Poems about Charles I and II

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2022
The United Kingdom’s next monarch, Charles III

Friday

“The king is dead. Long live the king.” I remember first encountering that apparent paradox when reading Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper as a child. Combined, the two declarations emphasize both ending and continuity. Tom in this passage is the pauper who has been mistaken for the king:

“The King is dead!”

The great assemblage bent their heads upon their breasts with one accord; remained so, in profound silence, a few moments; then all sank upon their knees in a body, stretched out their hands toward Tom, and a mighty shout burst forth that seemed to shake the building—

“Long live the King!”

The paradox doesn’t work when the monarch is a queen, however. Nor, for all the coverage that Queen Elizabeth II’s death is getting, is there as much at stake as there was in days of old. When British monarchs wielded real power, transitions often raised extravagant hopes and overblown fears.

In recent years I’ve found myself thinking more about Queen Elizabeth than I normally would, largely because she interested my late mother, the two having been born less than a year apart. (Both died at 96.) We watched The Crown together, along with other programs featuring British royalty. My mother admired Elizabeth’s class and her propriety, qualities that she possessed as well.

So now we are set to have the first Charles since the 17th century. To celebrate the ascension of Charles III, I share two noteworthy poems about the previous two. Charles I was beheaded following the Puritan revolution, an event that is mentioned in Andrew Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.”

Marvell is somewhat ambivalent about Charles’s execution since he sees Cromwell as the better man. The poem praises Cromwell’s successful campaign against the Irish (Marvell doesn’t mention its brutality). Charles, he suggests, could not have been so successful. Perhaps tradition has been broken but “Nature”—which is to say, natural talent, natural law—must win out.

Come to think of it, this is the way some Trump fanatics defend their leader’s violation of precedent, law, and democracy itself. When force is changing history, the old rules seem expendable–or empty, as Marvell puts it:

Nature that hateth emptiness
Allows of penetration less,
And therefore must make room
Where greater spirits come.

As the greater of the two men, Cromwell successfully lured Charles to Carisbrooke Castle, where he captured him and bore him off to “the tragic scaffold.” The execution was necessary, Marvell suggests: “This was that memorable hour/Which first assur’d the forced [Parliamentary] pow’r.” But he goes on to add that Charles at least died with class:

That thence the royal actor borne
The tragic scaffold might adorn,
While round the armed bands
Did clap their bloody hands.
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene,
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor call’d the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.

Having given Charles some credit, however, Marvell then returns to praising Cromwell again. He, not Charles, is what Britain needs at this moment:

And yet in that the state
Foresaw its happy fate.
And now the Irish are asham’d
To see themselves in one year tam’d;
So much one man can do
That does both act and know.
They can affirm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confest
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest trust;
Nor yet grown stiffer with command,
But still in the republic’s hand;
How fit he is to sway…

The second Charles comes off even worse, at least in the verse of John Wilmot, who had a love/hate affair with the king while serving essentially as court jester. One poem he wrote about Charles–“A Satyr on Charles II”–got him banished from court for a while. You just have to glance at the first stanza to figure out why. Wilmot contrasts Charles with the “French fool” Louis XIV, with one being too warlike and the other too easygoing:

In th’ isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.

The poem concludes by referring to Louis XIV as a hector (a bully) and Charles as a cully (an easy mark):

All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
    From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.

I prefer Wilmot’s other poem about Charles, however, because of its pithiness. Wilmot posted it on Charles’s bedroom door:

Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never says a foolish thing,
Nor ever does a wise one.

In hindsight, the relaxed Charles II may have been a better king than Wilmot gives him credit for. His decision to go easy following his restoration to the monarchy may have been what the country needed following its civil war. Charles I, on the other hand, appears to have been rather inept. Marvell wasn’t wrong to associate him with “emptiness.”

Given how the monarchy has evolved, Charles III won’t have the opportunity to do great good or great harm. As a result, he is unlikely to trigger any memorable poems, either of praise or of condemnation.

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Actors of Color in New Tolkien Drama

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2022
Nomvete and Córdova as dwarf and elf in Ring of Power

Thursday

Given the objection of some Tolkien fans to dwarfs and elves of color in Amazon’s Ring of Power—a prequel to Lord of the Rings based on other material Tolkien wrote—I am reposting a past post on Tolkien’s politics. As you will see, I don’t deny that Tolkien had blind spots, which also show up in his groundbreaking scholarship on Beowulf. That an author has some of the prejudices of his place and time should surprise no one. At the same time, I also believe that great literature transcends both author and time.

 And because of this, film adaptations have a lot of leeway in how they handle the source material. We see this all the time in Jane Austen films—Anne Elliot in the latest Persuasion is much more socially assertive than Austen’s original but the strength of character is similar—and one could say the same about Tolkien’s drama. Is anything lost by making Middle Earth multicultural? If anything, Tolkien’s drama is already moving in a multicultural direction by the contrasts it draws between dwarf and elf culture. The need of the dwarfs and elves to unify in the face of a common enemy cries out for casting decisions that upend racial tribalism.

It sounds like those accusing Ring of Power of wokeness are people who dream Hitler’s dream of white purity and his fears of white replacement. If they are looking Tolkien to bolster fascist leanings, however, they should think twice. After all, in Lord of the Rings Tolkien based Sauron and his Nazgul on German fascists. For that matter, by the end of the trilogy hobbits must move beyond their xenophobia, which has trapped them in a limited world, and open themselves to a globalist perspective.

Reprinted from October 10, 2019

My son Toby Wilson-Bates just alerted me to a Dorothy Kim article about how J.R.R. Tolkien, even as he brought general attention to Beowulf, also circumscribed how people interpreted it. The Oxford don could only see it as a white, male hero story and, more disturbingly, he shut out scholars of other races who might have interpreted it differently.

While I find the article overly opaque and convoluted, it does alert us to Tolkien’s prejudices. It also provides me an opportunity to reflect on how literary works are more complex than the writers who authored them or the scholars who study them. This is certainly true of Beowulf and somewhat true (because it’s a lesser work) of Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s landmark essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” elevated the epic from an interesting historical document to the masterpiece that launched Britain’s literary greatness. Since then, however, Kim says that critics have read it “through the white gaze and a preserve of white English heritage.” Tolkien, she argues in an elliptical and not altogether convincing manner, regarded Grendel as a black man. I’m less skeptical that his concern was “solidifying white Englishness and English identity.” While he “abhorred fascism and antisemitism,” he “upheld the English empire’s white supremacy.”

Kim then contrasts Tolkien’s vision with Toni Morrison’s. While the white author focuses on Beowulf, the black author focuses on Grendel and his mother, regarding them as “raced and marginal figures.” In Morrison’s view, Grendel represents the dispossessed, one who yearns “for nurture and community.” I haven’t read Morrison’s essay but, by Kim’s account, it sounds like she regards him as a Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son.

That Tolkien has racial prejudices I am willing to grant, to which I would add gender and class prejudices. In Lord of the Rings, the good guys are Nordic-looking Rangers of the North (Aragorn), elves that resemble British yeomen out of the Robin Hood stories, and the very white Riders of Rohan while the bad guys (the Orcs) are Slavic-looking proles who threaten to overwhelm the comfortably middle-class Shire. Women, meanwhile, are in scarce supply.

I also grant that his interpretation of Beowulf is lacking, especially as it omits any discussion of Grendel’s Mother. (In other words, he overlooks women once again.) This is why diversity in academic scholarship is vital: women and people of color spot things overlooked by scholars with Tolkien’s demographics.

But Beowulf is greater than either his or Morrison’s interpretations of it, and I believe that Lord of the Rings transcends Tolkien’s racism, classism, and sexism as well. Beowulf is one of the great literary works about violence—it ranks up there with the Iliad—while Lord of the Rings changed the course of fantasy fiction.

As I see it, Beowulf captures how violence hollows us out and distorts our souls. Tolkien may or may not have regarded Grendel as black, but the monster’s resentful rage maps easily on to our white supremacists, who themselves feel dispossessed.

Grendel’s Mother, meanwhile, I regard as the vengeful rage that wants others to experience the hurt she feels. To apply one instance of Tolkien’s own countrymen yielding to her rage, Britain firebombed Dresden, an open city for refugees of no strategic importance, in revenge for the bombing of London.

The Beowulf poet could create this timeless monster because he had seen up-close his culture’s endless blood feuds. If he imagined this monster as a woman and a mother, it’s because no rage seemed fiercer to warriors than that of a mother who has lost her son. Think of it as Mother Bear rage.

In other words, I don’t see Beowulf’s monsters as limited to any demographic but rather as archetypes of our most destructive impulses. In his society, the monstrosity could consume disaffected warriors (Grendel resentment), grieving warriors (mother vengeance) and paranoid rulers (dragon rage). Every age and country has its own version of these three monsters.

To touch briefly on Lord of the Rings, it suffers from some of the author’s blind spots. Fantasist Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, for instance, exposes Tolkien’s one-dimensional depiction of goblins by giving them personalities, even as British gentry hunt them down or ruthlessly exploit them. But Rings also shows, through compelling storytelling, the seductive lure of power. Having witnessed Europe’s 20th century madness from the front row, Tolkien created a drama that can be used to expose Britain’s Brexit arrogance and anti-immigrant reaction as much as it reveals Hitler’s or Stalin’s ambitions.

To reiterate my basic point: while we should call out literary works for their shortcomings, we should not overlook their greatness in the process.

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Childhood Books Recollected in Tranquility

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2022
Renoir, Child Reading

Wednesday

Sorting through my parents’ children’s books—and the books I read as a child—is proving to be more emotionally fraught than I anticipated. The past weighs heavily so that each choice—whether to keep, to move on, or to throw—tears at me. Given that there are hundreds of such books, you can imagine my mental state.

Our collection includes books that meant something to my paternal grandparents and my great aunt Rose but probably not to my father. And books that he loved as a child but that seem no more than interesting historical artifacts to me. And books that I loved to death as a child that will mean nothing to my children when, in 10-30 years, they will have to deal with them if Julia and I don’t dispose of them first.

And then, of course, there are the books that were meaningful to them, which I’m being careful to keep.

All of this culling is occurring after my three brothers, my niece, and my nephew went through the collection. Nephew Fletcher took the Doctor Doolittle books and he and his sister split the Oz books (all 30 of them). Brothers David, Sam and Jonathan picked at books here and there, including the Tintin and Asterix books (in French). But it feels like they did no more than pick up a few pebbles from the shore.

I’ve mentioned before that, by having so many books, my parents essentially buried them so that I—and perhaps they—forgot they existed. Some obviously have not been handled since the day they were put on the shelves.

I have Proustian moments with some of what I’m seeing for the first time in decades. For instance, a colorful book on children from around the world stands out to me because I was given it when I woke up from a tonsillectomy at age 7. My throat was horrifically sore but this brightly colored book helped compensate.  I’ve come across some beloved books, illustrated although not authored by Maurice Sendak, that I’d forgotten about, such as “What Can You Do with a Shoe?” (Wrong answers only follow.) I’ve also discovered some Winnie the Pooh books that are so worn that they are held together with rubber bands. My father had them as a child and read them to me.

So here’s a question: Do I hold on to them for sentiment’s sake, even though I have exact modern replicas in much better condition? And if I do, should I make sure to revisit them periodically rather than allow them to be buried? Or is enough to recall, somewhere in the back of my mind, that they lie somewhere in the collection, perhaps to be rediscovered in the future as I am rediscovering them now? I really don’t know.

The same question applies to my grandfather’s complete collection of Robert Louis Stevenson. These old leather bound books would fall apart if I opened them up to read them, and since I own modern editions of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Treasure Island, and A Child’s Garden of Verses—and since I can find all the rest on line or in the library—should I hold on to them? Or do I just display them as one does an antique china vase that one doesn’t use. Or, for that matter, an elegant clock that no longer works. (We have several of these.) Please tell me what you think.

Returning to our collection of children’s books that I began reporting on last week, memories are flooding back about the following:

–Rudyard Kipling was very important to us as children, especially the Just So Stories, The Jungle Books, and Captains Courageous. Returning to a story like “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” years later, I was astounded at the violence. Everyone flogs the little elephant for his “insatiable curiosity” but boy does he make them pay once he gets his trunk.

–Selma Lagerlof’s Wonderful Adventures of Nils, about a boy who shrinks in size and then flies all over Sweden on the back of a goose, introduced me to sadness and death, which I hadn’t encountered before in children’s literature. Still, I was enthralled by the adventures, which function as a Swedish geography lesson.

–Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Doolittle books were special to us, in part because my nature-loving father was so in love with them. He read all six or so of them to us.

–George MacDonald was big in my life (as he was in C. S. Lewis’s), especially The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. I was intrigued by At the Back of the North Wind but ultimately felt it to be suffocating, given the North Wind is a figure of death.

–And speaking of Lewis, I can’t leave out the Narnia books. Along with sThe Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, they towered over all other books of my childhood.

–All the Pooh books were also very big when I was younger, and I may owe my name in part to Christopher Robin. (“Robins,” with an “s,” is also a family name.) Many of the poems in When We Were Very Young and Now I Am Six I had memorized.

–E. Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, The Would-Be-Goods, and The New Treasure Seekers taught me the importance of point of view since the narrator—who tries unsuccessfully to hide his identity and pass himself off as a neutral reporter—is the older brother (as was I).  That the five children in the family are all book lovers, especially of The Jungle Books, helped me identify with them. My youngest brother Sam, on the other hand, was more drawn to Nesbit’s fantasy novels, like The Five Children and It, The Book of Dragons, and The Phoenix in the Carpet.

—We own all of Mary Norton’s Borrower books, along with Bedknob and Broomstick (although I didn’t encounter the latter until later in life). I found them fun although not compelling.

–On the other hand, I was riveted by The Scarlet Pimpernel, which was just the kind of dashing adventure and love story that would appeal to a bookish kid like me. I remember the joy I felt when I discovered there were sequels.

–If we don’t own all 26 of the Lucy Fitch Perkins’s twin books, we certainly own most of them, almost all in first editions. Perkins’s books about twins of different nationalities and historical periods were immensely popular, and I especially liked the ones with adventures (like The Twins of the War of 1812).

–Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (upon which the movie Braveheart is based) strikes some as overly long, but I recall receiving this novel about William Wallace’s rebellion against the British as a Christmas present staying up all night reading it. The N.C. Wyeth pictures contributed.

–Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels is a series about kids who have sailing adventures. I found the series somewhat tame (except one where they have to escape modern-day pirates) but my two youngest brothers loved them.

–I couldn’t get enough of Margery Sharp’s Miss Bianca books when I encountered them in 8th grade. We have all of them.

–We also have all of my mother’s Little Pepper Books. I enjoyed the first but wasn’t drawn to read the sequels, as she did.

–My father used to read us Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books, about a misbehaving boy who is partly modeled on Tom Sawyer. I wasn’t that kind of boy—I followed all the rules—but I was intrigued by his misadventures.

–Speaking of Tom Sawyer, we have not only that book and Huckleberry Finn but two further sequels, Tom Sawyer Aloft and Tom Sawyer Detective. All of which I loved.

–We enjoyed Jules Verne’s adventures. My brother Jonathan was drawn to his science fiction, like 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but I preferred Around the World in 80 Days.

–We have all of E.B. White’s children’s books although the only one I remember reading was Charlotte’s Web. That one, however, haunted my imagination, especially Garth Williams’s image of the father going after Wilbur with an axe.

–I conclude with one of my very favorites, T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose. Lilliputian citizens, kidnapped by the 18th century captain who rescues Gulliver from sea, escaped and have been living ever since on an estate. Maria discovers them and then, together, they thwart her wicked guardians.

I can’t overstate the pleasure that these books brought me, and I have confined myself to noting the better ones. I haven’t even touched on others books we own, like ones from the Hardy Boy, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and other series. And these are only the children’s books, not all the novels, plays, and poetry and essay collections. And then there are all the cartoon books and the mysteries and the art books and the literary theory and the travel books and the history books and the biographies and the nature books and the books on feminism and civil rights and…

We can’t keep them all—or rather, we technically could but then we’re back to my original problem, which is that too many books–or too many things–means that you can’t fully appreciate them.

So what would you do? Or what have you done? I’m hungry for answers.

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Serena and Venus Transformed Tennis

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2022
Serena Williams bows out

Tuesday

Last week, as we watched the greatest woman tennis player of all time play what is probably her last professional match, we could only marvel at how she and her sister transformed the sport. Fox Sports commentator Nick Wright spoke for many of us when he opined that Serena Williams is “the most dominant in her field of any athlete I have ever seen.” Wright added that Serena belongs on the Mount Rushmore of greatest athletes ever, up there with Muhammad Ali, Usain Bolt, and only one or two others. In every way, she has been extraordinary.

Speaking for myself, I was always amazed at how Serena could win clutch points when the whole match hung in the balance. She seemed absolutely fearless at such moments.

The late poet Tony Hoagland wrote a poem that captured how she and Venus changed the sport in a poem appropriately titled “The Change.” The speaker in the poem is a man with unconscious racial biases who finds himself enthralled by a Williams match in spite of himself. While he is watching Venus play, he could just as easily be describing Serena.

Expecting deference from Black women, he’s struck by how Venus was

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission

The poem makes some factual errors: the match the speaker appears to have seen was Venus defeating Belgian Justine Henin, who indeed was a “tough little European blonde,” in 2001. (Technically, 2001 is still the 20th century, so “the 20th century almost gone” is accurate.) Furthermore, the match was held on the green grass of Wimbledon, not the red clay of the French Open. (The only time Venus reached the French Open finals, she lost to Serena.) In 2001, George Bush would have been “the new president [who] proves he’s a dummy.”

The speaker also garbles the name by mixing up Venus with Aphrodite while joining it with a caricatured Black name: in the poem she becomes “Vondella Aphrodite.” (“Say her name correctly,” I imagine Black Lives Matter protesters saying.) And I have no idea what it means that the speaker gets the Williamses’ hometown wrong. Maybe he has confused Compton, California (their actual home) with Compton, Alabama, or maybe he has projected a primal civil rights drama onto the match. At any rate, even though he finds himself rooting for the white women—”because she was one of my kind, my tribe, with her pale eyes and thin lips”—he can’t help being riveted by Venus’s power and her “to-hell-with-everybody stare.” Incidentally, Venus won the match 6-1, 3-6, 6-0. Or as the speaker puts it,

that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

Unfortunately for the Williams sisters, simply winning in those early years didn’t change hearts and minds. Many Americans rooted against them, especially Serena, because of their unapologetic dominance. Furthermore, Black athletes have never won White hearts simply by being good. If anything, stereotypes are sometimes reinforced, not changed, by their success.

Given how white the tennis world was in 2001, however, it’s remarkable how much the Williams sisters have transformed it. Players of color, like Naomi Osaka, Coco Gauff, and Francis Tiafoe (the latter two having reached the U.S. Open quarterfinals this year) now travel the road that Serena and Venus blazed. In that way, the speaker in the poem is absolutely correct: the sport can’t be “put it back where it belonged” because we ourselves have been changed.

The Change

By Tony Hoagland

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine.
In the park the daffodils came up
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes –

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies,
and the new president proves that he’s a dummy.

but remember the tennis match we watched that year?
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama,
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms,
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite –

We were just walking past the lounge
and got sucked in by the screen above the bar,
and pretty soon
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return
as the volleys went back and forth and back
like some contest between
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare,
and I,
I couldn’t help wanting
the white girl to come out on top,
because she was one of my kind, my tribe,
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big
and so black,
so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation
down Abraham Lincoln’s throat,
like she wasn’t asking anyone’s permission.

There are moments when history
passes you so close
you can smell its breath,
you can reach your hand out
and touch it on its flank,

and I don’t watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre,
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent
then kicked her ass good
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge
had to climb up on a box
to put the ribbon on her neck,
still managing to smile into the camera flash,
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed –

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone,
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged,
it was past us
and we were changed.

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Think of Work Sweat as “Odorous Oil”

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2022
Bumpei Usui, The Furniture Factory

Monday – Labor Day

Today America celebrates the nobility of work while giving its workers a day off from same work. Nor is it only Americans who regard work as practically something holy. I share today a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning which shows the Victorians having the same view of it.

Many trace this back to the Protestant work ethic, which as Weber argued has its roots in fear-driven Calvinism. Believing that whether we are headed for heaven or hell has already been predetermined by an all-knowing god, Calvinists/Presbyterians obsessively scrutinized their own lives to find evidence that would prove that they were amongst the elect rather than the damned. If their lives turned out prosperous, they hoped this meant that God favored them, so they did everything they could to make money.

(To be sure, this is an example of flawed logic. In addition to the flawed assumption that you can tilt the playing field by anything you do, why should material prosperity be a sign of God’s election rather than other things in life? Nevertheless, the belief was psychologically satisfying in that doing good and doing well could be seen as one and the same. Such belief is foundational to prosperity theology, the power of positive thinking, and other variants that have taken hold in various American Protestant denominations.)

Puritan self-scrutiny, at least when it came to Great Britain’s shores in the 17th century, led to intense journaling, which in turn (so argues Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel) led to the novel, a form of literature that can focus intensively on small details in the lives of ordinary people. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, and Journal of the Plague Year are great examples of this, as are the novels of Samuel Richardson. Crusoe’s intense efforts to develop his desert island are driven by guilt over having disobeyed his father and a fear of damnation, and his material achievements so caught people’s imaginations that for 200 years Robinson Crusoe was Europe’s most popular novel.

I offer this as backdrop for Barrett Browning’s “Work.” Her image of tending vines and the heat of the day, furthermore, must be a reference to Adam and Eve before the fall in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In those blissful hours before all hell broke loose (literally in Milton’s imagery), the couple clip a few vines here or there and then, when they get tired, retire to rest. In the following passage, Eve has just mentioned to Adam that they could prune more efficiently if they split up—after all, the vegetation seems to be growing faster than they can it back—to which Adam replies that “irksome toil” is not “the end of human life.” Rather work, in moderation, provides us the same kind of delight as eating, having meaningful conversations, and looking into each other’s eyes:

Yet not so strictly hath our Lord imposed
Labor, as to debar us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles; for smiles from reason flow,
To brute denied, and are of love the food;
Love, not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksome toil, but to delight,
He made us, and delight to reason joined.

Essentially, Eve has attempted to introduce the Puritan work ethic into Eden, only to be told to relax. And if she’s really worried about the vines getting out of control, Adam points out, there will soon be kids to help them out:

These paths and bowers doubt not but our joint hands
Will keep from wilderness with ease, as wide
As we need walk, till younger hands ere long
Assist us…

 After the fall, of course, it’s a different matter as God puts the hammer down:

Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife,
And eaten of the tree, concerning which
I charged thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat thereof: 
Cursed is the ground for thy sake; thou in sorrow
Shalt eat thereof, all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles it shall bring thee forth
Unbid; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread…

Oh, and God adds that Adam, Eve, and their descendants will have to keep working this way until they die:

Till thou return unto the ground; for thou
Out of the ground wast taken, know thy birth,
For dust thou art, and shalt to dust return.

Back to Barrett Browning’s poem. There will be no leaving one’s vine-tending, she tells us, “till Death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.”

Note the use of the word “mild,” however. What seems like a curse to Adam becomes almost a blessing. “Sweat of thy face,” for instance, becomes “odorous oil,” which itself sounds like an allusion to the 23rd psalm: “Thou anointest my head with [odorous] oil.” Tears of misery, meanwhile, become “pure crystallines,” which those who are inspired by our example will “wear for amulets.”

In other words, Barrett Browning is telling us to work hard, patiently and cheerfully, because, by doing so, we will inspire others to do the same. “My cup runneth over,” the 23rd psalm goes on to say, while Barrett Browning writes,

The least flower, with a brimming cup, may stand.
And share its dew-drop with another near.

So work sweat has morphed first into odorous oil and now morning dew. Here’s her poem:

Work
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What are we set on earth for? Say, to toil —
Nor seek to leave thy tending of the vines,
For all the heat o’ the day, till it declines,
And Death’s mild curfew shall from work assoil.
God did anoint thee with his odorous oil,
To wrestle, not to reign; and He assigns
All thy tears over, like pure crystallines.
For younger fellow-workers of the soil
To wear for amulets. So others shall
Take patience, labor, to their heart and hand,
From thy hand, and thy heart, and thy brave cheer,
And God’s grace fructify through thee to all.
The least flower, with a brimming cup, may stand.
And share its dew-drop with another near.

It sounds like Barrett Browning is describing a process of socialization. By undertaking burdensome work with “brave cheer,” we convince others to take on that same work with the same cheer and so on through generations. And perhaps it’s true that work feels less arduous if we see it as the reason God set us on earth.

Only, according to Milton, God didn’t originally intend “odorous oil” for us but something gentler. We brought on the tears ourselves. Barrett Browning just seems to be making the best of it.

Labor Day intends to do the same. By celebrating the labor we do—and by giving us temporary relief from this labor in order to do the celebrating—it makes things a little easier. We get a brief glimpse of life before the fall every year at this time as we sit back and relax with family and friends.

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Pots Turned on the Wheel of Life

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2022
Jost Amman, The Potter (1574)

Spiritual Sunday

As Julia and I are in the process of transforming my parents’ house into our house, we’re looking for ways to highlight our pottery collection. Silver we can do without—two of my brothers are taking that—but fine pottery is a passion of mine. My mother owns a number of wonderful pieces by local potters, as do we, and we’re clearing space so that guests and visitors can enjoy the collection as well.

All of which makes me interested in one of today’s Old Testament readings. In 18:1-11, Jeremiah imagines God as a potter. Longfellow, meanwhile, may have this passage partly in mind in his poem “Song of the Potter.”

First, here’s Jeremiah describing God as an angry potter. Envisioning Israel as a vessel in process, Jeremiah says that God can mess up humanity the way He messes up a pot. “I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you,” Jeremiah’s God tells humanity:

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it

And:

Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Presumably Israel will become a better pot if it listens to God.

Longfellow also imagines God as a potter, and at one point he seems to allude to today’s passage: “A touch can make, a touch can mar.” In the end, however, he is making another point: the rotating pot is like the great wheel of fortune or the cycle of life. Longfellow may also have in mind Ecclesiastes 3, the passage that begins, “To everything there is a season.” (“Turn, turn, turn,” I hear Pete Seeger singing.)

In this drama, the pot cannot demand an explanation from the potter since the ways of that potter—whether it is God or fate—are beyond our understanding. So just accept that it is of clay that we are made and it is to clay that we shall return.

Song of the Potter
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Turn, turn, my wheel! Turn round and round,
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
For some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!

Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change
To something new, to something strange;
Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
To-morrow be to-day.

Turn, turn, my wheel! All life is brief;
What now is bud will soon be leaf,
What now is leaf will soon decay;
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
The blue eggs in the robin’s nest
Will soon have wings and beak and breast,
And flutter and fly away.

Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar
A touch can make, a touch can mar;
And shall it to the Potter say,
What makest thou? Thou hast no hand?
As men who think to understand
A world by their Creator planned,
Who wiser is than they.

Turn, turn, my wheel! ‘Tis nature’s plan
The child should grow into the man,
The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray;
In youth the heart exults and sings,
The pulses leap, the feet have wings;
In age the cricket chirps, and brings
The harvest home of day.

Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place,
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay.

Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,
To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay.

Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon
The noon will be the afternoon,
Too soon to-day be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay.

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September Days Are Here

By Robin Bates | Published: August 31, 2022
Apples at Ricker Hill Orchards, my cousins’ Maine apple farm

Thursday

Here’s a lovely Helen Hunt Jackson poem to usher in the first day of September. Jackson, an exact contemporary of Emily Dickinson, hits all the right notes in describing the season, including the way September stands at the intersection of summer and fall. As Jackson puts it, “With summer’s best of weather,/ And autumn’s best of cheer.”

After having captured the loveliness of the month, however, Jackson then takes a further step and says that it brings about something even lovelier: “a thing which I remember.” We aren’t told what this thing is. It’s a secret that the poet leaves up to our imagination.

September
By Helen Hunt Jackson

The golden-rod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

The gentian’s bluest fringes
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed
Its hidden silk has spun.

The sedges flaunt their harvest,
In every meadow nook;
And asters by the brook-side
Make asters in the brook.

From dewy lanes at morning
The grapes’ sweet odors rise;
At noon the roads all flutter
With yellow butterflies.

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather,
And autumn’s best of cheer.

But none of all this beauty
Which floods the earth and air
Is unto me the secret
Which makes September fair.

‘T is a thing which I remember;
To name it thrills me yet:
One day of one September
I never can forget.

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Longing for Walden-Like Simplicity

By Robin Bates | Published: August 30, 2022
Walden Pond

Wednesday

Julia and I have inherited my parents’ house, and while we are thrilled, we are also discovering that it is no small feat to clean out the detritus of 74 years—not to mention all the stuff that my parents inherited from their parents and grandparents. We’re trying to be careful—you never know when you’ll open an envelope and find a letter from Pete Seeger, which we just did—but it can feel overwhelming at times.

I think of Thoreau, who at one point in his Walden sojourn found himself overwhelmed by three pieces of limestone. The episode occurs in a reflection on people always wanting bigger houses and more stuff.

The passage starts with longing for the simple life of the uneducated Arab or Indian. (Anthropologists tell us that their life is far from simple but let that pass.)

Shall we always study to obtain more of these things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the necessity of the young man’s providing a certain number of superfluous glow-shoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as simple as the Arab’s or the Indian’s?

And then there’s the fact that the great prophets—Jesus, for example—did not carry furniture around with them:

When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture…At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone.

At this point we learn of Thoreau’s dislike of dusting:

Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.

Alan Dillingham, my American lit teacher in grad school, pointed out that Thoreau has another option: he could just leave the rocks dusty. Dillingham was making the point that Thoreau was obsessed with purity, starting with Walden Pond itself. So yes, anyone living in the woods needs to get over a dirt phobia.

But set that discussion aside. Right now, I’m relating to Thoreau’s desire for an uncluttered life. Before I get there, however, there are mounds and mounds of stuff standing in my way.

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