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.

Dialectical Rhetoric in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie

  

Parenthetical citations, sometimes serving to locate more than one quotation, refer to Book and Chapter of Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie.  Numbers in brackets are endnotes.

 

     With the decay in the social value of public speaking and the general fading of the Classical tradition, the role of oratory in education, once so prominent, has all but vanished.  Only a few generations ago, the brightest secondary students competed in declamation competitions and participated in Mock Trial exercises that would have been recognizable to an ancient Athenian.  For two thousand years many wrote about rhetoric as the definitive art of the effective use of language and drew examples from both poetry and speeches.  Though there are significant exceptions, many literary theorists have used the vocabulary of rhetoric from Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian and Cicero, through medieval writers like Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland.  The most important Elizabethan work in this lineage is George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589) which, though entirely concerned with poetry, employs the concepts of earlier rhetorical manuals.  While Puttenham thus roots his work deeply in past authorities, he is nonetheless able to use it to develop and express sophisticated, sometimes novel, concepts.  He is far more pragmatic than theoretical, tolerant of contradictions in the interest of presenting a full description view of poetry.  On a good many matters he is unwilling “to commit himself and holds the balance between the contesting parties,” as a modern critic comments on his posture regarding the use of rhyme and of learned vocabulary. [1]

     Puttenham’s rhetorical orientation was standard in his own day [2], but his use of it was unusually pragmatic, rigorous, and productive.  He fully understands the arbitrary nature of the relation between signifier and signified, noting, “speech it selfe is artificiall and made by man,” [3] yet, in a dialectical gesture that recurs throughout his work, he also says “VTterance also and language is giuen by nature to man for perswasion of others.” (I, 4) 

     A parallel ambiguity is reflected in his opening claim that the poet is a “maker” and thus in a way divine while at the same time being a “counterfaitor” who simply imitates the world around since “Poesie an art not only of making, but also of imitation.”  (I, 1)   Similarly he is elusive, or, rather, pleased to affirm both options, on the old issue of whether a poet is born or artistic skill must be learned, observing that poetic skill might “come by nature or by arte or by exercise.” (III, 2)

     Puttenham declares that the poet must be inspired “by some diuine instinct, the Platonicks call it furor.” (I, 1)  This special access to truth led to poets’ role as “Prophetes or seears” (I, 3), giving birth then to religion since the first role of poetry is “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods.” (I, 9)  Poets then created culture, civilization, and all the arts and sciences.    

      Yet these grand roles seem forgotten when he treats poetry as a courtly accomplishment.  Puttenham, writing in the wake of Castiglione [4], describes his work as is “fitter to please the Court then the schoole” and claims that his “chiefe purpose herein is for the learning of Ladies and young Gentlewomen, or idle Courtiers, desirous to become skilful in their owne mother tongue, and for their priuate recreation to make now & then ditties of pleasure.” (III,10)  This paradoxically studied off-handedness is surely itself a form of sprezzatura or Renaissance “cool.”  A wider gap could scarcely exist than between this aestheticism and the pious author who defined the first function of poetry as “the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods,” followed by cdelebrating princes, then “the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the reuealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion.”  Only then does he accept also “the consolation and repose of temperate myndes, finally the common solace of mankind in all his trauails and cares of this transitorie life.” (I, 9)

     The dialectical nature of aesthetic language is also reflected, Puttenham recognizes, by another sort of doubling, the operation of novel figurative language over the inherited formulae of everyday speech.  In the gap between expected usage and artfully twisted figure is born beauty and delight, new thoughts, and courtliness, an aristocratic cultivated style.  Puttenham calls “our ordinary talke then which nothing can be more vnsauourie and farre from all ciuilitie.” (III,2)  According to him the beauty of both women and poems depends upon their being “artificially handled.”  “The discreet vsing” of figures” in writing is like the use of ornament in clothing and “other mechanicall artes” requiring taste. (III,1)  He quotes Horace on changing fashions in language as in other matters. (III, 3)

     “Figuratiue speech is a noueltie of language euidently (and yet not absurdly) estranged from the ordinarie habite and manner of our dayly talke and wri∣ting”  (III, 10)  Novelty seems a requirement since poetry’s appeal derives from “a certaine noueltie and strange maner of conueyance, dis∣guising it no litle from the ordinary and accustomed.” (III, 1)  Yet at the same time, every new work is built upon the old and new fashions are often accepted, “though many tymes worse then the old.” (I.7)

     Poetry may not only be in bad taste; it also may mislead, since the domain of poetry includes lying as well as truth-telling, as Hesiod had had it in one of the earliest formulations of art’s ambiguous character.   Puttenham cautions that “poesie should not be imployed vpon vayne conceits or vicious or infamous.” (I, 8)  He dramatizes the negative potential of poetry with the cautionary story of Hegesias (III, 8) whose words, according to Cicero [5], persuaded people to suicide with his words.

     Yet he feels that it is not the failings of poetry, but rather a failure of appreciation by those who should be its consumers that poetry has lost prestige since ancient times, in spite of its once central place in all culture, to the extent that the poet is labeled “light headed.”  Poets as well as “Poesie are despised, & the name become, of honorable infamous, subiect to scorne and derision.”  He says that a poet, instead of being respected, is likely to be called “in disdayne a phantasticall” man. (I, 8) 

     In the course of his compendious volume, Puttenham provides a rich exposition of rhetorical figures and an invaluable guide to the taste of his day, but the reader looking for a coherent theory will find a wealth of ideas but little system.  Thus language is said to be wholly artificial and man-made as well as given by nature.  Poetry is wholly original, created as though by divine fiat and, at the same time, imitation or “counterfeit.”  Powerful poetry is at once the result of a “divine instinct” and the imitation of models.  The ends of poetry could not be more ambitious – praise of god and inculcation of morality – and yet it is also a “priuate recreation” pastime for “idle Courtiers.”  Poetic language must be fresh and novel, yet it must also follow accepted models.  A poet, finally, he finds, might be valued as the most acute and inventive thinker, the sort he calls “euphantasiote” but also might be “dismissed and derided.” (III, 8)  All these propositions may indeed be true at once – art is more adept than other forms of discourse in handling contradiction and ambiguity – but Puttenham is unconcerned with delineating the tensions among these antinomies. 

     For him poetry’s fallen status calls for a heart-felt lament resting on the notion of a bygone Golden Age rather than a specific program for its returning to relevance.  Even apart from the marvelous catalogue of figures his book is a useful record of the ideas current in his day and what he knew or took to be the opinions of the past.  The venerable study of rhetoric broadly conceived which had formed the foundation of education for millennia underlies Puttenham’s careful work, recording rather than reconciling the contradictions and mysteries that have always characterized art.  If he affirms opposites, it is because only in that way might he provide an accurate picture of his (and of our) lived experience of literature.  

 

 

1.      1.  Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature (1930), 357.

 

2.      2.  Among his predecessors extending the tradition in England were Richard Sherry, A Treatise on Schemes and Tropes (1550), Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586), and Abraham Fraunce The Arcadian Rhetorick (1588), and Henry Peacham The Compleat Gentleman (1622).  Some critics, notably Sir Philip Sidney, focused, somewhat defensively, on a moral defense rather than a broader view of art’s ends and a technical analysis of poetic devices.      

 

3.      3.  Similarly, “SPeach is not naturall to man” (III, 3).

 

4.      4.  Castiglione’s The Courtier, the influence of which on Puttenham and others can hardly be overstated, had been translated in 1561 by Sir Thomas Hoby.

 

5.      5.  Tusculan Disputations 1.83.

A Take on Plato’s Parmenides

 

     The informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be called philosophical.  My reading of Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic.  Yet I have always found that the subjectivity of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians. 

 

     Plato’s Parmenides is to many a puzzler.  One modern reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another, equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it "aporetic." [2]   In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and “how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be shouting, “but no!”  In the Parmenides the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the elder philosopher.  Parmenides even scolds like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.”  [3]  Plato’s point of view can always be elusive, given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing, but where is the authority here?   The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first.  Finally, through the entire dialogue the argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish. 

    If one persists, the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of ratiocination.  Perhaps some savant might be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought, but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a contemplative to the sublime?  A good many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can.  Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their never quite measuring up to the original flash.  (Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?) 

     For me the Parmenides induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.  The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed.  Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s equanimity.  In singing the song of powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders and limits of humanity. 

     I imagine Plato winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high intellectual amusement.  In Plato’s wink, though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.

     (Another Platonic actor may provide a parallel.  Gorgias had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously Skeptical position.  Having concluded that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of words.  Sitting on a Mediterranean terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes.  Behind such pleasant theatricals, though, there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each person arises, though only temporarily.)

     This notion is not entirely a vagary of my own.  There is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on Parmenides himself.  As early as 1894 the author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy” found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the Eleatics.”  He believed in actual influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4]  Since then a variety of scholars have examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and Nagarjuna. [5]  At least one professor of Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India. [6]  

     While Plato’s precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.”  Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7]  One reader, at least, of the Parmenides imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece, already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold world.  

 

 

1.      1.  Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.

 

2.     2.  R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).

 

3.      3.  I use Jowett’s old translation.  The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).

 

4.      4.  Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).

 

5.      5.  See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4; and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses Shankara in particular. 

 

6.      6.  Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).

 

7.      7.  Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others.  Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing.  "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.”  Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”

 

8.      8.  Aristotle in his Physics explicitly refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.  

 

Enoch Arden as Popular Literature

 

 

     In his own day, the prestige of Alfred, Lord Tennyson was immense.  He was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in British history and to many embodied Victorian values in his very skillful, high-minded, and stately works.  A reviewer spoke for a great many, critics as well as the general population, when in the middle of the poet’s career he declared unreservedly “We have no great living poet but Alfred Tennyson.” [1]  His reputation remained potent enough that my generation still read Idylls of the King in junior high where a common curriculum made it many American students’ first substantial poetic text (as well as, perhaps, for many their last). 

     In the 1860s Tennyson was clearly the most prominent of British poets, and Enoch Arden was one of his most popular works, selling 17,000 copies on the day of publication and over 60,000 the first year.  Fancy illustrated gift editions and translations then appeared, both authorized and pirated. [2]  A reviewer hailed the poem as “the most popular poem since the days of Byron.” [3]  The initial review in the New York Times put the author’s name in all capitals, lauding “TENNYSON” as “the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.” [4]  a recent scholar notes that in America editions of Enoch Arden ”were too numerous and their sale too rapid for accurate recording.” [5]

  The poem’s appeal persisted.  In 1897 Richard Strauss wrote a piano composition to be performed along with a dramatic reading of the poem, indicating the poem’s success among Continental readers. [6]   Three stage versions and four silent movie treatments were produced, including a 1922 version by D. W. Griffith. 

     Yet in the marketplace of literature Tennyson’s stock was falling.  Already in 1926 a judicious critic noted “Tennyson pre-eminently represents Victorian literature, a privilege which to-day is in the eyes of many one of his shortcomings.” [6]  Literary judgments of Tennyson’s reputation had dramatically slumped, with writers leading critics in revising their parents’ literary judgement.  Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance, dismissed the poet, remarking, "Tennyson a poet? Why, he’s only a rhymester," [7] and in Ulysses he is called “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet.” [8]  Hardy’s late (1922) poem “An Ancient to Ancients” describes the decay of the laureate’s appeal mercilessly yet with a powerful sense of longing, nostalgia, and loss, noting that "The bower we shrined to Tennyson" . . ."is roof-wrecked . . "damps there drip upon/ Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,/ The spider is sole denizen."    

                  The very reasons that made Enoch Arden so popular in its on day limited its long-term literary reputation.  There is no question of Tennyson’s skill and craft.  The greatest master of sound in English poetry since Pope, his melodies are regularly precise and satisfying.  The opening of Enoch Arden has sharp and well-formulated images, with a painterly depiction of the scene.  

                                               a hazelwood,

By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes

Green in a cuplike hollow of the down. 

This opening sketch concludes with the three principals as children making sand castles on the shore, an effective symbolic premonition of their ill-starred plans. 

     Soon, however, qualities emerge that might ultimately prove Tennyson’s aesthetic vulnerabilities.  The vigorous Enoch sometimes bests Philip in a fight, causing his friend to declare, “I hate you, Enoch!”  

                                                          at this

The little wife would weep for company,

And pray them not to quarrel for her sake,

And say she would be little wife to both. (33-36) 

This is surely by most any standards “twee.”  The “little” before “wife” insists on the already cloying cuteness even further.  Tennyson may be salvaged by admirers who could maintain that this prettiness is only a set-up for the cruel caricature that life makes of the “wife to both” notion, [9] but through the rest of the poem he consciously aims at highly-colored sentimental effects emphasizing the cute and the pathetic. 

     The reader of the poem’s latter scenes may think as Enoch wastes away in sickly virtue of Wilde’s well-known line “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” [10]  Wilde went for aphoristic reversals, but his play was rarely verbal alone.  He justifies his witticism elsewhere, noting “a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” [11]   

     From the start a taste for the sentimental found both ardent admirers and mockers.  The earliest citation of the word in the OED is from a 1749 letter which indicates both the term’s novelty and ambiguity, yet also indicates its vogue. "What, in your opinion,” Lady Bradshagel asked Samuel Richardson whose novels were thought to contain fine feelings indeed, “is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite...Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk." [12]  Not only “everything clever and agreeable,” that is to say, what is socially attractive, but aesthetic and moral excellence as well were implied by eighteenth century notions of sensibility. [13]  A popular example, albeit using the term “sensibility” rather than “sentimentalism,” indicates the claims of the partisans of feeling.

 

Sweet Sensibility! Thou keen delight!

Thou hasty moral! Sudden sense of right!

Thou untaught goodness! Virtue's precious seed!

Thou sweet precursor of the gen'rous deed!

[14] 

In his History of England (1771) Oliver Goldsmith noted the “refinements” brought to Britain through Roman occupation, but noted “They were only incapable of sentimental pleasure” [15] as though that were the crowning attribute of a sophisticated society. 

     Yet from the time of its birth, the eighteenth-century concept of the “sentimental” also attracted satirists.  Whereas Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) popularized a hero whose sensibilities and the sympathetic bonds with others they inspire form the basis for both a model of a harmonious society and a genuine individual moral virtue, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768) is decidedly more ambivalent.  Yorick is often absurd and misguided when he feels uplifted by lofty sentiments.  In 1784 a poet pointedly associated “mischief” with “your dying sentimentals,” [16] referring to the habit of fainting by men and women of sensitivity in novels and, apparently, in person.  An anonymous Veronese painting from 1750 depicts “A Lady Fainting During a Party.”  So many fictional protagonists were prone to such incidents that Jane Austen in her juvenile novel Love and Freindship [sic] (1790), imitating but also reacting against Samuel Richardson, a character prudently provides advice to another: “Beware of swoon, dear Laura . . . Run mad as often as you chuse, but do not faint.”

     In 1797 Coleridge published a set of sonnets attributed to Nehemiah Higginbottom satirizing the vogue of sensibility, what he called in Biographia Literaria “the spirit of doleful egotism.” [17]  The appeal of sentiment was not in fact vanishing, though.  It was probably increasing, becoming perhaps less prominent among poets and the upper reaches of the beau-monde but more popular among the less well-to-do and less educated.  As late as 1899 an article in a popular magazine celebrated "The Decay of Sensibility" but demonstrated its persistence as well by saying “the modern young woman does not swoon promiscuously.”  She no longer “at the slightest shock shuts up into a pink, formless pulp.” [18]

     Fainting, however, was just one of the more dramatic representations of vulnerability to feelings.  Though in Enoch Arden no one faints, it seems to the modern taste far too sentimental.  Sentimentality describes excessive emotion (clearly a matter subject to taste and judgement) or the unseemly enjoyment of the spectacle of a character’s emotions unjustified by sufficient artistic or thematic role.   

        But “excessive” and “unseemly” are value judgements from which the masses may dissent.  Sentimentality has always been popular because of its simplicity.  It is straightforward, unambiguous, luxurious, and easily understood.  Charles Cary Rumsey’s sculpture of a “Dying Indian” is sentimental because it invites the viewer to feel a sweet sadness about the displacement of native Americans “free of charge” to use the imagery of Wilde and Joyce, that is, in a reductive and facile view. [19]  Similarly Enoch Arden posits an unusual hero.  While most heroes exemplify characteristics prized in their culture and inspire people to imitation, Enoch is specifically meant to elicit strong emotions in the sensitive reader by his passive submission.  The reader’s pleasure is directly inspired by Enoch’s suffering. 

     Though all overdone pathos might be in questionable taste, the poem’s climactic focus on death in the nearly hagiographical Enoch Arden heightens Tennyson’s aesthetic risk, though it clearly increases as well his demands on the reader’s sentiment.  Such pleasures do not suit the modern taste.  Even those who relish the works of Edgar Allen Poe are likely to hesitate before his celebrated dictum declaring the death of a beautiful woman “the most poetical topic in the world.”  “Beauty,” Poe continues, “of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

     The emotional appeal to the picturesque, the sentimental, the easy laugh or tear is part of what allows a work to be popular.  It must be assimilable at first scan, avoiding the complexities of character in works considered “high art.”  A parallel relation exists between the themes of popular art and “high” art.   Popular works, including orally transmitted material and commercial popular art of either “folk” or mass culture provenance tend necessarily to reinforce received ideas, reassuring the audience of the correctness of the community’s consensus, transmitting values to the young, celebrating a culture’s (or subculture’s) values.  In contrast, elite, academic, and learned art is likely to point out the lapses or contradictions of social and intellectual norms, to challenge readers’ expectations, and to develop innovative forms.  Such poetry foregrounds ambiguities, ambivalences, contradictions, and mysteries, causing readers to question what is accepted.  

     Tennyson wishes to approve the institution of faithful marriage, yet the life of an honest and hard-working fisherman would, however desirable in a citizen, have little to recommend it to a reader.  A harmonious marriage, though it be a practical and moral ideal, would make an uneventful love story.  How many pop songs celebrate a happy marriage?  Tennyson seeks to regain the excitement that he loses by being so proper by exaggerating his emotional scenes and indulging in overdone pathos, in a word, by his practice of sentimentalism.

     He also, for all the Crabbe-like “realism” of the setting [21], did not hesitate to include unlikely, all-but-fairytale elements. Enoch’s prolonged disappearance as a castaway, his glimpse of the domestic scene of Annie and Philip, and his subsequent wasting away, all the while unknown to the happy couple need not be plausible. Their goal is to render possible not the happy ending so common in popular art, but the more intense option, a lugubrious one, lifted to sublimity by affording Enoch the opportunity to act with wholly selfless great-heartedness. He pauses then beyond the virtue of the monogamous spouse to the altruism of the saintly. This extreme, while it exalts the hero, removes him safely from the realm of daily lived experience. 

     The poem’s concluding lines have been a subject of considerable discussion. 

            And when they buried him the little port

Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

 The contrast between Philip’s affluence and Enoch’s poverty had been a theme from the start.   Enoch only went to sea in order to provide for his family, though his more sensitive wife could see the ominous future.  Part of his reluctance to disturb Annie and Philip upon his return is because they have such a comfortable and secure life.  Just as Philip had had to bear the cost of educating Enoch’s children, so he also pays for Enoch’s funeral.  We resist the assumption that a lavish ceremony is something grand and good.  But there can be little doubt that for Tennyson the line was straightforward. The expenditure was a tribute to the “brave heroic soul” who had passed away.  The laureate unquestioningly participates in bourgeois values, improving his chances of a large readership but damaging his name among the cognoscenti.

     Unsurprisingly, some recent critics has sought to rehabilitate “Enoch Arden,” not by the intriguing route of recovering sentimentalism itself, but by pointing to the fissures and contradictions in his text as evidence of irony in order to make the tale acceptable to moderns. [22]   Both approaches are likely fruitful.  Just as other genres from the early Chinese novel to American comic strip art, once ignored by the literati, have received fruitful attention, as we have become more accepting of outsider art, the camp, and the kitsch, perhaps the sentimental is due for a re-evaluation.  Yet wherever one assigns value, whatever one’s taste, the generic characteristics of the popular and the sophisticated will remain distinct, each pursuing different goals by the most appropriate methods.  The very qualities that made Enoch Arden a roaring success with some audiences have also made it wholly ignored or disdained in others. 

 

 

 1.     The North American Review (vol. 100, p. 305) notes the publication of illustrated editions which “meet the demand of the general public for ornamental books which may serve as pretty gifts.”

 2.      The Union Review, vol. 3 (1865), p. 132.

 3.      New York Times, August 10, 1864.  The writer went continued, “Readers full of strong sympathetic admiration trace in TENNYSON the poet of the age, whose song reflects faithfully the movement, the intellectual tendencies, the moral conflict, and all that goes to make up the complex sum of our civilization.”

 4.      In 1962 Strauss’ Enoch Arden was recorded by Claude Rains and Glenn Gould and, the following year, received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording. in 1962.

 5.      Norman Page, “Tennyson’s Sense of an Ending: the Problem of ‘Enoch Arden’,” Tennyson Research Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 2014), pp. 219-235.

 6.      Émile Legouis and Louis Cazamian. A History of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent.  1169.

 7.      A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 2.

 8.      Ulysses, 3.492.  Lawn tennis was considered a particularly genteel game.  The satirical nickname for Tennyson had been used in Punch and other humor magazines since the 1870s, so by Joyce’s time even the humor must have had a musty air about it. 

 9.      Indeed, the processes of taste are dynamic.  Since the seminal work by Susan Sontag in Notes on “Camp,” many have sought to recover the aesthetic value by revaluing rejected materials, sometimes with humorous or ironic intent.  To mention only a few phenomena among many, see Odd Nerdrum’s theory of kitsch, scan James Parker “The Twee Revolution,” in the Atlantic, July-August 2014, or survey the pervasive Japanese fascination with what they call kawaii. 

 10.   Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx.  Wilde, who claimed to prefer Disraeli’s novels, doubtless envied Dickens’ immense popularity.

 11.   De profundis.

 12.   Lady Bradshagel (Balfour) to Samuel Richardson, published in his Correspondance (1804) IV. 282.  See also Allen Sprague, “The Date of Sentimental and its Derivatives,” PMLA vol. 48 (1933), 303-307.

 13.   See, for instance, Adam Smith’s The Theory Of Moral Sentiments.

 14.   Lines 337–340 of Hannah More’s “Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honourable Mrs. Boscawen.”  More was a prominent social reformer and religious thinker as well as being a poet, playwright, and a leading Bluestocking.

 15.   Oliver Goldsmith, History of England, 28.

 16.   Unfortunate Sensibility; or the Life of Mrs. L-, Written by herself. In a Series of sentimental Letters, dedicated to Mr. Yorick in the Elysian Fields. 2 Vols. 6s. Richardson and Urquhart.

 17.   Ch. 1.  Coleridge makers it clear that he was parodying himself as well as Southey, Lamb, and Lloyd.

18.   The Cornhill Magazine, July 1899.

 19.   Rumsey’s work is from the first decade of the twentieth century.  A good many similar works were produced, among them “The Wounded Indian” (anonymous 1848), Ferdinand Pettrich’s “The Dying Tecumseh” (1856), and Thomas Crawford’s “The Dying Chief” (1875).  The stricken Indian shares with the cheerful Black jockey hitching posts an utterly non-threatening view of the Other.

 20.   “The Philosophy of Composition,” Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April 1846.

 21.   One of Tennyson’s influences was Crabbe’s “The Parting Hour.”

 22.   See, for instance, James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major Poems: the Comic and Ironic Pattern.  Kincaid describes the ironic view, but then adds, “Everyone recognizes, though, that this is a wild misreading.”

Loving Lists in The Greek Anthology

 

This is not scholarly, but purely appreciative.  My modest goal is to direct a few readers to unfamiliar territory.  W. R. Paton’s 1916 edition with translations in the Loeb Library series is perhaps the only complete version of the Anthology in English.  All poems quoted are from Book VI, included in the first Loeb volume.  Though Paton’s renderings are not only prose but also fusty in style, I believe they adequately serve the purpose of this essay. 

 

     The pre-eminent genre of Hellenistic poetry was the epigram, though epics were still written and pastoral was shaped during the era.  The huge collection of collections that is called The Greek Anthology preserves a good deal of this poetic production, but most modern readers including many scholars focus very narrowly on a few poems.  Certain post-Classical Greek attitudes are resonant in our own post-Decadent time.  Modern poets are fond of the wistful, elegiac epitaphs and the passionate, sometimes scurrilous erotic verses, but, often for adequate reasons, they neglect the bulk of the collection.  Even a brilliant rendering into English would attract few readers to the volume of verses describing the bronze statues in a Theban gymnasium [1].  Later books include such materials as metrical oddities (Book XIII) and puzzles (Book XIV) that could only interest specialists, but wandering in these little-visited volumes can have its rewards for the general reader.  Book IX, for instance, made up of declamatory epigrams, basically a catalogue of variations on rhetorical figures, many of which circle about metaphor’s core, playing with proverbial wisdom, almost at times riddling, contains a good many verses worth reading.

     Book VI, the dedicatory epigrams, is among those rarely translated today.  In it are preserved literary examples of votive inscriptions, versions of a genre well-known in the lived experience of antiquity, polished into lapidary works of art.  Countless such dedications, similar though anonymous, are known from inscriptions associated with actual cult offerings with an implied end little different from that of people who buy classified advertisements containing prayers “never known to fail,” published in fulfillment of a vow to the Virgin Mary. 

     In the Anthology some dedications seem to be simple formulaic statements of this sort. 

             6.  Philip of Thessalonica

Amphitryon dedicated me, having won me from the Teleboi. 

Such a votive dedication may be of interest to philologists or historians, but it offers little to readers of poetry.

     In other poems, the focus seems to be on the virtuoso display of minute variations in phrasing and rhythm.  Sometimes a long series of poems which are almost identical are ranged next to each other for the comparison of connoisseurs.  For instance, poems 11-16 as well as 179-187 all describe the same three brothers, one a fisherman, one a fowler, and one a hunter dedicating their implements to Pan. [2]

             11. Satyrius

The three brothers, skilled in three crafts, dedicate to Pan, Damis the huntsman this long net, Pigres his light-meshed fowling net, and Clitor, the night-rower, his tunic for red mullet. Look kindly on the pious brethren, O Pan, and grant them gain from fowl, fish and venison. 

The poems on this theme, often with the smallest of variations, are by different authors, indicating that the original readership appreciated subtleties of rhythm and phrasing of which most modern readers would be wholly unaware, even in their own language.  In an inversion of the Romantic and modern assumption that associates literary value with originality and self-expression, these poets prize technical mastery and imitation of worthy models. 

     In the sixth century C. E., about a century before the Rashidun Caliphate conquered Egypt, a Roman official there felt sufficiently connected to Classical Greece to write a variation on an old poem attributed to Plato the Philosopher. 

   20.  Julianus, Prefect of Egypt

Lais took captive by her beauty Greece, which had laid in the dust the proud shield of Persia.  Only old age conquered her, and the proof of her fall, the friend of her youth, she dedicates to thee, Cypris.  She hates to see even the shadowy image of those grey hairs, whose actual sight she cannot bear. 

Here the woman’s hair is more a pretext than a plausible offering, especially when presented with bitterness.  Rather than thanks to the divine, it is a complaint, the more eloquent for understatement.  Erotic appeal illustrates its power as the conquerer of the country that conquered proud Persia.  The final line heightens the intensity of regret, the characteristically Greek attitude in which the joyful and exuberant sensuality celebrating sex and drinking is linked with a concomitant melancholy, born of the consciousness of inevitable old age and death.  The hair, at one time a “friend” as an emblem of Lais’ glorious physicality, now suggests only ugliness, feebleness, and the grave. 

     The following is another “imitation,” following very closely an earlier poem by Leonidas, again illustrating the writer’s preference for tradition and technical skill over the pose of literary “sincerity.”  The details up to the five grapes and the recovery from illness are identical. 

190. Gaetulicus

Take, honoured Cythereia, these poor gifts from poor Leonidas the poet, a bunch of five fine grapes, an early fig, sweet as honey, from the leafy branches, this leafless olive that swam in brine, a little handful of frugal barley-cake, and the libation that ever accompanies sacrifice, a small drop of wine, lurking in the bottom of the tiny cup. But if, as you have driven away the disease that weighed sore on me, so you do drive away my poverty, I will give you a fat goat. 

The catalogue of products – grapes, a fig, an olive, a barley-cake, and a few drops of wine – present in miniature the basics of the Greek diet.  Even the poet’s cup is small (like traditional Chinese wine cups), perhaps to allow the ceremonious drinking of many servings.  The shameless bargaining with divinity promises a rich blood sacrifice in return for prosperity, but the prosperity presumably must perforce come first.

     Coming of age is also the occasion for dedications. 

309. Leonidas

To Hermes Philocles here hangs up these toys of his boyhood: his noiseless ball, this lively boxwood rattle, his knuckle-bones he had such a mania for, and his spinning-top. 

Though achieving maturity is the occasion for celebration, the verse has still about it the slow and melancholy music of the passing of time, the end of innocence, the arrival of adult responsibilities. 

     The poems often record significant “objective” depictions of material culture, but never without the addition of considerable subjective value.  

174. Antipater

The three girls all of an age, as clever as the spider at weaving delicate webs, dedicated here to Pallas, Demo her well-plaited basket, Arsinoe her spindle that produces the fine thread, and Bacchylis her well-wrought comb, the weaver's nightingale, with the skilled stroke of which she deftly parted the threads. For each of them, stranger, willed to live without reproach, gaining her living by her hands. 

Here the characteristically female work with textiles, producing work as lovely as its makers, is dedicated to Athena who, like the three “girls,” is a virgin.  The products of each is a testament to their femininity, skill, and proper modesty with the final line assuring the reader that they each earned an honest living.  The poem is a lovely little tribute to a trio of respectable young women, but the opening simile likening them to spiders implies several ironies.  Apart from the wiliness suggested by “weaving a web” which for the spider is deadly trap, there is the mythological association with Arachne who was ruined by the very same goddess due to her extraordinary skill at weaving.

     War, the occupation most identified with masculinity, is also represented.  

81. Paulus Silentarius

Lysimachus, who has now exchanged his armour for an old man’s staff, presents to Ares his oxhide shield, the protector of his body, his spear that often tasted, his coat of mail that warded off missiles from his breast, and his helmet with thick horse-hair plume. 

Here the only pathos is the mention of “an old man’s staff,” yet the image of a laconic aging warrior is compelling.  The details of his gear make the action of ancient warfare dramatic whether the author had ever fought or not.  The reader is brought into the (imaginative) thick of the battle with the ferocity of the spear “that tasted the entrails of his foes,” the rain of stones and darts on his body, and the defiant towering helmet.

     Other professions are also defined by their characteristic tools.  

38. Philippus of Thessalonica

To you Poseidon, Lord of the sea, did Amyntichus give these his last gifts, when he ceased from his toil on the deep - his nets edged with lead that plunge into the sea, his oar still drunk with the brine, his spear for killing sea-monsters, strong lance of the waters, his weel ever betrayed by floats, his anchor, firm hand of his boat, and the flint, dear to sailors, that has the art of guarding the seed of fire. 

Here again is an elegiac poem upon retirement, this time from a fisherman.  The list of the tools of his trade would make a fine material culture exhibit (a “weel” is a trap), and the unexpected mention of a flint brings to mind the value of fire on a long wet and windy voyage. 

     Another epigram provides a list of a scribe’s tools, to be dedicated to Hermes. 

62. Philippus of Thessalonica

Callimenes, on giving up his work, now old age has veiled his eyes, dedicates to the Muses his circular lead which marks off the margin of the pages, and the knife that sharpens his pointed pens, his longest ruler, and the pumice from the beach, the dry porous stone of the sea. 

     A number of the dedications commemorate the speaker’s miraculous escape from wild beasts in one case slightly lengthened to a bit of a short story with an exotic protagonist.  

220. Dioscorides

Chaste Atys, the gelded servant of Cybele, in frenzy giving his wild hair to the wind, wished to reach Sardis from Phrygian Pessinus ; but when the dark of evening fell upon him in his course, the fierce fervour of his bitter ecstasy was cooled and he took shelter in a descending cavern, turning aside a little from the road. But a lion came swiftly on his track, a terror to brave men and to him an inexpressible woe. He stood speechless from fear and by some divine inspiration put his hand to his sounding tambour. At its deep roar the most courageous of beasts ran off quicker than a deer, unable to bear the deep note in its ears, and he cried out, "Great Mother, by the banks of the Sangarius I dedicate to you, in thanks for my life, my holy cell [the thalame or receptacle into which the organs of these castrated priests were deposited] and this noisy instrument that caused the lion to fly." 

The Phrygian cult of Cybele with its self-castrated priesthood had been familiar in Greece since pre-Classical times, sometimes as a simple protective Mother Goddess figure, sometimes as the center of a mystery cult.  During her rites described in the poem as “wild” and “ecstatic,” the most prominent instrument was the τυμπανον, a small hand drum, such as here saves the speaker.  In dramatic fashion the poem expresses what everyone, perhaps, has felt on occasion: the redemption by grace, unexpected, sudden, unaccountable.    

     In this intimate little poem on love through calling the oil lamp his “play-fellow” and love-making a “night festival” the poet constructs what might be called a wholly celebrative attitude toward sexuality while maintaining some sense of social taboo by saying that these must be “secret.”  Of course, this also suggests that Aphrodite may be a sort of mystery cult.  Since these tended to be salvationist, the implication can only be that participation in sex provides a sort of immortality, if only because time vanishes during love-making.  

162. Meleagar

Meleager dedicates to you, dear Cypris, the lamp his play-fellow, that is initiated into the secrets of your night festival. 

One could scarcely better the economy and the poignance of this epigram on a peasant. 

226. Leonidas

This is Cleiton's little cottage, this his little strip of land to sow, and the scanty vineyard hard by, this is his patch of brushwood, but here Cleiton passed eighty years. 

     Book VI of The Greek Anthology has a great variety of other poems, but the special charm of the dedicatory epigram (and a good number of the poems in the book are not in fact dedicatory) is best displayed in poems in which a list of objects that might remind a twenty-first century reader of the prose poems of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge is lent a human significance.  In these highly conventionalized works, the minimalist eloquence of simple naming can sound almost incantatory.  The gesture of a sacrifice to a god uplifts the poet’s world and all sorts of objects are thereby invested with potent meaning and emotion.  If few today can appreciate the metrical music of the epigrammatists’ language, the images speak to all.  Sappho and Pindar are in little danger of losing their pre-eminence in ancient Greek poetry, but the myriad epigrammatists of the Anthology add masterful polished little works on the great themes of love and god and death.

 

  

1.      1. Such poems with their tiresomely repetitive amazement at the statues’ realism constitute Book II of the Anthology.  Similar ekphrastic poems fill Book III. 

2.      2. The familiarity of listeners or readers with such poems is then the basis for an obscene play on the theme in poem 17, attributed to Lucian. 

3.      3. One thinks of Villon’s several poems which expatiate at greater length on the theme.