Lola Ridge as Agitprop Modernist

     I have elsewhere argued that aesthetic judgments are entirely independent of moral values or other thematic considerations. Were we to eschew books written by those who believed in slavery, we would lose Plato. If Roman Catholicism were deemed a superstition occluding any clear view of the world, Dante must be discarded. If sexism, racism, or class prejudice made an author unreadable, the library shelves would hold very little.
     This conviction, which I believe I share with Marx and Engels, has estranged me from writers with whom I carry protest signs, but who think the correct political line an enhancement to a work of literature and its absence a disqualifying failing. Such assumptions are to me little different from the philistine notion that authors thought to be free-living can produce nothing of worth, while those with exemplary lives are likely to produce exemplary work. How silly.
     The historical fact remains that McCarthyism and its predecessors and followers not only handicapped American society to the extent that we still lag behind all other developed nations in most measures of social welfare, it also led to the elimination of dozens of writers worth reading. In fact as artists writers identified with the left need have little else in common. Perhaps the most apparent division is that between those who identified with Modernism with its frequent fragmentation and obscurity and those who aimed at a fully proletarian art, immediately clear to the uneducated as a catalyst for social change. Since the leftist intellectuals of the era were such a heterogeneous lot, few aesthetic generalizations about the movement are possible.
     Lola Ridge is among those whose reputations diminished almost to the vanishing point before enjoying renewed attention in recent years. Her prominence in both avant-garde literary circles and in the radical socialist movement is evident from her associations with periodicals. She published in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth and served as poetry editor for the revolutionary journal The New Masses. She published in Alfred Kreymborg’s Others and edited Harold Loeb’s Broom, but also appeared in and edited major magazines such as Poetry, New Republic, and The Saturday Review of Literature. She embraced poverty even after achieving considerable celebrity. Rexroth’s line in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is the simple truth: “Lola Ridge alone/ In an icy furnished room.” By 1999 a critic could describe her as “now forgotten,” [1] yet at the time of her death in 1941, she was celebrated by the New York Times and Publishers Weekly as one of the country’s most important poets.
     Much recent comment on Ridge has focused first on the decline of her reputation. While her revival is well-deserved, it seems that much of the rebirth of interest in her work in the last few decades is inspired by the same non-aesthetic criteria often blamed for her eclipse; that is, her radical themes and her gender.
     She attempted to combine her straightforward commitment to left-wing causes, arising from her own unimpeachably proletarian life experience, with the tenets of the artistic experimenters of her day whop dealt in Imagism, fragmentation, indirection, and ambiguity. How these two elements combine, how impressively they collide or harmonize is likely to determine the reader’s reaction to Ridge’s oeuvre. The polarity emerges as early as Ridge’s breakthrough publication, “The Ghetto.”
     The first section of “The Ghetto” includes a line that echoes Pound’s celebrated “In a Station of the Métro,” which had been published five years earlier comparing the faces of passers-by to fallen flower petals. Ridge writes “Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, / And moist faces of girls/ Like dank white lilies.” The Lower East Side residents are beautiful like flowers yet afflicted with mold. The force hostile to their lives is then figured as oppressive heat “like a great beast.” The heat in Hester Street, “Heaped like a dray/ With the garbage of the world.” The apparently helpless distress of Hester Street resembles (and includes) “infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air as at empty teats.” In its fragmentary, associative technique the poem was aesthetically au courant in 1916, the year of its publication.
     In the following image, however, the agitprop themes take priority. The “young women” moving about the neighborhood are, it seems, all attending “forums and meeting halls,” presumably organizing to end capitalism. In this aspect they overcome the monster of their circumstances represented by heat and become themselves “surging” and “indomitable.” They are suddenly unburdened, “their heads are uncovered to the stars,” calling out “with a free camaraderie,” as though they had never suffered. While these terms certainly may describe the attitude of a worker who has realized the basis for exploitation, they are less likely to characterize an entire neighborhood. Can this newfound self-consciousness render the immigrants unconquerable and free-spirited?
     In the mythic role of “the people” or “the masses” “their eyes are ancient and alone.” They are a timeless presence, enduring everything as Ma Joad says of “the people” in her famous speech in Grapes of Wrath: “But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us.” Thus the working class gains in theory a positive prognosis that may or may not obtain in history, even if soi-disant scientific socialists think the development from capitalism to socialism is inevitable. Failing to fall in line may gain an individual the title of “defeatist.” [2] The reader may suspect that Ridge has strayed from impressionist Imagism into a tendentious program.
     The next section (II) describes the persona’s room sublet from a working class family in the most specific and personal terms. Though unmentioned, the larger strictures of American capitalism remain always in the background. She observes the piety of the senior Sodos with sympathy but not unanimity. To her Mr. Sodos’ devotions amount to nothing more than “a broken whinnying/ Before the Lord's shut gate.” The persona’s sympathies lie instead with Sadie whom she calls “pagan” and presumably others of the younger generation among whom it was not uncommon to abandon their parents’ Old World traditions. [3]
     She may be inherently something of a free spirit, but Sadie’s life is nonetheless dominated by her work in a sweatshop where “all day the power machines/ Drone in her ears” and “all day the fine dust flies.” Her misery reanimates the heat monster which “like a kept corpse - /Fouls to the last corner.” She has twice been injured “to the bone,” and must caution her fellow-workers not to be too productive for fear of “again” being cut in hours or pay. She is, in fact, an exemplary radical, educating herself with “those books that have most unset thought,” and speaking at protest meetings, “her lit eyes kindling the mob.”
     Ridge was, however, no Stalinist, but instead an anarchist, an associate of Emma Goldman whom she applauded as a “mountain” and an organizer for the Ferrer Association. [4] Her heroine Sadie is also something of a bohemian, dancing “madly” at festivals and welcoming a “Gentile lover, that she charms and shrews” at whom her mother casts “narrowed eyes.” Sadie’s reading is perhaps overmatched by her upstairs neighbor Anna whose “mind is hard and brilliant and cutting like an acetylene torch,” though she works “in a pants factory.” She reads “psychology, plays, science, philosophies,” though only just studying English. This remarkable woman defies gender expectations, neglecting her appearance, she “covets nothing” and “would share all things/ Even a lover.”
     Though the working-class movement was substantial and genuinely radical in Ridge’s day, the number of believers in free love was miniscule. Here again the idealized picture of the dawning of revolutionary consciousness among the poor ill-fits the uncompromising realism of the setting, constructed of such details as “the keen draught blowing up the empty hall” and through the transom.
     In the third section the sharply observed details of tenement life are foregrounded with only the most discreet hint of the imagined glory of a socialist potential. “The sturdy Ghetto children” are happily waving flags at a patriotic parade. They possess considerable élan vital, “prancing,” “lusty,” the promise of the rising generation. As though in proud if unconscious Promethean rebellion, they shake “little fire sticks” at the night, “unafraid.” In contrast to these figures of hope Ridge embodies the effects of generations of oppression by capitalists and anti-Semites in “a small girl” who “cowers apart.” Confused and afraid, she is unable to appreciate the gift of an orange. Her eyes have the glow/ Of darkened lights.” Anxious rather than excited by the occasion, she dashes off to take refuge in the night, afraid. Her eyes are bright but shrouded, “like hooded lights” “out of the shadow of pogroms.” Though it is likely to be the observer, not the child, who recalls of the persecutions of the Old World, the cowed look of the underclass is authentically drawn.
     The fourth section again reproduces the pattern. The first section is a rich catalogue celebrating the lives of the immigrants as a lovely “tapestry” (though a “motley” one) or a pattern “in stained glass” (albeit “shivered”). “All the colors out to play,/ Jumbled iridescently...” The chaos clearly possesses a kind of beauty.


Calicoes and furs,
Pocket-books and scarfs,
Razor strops and knives


Ridge’s list turns from pickles to ornaments: beads, ribbons, and feathers, indicating the people’s joie de vivre, and then to an even more emphatically positive image: a vision of babies with their mothers “making all things right.” With all the crowds and activity Grand street is “like a great bazaar,” resembling also a decorated parade float or a “crazy quilt/ Stretched on a line.” Each of these suggests a joyful affirmation of life in its intoxicating diversity.
     However, Ridge follows these images of hope and fecundity with a turn toward darker notes beginning with the word “but.” She proceeds in stages.


But nearer seen
This litter of the East
Takes on a garbled majesty.


The word “but” signals the poet’s alteration of tone. “Majesty” remains, but it is now “garbled.” The phrase “litter of the East,” while suggesting Eastern European origins, poverty, and crowding, might have come directly from nativist propaganda. The market stalls display “glitter and the jumbled finery” in an ambiguous “dissolute array,” but they also suggest something “faded” and “decomposing.”


The richest image marks another transition.
Like an ancient tapestry of motley weave
Upon the open wall of this new land.


     The people’s beauty is implied by the word “tapestry” but the qualification “motley,” economically indicates their heterogeneous character and suggesting (for instance in the phrase “motley crew”) their penury. Their appearance here is accidental; they have been “flung” to survive as best they can. Though stemming from “ancient” cultures, they are in a new and unpredictable context.
     The contrast is illustrated by the following portrait.


Here, a tawny-headed girl...
Lemons in a greenish broth
And a huge earthen bowl
By a bronzed merchant
With a tall black lamb's wool cap upon his head...


     These sharp distinct images, it emerges, serve the same bipolar opposition that has run throughout the poem. The young “tawny-haired” woman has little in common with the swarthy merchant whose mind is fixed on business alone. (In fact, he resembles anti-Semitic stereotypes.) The older generation is also represented by another stall-holder, a pious and scholarly man who is mocked by the younger Jews as well as being roughly ousted by the police. He is, however, a “rock,” due to his faith in “the wisdom of the Talmud.” He is another timeless or “ancient” figure.
     By contrast a “young trader,” less of a traditionalist, seems a precursor of modern marketing as he sells “the notions of the hour,” rather like a television pitchman. This man dreams of building a skyscraper, an accomplishment doubtless achieved by more than one man who started as a pushcart vendor.
     In the sixth section the persona in her “little fifth-floor room” sees the stained walls and cockroaches of her shabby quarters. Her neighbors are weak and poor and often ailing. They are described here with adjectives such as “stooped,” “futile,” and “slack.” Even the parrot is “frowsy,” but it repeatedly calls out the word “Vorwärts!” reminding the reader that out of squalor liberation may emerge. Vorwärts, meaning “forward” in both Yiddish and German might signify progress in general, but it is here specific to the economic struggle. The word was most familiar to Ridge’s readers as the name of the popular Yiddish socialist daily, a journal that survives today. The Forward was a neighborhood institution, founded in Walhalla Hall just around the corner from Hester on Orchard Street.
     The fires of life and potential rebellion within still burn, their persistence signified by lighting Shabbat candles, in Yiddish called licht bentschen or "light praying" or licht tsinden, "light kindling.” The ritual meaning of their fires is displaced in section VII in which a fiery revolutionary spirit becomes explicit in a depiction of a clandestine anarchist meeting. In this gathering of the most collective of theorists she finds instead “egos out of the shell,” trying to prevail against each other with words, practicing with pride if imperfectly their new-found intellectual skills in debates with each other. [5] They may seem unlikely intellectuals, these “little squat tailors with unkempt faces,” In a partial rationalization of individualist/collective conundrum one “garbles,” Max Stirner, the anarchist of egoism who thought no imperative exists except the pursuit of self-interest. Here men (and a few women) charge ever forward; the only ancient element is their suffering, the “world-old want in their eyes.” Their absurdities are understandable as they are “yet in the primer” and their leader a mere “lank boy with hair over his eyes.” Yet they follow a glorious vision.


The great white Liberty,
Trailing her dissolving glory over each hard-won barricade -
Only to fade anew...


     For this reason their efforts in this “secret meeting in this shut-in room” are blessed and the room’s emptiness, which at first resembled a “barn” is now “bare as a manger,” recalling Christ’s poverty.
     In spite of this conflation of the political and the religious, this seems more a sketch from life than an intrusion of vulgar “socialist realism.” The radicals are portrayed without unrealistic idealization. Their self-contradictions and their absurdity are clear. Here Ridge’s Imagist practice again prevails over the reductive temptations of a political line.
     In Part VIII she situates the entire scene in “cramped ova” where once again the opposition arises between the world’s harshness with its “travails, immolations, cataclysms, hates,” and the beautiful babies “like little potted flowers.” The men’s eyes may be “heavy and dimmed,” but they retain a vision of the moon “lolling on the coverlet... like a woman offering her white body.” The same sensual moon is meanwhile making the nipples of the young girls “tingle and burn.” Eros, it seems is the dynamo that powers these “young lovers” and not an end to exploitation. They can hear life “calling its new Christs” “like a word molten out of the mouth of God.”
     A lovely phantasmagoria descends with the night and a delicate loveliness descends over the ghetto.


Lights go out...
And colors rush together,
Fusing and floating away...
Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels...
Mauves, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples
And burning spires in aureoles of light
Like shimmering auras.


     Part IX continues the affirmative celebration of the life of the street and of life in general without entailing a specific political end. The viewpoint returns to its center, the tenement room occupied by the persona. The delicate beauty of the scene is now paramount.


Without, the frail moon
Worn to a silvery tissue,
Throws a faint glamour on the roofs,
And down the shadowy spires
Lights tip-toe out...
Softly as when lovers close street doors.


     Again Hester Street is characterized as a woman, though suffering has not vanished as a subtext; the neighborhood is “a forlorn woman over-born.” “The Ghetto” concludes with a paean to “LIFE!,” with Ridge’s emphatic capitalization and exclamation point. Likely influence by Bergsons’s élan vital. Here “the black and clotted gutters” are simply another detail like the “Sweet staccato/ Of children's laughter.” The spectacle of commerce is from this perspective a musical interchange of energies. The replacement of the old with the new seems a part of the great symphony of reality.
     The poem ends with the incorporation of suffering (“bloody,” “bitter”) into this majestic and beautiful depiction, including an explicit reference to Christ’s Passion implying that the redemptive trials of the workers will yet result in their redemption.

Bartering, changing, extorting,
Dreaming, debating, aspiring,
Astounding, indestructible
Life of the Ghetto...

Strong flux of life,
Like a bitter wine
Out of the bloody stills of the world...
Out of the Passion eternal.


     “The Ghetto” is built on a number of bipolar oppositions, set against one another in swinging Whitmanic lines. Thematically the most important is the old and the new, a natural reflection of the immigrant experience. This appears as the contrast between religious faith and secularism, with its choice of individualistic commerce and collective struggle. In association with these themes, significant image systems play off moist against fiery and dark against light. Surely the opposition between those who believe they glimpse the possibility of a better life and those focused on improving their lot under present conditions is as legitimate and workable a structural element as these (or others such as male/female or hot/cold that play a role in the poem).
     There can be no doubt that the contrast of the revolutionary with the traditional was a prominent part of Hester Street life in the early twentieth century. It is difficult to realize now that there were at the time of the publication of “The Ghetto” and for thirty years thereafter neighborhoods in which communism and anarchism were commonplace. “It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know…. We literally felt we were making history.” [6] Though Ridge may strike current readers as falsely including the question of revolution among the daily concerns of New Yorkers, this is due to historical short-sightedness.
     Art excels at ambiguity, mystery, and paradox whereas political commitment must for tactical reasons suppress ambivalence and uncertainty. For this reason tendentious works can be reductive. In Ridge, though, the poetry leads. Her lyrically beautiful images are the most prominent feature of her text. She is faithful to her impression of experience, with only an occasional hyperbole suggesting special pleading. Her anarchist notion of the possibility of human freedom serves a spiritual as well as an economic end. Revolution is in fact only a part of a larger opposition between the old and the new that oscillates in the Lower East Side ghetto in harmonic association with other tensions. If readers do not fault Aristophanes or Dante for detailing the struggles of their own times , making no secret of their own partisan positions, they need not shrink from Americans whose causes seem to them passé . Those to whom anarchists seem silly or Communists wicked as well as those who wish their art to conform to one ideology or another have a good deal in common. Those concerned with poetry will be content with the rhythms and the images.





1. Nancy Berke, “Ethnicity, Class, and Gender in Lola Ridge's ‘The Ghetto,’" Vol. 16, No. 1, Discourses of Women and Class (1999), pp. 70-81. Revaluations include Terese Svoboda’s biography Anything that Burns You and Louise Bernikow’s discussion in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry.

2. I myself was so labeled by a militant organization many years ago, though I thought my own analysis as radical as theirs.

3. In the decade to follow, this sort of generational conflict became the theme of popular works such as Abie’s Irish Rose and The Jazz Singer.

4. The phrase appears n her poem titled “Emma Goldman.” The association between radicalism and looser morality is by no means constant outside of anarchism. Vivian Gornick recalls her parents advising her to date only Communist boys as they would more predictably treat her with “respect.”

5. The American left has often repeated the story of factions turning on others, more easily defeatable than the ruling class, with whom they might better form a popular front. In this it resembles the splits of religious sects.

6. Paul Levinson, quoted in Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism.

Suburbs

     I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, closer in distance or travel time to the Loop than many of the city’s own neighborhoods. Yet Glen Ellyn was a world apart from that sometimes gritty city with its huge black population and its working class ethnic neighborhoods whose boundaries, though unwritten, were fiercely enforced. My own neighborhood, white and upper middle class, had its own rules. In the 1950s, by social convention enforced by real estate agents neither Black people nor Asians could buy homes in Glen Ellyn’s tree-shaded streets with large lots, nor could Jews.
     In the morning my father, like the other fathers of the town, would gather at the commuter train station, each wearing a dark suit with a white shirt, bleached and starched, and a fedora. There were few women. In the late afternoon they all returned.
     Like many of my age cohort, I did not find this an attractive prospect for my own future. I thought blacks had culture, as did every nation and national group. I could perceive cultural patterns in small Iowa towns, but I could not in the suburbs where it seemed size of homes and greenness of lawns were important determinants of social standing.
     There were numerous other standards for judging one’s neighbors. Mine was the first generation for whom orthodontia was the norm, and in Glen Ellyn, one practitioner had an office in the center of the village while the other was situated out on Roosevelt Road with the gas stations and drive-in burger shops. Though unable to compare the expertise of the two, Glen Ellyn’s adolescents all knew which was more prestigious and to which each classmate went. There were two country clubs, one more impressively costly than the other. (My family joined neither.) Many of my friends purchased their “ivy league” style clothing at Bob Horsley’s, the classy little haberdashery in our downtown (most of which was half-timbered neo-Tudor).[1] My closet was full of labels from Sears and Montgomery Wards where my parents felt at home. Frugal they may have been, but at least, I thought, they did not sink to the level of patronizing Thom McAn’s or Robert Hall.
     My home town seemed as tasteless as the bologna on white bread I daily took to school and vapid as a Mitch Miller tune. Though not as well off as many in the town, my family was secure, but I felt alienated and bored, stewing in a very particular brand of adolescent dissatisfaction, even as countless aspirants would have felt they had made it if their family owned a home to a town like mine.
     While I was in high school, the film club founded by a friend showed Eisenstein’s monumental Ivan the Terrible. At one dramatic peak, messengers arrive at the court declaring, “The suburbs of Moscow are burning!” The spell of that beautifully stylized operatic masterpiece was suddenly broken for me, as I involuntarily imagined the wanton destruction of golf courses and shopping malls.
     Another film club program featured a program of 30s documentaries including The City, a film made in 1939 by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke with a prestigious crew of progressives participating. [2] After depicting an early New England town, the film focused on urban pathologies, depicting the poor living in tenements and crowded apartments on unclean streets. The third section of the film portrays a more desirable alternative: garden towns with open spaces where residents might enjoy short commutes to nearby workplaces and could shop at convenient shopping centers. It was a vision of the suburbia of the future based on a few planned communities already built, though the real demographic shift did not occur until after WWII when the GI Bill allowed many veterans to purchase homes and developments like Levittown sprang up across the nation. Between 1948 and 1958, 85% of the new homes built in the United States were located in suburbs.
     The rosy hopes of the progressives of the thirties did not long survive. Lewis Mumford, who had contributed to The City came to believe that “the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion,” producing “not merely a child-centered environment” but a design for living “based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.” [3]
     Pejorative use of the adjective “suburban,” however, predates Mumford’s reversal. According to the OED the first recorded use of the word bearing an implied negative value is in Byron’s Beppo in which the lovely Laura criticizes one of her associates for an unfashionable look, “vulgar, dowdyish, and suburban." As an urbanite and, in fact, a resident of Venice, a notoriously sophisticated place, she looks down on the suburbanites even when they are wealthy. [4]
     Ralph Waldo Emerson continued the tradition in "The Conduct of Life," where he wrote, "If you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house." I think his terms could apply to the treeless, sidewalkless developments full of homes lacking character but containing numerous bathrooms which sell for over a half million dollars. In such would-be neighborhoods parents drive their children to a bus stop a block away and the dogs will go berserk when they descry a pedestrian.
     Born in the first wave of postwar babies, I grew up in the Eisenhower fifties, famous for the conformity that so characterized the suburbs. Yet voices of protest emerged and found a place on the best seller lists and, in the great American tradition of cooptation, even into hit movies: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman with (Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney), William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man, and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. The alienated became anti-heroes in such movies as The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause, and a series of films of Tennessee Williams’ plays, albeit softened for cinema. Further out the were the Beats, visible to everyone in Life magazine, and, at the decade’s beginning Neurotica, founded by Jay Landesman, edited after the third issue by Gershon Legman and, at its end, Paul Krassner’s The Realist.
     When I was in middle school, my brother’s high school English teacher risked, I have no doubt, his job by giving my brother a copy of The Realist. Though I lived in what seemed to me the emptiest of environments, I visited Hyde Park and Old Town in Chicago, seeking alternative spaces and wrote the small presses in the back of The New American Poetry 1945-1960. At school I ostentatiously carried this volume though, of course, it was not part of the curriculum. [5] I reached out to what I could find of the Other, visiting Old Left offices in the city, gratifying the aging radicals with a younger face and joining the handful of people who attended their demonstrations. I wandered Chicago’s great South Side, walking miles along 64th Street before returning to look for a used book store or a coffee house near the university of Chicago. I sought out restaurants like Diana’s in the old Greektown when the place was a small room in back of a little grocery with a stunning variety of olives, the Assyrian-American restaurant on North Halstead where old men stirred their pickled cabbage and gambled in the back room, or the Warsawianka which served such homely fare as boiled chicken and blood soup.
     My mind had rambled far from the suburbs, and once I left, I rarely looked back. I lived in college towns and big cities, often in more-or-less voluntary poverty, until moving from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley where it might seem to an observer that the suburbs never let go of me and that I have come to rest after a gypsy career in a village not so very different from the one in which I spent my schooldays.




1. All things devolve. Cheap housing developments tend to have British-sounding names like Bonnie Brae or Pickwick Estates.

2. The film included planning by Pare Lorentz, writing by Lewis Mumford, music by Aaron Copland, and narration by Morris Carnovsky and was considered sufficiently au courant to be shown at the World’s Fair in New York that year.  Steiner and Van Dyke were leftists, members of the agitprop film group Nykino, inspired by Vertov’s Kino Pravda and similar work in the Soviet Union.

3. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York, 1961), 494.

4. Stanza LXVI, line 524.

5. My wife and I were visiting a very affluent and very Southern Californian relative whose surly teen-age son could hardly be coaxed from his room from which one could constantly hear the sounds of Kurt Cobain. When his parents tried to persuade him to join us for a dinner out, he used what he surely thought a solid excuse. “Aww, I got to write a paper for English class.” When asked what topic had been assigned, he said, “Oh, just some stupid boring book my teacher made us read.” “What’s the title?” I pursued him. “Oh, it’s so dumb. On the Road.” Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Notes on Recent Reading 39 (Aristophanes, Machiavelli, Braddon)

Plutus (Aristophanes)

     An excerpt from this play was included in a 1916 anthology of socialist literature edited by Upton Sinclair, but Aristophanes, like many comic writers, was more a reactionary than a revolutionary. The play does make a strong case for the inequity of the distribution of wealth, but its plot is more a satire of human nature than of any political or economic system.
     Though Chremylos, the poor but honest farmer, complains bitterly that the virtuous tend to have little while scoundrels flourish, the solution he seeks is not that workers receive the fruit as of their labor but rather that they enjoy unearned income just as the upper crust has been doing for years. This casts Chremylos’ reform into the realm of fantasy. Thus the play ends with the unlikely displacement of the Olympians (and Hermes’ acceptance of a menial position in the main character’s household).


Mandragora (Machiavelli)

     This little play owes its energy to the high spirits of commedia dell’arte which like farce has a simple base in the absurd things which humans do when motivated by sex. The fact that such things are as funny today as four hundred years ago is suggested by the play’s frequent revivals. Tom Hanks has played Callimaco and Wallace Shawn did an excellent translation.
     In keeping with convention, the characters are reductive caricatures. I can enjoy Nicia, the elder husband; Lucrezia, the lusty wife mismatched with him; Callimaco, the man on the make, with his trusty sidekick and servant Siro; Ligurio, the sponger; and Fra Timoteo, the unprincipled churchman as much as anyone. Nonetheless, I felt just a bit disappointed when Callimaco’s fancifully elaborate seduction strategy succeeds and the new lovers look forward to further trysts, that is it. The play ends. Sketching the crazy unlikely structure of deception was the dramatic center.
     The cynical portrayal of the avaricious monk has often been considered satire of the Medici regime, and some have even seen Callimaco as a comic form of a Machiavellian Prince who, with his opportunistic use of strength overcomes Lucrezia who is associated with fortune. Such speculation may be left to those to whom politics are more interesting than the bedroom.


Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon)

     Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a super-productive professional Victorian writer like Trollope, produced “sensation” fiction which brought plot to the fore and themes of tabloid scandal to bourgeois readers, and the narrative turns make this book a page-turner to this day. If description rarely rises above the level of competence and character development is stalled at rudimentary, her work is still entertaining and “popular,” pleasantly digestible on a beach or in an airport terminal. One should not look too closely at such flaws as lapses in continuity – the author sometimes worked on several serials at once – or the acceptance of received ideas typical of literature with mass appeal. If Robert Audley’s pursuit of the truth is portrayed as motivated by Providence and “my lady’s” crimes in the end half-excused due to the revelation of her inherited insanity, this is wholly appropriate considering the author’s intentional focus on action. Real analysis of religion, gender roles, and psychiatric issues need have little place here. Even plausibility is sacrificed: what are the odds that the future Lady Audley would happen into the village of the uncle of her husband’s best friend? Or that Tallboys would have been such a successful prospector? Or that he would have been tossed into the well and then survived? Such questions are not likely to trouble Braddon’s readers.
     Likewise the story suggests a number of potentially significant themes relating to gender (Clara Talboys is a sort of double for her brother George), social class (the servant Phoebe resembles her mistress Lady Audley), madness (is Lady Audley really insane as the doctor concludes after a few moments conversation?), gentility (Lady Audley is so charming, she is not thought to be capable of crime), and bigamy (the author was living with her publisher whose wife was confined to a mental hospital), yet these are all in the end at the service of the plot. Judging from Wilkie’s earlier “sensation” novels and his later tendentious one, this is doubtless fortunate.

The Poetry of the Blues

This essay seeks to use the wider society’s first glimpse of the blues in W. C. Handy’s Father of the Blues as an image to sketch the character of the genre. I wrote it as the introductory chapter to a book of my essays on blues lyrics as poetry, many of which are posted on this site.



     Some of the finest twentieth century American poetry appeared neither in little magazines nor in books from literary or academic presses. The poetry of the blues was sung on front porches and in juke joints in some of the poorest and least educated regions of the country. In fact, it was specifically in such areas that the blues could flourish as could other traditional forms of oral poetry such as Appalachian ballads and Cajun song.
     In the Mississippi Delta gifted poet-musicians created a body of work that continues to move listeners both through recordings of the original artists and the countless others whom they influenced. The power of their poetry is best experienced in performance, but the strength of their lyrics as poetry emerges more dramatically in transcriptions on the page. Close readings of classic blues songs depend on a sophisticated system of conventions which the artist may observe or flout, but which have the precision and expressive power of troubadour cansos or Elizabethan sonnets.
     The subtlety and complexity of this signifying system allowed the singers to express the themes most central to the psyche in profound and beautiful verses. The primary topic of the blues is sexual love, the most powerful human desire, though the songs also engage alienation and mortality. The emotional range of the blues is wide. Though the melancholy heart’s cry predominates, some blues songs are high-spirited, even rollicking, which others have a tone of confidence or contentment.
     The orthodox origin myth of the blues is well-known. In his autobiography in 1941, W. C. Handy describes hearing a ragged man in the train station at Tutwiler, Mississippi who played slide guitar and made the “weirdest” music he had ever heard while singing the repeated line: “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” Handy understood the phrase to refer simply to the man’s destination, the town of Moorhead, at the intersection of the Southern Railroad and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley line sometimes called the Yazoo Delta or the “Yellow Dog.” The reference to such a crossroad has the functional purpose of using a landmark rare in a flat agricultural district, but that literal meaning is simply the foundation for a more significant complex of connotation from which may be spun a characterization of the blues themselves.
     The energy, the passion, even the “weirdness” of the song Handy heard suggest semantic trajectories beyond the simply geographical. In Handy’s own “Yellow Dog Blues” the poem expresses love-longing as the singer finds her lover has fled and has “gone where the Southern cross' the Yellow Dog.” [1] Here the intersection is less a specific location than simply indicating a place inaccessibly far away. Indeed, in most of the songs that later use the same phrase it signifies the distance distant between the singer and the love-object, and thus the phrase bears commonly a plaintive edge of lament. The utterance of the original singer in Tutwiler is obscure given the scarcity of data, but it is clear that he is expressing some heartfelt suffering associated with separation. In Handy’s usage the pangs of love-longing are explicit and foregrounded.
     Loneliness, though, is not always the inverse of romance. A feeling of lost desolation may be existential as well as situational and the bereft tones of blues songs have long spoken to listeners in a wide variety of suffering. If many blues songs are, in fact, laments or complaints, this is because the world is, as Christians say, a “vale of tears,” or, in the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths, life is suffering.
     Though the singer looked like a vagrant (probably especially so to the fastidious Handy), he was far from aping popular white musical styles as a great many black entertainers have done in all periods. His song sounded strange because it was a creole form using African elements of which the artist was well aware. He was in a sense an underground rebel, impudently asserting his own music in the center of a hostile Jim Crow culture. Local railroad slang -- “Yellow Dog,” “North Dog,” “Cannonball,” “Peavine” – was primarily used by the black workers, so the lexical choice as well is assertively African-American.
     The steam locomotives were spectacles and the railroad company’s properties reflected that industrial sector’s great strength, both mechanical and financial. The intersection of two rail lines, an intensification of a highway crossroad, seemed a nexus of power. Any such point suggests a point of decision, a choice of routes in life as in the motif of Herakles at the crossroads of virtue and vice. More broadly in many traditions including the New World belief systems derived from Yoruba, crossroads suggest a point of contact between human and divine realms. [2] In the context of blues history one cannot avoid the supernatural associations that lend such power to Robert Johnson’s prayer at the crossroads in “Cross Road Blues.”
     Though Handy was, by his own declaration, ignorant of the blues, and his experience was not only fragmentary but also accidental, these terms together construct the distinctive semantic field that characterizes the blues. They are often focused on the theme of suffering, alienation, and a consciousness of mortality, and on a dramatic enactment of the power of Eros. The songs are expressed in a purely American creolized form that mixes African and European musical conventions and employs subcultural slang. At times a scent of the divine or of the diabolic lingers in the air.
     The generic development over a period of time generated a rich inventory of conventions and thus an equal number of ways to negate or twist or develop those conventions, leading to increased signifying potential. The code was rendered denser yet by the African-American perspective which lent it a hip DuBoisian “double consciousness.” The signifying monkey, though a figure in toasts rather than blues songs, is an apt emblem for the cunning indirections of African-American poetry and, indeed, of all artful use of language.
     Since adolescence I have been as captivated by the sound of the blues as W. C. Handy was upon hearing the anonymous musician. I am convinced that listeners’ appreciation of the lyrics of singers like Son House and Charlie Patton would benefit from close critical reading no less than sonnets by Spenser and Sidney. I, like any reader of blues songs on the printed page, will return to the recorded performances, of course, in which the addition of expressive music, phrasing, and tone contribute to the uniquely American beauty of these extraordinary poems. Anyone who has ever felt abandoned and lost, or altogether in love, or simply lusty has experienced the blues. Anyone susceptible to poetry can feel the power of the blues in these masterful American songs.



1. See W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues. With only this snatch of the anonymous singer’s song, his meaning remains unknown. In their general narrative outline, Handy’s later lyrics are a reply to Shelton Brooks’ “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” (1913) which uses racetrack imagery and makes no reference to trains. The versions of “Yellow Dog Blues” by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith follow Handy closely.

2. Crossroads are associated with Odin, Hekate, Hermes, and other deities. In late medieval and early modern times, suicides and sometimes murderers as well were buried at crossroads.

Every Reader's Herbert

     George Herbert, the seventeenth century poet and Anglican priest, reminds me of certain Tang Dynasty Buddhists who retreated from the world to cultivate their spirituality and to write. Scion of a wealthy aristocratic family and godson of John Donne, he excelled at Cambridge where he was named Public Orator before joining Parliament. Though he seemed headed for a career in government – his brother Edward who assumed the title of 1st Baron Herbert combined service as a soldier and ambassador with significant publications as a poet and philosopher – at the age of thirty-six George Herbert gave up all worldly ambitions to devote himself to the duties of a parish priest in the obscure parish of Fugglestone St. Peter. He seems to have pursued his work there with exemplary dedication. Izaak Walton’s unreliable biography tells how Herbert paused while walking to Salisbury to offer assistance to a poor man and arrived eventually to join his company “soyl’d and discompos’d,” saying that “the thought of what he had done, would prove Musick to him at Midnight.”
     By the time of his death, only a few years after his ordination, he had published nothing beyond a few Greek and Latin poems, but on his deathbed he gave the manuscript of a volume he called The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later known for his own withdrawal from affairs to establish the community at Little Gidding. Herbert’s poetry is entirely concerned with religious topics; it resembles the Psalms in that his primary topic is the depression and elation, the alternation between obedience and errancy in the individual spiritual life. This may be a hard sell to a modern audience that would prefer verses treating love or violence or madness, but Herbert’s passion is so high and his self-discernment so sensitive that he moves and impresses readers who cannot share his doctrines.
     Yet Herbert had a remarkable sensual quality in his spirituality. In his manual for rural priests like himself, he suggests that minister should preach using figures of speech employing images of "things of ordinary use” such as farm implements in order to lead the congregation toward “Heavenly Truths.” Though his description of his parishioners as “thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a poynt of Zeal” may sound condescending, his poems use the same technique to make spiritual experience intelligible to his readers.
     Metaphysical poets like Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw favored extended, often unlikely comparisons now called “conceits.” “The Pulley” illustrates both a rhetorical figure of this sort and the unique ambivalence of the author’s faith, marked by an unusually agonistic note, as though he, like Jacob, must always wrestle with his angels.


When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”


     The pulley is unmentioned in the body of this little fable; still, the reader understands that the mechanical device represents the force that lifts the soul toward god, toward what Christians call salvation (what other traditions may consider enlightenment or liberation). The deity in Herbert’s view uses a cunning means to outwit human sloth, relying neither on the force of revelation nor on blind faith. If the surest way to hoist people up to the heavens is their deep-rooted anxiety, the troubled believer may paradoxically gain confidence as well as guilt from doubt, certainty arising our of uncertainty. The mortal is drawn upwards, willy-nilly, by the pulley of his restless Angst.
     In a clever trope on the story of Pandora, god is said to have granted all good things to people, withholding only “rest,” to ensure than they avoid complacency or pride and fail to render divine homage. In the last stanza the word rest is deployed bearing its other meaning of remainder in a playful way suddenly referring not to relaxation but to all the other treasures. The word acts like a prism, promising “the rest,” that is, all the other available excellences as well as “rest” meaning psychic repose. The implications of the word “rest” grow until what might have meant simple indolence merges with the final rest of an eternity in paradise.
     With his audience for the most part reading his poetry on a printed page, Herbert exploited the appearance of the text, making pictures with the words in a sort of concrete poetry. One example is “Easter Wings” which was originally published sideways on two facing pages, as though it had been rotated ninety degrees to the right.


Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.


     Here in place of the pulley that lifts the believer heavenward, it is wings, associated with Christ’s return from the dead which Christianity teaches allows the individual likewise to conquer death. The image of “imping” or grafting extra feathers on a falcon’s wings in the effort to increase her powers in flight is another example of an unlikely Metaphysical conceit which with wit seeks to shadow forth truth. God’s wings cannot fail; therefore, Herbert can fly by joining his poor insufficient human wing to the divine. Though such an image had perhaps never before been used, it should strike the reader with the pleasure of a stroke of wit and the deeper and longer-lasting satisfaction of a comforting insight.
     The effects of the poem’s arrangement on the page are simple but multiple. Apart from the immediately pleasing novelty effect of the double pair of wings, the reader observe that the shortest lines describe the greatest spiritual impoverishment and the latitude of the longer lines contains a plenitude of bliss. In a sense, each of Herbert’s poems may be conceived as an attempt to fashion wings that might bear his readers aloft.
     Herbert’s paradoxical principle of spiritual advancement through hesitation is again the theme. The first stanza concludes with the convention of the “fortunate fall,” which deems Adam’s sin in the end felicitous because it allows then for Christ’s sacrifice and the salvation of humankind. With insistent alliteration, Herbert insists that the fall in this way is a prerequisite to his gaining wings to “further the flight in me.” In the next stanza, more directly personal, Herbert confesses his shortcomings, his “sicknesses and shame,” yet claims that his very “affliction” “shall advance the flight in me.” Out of his need, Herbert has created a model that has since served many others. One may doubt one’s sanctity, but who can doubt his or her sinfulness? Of his poignant longing to rest in the divine bosom, Herbert has created what the cynic may regard as an ingenious exercise in self-hypnosis.
     In the final poem of Herbert’s book, the speaker’s acceptance and rejection of the divine is paralleled by the dramatic back and forth, the call and response of the poem’s dramatic narrative. For all the poet’s anxieties and self-criticism, this tortuous oscillation ends on a sublimely positive note, and it suddenly seems as though his doubt was the dynamo that propelled him in his terms to salvation.


Love (III)

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.


     Here the dramatic back and forth of conversation substitutes for the elaborate Metaphysical conceits of other poems. The second line’s mention of “dust” stands out for its very concreteness. The pose is utter sincerity and directness; in which ars est celare artem (“art is to conceal art”). The poet fashions a lovely anticipation of heaven using the homely image of a good meal. While perfectly orthodox in terms of Christian teachings on grace and original sin, the persona’s self-doubt opens the text even to non-Christians.
     Herbert’s themes were so unrelentingly Christian at a time when the rhetoric and drama of Christian myth shaped virtually European spirituality. Modern secularists may be more tolerant of Hindu or Buddhist theology than Christian, but it is not difficult to transpose Herbert’s existential fears, his sense of unworthiness into terms general enough to apply to most individual experience. A dear friend who is a critic told me he does not deal with religious writings, because no one can know anything of the claims of religion and thus we have nothing to teach each other. This attitude, of course, is parochial, limited to a cultural slice of our own time and place. In fact god broadly conceived probably tops even love as a topic to engage writers and readers through the whole of human history. And fortunately, Herbert, though grave as can be, is anything but sanctimonious.
     Those for whom personal experience is more significant in spirituality than tradition, theology, and bureaucratic status value often the full-blown visionary mystics, but the consciousness of a man like Herbert who struggled and wavered and yet, according to the testaments of his contemporaries, strove to actually live a Christian life, may have more to offer most readers. In the end religion and philosophy are not arcane disciplines for studious eccentrics, but instead present the issues at the core of everyone’s life. The records of a man like Herbert who, with a sensitive and open heart, sought to live the best life he could conceive in this fallen world, will always find receptive readers. He aimed every poem at the very horizon of truth, seeking to glimpse Ultimate Reality in the myriad things of this world. If he never could feel he stood quite on solid ground, he is the more plainly like all the rest of us.

Trouble in Elysium: Carew’s “A Rapture”

Parenthetical numerical references are to the lines of the poem. Endnotes are in brackets.


     A purely libertine poem is possible, but it must be very short. [1] With even modest amplitude, the complexities, ambiguities, ambivalences, and mysteries of Eros will almost inevitably emerge, often with little regard for the author’s conscious intention. The libertinism of Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture,” which attracted opprobrium as well as readers since its composition, is justified by an argument for enthusiastic utopian free love, yet the poem is laced with contradictions. Its joyful sensual hedonism is broken by nastiness and self-doubt, and the females who appear at times as independent sexual agents seem at others mere passive commodities. Such incongruities are part of the very structure of the poem which mixes literary genres in a continual play with reader expectations. [2]
     Carew embodied the Cavalier values expressed in the carpe diem poems of Herrick, Suckling, and Lovelace. [3] He was himself a courtier, holding offices such as server or “taster in ordinary” to the king, though his behavior was not shaped by a wish to avoid scandal. His reputation as a rake and a wit was well enough, but his excesses went beyond those typical of the privileged of the day. Thoughts of reform may well have come to him once his health was failing. The Earl of Clarendon noted that "after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence.” [4]
     However that may be, “A Rapture” seems at first glance an assertive defense of free love. It is difficult to mistake the antinomianism of some of Carew’s lines.


          All things are lawful there, that may delight
          Nature or unrestrained appetite ;
                                                        (111-112)

          We only sin when Love's rites are not done.
                                                       (114)


     His claim is not merely that all is permitted; he further insists that bliss and blessedness are certain to result. This is the central significance of the equation between sexual experience and paradise, figured as a blissful shore (9), a heavenly spot occupied by “blest shades” (24), where choirs sing paeans to the “deity of love” (47); love makes, in fact, Elysium (2 and 110). The woman is as enthusiastic as the man; she is, after all “free” (20 and 150), they both have “necks unyoked.” (151). He refers to “our joys” (147) as wholly mutual. He uses political language, saying that he can enjoy her body because he is “enfranchised.” (29), that those who accept conventional morality are slaves to a tyrant (144) who has usurped (150) the place that should belong to Beauty and Nature (26).
     The liberty and equality of the couple is problematized, however, by the poet’s imagery. All the elaborately pretty accoutrements of the locus amoenus cannot conceal the fact that the lady is most passive. She is an ivory carving (30), a thing of snow (28, 72) and gold (28). It may be commonplace to call one’s beloved a “treasure” (32, 56), but Carew’s financial language goes further. She is a “mine” (33), potential children are “coinage” (35), the regrets of those who had been modest become their payment of “double rent” to “Love's exchequer” (146).
     He manages even a few acrobatic image systems in which the female is twice passive. She is the sea (81) and yet she is also the harbor (87), while he, the ship, moves through both. In another passage women are at first flowers, rose, violet, and others (63-64) visited by the active male bee and then Celia is the beehive to which the active bee returns (78).
     Mythological references allow writers to introduce complexes of narrative, often elaborated in meaning by a history of usage, with a single word. Carew’s are curiously at cross purposes with the trajectory of his argument. [5] He cites Danae, Daphne, and Lucrece as though they were women who notoriously enjoyed passionate love, though all were raped while seeking to avoid sexual contact, as well as Penelope, legendary for fidelity to her long-absent husband, and Laura, Petrarch’s highly idealized love. The inevitable effect of these references, after an initial quizzical surprise, is to undermine Carew’s contention that sex makes all things well.
     The conclusion of the poem undercuts the ostensible theme most dramatically. Though “Honour” and morality in various forms had been ridiculed at the outset as a bugaboo and imposter one might readily ignore. The malevolent giant returns however (154 ff.), reminding Carew that he would be honor-bound under certain circumstances to fight a duel, despite the disapproval of the church. Here he does not question social convention, but assumes he would have no choice but to ignore Christian teaching in favor of his culture’s expectations. With suddenness and drama he equates that dilemma with his lady’s free sexual practice, calling her by the same name the most conservative prig might use: “whore” (166). The reader must feel very far indeed from Elysium. [6]
     Surely it is unlikely that the author is clumsily attempting Celia’s seduction while unaware of the ambiguities, nor does it work as a cynical display of self-interest whose very incongruities make it the more amusing. One doubts that Carew is simply confused, except in the sense that we all are confused. Surely each of the positions suggested by the poem has a sort of truth. Doubtless Carew did fantasize at times that he might occupy a prelapsarian paradise with unlimited orgasms for all, while on other occasions he felt the notoriety that reminded him he did not live in Elysium. He may well have felt respect and concern for the wishes of one woman at one time, while thoughtlessly wishing to take possession of another. His jumble of literary genres and his self-defeating use of allusion are among the signs that he was well aware of his own contradictions. Not knowing what else to make of them, he made a nicely turned poem.





1. The same is true of a poem of unadulterated "romantic" love.

2. A critic has delineated the role of “pastoral, Ovidian epyllion, carpe diem seduction lyric, [and] elegiac couplets.” See Laura Alexander Linker’s “Goblins of Desire: Carew's Libertine Women in ‘A Rapture’" CEA Critic vol. 69, no. 3 (spring and summer 2007), pp. 1-12.

3. Metaphysicals and cavaliers were not always as clearly distinguished in life as in reductive histories. Donne, from whom Carew borrowed much, was court preacher to Charles I during Carew’s service there and Carew had earlier spent time in the service of Baron Herbert of Cherbury, George Herbert’s brother. His use of the name Celia and his smooth and melodious lines suggest affinities with Jonson and the Cavaliers, while his use of elegiac and heroic couplets foreshadows neo-Classicism. “A Rapture” is most clearly influenced by Volpone III, ii and Donne’s Elegy XIX.

4. Earl of Clarendon, Life and Continuation.

5. The point is thoroughly developed in Laura Alexander Linker’s excellent essay cited in note 2.

6. Moderns would be even more outraged to read Carew’s “The Second Rapture” in which he declares that wealth, honor, family, long life, all are mere “shadows of felicity” when compared with a “wench about thirteen,” though, to be sure, she should be already experienced, “Already voted to the queen/
Of lust and lovers.”

The Orphic Hymn to Hekate

The Orphic Hymn to Hekate

 

 

Εἰνοδίην Ἑκάτην κλῄιζω, τριοδῖτιν, ἐραννήν,

οὐρανίην, χθονίαν τε, καὶ εἰναλίην κροκόπεπλον,

τυμβιδίην, ψυχαῖς νεκύων μέτα βακχεύουσαν,

Πέρσειαν, φιλέρημον, ἀγαλλομένην ἐλάφοισιν,

νυκτερίην, σκυλακῖτιν, ἀμαιμάκετον βασίλειαν,

ταυροπόλον, παντὸς κόσμου κληιδοῦχον ἄνασσαν,

ἡγεμόνην, νύμφην, κουροτρόφον, οὐρεσιφοῖτιν,

λισσόμενοις κούρην τελεταῖς ὁσίαισι παρεῖναι

βουκόλῳ εὐμενέουσαν ἀεὶ κεχαρηότι θυμῷ.

 

 

O Hecate of crossroads, come to me!

You rule sky, earth, and sea in saffron robes.

At home among the dead you wildly dance,

o Persian, fond of solitude and deer!

Unconquerable queen of dogs and night,

bull-mistress, key to all the cosmos, queen!

O nymph who nurtures babes and rules the hills,

We pray you, lady, see our sacrifice,

enjoy the incense, smile upon your shepherd

 

 

     The Orphic hymns have been rather neglected by admirers of ancient poetry. They are still to find a place in the Loeb’s Library series and they have attracted very few translators [1] and little comment. Ignoring the priorities of scholarship, though, neo-pagans have adopted the poems, sometimes with the hope that the verses retain magic efficacy. In fact, from the time of their composition these poems have been found in contexts of ritual and cult rather than of literature. For that reason they yield accurate information about ancient religious practice. Yet such data are sometimes self-contradictory. Often, like the book of Genesis, such texts are collages of materials added at different times or for different purposes.

     The book of hymns opens with an invocation to Musaios, the legendary son of Orpheus considered the founder of religious poetry in Greece. Just as in the Indian Vedas, the priestly concern is to define sacrificial procedures. Musaeus is asked to attend “to learn what rites to sacrifice belong,” and only then does the poet invoke a long list of deities including all the Olympians with the exception of Aphrodite as well as a raft of other deities. [2] It looks rather as though the author were anxious not to pass over any powerful figure that might resent the omission. [3]

     The fact that Hekate is the first divinity to receive more than a mention may relate to her role in Orphism which, like most of the other mystery cults of the ancient world as well, is salvationist, promising devotees eternal life. Hekate is often conflated with Diana, Demeter, and Proserpine. Each of these deities has to do with the renewal of life, the first through the annual cycle of animal and vegetable rebirth and the second and third through myths involving their visiting the world of the dead and returning.

     Orphism and Hekate have also strong ties to Dionysos, another deity associated with death and rebirth. Hekate is said to do specifically Bacchic dances, and Orphism is Thracian in origin, as is Sabazios the chief Thracian deity, depicted on horseback, but later identified with Dionysos. [4] Another god absorbed within Dionysos’ cult in antiquity is Zagreus who was identified with rites in which sacrificial animals were torn to pieces and eaten raw reenacting Dionysos’ omophagia by the Titans. Orpheus and Dionysos have in common the pattern of death and rebirth which encourages the worshipper to hope for a similar individual victory over death. [5]

     Hecate is thus woven into a mythic texture preoccupied with rebirth. The fact that her powers are regarded as a gift from Zeus implies her receptiveness in turn to the requests of pious petitioners, and, in fact, this hymn is a prayer, seeking to establish contact with the deity in order to ask for favor. The incense mentioned in the last line is an inducement, as is the praise implicit in the catalogue of divine attributes. This catalogue of titles formally resembles such Catholic prayers as the invocation to Mary called the Litany of Loreto.

     The goddess’ epithets define a capacious but not boundless identity. Of the eighteen attributes in this rhetoric of the divine four are simple honorifics, calling attention to the status of the deity and: leader (ἡγεμόνην), irresistible, (ἀμαιμάκετον), queen (βασίλειαν), and nymph (νύμφην). Her governance in land, sea, and air is sanctioned by Hesiod. [6]

     The terms queen and nymph acknowledge her femininity and draw on the archaic worship of the earth goddess typical of the Neolithic era, assigning Hekate governance of the world of nature. This realm of governance is elaborated as frequenter of mountain wilds (οὐρεσιφοῖτιν), protector of dogs (σκυλακῖτιν), delighting in deer (ἀγαλλομένην ἐλάφοισιν), and bull mistress (ταυροπόλον) [7]. Her association with the earth’s vital energy and the flourishing of game and wild animals in general leads to her role as nurturer of children (κουροτρόφον), [8]

     She is associated in general with hidden things, mysteries signified by solitude (φιλέρημον) and the night (νυκτερίην), and this, together with her role as an intercessor for humans, suggests that she is at home among the dead (τυμβιδίην). Her identification as a witch and her role as an aid in magic arises from this nexus.

     She is identified with crossroads (Εἰνοδίην), in particular with locations where three roads meet (τριοδῖτιν). Americans will think of Robert Johnsons’ “Cross Road Blues” in which the singer prays at a crossroad. Though the interpretation of Johnson’s lyrics remains disputed, it is likely that the setting derives its supernatural associations from the Yoruba orisha Eshu [9]. The tripling parallels Hekate’s representation in art as three figures as well as recalling another figure depicted as three and associated with crossroads and with magic, Diana Trivia. [10] In the most general sense, crossroads suggest boundaries, including the liminal space between heaven and earth, as well as decision points as in the motif of Hercules at the crossroads.

     What I have rendered as Hekate’s saffron robes is in Greek crocus robes (κροκόπεπλον) which recalls the mortal Krokus who, in a doubling of the story of Apollo and Hyakinthus, was transformed into the flower after Hermes accidentally kills him or, in a different version, after he is disappointed in his love for the nymph Smilax. An archaic Minoan fresco on Santorini show women in such crocus/saffron robes gathering the stigmas and offering them to a goddess. Here, too, the focus is on the borderline between human and divine.

     The epithet Πέρσειαν has nothing to do with Persia, but rather refers simply to Hekate’s father, the Titan Perses. [11] Her influence over “sky, earth, and sea” is thus an example of particular favor from Zeus. Her devotees seek to share her auspicious good fortune through seeking her intercession.

     I have noted already the association with Dionysos implied when the goddess is said to dance wildly using the verb βακχεύουσαν which contains Bakkhos’ name and can be used simply to mean to observe his rites. He, like Hekate, is an intercessor deity, who in the account of his myth adopted by the Orphics actually died and was reborn.

     Perhaps Hekate’s followers, like the goddess herself, performed frenzied dances under divine enthusiasm. In these ecstasies, they may have tasted what they were promised by other salvationist cults, eternal blessedness. Indeed the ancient mysteries may have resembled nothing so much as a Pentecostal service.

     A disjuncture exists between the mythic identity of the goddess, though, and the personal prayer. On the one hand the goddess is conceived as the utterly other divine, that which cannot be controlled, linked to death and the eternal turning of the cosmic wheel, while, on the other hand, she has the role of potential grantor of poignant wishes such as those for life after death or for children or riches or the defeat of one’s enemies on the other. A similar pattern exists in other traditions as well. One may see the desire that Buddha sought to overcome embodied in the offerings, often junk foods like Mallomars, offered at his temples. The great gods of the ancient Near East who gather like flies to consume Utnapishtim’s blood sacrifice after the flood resemble the hungry and impotent dead Odysseus attracts with his. Thus while humans seek to obtain the divine gift of immortality, they also endow their gods with an all-too-human desire.

 

 

 

1. In 1787 Thomas Taylor published The Mystical Initiations or Hymns of Orpheus, with a preliminary Dissertation on the Life and Theology of Orpheus. Taylor was a Neoplatonist for whom these texts had a genuine spiritual appeal when read symbolically. He set it as his goal to translate all the untranslated works of the ancient philosophers. A modern translation of The Orphic Hymns was published by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow with an introduction and notes. A version by Stephen Dunn “for the occult practitioner” has also appeared.

 

2. The list includes others gods such as Proserpine, Hades, Dionysos, and Hebe; natural objects such as Gaia, Helios, Mene and the Brontoi; and abstractions such as Eileithyia, Dikaisyne, Eusebia, and Mnemosyne.

 

3. As, for instance, the evil fairy in Perrault’s “La belle au bois dormant.”

 

4. Curiously, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch, and others describe the Jews as worshippers of Dionysos through confusing the name Sabazios with the Hebrew sabaos (of the hosts”).

 

5. To Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy) Pythagoras was a reformer of Orphism as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Dionysus.

 

6. Theogony 411 ff.

 

7. The exact meaning is uncertain. It may be associated with bull-herding or driving a bull cart or bull-fighting (perhaps bull-leaping or ταυροκαθάψια as practiced in ancient Crete).

 

8. An epithet she shares with Artemis, Eirena, and Hestia.

 

9. Eshu is also called Èṣù-Elegba and, in the New World Legba and number of variations. He is identified with crossroads, gateways and highways. A trickster, he represents in part the chance element in life. Among other gods also associated with crossroads are Hermes and Herakles and Odin. It would be natural to consider the Christian cross as signifying the meeting place of the divine and human planes.

 

10. Trivia is the earliest recorded epithet for Diana. She is often represented in art as a triple goddess as Hekate is as well. The factor of three is sometimes glossed as suggesting Diana’s three functions: huntress (earth), moon (heaven), and underworld. In Seneca’s play about her Medea calls on Trivia to accomplish her spell.

 

11. The name of Hekate’s Titan father Perses is related to πέρθω meaning to sack or destroy.