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.
