Labor Day
Labor Day is a good day to reflect upon work, hopefully while you’re lounging in the shade on a lawn chair with your favorite drink. In England, work became a virtual religion in the 19th century with the rise of the middle class (anticipated in America by the Puritans and Benjamin Franklin). Count on the irreverent A.E. Housman, therefore, to poke holes in pieties about work.
To set up his poem, I turn first to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where narrator Marlow has thoughts about work. He’s talking about his river boat, which he’s had to restore after an inept pilot sank it:
She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmer biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.
I don’t disagree. In fact, the opportunity to find oneself in a job is one of the best arguments for work. My heart goes out to those millions who, in the wake of the pandemic, are losing jobs, along with the security, basic necessities, and sense of self worth that accompany it.
All that being acknowledged, let’s also recall that sometimes it’s good just to “laze about”–or as Housman puts it, to “lie abed and rest.” John Donne expresses such sentiments in “Sun Rising,” accusing the sun of interrupting his morning love-making. You can go off and “chide late school boys and sour prentices,” he tells it. You can “go tell court huntsmen that the king will ride” and “call country ants to harvest offices.” Just leave me and my girlfriend alone.
Housman voices his own breezy complaint:
Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink
And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.
Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what's to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten thousand times I've done my best
And all's to do again.
Happy Refrain-from-Labor Day!