Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud. 

The Idea of Nature in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

  

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in  parentheses refer either to lines in the “Essay on Criticism” or the “Essay on Man” or to Canto and stanza in Dryden’s translation of Boileau’s “L'Art poétique.” I use the text of the “Essay on Criticism” available online at https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3675-w0010.shtml.

 

     The distinction between the natural and the artificial is among the bipolar oppositions most commonly invoked in the discussion of poetry.  The ancient “Asiatic” rhetorical style, Occitanian trobar clus, and Euphuism, for instance, revel in language that is pointedly artificial in contrast to the Attic style, trobar leu, and Philip Sidney who concluded sonnet 1 in Astrophel and Stella with the line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”  His pose, of course, is as much a convention as any. 

    There is nothing “natural” about even such direct and simple lyrics as those of A. E. Housman.  All poetry is simply sounds in the air or marks on a page, with no necessary correspondence to lived experience of the world.  Every work of art is oblique and conventional in signification, relying on sound, symbolism, and allusion.  Though no story is “realistic,” since every narration is “made-up,” some have “seeming reality,” while others strike readers as fantasy, and in poetry some writers seem to rely more heavily on nature and inspiration, while others seem more consciously craftsmanlike.  Each is a pretense, an equally manufactured impression created by the author. 

      Still, a poet’s expressed reaction to nature signifies a whole complex of accompanying attitudes.  Nature is a critical element in the contrast constructed by literary historians between Classical and Romantic ideals.  The Classical artist is associated with inspiration through imitation, achieving effects through mastery of rhetoric, and a general attachment to urbane sophistication, while the Romantic is stimulated by direct experience, expressed in a “spontaneous overflow” of words, responding with “natural” emotion to beauty.  

     While Pope is often considered the prime exponent of a neo-Classical poetics, and his “Essay on Criticism” is intended as an English counterpart of Boileau’s L'Art poétique (itself a revision of Horace), in fact both Pope’s poetic theory and practice are far from doctrinaire.  In numerous important ways, Pope contains the embryo of Romanticism in his own writing, though the meaning his gave to the word “nature” was quite different from later usage including our own. 

     The “Essay” does indeed prescribe rules, but also allows for their violation.  While he cautions “Discretion” (163) in violating traditional artistic practices, he recognizes that “Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend” (153) and please readers with “lucky LICENCE” (149), constructing   “Nameless Graces, which no Methods teach” (145).  To Pope “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/ For there's a Happiness as well as Care” (142-3).  The aesthetic effects beyond those taught in the schools are not necessarily unknown only because of their novelty; according to Pope, they may be in fact beyond analysis.  “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare.” (142)

     A source of inspiration beyond the models of the ancients, beyond even their conscious understanding, was nature, though for Pope the word had a meaning rarely used today.  The most reductive formulations of the Classical-Romantic dualism would premise a Classical preference for civilization, typified, perhaps, by Samuel Johnson’s comment (according to Boswell) “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." [1]  The Romantic answer would be a reverence for nature as equivalent to “the fair and open face of heaven” as  Keats put it in “To one who has been long in city pent.”

     The word nature to a modern suggests trees and streams, a landscape unshaped by people, but Johnson’s dictionary, which offers eleven definitions, never quite includes this one.  Johnson begins with Nature as a mythological personification and ends with “physics.”  This last comes close to what Pope had in mind when he declared “First follow NATURE” (68).  The “Essay on Criticism” could hardly be more emphatic about the value of nature in the composition of poetry.  To him “That Art is best which most resembles Her” (74) as nature is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (73). 

     The character of Pope’s concept of nature emerges in his justification for literary convention which insists that  “Rules are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (88).   The next line insists “Those RULES of old [are] discover’d not devis’d” (89), though, of course, in fact, works of art are always culturally constructed. 

     Nature impresses Pope’s sensibility not as the picturesque but as a beautifully functioning system.  He loves not the nighttime stars, but the patterns of their movements, not the lily but the annual death and rebirth of vegetation as a whole.  Thus to him nature is the spectacle of the system, miraculous in complexity, that animates the universe.  The analogy with literary “rules” or conventions is natural, reinforced by the veneration for the ancients in which it seems that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (136).

     The same privilege Pope grants to generalities underlies his opening passage in which he maintains, somewhat counter-intuitively, that incompetent critics do more harm than bad writers.  By suggesting the wrong general principles, a misguided critic will deny the order that constitutes nature.  

     Among the notions that might seem to be Romantic, but which Pope affirms is the existence of the natural “true Genius” (11) among poets as well as critics.  To him the greatest writers are “Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free” (652).  To such gifted artists the rules that govern most artistic practice appear as “vulgar Bounds” and the poet flouting them exhibits “brave Disorder,” enabling  by this violation “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155-156).

     Yet in much of what Pope maintains, he is seconding the views of Boileau, the législateur du Parnasse, who, though he said  “A hundred times consider what you've said:/ Polish, repolish” (I, 11), also prescribed  “To study nature be your only care” (III, 49) and insisted the writer should “Strive to be natural in all you Write” (III, 50).  His treatise opens by  declaring that only those born under a “Poetic Influence” should attempt poetry and that “In all you Write, observe with Care and Art/ To move the Passions, and incline the Heart” (III, 30).

     Furthermore, both Boileau and Pope praise Longinus, the author of On the Sublime, who focuses on the reader’s reaction and allows for subjective intuitive judgements.  Boileau had himself translated Longinus, and Pope hails him enthusiastically. 

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,

And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

                                                           (675-680) 

The language here emphasizes the reader’s emotional response to a text with word like “fire,”, “ardent,” and “warmth,” and justifies Longinus’ judgment, not through logical reasoning, but because his own writing is powerfully moving.  

     The view of nature that underlies Pope’s literary criticism is expressed as well in his more generally philosophical “An Essay on Man” where nature is divinely inspirited. 

All are but parts of one stupendous Whole,

Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul

                                            (259-260)

 This holy universal nature is then identified with the aesthetic: “All nature is but art unknown to thee.” (281).  As the godhead is the supreme artist, the order of creation is the ultimate work of art, the model for all human poets.  To him the ancients were able to conform to the dictates of an all-but-deified nature that they borrowed from it some flames of “Coelestial Fire” (198). 

     This nearly numinous concept of nature underlies Pope’s literary theory, allowing him to contain in  embryo significant elements of what came to be Romantic assumptions about art.  His reliance on authority, on the “unities” attributed to Aristotle and other prescriptive rules, and his claim that "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363) are quite real, but they arise from the conviction that reliance on literary tradition and drawing from nature itself are similar processes.   For Pope the contemplation of the phenomenal world and the appreciation of earlier poetry both lead, not through rational processes but through a kind of spiritual apprehension, to an understanding of beauty.  Pope’s conflation of art and nature allows him simultaneously allegiance to the natural and the artificial; for him there is little difference since god is an artist like himself.  In the study of nature and of poetry (and of the divine as well) Pope finds an ineffable element, revelatory yet resistant to analysis, known only by the afflatus Longinus called the sublime.

 

 

1.  This is consistent with the Biblical attitude in which the wilderness is regularly opposed to the garden.

2.  For Boileau reason often stands in place of what Pope calls nature.  “Always let sense accompany your Rhyme” (I, 2).

A Question about John Pomfret

 

Pomfret’s “The Choyce” is appended.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses to lines of the poem.  I have here been somewhat casual with the proprieties expected in quasi-scholarly writing.  See note following the essay.  

 

     The novice world traveler is likely at first to make it a point to stop by those sites already over-familiar from a thousand pictures: the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, but later trips may turn to neighborhoods and parklands that attract fewer visitors.  The reader has a parallel experience.  One can only once read for the first time the Iliad or Quixote or Rabelais or Hamlet, and the experience is wondrous and staggering, yet, having encountered such grand prospects, one wishes at times to wander in less-frequented purlieus of literature where the pleasures may be less potent but offer instead a certain piquant novelty.

     A bookish flâneur, I sought just such a mental excursion by reviewing a few passages in what is surely one of the finest works of general applied criticism, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets.  While his theory may be creaky, Johnson’s taste is generally on the mark, and, more than many old critics, he provides evidence for his reactions.  I determined to simply select at random a poet of whom I was wholly ignorant and have a look to see what Johnson saw in him (all fifty-two if Johnson’s choices are men).

    One of the poets whose names meant nothing to me, but whom Johnson considered important, drew my attention.  Johnson’s account of John Pomfret runs less than a page but includes a startling claim: “Perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice.”  Pronouncing a well-formulated dictum (as was his habit) that expresses skepticism of the poet’s worth, Johnson then declares “He pleases many; and he who pleases many must have some species of merit.”  Even the word “peruse,” the reader realizes, had been chosen to suggest a more casual engagement the reader requires from “great” literature. 

     Johnson’s observation about Pomfret’s popularity is substantiated by the fact that his works went through sixteen editions during the eighteenth century.  In a magisterial tone, Johnson accounts for the poet’s popularity by the patronizing comment that he “has been always the favourite of that class of readers, who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own amusement.” 

     Johnson was not alone in feeling that the poet enjoyed more prestige than sophisticated readers would think he deserved.  In 1753 Theophilus Cibber noted those who held Pomfret’s work “in very great esteem” were specifically the “common” readers, “people of inferior life” who appreciate the fact that “there is little force of thinking in his writings” as that makes the poems “level to the capacities of those who admire them.” [1]  The ambiguity of Pomfret’s standing is evident in Southey’s question in 1807: "Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact is certain, and the solution would be useful.” [2]  Leigh Hunt’s “The Choice” (1823) imitates Pomfret, but Hunt opens by calling his model “trivial” and his poem “A pretty kind of -- sort of -- kind of thing.”

    The poem that “sort of” inspired Hunt was Pomfret’s most popular composition, “The Choyce,” a piece in  heroic couplets outlining an idealized life plan in retirement from London in  a country estate.   The poem had an impeccable pedigree, with influence from Horace, as well as sharing its theme with other respected poems such as Cowley’s “The Wish.”

    The sentiments Pomfret expressed in the poem were far from original; they emphasized moderation and temperance in all things, “not little, nor too great” (6), the old ideal of nothing in excess, μηδὲν ἄγαν as the oracle once put it.  [3]  the writer wishes only for what is “Useful, Necessary, Plain,” (10) which to him must include “a Clear and Competent Estate,/ That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.”  Eschewing “The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture” he will feed on “healthful, not luxurious Dishes” .  Pomfret spends fourteen lines assuring his reader that he would  not drink too much (53-64).  Rather, he would enjoy books of “the Noblest Authors,” both ancient and modern, dispense charity so that “the Sons of Poverty” might not “Repine” “Too much at Fortune.”  He describes his chosen friends at length, using balanced  periods to reaffirm that they, too, follow “the middle way,” as they are, for instance, “Merry, but not Light” (82), “Close in Dispute, but not tenacious”(88), “Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight” (93).  The reader feels something of the sensation of riding a see-saw.

     In an even longer passage (98-139), Pomfret describes his ideal female company, some “Modest-Fair” from whom he may obtain “Fresh Vital Heat” [3].  She, too, is the soul of temperance.

 

No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:

Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,

To give good Counsel, or to take the best.

I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,

She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;

That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:

More than enough, is but Impertinence.        (114-120)          

 

In spite of her exemplary character, he would see her only “seldom” and “with Moderation,” “For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,/ By a too frequent, and too bold an use” (137).

     With his strong allegiance to social norms, he is, of course, patriotic and willing to serve.

 

T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,

Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,

My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword. (143-145)

 

     He anticipates preparation for death and the aid of “Some kind Relation” (157) to take over his affairs “While I did for a better State prepare” (159).  His life plan is so emphatically mainstream that he feels confident that, given the choice, “All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me” (167).  Far from the Romantic idea of representing himself as a distinct and idiosyncratic genius, he is guided by the neo-Classical ideal familiar from  Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.” 

    While writers who retread familiar ground may expect, at least at first, a greater readership than those that strike out in new directions, it remains difficult to imagine a writer who so definitively fulfills every reader expectation, who affirms every received idea so perfectly as to become a veritable prince of mediocrity, yet this is Johnson’s explanation of Pomfret’s popularity.  By  definition the bulk of the writing of any age is fundamentally “ordinary,” yet some authors, it seems, please their readers by paradoxically excelling at ordinariness.  For over a hundred years Pomfret was praised and admired for his perfect rendition of the average, the expectable, reassuring readers of their perspicuity and good taste by endorsing their idées reçues.  While his secret for besting dozens of other predictable writers may remain elusive, once he had become popular, his position would naturally reinforce itself.  Just as some of today’s bourgeoises might show they are au courant having attended the most popular Broadway shows, in Pomfret’s day and for a good while after, they could do so by demonstrating familiarity with his work. 

     Some authors’ popularity is more easily explicable: Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas were public characters who sometimes behaved extravagantly.  In a time when fewer people read poetry, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen won fame by casting their poetry in the genre of popular music.  Perhaps the closest parallel to Pomfret’s celebrity may be found in writers like Edgar Guest, Joyce Kilmer, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins [4] who have proven comforting and highly digestible to large numbers of readers.  Each of them, like Pomfret, satisfies readers by affirming the correctness of their preconceptions in easy and competent verse.

 

 

1.  Theophilus Cibber, “The Life of the Revd. Mr. John Pomfret,” in The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland vol. III.

2.  Robert Southey, Specimens of Later English Poets, I, 91.

3.  This passage of the poem proved controversial.  Johnson says that, just as Pomfret was about to assume an ecclesiastical “living,” a “malicious” informant delayed his departure, alleging that “The Choyce” suggested a mistress was preferable to a wife.  Remaining in the city to answer the charge, Pomfret (who was himself married) contracted smallpox and died. 

4.  A dramatic example is the synthetic Rumi composed using other English versions by Coleman Barks which proved immensely popular in the 1990s, offering contemporary Americans a Sufism in which they felt instantly at home..  

 

 

An apologia

     The modest liberties of tone I have here allowed myself may seem out of place in a commentary with any scholarly pretensions.  Academic essays are usually written in a rigid form, sometimes betraying an anxious effort to appear learned, sometimes to sound scientific.  Inspired once by a lecture from William Arrowsmith about a French T. S. Eliot poem which he cast as a dialogue among recognizable faculty types, published then as “Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Lune de Miel’”,  I once proposed a session of conference papers which had in common deviation from the standard thesis-proof format.  None were submitted. 

     I consider this piece pure recreation, though the reader might object that everything I write could be so described.  Opening with a reflection on tourism, I stroll off into a text of Dr. Johnson, finding my way then into Pomfret with divigations toward Horace, Cowley, and others.  To me the exercise constitutes a sort bracing mental dérive, to use the Situationist term.

 

 

 

The Choyce

 

If Heav'n the grateful Liberty wou'd give,
That I might chuse my Method how to live:
And all those Hours propitious Fate shou'd lend,
In blissful Ease and Satisfaction spend.
Near some fair Town I'd have a private Seat,
Built Uniform, not little, nor too great:
Better, if on a rising Ground it stood,
Fields on this side, on that a Neighb'ring Wood.
It shou'd within no other Things contain,
But what are Useful, Necessary, Plain:                            10
Methinks, 'tis Nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture:
A little Garden, grateful to the Eye,
And a cool Rivulet run Murmuring by:
On whose delicious Banks a stately Row
Of shady Lymes, or Sycamores, shou'd grow.
At th' end of which a silent Study plac'd,
Shou'd with the Noblest Authors there be grac'd.
Horace and Virgil, in whose mighty Lines,
Immortal Wit, and solid Learning Shines.                           20
Sharp Iuvenal, and am'rous Ovid too,
Who all the turns of Loves soft Passion knew:
He, that with Judgment reads his Charming Lines,
In which strong Art, with stronger Nature joyns,
Must grant, his Fancy do's the best Excel:
His Thoughts so tender, and exprest so well;
With all those Moderns, Men of steady Sense,
Esteem'd for Learning, and for Eloquence:
In some of These, as Fancy shou'd advise,
I'd always take my Morning Exercise.                                   30
For sure, no Minutes bring us more Content,
Than those in pleasing useful Studies spent.
I'd have a Clear and Competent Estate,
That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.
As much as I cou'd moderately spend,
A little more sometimes t'oblige a Friend.
Nor shou'd the Sons of Poverty Repine
Too much at Fortune, they shou'd taste of Mine;
And all that Objects of true Pity were,
Shou'd be reliev'd with what my Wants cou'd spare;        40
For what our Maker has too largely giv'n,
Shou'd be return'd in gratitude to Heav'n.
A frugal Plenty shou'd my Table spread,
With healthful, not luxurious Dishes, fed:
Enough to satisfy, and something more
To feed the Stranger, and the Neighb'ring Poor.
Strong Meat indulges Vice, and pampering Food
Creates Diseases, and inflames the Blood.
But what's sufficient to make Nature Strong,
And the bright Lamp of Life continue long,                          50
I'd freely take, and as I did possess
The bounteous Author of my Plenty bless.
I'd have a little Cellar, Cool, and Neat,
With Humming Ale, and Virgin Wine Repleat.
Wine whets the Wit, improves its Native Force,
And gives a pleasant Flavour to Discourse;
By making all our Spirits Debonair,
Throws off the Lees, the Sedement of Care.
But as the greatest Blessing Heaven lends
May be debauch'd, and serve ignoble Ends;                       60
So, but too oft, the Grapes refreshing Juice,
Does many mischievous Effects produce.
My House, shou'd no such rude Disorders know,
As from high Drinking consequently flow.
Nor wou'd I use what was so kindly giv'n,
To the dishonour of Indulgent Heav'n.
If any Neighbour came he shou'd be free,
Us'd with respect, and not Uneasy be,
In my Retreat, or to himself, or me.
What Freedom, Prudence, and Right Reason give,       70
All Men, may with Impunity receive:
But the least swerving from their Rules too much;
For what's forbidden Us, 'tis Death to touch.
That Life might be more comfortable yet,
And all my Joys refin'd, sincere and great,
I'd chuse two Friends, whose Company wou'd be
A great Advance to my Felicity.
Well born, of Humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and Men as well as Books have known.
Brave, Gen'rous, Witty, and exactly free                         80
From loose Behaviour, or Formality.
Airy, and Prudent, Merry, but not Light,
Quick in discerning, and in Judging Right;
Secret they shou'd be, faithful to their Trust,
In Reasoning Cool, Strong, Temperate and Just.
Obliging, Open, without huffing, Brave;
Brisk in gay Talking, and in sober Grave.
Close in Dispute, but not tenacious, try'd
By solid Reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to Lust, Revenge, or envious Hate;              90
Nor busy Medlers with Intrigues of State.
Strangers to Slander, and sworn Foes to spight,
Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight:
Loyal and Pious, Friends to Caesar true
As dying Martyrs to their Maker too.
In their Society I cou'd not miss,
A permanent, sincere, substantial Bliss.
Wou'd bounteous Heav'n once more indulge, I'd chuse
(For, who wou'd so much Satisfaction lose,
As Witty Nymphs in Conversation give)                      100
Near some obliging Modest-Fair to live;
For there's that sweetness in a Female Mind,
Which in a Man's we cannot find;
That by a secret, but a pow'rful Art,
Winds up the Spring of Life, and do's impart
Fresh Vital Heat to the transported Heart.
I'd have her Reason, and her Passions sway,
Easy in Company, in private Gay.
Coy to a Fop, to the Deserving free,
Still constant to her self, and just to me.                   110
A Soul she shou'd have for great Actions fit,
Prudence, and Wisdom to direct her Wit.
Courage to look bold danger in the Face,
No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:
Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,
To give good Counsel, or to take the best.
I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,
She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;
That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:
More than enough, is but Impertinence.                   120
Her Conduct Regular, her Mirth refin'd,
Civil to Strangers, to her Neighbours kind.
Averse to Vanity, Revenge, and Pride,
In all the Methods of Deceit untry'd:
So faithful to her Friend, and good to all,
No Censure might upon her Actions fall.
Then wou'd ev'n Envy be compell'd to say,
She goes the least of Womankind astray.
To this fair Creature I'd sometimes retire,
Her Conversation wou'd new Joys inspire,               130
Give Life an Edge so keen, no surly Care
Wou'd venture to assault my Soul, or dare
Near my Retreat to hide one secret Snare.
But so Divine, so Noble a Repast,
I'd seldom, and with Moderation taste.
For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,
By a too frequent, and too bold an use;
And what would cheer the Spirits in distress,
Ruins our Health when taken to Excess.
I'd be concern'd in no litigious Jarr,                          140
Belov'd by all, not vainly popular:
Whate'er Assistance I had power to bring
T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,
Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,
My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword.
Law Suits I'd shun with as much Studious Care,
As I wou'd Dens, where hungry Lyons are;
And rather put up Injuries, than be
A Plague to him, who'd be a Plague to me.
I value Quiet, at a Price too great,                           150
To give for my Revenge so dear a Rate:
For what do we by all our Bustle gain,
But counterfeit Delight for real Pain.
If Heav'n a date of many years wou'd give,
Thus I'd in Pleasure, Ease, and Plenty live.
And as I near approach'd the Verge of Life,
Some kind Relation (for I'd have no Wife)
Shou'd take upon him all my Worldly Care,
While I did for a better State prepare.
Then I'd not be with any trouble vext,                  160
Nor have the Evening of my Days perplext.
But by a silent, and a peaceful Death,
Without a Sigh, Resign my Aged Breath:
And when committed to the Dust, I'd have
Few Tears, but Friendly, dropt into my Grave.
Then wou'd my Exit so propitious be,
All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me.

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.