Underdetermination in Two French Poems

 

Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” and Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” are appended following the endnotes in new translations of my own as well as in the French originals. 

 

    Teachers of expository writing, technical writing, and journalism generally stress clarity and economy.   For such forms of discourse the language should most often be transparent with the meaning evident and the style unobtrusive.  In aesthetic genres, though, to exploit literature’s capacity for an extraordinary density of meaning, phrasing, figures of speech, tone, and sound enrich and deepen signification.  Ambiguity can convey a richer truth that reflects the contradictions, even the mystery of things, rather than a reductive simplicity. 

     Literary usage, however, differs widely in deployment of this strategy.  Some texts have what seems a unitary (or at least a rapidly decodable) signification while others are more ambiguous or unclear in meaning [1].  The distinction was recognized in medieval France in the contrast between trobar leu and trobar clus.  Either may be appropriate depending on the aims of the text.  Realistic fiction, for instance, is generally highly determined as are popular dramas like television situation comedies and folktales, while experimental and avant-garde works are more likely to be underdetermined.  Poetry that succeeds in oral performance is likely to be more immediately intelligible than written texts which the reader may ponder and review.

     Though works of both kinds may be found throughout literary history, during the last century and half underdetermined poetry has been particularly prestigious.  Since Romanticism the elevation of the individual genius and the rise of an art indifferent or even hostile to popularity has in part displaced the old emphases on art’s transmitting cultural norms while seeking to please.  Intellectuals relish complexity while the great majority of the population consumes poetry only through the medium of popular music.

    These attitudes are often quite self-conscious.  Flaubert and Baudelaire sought to distance themselves from social norms [2].  Verlaine considered the modern writers he admired to be Les Poètes Maudits and Mallarmé cultivated an obscure style. French Symbolism and Italian Hermeticism gloried in vaguer signification, while Realism, Naturalism, and Tendenzromane of both right and left strove in general for unitary, clearly prescribed meanings.   

     “L’Étranger,” one of the prose poems in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose or Spleen de Paris (1869) and Verlaine’s “Art Poétique” from Jadis et Naguère (Formerly and Recently) (1884) both promote underdetermination in service of rather different styles.  While both poets share with Gautier the view that beauty is the primary desideratum of art, Gautier’s “L’Art” promotes a Parnassian style with attention focused on form and precise concrete description.  For Gautier a poem is a cunningly crafted object like Cellini’s gold, enamel, and ebony salt cellar, its shapes well-defined, with solid heft.  Though Gary Snyder would scarcely be classed with Gautier, he expresses a similar notion in “Riprap”: Lay down these words/ Before your mind like rocks.”  Both Baudelaire and Verlaine depend on a different aesthetic, with beauty based on more elusive meaning.

     Baudelaire’s stranger prefers clouds the very excellence of which arises from their imprecise suggestiveness.  After denying that he loves what others do – family, friends, country, and wealth – the speaker hedges on beauty, saying that what is called art he finds not always beautiful or divine.  He chooses instead to celebrate the clouds.  Surely this is a manner of saying that he revels in his own imagination.  The clouds themselves bear no meaning, it is only his reception of their appearance that lends them appeal.  In other words, he is affirming his own sensibility as the source of aesthetic delight.  He follows here the Romantic celebration of genius and anticipates not only the obscurity associated with Symbolist imagery, but also the notion of idiosyncratic taste inherent in hip, camp, and kitsch appreciation.  Classical standards of beauty and monosemous theme are dismissed or ignored.

     Verlaine’s “Art Poetique” advocates a similar aesthetic, though with considerably more elaboration.  In fact his “nuance” (also nuance in English) shares an etymology with Baudelaire’s ”nuage” (cloud).  Like Baudelaire he condemns traditional eloquence using vivid terms, even saying it should be throttled).  Like Pater in The Renaissance saying that all art aspires to the condition of music, he declares that music, the most abstract of the arts, must rule [3].  His enemy is the obvious: a cheap laugh, too much garlic, showy costume jewelry.  For him beauty lies in the subtlety of a scent in the breeze, a musical phrase, the flight of a bird.  Equivocation becomes a part of charm.

   Baudelaire’s “L’Étranger” used the open form of the prose poem, employed by Aloysius Bertrand in Gaspard de la nuit (1842) and later to shattering effect by Rimbaud in in Illuminations (1886).  Though Verlaine inveighs against rhyme, he rhymes nonetheless (sometimes in slant rhymes such as midi/attiédi, énergie/assagie, and matin/thym).  The eight syllable lines are not entirely predictable, as they are varied without pattern with seven and nine syllable lines, and one of ten [4]. 

     This freedom is consistent with the expression of novel content and the elevation of art to a quasi-religion.  The appeal of the poets’ underdetermination arises in part from its suggestion that the artist is a kind of shamanic conjurer dealing in spells, but the reader, too, shares in the creation of meaning not through mechanical decoding but in a kind of collaborative construction of signification.  By violating conventions and establishing new ones, the poets help bring to birth new forms of literature.

      

 

 

1.  Roland Barthes’ S/Z distinguished between readerly (lisible) texts and writerly (scriptable) ones   Since for him certain further assumptions and value judgements are associated with these terms, underdetermined and highly determined are preferred here.  (Overdetermined should be reserved for cases in which too much information is given resulting in potentially tiresome replication.)

2.  Flaubert ridiculed the bourgeois, for instance, in Bouvard and Pecuchet and the Dictionary of Received Ideas, and Baudelaire praised the “dandy” whose style indicates his aesthetic concerns.  In another clear sign of transgressive intent, both were prosecuted for obscenity.

3.  Pater in 1873 was far from alone in his sentiment.  In Poe’s “The Poetic Principle” (1850) he said "It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles -- the creation of supernal Beauty.”  Verlaine had described Poe as malin though naïf and even puéril in a letter of May 16, 1873 to Edmond Lepelletier.  Many others have voiced similar ideas.  For instance, Susan Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 says “Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts— it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure— and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.”

4.  I find two lines of seven syllables, ten of eight, twenty-three of nine, and one I count as ten: 8899 8899 8998 9979 10998 9999 9898 9997 9989.

 

 

 

 

The Stranger

 

 

     “Whom do you love better, mystery man, tell me: your father, or mother, your sister or brother?”

    “I have no father, mother, sister, or brother.”

     “Your friends?”

     “You are using a word the meaning of which has always been unknown to me.”

     “Your country?”

     “I don’t even know its latitude.”

     “Beauty?”

     “I would gladly love her as an immortal goddess.”

     “Gold?”

     “I hate it just as you hate god.”

     “So, what then do you love, you extraordinary stranger?”

    “I love the clouds – the clouds which drift by – like there – and there! The marvelous clouds!”

 

 

L’Étranger

 

— Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis ? ton père, ta mère, ta sœur ou ton frère ?

— Je n’ai ni père, ni mère, ni sœur, ni frère.

— Tes amis ?

— Vous vous servez là d’une parole dont le sens m’est resté jusqu’à ce jour inconnu.

— Ta patrie ?

— J’ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.

— La beauté ?

— Je l’aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.

— L’or ?

— Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.

— Eh ! qu’aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger ?

— J’aime les nuages… les nuages qui passent… là-bas… là-bas… les merveilleux nuages !

 

 

 

The Art of Poetry (Paul Verlaine)

 

Before all else the verse must swing,

so build a rhythm just off-beat,

dissolved in air and not too neat,

no weighty or prescriptive thing.

 

You must not choose your words without

allowing polysemy in. 

Grey songs have aways finest been

where certainty contends with doubt.

 

Behind a veil a lovely eye,

or noonday trembling in the sun.

Blue stars arrayed when day is done

across the mild autumn sky.

 

Nuance alone is what will suit

No color, just nuance alone!

For only by nuance is shown

The links of dreams or horn to flute!

 

Fly far then from the deathly spot,

the cruel shade, the laugh so cheap

which makes the very sky to weep

like too much garlic in the pot.

 

Take eloquence and twist its neck! 

A little work and you’ll do well

To calm the rhymes for a short spell

If we don’t curb them, there’s no check!

 

Why, who rhyme’s wrongs can ever know?

And what deaf child or crazy slave

to us this shoddy jewel gave

which proves so false when studied close.

 

It’s music always wins the prize!

Your verse must be a thing in  flight,

an active soul alone can write

which takes to other loves and skies.

 

So may your verse fly with the birds,

and swim in morning’s breeze so chilled,

with mint and thyme aromas filled

and all the rest is only words.

 

 

Art Poetique

 

Paul Verlaine

De la musique avant toute chose,

Et pour cela préfère l’Impair

Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air,

Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.

 

Il faut aussi que tu n’ailles point

Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise :

Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise

Où l’Indécis au Précis se joint.

 

C’est des beaux yeux derrière des voiles,

C’est le grand jour tremblant de midi,

C’est, par un ciel d’automne attiédi,

Le bleu fouillis des claires étoiles !

 

Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,

Pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance !

Oh ! la nuance seule fiance

Le rêve au rêve et la flûte au cor !

 

Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,

L’Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,

Qui font pleurer les yeux de l’Azur,

Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine !

 

Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou !

Tu feras bien, en train d’énergie,

De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.

Si l’on n’y veille, elle ira jusqu’où ?

 

Ô qui dira les torts de la Rime ?

Quel enfant sourd ou quel nègre fou

Nous a forgé ce bijou d’un sou

Qui sonne creux et faux sous la lime ?

 

De la musique encore et toujours !

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée

Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée

Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.

 

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Éparse au vent crispé du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym…

Et tout le reste est littérature.

Maeterlinck’s Bees

 

 

      My thrift store copy is a 35 cent Mentor New American Library book translated by Albert Sutro and with an introduction by Edwin Way Teale..

 

     Numbers in parentheses refer to the book’s sections; those in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

 

     Maurice Maeterlinck is primarily remembered for his Symbolist drama, notably The Blue Bird and Pelléas and Mélisande, but he wrote as well poetry, translations, a memoir, and a number of mn0onfiction books, mostly on philosophic topics and on nature.  The most successful of this last category is The Life of the Bee (La Vie des Abeilles) [1]. 

     Maeterlinck makes clear in his first pages that his book is neither a scientific treatise nor a practical guide to apiculture, but it is also not a work of pure poetry.  He says he wishes to speak as a passionate amateur, “very simply, as one speaks of a subject one knows and loves to those who know it not.” (1)  The book has proven consistently popular since its appearance in 1901.  The author was a lifelong apiarist, raising bees for their honey, and was consistently informed by his own experience, often writing at a table while observing the insects’ activities in a glass hive.  He describes in fascinating detail their highly organized society and the extraordinary round of their life.  In addition, he seems to have studied the chief authorities on the subject and often comments on the previous findings of experts. 

     Maeterlinck does not simply observe his bees; he marvels at them.  To him their behavior is more wondrous than what a reader might find in “the most miraculous fairy stories.”  To students who watch a hive closely, “astonishment becomes so habitual to us that we almost cease to wonder.”  (111)  He assumes a sort of Darwinism, saying that improvement is a consequence of “the triumph of the stronger,” (112) though he tends toward the unscientific assumption that evolution creates ever more sophisticated organisms (rather than simply those that better fit an ecological niche), an attitude best viewed as an  expressive reflection of his enthusiasm.  Seeking to come face to face with “the intelligent will of a life” (112) in the “stupendous incident” of the insects’ daily lives is for him a technique for “amusing the darkness” through receiving “some revelation, a message, for instance, from a planet more ancient, more luminous, than ours” which might reveal the secrets of “the obscure forces of life” (164).

     He might equally have sought such intelligence in any biological phenomenon, but he has the energetic dedication of the amateur bee-keeper.  To him the insects’ cognitive skills are scarcely inferior to those of humans, indeed, while undeniably different, he finds the bees perfect in their own way.  “Other beings may possess an intellect that differs from ours, and produces different results, without being therefore inferior.” (34)  He insists that “the habits and the policy of the bees are by no means narrow, or rigidly predetermined; and that their actions have motives far more complex than we are inclined to suppose” (48).  To him they have “more confidence and courage than man” (43)  Human intervention is inevitably a disturbance in their lives.  “It is not chance that controls them, but a wisdom whose deep loyalty, gravity, and unsleeping watchfulness man alone can betray” (55). 

     For him the bees display not wisdom alone, but even a sort of  morality.  “When we, in our study of human history, endeavour to gauge the moral force or greatness of a people or race, we have but one standard of measurement – the dignity and permanence of their ideal, and the abnegation with which they pursue it.  Have we often encountered an ideal more conformable to the desires of the universe, more widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime: have we often discovered an abnegation more complete and heroic?” (36)  The patterns of their lives limns out not the “unconquerable duty of a being” (165) alone, but glows with a kind of holiness, “the god that the bees obey” (36).  He envies the bees their perfect adjustment to this difficult world, the fact that the hive has been able to  “create its own little triumphant and permanent place in the midst of the stupendous inert forces of nothingness and death” (56).  They seem to him more satisfied, more enlightened in a way, than people.

     Yet he does not shrink from  anthropomorphizing the bees.  When he hears the sounds of a frustrated queen it is to him a war-song, or angry complaint . . . resembling somewhat the note of a distant trumpet of silver” (106).  Since their adaptation is so successful, though, their sounds are more frequently joyful.  A swarm is lit by a “spirit of holiday”; they enjoy the “blind happiness” of acting perfectly in accordance with their nature (58).  Their work of gathering nectar is form a series of “blissful journeys,” leading ordinarily to “peaceful abundance,” though he senses – and it is here that the most obvious projection occurs – that “underlying the gladness . . .  there reposes a sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold” (92).  Nonetheless, it is primarily what he sees as their profound pleasure in being alive from which he wishes to learn.  To him their most “precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months . . .They teach us to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good natural hours.” (38)

     For Maeterlinck the apparently superior analytic abilities of the human mind may be in fact a hindrance, a disadvantage.  “There are intentions in nature that it is dangerous to understand too clearly, fatal to follow with too much ardor, and that it is one if her desires that we should not divine, and follow, all her desires” (114).  Thus lack of knowledge may be the greater wisdom, and moderns recognize the potential of self-consciousness to generate disabling anxiety, the fruit of too much reflection.  The model that the bees offer “as they go from flower to flower” resembles the human mind as it flits “from reality to reality seeking food for the incomprehensible flame.  This flame, which represents vitality itself must recall the “hard, gem-like flame” of which Pater spoke.  If people, like bees, might only follow their own natural inclinations, without striving for mastery, without feeling dissatisfaction, “a time will then  come when all things will turn so naturally to good in a spirit that has given itself to the loyal desire of this simple human duty, that the very suspicion of the possible aimlessness of its exhausting effort will only rebnder the duty the clearer, will only add more purity, power, disinterestedness, and freedom to the ardor wherewith its seeks” (166).  Maeterlinck recommends a state of mind that has much in common with the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment [2].  Thus the bees point the way, first toward following one’s essential nature and living the life for which nature designed every creature, but even beyond that, toward an acceptance that lies beyond questioning and acting, that finds rest and perfection in simple being.

 

 

 

1.  Twenty-five years after his book on bees, Maeterlinck published a study of termites, largely copied from a volume by a South African Eugene Marais.  No accusations of plagiarism have been made against La Vie des Abeilles.

2.  In Chinese, wú niàn (無念), “no thought,” which refers to non-attachment, not in fact to an utterly blank mind.  The concept is rooted in the Hindu ideal of vairāgya (वैराग्य), “dispassionateness.” 

Spit

 

    What could be more familiar than spit which is always present for each of us though we may give it little attention?  Spit occupies a curious borderline zone in many ways.  It both is and is not a part of one’s body.  It has been regarded as both a medicine and a poison and is employed in magic to avert evil and attract good as well as to curse.  Associated with identity and intimacy but also filth and contempt, saliva, which has vital biological function, has been assigned potent symbolic roles as well. 

     Animal life emerged from the oceans through the stratagem of making the sea portable, carried about in the cells and blood and lymph fluids of beasts who learned to breath in open air.  Estimates of the water content of the human body vary, but are generally close to two-thirds.  If that vivifying moisture is not renewed, death will occur in a matter of days, or at most, a week or two.   One function of water in the body is to carry out waste in sweat and urine.  Thus our liquid content has a sort of liminal status, at once an essential part of the body, and, at the same time, a temporary component just passing through.  As incoming fresh water it is vital; as outgoing waste, it is disagreeable and even toxic.

     Thus spit may be considered very dirty, and appropriate for potent insults, used like the sole of one’s shoes in Islamic countries or excretions in maximum security prisons.  The Deuteronomic Code provided that, if the brother-in-law of a woman whose husband had died refused to take the widow as wife, she should spit upon him in the presence of the elders.  In his suffering Job is considered so contemptible that he is spit upon as is Christ in his passion. [1]  Such a gesture might evoke a forceful response such as that of Shylock who complained to Antonio through gritted teeth, “Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last.” [2]

     Yet spit may also be considered a healing balm.  Christ heals a deaf mute and a blind person with an application of his saliva. [3]  Tacitus tells us that while in Egypt Vespasian was asked to do as much for a blind petitioner and to cure the paralyzed hand of another. [4]  Though at first ridiculing these requests, the emperor was prevailed upon to apply the royal spittle and both were, according to reports, instantly cured.  His suppliants, doubtless familiar with the story of Thoth similarly curing Horus, [5] were perhaps unsurprised. 

     The ancients believed in the efficacy of spittle in curing snakebites.  This opinion is shared by Aristotle, Aelian, Pliny, and others.  [6]  The use of saliva in treating a variety of other conditions is prescribed in Celsus, Galen, Paulus Aegineta, and Oribasius. [7]  While these uses remain in the category of folk medicine or the miraculous, science has confirmed that saliva contains antifungal proteins, immune cells, antimicrobial compounds, and growth factors that promote healing.  Dogs, and sometimes their owners as well, lick a wound instinctively.

     The same belief in the beneficent power of spit is evident in many old practices.  Theokritos’ shepherd, to avert ill fortune after seeing his reflection in the sea, spits three times “into my breast.” [8]   Persius records the custom of spitting on an infant to protect against the evil eye.  [9]  The extreme antiquity of this practice is suggested by its widespread distribution.  Three spits are considered efficacious in averting evil yet today in Greece, India, and among Jews, though only symbolic sounds of spitting have been considered sufficient in recent times: in Greece saying “ftou ftou ftou,” in India "thoo-thoo-thoo,” and among Jews “pooh-pooh-pooh.”  

     As the power of spit is a double-edged, such spitting serves both to avert bad luck and tom attract the good, just as Aristotle thought it could not only combat the venom of snakes, but also kill the reptiles.  Modern science, while rejecting these particular claims, recognizes the role of bodily fluids, including spittle, in both the spread of illnesses such as tuberculosis and HIV and in protection against transmission of diseases such as colds, covid and other flus, streptococcus, and hepatitis.

     Yet our fluids contain as well our identity in DNA, and, perhaps through some intuitive caution, people have often feared that any cast-off portions of ourselves, like spit and cut hair and fingernail parings, might be used in conjuring.  Frazer provides examples of such malicious use of spittle among Native South Americans, New Zealanders, Hawaiians, and South and West Africans. [10] 

     In modern times a good deal of spitting is associated with the use of tobacco and betel, but attenuated versions of these superstitions survive in recent times.  Such gestures include spitting into the hands before setting to do a task or shaking hands on a bargain, or to seal an oath, or in disgust.  In the nineteenth century “boys in the North of England have a custom amongst themselves of spitting their faith (or, as they call it in the northern dialect, ‘their Saul,’ i.e. Soul), when required to make asseverations in matters which they think of consequence.”  In the same region miners spit together on a stone “by way of cementing their confederacy.”  Parties to an agreement are said to “spit upon the same stone.” [11] 

     Anthropologists record a great many spitting customs.   The Maasai of Kenya are well-known for spitting on babies as a blessing, on a bride to bless the marriage, and when greeting others as a sign of respect.  In India some may spit in a toilet before using it or to the side of a companion to guard against the evil eye (buri nazar).   Some Indian shopkeepers think it prudent to spit on the cash from the first sale of the day. [12]  Some of their fellow citizens consider it prudent to spit in the corner of a toilet before using it. [13]

      Spitting is sometimes, however, practiced with no reference to magic or medicine, but simply as a natural activity of everyday life like sweating or excretion.  To Erasmus it is “unmannerly,” not to spit, but, on the contrary, ”to suck back saliva,” though a polite person will see that he does not spit on a bystander. [14]  Medieval poems advise that proper etiquette requires spitting properly, avoiding the dining table or the washbasin. [15]  In a curious mingling of the nasty and sexual associations of spit, Samuel Pepys reports that he had been enjoying a play when “a lady spit backward upon me by a mistake, not seeing me, but after seeing her to be a very pretty lady, I was not troubled at it at all.” [16]  Still in 1702 a French etiquette book advises that it is not spitting but swallowing what one should spit which is revolting to others.  Nonetheless the writer adds that one should not spit unnecessarily or often.   By 1859 a British volume flatly advises against spitting altogether, and shortly before Frances Trollope had expressed her distaste at spitting as a crude American habit.  “The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again.” [17]  In Germany Heine, wondering where he might head, rejects America as a place where “they spit without a spittoon.” [18]

     These writers may have wished to demonstrate the barbarity of American society, but practices elsewhere were similar even in what might be assumed to be refined settings.  Indeed, there are accounts of members of Parliament spitting during deliberations until the end of the nineteenth century and British pubs were still being built in the nineteen-thirties with spitting troughs for the accommodation of patrons. [19]   The Museum of the Georgia State Legislature in the Capitol Building exhibits a spittoon of the type that was used in legislative sessions into the 1970s.  To this day spittoons are provided on the floor if the United States Senate and in the Supreme Court chambers, though they are now considered simply a tradition and are used, if at all, merely as trash cans. [20]

     The Georgia legislators may have been old-fashioned.  By 1910 a writer refers to open spitting as a relic of the past.  [21]  The influenza epidemic of 1918 accelerated social disapproval of the practice to the point that in America today routine spitting is ordinarily done discreetly if at all, though Sears, which  once featured pages of cuspidors, offers yet today a modern version, the “Don't Tread On Me Spit Bud Portable Spittoon with Can Opener: The Ultimate Spill-Proof Spitter by Spitbud.”  Casual spitting survives, though often associated with the lower classes and with men.  Many visitors note with distaste the spitting commonplace in some parts of the world, particularly in China, India, Nepal, and Korea. 

     Even when stripped of its supernatural qualities, spitting can retain considerable symbolic power.  Such culturally constructed uses may be confined to a single artifact or to an era or moment in history, while some symbolism seems all-but-ubiquitous. 

     In Montaigne’s marvelous essay “Of the Cannibales,” describing the cruelty with which Tupinambá people in Brazil treat sacrificial victims, notes that “those that paint them dying, and that represent this action, when they are put to execution, delineate the prisoners spitting in their executioners faces, and making mowes [grimaces, i.e. making faces] at them” [22]  As Montaigne says, artists had chosen to depict the scene of defiant spitting, he had made it a dramatic point of his account, and the passage has remained among the best-known in his work. [23]  The notion that one might, though dying, turn the tables on a captor, demonstrating contempt and casting an implied curse, while the very opposite of the meek deaths told of the saints, has doubtless been reenacted numerous times through the violent turns of history.  As a chilling image of fortitude such stories indicate the potency of spit even for a person facing imminent and certain death.  The victim, in a kind if tragic acceptance, can retain dignity despite helplessness.  

     A widespread modern myth indicates that spitting has not altogether lost its magical efficacy.  Although organizations opposing the Vietnam War regularly expressed support for soldiers, including placing active-duty and returned service members at the head of protest parades and seeking to organize inside the military, when the war ended in America’s defeat in 1975 and President Carter then  pardoned draft resisters two years later, narratives began to surface claiming that anti-war protesters had spit upon soldiers.  Accounts multiplied after a scene of protesters spitting on Army men appeared in the film Rambo in 1982.  Such incidents became a commonplace, mentioned as fact in countless news stories, though most likely nothing of the kind had ever occurred.  In 1998 Jerry Lembcke, a sociology professor and Vietnam veteran, published The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam which painstakingly demonstrated the lack of evidence of such incidents; there is not a single news account or photograph, no arrest or police complaint of such acts, no references even in private correspondence. [24]  Though many such stories are third-person, there are also hundreds of people who came to assert that they had themselves been spit upon, though none mentioned such an insult until years after the end of the war.  It seems clear that, though of course it is impossible to prove absolutely that not a single spitting incident ever happened, these “memories” are mythic, manufactured for a symbolic reason and not an account of actual events. 

     In spite of a long history of ambivalence, spit elicits predominately negative reactions today.  By gazing just a bit into what might be an adjoining room in the Museum of Cultural Practices, though, the inquirer will note a practice allied with spitting but universally appreciated and likely as old as the species: kissing.  In many of the earliest references to kissing, the practice clearly occurs as part of romantic love as in the Song of Songs (!:2) “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth--for thy love is better than wine.”  The intensity of erotic kisses is associated with spit since the wetness is an index of intimacy from a dry cheek-peck to a lover’s deep kiss.  Love kissing may be considered as well a survival of the use of spit to certify oaths since a kiss is often a pledge of fidelity.  Kisses may also signify fealty, or friendship, or may indicate spiritual fellowship.  Indeed we know from Justin Martyr that in the second century the “kiss of peace” was a regular part of the liturgy. [25]  Though this usage has dwindled now to a gesture during the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, it parallels the practices of Jews kissing the Torah or a mezuzah and Muslims kissing the Koran or the Ka’aba.  Kisses of friendship or respect or simply of greeting are common as well.  The social kissing that used to be characteristically European has become widespread in the United States.

     In each of us dwells a solipsistic infant whose most absorbing interests are bound by the body itself: pain and pleasure, the passage of materials into and out from the self.  Pared to the essential, this constitutes human life, though between the baby in a cradle and the aged and failing sufferer in a hospital bed we have more than sufficient distractions to focus attention elsewhere. The balance of trade in the regulation of the corporeal economy deals in acts of feeding, excretion, secretion, bleeding, vomiting, and spit.  Around each of these has accumulated vast stores of both practical and symbolic associations to aid the individual in easing the passage through life by the wise management of intake and output.  Before the time that all systems fail, spitting holds a place in such somatic regulation, contributing to health as well as, through the sort of applied metaphor which lies at the base of both magic and religion, aiding in making alliances, even love relationships, avoiding misfortune, bringing woe to enemies, or lifting the soul in the direction of the divine. 

 

 

1.  Deuteronomy 25:9, Job 30:10, Matthew 26:67, 27:30, Mark 10:34, 14:65, and 15:19.

2.  Merchant of Venice I, iii.

3.  Mark 7:33, 8:23.  In the case of the deaf mute it may be that Jesus spit on the ground before healing with his hand.  

4.  Tacitus, Histories, LXXXI.

5.  See Book of the Dead, 17.

6.  Aelian, De Natura Animalium, I, 24; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, VII. 14 and XXVIII, ; Aristotle, Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν, called Historia Animalum, VIII, 29.

7.  See G. Chowdharay-Best, “Notes on the Healing Properties of Saliva,” Folklore, Vol. 86, No. 3/4 (Autumn - Winter, 1975), pp. 195-200.

8.  Idyll VI, line 33.

9.  Satire II, 31 

10.  The Golden Bough (Macmillan abridged one-volume edition), p. 276.  Other examples in the same book include practices in Malaysia (15) and in the Marquesas (272).

11.  John Brand, Observations on the popular antiquities of Great Britain: chiefly illustrating the origin of our vulgar and provincial customs, ceremonies, and superstitions (Volume 3), p. 26.  The proverbial expression is also included in Robert Christy’s Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages (1887).

12.  See Coomber, R., Moyle, L. and Pavlidis, A., “Public Spitting in ‘developing’ nations of the global South: Harmless embedded practice or disgusting, harmful and deviant?” in Kerry Carrington, Russell  Hogg,  John Scott and Máximo Sozzo (eds.), The Palgrave  Handbook of Criminology and the Global South, 2018.  A contemporary website provides practical instruction on combating the buri nazar: https://rgyan.com/blogs/easy-ways-to-remove-evil-eye-buri-nazar-nivarak-sujhav/.

13.  “Spit and Unpolish,” The Hindu Oct 11 2020.

14.  De civilitate morum puerilium.

15.  Examples are collected in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939).

16.   In his entry for January 26, 1661.

17.  Ch. 6, Domestic Manners of the Americans.

18.  “Jetzt Wohin?” line 24.

19.  Paula Cocozza, “Spitting in public: disgusting and antisocial – or a great British tradition?,” The Guardian, September 25, 2013.

20.  See the Wikipedia article on “spittoons”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spittoon.  Original references were Richard A. Baker’s Traditions of the United States Senate and a web posting, "Advocate's Lectern" from The Oyez Project of the Illinois Institute of Technology's Chicago-Kent College of Law.

21.  More examples from  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939).  The French book is Jean-Baptiste de la Salle’s Les Règles de la bienséance et de la civilité chrétienne and the British one is The Habits of Good Society.  The 1910 reference is in Moeurs intimes du passé, attributed to Docteur Cabanès.

22.  I quote from Florio’s translation, but add the bracketed definition.

23.  Three engravings from the late sixteenth century on the theme are reproduced in Michèle H. Richman, “Spitting Images in Montaigne and Bataille for a Heterological Counterhistory of Sovereignty,” Diacritics vol. 35, no. 3 (Autumn, 2005), 46-61.

24.  Lembke also demonstrates the consistent support for GIs within the anti-war movement and the government’s propaganda attempts to paint the protesters as hostile to the troops. 

25.  See I Apology, 65.

Moréas’ Symbolism

 

Translations from Moréas are my own.  See endnotes for the original French.

 

     Like most of the manifestoes written during the great procession of modern art movements, Jean Moréas’ “Le Symbolisme” [1] is stronger when treated as an imaginative text than as a theoretical statement.  There was no stable and organized Symbolist group though Moréas did publish a short-lived journal called Le Symboliste; some of his ideas were shared with others often identified as Symbolists, others are his alone.  Indeed, the essay imagines Symbolism as not quite realized.  “the Supreme Enchantment has not yet come: a stubborn and jealous job of work awaits newcomers.” [2]  Far from setting out a coherent program, the essay sails on the high winds of the author’s animated spirits, charged with polemical energy, expressing total confidence against the background of a dazzling display of pyrotechnic rhetoric. 

     Moréas opens with an idea that implies no stable set of literary recommendations.  He proposes a cyclic and organic concept of art in which each movement is born, ages, and then declines as the next arises. [3]  The sole imperative is that proclaimed by Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” [4]  Culture follows an inexorable recurring pattern in which “that which had been novel and spontaneous turns cliched and commonplace.”  Thus “after the classical cliché, there came the romantic cliché.” [5] 

     Such ideas are widespread – one thinks of the neoterics of the first century C. E. or Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Nova Poetria of the early thirteenth, but they are hardly universal.  Defenders of imitation of the masters and strict adherence to convention are always available to assert an opposite tendency, thus creating a dynamic tension on both sides.  In “Le Symbolisme” this role is filled by the Intermezzo character called “un détracteur” who is prone to such utterances as “but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!” and “Horrors!  Not to respect the alternation of rhymes!” [6] 

     Moréas proceeds to the alternatives to Symbolism as the mode of the coming generation.   He concedes Naturalism a certain value as novelty as a counterweight to the banality of a Romanticism “sunk in senility.”  Such innovation, while “legitimate” is “ill-considered” and “naïve.”  “One can,” he sniffs, “only seriously value the work of the Naturalist writer as a cry of protest.” [7]  The basis for his reaction against Naturalism is his rejection of the Platonic concept of art as imitation.  According to Moréas, his “simple and exceedingly succinct point of departure” is the principle that “art cannot be faithful to the objective”.  [8]  There could scarcely be a more energetic challenge to any realistic style that aims at imitating lived experience.  While language cannot reproduce reality for Moréas, it can reflect subjectivity.

     Another competitor for the leading role in art is the school identified as Decadent.  Having asserted that impressions are all that exist, it is unsurprising that Moréas’ strictures on the Decadents are unashamedly subjective.  Such writers are “tough and stringy” like an ill-prepared beefsteak, as well as “frightened and groveling” like despicable weaklings. [9]  The reader can only speculate about just what he means.  There is little clue to the specific characteristics of the Decadent group or to Moréas’ objections, but it makes for lively reading. 

     He does propose Symbolism as the “reasonable” alternative corresponding to “the actual spirit of the creator in art” [10], and he does sketch out some characteristics of the sort of new writing he would approve.  He energetically defends obscurity and ambiguity and declares Symbolism the “enemy of didacticism, declamation, false sensibility, and,” Moréas concludes climactically, “objective description.”  He declares that “the essential character of symbolist art consists in never aiming at the conception of the idea in itself,” but rather in assuring that the idea “never lets itself be seen without the sumptuous gowns of extraneous associations.” [11]  A certain extravagance is implied by the adjectives “sumptuous” and “extraneous.”  The delight in verbal collage, in resonant if in part arbitrary and improvisatory imagery, is implied by the sentiment and reinforced by the out-of-the-way choice of “simarre” rather than “manteau” or “robe” for “gown.”  The Symbolist will make use of “perceivable appearances” not to reconstruct reality on the page, but to suggest “esoteric affinities with primordial ideas,” [12] though just what those ideas are remains intentionally enigmatic.

     Moréas offers to provide an “exact translation“ of just what his theory means in  practice: “unpolluted words,” “arching and periodic phrases intermixed with waves of its absence,” “meaningful pleonasms,” “mysterious omissions,” “anaculothia held in suspense,” indeed “all bold and polysemous tropes.”  His emphasis here, far from prescribing a particular style, is to endorse enthusiasm and showy rhetoric.  The passage itself goes on to recommend language that is “good and luxuriant and frisky” and ends with a delicious and gratuitous reference to certain archers of antiquity: “free writers who let fly their barbed language much like the sinuous arrows of the Toxotes of Thrace.” [10]  

          Moréas lets the cat altogether out of the bag eventually when he imagines this art of the future inn this bravura passage, replete like Rabelais’ catalogues, as decadent as Huysmans on Silver Latin, as crankishly bookish as Baron Corvo.

 

At times mythic phantasms are evoked from old Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiris to the nigromantes [necromancers] lavishly turned out on Caliban’s rock or by Titania’s forest to the mixolydian music of barbitons and octochords. [11]

 

One could disentangle some of the elements so gleefully thrown together here beginning perhaps with the echoes of the demiurge in neo-Platonism, Spenser, and Shelley (who associated it with the French Revolution).  The reader, though, has hardly a moment to consider before this initial figure is succeeded by another and then another.  After half a dozen allusions, Moréas concludes the display with three rare ancient Greek words. 

     Surely this is recreational language, meant less to be understood than to create a tone, a mood, a curious symbolic pattern that involves the reader in an experience rather than inviting exegesis.  Far from a meticulous structure where every mot is juste, this is a bricolage, looking as though it has been constructed from whatever happened to be at hand.   

     Summing up the characteristics of Symbolist writing, Moréas notes, “The very truth of lyric poetry is found in seeming disorder, luminous madness, and passionate grandiloquence.”  He advocates running the risk of an “excess of rhetorical figures and colorful expressions.” [12] 

     With such energy and improvisatory enthusiasm, Moréas’ reader feels at some distance from the Symbolism of Mallarmé and Valéry whose magisterial, even still-Parnassian, tone suggested a cool composure as opposed to Moréas’ excitement.  Their thoughtful lexical precision contrasts with his eruptions of exuberant words.  Though Moréas insisted that his images would aim at “primordial ideas,” in practice he cares little for such moorings, letting his words float freely like a skyful of clouds. While both Mallarmé and Valéry stuck to alexandrines and sonnets until the very end, Moréas recommended a looser prosody which in his description sounds rather like syncopated jazz.  “An alexandrine with multiple and mobile caesurae, the primary task of certain numbers -- seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – resolute in many rhythmic permutations of which they are the sum.” 

     Moréas then might be considered less as the inspiration of the French poets generally identified as Symbolist and of their American cousins Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, perhaps in more recent years, than he is of freer word-slinging rhetoricians from Apollinaire to Gregory Corso.  Though Moréas had posed as the herald of the new Symbolist movement, a few years later he had changed direction and began to advocate neo-Classicism,  the “école romane,” a taste that persisted to the end of the poet’s life.   This group became associated with nationalism, reactionary views, anti-Semitism, and, through Maurras, the formation of the fascist Action Française.  In this way a writer who had been a young radical came in time to be a monarchist, a writer who had shouted for novelty came to idealize past masters, and a rebel became a defender of privilege.  The scheme of generational evolution Moréas had outlined gained, at least in his own case, a sort of ironic truth as he abandoned the provocative and exhilarating coruscations of “Le Symbolisme.”

 

  

1.      Published in Le Figaro for December 18, 1886.  A twenty-first century American can only feel nostalgia for those long-ago days when a newspaper of general circulation would publish aesthetic polemics and people would discuss such issues in the cafes.

 

2.      “Cependant le Suprême Enchantement n'est pas encore consommé : un labeur opiniâtre et jaloux sollicite les nouveaux venus.”  The extravagance of the capitalized “Supreme Enchantment” is a giveaway of the self-indulgences to come.

 

3.      Darwin was surely an influence in Moréas’ time.  Similar ideas have been advanced by Vico in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth by Harold Bloom with the addition of an overlay of neurotic guilt in descriptions of the “anxiety of influence.” 

 

4.     Make it New was the title of Pound’s 1934 book of essays, but he had earlier used the phrase, in fact a translation of M. G. Pauthier’s French version of the Chinese, in his 1928 translation of the Confucian text he titled Ta Hio: The Great Learning.  

 

5.      “ce qui fut le neuf et le spontané devient le poncif et le lieu-commun.” “et qu'après les poncifs classiques, il y a eu des poncifs romantiques.”

 

6.      In the original “Mais la césure, la césure! On viole la césure!!” and “Horreur! Ne pas respecter l'alternance des rimes!”

 

7.      In the French “tombé en enfance,” “légitime mais mal avisée,” “la méthode puérile du naturalisme,” “on ne peut accorder sérieusement qu'une valeur de protestation.”  Moréas exempts Zola who was miraculously “saved by his wonderful writer’s instinct” (“sauvé par un merveilleux instinct d'écrivain”).

 

8.      In the original “un simple point de départ extrêmement succinct”  “l'art ne saurait chercher en l'objectif.”

 

9.      “Les littératures décadentes se révèlent essentiellement coriaces, filandreuses, timorées et serviles.”

 

10.   “Nous avons déjà proposé la dénomination de Symbolisme comme la seule capable de désigner raisonnablement la tendance actuelle de l'esprit créateur en art.”

 

11.   “ennemie de "l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective" “le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la conception de l'Idée en soi.” “L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures.”

 

12.   “des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales”

 

13.   I left “sinueuse” as “sinuous” to preserve its oddity.  The entire passage in French: Pour la traduction exacte de sa synthèse, il faut au symbolisme un style archétype et complexe : d'impollués vocables, la période qui s'arcboute alternant avec la période aux défaillances ondulées, les pléonasmes significatifs, les mystérieuses ellipses, l'anacoluthe en suspens, tout trope hardi et multiforme ; enfin la bonne langue – instaurée et modernisée – la bonne et luxuriante et fringante langue française d'avant les Vaugelas et les Boileau-Despréaux, la langue de François Rabelais et de Philippe de Commines, de Villon, de Rutebœuf et de tant d'autres écrivains libres et dardant le terme acut du langage, tels des toxotes de Thrace leurs flèches sinueuses.

 

14.   “Tantôt de mythiques phantasmes évoqués, depuis l'antique Démogorgôn jusques à Bélial, depuis les Kabires jusques aux Nigromans, apparaissent fastueusement atournés sur le roc de Caliban ou par la forêt de Titania aux modes mixolydiens des barbitons et des octocordes.”

 

15.   “Le désordre apparent, la démence éclatante, l'emphase passionnée sont la vérité même de la poésie lyrique. Tomber dans l'excès des figures et de la couleur, le mal n'est pas grand et ce n'est pas par là que périra notre littérature.”   

 

16.   “l'alexandrin à arrêts multiples et mobiles ; l'emploi de certains nombres premiers – sept, neuf, onze, treize – résolus en les diverses combinaisons rythmiques dont ils sont les sommes.”es sommes.”

Foggy Dew as Symbol

     To some, the idea of literary excellence is obsolete. Over fifty years ago Northrup Frye ridiculed “odious comparisons,” noting “We begin to suspect that the literary value-judgments are projections of social ones.” [1] From a political perspective opposite to Frye’s, advocates of cultural studies have sought to reduce the text to an exhibit like an object in nature. Yet still today one may encounter the old attitude that folk music is simple, a kind of lowest common denominator in contrast to the sophistication of high art or, on the other hand, the less common notion that the collective unconscious operates like an oracle, transmitting Truth mysteriously.
     In fact any attempt to remove value from literary analysis flies in the face of every reader’s experience. One enjoys and admires some work more than others, and accounting for this subjective conclusion has long underlay criticism. Yet the fact remains that no critic has adequately rationalized the assignment of value. The old English song “Foggy Dew” is a “good” one if its popularity for centuries is any evidence. Variants have been collected across Britain as well as in Canada and the United States, and in recent times the song has often been recorded in both symphonic and folk versions. [2]
     The image of the “foggy dew” binds the song and, like a title, provides a formula for its essence. Yet critics have often expressed either uncertainty about the meaning of the image or have advanced one of a surprisingly wide range of interpretations. In the realistic reading of the narrative the dew seems simply a humorously transparent excuse, a jocular euphemism, for the singer’s true motive. Here the foggy dew plays a role similar to the weather in Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” [3]
     Within the text, though, a more complex progression is discernable. In the version used by Benjamin Britten [4] the initial reference is an exculpatory gesture with a bit of nervous iteration “And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong.” The second is more disturbing. The speaker seizes the woman, hauls her into bed and covers her head. The flimsiness of the pretext is clear, the impetuous action all the more aggressive in light of the woman’s apparent helplessness (What shall I do?) Then at last the image appears in a warm nostalgic glow as the son in his shop reminds him of his erotic joy of the past. Here the reference to “many, many” encounters highlights the artificiality of the already shameless use of “foggy dew” simply to indicate a sexual experience. One sees depicted the ordinary course of a sexual episode: first irresistible desire, then a push for mastery, followed by pleased reflection.
     In the composite of American versions by James Reeves [5], very much the same series series may be traced, from the delicately stated “I thought it my time to roll her in my arms” through a hint of coercion, this time on the woman’s part (“I’m resolved to stay with you”), to an apparently happy marriage with a large family in prospect. Reeves comments on the meaning of the title image and decides that it implies “protracted virginity.” Noting that “fogge” could be used “for coarse, rank grass of the kind that grows in marshes and bogs where the atmosphere would be damp and misty,” he concludes that this untrimmed vegetation corresponds to “protracted virginity” (as mowing might mean sex).[6] He collects references in which to him dew implies chastity, beginning with its repeated use in “I sing of a maiden that is makeles.”


He cam also stille
Ther His moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the gras.


     Apart from the fact that reading both “fog” and “dew” as meaning virginity would make the title a reduplication, the verse clearly associates Mary not with the dew but with the grass (in the subsequent verses with a flower and with a springtime “spray”) It is the male lover, the divine Christ, who, as in a host of Biblical passages (such as Gideon’s fleece) is represented by the fructifying dew. The church fathers do not mention the obvious association of dew with semen. [7]
     The fact remains, whatever associations one infers for the foggy dew, that its use is not strictly consistent any interpretation. For all the sexual innuendo the first occurrence of the term in Britten version says that when the speaker was with his beloved he did not think of the foggy dew. A version collected in Newfoundland concludes “We'd both give up to sow no more but think on the foggy dew,” implying that the thought of the dew has displaced sexual activity. [8] On the other hand, Sharp heard one version that makes the most direct sexual meaning explicit:


And ev-er-y time she cocks her leg,
I thinks of the fo–o–ggy de-ew.


     In one of the early broadside variants the dew is realistic, simply the ground on which the two make love: “And many a night I roll’d her in my arms,/All over the Foggy dew.” [9] Another more or less rationalized version has the lover conspire with a friend to impersonate a demon and drive the woman into his room. Reeves quotes a version from Sharp in which men’s affection is said to resemble the foggy dew in its evanescence, saying that this “eliminates the essential spirit of the song.”
     Some researchers have sought to discover the meaning of the foggy dew through Celtic vocabulary and pre-Christian belief. A 1689 broadside and a number of American versions substitute “bugaboo” (or Boglemaroo, Boglebo, etc.) for “foggy dew” suggest that the supernatural aids the seduction, while in Britten’s version, in which the man is left with a son but no lover, might imply that she was herself a spirit.
     Numerous writers have pursued the decoding of this image, yet it seems clear that so single reading works. The fact is that the foggy dew is a symbol in the sense of an image whose strength derives in part from its indeterminacy. The fundamental connotation of foggy dew with fertility and mystery are exploited in most uses of the term, but it is never limited. The complex relationships between the man and the woman, between the man and the environment, and the cosmos (represented by the supernatural beings) are suggested but not determined by the image. It is carefully balanced to be attractive (fertile, sexual) and disagreeable (cold, associated with illness and danger). The very ambiguity of the dew replicates the ambivalence of each of the relationships evoked. Thus, if the woman is at once a beautiful love object and a frightening menace, so likewise is the man. If life appears unpredictable and hazardous it is also satisfying and seductive. The world is full of invitation and threat. The very fact that such propositions could be multiplied nearly without end signifies not the incoherence of the poem, but its precise correspondence to our experience of daily reality. More highly determined images will necessarily lose a good deal of the accuracy and emotional charge of this “vague” one.
     The same sort of vagueness was consciously prescribed by the Symbolist poet. Jean Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto, while calling Zola’s Naturalism “ puerile,” goes on to say, “Symbolist poetry tries to house the Idea in a meaningful form not its own end, but subject to the Idea. The latter in its turn will never appear without the sumptuous clothing of analogy; for the essential character of Symbolist art consists in never going so far as to conceive of the Idea in itself. So this art will never show details of nature, actions of humans, concrete phenomena: for they are only the appearances destined to represent to the senses their esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas.”
     Among folklore scholars, M. J. C. Hodgart is almost unique in his recognition of this technique. “However much of the force of ballad imagery comes from our apprehension of its meaning, a great deal nevertheless comes from the very fact that the meaning is not clearly understood at all” [10]



1. Anatomy of Criticism, "Polemical Introduction."

2. Benjamin Britten set it to music and Burl Ives made a pop tune of it. This song is not to be confused with two other songs of the same name: the quite different overblown Irish song with its unlikely happy ending "Oh, a wan cloud was drawn o'er the dim weeping dawn" nor the later Nationalist anthem commemorating the Easter Rising "As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I."

3. The song was recorded by many, including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan, Armstrong and Velma Middleton, Pearl Bailey and Hot Lips Paige all in 1949.

4. When I was a bachelor, I liv'd all alone
I worked at the weaver's trade
And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong
was to woo a fair young maid.
I wooed her in the wintertime
And in the summer, too
And the only, only thing that I did that was wrong
Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

One night she came to my bedside
When I was fast asleep.
She laid her head upon my bed
And she began to weep.
She sighed, she cried, she damn near died
She said what shall I do?
So I hauled her into bed and covered up her head
Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.

So, I am a bachelor, I live with my son
and we work at the weaver's trade.
And every single time that I look into his eyes
He reminds me of that fair young maid.
He reminds me of the wintertime
And of the summer, too,
And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms
Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy, dew

5. The Idiom of the People.

6. Surely it is more natural to associate such growth with public hair, particularly when presented in conjunction with the dew’s moisture.

7. Consistent with Psalm 72, 6 and Isaiah XLV. 8. See also useful material from Peter of Celle and Honorius Augustodunensis in Michael Steffes’ “‘As dewe in Aprylle’: ‘I syng of a mayden’ and the liturgy” Medium Aevum spring 2002.

8. Published in Kenneth Peacock, Songs Of The Newfoundland Outports, Volume 2, pp. 518-519.

9. From the National Library of Scotland, viewable at http://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/pageturner.cfm?id=74896969.

10. The Ballads, p. 37.