Amorous Cries

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude;

—Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene vii

Yeats when young wrote a poem he called,

“He thinks of his Past Greatness when

a Part of the Constellations of Heaven.”

I think of my Present Obscurity—

an Aspect of the Depredations of Earth.

Toys scorn the Constellations now,

"The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough";

I do my best—for what my best is worth.

“I became a rush that horses tread:

I became a man, a hater of the wind,"

a cicerone in the Country of the Blind.

Who know too much confound surprise.

“O beast of the wilderness, bird of the air,

Must I endure your amorous cries?”

Note: The quoted lines are quotations from Yeats’s poem, published a century and a quarter ago.

Sunday, March 9, 2025

Breaking Things

Claude Rowberry, London Blitz—Interior of a Ruined House. Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, UK

“Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.”—1 Cor. 15:33 (KJV)

Thaïs, a celebrated courtesan in Antiquity

got Great Alexander to burn down Persepolis

it’s said—revenge of some sort, who knows?

And we fear Persians with nuclear weapons!

“When children begin to play, they don't eat,”

Anna Freud observed at her nursery school.

“The pleasure's greater than the wish to eat.”*

These children were, of course, not starving—

Passing a bombed house on a walk, a child said, “Naughty, naughty!”†

For him, things broken in the Luftwaffe’s Blitz

or in a boyish game were much the same.

To break things is the great temptation,

as we begin to grasp in this our nation.

Lives had been shattered in that city.

For these the breakers felt scant pity.

* Anna Freud, “Children’s Lunches, with trays,” report, Freud Museum, London, cited in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 224. Quotations edited.

† Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, 212.

Epigraph: As Milton noted in his preface to Samson Agonistes, "Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call'd Tragedy," Saint Paul is here quoting Euripides (perhaps by way of Menander’s lost playThaïs). Paul is considered the patron saint of the city of London.

Ash Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Clowns in Limbo

Christ in Limbo by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch (Netherlandish, ca. 1450–1516), Philadelphia Museum of Art

Sir, Colonus is an Inhabitant:

A Clown Original: as you’ld zay a Farmer, a Tiller o’th’ Earth,

E’re sin’ the Romans planted their Colony first . . .

—Ben Jonson, A Tale of a Tub (1633), act 1, scene 3

Migrants to Limbo, sense conveys,

are in many ways quite a lot like us.

They read the news just as we do,

eat, like us, what they choose, fancy

a little travel, do romantic research,

sing popular songs, write poetry.

But “three things ought always to be kept under: a mastiff dog, a stone horse*

and a clown; and really I think a snarling,

cross-grained clown to be the most unlucky

beast of [the] three,” says Timothy.†

Such migrants, too, no matter how many

generations they’ve been in a country,

are always considered to be settlers.

Still, isn't that likely true of us as well,

once, finally, we’ve nothing left to sell?

Envoi

“The language spoken by the tribes of Limbo

Has many words far subtler than our own

To indicate how much, how little, something

Is pretty closely or not quite the case,

But none you could translate by Yes or No,

Nor do its pronouns distinguish between Persons.Ӥ

* That is, a stallion with balls. "Clown" = farmer, countryman (1599), likely derived from Latin colonus. Cf. Swedish kluns "a hard knob; a clumsy fellow"; Afrikaans klonkie, "Of black or ‘coloured’ people: a patronizing name for a youth; an insulting name for a man" (https://dsae.co.za/entry/klonkie/e03912). The name Columbus is probably just another corruption of colonus; in Spanish, he is Cristóbal Colón. (The name may be an adopted one. Some allege him to have actually been a Marrano, or cypto-Jew.)

† Timothy Nourse, Gent., Campania Foelix (1700).

§ W. H. Auden, “Limbo Culture” (1957).

Tuesday, March 4, 2025