently identified the poet as “a poor Thresher” but even specified his wages: “Four Shillings and Six Pence per Week.”  These surprising facts are made even more impressive by adding the circumstance that the poems were “publickly read” by the Earl of Macclesfield to “Her Majesty” who thereupon deigned to offer the writer a home and an annuity.  Though George II had scant literary interests, his wife Caroline indeed so favored Duck that she made him keeper of her private library in a fanciful grotto called Merlin’s Cave where a journalist said “the work of the Learned surrounded him [Merlin], and the celebrated Stephen Duck is both his House-keeper and his Poet Laureat.” [8]   Thus both Duck’s rusticity and his acceptability were proven before the reader had perused a line.

     The early pension was one of many signs of his popular success.  He was the talk of the town.  Satires of his biography and his poetry appeared. [9]  He was introduced to London’s beau monde in the eighteenth-century version of radical chic.  Joseph Spence, at the time Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote a biography to preface Duck’s first book and recommended it to all, including his friend Pope to whom he wrote that Duck was “an Excellent Poet” “of particular good sense.”  Both Pope and Swift were subscribers to Duck’s Poems on Several Occasions (as was the Prince of Wales), though the two poets were less impressed than the Rev. Spence. 

     Pope, for instance, though finding Duck “an honest man,” sniffed that “most villages could supply verses of equal force” and mocked Duck’s role with the Queen’s library, in a satiric picture of modern poetasters artificially boosting each other’s reputation

 

Call Tibbald Shakespear, and he'll swear the Nine

Dear Cibber! never match'd one Ode of thine.

Lord! how we strut thro' Merlin's Cave, to see

No Poets there, but Stephen, you, and me.        [10]

 

 

     Swift for his part griped about Duck’s pension in letters to Pope and Gay and published his reaction publically as well.

 

 

On Stephen Duck, the Thresher and Favourite Poet.

A quibbling epigram. 1730.

 

THE thresher Duck could o'er the queen prevail,

The proverb says, "no fence against a flail."

From threshing corn he turns to thresh his brains;

For which her majesty allows him grains:

Though 'tis confest, that those, who ever saw

His poems, think them all not worth a straw!

⁠Thrice happy Duck, employed in threshing stubble!

Thy toil is lessen'd, and thy profits double.

 

 

In representing Duck’s mind as worthless straw or stubble, Swift deftly associates the poet’s rural occupation with stupidity, quite naturally concluding that Duck’s poems are “all not worth a straw!”

     While estimations of its value might differ, Duck clearly offered a voice hitherto little-heard in literature, a working man speaking from a class perspective.  [11]  From this perspective the traditional  pastoral conventions seem inappropriate.  In  the tumult of his work poetry, indeed, language at all, becomes inaudible.

 

The Voice is lost, drown'd by the louder Flail.

But we may think — Alas! what pleasing thing,

Here, to the Mind, can the dull Fancy bring?

(51-3)

 

Even could the Muses be heard, their songs would be out of place on a working farm.

 

’Tis all a gloomy melancholy Scene

Fit only to invoke the Muse’s Spleen

                                                         (60)

 

 

       In the morning voice of the “Master” the reader hears not a joyful anticipation of plenty but an irritable foreman: “Sure large Days-works I well may hope for now.” (27)  And in the afternoon he is never satisfied: “Ye scatter half your Wages o’er the Land” (244), denouncing the laborers as “Rogues.” (74)

     Duck appeals to the reader who is presumed never to have been in his position.

 

Let those who feast at Ease on dainty Fare

Pity the Reapers who their Feasts prepare”

(246)  

 

“Think what a painful Life we daily lead,” (251) he cries out, with “toils scarce ever ceasing.” (248)  As for beauty the workers are said to destroy the landscape, turning “pleasant Prospects” to “a gloomy Waste.” (231).  Their reaping turns the “Beauties” of the field to “Ruin” (223) and “sure Desolation.” (229)  In a bathetic burlesque of heroic war-making in which the field workers resemble a troop of marauding Muslims. (230)

    Duck’s voice is far from consistent, however.  As one of the poem’s most acute critics has noted, the variation in voice is one of the most striking aspects of “The Thresher’s Labour.” [12]  When the first person plural is used, it is the workers speaking collectively, Duck among them, while it is clearly a disciple of Pope who opens the piece and ornaments it throughout, and every now and then the supervisor or “Master” rails to the laborers with consistent antagonism.  While the first and third of these foreground the socio-economic relationships of the actors, it is the second that reveals most about Duck and his use of Augustan convention.

     The first lines of the opening address to both Muse and patron establish the verses’ bona fides in poetic discourse, indicating familiarity with Classical lore and by patronage a connection to the respectable world.  He does insert a mention of his own goddess’s “Poverty” (6) and he goes on to mention the “Toils of each revolving Year;/ Those endless Toils, which always grow anew,” (8-9) striking a note that must have jarred his genteel audience while perhaps delighting the more fanciful among them with its very novelty.

     In what might be considered the central image of the poem – the thresher threshing – the heroic epic tone strains against the insistently bathetic realistic details.  Almost as though he had intended to illustrate Pope’s 1728 essay "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry" [13], Duck mixes here the lofty and the familiar in the most provocative manner.  Though the grain is “Ceres’ Gifts” (14), to the farmer it brings only intimations of ”the Profits of the Year” (16).  The threshers who work “Divested of [their] Cloathes” wield their flails like “Weapons” (36) of war, momentarily resembling valiant warriors.

 

 

The CYCLOPS' Hammers could not truer chime;

Nor with more heavy Strokes could Aetna groan,

When VULCAN forg'd the Arms for THETIS' Son.

In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace,

Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face.

                                                                            (39-43)

 

References to Cyclops, Aetna, and Vulcan, then, are deployed in order to introduce the sweat “in briny Streams” running down the workers’ faces. [14]  Bathos could hardly be more audacious. 

     The intentional mingling of high and low strains might produce comedy (as in Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week), but here the principal effect is simply incongruity.  Cyclops and Vulcan have little relevance to the scene, nor do they play a role in a greater mythological structure shaping the poem, and when the passage culminates in sweat, the effect is inevitably ridiculous.  Duck is only too clearly straining to establish his own Classicism, imitating his university-educated fellow poets by decorating his lines with adventitious learned references. 

     Throughout the poem the comparison of the workers to ancient martial heroes enables the allusive machinery to operate though it is regularly ambiguous.  While their implements are called weapons (36), and the workers are themselves are “Hero-like” (114), they resemble Muslim not Christian warriors (230).  This denigrating qualification is intensified with their later identification with “Ethiopians” (65) not to mention “Rogues” (74) and “School-boys” (78). 

     Duck testifies from years of experience when he calls the field-workers occupation a “dull Task” (68), deserving of “Pity” (247).  The contests of Achilles and Hector or Aeneas and Turnus had a victor and of nations, too, to the winner goes the glory, but on the farm, there is no triumph no matter how dedicated the worker.

 

 

All strive to vanquish, tho' the Victor gains

 No other Glory, but the greatest Pains.

                                                                   (118-9)

 

 

For this reason the entire enterprise seems in the end a “Cheat.” (277)  Facing the challenge before him, the thresher responds soldier-like with energy and dedication, but the fact that he never gets anywhere, that the same tasks must be endlessly repeated, renders his occupation ignoble.

     Duck’s biography leaves little doubt that he himself escaped sweating in the fields as soon as he was able.  He had not even wished to write about the work experience that in his day and yet today endows his poetry with particular interest and he never returned to the topic.  Becoming a priest, he was first chaplain to a courtier and then pastor of a church in Surrey. [15]  He surely adopted the most prestigious literary practices of his day with the hope that he might thereby gain acceptance, and chance brought him extraordinary success.  His use of Classical references in spite of having through no fault of his own failed to receive the thorough education in Greek and Latin poets then standard for the wealthy must always seem factitious, tentative.  He was an expressive enough poet that his dubious status as an outsider is always evident.  He genuflects before the names of ancient mythology as one would before a patron.

     When directly commenting on his work experience, Duck never softens or deceives.  He cannot, like some socialist writers, conceive of labor as itself heroic; it is for him merely a harsh reality.  The closing lines of “The Thresher’s Labour” figure the farm hand not as a valiant warrior but as Sisyphus, a vicious man undergoing eternal punishment.

 

 

THUS, as the Year's revolving Course goes round,

No Respite from our Labour can be found:

Like SISYPHUS, our Work is never done;

Continually rolls back the restless Stone.

New-growing Labours still succeed the past;

And growing always new, must always last.

                                                                       (281-286)

 

 

This choice of Sisyphus, which casts the collective “our Work” as a meaningless grind, leading only to fatigue, harmonizes oddly with Camus’ image for the absurdity of human life in the twentieth century.  Though the reader may not share Duck’s ambition to find acceptance in proper society, his suffering and alienation are universal.  His own wish to rise in status prevented his critiquing the system he sought to enter and thus qualifying for the role of proto-radical some would like to give him.  Nonetheless, writing about rural life was never again so wholly imaginary as it had been for his predecessors.  Varying degrees of country realism may be traced in Thomson, Crabbe, Wordsworth, and the Tennyson of Enoch Brand and the Northern Farmer (both Old and New) as the influence of Classical poets and the use of ancient references has faded. 

     The tension between the learned gentility of the poetic conventions and unpretty facts like sweat and economic exploitation is the wellspring of Duck’s poem.  Using the heroic couplets associated with Dryden’s Aeneid and Pope’s Homer the very name of which implies grandeur, aristocratic values, and war, Duck produced a poetic chimera compounded of high and low, with attitudes from either end of the social scale mingled with little design and suggesting no new synthesis

     Duck was able to hone his own poetic skills sufficiently to accomplish his goals.  He impressed the Queen and the Oxford Professor of Poetry with his pastiche of successful Augustan poets, but he also gained readers, both then and now, by recording a genuine worker’s voice.  If the high-flown rhetoric and gritty detail never really work together, “The Thresher’s Labour” nonetheless provides the reader with a sympathetic experience of the rigor and hopelessness of manual labor, little unchanged for the greater part of humanity yet today.  For that alone it remains worth reading.

 

 

 

 

1.      1.  George Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie I.18.

2.      2.  Puttenham, Arte I.11.

3.      3.  The Guardian No. 22, 6 April 1713.  The essay was long attributed to Addison.

4.      4.  The first two quotations are from Spectator 70 (May 21, 1711).  The theme continued in Spectator 74 (May 25, 1711).  Then in Spectator 85 (June 7, 1711) he continued the theme with an account of the sentimental broadside  ballad “Two Children in the Wood” in which, though the song was “a plain simple Copy of Nature, destitute of the Helps and Ornaments of Art,” he found “a most exquisite Pleasure.”

5.      5.  Spectator 160 (Sept. 3, 1711).

6.      6.  "Proeme,” The Shepherd’s Calendar.  The immediate target is Ambrose Philips, whose eclogues rivaled Pope’s in popularity for a time.

7.      7.  His other poems are nearly all occasional or religious.  Duck had written about his agricultural work only at the suggestion of his patron, Rev. Stanley.  In his own time his Biblical “The Shunammite” was widely applauded.  Having acquired a late education, Duck became a priest.

8.      8.  Country Journal, No. 15, 1735, issue 489.

9.      9.  The Thresher’s Miscellany: or, Poems on Several Subjects, Written by Arthur Duck appeared even before the real Duck’s work.

10  10.  Alexander Pope, “The Second Epistle Of The Second Book Of Horace,” 137-140.  In the dense semantic underbrush Pope constructs he cleverly played on Dryden’s translation of Virgil Eclogue III 162 with his l. 146 "And you shall rise up Otway for your pains."  With even greater subtlety Pope set a line from Horace (Epistles II.2) as epigraph: “Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur” (“he will give the appearance of playing and be turned”) which implies the decline of letters and plays on the original sense of “turning,” meaning the poet’s ability to assume different moods and voices.

11    11.  Though not educated in the conventional school curriculum, Duck aspired to the same stylistic ideals as the accepted culture of the day.  In this he differs from those today called “outsider” artists.  His class viewpoint was prudentially softened in the authorized edition, most dramatically by eliminating the lines (17-18 in the 1730 edition) referring to the landlord.

1      12.  Bridget Keegan, “Georgic Transformations and Stephen Duck's ‘The Thresher's Labour’", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 41, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 2001).

1      13.  Pope had recommended that the poet prepare “by familiarizing his mind to the lowest objects” (Ch. 7) by that means developing a style “frothy, pert, and bouncing” (Ch. 4).

14    14.  Sweat, clearly a strong marker of outdoor labor, reappears four other times in Duck’s poem.

15    15.  His apparent suicide has by some over the years been ascribed to his rise in social standing though without evidence.