Canning’s Iter Ad Meccam (1789)

Iter ad Meccam Religionis causa susceptura.

Quæ populis Mahumeda suis praeceperat olim
Servanda æternum officia; et quo more, quotannis,
Quo studio, variis diversæ e partibus orbis
Inter se coeant gentes, opulentaque Meccæ
Delubra, et celebri stipent penetralia pompa,
Expediam; quæ tanta adeo per sæcula perstet
Relligio in seros longum deducta nepotes.

Non etenim leve nomen habes, quae cara Prophetae,
Quae patria, imperiique audis sanctissima sedes,
Obluctata diu quamvis, atque ausa nefandis   10
Ipsum odiis vexare, adversaque bella movere,
Mox reducem primis cumulabas, Mecca, triumphis.
Quinetiam, ni vana fides, tibi rnaximus hospes
Successit, profugus patriam cum numine fausto
Linqueret Abramus, tuaque inter mesnia fertur
Ipse aras posuisse novas, purisque litasse
Ritibus, et magno cultum instaurasse Jehovae.
Ergo te sanctam ante alias, te rite colendam
Praestabat, regnique sui Mahumeda jubebat
Esse caput. Tibi rite ergo solemnia gentes   20
Dona ferunt; tantum venerandi jussa Prophetae,
Et pietas valet, et promissi gaudia coeli.

Contra autem quicunque tui neque limina temple

Intrant supplex, neque humum semel ore sacratam

Attigerit; non sese illi ccelestia pandent

Ostia, non ilium ridentes suaviter Horae

Accipient venientem, et laeta in sede locabunt;

Sed lacrymis scelus ille suum, tristique piabit

Supplicio, aeternam in noctem, et pallentia missus

Tartara, nec valles Paradisi adjturus amoenas.   30

Ergo omnes idem ardor agit; jamque omnia circum

Littora—qua sese Byzanti regia moles

Erigit, et late subjecti marmora ponti,

Edomitamque Asiam Europes prospectat ab ora;—

Fervere agros turba innumera, mistumque videbis

Effundi populum, et laeto strepere undique plausu.

Non aliter, quam si ipse viros in bella cieret

Othmanides, strueretque aciem, quae maxima sese
Auderet, Catharina, tuis opponere coeptis,
Amissasque urbes, et rapta resposcere signa,   40

Nec minor—indigenis quondam regnata tyrannis
Qua tollit Memphis caput, et monumenta priorum
Vesta virum, antiquae ostentat vestigia famae,
Nunc Satrapae imperils, et saevo subdita Turcae;—
Turba coit, quos centum urbes, atque ultima misit
Africa; queis laetas segetes, et ditia late
Pascua felici foecundat flumine Nilus;
Quique feram Barcen, et magni nominis olim
Cyrenen; sterilesque colunt Mareotidos agros,
Vexatamque urbem multo Ptolemaida bello;    50
Quos Tripolis, vel quos Carthaginis aucta minis
Moenia Tuneti, aut flavescens Tingis arista
Mittit, et Angliacam spectantia littora Calpen.

Accensi pietate omnes, fremituque secundo
Incedunt, tardoque ingens pede flectitur agmen.
Jamque et Erythraei supremo in littore ponti
Arsinoen, claro quam nomine regia pellex
Ornavit, jussitque suam Cleopatra vocari,
Praetereunt; montes Melanum quoque, et ardua Sinae
Culmina, ubi Amramidae quondam dum armenta regebat   60
Pastor, Isacidum volvebat mente dolores,
Adfuit e coelo praesens Deus; ipse vocantem
Audiit; ipse locum insolitis splendescere flammis
Vidit, et ardentem manifesto Numine dumum.

At neque per deserta phalanx Memphitica cursu
Tendere, nec sacram properant contingere terram,
Ante peragratis Syria? quam finibus, arma
Ferre, et per colles demum adventare propinquos
Prospiciant Turcarum aciem, et socia agmina jungant.

Ilia quidem multo stipata Satellite dudum,      70
Armorumque ferax graditur, totaque coacta
Secum Asia; vel quos Byzantius alluit arcto
AEquore, et opposita secernit Bosporus ora;
Vel quos Euphrates fluviorum maximus inter
Volvitur, ingenti miscens cum Tigride fluctus
Ambiguos. Ipse in medio Dux agmine, claros
Enumcrans a stirpe atavos, sanctumque Prophetam
Stemmatis auctorem, et viridem de more tiaram
Implicitus capiti, et magno se munere jactans,
Palantes cohibet turmas, et rite locatis   80
Undique prassidiis, et fido milite servat.

Qua veto in medio tanta? pars maxima pompae,
Votivae portantur opes, aurumque tapetesque,
Ipsius dona Othmanidae: praetoria circum,
Densa magis glomerari acies, horrentibus hastis,
Tymparraque, et strepere assiduo resonantia pulsn
Æra; et vexillis fluitantibns intertexta,
Sanctum insigne, mieant crescentis cornua Lunae.

Vos, altae O Solymarum arces! vos saepe superbam
Conspicitis pompam vestra inter mcenia duci.   90
Namque illos, spreto quantumvis Numine Christi,
Relligio tamen ista tenet; sanctosque verentur
Praeteriisse locos temere, et juga celsa Sionis
Plena Deo quandam, et summo dilecta Jehovae.

Mox ubi jam ulterius tendunt, jam mille laborum
Taedia perpessi, et discrimina tanta viarum;
Hie vero trepidant animis, ubi vasta sine ullo
Hospitio immensi pandunt sese aequora campi,
Foeda situ informi, et congestis obruta arenis.
Ilia ergo nec laeta suo se gramine vestit;   100
Nec cultu, tellus, hominumque exetcita curis,
Induit auratas, Cerealia munera, messes,
Aut viridem ramorum umbram; tam fervida coeli
Urit humum rabies, tanto impete tela diei
Lucida, perpetuumque jubar puro aethere fundit,
Arentesque siti torret sol igneus agros.

Infelix! quicunque istis se ignarus arenis
Credat, ubi infido, tanquam maria alta, tumultu
Fluctuat omne solum, et vestigia fallit euntis.
Praesertim magno incumbat si turbine ventus,   110
Pulvereamque trahat, miscens late omnia, nubem.
Volvitur ilia alte coeli sublata per auras,
Et saspe errantes confusa strage catervas
Obruit, ingentique premit sub mole sepultas.

Quin et saepe illic trans aequora lata citatis

Fertur equis effraenus Arabs, aut cum alta soporem

Nox tulerit, praedae cupidi rapiuntque feruntque

Castra virum; aut sepsere vias, et euntibus ultro

Opposuere acies, atque aspera praelia miscent.

Ergo omnis properanda via est; nec si obvia forte   120

Prodat se, tenui prorumpens gurgite lympha,

Arboribus circum, et muscoso cespite cincta;

Non tamen hie, licet herba virens invitet, et amnis

Purus aqua, et gelidae texant umbracula palmae,

Ullam audent traherc ante moram, confinia Meccae

Quam demum optata attigerint, metamque laborum.

Est locus aerii propter latera ardua montis,
(Bederam indigenas dicunt) ubi prima movebat
Praelia, et ibat ovans primis Mahumeda triumphis.
Nunc etiam lustrare locum juvat, omniaque ultro   130
Facta referre Ducis, totamque ex ordine pugnam.
Quanta hostes coiere manu, quam tenue Prophetae
Agmen erat; stetit ille tamen, nomenque verendum
Extulit, alta sonans, Allae; tum, pulvere jacto,
Occupat ad versos hostes, ac devovet Orco.
Tum vero et referunt, medio in certamine, qualis
AEtheream prodens speciem, coelestiaque arma,
Palantes ageret Gabriel magno impete turmas,
Et dira ultrici misceret praelia dextra.

Hinc primum ut turres, et sole micantia Meccae   140
Culmina, delubrique vident fastigia summi;
Solvunt se in lacrymas omnes, et quos sibi quisque
Intus habet scelerum stimulos, culpaeque nefandae.
Jam tacita sub mente dolent, vestesque nitentes
Protenus, externaeque adeo decora omnia formae
Projiciunt, et membra nigro velantur amictu.
Turn pura purgantur aqua, et, de more, fluentem
Caesariem ferro minuunt; deinde agmine facto
Incedunt; passim audiri suspiria ab imo
Ducta sinu, et tunsis resonantia pectora palmis.   150

Jamque adeo intrarunt urbem, temploquo propinquant.
Quinquaginta aditus illi, centumque columnae
Ex solido stant aere, illas argentea circum
Volvitur, et nodis ambit capita alta catena.
Tum rutilae fulvo dependent lampades auro.
Ipsa autem, tanta quanquam septa undique mole,
Parva ipsa, et simplex, et nullo splendida luxu,
Stat sacrata domus; sed quae sibi nomen Abrami
Vindicat, auctoremque Deum: nec sanctior ulla
Relligio est, Mahumeda, tuis, nec quam magis isti   160
In votum metuunt conceptis poscere verbis,
Ambiguaque fide, et perjura fallere lingua.

Ergo ubi jam admissam excepit vasta area turbam,

Dilectam venerantur humum, et ferventia figunt

Oscula parietibus: tum summi in culmine tecti

Obducunt nigros, solennia dona, tapetas.

Ipse olim quales, antiqua ex urbe Damasci

Misit Omar, quales, dum res et fata sinebant,

Pollentes opibus Pharii misere tyranni,

Inclyta progenies Fatimae; nunc maximus ista    170

Jura habet Othmanides, solium magno omine firmans,

Et sanctum imperii pignus sibi vindicat uni.

Tum passim sternuntur humi, et ter voce vocantea
Alia, colunt; solus nutu qui temperat orbem,
Sincerumque Deum, purosque Unius honores.
Inde decus, Mahumeda, tuum, et tua carmine dicunt
Rite ministeria; ut lectum Deus ipse Prophetam
Per medios hostes, per tanta pericula belli
Sustulerit, demumque aeterna in pace locarit.

Tu solus penetrare polum, et spatia ultima coeli;   180
Tu super Angelicis cinctos custodibus orbes
Tendere iter potuisti, et puro in fonte lavari,
Et scelerum ad terras abluta labe remitti.
Tu quoque laeta potes venturae gaudia vitae,
Coelorumque arces, sedesque aperire beatas.
Dulcis ibi requies, et molli stratus in herba
Somnus, et egelidis placidae in convallibus umbrae;
Alta domus, lautaeque epulae, et madentia fusis
Vina favis; trepido miscens ibi murmura lapsu
Lactea purpureos interstrepit unda lapillos.    190

Accinget lateri comitem, amplexuque fovebit
Ambrosio, et teneros virgo spirabit amores.

Haec adeo, haec turpes tangentia praemia sensus
Pollicitus, stimulisque animos haud mollibus urgens,
Terrarum Mahumeda aequa plus parte triumphat.
Atqui non tali studio, nec ritibus istis,
Integra se jactat pietas; neque inania nobis
Tu, Christe, officia, et tantum cumulanda superbis
Muneribus templa, et steriles vano ordine pompas,
Mandasti! Tibi firma fides, Tibi criminis expers    200
Vita placet, puroque incoctum pectus honesto!
Ergo te, natumque Deo, soliique Paterni
Participem, humano commistum corpore Numen,
Te memores colimus! Tu nostram, Maxima, culpam
Victima, morte luis! Tu nobis, sanguine fuso,
Sola Salus, sola amissi Spes reddita coeli!

One thing I know: this needs a lot of work.  But here you are, anyhow: 

Mohammed led his people, long ago,

in holy rites and offices, and other duties: year by year

he united diverse tribes from various parts of the world

into one pious nation.  The opulent shrines of Mecca

where a great crowd circles the holy places—

I will unfold all this; and so down through long ages

a religion still revered by long descended great-grandchildren.

This is no insignificant name, shared between the beloved Prophet,

and this country, where glory surrounds the holy seat,

through long struggles, when impious opposition   10

when warlike adversaries despicably drove him away,

yet when he triumphantly returned, Mecca, you were first to shower incense on him.

Moreover yours was no vain faith: to you the great wanderer

Came, a fugitive led to this land by divine omens

Abraham, a refugee, welcomed into your courts

Where he built a new and most pure shrine

and restored the rites of worship to great Jehovah.

So, considering you more sacred than any other place,

And more excellent, Mohammed founded his kingdom here,

made it his capital.  Therefore were solemn rites,    20

established here, the commands of the Prophet revered

strong piety and the promised joys of heaven preached.

But the unwilling, those who never cross your temple threshold

With humility, who never kiss the holy ground—

they shall never reach the enter the doors of heaven,

no sweetly smiling Houris will receive him,

greet him gladly and settle him in the happy couch;

only bitter tears await him: he will propitiate misery

with his punishment, the endless night of banishment in pale

Hell—the pleasant valleys of Paradise eternally denied him.   30

Behold! A multitude, fired with a single passion, surrounds

The wide walls of royal Byzantium—

The broad marble towers from where Europe overlooks

And dominates the borderlands of Asia:—

A fervid innumerable crowd gathered, watching the darkened lands

People pouring out, joyous applause resounding everywhere.

Just as if he had mustered a great army for war

Followers of the Prophet drawn up in ranks and files, his great

daring, Catharine, was to try recapture the cities

he had lost to you, and repossess his captured standards.  40

The force that obeyed their tyrant kings was not smaller than this

Raised by Memphis kings—their earlier monuments

Amongst the antique vestiges of her former fame

The haughty Turkish satrap now despotically rules;—

A hundred cities supply the army, drawing every last man out of

Africa, where the crops grow far and wide, and rich

Happy pastures are watered by the river Nile;

From the land of Libyan Barca, and from once-famous

Cyrenaica; from sterile Mareotis’ uncultivated fields,

A city ruined by long Ptolemaic war;   50

From Tripoli, where Carthage rises again,

From the walled-city of Tunis, and the golden wheat-fields of Tangiers [Tingis],

Watched over by the English flag from Gibraltar’s [Calpe’s] shores.

Inflamed by piety and with great clamour

the huge close-formed phalanx slowly moves

and now they come to Arsinoe, on the shores of the wide

Red Sea, the town famous for its royal mistress,

a place she beautified and ordered to be named after her, ‘Cleopatris’.

Now they pass over Moriah’s holy mountain; and arduous high lands of Sinai

where Amram’s son once shepherded the flocks    60

of Isaac,  and his mind turned round in pain [or ‘meditated in awe’]

hearing the divine voice from heaven; God himself calling

to be heard; in that place the miraculous fire shone

and he saw God manifested in a burning bush.

Still, the phalanx, crossing the Egyptian desert, dares not
overstretch itself, nor can they seize the Holy Land,

without first crossing the boundaries of Syria.  Accordingly

finally advancing from the nearby hills, they discern

the front ranks of the well-armed Turks, and join with this troop as allies.

Asia: long hemmed about by neighbouring armies,   70

Enemies who can easily strike at her from every side,

the waters of Byzantium washing close

the Bosphorus separating her by mere yards from the opposite coast;

No further than the distance between the rolling river

of the Euphrates and where the great Tigris’s tidal

flow.  Their general marches in their midst:

most sacred Prophet, descended from Enumcran stock,

easily identified by his green turban, a commander
who leads from the front, throwing himself forward,

keeping his roving bands in check, and properly placed   80

everywhere to protect and guide his loyal soldiers.

And in the very heart of this vast parade

are carried votive treasures of tapestried gold,

gifts of the Turkish royal family [the Othmanidae]: chosen guards surround these

ranked in a right circle, bristling with spears,

a constant bustle of movement to the beat of drums

music filling the air, and banners woven with the

holy emblem of the gleaming crescent moon.

O high-towered Jerusalem! in your pride

you have seen many generals parade between your walls.   90

yet, though they mock the Deity of Christ,

for them religion still holds holy dread

having passed so many places, the lofty peaks of Zion

are full of God’s grace, the dearly beloved of Jehovah.

Soon they march on; and now a thousand trials afflict them:

exhaustion, suffering, crises on the road;

here in the desert their minds give way to panic

viewing the immense and comfortless plain,

the many leagues of rude sand and heaped-up debris.

No smiling greenery clothes the arid ground;     100

nothing is cultivated in that region,

mankind has neither tamed nor cultivated that world,

nor dressed it in the gold of Ceres’ harvests;

no green shade is cast by branches: instead scorching air

has drained soil with madness, shafts of sunlight

perpetual dazzling radiance poured from the pure ether,

parching drought and the fiery sun scorching all agriculture.

Unlucky are those who must navigate these sands

where the untrustworthy terrain mimics the deep seas—a tumult

of shifting ground—following the steps of a lost company.   110

Especially unlucky is he who meets a sandstorm,

when the clouds and winds whip up everything

stir it all up sky-high through the air;

and often the army wanders in confusion

Leaving behind it many bodies buried beneath the ground.

Often the rapid Arabian cavalry lead the disordered mass

across the wide expanse, or when night tempts

other travellers to deep sleep, they raid their settlements

preying upon the unwary, and bringing battle

to the camps of men, as different paths    120

throw opposing armies together—rough war the result.

So they hurry onwards; if by chance they find

a thin rivulet of water, gushing out, surrounded

by desert trees, and bordered by moss and turf;

they pause, where green grass is inviting, and a river

of pure water, with cool shadows woven by the palms.

Yet they dare not delay long; all thought is of Mecca

and focus all their efforts on reaching the desired end.

And now they reach the steep mountain sides

where (the natives of Beder say), battle colours were    130

first raised, the scene of Mohammed’s first triumph.

Now with delight they survey the scene, the whole battle

rallied to their leader, and the whole of the order of battle.

Here they met the enemy hand-to-hand, the Prophet leading them;

How small his army was! Yet he took his stand, the great name

Lifted high on their voices, Allah!  They tossed into the dust

the usurping enemy, overthrew them, sends them to the land of the Dead.

Then, or so it is said, and in the midst of the conflict,

Than the heavenly arms themselves appeared,

The angel Gabriel led a great assault against the straggling troops,  140

Fighting, his fiery sword held in his right hand.

From here they first saw the towers of Mecca, the topmost pinnacles

of the highest temples glinting in the sun

They all dissolve in tears, each man of himself

thinking of his sins—unspeakable wickednesses

stinging the mind.  Their white clothing

and all their foreign fashions, howsoever beautiful,

is all discarded: they wear instead plain black, covered with a robe.

They wash themselves with pure water, and cut away

their flowing locks with iron blades.  Then the ranks    150

advance; everywhere heartfelt sighs are heard,

chests heave, and the men beat their breasts with their hands.

So now they enter the city, hard by the temples.

Fifty gates open, and the army moves through

where one hundred standing columns of solid brass

are linked by silver chains, entwining each with each.

and hanging lamps of yellow gold burn red.

So great a city, yet within its bounds

standing small, and simple, bright, and free of any luxury,

the sacred house, that took its name from Abraham’s faith    160

claiming God’s authority, that no religion is

holier, Mohammed, than yours, nor more to this than

none dare to utter words of fraud, or the language of perjury

or doubt the faith based in this place.

So the open square now accepted the happy crowd,

they worshipped, bowing to the ground, with earnest zeal

kissing the walls, then dressing the central structure

replacing the black tapestries that surround the shrine.

This holy gift of new drapes, woven in the city of Damascus

was sent by Omar, what manner of men, fate and time permitting,   170

once the work was sent by the tyrant Pharaohs

now this great task falls to Othman’s son;  a great omen confirming his throne,

and holy is the one who dedicates himself to the pledge of empire.

Then, covering the ground in all directions, they thrice cry aloud

Allah; who made the world from nothing

most pure God, honouring His perfect Oneness.

From the ground they praise you, Mohammed, and celebrate your song

and holy offices; how the Prophet was chosen by God Himself

through the midst of the enemy, through the fortunes of war

kept safe, until finally achieving eternal peace.    180

You alone can rise above world’s axis and cross into heaven;

to where the angels oversee the girded orbs

you can to encompass that journey, and be washed in the pure fountain

and return to earth washed clean of all stain of sin.

For you is reserved the happiness of endless life

where the highest Heaven reveals happy couches.

Sweet rest is there, lying prone on the soft grass

and sleep, and cool valleys filled with placid shade;

tall houses, and delicious food, and poured wine

Flowing over honeycombs there, as mingling murmurs swoop,   190

streams of milk gurgling over purple pebbles.

And at your side the warmth of a companion’s ambrosial

embrace, and a young girl breathing her love.

So: these are the low and sensual rewards promised

To the faithful, with ungentle goads such as this

has Mohammed triumphed over half the world.

But it is not dedication like this, nor are these the rites

the vain and empty boastful pieties

that are your offices, O Christ; though the proud raise

temples gifts, and make vain and barren displays,     200

under compulsion.  Yours is a firm faith, you free us from sin,

giving us a purer Life, an honest unspotted breast!
So you, son of God, seated beside the Father

who once partook of the human body, though commixed with deity,

Our remembrance and service is yours! You, great one, made wickedness

your victim, the plague of death! You, by shedding your blood

Gave heaven and salvation to those who had lost all hope!

Thought for the new year

'There is no fiction that does not in some measure stand askew to the world.' Valentine Cunningham.

Heraclitus

They told me Heraclitus, in fact they promised me that you were dead;
They told me Πάντα ῥεῖ οὐδὲν μένει and other things you said
And συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα something something πάντα--
But death will put an end to all your suchlike philosophic banter.

Article idea

'"Error" in Kingsley's Water Babies'

A brief history of European 18th-century Philosophy

Very brief. One paragraph.

18th-century philosophers thought and wrote about many things, and many of them were very clever people; but one debate in particular dominated their discourse: what Jerry Fodor recently called 'mind-stuff versus matter stuff':

One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter ... [that] there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however, this view has hard problems of its own. For example, if matter-stuff and mind-stuff are of fundamentally different kinds, how are causal relations between them possible? How is it possible that eating should be caused by feeling peckish or feeling peckish by not eating? For this and other reasons, mind-stuff has mostly fallen out of fashion. [LRB, Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007; page 9]

Many 18th-century thinkers were motivated by a desire, the grounds and strength of which I don't have time to speculate about here, to retain the revealed religion known as 'Christianity' as part of their way of talking about the world. Descartes suggested that human beings are bodies + souls, the mind-stuff going through a magic router called 'the pineal gland' to enable it to interact with teh matter-stuff. But, for reasons akin to the ones to which Fodor alludes, plenty of people weren't persuaded by that. Other philosophers (Hume, Hartley, Priestly) claimed that there was nothing but matter-stuff, and mind-stuff was just an effect of the way the matter-stuff of the brain operated, not unlike (although this isn't, of course, an analogy any of those gentlemen used) 'speed' emerges from the proper operation of a motorcycle. Hartley believed in God, and used half his most famous book presenting 'proofs' for His existence; but since his account of human beings was entirely material some people accused him of inconsistency (Priestly, who is interesting here predominantly as a diseminator and analyst of Hartley) had an ingenious theory of his own that managed to keep Christianity as 'true' without sacrificing Hartley's materialism. Berkeley approached the problem from the other side, and denied that there was anything called 'matter' -- everything is mind-stuff. But not many people believed him. So there was a breach, between 'soul' and world, that haunted the thinkers of the 18th-century; and it haunted them in part because they worried that the path of truth might compel them to give up 'soul' altogether. This is one reason why Kant proved so influential: he argued, in the Pure Reason critique, that 'mind' and 'world' were not separate entities at all, because key aspects of the world (dimension, causality etc.) were actually the way the soul itself was structured. Coleridge and the second-generation Romantics he inspired took this to be a great healing of the breach. I'm not sure they were right, though.

The soldier's way

Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata book 13, stanzas 38: our heroine has been transformed into a tree

‘He [Tancred] drew his sword at length, and with full force
Struck the tall tree; O wonderful! The wound,
As bursts a fountain from its sylvan source,
Gush’d forth with blood, and crimson’d all the ground.
Chilld horror seized the knight: yet, fix’d to sound
The mystery to its depth, and desp’rate grown,
Again he struck; when, hollow and profound,
As from a vaulted grave, in piteous tone,
Murm’ring he heard within a spirit deeply moan.
[The Jerusalem Delivered of Torquato Tasso, translated into English Spenserian verse by J H Wiffen (2 vols, 1824-5), 2:40]

He doesn't realise there's something odd about the tree after one sword-hack? Or he does, but hitting the creature a second time with a sword is the only way he knows of investigating further?

Newness

This post, on Piccolo, struck a chord with me. I'm not sure if it did because thinking about its implications flatters me into feeling less glum about my many failures as a working novelist. But that is probably (probably! say rather, surely ...) missing the point.

Proust's point is that genuine novelty in the arts is always experienced as contrived, artificial, wilfully difficult, unnatural - i.e., not yet naturalised, customary. (By implication, if something is immediately and painlessly recognised as 'new and revolutionary', the very fact of recognition suggests it isn't). His other point is that the new is not and cannot be recognised. The categories, explicit or implicit, available to the reader, viewer or critic are those appropriate to the old, and unable to even register the new, which is experienced only as a kind of absence. How many new works (from Beethoven to Joyce) have been described - or dismissed- as chaotic, unharmonious, confused, sprawling, cacophonous. All the critic or auditor can hear or see is the absence of what they are used to. They lack the language to name the new. The new is an invitation, precisely, to invent such a language.

The new typically appears as a monster, a distortion or mutation of the old, the collapse of the familiar, of taste, of decorum, form, structure.

In another sense, all artistic products have elements of novelty, however minor, just as they all have elements of the familiar. A particular arrangement of words in a novel hasn't seen the light of say, even if the words themselves are trite and uninspired. Even an exact repetition is new as a repetition, and in terms of its context, effects, its baptism of the 'original' as an original (i.e. it becomes an original only when copied). The key thing is deciding whether the new elements are significant and in some way inaugural.

Quaestion

Why time must always pass --
the question's fair scary:
quid sit futurum cras
fuge quaerere.

Language

Anthony Burgess (in A Mouthful of Air) argues that ancient language was more complex and synthetic, grammatically speaking; and that modern languages tend towards the simpler, atomistic and (he doesn't say this, but it's rather implied) degraded form.  He notes for instance that

'They will be loved' is the Ebglish for the Latin amabuntur. The English way -- and English is a progressive, self-simplifying language: the technical term is syncretic -- is to analyse a complex experience into irreducible particles: four words to the Latin one. [15]

Anyone who has studying the Classics must have been struck by how much more difficult the older languages seem to be. But Burgess hypothecates from this a radically different mode of being-in-the-world for our ancestors.

We [moderns] think of the conscious creation of a structure out of verbal atoms: our unit is the smallest possible verbal form. But the unit of primitive man would be more like a phrase, a clause, a total statement. He would learn to associate a segment of the flow of speech with a particular experience to be described or expressed. When we see a sunrise, we instinctively analyse into particles: sun, east, sky, red, gold, rising. Primitive man would see the process as a single experience, indivisible.

Is this right, I wonder? I mean, is there any evidence for it? Attractive notion, certainly.

Bowles 2

Cracking on, a tad belatedly, with more of this. The second poem from Sonnets, Written Chiefly in Picturesque Spots, During a Tour (1784):

Languid, and sad, and slow from day to day,
I journey on, yet pensive turn to view
(Where the rich landscape gleams with softer hue)
The streams, and vales, and hills, that steal away.
So fares it with the children of the earth;
For when life's goodly prospect opens round,
Their spirits beat to tread that fairy ground,
Where every vale sounds to the pipe of mirth.
But them, vain hope, and easy youth beguiles,
And soon a longing look, like me, they cast
Back o'er the pleasing prospect of the past:
Yet fancy points where still far onward smiles.
Some sunny spot, and her fair colouring blends,
Till cheerless on their path the night descends.

Bowles is, amongst other things, playing games with monosyllables, by way of stepping through a mournful, slow theme. The first line is 80% monosyllabic; the second 60%; the third 100%; the pattern looks as though it will repeat (line 6: 80%; line 5760%) but then it doesn't. 'Spirits' is disyllabic I suppose; although its quantity is strange -- a classical long syllable that reads more like a single stress than a trochee. The 100% monosyllable line is postponed to line 8 -- as if the poem is already slowing, lengthening, drawing out its form. Then it's

Line 9 80%
Line 10 80%
Line 11 60%
Line 12 60%
Line 13 55%
Line 14 60%

OK, so it's a disproportionately monosyllabic poem: let me not flog the point to death. I think what I'm suggesting is that there is something of a pulse, or ebb-flow, to the way the poem handles its monosylls. Languid and sad and slow.  Otherwise, the blot in the sonnet to my ear is 'pipe of mirth', which strikes an artificial, conventionalised note (playing a recorder outside, no matter how perkily, no longer correlates to 'mirth' in the sense the poem needs it to; and I'm not convinced it did the 1780s either).  I mind less the deliberate blurring of topographies, physical and temporal, the 'walk through the countryside' that is also somehow 'the walk through life.'  I assume the idea is: we are walking eastward, whilst the sun sets behind us. The land behind us, bathed in roseate light, is our youth.  There are peaks ahead where the sun still illuminates the grass. But we all know where we are going.  Don't we.

The 'Shaping Experience' bias

There's a very large and, I think, very important critical question about art I never see addressed; or at least, if it is discussed I don't know where and by whom.  I'll give some examples of what I'm talking about.

Let's take a man (for example) in his 40s.  As a kid he fell in love with the music of The Beatles, just like millions.  But although some of what he responded to, in that music, had to do with the skill of Lennon-McCartney-as-popular-composers, much more had to do with the extraordinary potency of music itself.  Nobody ever hears music in the abstract; we always listen to music embodied in one composition or another.  The thing is: whichever musical text happens to be the one that introduces you to the wonder of music itself will tend to receive, back over itself (as it were) a lustre it has not in and of itself earned.  Lennon-McCartney were a talented pair of songwriters; but they didn't invent music itself.  A good proportion, I'd say, more, a majority of the emotional impact of their work involves them piggybacking on Music Itself. Another example might be: 'I used to think Robert Graves' Claudius novels were brilliant; now I see what I was reacting to was the fascination of Roman history; and Graves's novels are rather clunkily put-together.'

The problem is: how can a critic separate out these aspects of a work of art?  It's a particular problem in SF, where the sort of short stories, novels and films that first blew our minds and introduced us to Sense-of-Wonder can shape our tastes, such that we prize works that imitate those earlier works, and we ignore their faults to the exclusion of other, better-written or better-made stuff.  But as with Music Itself, 'the Sublime' was not invented by Asimov's Nightfall (or whatever); the 'Visual Spectacular' was not invented by Star Wars, and (to select one particular key text of my own youth) Narrative and Enchantment not invented by The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings.

Sincerity

Reading, and enjoying, Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), in which is examined, to quote this impeccable summary, '"the moral life in process of revising itself," a period of Western history in which (argues Trilling) sincerity became the central aspect of moral life (first observed in pre-Age of Enlightenment literature such as the works of Shakespeare), later to be replaced by authenticity (in the more recent centuries).' Lots of thought-food. But, here's a sticking point for me:

The sincerity of Achilles or Beowulf cannot be discussed: they neither have nor lack sincerity. But if we are to ask whether Young Werther is really as sincere as he intends to be, or which of the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor or Marianne, is thought by Jane Austen to be the more truly sincere, we can confidently expect a serious response in the form of opinions on both sides of the question. [2-3]

I see what Trilling is getting at here, but I don't agree. For Beowulf, surely his sincerity is key? (That is to say: one of the important currents in Beowulf is about whether he is in Denmark merely to help the Danes, out of the goodness of his heart, or whether it is a bid for power. His 'sincerity' is proved, over the course of the poem: but it's not something we can be sure of at the beginning). And as for Achilles: well, this seems to me a profound and important question. I'd put it like this: what's more sincere than anger? I'm not sure I can think of anything.

Casimir and Watts

Coming late to Casimir -- but what a fasciating figure he is! A footnote to start with: Watts plagiarised him to write his hymns. That at least was the charge.  Here's a letter in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1785:

The gentleman who enquires after Casimir, the poet, p. 610, will receive much information from one of Dr. Knox's Essays, which is written expressly on the subject. I believe the whole of his works were never attempted in English. Nor do I think any person is likely to undertake such a translation, unless he be a Roman Catholick, as many of his pieces tum expressly upon the peculiarities of the Romish church. Dr. Watts seems to have been the most familial with him of any of our English poets. In some places he translates, or imitates, and refers to Casimir. Cut, almost in innumerable others, in various parts of his works, he borrows and makes no acknowledgement, except a kind,of general one, in the Preface to his Lyric Poems. One of his hymns is little more than a translation, from Casimir*; and there are others where particular turns of thought, at well as expressions, arc evidently borrowed from him, besides very many unacknowledged parts of his Horae Lyrae, The late pious Mr. Hervey, who certainly was no poet, attempted part of an ode from Casimir with considerable success. I am sensible that Dr, Watts by no means ranks high in the poetical world. The soft smoothness of his numbers, in my opinion, borders on effeminacy; and, if his works were published, with references at the foot of the page to authors from whom he has borrowed, no vast share of originality would fall to his lot. But yet there it one peculiarity of his religious pieces which tenders them valuable—they are level to the capacities of the lowest orders of mankind. You will excuse me, Mr. Urban, if I say, that I have heard very poor people, on a dying bed, repeat some of his verses with an emphasis that would have stopped the mouth of an Infidel. In this view, I esteem them very highly. But when I exercise the judgement of a scholar., or a criick, they appear in a very different light. Nevertheless, whatever they are as to merit, Casimir was certainly his exemplar. From him he has borrowed and copied more than any one will suppose till he takes the trouble of comparing them together. U. U.

*Compare Hymn IV Book II with Casimir Epod V

I don't know if anybody has noticed this, or chased it up. By the same token I don't know if anybody cares. But on that latter point I can at least make an educated guess.

An undiscovered Coleridge poem?

The third of 'Satyrane's Letters', published in The Friend (1809), and later in the Biographia Literaria (1817), contains an account of Coleridge and Wordsworth meeting Klopstock in 1798. 'Wordsworth told him,' Coleridge reports, 'that I intended to translate a few of his odes as specimens of German lyrics.' These translations, if they were ever undertaken, have not been discovered.

Is it possible that the following anonymous 'Ode, from Klopstock' [from The German Museum, Or, Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in General (1801, 400)] is by STC?

Moons move round earths,
Earths round suns;
All the host of suns move
Round one great sun.
Our Father who art in Heaven.

On all these worlds, lightened and giving light,
Live spirits unresembling each other, in powers, in bodies;
But all Conceive God, and rejoice in God.
Hallowed be thy name.

He the great supreme of all,
Who can alone wholly conceive himself,
And in himself wholly rejoice,
Formed the vast design
For the happiness of all the Inhabitants of his Worlds.
To us thy kingdom come.

Well for them, that he, not they,
Their present, and their future regulated.
Well for them, well!
And well also for us.
Thy will be done in Heaven,
As it is on Earth.

He raises with the straw, the car on high;
He ripens the golden apple, the blushing grape;
He feeds the lamb on the hill, the roe in the wood;
But his thunder also rolls along;
And the hail lays it low
On the straw on the branch, on the hill, and in the wood.
Give us this day our daily bread.

Do mortals and sinners also dwell
High over the thunders path?
Does there the friend become the enemy?
Must there the friend by death be separated?
Our debts forgive us
As we forgive our debtors
Separate roads lead to the great end,
To happiness;
Some wind through desarts,
Yet in these some joys spring forth
And refresh the thirsty.
Lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
Adoration to thee, who the great sun encompassed
With suns, with earths and moons:
Who created spirits,
Regulated their bliss,
Raises the ears,
Calls to death,
Who leads through desarts to the great end and refreshes the traveller.
Adoration to thee,

For thine is the kingdom, the power,
And the glory,
For ever and ever. Amen.

There's no direct evidence linking this to STC, but it has a certain Coleridgean flavour, I'd say.  And Coleridge was certainly known (and known as a Germanist) to the London literary scene from which the editors (amongst them, the Rev Peter Will) sourced their copy.  And to speculate further, 1801 might be close enough to the (anonymous) publication of the Lyrical Ballads to mean that Coleridge would keep his name from this translation -- although such anonymity was also German Museum house style.  It's a possible, then; though it would be nice to have some harder evidence.

Why did Coleridge adopt the pseudonym 'Satyrane'?

Easy question, no easy answer. A note in Nov 1809 The Friend explains that the name is taken from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where ‘Sir Satyrane’ is initially a wild man, the son of a satyr, whom Una tames. He protects her against attack by other satyrs, and battles inconclusively with the lawless ‘Sansloy’. Later in the poem he chances upon Florimell's girdle, which she had lost in the process of escaping a monster. Satyrane holds a three-day tournament in which he and he and his ‘Knights of Maidenhead’ fight all-comers for the right to possess the girdle. He wins this tourney, with the assistance of Britomart. Coleridge prefaces his explanatory note with a poem, that make clear the nickname was bestowed upon Coleridge by his friends:

Tis true, IDOLOCLASTES SATYRANE
(So call him, for so mingling blame with praise
And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends,
Masking his birth-name, wont to character
His wild-wood fancy and impetuous zeal)

‘Idoloclastes’ means ‘breaker of Idols’. As to other possible meanings of ‘Satyrane’ as a nickname, we have only speculation. Coleridge enjoyed playing interlingual puns with his initials ‘STC’, and the ‘Sa-Ty’ portion of ‘Satyrane’ looks enough like a rubbed-down version of ‘Samuel Taylor’ to be suggestive. ‘Rane’ might glance at the Latin for ‘frog’ (a famous Gilray cartoon of 1798 had ridiculed the new poets as a toad and a frog reading a book called ‘Poems by Toad and Frog’); or it might, less decorously, take in the Greek ῥανίς, which means ‘spot’ and more particularly ‘semen, sperm’. Maybe the name means 'S. T. Cum'. Maybe not.

Sweet rural Peckham

From the department of 'haven't things changed!' Here's The Poet, a Poem (1773) by the I'd-never-heard-of-him-either Percival Stockton. Percival dreams of quitting the noise and bustle of London and getting away, far away to the rural delights of ...

Oft with the love of simple nature smit,
May I the seat of noise, and folly quit
Its tainted manners, and its tainted air,
And to the calm of rural scenes repair;
Oft may I stray through Peckham's winding shades,
Sweet haunt of poets, and the tuneful maids;
In quest of imagery mount Haly-Hill,
Where varied views the eye, and fancy fill.

I was born in Peckham. All I'll say is: it's not like that nowadays.

Four

I've
I.V.
Dead-hand Ward
bed & board.

Bacon's duplex

Francis Bacon talks of the sirens in terms of plague ('the bones of dead men littered the shores of their island ...' and so on). His answer is 'duplex': 'Huic malo remedium repertum est genere & modo duplex; alterum ab Ulyjse, alterum ab Orpheo'. Two ways of remedying this situation have been found: the way of Ulysses, and the way of Orpheus. Either you stop up your ears with wax, hurry past, and hope to escape -- or else (in effect) you out-sing the sirens, beguile them with your song rather than the other way about. I know which way I prefer.

Poem: Love made me laugh and cry

I'm going to pull this out of an earlier post, where it's buried at the bottom; because it's such a lovely little poem:

Love made me laugh and cry, but never did
I write except in fire, in water, or in wind;
Often I found that mercy
Was cruel, always feeling myself die as others lived.
Sometimes from a darker abyss I rose to the sky,
Sometimes I fell down again;
Here at last I make my final stand!

Giovambattista Strozzi. 1593.

Odes: the Mason-Keats line

These two Odes, by William Mason, appear next to one another in the sixth volume of Dodsley's popular and much-reprinted A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands: Printed by J Hughs, for J Dodsley, in Pall-Mall (1765). I think Keats read them, and they fed his own odes.

ODE. TO INDEPENDENCY.

I.
On my native shore reclin'd,
While Silence rules this midnight hour,
I woo thee. Goddess.
On my musing mind
Descend, propitious Power!
And bid these ruffling gales of grief subside:
Bid my calm'd soul with all thy influence shine;
As yon chaste orb along this ample tide
Draws the long lustre of her silver line,
While the hush'd breeze its last weak whisper blows,
And lulls old Humber to his deep repose.

II.
Come to thy vot'ry's ardent prayer,
In all thy graceful plainness drest:
No knot confines thy waving hair,
No zone, thy floating vest;
Unsullied Honour decks thine open brow,
And Candour brightens in thy modest eye:
Thy blush is warm Content's ethereal glow;
Thy smile is Peace; thy step is Liberty:
Thou scatter'st blessings round with lavish hand,
As Spring with careless fragrance fills the land.

III.
As now o'er this lone beach I stray,
Thy fav'rite swain oft stole along,
And artless wove his Dorian lay,
Far from the busy throng.
Thou heard'st him, Goddess, strike the tender string,
And bad'st his soul with bolder passions move:
Soon these responsive shores forgot to ring,
With Beauty's praise, or plaint of slighted Love;
To loftier flights his daring genius rose,
And led the war, 'gainst thine, and Freedom's foes.

IV.
Pointed with Satire's keenest steel,
The shafts of Wit he darts around;
Ev'n mitred Dulness learns to feel,
And shrinks beneath the wound.
In awful poverty his honest Muse
Walks forth vindictive thro' a venal land:
In vain Corruption sheds her golden dews,
In vain Oppression lifts her iron hand;
He scorns them both, and, arm'd with Truth alone,
Bids Lust and Folly tremble on the throne.


ODE ON MELANCHOLY. TO A FRIEND.

Oh! cease this kind persuasive strain.
Which, when it flows from friendship's tongue,
However weak, however vain,
O'erpowers beyond the Siren's song:
Leave me, my friend, indulgent go,
And let me muse upon my woe.
Why lure me from these pale retreats?
Why rob me of these pensive sweets?
Can Music s voice, can Beauty s eye,
Can Painting's glowing hand, supply
A charm so suited to my mind,
As blows this" hollow gust of wind,
As drops this little weeping rill
Soft-tinkling down the moss-grown hill,
Whilst through the west, where sinks the crimson day,
Meek Twilight slowly sails, and waves her banners gray.

Say, from Affliction's various source
Do none but turbid waters flow?
And cannot Fancy clear their course?
For Fancy is the friend of woe.
Say, 'mid that grove, in love-lorn state,
When yon poor ringdove mourns her mate,
Is all that meets the shepherd's ear,
Inspired by anguish, and despair?
Ah no, fair Fancy rules the song:
She swells her throat; she guides her tongue;
She bids the waving aspen-spray
Quiver in cadence to her lay;
She bids the fringed osiers bow,
And rustle round the lake below,
To suit the tenor of her gurgling sighs,
And sooth her throbbing breast with solemn sympathies.

To thee, whose young and polish'd brow
The wrinkling hand of Sorrow spares;
Whose cheeks, bestrew'd with roses, know
No channel for the tide of tears;
To thee yon abbey dank, and lone,
Where ivy chains each mould'ring stone
That nods o'er many a martyr's tomb,
May cast a formidable gloom.
Yet some there are, who, free from fear,
Could wander through the cloisters drear,
Could rove each desolated isle,
Though midnight thunders shook the pile;
And dauntless view, or seem to view,
(As faintly flash the lightnings blue)
Thin shiv'ring ghosts from yawning charnels throng,
And glance with silent sweep the shaggy vaults along.

But such terrific charms as these,
I ask not yet: my sober mind
The fainter forms of sadness please;
My sorrows are of softer kind.
Through this still valley let me stray,
Wrapt in some strain of pensive Gray:
Whose lofty genius bears along
The conscious dignity of song;
And, scorning from the sacred store
To waste a note on Pride, or Power,
Roves, when the glimmering twilight glooms,
And warbles 'mid the rustic tombs:
He too perchance, (for well I know
His heart would melt with friendly woe)
He too perchance, when these poor limbs are laid,
Will heave one tuneful sigh, and sooth my hov'ring shade.