Family Easter

 

There is a certain kind of holiday letter that might better be called the Annual Family Report.  Its purpose is to bring the reader up to date on the most recent doings and achievements of the various members of the family being reported upon.   The posterity of our friends all appear to be prolific, very active, and fertile.  If one’s contemporaries tend to be grandparents with a scattering of even great-grandparents, the dramatis personae of the annual Christmas reports can easily grow to Shakespearian proportions.  It soon enough can become impossible to keep your Gloucesters differentiated from your Leicesters, or be certain that your Imogens, Violas, Rosalinds and Beatrices are accurately distributed among the bourgeoning households of the second and third generations.  One reads on in admiration but sometimes only with modified comprehension.

 

In attempting to convey some sense of the highly satisfactory family Easter we just observed, I am doubtful that I can entirely avoid something of the vibe of the annual report.  But given the facts that the numbers involved were relatively limited, and that the events of the day can plausibly be carved into manageable and discreet episodes, it may prove possible.

 

Late on Good Friday, our younger son Luke, his wife Melanie, and their two children—John Henry (11) and Hazel (9) arrived by car from Montreal.  They had not been able to leave all that early, and there had been a long line at the border crossing, and there was not a lot of Friday still left.  There was of course enough time for us to ooh and aah about the kids’ notable increment in size since last sighting, but the serious visit began on Saturday.  At what age do Easter eggs, especially their decoration, and the disputes attendant upon their decoration, cease to command passionate family engagement?  I cannot yet answer that question, but it is obviously well over eighty.  Nonetheless a multi-generational corps of decorators did at last succeed in producing a small but elegant collection of eggs approaching Romanov standards.  From the point of view of weather Saturday was as at best mediocre, with prognostications for Sunday at first being not all that much better.  

John Henry, Hazel, & eggs 

 

The miracle of Easter is of course an improbable and unexpected corporal resurrection.  So was its secular echo on Hartley Avenue.  All the Montrealers, in addition to the two permanent residents, were up and about by about 4:15 a.m. to prepare to attend the Easter Vigil eucharist in the Princeton University Chapel.  This chapel, which cost more than a million dollars in the 1920s (when it was affectionately known as “Princeton’s million-dollar answer to materialism”), is a mini-Amiens of great beauty.  The lengthy Easter service is of exceptional beauty.  Save for a few rare occasions when I was temporarily resident in Europe, I have not missed one in more than thirty years.  The congregation gathers in darkness outside the cathedral-like west door for the lighting of the “new fire", then solemnly processes, in the dark and  in two parallel single lines, the whole length of the huge nave before mounting the chancel stairs to take up places in facing banks of  unlit choirstalls of the slightly elevated chancel.  More miraculous activity: here the Hartley Avenue group was joined by granddaughter Cora Louise, currently a sophomore living on campus.  The service is long, solemn, and impressive, and more than an hour of it elapsed before the light appeared, but faintly at first, in the huge east window.  Soon the sun would be fully risen in a cloudless sky.  But by then you already knew that Easter had really arrived.  We certainly knew it when we got home and rustled up the rare treat of a pancake breakfast—festively eaten, though in moderation, as we knew the real feast that awaited us in the afternoon.

 

At about ten-thirty we all piled into the monster Dodge van from Montreal and headed north toward Kingwood Township.  We took the route along the Delaware River from Trenton, which goes through several little waterfront villages, including two sizeable ones, Lambertville and Frenchtown, though we turn east before reaching the latter.  Most of the way is through beautiful Hunterdon County, still amazingly rural, the seat of which, Flemington, was presumably founded by one of my very distant relatives.  It is barely more than thirty miles from our house to the Fleming-Dixon property, but it takes about an hour to get there.  The word “property” is definitely a faute-de-mieux.  Farm, estate, mansion, and empire—though not without accuracy—don’t capture the down-home vibe.  Obviously some money exchanged hands in its acquisition; but the real enabler was imagination.  The house is a genuine colonial mansion (ca. 1790), and if Washington didn't sleep there I want to know the reason why!

Kingwood House
 

By the time we got there, the major New York delegation had already arrived: our daughter Katy and son-in-law Zvi (daughter Katy fortunately being orthographically distinguishable from our daughter-in-law Katie), who arrived with their eldest daughter Sophia (whose husband Raymond was unfortunately sidelined at home in Brooklyn with a cold).  So with the thus far unmentioned but indispensable granddaughter Ruby (daughter of the Kingwood hosts) the dinner party of eleven was now complete.  That is also the end of the incomprehensible family catalogue

 

Son Richard is a super chef and also a small-d democrat who imaginatively catered to the majoritarian vegetarianism of his guests.  Carnivores like me simply had to suck it up, which is not hard to do if what is on the table is the festival of vegetables we found before us.  These were such delicacies as galette of caramelized onion, imperial lentils, and a half dozen other succulent dishes previously known to me only from the Le Guide culinaire of Escoffier (from which my favorite untried recipe, for bear’s paw, begins thus: ‘Wrap the paw in clean mud…’).  

Rich's vegetarian feast

 

The young kids, in the nine to eleven range, still love an egg hunt, and there was one, using the rather superior eggs we had painted on Saturday.  There was also a limited bit of walking about the open woods, still leafless, but just on the verge of verdure, so to speak.  There was a marvelous show of daffodils.  The kids are fascinated by the huge old barn, and even more by its contents, including Richard’s burgeoning shop.  But mainly it was a gab-fest sitting around on a side patio with its view down to the pond.   Zvi, always interesting,  was recently returned from China.  The conversation was wide-ranging and mellow.

 

The Montrealers regaled us with tales of the life and hard times of Justin Trudeau, and the two K’s, Katy F. and Katie D., offered occasional expert opinions about the larger arts scene.  I have probably said enough in earlier posts about our daughter, who is the President and CEO of the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles, one division of which is the fabulous Getty Museum.  Let me now say a few words about the somewhat less well-known museum of which our esteemed daughter-in-law Katie Dixon is the current interim director.  That is the Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens, on the East River front just below the Astoria Ferry and just above the Noguchi Museum.  It is one of many little-known cultural institutions that make their contributions in establishing New York City as the inexhaustible cultural resource it continues to be through thick and thin.  As its name and location might suggest, the origins of the Socrates Sculpture Park are to be found among philanthropists in the large Greek-American community in Astoria.  It is among several New York cultural institutions that I myself, alas, have never visited; but it is claiming an eminent place among the growing number of sculpture gardens and parks displaying monumental works of material and size more appropriate to open spaces than enclosed salons.  There was a lot to hear about.  By the late afternoon of this perfect day the incoming light clouds were beginning to contest the day’s sunshine, and the party broke up, replete with good food and family fellowship.  Cora decided to go to the city with her parents and her elder sister, but we were still six driving back to Princeton, replete with good food and good talk and that relatively uncommon feeling of celebration rightly demanded and achieved.

 

George Chapman

 

One feature of enjoying literature is the appreciation of tradition.  Literary works involve both individual authorial expression and allusion, implicit or explicit, to some earlier work or works.  Indeed, one of the reader’s pleasures is recognizing and evaluating an author’s sometimes complex or intentionally tricky commerce with a predecessor.  One of the more remarkable poetic monuments of this sort is a sonnet of John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”.  In this famous poem the young English poet related his first experience of Homeric epic.  The Iliad and the Odyssey are about as close to ground zero of Western poetry as you can get.  Yet very few modern readers—and I am certainly not among the happy few—are able to read the original Homeric Greek with ease.  The prominence of English as a world language is a huge advantage to those of us for whom it is a native tongue, but one that undoubtedly makes us linguistically lazy.  We think, and mainly correctly think, that if a book is important, it will be translated into English.  Indeed, most of us, at least most Americans, read a great deal of world literature in English versions translated from something else.  Hence the great importance of literary translation as a semi-autonomous artistic undertaking.  Keats in his sonnet is perhaps extravagant in describing his encounter with Homer in English.  He felt like an astronomer who had discovered a new planet.  He felt like a heroic explorer, like Hernan Cortez, as his European eyes viewed for the first time the vastness of the Pacific Ocean! But any lover of good reading will have a sure sense of what he is talking about.  Keats implies that his discovery of Homer, made possible for him by Chapman’s translation, is itself an epic event like the European discovery of the Pacific!

 

The point of all this is that I have spent a good deal of time this week “looking into” George Chapman—though not his Homeric translations.  Chapman is a minor if not an obscure figure in English literary history, yet for me this is not strictly speaking a first look.  In preparing for my doctoral general examinations more that sixty years ago I did read a couple of his plays—concerning which I today recall very little.  In the context of such competitors as Marlowe, Jonson, and William Shakespeare, George Chapman has to be relegated to minor status.  But even the minor Elizabethans seem pretty mighty to me.

 

            We think that Chapman was born in or about the year 1569, in or about Hitchin, an old town north of London and about midway between Oxford and Cambridge.  We think he  spent time at both universities, gaining  a high level of mastery in the classical tongues and earning the reputation, in particular, of a considerable Greek scholar.  Later classicists have found some fault with various aspects of his Homeric translations, and the general reader of today is likely to be put off by aspects of his Elizabethan high style, but he was widely read by a general audience right through the nineteenth century.  My late colleague and friend Robert Fagles, whose translations of Homer gained a very large English-speaking audience in the 1990s, appreciated Chapman’s achievement.

 

a tavern full of Renaissance poets as imagined by Victorian artists

 

            Literary history is replete with examples of writers who excel in one genre but fall short in another.  If you are Henry James, and maybe the world’s greatest novelist, why should you in your heart of hearts desire to be a playwright instead?  Chapman appears to have regarded his Homer as apprentice work.  His heart was in the theater.  The Elizabethan theater was home base for some pretty tough characters.  Ben Jonson, who killed a man, barely dodged being hanged himself.  Christopher Marlowe was killed in a bar-room brawl.  In comparison to these worthies, Chapman seems to have been a rather dull and sober citizen.  He wrote many plays, but only one or two of them have passed the test of time.  I have on my shelves a nearly complete set of the old “Mermaid” series devoted to early British drama—advertised as “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists”.  The title of the series is taken from the name of the Mermaid Tavern, a long-vanished public house in Cheapside, near St. Paul’s cathedral, a notable haunt of poets, dramatists, and actors in search of ale and witty conversations.*  The group habitually gathering there just might, maybe, have included the Bard himself—though probably not.  The Mermaid thus became the most famous pub in British literary history.  In 1913 the once popular English poet Alfred Noyes published a long poem, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, dealing with the literary eminences supposed to be the habitués of the place.  The Chapman volume in the Mermaid series was published in 1895 (!) and edited by the young William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), a Yale professor destined to become famous as one of America’s first public superstar academics, and apparently the first person ever to teach a university course devoted to the novel.  There were in those days academic giants in the earth.  Phelps appreciated Chapman’s dramatic abilities but was not shy of pointing out that they were too infrequently displayed.  He confidently declares long passages, and indeed whole plays “worthless”.  On one occasion, indeed, he declares a venerable literary relic “trash”.  His general summary is that “An unbiased study of his work for the stage will show that as a dramatist he has been vastly over-rated”.  This is very bracing for a reader familiar with some of our contemporary reviewers who, usually out of current political or cultural enthusiasm, seem expert at discovering covert excellences in apparent mediocrity.

 

            But in truth what led me back to old Chapman was not his plays but a few intriguing and intricate poems on classical themes.  In particular I have in mind a long, ornate, and mildly pornographic early poem of his called “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense.”  I haven’t yet figured out the meaning of this exotic production, supposing that it has a meaning to figure out.  The intellectual battlefield is clear enough: the Platonic-Christian conflict of reason and sensuality.  The subject of the poem is old Ovid, the great classical poetic authority on sensual love.  Ovid has spotted a gorgeous young girl, Corinna—a female figure taken from Ovid’s actual love poems—privately (as she thinks) bathing in a kind of bower of bliss.  The old poet has snuck into this little paradise to make a sexual approach that only begins with voyeurism.  He lusts after her extravagantly and schematically through all five of his bodily senses, achieving an ambiguous final physical intimacy with her by the progression that classical and medieval literary theorists called the quinque gradus amoris, the “five steps of love.”  The lover [1] sees the beloved woman, [2] approaches her, [3] talks to her, [4] kisses her.  Step five is called “the deed”.  The old poet’s lubricious activity is delineated in incrementally lubricious verse: five senses, exercised in five steps, a Pythagorean bonanza.  Chapman makes his reader the voyeur of “Ovid’s” voyeurism.  Quite a poem, but is it philosophy or pornography?  Figuring that out will require more than a first look into.

approximate site of the vanished Mermaid Tavern

 

*Readers of a philological turn of mind will note that both the surname Chapman and the topographical names Cheapside and East Cheap—along with hundreds of others in Britain--derive from mercantile activity, ceap meaning a market in Old English.  What today is cheap in England and America is in France à bon marché,

 

Proserpina's Return

             Sir Stanley Spencer: Resurrection of the Dead in Cookham Churchyard

 

            There are at least two books that ought to be in, or accessible in, any family home.  One is the Bible and the other is Bulfinch’s Mythology.  The suggestion of the Bible does not carry with it any particularly religious implication—merely to recognize the sacred text that is genetically linked  with so very much of our literary, political, and intellectual history of the last two thousand years.  The possessive pronoun frankly invokes the important elements still shared by nations of Europe and their many descendants on other continents.  Bulfinch’s Mythology is simply a convenient modern English-language anthology of the ancient Greek and Latin myths scattered throughout classical literature but particularly prominent in the works of Ovid and a few others.    Some medieval writers spoke of the two Bibles: the Bible of the Theologians and the Bible of the Poets.  The European literary tradition continues to find inventive ways of bringing the two together, as we see so famously done by Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and so many others.

 

            There is certainly nothing sacred about Bulfinch, except that he was a very early American scholar, a Bostonian born in 1797, whom I favor on patriotic grounds.  He represents the learned strain that was in our country from its very founding.    But there are probably half a dozen other encyclopedias of myth to which one could turn.  Not only could, but probably ought to.  The great myth systems of the world are among the richest aspects of its cultural legacies.

 

I can hardly claim a coherent thematic architecture in the choice of blog topics, but I at least sometimes do have some sense of affinity—conscious continuity or conscious contrast—as I move from one week to the next.  The grievous sudden death of my wonderful friend Andrew Seth of course made an “emergent occasion” that fully occupied my mind.  It still occupies my mind, but grief can be tutored by philosophy, and even as one begins the process of grief one does begin to see a little more clearly and think a little more calmly.  I now regard it as a serendipity that only two weeks ago I wrote a little piece touching upon the plangent myth of Proserpina, as circumstances now allow, indeed almost require, that I return to it today.  That is because in the last few days there are many signs of Proserpina’s return.  And Proserpina is, in a certain sense the spring.  And spring is arriving—not merely in the technical calendrical sense—but in both physical and spiritual senses as well.

 

The story of Proserpina favored by Bulfinch contrasts, as so many of the myths do, the capriciousness and cruelty of the gods with the dignity and natural charity of humble mortals.  Proserpina, a lovely young girl, was a flower-gatherer.  Pluto was the dark king of the Underworld.  The hot goddess Venus could be a real bitch at times—such as most of them.  Just to stir things up Venus instructs Cupid to shoot Pluto, spotted making a rare appearance above ground, with one of his fatally aphrodisiac arrows.  Standard results ensue: hot pants in high places.  Inflamed by “love” Pluto sees Proserpina gathering flowers, grabs her, and carries her home to hell.  The kidnapped girl’s mother Ceres, goddess of agriculture, searches for her vainly in the four corners of the earth.  Of course she does not find her; she is under the earth.

 

Few detective novels are more carefully plotted than the ancient Greek legends, and there is much more fine-grained narrative in this myth, but in the end Proserpina is almost rescued.  A compromise is arranged.  Proserpina must spend half the year with her hellish husband, the other half on the sunny earth.  We have here obvious allegories of both a calendrical and a spiritual nature.  The pattern recurs endlessly: life, death, rebirth….the eternal return.

   “Fear first invented the gods.”  We find that in an ancient Latin poem, and we find it in English literature as early as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a brilliantly imagined epic historical novel in verse written by a Christian author seriously attempting to enter the mental life of his imagined ancient pagan characters.  What must it have been like, the author asks, to live in that ancient society of those who, as Saint Paul put it, “have no hope”?  The philosopher George Santayana said this: “That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”  But I deny that fear is the source of the strange Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the Dead, which at least claims to be based in an empirical, historical experience.  Fear and hope are very different things.  Rebirth a delusion? Perhaps.  Extravagant hope, doubtless.  But if your experience is that life is good, so good indeed that its final defeat is to you unthinkable, you find yourself trying to imagine the unimaginable along with Piero della Francesca in the fifteenth century or Sir Stanley Spencer in the twentieth.  The brilliance of Spencer’s art resides in its combination of the humdrum and the barely imaginable.  Here a random group of ordinary English villagers are coming out of their graves as if from a slumber party!

 

            So a dear friend is dead, and there’s no denying that.  But Proserpina has returned, even if here it is still so cold as to make one think twice before walking out in the chill air to take in the flowers that are already appearing massively in her train.  But Palm Sunday is only four days hence, and then but a week more to an unusually early Easter.  Chances are good it will be fairly warm by then.  And now each Easter I myself have left, however few or many they may be, will be vivified by happy memories of a great friend and companion—and of bright and fragrant spring flowers.

                                          along the path to the lake
 

 

Andrew Seth

Even before I had begun to cast about for this week’s topic, it was unhappily thrust upon me, and therefore on you, with the shocking news of the sudden death of a very dear friend, Andrew Seth, in England.  Andrew was, indeed, the closest of my surviving friends from my wonderful years in Oxford (1958-1961).  I have written about him on this page several times, and indeed recently.  I have even posted a couple of blog essays from Saint Michel, the Seths’ delightful old house in the hills skirting the small old town of Salernes in the upper Var.  Spending a generous stretch of September there in a serious gastronomic and conversational orgy with Andrew and his partner Lee, in the company also of other old friends from decades past, had become for us an annual highpoint of our senior years.  So there are no glad tidings in this blog and practically no glad teaching; but I cram a linguistic point in at the end.

 

Andrew’s importance in the British commercial world, which saw him in prominent positions in various parts of the world and heading the British branch of a large international conglomerate, will guarantee ample obituary notices in the British press.  What follows is in no sense a biography, merely the first thoughts of a grieving friend.  Andrew and his late wife Edith, also a good friend, came from Belfast.  Andrew’s father was a prominent professor of psychology at the university there.  I would meet Andrew in the autumn of 1958 at Jesus College, Oxford.  He was a lawyer—meaning a student of law as an undergraduate Oxford subject—and our rapidly established friendship had little to do with the academic side of life.  Young Andrew was in fact a bit of a rogue.  But he was brilliant, knowledgeable, a great wit and the kind of fellow whose broad popularity soon guaranteed his election to the presidency of the Junior Common Room.  Yet eventually he could not conceal, nor particularly desired to conceal, a broad-based and usefully focused knowledge of literature, music, and politics.  Some of our undergraduate highjinks were of the kind that cannot be recalled without a certain amount of embarrassment, but I was never unaware of his broad intellectual interests or the passion with which he pursued them.  What I did not know is that our rather casually shared “serious” interests would be the basis of our own life-long and gradually intensifying friendship.

 

The academic world into which I fully submerged myself after leaving Oxford tends to become narrow and exclusive in its academic character.  I had the good luck to have a few real world friends doing real world things.  Very slowly, but also with a pleasant inexorability, Andrew became the greatest of such friends to me.  He and lovely Edith raised four remarkable and versatile sons.  Andrew rose—not without testing adversities—to the high roles of professional leadership that allowed him in time a country house and a property in the south of France—magnificent, but not fancy, if you understand the distinction.  Edith, alas, was taken away, far too early, by a bad cancer.  Well, I suppose there are no good cancers.  We grieved for and with Andrew, but were delighted when in later years he connected with Lee, the surviving widow in a couple with whom the Seths had once shared a long friendship and French vacations.  We soon came to know and love her, as did Andrew’s offspring.  She was with Andrew at the sudden end, and we are grieving with her even as we admire her deep strength of character.

 

Seth in pundit mode

 

The only newspaper photograph I could find of Andrew on the Internet is a rather somber one.  I believe it must have appeared in the British press to accompany his solicited expert opinion regarding the “grocery wars” periodically waged among the supermarketeers in the Continental European countries and in Britain.  As I learned from him in conversation, the highly volatile large-scale market in domestic table food is a huge and treacherous one where small margins mark the divisions between lucre and loss.  With his late long-time friend Buff Randall, another Jesus College contemporary, he had co-authored a book called The Grocers: the Rise and Rise of Supermarket Chains (2011).  Fortunately, we had more recent photos, taken by us in Salernes about six months ago.  Of the two I have chosen is one memorializing what were literally the last moments we would spend on this earth in the company of this dear friend.  Squinting into the brilliantly rising Provençal sun we lined up together for a staged farewell photo.  Behind us is the car that would take us to Nice airport.  The driver of that car is the one who took the picture.  We were sad to be leaving such beautiful friends and such a beautiful place, but the last thing in our minds was that the farewell might be final.  Indeed: in the midst of life, we are in death.

 

            Some friendships are great multipliers of friendship.  During our autumnal stays at Saint Michel we met and became friends with other of Andrew’s friends, or increased the friendship with others whom we already knew.  One new friend, Alison Loyd, has known him well for sixty years.  They worked closely together in his first job after leaving Oxford.  In a lovely letter in which she commiserated with us, she summarized the essence of our shared Salernes idylls thus: “Above all, Andrew loved conversation and we were all the beneficiaries of his wide reading, broad interests, enquiring intellect, listening skills and decisive mind, alongside wit and humour.”  Another member of this year’s house party, our shared Oxford friend Michael Nicholas and one of the most prominent church musicians in England, will probably be the organist at Andrew’s funeral.

 

Naturally, very old friends often preserve between them long superannuated “in” jokes, the shelf-life of which expired decades earlier , adding further absurdity to the absurdities of discourse characteristic of class reunions or accidental meetings with the old girl-friend you last saw forty years ago.  One such bit of humor, a tedious “in” joke, involved the words for a meal’s final course--dessert (American) and (sweet)  often English.  Andrew would occasionally ask me “How would you like a Fresh fruit, juice, jelly, cream and ice cream to top things off?”  This referred, obscurely, to an offering to be had in the prix-fixe menu (three shillings and sixpence, as I recall) on offer at a modest café in the little village of Iffley where he and other memorable friends lived for a year when room had to be made in the college buildings on the Turl to give incoming students their chance to dwell among forehead-smashing lintels and gargoyled façades.  A mixture of fresh fruit, juice, jelly (Jello in our land), cream, and ice cream were presumably the contents of this mouth-watering concoction, but also its name.  The waitress would cut no corners.  This course could not be referred to in less than ten syllables.  Andrew and his flat-mates derived mirth from this habit of speech,   And note that it was not “fresh fruit juice” but two different items: a fresh fruit (to be determined) and a juice (likewise) that might or might not be a relative of the juice.   In Mencken’s still wonderful American Language (1919) the author points out the typical way in which the British usage with regard to the names of comestibles and potables differs (or used to differ) from the American.   An Englishman prepares a drink composed of Scotch whiskey (or even whisky) and soda water and calls it what?  A whiskey-and-soda, of course.  His American counterpart needs poetry.  His identical drink had to be a high ball at the very least and quite possibly a Caledonian Comforter or something more exotic.  I doubt that anyone in the world still asks for a high ball.  And I am a certain that never again will anyone in this world be offered this ten-syllable sweet course.  One minute loss amid a great personal one.  Andrew Seth, 1937-2024.  May he rest in peace in rise in glory.

John, Andrew, Joan, Lee: September 2023

 

 

 

Flower Girls

Raptus Proserpinae by Alessandro Allori

 

I am sometimes asked how I came to spend a career studying medieval literature.  In fact, the question comes up so frequently that I early invented a facetious answer designed to disarm the apparent surprise or even disdain that resides within it.  “When it became clear that I was going to be a college professor and therefore irrelevant anyway, I determined to do it with as much pizzaz as possible.”  In fact, the choice was to some extent arbitrary.  The world is infinitely interesting.  The wonder of it all is to have lived in a time and place when the larger culture not merely allowed but actually encouraged me in a scholarly vocation.  I could have as easily become a historian as a literary scholar.  In fact, my view is that literary study when brought to bear on anything written before the day before yesterday is necessarily “historical”.  This means that a real literary scholar has to learn a lot of other stuff along the way.

 

But beyond that, the aesthetic assumptions of the earlier (pre-Romantic) periods of European poetry were crucially different from those of modernity.  Alexander Pope (early eighteenth century) famously defined “true wit” (roughly, fine literature) as “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”  Originality of thought, and the individual expression of unique poetic consciousness, are in this view supplanted by tradition—what oft was thought.  The English theologian and murder mystery writer Dorothy Sayers has an essay with a title that explains the classical idea succinctly: “The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement.”  The “statements” of major medieval works require the study of history, philosophy, theology and very often earlier Latin and vernacular poems.  I liked the idea of the “whole package”.  To begin with, the medium in which literature exists—namely language—is among the most malleable of human institutions, so that the study of early literature necessarily brought with it philological challenges that intrigue me.  Shakespeare’s language (around 1600)—classified by language students as modern English—is still a hill too steep for some of today’s undergraduates.  Chaucer’s English (around 1400) actually does require a bit of preliminary study.  The preparation to read Beowulf (about 1000 or earlier) requires learning an essentially foreign language.

 

            My doctoral dissertation of 1963 was a hybrid literary-art historical essay in which I tried to interpret the moral and philosophical sense of the Romance of the Rose (Roman de la Rose in French) by analyzing the miniature painted illustrations to be found in so many of its surviving medieval manuscripts.  There is visual as well as verbal allegory; and I would spend many years studying the language of medieval pictorial iconography.  This poem enjoyed huge popularity among aristocratic readers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and exercised a large influence on such writers as Chaucer.  It is a very long, and in some ways very difficult poem, the hybrid work of two authors living at different times (Guillaume de Lorris, probably about 1240, and Jean de Meun, closer to 1300).  Jean claims to have taken up the unfinished work forty years after Guillaume’s death.  The two authors, of whom the latter was by far the more prolific both in lines written and in ideas raised, were of very different temperaments.  Guillaume was an elegant Ovidian love poet, Jean a learned university theologian and very much of an ideas man.  He could also be distinctly ribald.  The allegory that Guillaume began is that of a Lover in pursuit of a hard-to-get lady represented as a rose.  In the continuation by the randy theologian the much sought-after rose is more clearly a part of a woman, if you follow—an emendation that considerably changes the tone of the work.  I have not followed the philological track back to its origins.  “Deflowering” (defloratio) is already in the moral vocabulary of early Christian writers.

 

            Many flowers are lovely, but the rose is definitively the flower of love, romantic and sexual.  Its classic simple statement, perhaps, is the most famous line penned by sweet Robbie Burns “O, my Luve is like a red, red rose…”  Is it even possible to imagine the beloved object as hollyhock or petunia?  For many poets, it was possible to imagine the “floral lady” in quite extraordinary ways.

 

One early poet who typically illustrates his Christian humanism in a union of the classical and the biblical is John Milton.  In the fourth book of Paradise Lost, which is a fancy retelling of the biblical story of the “Fall of Man,” Milton describes the arrival of Satan on earth, an earth so stunning in its prelapsarian beauty that the poet can but tell us of about twenty beautiful places which--though of the greatest beauty described by the classical poets—cannot approach it.  This is a catalogue of places that the site of our primal fall was not.  And the first is this:

 

Not that faire field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours
Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis

Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world… (P.L. 4, 268-72)

 

                                                            Enna
 

            The geography of the brilliant image of Proserpina (Persephone in the Greek sources) as both flower gatherer and flower builds on a passage in Ovid.  Enna is a hilltop town in the center of Sicily and therefore, in a sense, the very center of the Mediterranean.  The infernal ravisher has also the names of Pluto and Hades, but Milton follows Dante (Purgatorio 28) in calling him Dis (Ditis in the medieval Italian, formed from the Latin genitive.)  Dante’s own treatment of the story is stamped with the startling originality of the Tuscan genius: what oft was thought, but…Ceres, goddess of agriculture and mother of Proserpina, searched fruitlessly for her stolen daughter.  The Romantic poet Shelley thought Dante’s remaking of Proserpina as Matelda so extraordinary that he translated it in a fine poem of his own.*

 

“Where have all the flowers gone?” crooned Pete Seeger in the ‘50s of my early youth.   I think they were actually still there, certainly in song titles.  Mainly red roses, and mainly Hibernian, as in “Rose of Tralee,” and “My Wild Irish Rose” and Robbie Burns.  But we also have bluebells, daisies, and buttercups.  And not all the roses are red.  Mature readers of the blog may well remember the brilliant fist-fight scene in the film version of “Giant” (1956), one of the best of Edna Ferber’s terrific novels, in which the Rock Hudson character is beaten to a pulp by the racist proprietor of a two-bit diner as the broken Wurlitzer plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”  Theme music, you might say.

 

The "six degrees of separation” rule supposedly governing human beings is cumbersome when compared with the association of ideas, for which the number is usually one.  One of the great joys of literary study is the caprice by which one thing leads to another, potentially endlessly.  We may doubt that George Stevens, the director of “Giant,” was ever aware of the Latin poet Claudian; but here he comes.  Claudian, I mean.  Around the year 400 Claudian wrote an epyllion (baby epic) of a thousand lines or so entitled De raptu Proserpinae (The Rape of Prosperpina). I find it slightly tough sledding, but it seems to have been well-known to John Ruskin, the Victorian sage, art critic, architectural historian, early eco-warrior, and incidental medievalist.  Most of his books are slightly odd in a geniusy sort of way.  Modern Painters (1843-60) and The Stones of Venice (1851-) are the most famous monuments of his polemical erudition, and both works of permanent literary merit.  He was himself a painter and draftsman of ability.  The first book of his I ever bought was an old and battered copy of his essay on wildflowers:  Proserpina.  Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air Was Yet Pure Among the Alps and in the Scotland and England which my Father Knew (1879).  We may note in passing that Ruskin, and not he alone, thought the earth’s atmosphere was already poisoned by 1860 or so.  He hated the smoke-bellowing railroad engines with a passion.  Eventually I bought up, one at a time and all for a song, most of the matched set to which this edition of Proserpina belonged.  That volume reproduced dozens of his own exquisite botanical drawings, but it is necessarily of a larger format than the others in the set, and hence too tall for the “Ruskin shelf”.  I have just conducted an exhausting (but obviously not exhaustive) search for it amid some of the double- and triple stacked shelves of my library.  I had no better luck in finding Proserpina than did her mother.  I know it must still be in this house somewhere, but where?  A conundrum for the heirs.  Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven  for?      

  

Daniel Gabriel Rossetti: Proserpina

 

 

* “Matelda Gathering Flowers”: from the Purgatorio of Dante