Good Friday

Friday is Frigg's day; and Frigg, wife of Odin, was the goddess of married love. So Good Friday would therefore be the day of good married loving.

Incidentally, this crosses over to the romance languages where Friday is sacred to the Roman goddess of love, Venus. Thus vendredi in French.

Which brings us round to remembering embryo chickens, which we should all do at this time of year (explanation in the lines from Auden below):

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens,
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky—
Season when lovers and writers find
An altering speech for altering things,
An emphasis on new names, on the arm
A fresh hand with fresh power.
But thinking so I came at once
Where solitary man sat weeping on a bench,
Hanging his head down, with his mouth distorted
Helpless and ugly as an embryo chicken.


So I remember all of those whose death
Is necessary condition of the season’s putting forth,
Who, sorry in this time, look only back
To Christmas intimacy, a winter dialogue
Fading in silence, leaving them in tears.

Some more Auden lines

Dust and Dustmen

Dust used to be the subject of poetry. Hamlet, in his great prose speech, asks of mankind:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me...

Because men are made of dust, and to dust we return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fun to funky. So Auden also asked:

May I, composed like them
Of Eros and dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

In which he merely adds sexual appetite to the vacuum-fodder. It was therefore rather pleasant to find this entry in an old slang dictionary of 1811:

DUSTMAN. A dead man: your father is a dustman.

Which lends a certain poignancy to this song:

Bless You, Autocorrect

The original well

Those of you who possess an iPhone will know about Autocorrect, a system that automatically replaces a strange word with a more familiar one. This plays havoc with my prose as bathycolpian is corrected to Bathe impish and malbolge comes out as Map Olga. There's a whole website called Damn You, Autocorrect that is devoted to such amusing alterations. However, it doesn't always get it wrong.

On Saturday I was in Clerkenwell, which is a bit of London mentioned by T.S. Eliot:

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.

And I tried to send a text message saying where I was. But Autocorrect was having none of it. Clerkenwell was, according to Autocorrect, Clerks Well. And the odd thing is that that is absolutely right.

Thomas á Beckett had a subdeacon called William Fitzstephen who wrote a brief description of the City of London in 1174 praising "the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives". He also describes how:

There are also in the northern suburbs of London springs of high quality, with water that is sweet, wholesome, clear, and "whose runnels ripple amid pebbles bright". Among which Holywell, Clerkenwell and St. Clement's Well have a particular reputation; they receive throngs of visitors and are especially frequented by students and young men of the city, who head out on summer evenings to take the country air.

The description was written in Latin, but the old English for students was clerken, from which we get the modern English clerk (and clerical). So the well where students hung around on summer evenings was the clerks' well, or Clerkenwell.

But Autocorrect knew that already.

The well, incidentally is still there, now contained within an office block called Well Court (pictured). And while we're on the subject of clerks, here's an interesting little detail about a poem by Auden.

Auden once wrote a poem called The Fall of Rome about the end of a civilisation that is, nominally, ancient Rome. However, there are all sorts of modern details (like trains and musclebound marines) that suggest he was thinking about a more modern civilisation. But which?


Auden was an Englishman who had emigrated to America so he knew that in Britain we pronounce clerk to rhyme with ark, but in America clerk rhymes with Turk. So the fifth stanza of this poem shows exactly which civilisation he's thinking about.

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.


Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.


Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.


Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.


Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.


Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.


Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

God, I love that last stanza. Incidentally, cerebrotonic means:

Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ectomorphic.

Clerkenwell Gaol (or maybe Jail)

The Poetics of the Zoom

There's a fantastic article here about how poets invented the zoom lens, or rather the idea of zooming in and out, which, if you think about it, is something impossible to the human eye. Zooming can only happen in cameras and in the imagination, and it was the imagination that got there first, with the lens-makers scuttling along behind. The first zoom is credited to Milton.

The article misses, though, my favourite poetic zoom, which comes from the opening of an Auden poem:

Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly - look there
At cigarette end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.

The parted clouds to the cigarette end, faster than any film could make sense of the matter.

Two other little linguistic points were suggested by the article. First, an animalcule is a small or worthless animal. The word isn't in the OED, but that's what -cule always means. Second, zoom is onomatopoeic. The word was originally applied to the flight of aircraft, and specifically to the noise made when the throttle is opened and the aircraft shoots upwards - zoooom. The camera meaning is recorded from 1948.

Anyway, go and have a look at the article. The weather's horrible* and any notion that you have something better to do with your Sunday is a delusion. Click here.

The Inky Fool searching for cigarette ends

*Or it is in the Lake District where I am sojourning.


P.S. I'm indebted to the Antipodean for sending me the link.

Doggerel and Dog Mess

I was once stomping about, feeling proud and tragic and misunderstood, when my stern and heroic shoe was cushioned by something soft and forgiving, donated to the pavement by the generosity of a dog's bottom. It is the nature of tragedy that Hamlet never treads on a turd, and in the nature of life that he would. As Auden put it:

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

In the end, our heroic autobiographies are all written in doggerel, which means little dog. Nobody is quite sure why. Perhaps doggerel is the sort of writing that would appeal to a puppy. But perhaps there is a better explanation deducible from the words first* recorded use in The Canterbury Tales. When it finally comes round to Chaucer's turn to entertain the pilgrims with a story, the narrator starts to tell the Tale of Sir Thopas. It's a truly terribly story about a knight and a not very frightening monster, and nobody wants to hear the end, for, as the landlord says:

Mine ears achen of thy drasty [shitty] speech.
Now swich a rhyme the devil I biteche!
This may well be rhyme doggerel," quod he.


"Why so?" quod I, "why wilt thou lette me
More of my tale than another man
Syn that it is the best tale I can?"


"By God," quod he, "for plainly at a word
Thy drasty rhyming is not worth a turd."

So I humbly submit, dear reader, that doggerel is the little bit of dog that is left behind on the pavement, and that rhyme doggerel was originally dog-turd rhyme.

*There are earlier records of doggerel as a name, but they don't appear to have anything to do with poetry.

Passiuncle

A passiuncle is an insignificant or trivial passion. The word was invented by De Quincey to describe those emotions whose exercise exhausts the soul and the heart, making them incapable of true passion.

Such a failing is evident in Romeo who, you will recall, begins the play madly in love with a girl called Rosaline. As Friar Laurence says:

Holy Saint Francis, what a change is here!
Is Rosaline, whom thou didst love so dear,
So soon forsaken? young men's love then lies
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes [...]
And art thou changed? pronounce this sentence then,
Women may fall, when there's no strength in men.

Although Auden may have put it better in his sequel to The Tempest:

Will Ferdinand be as fond of a Miranda 
Familiar as a stocking? Will Miranda who is 
No longer a silly lovesick little goose, 
When Ferdinand and his brave world are her profession, 
Go into raptures over existing at all?

And while we're on the subject, too few people are aware that E.M. Forster wrote a brief sequel to A Room With A View (called A View Without A Room), in which George Emerson, forgets all his peacenik principles and cheats prolifically on Lucy Honeychurch.

For myself, I am certain that I am incapable of true emotion, but I inhabit a delightful aviary filled with flittering passiuncles and squawking whimsies.

Amazing Clues

How vainly men themselves amaze...

Old meanings are confusing enough without shoving two into a line, yet that is what Andrew Marvell did without a flicker of compunction in the opening line of The Garden. The modern reader would be almost excused for thinking that narcissistic men are going about impressing themselves. Though that may be so, Marvell is writing about men who futilely consign themselves to a labyrinth, or maze.

Labyrinths are terrible places, teeming with minotaurs and littered with lost threads, or at least that's how I imagine them. Hampton Court was a disappointment. The reason, of course, is that I was exposed to the myth of Theseus as an infant, though the really dirty bits were thoughtfully concealed from me until I was six.

Anyway, Theseus had to run into the labyrinth, kill the Minotaur and dash out again, all in time for tea. Ariadne, fearing that the tea would go cold, suggested the preposterously obvious idea that he take some thread with him, unwind it on the way in, and follow it on the way out. That way he would not be amazed.

What with the Trojan horse and Ariadne's thread, one can see the Attic genius for the bleeding obvious. To stop himself getting lost he had a thread. And what was the medieval term for a ball of yarn? It was, dear threadbare reader, a clue.

It was a clue that Theseus laid for himself in the labyrinth, it was a clue that led him back and dismazed him. If he had not had a clue of thread he would not have had a clue about how to escape. As John Pomfret wrote of the ideal woman:

She knows the best, and does the best pursue,
And treads the maze of life without a clue,
That the weak only and the wavering lack,
When they're mistaken, to conduct them back.
She does, amidst ten thousand ways, prefer
The right, as if not capable to err.

Slowly, of course, the clue that leads you through the labyrinth became the key that solves the puzzle, and then became the hint that helps you to solve the puzzle, and then, in 1914, received its apotheosis when it was attached to crosswords.

Incidentally, the original labyrinth (etymology uncertain) in which the Minotaur resided was designed by Daedalus, and has therefore been called a Daedal.

Now read this lovely poem by Auden. It's called The Labyrinth.


Anthropos apteros for days
Walked whistling round and round the Maze,
Relying happily upon
His temperament for getting on.


The hundreth time he sighted, though,
A bush he left an hour ago,
He halted where four alleys crossed,
And recognized that he was lost.


"Where am I?" Metaphysics says
No question can be asked unless
It has an answer, so I can
Assume this maze has got a plan.


If theologians are correct,
A Plan implies an Architect:
A God-built maze would be, I'm sure,
The Universe in minature.


Are data from the world of Sense,
In that case, valid evidence?
What in the universe I know
Can give directions how to go?


All Mathematics would suggest
A steady straight line as the best,
But left and right alternately
Is consonant with History.


Aesthetics, though, believes all Art
Intends to gratify the heart:
Rejecting disciplines like these,
Must I, then, go which way I please?


Such reasoning is only true
If we accept the classic view,
Which we have no right to assert,
According to the Introvert.


His absolute pre-supposition
Is - Man creates his own condition:
This maze was not divinely built,
But is secreted by my guilt.


The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious Mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.


My problem is how not to will;
They move most quickly who stand still;
I'm only lost until I see
I'm lost because I want to be.


If this should fail, perhaps I should,
As certain educators would,
Content myself with the conclusion;
In theory there is no solution.


All statements about what I feel,
Like I-am-lost, are quite unreal:
My knowledge ends where it began;
A hedge is taller than a man."


Anthropos apteros, perplexed
To know which turning to take next,
Looked up and wished he were a bird
To whom such doubts must seem absurd.


And buy the Complete Auden here.

The Inky Fool visits Hampton Court

A Hymn To Sheila

Today, as all Australians must be aware, is Sheila's Day. That is because Sheila is merely the Irish equivalent of Cecilia, which is the female equivalent of Cecil, which ultimately derives from the Latin caecus, which meant blind.

Anyway, today is St Cecilia's day, and St Cecilia is the matron saint of music. Thus this day is devoted to the muses.

Sheila (as I like to call her) only obtained this honour through a misunderstanding. She was a martyr of some sort in the second or third centuries, and an early account of her death said that she was stifled by being locked in her bathroom which was then overheated with air from red hot pipes, or candentibus organis. This seems to have been misread as cantatibus organis, which meant she was stifled while the organ played.

Anyway, writing hymns to St Cecilia has been a standard poetical business for years. Poets must describe music, which is a lot harder than you think. You get some lovely lines, like these by Pope:

Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

Or these from Auden:

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,

But the best are the closing lines of John Dryden's , which given his usual mediocrity is a miracle attributable only to the intervention of a saint.

So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.

And here is the whole Auden poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.



P.S. St Cecilia's body is, allegedly, in a church in Trastevere which I visited a couple of months ago. I would have knelt and prayed but somebody was playing the organ very, very badly, and it quite put me off.

In My End is My Beginning

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

Wrote Shakespeare and the result was an unending TV series and Catherine Zeta Jones. I fear that many people may read Shakespeare's line and imagine that there are rough winds during May shaking the buds. I'm pretty sure that that is not the case. The point of the line is that the flowers that were buds are being shaken by the rough winds of Autumn. Thus:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

There's something lovely about the end being seen in the beginning and the beginning being seen in the end. Auden wrote:

Time and beauty burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral.

Which does approximately the same thing. As Pozzo says in Waiting for Godot:

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. 


Which Vladimir elaborates thus:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens) But habit is a great deadener.

Thus, in writing, we can all be tomorrow's corpses and yesterday's babies, trees are overgrown seeds, buildings rubble, and champagne is grapes and urine. Rhetorically the trick is called prolepsis, or at least that's when you refer to something by its future state (You're a dead man). I don't know if the backward looking trope has a name.

The point is that words can do what dull reality cannot. They can see the beginning and the end simultaneously. Centuries collapse in clauses. As Bob Dylan put it:

I waited for you on the running boards, 
Near the cypress trees, while the springtime turned
Slowly into Autumn.

Auden and Schwarzenegger: The Hunter Becomes the Hunted!

A plunderer is somebody who takes plunder. Words are often their own victims, and perforce prey on themselves like monsters of the deep. Once such word is prey.

Once upon a toga-clad time, you prehended things, meaning that you got them: hence apprehend, comprehend and reprehensible. Pr(a)ehend then turned into Latin praeda, meaning something that was got, usually plunder. From praeda, via French, we got prey.

From praeda too, the Romans got praedari, meaning to plunder, and from that the English got predation, and from that you got predatory and then finally, in 1908*, you got predator.

And thus the hunter is, etymologically, also the hunted. And thus we are off to the jungles of South America and a crack team of special forces running for their lives and pondering their political careers (two of the actors later became state governors and a third ran unsuccessfully for the governorship of Kentucky).

Anyway, watching Predator I am always reminded of Auden's revisions of his own poetry. It's hard to say what the greatest line in the film is, but one of them is:

There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man. We're all going to die.

Auden once wrote a poem called September 1st 1939 (scholars aren't sure when). It climaxes with this stanza:


All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street 
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky: 
There is no such thing as the State 
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


He then decided that that last line didn't work. We die anyway, whether we love or not. All men are mortal (and most women). So he changed it to "We must love one another and die." But that hardly means anything. You might as well say "We must remember to feed the cat and die". He therefore decided to scrap the whole poem. He suppressed it. It is therefore still omitted from many, many editions of Auden's complete poetry, much to the bewilderment of readers.

The same, of course, applies to "There's something out there waiting for us, and it ain't no man. We're all going to die." Well, of course you're all going to die: all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

That, I think, concludes our week of eighties action movies. I simply can't work out why Rambo is named after a French poet and it's not that interesting that commando was first used in English by Winston Churchill. The old action stars are gone. The golden age has turned to bronze. The stars have gone out one by one (or been cast in The Expendables) and now, as Auden said of Arnold in the same poem:

...helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game: 
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

Whatever is out there, it killed Hopper, and now it wants us.

*There is a lone citation from 1581, but it seems to have been a Latin pun and didn't catch on.

The Wright Brothers, Baedeker and the Beauty of Pylons

What, dear reader, do these two photographs have in common?

Give up? So soon? Ah well, dear reader, you were never one to make an effort, were you? They are both pictures of pylons, for strange and gradual reasons that I shall explain as gently as possible.

Once upon a time there was a Greek word pylon that meant gate. It was a dull Greek word that might have died in obscurity were it not for the fine classical education of Egyptologists. They took pylon and decided to use it for the gateways of Egyptian temples. They had already decided to call the entrance to Greek temples the propylaeum.

Egyptian temples tend to have the same kinds of gateways. You have two big towers on either side and then a cross-beam between them, as in the illustration that I have so solicitously provided.

Things might have stopped there were it not for bridges. In the late nineteenth century people liked to put towers at either end of a bridge: not for any practical purpose, you understand, just because they looked nice. Such pylons can be found on the Pont Alexandre III in Paris.

You see the towers at either end? You see how they could be considered like the towers of the Egyptian temples with a crossbeam between? It's tenuous. Almost the first reference that I can find to pylons in this sense comes from the 1901 Baedeker guide to Paris, which describes these very pylons and the statues that perched atop them. The same volume of Baedeker also refers to the obelisk in Paris, and to how it had been taken from the temple of Ramses II at Thebes where it had stood "in front of a 'pylon', or gateway".

From here, things become a trifle muddied. It is certain that in suspension bridges, which had been around for a century, these pylons were used to hold the cables that held the bridge. However, the OED is extraordinarily unhelpful on this front. I found an architectural dictionary of 1912 that said they were purely decorative. Nonetheless, observe the wonders of Bristol.

A pylon if ever I saw one

What is certain is that seven years after that Baedeker was written, on the far side of the Atlantic, in North Carolina (near Buncombe country about which I have blogged), the Wright brothers were trying to make their new-fangled airplanes take off. This was troublesome as planes have to gather speed terribly quickly. So they came up with a cunning plan. They built a metal frame tower. At the top of it they had a heavy weight attached by rope to a pulley and thence to the land-loving aircraft. When they dropped the weight the aircraft would be yanked forward giving it the speed required for take off. Here is a picture:

The tower was rather useful. It was light and easy to build and terribly importantly it marked where the runway was. Early aviators found this aspect so useful that they would have a line of pylons marking the approach to the runway. Then they got used as markers in airplane races. You would take off, head for a pylon, perform a pylon turn around it and return to the runway.

I can't work out whether the Wright Brothers were the first to call this a pylon, but it was in use by 1909 and here's a lovely illustration from a 1912 edition of Popular Mechanics:

So now you have lines of frame towers running across the countryside. And from there, dear reader, you get the modern sense, which pops up in 1923 in a novel by Edward Shanks, and by 1930 we finally arrive at the poetry:

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires

Pylons falling or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;*

So wrote W.H. Auden and three years later Stephen Spender wrote a whole poem called simply "The Pylons". So fond were these thirties poets of Egyptian gateways that they were later known as the Pylon School of poetry.
 
Betjeman, who was not of the Pylon School, reacted thus:
 
Encase your legs in nylons
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul
 
For myself, I have always been rather fond of pylons. The discipline of structural necessity gives them elegance. They seem like great elegant giants striding single-file across the countryside. If Don Quixote were alive today, I am certain that he would charge them and not windmills.
 
It is a frailty of the aesthetic sense that people rarely appreciate beauty when it is necessary. The Roman aqueducts that tourists now gawp at would have been eyesores in their time. A hideous necessity cutting across the pastoral valleys. Windmills were once no more picturesque than windfarms, because they were necessary structures.
 
I was once being talked at by a terrible bore who was explaining how he had done up his horrid little house in the countryside. He had preserved at great expense some old contraption for grinding corn. I was not interested. I was gazing at the line of pylons that waddled magnificently from one horizon to the other. He noticed my inattention, noticed the pylons and said "Yes, they're horribly ugly, aren't they? Completely ruin the view. But anyway, the corn would have gone in here and then this handle...."
 
Which only goes to prove what I have always believed: beauty is utility plus a few hundred years.
 

The march of the giants

 
P.S. A pylon can also be an artificial limb, or a prologue.
 
*The opening chorus of The Dog Beneath the Skin

The Lullaby Meter

My favourite poetic meter is the acephalous iambic tetrameter. If that opening sentence doesn't have you weeing in your intellectual nappies then click on read more. For the rest of you, here is a link to Topsy and Tim making a picnic.

Haywire Straw Polls And The Grass Roots

I find few things more embarrassing than making an unintentional pun. Yesterday, a journalist told me that she had been watching the wires and I said that they must have been going haywire. Then I tried to hang myself. Then I started to wonder what haywire meant.

Hay wire is (amazingly) wire that you use to bind a bail of hay. Apparently its not as strong as normal wire and should never be used for repairs to machinery. If it is, then your machine will become a "haywire outfit". That may or may not be the reason that things go haywire. There's also the possibility that hay wire, like coat hangers and headphone wires, tangle themselves up horribly and that if something has gone haywire it simply means that it has become inextricably interwoven and loopy like the Gordian Knot (which was an actual knot in a place called Gordium, a problem that Alexander the Great solved at a stroke).

Straw polls are similarly enigmatic. Auden once said* of the relationship of a poet's biography to his work that it was simultaneously too obvious to need comment (Catullus loved Lesbia) and too obscurely complex to endure analysis. The same goes for these words of grass.

You do not, as Bob Dylan correctly observed, need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Shakespeare agrees and adds in The Merchant of Venice that an amateur zephyrologist can manage by:

Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind,

You throw a straw in the air and see which way the wind takes it. Hence a straw vote. Hence a straw poll, which elephantine-memoried readers of this blog will remember is a headcount.

OR, it is simply a weak poll, a poll of straw. Straw has always been weak as in straw dogs and straw men and clutching at straws etc etc which is why you only need hay wire to bind it together.

Grass roots is the third of these frail etymologies. It popped up at the beginning of the twentieth century. The roots I can understand, but the grass seems unnecessary. Why not dandelion roots, which are considerably stronger? English seems to be a strangely graminivorous language. But perhaps that's a good thing: hay fever used to be called summer catarrh, which is just horrible.

Or perhaps it's that grass roots are destroyed by GOATs. Now I'm off to accuse my lawn of informing on me to the police.**

The Inky Fool's summer residence

*In his preface to Shakespeare's sonnets. I don't have a copy to hand.
** A grass hand was a jobbing printer who moved employers, hence the sense of disloyalty, probably. A grass widow is an unmarried woman with a child (although I can't for the life of me see how that could happen). All flesh is grassy, bring on the lawnmower.

April is Icumen In

I am feeling idle and working frantically at tomorrow's post: so a mere medley on April as we are now entering the months of women's names: April, May, June, Julia and Augusta.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
   - 1984 by George Orwell

'But tell me, now, which season do you like best, Kay?'
'I like them all,' he said. 'I suppose I like April best, on the whole.'
    - The Box of Delights by John Masefield

April is in my mistress' face,

And July in her eyes hath place;
Within her bosom is September,
But in her heart a cold December.
  - Thomas Morley

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!
   - Home Thoughts From Abroad by Robert Browning

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote [sweet showers]
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote [drought]
And bathed every veyne in swich licour, [liquid]
Of which vertu engendred is the flower;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sun
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, [Sun's in Aries]
And smale foweles maken melodye, [fowls: birds]
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.
   - Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens
Hearing the frogs exhaling from the pond,
Watching traffic of magnificent cloud
Moving without anxiety on open sky–
Season when lovers and writers find
An altering speech for altering things,
   - Auden It was Easter...

April brings the sweet spring showers:
On and on for hours and hours.
    - A Song of the Weather by Flanders and Swann
 
There! And I didn't mention The Waste Land once.
 

The Inky Fool beset by feral youths

The Emperor's Crown and Other Enigmatic Perversions

N.B. This post was originally written about a mystery, but the mystery is now solved. See the wonderfully worldly description in the comments section.

 

The problem with the Internet is that there's not nearly enough information on obscure sexual practices. It's really quite maddening. For example, I was re-reading Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt when I came across this line:

There was a brothel in Havana where the Emperor's Crown was admirably performed by three nice girls.

Now, I'm proud to say that I have a depraved and horrible mind. I know what felch means, I know what changing at Baker Street is, and I know at least 5,636,336 synonyms for the word perineum. But I have no idea what the Emperor's Crown might be. So I googled it. And what did I find? Nothing nil zero zilch rien.

It's actually a rather important point in the novel, now lost to understanding.

There are several competing problems with understanding the language of filth. The first is that obscenities are not written down enough, except on the walls of lavatories, which are then demolished or repainted. The second is that those places where they are written down tend to be terribly dubious. There is, for example, a splendid book called Roger's Profanisaurus that lists rude words and their meanings. It is revised each year in time for Christmas and then appears on the tables in Waterstones. Yet ten years of revisions have not got rid of the fact that a chap I know spuriously entered the name of another chap I know with an obscene definition. It's still there. I check every year.

The Urban Dictionary, which is in some ways terribly useful, is the same. There's an Auden poem that opens:

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle

I happened to mention this aspect of doom to Mrs Malaprop and she didn't know what a sea dingle was. I reached for a dictionary, she for a computer. I found that a dingle was another word for a dell (hence Dingly Dell in Pickwick Papers is a tautology). She found this definition from the Urban Dictionary:

A sex act involving two people in which salmon roe is used as lubrication

Now, that ain't true. I know that ain't true. That's somebody who's read a little too much Auden (if that's possible) and is having a laugh. The problem is that the two best resources for the investigation of obscene English are tainted, infected. They have informational herpes.

And where does that leave the Emperor's Crown? What were the three nice girls doing so admirably? Perhaps Graham Greene was making it up. Almost any words in the right context can sound obscene. Have you ever done a flick Geoffrey? A koala gherkin? A Dutch steamboat?

If you have any idea what the Emperor's Crown is, do leave it in the comments. Otherwise the details may be lost to future annotators of this great novel. All that the prudish, priggish web would tell me was that the Emperor's Crown is usually bestowed by the Pope.

Yes, please.

The Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

Here is the updated list of the fifty most quoted lines of poetry on the internet, including all the readers' suggestions. We started with a long list of over 400 lines taken from dictionaries of quotations, collections of favourite poems and our own knowledge. We put each one into google and google told us how many pages contained that exact line. The number of search results is shown on the right. It should be stated before you begin that google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent. Click on the author's name for the full poem. Counting down from number fifty...

50. The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n] 403,000 Milton
49. Full fathom five thy father lies 438,000 Shakespeare
48. If you can keep your head what all about you 447,000 Kipling
47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways 467,000 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
46. If music be the food of love, play on 507,000 Shakespeare
45. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers 521,000 Shakespeare
44. What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare 528,000 W.H. Davies
43. The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on 571,000 Edward Fitzgerald
42. They also serve who only stand and wait 584,000 Milton
41. The quality of mercy is not strained 589,000 Shakespeare
40. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 594,000 Coleridge

Festive Quatrain

And He said: ‘What hast though done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.’
Genesis IV,9

The answer to the blood of Abel
 Was found among abandoned sheep,
 And landlord startled from his sleep
By woman screaming in a stable.


Incidentally, Auden used to miss out articles definite and indefinite in his early poems because he believed some linguistic theory that the article was going to die out as a part of speech. He was therefore adjusting his style for theoretical generations of the future, who never came to be.

Naughty Noughty

As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade
Some Australians have run a competition to see what to call the next one. They have concluded that the years of our Lord 2010-2019 should be called the One-ders. They give two reasons for this:

1. There is hope for many scientific, humanitarian and environmental breakththroughs.
2. The inclusion of number one in every year

For some reason, upon reading this my fists started to spasm and I could think about nothing other than ritual dismemberment involved in the Viking blood-eagle sacrifice. But that's by the by. More important is that nobody seems to agree on what to call the decade towards the end of which we are wearily trudging. Most newspapers dodge the issue by referring to the 2000's. Newsreaders tend to ge out of it with "this decade", "this century" or "since the millenium" and, if pushed, refer to the "two thousands".

Once you're on to the laxity of the review section the name becomes the noughties. This seems far more common, though, in Britain (380 recent uses) than in America (a mere 46).

Noughties is obviously a pun on naughty and suggests the naughty nineties of Wilde, Whistler, Dowson and all those other sinners. The thing about the naughty/noughty pun is that the etymology of the two words is the same. A wight with no possessions was a nowight or nought/naught. Such people tend to be criminals and are therefore naughty.

Naughty used to be a far more serious word. When I arrested Conrad for deceiving the duke and maligning a girl so terribly that she had to fake her own death I called him a "naughty varlet", and that wasn't just me mixing up my words: Leonato used the word naughty too. It's a bit of problem for Shakespeare. I remember the whispered titter that overtook the National Theatre once when I was watching King Lear and Gloucester, having his eyes torn out, calls Regan a "naughty lady".

But of course like so many words it has been used too much in exaggeration and disobedient children were being called naughty by the 1630s. Incidentally, aught, to mean nothing is simply a metanalysis from a naught to an aught, in the way that the snake called a nadder became an adder.

I don't know what to call the next decade. As I believe I said before: Dost thou not suspect my years?

Me arresting a naughty varlet