Laudator Temporis Acti

Men of Pith and Thew

2009-07-15T04:50:00.002-05:00

Edmund Blunden, Forefathers:

Here they went with smock and crook,
Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade,
Here they mudded out the brook
And here their hatchet cleared the glade:
Harvest-supper woke their wit,
Huntsmen's moon their wooings lit.

From this church they led their brides,
From this church themselves were led
Shoulder-high; on these waysides
Sat to take their beer and bread.
Names are gone - what men they were
These their cottages declare.

Names are vanished, save the few
In the old brown Bible scrawled;
These were men of pith and thew,
Whom the city never called;
Scarce could read or hold a quill,
Built the barn, the forge, the mill.

On the green they watched their sons
Playing till too dark to see,
As their fathers watched them once,
As my father once watched me;
While the bat and beetle flew
On the warm air webbed with dew.

Unrecorded, unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within -
There is silence, there survives
Not a moment of your lives.

Like the bee that now is blown
Honey-heavy on my hand,
From his toppling tansy-throne
In the green tempestuous land -
I'm in clover now, nor know
Who made honey long ago.

Staying Healthy When Old

2009-07-14T03:45:00.001-05:00

Logan Pearsall Smith, Last Words:

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

Tools, Land, Beasts, Loves

2009-07-13T04:05:00.002-05:00

V. Sackville-West, A Saxon Song:

        Tools with the comely names,
        Mattock and scythe and spade,
        Couth and bitter as flames,
        Clean, and bowed in the blade,—
A man and his tools make a man and his trade.

        Breadth of the English shires,
        Hummock and kame and mead,
        Tang of the reeking byres,
        Land of the English breed,—
A man and his land make a man and his creed.

        Leisurely flocks and herds,
        Cool-eyed cattle that come
        Mildly to wonted words,
        Swine that in orchards roam,—
A man and his beasts make a man and his home.

        Children sturdy and flaxen
        Shouting in brotherly strife,
        Like the land they are Saxon,
        Sons of a man and his wife,—
For a man and his loves make a man and his life.

Milver

2009-07-12T03:47:00.004-05:00

Thanks to Eric Thomson for introducing me to the word milver. The word appears in Owen Barfield, "Coleridge's Enjoyment of Words," in John Beer, ed., Coleridge's Variety: Bicentenary Studies (London: Macmillan, 1974; rpt. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), pp. 204-218. Here is the beginning of Barfield's essay:

There is a little volume in the series known as the Home University Library entitled The English Language. It is rather more than sixty years old now, but it is a book I always recommend very strongly to anyone who either enjoys words already or is anxious to begin enjoying them. But what does one mean when one speaks of 'enjoying' words?

When I was a very young man, I was for a brief period in rather close touch with the author of that book, Logan Pearsall Smith. In fact he took me to a certain extent under his wing as the result of an article I had published. Pearsall Smith was a literary friend of the poet Walter de la Mare, and I remember him telling me that, in one of his conversations with the poet, they had agreed there ought to be a word to denote a person with a certain easily recognisable but hardly definable feeling for, or delight in, or enjoyment of words. They decided to invent one and they further decided that, in doing so, they would apply a new principle of coinage. This was, to look around for some especially lovely word, with which there happened to be no available rhyme, and to invent a rhyme for it. The existing word they hit on was 'silver' and the word they invented was 'milver'. A 'milver' was to be a man who enjoyed words in the way they both meant.

I believe I am right in saying that that was as far as it went and that neither of them ever did actually did use the word in public.

As a matter of fact, Logan Pearsall Smith did use the word in public. It occurs, although with a different meaning, in his Afterthoughts, which I quote from the collection All Trivia: Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), pp. 168-169:

When we talk politely of new books with a new acquaintance, what chasms, abysmally, yawn between us!

But what festivals of unanimity we celebrate when we meet what I call a 'Milver'—a fellow-fanatic whose thoughts chime in a sweet ecstasy of execration with our own!

In either meaning of the word, Eric Thomson is a milver.

Jennifer Steinhauer, "A Literary Legend Fights for a Local Library," New York Times (June 19, 2009), quotes Ray Bradbury:

"Libraries raised me," Mr. Bradbury said. "I don't believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don't have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years."

....

The Internet? Don't get him started. "The Internet is a big distraction," Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

"Yahoo called me eight weeks ago," he said, voice rising. "They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? 'To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.'"

My Luddite sympathies incline me to agree with Ray Bradbury's execration of the Internet. On the other hand, if it weren't for the Internet, I would never have had the privilege of meeting Eric Thomson and a few other milvers.

I found Owen Barfield's essay on "Coleridge's Enjoyment of Words" a delightful read, and I want to record here another passage from the essay (pp. 212-213) which struck my fancy:

There are two ways in which the mind can relate itself to reality; and both of them have their importance. If you care to imagine reality as a vast solid sphere and the individual mind as an ant on its surface, one of the things the ant can do is to crawl about over as much of the surface as it has time for. The other thing is to begin from any point where it happens to be and bore its way in towards the centre. This is rather what can happen when anyone enjoys, studies and meditates on a particular word. That word, the point where he happens to be, becomes the point of penetration. This was very much Coleridge's way. And one of the first things this kind of ant discovers is that language is not, as he first supposed, a kind of thin film spread over the surface of a wordless sphere (a film which he can penetrate by taking care to feel through a word and not for it), but that the entire sphere is composed of a substance for which 'word' and 'thing' are both correct names in different contexts. 'I would endeavour', Coleridge wrote to Godwin in 1800, 'to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, and living Things too. All the nonsense of vibrations etc. you would of course dismiss.'

In other words, if your goal is reality, or truth, or Life with a capital 'L', or whatever your favourite nickname may be for the sphere as a sphere, and if you are anxious to get at it through words, one of the sharpest instruments you can use is a deep feeling for words, and for their history. You will be all the better equipped for finding out how things came to be what they are, if you know something of how words came to be what they are.

Owen Barfield recommended Logan Pearsall Smith's The English Language to one who enjoys, or is eager to enjoy, words. I'd recommend Owen Barfield's own History in English Words (London: Faber, 1953; rpt. 1969).

Winter in July

2009-07-11T04:13:00.003-05:00

August von Platen (1796-1835), Winterlieder:

I.
Patience, tiny bud,
In the dear quiet wood:
It is still much too cold,
It is still much too soon.

For now I pass you by,
But I remember the spot,
And when Spring draws near,
I'll fetch you then, my treasure.

II.
The sky is so clear and blue,
If only the earth were green!
The wind cuts, if only it were mild!
The snow glistens, if only it were dew!
If only the earth were green!

I.
Geduld, du kleine Knospe,
Im lieben stillen Wald,
Es ist noch viel zu frostig,
Es ist noch viel zu bald.

Noch geh' ich dich vorüber,
Doch merk' ich mir den Platz,
Und kommt heran der Frühling,
So hol' ich dich, mein Schatz.

II.
Der Himmel ist so hell und blau,
Ach wäre die Erde grüne!
Der Wind ist scharf, ach wär' er lau!
Es schimmert der Schnee, ach wär' es Thau!
Ach wäre die Erde grüne!

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Platen's Poems," in Essays and Studies, Educational and Literary (Baltimore: N. Murray, 1890), pp. 401-450 (at 403):

We may well despair of giving to an English translation the finished perfection of language which is to many the highest, to some the sole charm of Platen.

Related post: That Man, Where Is He Now?

Star Wars

2009-07-10T03:23:00.001-05:00

Randall Jarrell, The Breath Of Night:

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars.

A beautiful poem, but I find the last line a bit puzzling. Traditionally, it isn't Strife that moves the stars, but Love. See, for example, the last line of Dante's Paradiso: "l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle."

Curious About Nature

2009-07-08T04:33:00.003-05:00

Niko Tinbergen, Curious Naturalists (New York: Basic Books, 1958), chapter 16:

It seems to me that no man need be ashamed of being curious about nature. It could even be argued that this is what he got his brains for and that no greater insult to nature and to oneself is possible than to be indifferent to nature.

....

Scientific examination naturally requires concentration, a narrowing of interest, and the knowledge we gained through this has meant a great deal to us. But it has become increasingly clear to me how valuable have been the long periods of relaxed, unspecified, uncommitted interest.

....

The curious naturalist often feels sorry for those of his fellow-men who miss such an experience; and miss it unnecessarily, because it is there, to be seen, all the time. Nor is reading about it anything more than a poor substitute; direct, active observation is the only real thing.

Related post: The Investigation of Nature.

Bible Study

2009-07-08T04:20:00.005-05:00

Gary A. Rendsburg, "The Mock of Baal in 1 Kings 18:27," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 50.3 (July 1988) 414-417 (at 414):

One of the most memorable scenes in the entire Bible is the contest between Elijah the prophet of Yahweh and the 450 prophets of Baal atop Mt. Carmel. The confrontation, recorded in 1 Kings 18, called on both parties to attempt to produce rain, with the Baal prophets going first and Elijah scheduled second. When the former's efforts from morning until noon had produced no results, Elijah began to taunt his opponents about the inefficacy of their god. His exact words were as follows: "Shout in a loud voice, for he is a god, kî śîaḥ wekî śîg lô, or he may be on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping or waking up" (1 Kgs 18:27).

The words left untranslated apparently form a hendiadys, i.e., the use of two words (śîaḥ and śîg) to express one idea (compare the English "bits and pieces" or "odds and ends"). Unfortunately, however, none of the usual meanings of these Hebrew words fits the present context, so the phrase has proved to be enigmatic for scholars.

Rendsburg in his article argues that śîg (go aside, move away) means to go aside for the purpose of defecating (Targum Jonathan translates it as a euphemism for ease oneself) and that śîaḥ means to urinate (there are cognates with this meaning in other Semitic languages). He concludes (at 416):

In short, there is good reason to conclude that both elements in the hendiadys, śîaḥ and śîg, refer to excretion and that the phrase should be rendered "he may be defecating/urinating." These would certainly be powerful words from the mouth of Elijah and would be a most appropriate mock of the Canaanite god Baal.

Unfortunately, I don't know Hebrew, so I can't judge how plausible this interpretation is. There can be no question of any classical influences, but like Old Porteous, I always come back to the Greeks and the Romans, or, in this case, the Greeks.

First, on "going aside," see Xenophon, Education of Cyrus 1.2.16 (tr. Walter Miller):

There remains even unto this day evidence of their moderate fare and of their working off by exercise what they eat: for even to the present time it is a breach of decorum for a Persian to spit or to blow his nose or to appear afflicted with flatulence; it is a breach of decorum also to be seen going apart [ἰόντα ποι] either to make water or for anything else of that kind. And this would not be possible for them, if they did not lead an abstemious life and throw off the moisture by hard work, so that it passes off in some other way.

Second, on the bodily functions of gods, see the passages collected at Holy Ordures and Noctes Scatologicae: Divine Flatulence, to which add Aristophanes, Clouds 373 (tr. Jeffrey Henderson), where, after learning that clouds cause rain, Strepsiades says:

And imagine, before now I thought that rain is Zeus pissing through a sieve!

καίτοι πρότερον τὸν Δί' ἀληθῶς ᾤμην διὰ κοσκίνου οὐρεῖν.

J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams, Oxford Introduction to Proto-European and the Proto-European World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 126, connect Greek οὐρέω (ouréō = urinate) with Hittite warsa- (rainfall) and Sanskrit várṣati (rain). Some derive Greek οὐρανός (ouranós = sky, heaven, cf. Latin and English Uranus) from a root that is also the source of ouréō: see Gregory Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 275, who cites Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, II, 446-447. One is supposed to be able to search Frisk at the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary web site, but I have consistently bad luck with this tool. It almost always responds to my queries with "Sorry, the server may be busy: please try your request later!" M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 137, discussing the suffix *-nos, derives Greek Ouranós from *Worsanos = lord of rain.

Hat tip: Rick Brannan, Humor in Ancient Literature (the meme).

Method of Study

2009-07-07T03:48:00.001-05:00

Linnie Marsh Wolfe, ed., John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938; rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), p. 69:

This was my 'method of study': I drifted about from rock to rock, from stream to stream, from grove to grove. Where night found me, there I camped. When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance and try to hear what it had to say. When I came to moraines, or ice-scratches upon the rocks, I traced them, learning what I could of the glacier that made them. I asked the boulders I met whence they came and whither they were going. I followed to their fountains the various soils upon which the forests and meadows are planted; and when I discovered a mountain or rock of marked form and structure, I climbed about it, comparing it with its neighbors, marking its relations to the forces that have acted upon it, glaciers, streams, avalanches, etc., in seeking to account for its form, finish, position, and general characters. It is astonishing how high and far we can climb in mountains that we love, and how little we require food and clothing. Weary at times, with only the birds and squirrels to compare notes with, I rested beneath the spicy pines, among the needles and burrs, or upon the plushy sod of a glacier meadow, touching my cheek to its gentians and daisies. No evil consequence from 'waste of time,' concerning which good people who accomplish nothing make such a sermonizing, has befallen me.

So Foul a Deed

2009-07-06T04:24:00.003-05:00

Thanks very much to Dr. Robert J. O'Hara for the following email:

I'm enjoying your series of blog posts on trees and groves. Here's another you may like -- George Wither's "When I behold the havocke and the spoyle" (1635):

http://rjohara.net/teaching/uncg/biology-105-poems#wither

And there's also Stanley Kunitz's "The War Against the Trees" (1958):

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-waragainsttrees/poem.html

Many thanks for the interesting posts.

George Wither, When I behold the havocke and the spoyle:

When I behold the Havocke and the Spoyle,
Which (ev'n within the compasse of my Dayes)
Is made through every quarter of this Ile,
In Woods and Groves (which were this Kingdomes praise)
And, when I minde with how much greedinesse,
We seeke the present Gaine in every thing;
Not caring (so our Lust we may possesse)
What Dammage to Posterity we bring:
They doe, me-thinkes, as if they did foresee,
That, some of those, whom they have cause to hate,
Should come in Future-times, their Heires to be:
Or else, why should they such things perpetrate:
For, if they thinke their Children shall succeed;
Or, can believe, that they begot their Heires;
They could not, surely, doe so foule a Deed,
As to deface the Land, that should be theirs.
What our Forefathers planted, we destroy:
Nay, all Mens labours, living heretofore,
And all our owne, we lavishly employ
To serve our present Lusts; and, for no more.
But, let these carelesse Wasters learne to know,
That, as Vaine-Spoyle is open Injury;
So, Planting is a Debt, they truely owe,
And ought to pay to their Posterity.
Selfe-love, for none, but for it selfe, doth care;
And, onely, for the present, taketh paine:
But, Charity for others doth prepare;
And, joyes in that, which Future-Time shall gaine.
If, After-Ages may my Labours blesse;
I care not, much, how Litle I possesse.

Stanley Kunitz, The War Against the Trees:

The man who sold his lawn to standard oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the soil
Under the branchy sky
By overthowing first the privet-row.
Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck again,
And with each elm a century went down.
All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer's mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.
I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.
Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! On a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.

Old Porteous

2009-07-05T06:51:00.002-05:00

George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, III.1:

It's always that way with old Porteous. All his talk is about things that happened centuries ago. Whatever you start off with it always comes back to statues and poetry and the Greeks and Romans. If you mention the Queen Mary he'll start telling you about Phoenician triremes. He never reads a modern book, refuses to know their names, never looks at any newspaper except The Times and takes a pride in telling you he's never been to the pictures. Except for a few poets like Keats and Wordsworth he thinks the modern world—and from his point of view the modern world is the last two thousand years—just oughtn't to have happened.

I'm part of the modern world myself, but I like to hear him talk. He'll stroll round the shelves and haul out first one book and then another, and now and again he'll read you a piece between little puffs of smoke, generally having to translate it from the Latin or something as he goes. It's all kind of peaceful, kind of mellow. All a little like a schoolmaster, and yet it soothes you, somehow. While you listen you aren't in the same world as trams and gas-bills and insurance companies. It's all temples and olive trees, and peacocks and elephants, and chaps in the arena with their nets and tridents, and winged lions and eunuchs and galleys and catapults, and generals in brass armour galloping their horses over the soldiers' shields.

Riddle

2009-07-04T06:35:00.005-05:00

Richard Wilbur, Riddle:

Where far in forest I am laid,
In a place ringed around by stones,
Do not look for melancholy shade,
And have no thoughts of buried bones;
For I am bodiless and bright,
And fill this glade with sudden glow;
The leaves are washed in under-light;
Shade lies upon the boughs like snow.

Albert Bierstadt, My Camp in the Rocky Mountains

Wealth

2009-07-04T06:07:00.002-05:00

Greek Anthology 9.234 (Crinagoras, tr. D.L. Page):

How long, poor fool, fluttering on hopes as high as the chilly clouds, my soul, will you sketch dream upon dream of riches? Nothing comes to man's possession of its own accord. Pursue rather the Muses' gifts, and leave these dim phantoms of the mind to fools.

ἄχρι τεῦ, ἆ δείλαιε, κεναῖς ἐπὶ ἐλπίσι, θυμέ,
  πωτηθεὶς ψυχρῶν ἀσσοτάτω νεφέων
ἄλλοις ἄλλ' ἐπ' ὄνειρα διαγράψεις ἀφένοιο;
  κτητὸν γὰρ θνητοῖς οὐδὲ ἓν αὐτόματον.
Μουσέων ἀλλ' ἐπὶ δῶρα μετέρχεο, ταῦτα δ' ἀμυδρά
  εἴδωλα ψυχῆς ἠλεμάτοισι μέθες.

Gow and Page, commentary (The Garland of Philip) on line 4:

The point seems to be that it is no good merely dreaming of riches, hoping that they will fall into your lap; wealth will come only with effort—a kind of effort beyond the power of Crinagoras, who will be well advised to stop dreaming of becoming a millionaire and to make good use of the talents which the Muses have given him.

Trees

2009-07-03T04:52:00.001-05:00

Walter de la Mare, Trees:

Of all the trees in England,
    Her sweet three corners in,
Only the Ash, the bonnie Ash
    Burns fierce while it is green.

Of all the trees in England,
    From sea to sea again,
The Willow loveliest stoops her boughs
    Beneath the driving rain.

Of all the trees in England,
    Past frankincense and myrrh,
There's none for smell, of bloom and smoke,
    Like Lime and Juniper.

Of all the trees in England,
    Oak, Elder, Elm and Thorn,
The Yew alone burns lamps of peace
    For them that lie forlorn.

Like Another Erysichthon

2009-07-01T02:37:00.002-05:00

Kenelm Henry Digby, Compitum; or, The Meeting of the Ways at the Catholic Church. The Second Book, 2nd ed. (London: C. Dolman, 1852), pp. 30-31:

There was an oak, itself a grove, una nemus, under whose spreading branches I had sat and read old books each day during two summers. No repose like this under the greenwood tree. Here the ancients would have thought the Dryads led the festal dance; for under no other shade on all that common was the grass so delicate. If unacquainted with enterprising men of money, who, as Pliny says of Nero, accelerate the death even of trees, one might have thought that it would have outlived generations yet unborn, like the lofty chestnut, with deep roots, proof against the wintry tempest, that Virgil describes,
—————"immota manet, multosque per annos
Multa virûm volvens durando secula vincit."‡
To me it was like already an old friend: though I did not, like Papienus Crispus, the consul, kiss it and embrace it, as he used to do the beech tree on the Tusculan hill, I used to lie under it, and feel transported to Camaldoli and Vallombrosa, and even talk to it as many have talked to trees, like Perigone, daughter of Sinis, who flying from Theseus, after he had slain her father, implored the thorns and wild asparagus, as if they could hear, to screen her from view, promising in return never to cut them more, for which reason the Toxides, as sprung from her, respected these poor plants. Alas! on my return, after an absence of some months, I found that less gentle visitors than even Shakspeare's duke, who would drink under this tree, had been to that spot; for the mayor of the adjacent town, like another Erysichthon, had profanely cut it down. One day carelessly he sent his wood-cutter,
"Et nemora evertit multos ignava per annos,
Antiquasque domos avium cum stirpibus imis
Eruit;"§
I came but in time to see the ground strewed with some naked branches, and the last waggon that was employed in their removal. Thus was I directed to a better and more lasting shade.

‡ Georg. ii. 295. § Georg. ii. 208.

The tree hugger "Papienus Crispus" is a mistake for "Passienus Crispus" — see Pliny, Natural History 16.91.242 (tr. John Bostock and H.T. Riley):

In the territory about the suburbs of Tusculum, upon a hill known by the name of Corne, there is a grove which has been consecrated to Diana by the people of Latium from time immemorial; it is formed of beeches, the foliage of which has all the appearance of being trimmed by art. Passienus Crispus, the orator, who in our time was twice consul, and afterwards became still more famous as having Nero for his step-son, on marrying his mother Agrippina, was passionately attached to a fine tree that grew in this grove, and would often kiss and embrace it: not only would he lie down, too, beneath it, but he would also moisten its roots with wine.

est in suburbano Tusculani agri colle, qui Corne appellatur, lucus antiqua religione Dianae sacratus a Latio, velut arte tonsili coma fagei nemoris. in hoc arborem eximiam aetate nostra amavit Passienus Crispus bis cos., orator, Agrippinae matrimonio et Nerone privigno clarior postea, osculari conplectique eam solitus, non modo cubare sub ea vinumque illi adfundere.

Here are translations, by H. Ruston Fairclough, of the two passages from Vergil's Georgics quoted by Digby:

Unmoved it abides, and many generations, many ages of men it outlives, letting them roll by while it endures. (2.194-295)

Levelling groves that have idled many a year, and up-tearing by their deepest roots the olden homes of the birds. (2.208-210)

Regum Aequabat Opes Animis

2009-06-30T05:04:00.002-05:00

Vergil, Georgics 4.125-148 (tr. L.P. Wilkinson):

I well remember how, beneath the towers
Of old Tarentum where the dark Galaesus
Waters the yellow crops, I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages or white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.
He was the first in spring to gather roses,
In autumn, to pick apples; and when winter
Was gloomily still cracking rocks with cold
And choking streams with ice, he was already
Shearing the locks of the tender hyacinth
While grumbling at the lateness of the summer
And absence of west winds. And his again
Were the first bees to breed, the first to swarm
Abundantly and have their foaming honey
Squeezed from the combs. Plenty of limes he had
And laurestines; and all the fruit a tree
Promised in blossom-time's array to bear
It bore matured in autumn. Elms well-grown,
Pear-trees already hardened, even blackthorns
Already bearing sloes and planes already
Providing welcome shade for drinking parties
He planted out in rows successfully —
But I, restricted by my boundaries,
Must leave this theme to later generations.

namque sub Oebaliae memini me turribus arcis,
qua niger umectat flaventia culta Galaesus,
Corycium vidisse senem, cui pauca relicti
iugera ruris erant, nec fertilis illa iuvencis
nec pecori opportuna seges nec commoda Baccho.
hic rarum tamen in dumis olus albaque circum
lilia verbenasque premens vescumque papaver
regum aequabat opes animis seraque revertens
nocte domum dapibus mensas onerabat inemptis.
primus vere rosam atque autumno carpere poma,
et cum tristis hiems etiamnum frigore saxa
rumperet et glacie cursus frenaret aquarum,
ille comam mollis iam tondebat hyacinthi
aestatem increpitans seram Zephyrosque morantes.
ergo apibus fetis idem atque examine multo
primus abundare et spumantia cogere pressis
mella favis; illi tiliae atque uberrima pinus,
quotque in flore novo pomis se fertilis arbos
induerat, totidem autumno matura tenebat.
ille etiam seras in versum distulit ulmos
eduramque pirum et spinos iam pruna ferentes
iamque ministrantem platanum potantibus umbras.
verum haec ipse equidem spatiis exclusus iniquis
praetereo atque aliis post me memoranda relinquo.

Andreas Schelfhout, Farmyard

Negative Prefixes

2009-06-29T03:57:00.003-05:00

M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 128 (on "Characteristics of divinity"):

In his Preface (p. v), West modestly states, "I have furnished myself with a working knowledge of some of the relevant languages." I know only "small Latine and lesse Greeke," but some of West's Vedic and Avestan examples look to me like series of asyndetic, privative adjectives. On sleepless gods, I would add some Greek philosophical speculation, from Walter Scott, Fragmenta Herculanensia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), p. 198 (col. 11, l. 42-col. 13, l. 70):

Though a large part of the sentence is lost, the argument is clear. 'Sleep is like death; so much so, that the fact that the soul sleeps may be used as an argument that it will perish. Therefore sleep is a thing tending to dissolution. But the Gods must be kept free from all things tending to dissolution; therefore the Gods do not sleep.'

The remains of Philodemus' Greek on this subject can be found in Scott, p. 173.

See also West, p. 110 (on "Anaphora of first element of compounds"):

Finally, see Hollister Adelbert Hamilton, The Negative Compounds in Greek, diss. Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, 1899), p. 9:

Related post: Via Negativa.

The Language of Peasants

2009-06-28T10:03:00.002-05:00

H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (1956; rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 230-231:

Indeed the whole Latin language seems like the language of peasants (4). So many of the words that later developed a wider meaning began by being technical agricultural terms: laetus was first used to describe well-manured ground, felix, the fertility of the soil, sincerus, honey without beeswax, frugi, the profits, egregius, a beast separated from the rest of the herd—yet these came to mean "joy", "happiness", "truthfulness," "virtue" and "fame". Putare meant "to prune," then "to mark a stick with notches", then "to calculate", before it finally came to mean "to think".

Note 4 on p. 418:

"Le Latin, langue de Paysans": see the very illuminating essay under this title by J. MAROUZEAU in Mélanges linguistiques offerts à M.J. Vendryes, Collection Linguistique publiée par la Societé linguistique de Paris, 17, Paris, 1925, pp. 251-264, which refers to the classic work by A. ERNOUT, "Les Eléments dialectaux du Vocabulaire latin", in the same collection, 3, Paris, 1909, and the valuable pages in A. MEILLET, "Esquisse d'une Histoire de la Langue latine"⁴, pp. 94-118, and the chronological details in G. DEVOTO, Storia della lingua di Roma (Storia di Roma), Rome, XXIII, 1940, pp. 101-103.

More on Scythes

2009-06-28T07:19:00.002-05:00

See K.D. White, Agricultural Implements of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 71-103, on "Sickles, Hooks and Scythes."

Thanks to Dave Lull for drawing my attention to Robert Frost's poem Mowing:

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

The Eagle and the Mole

2009-06-27T05:17:00.003-05:00

Elinor Wylie, The Eagle and the Mole:

Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.

The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps, above the clouds,
His cliff inviolate.

When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.

If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.

If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole;
Go burrow underground.

And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.

Euripides, Heracles 1157-1158 (tr. David Kovacs):

Ah, what am I to do? Where must I go to escape misfortune? Soar to high heaven or sink beneath the earth?

οἴμοι, τί δράσω; ποῖ κακῶν ἐρημίαν
εὕρω, πτερωτὸς ἢ κατὰ χθονὸς μολών;

Scythes

2009-06-26T05:16:00.005-05:00

In his poem Junk, Richard Wilbur wrote, "The heart winces for junk and gimcrack, / for jerrybuilt things / and the men who make them / for a little money..." Wilbur prefaced his poem with a motto from the fragmentary Old English epic Waldere:

Huru Welandes
worc ne geswiceð
monna ænigum
ðara ðe Mimming can
heardne gehealdan.

This is translated by Bruce Mitchell et al., edd. Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), p. 209, as "Surely the work of Weland will fail not any of those men who can hold strong Mimming." Weland was a smith, and Mimming was a sword.

I thought of Wilbur's poem and the merits of fine craftsmanship recently when I read Larry Lack, "Preserving and Reviving a Timeless Technology," The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener (Summer 2009), an article on scythes. Lack's article also started me wondering about scythes in the classical world. The article on the scythe by Solomon Reinach in Daremberg-Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, II.2 (Paris, 1896), pp. 968-971, s.v. falx, is available on the Internet. Indeed, all of Daremberg-Saglio is available.

The main Greek word for scythe is δρεπάνη (alt. δρέπανον). Scythes appear on the shield of Achilles (Homer, Iliad 18.550-551, tr. Richmond Lattimore):

He made on it the precinct of a king, where the labourers
were reaping, with the sharp reaping hooks in their hands.

ἐν δ᾽ ἐτίθει τέμενος βασιλήϊον· ἔνθα δ᾽ ἔριθοι
ἤμων ὀξείας δρεπάνας ἐν χερσὶν ἔχοντες.

In the Odyssey (18.366-370, tr. Butcher and Lang), Odysseus challenges Eurymachus to a scything contest:

Eurymachus, would that there might be a trial of labour between us twain, in the season of spring, when the long days begin! In the deep grass might it be, and I should have a crooked scythe, and thou another like it, that we might try each the other in the matter of labour, fasting till late eventide, and grass there should be in plenty.

Εὐρύμαχ᾽, εἰ γὰρ νῶϊν ἔρις ἔργοιο γένοιτο
ὥρῃ ἐν εἰαρινῇ, ὅτε τ᾽ ἤματα μακρὰ πέλονται,
ἐν ποίῃ, δρέπανον μὲν ἐγὼν εὐκαμπὲς ἔχοιμι,
καὶ δὲ σὺ τοῖον ἔχοις, ἵνα πειρησαίμεθα ἔργου
νήστιες ἄχρι μάλα κνέφαος, ποίη δὲ παρείη.

The Latin word for scythe is falx, which is really a broad term covering many types of tools with curved blades. Cato, On Agriculture, distinguishes various types of scythes by adjectives describing what they cut, at 10.3 falces faenarias ... stramentarias ... arborarias (hay hooks ... straw hooks ... tree hooks) and 11.4 falces sirpiculas ... silvaticas ... arborarias (rush hooks ... wood hooks ... tree hooks). Cato says that the best place to buy scythes is at Cales and Minturnae (135).

Theodore Robinson, Man with Scythe
Related post: The Hoe and the Axe.

No More Pencils, No More Books

2009-06-25T05:03:00.003-05:00

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601), Summer's Last Will and Testament (excerpt in modern spelling):

WINTER:
Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters,
They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes;
They seek to lay the curse of God on you,
Namely, confusion of languages,
Wherewith those that the Tower of Babel built
Accursed were in the world's infancy.
Latin, it was the speech of infidels.
Logic hath nought to say in a true cause.
Philosophy is curiosity;
And Socrates was therefore put to death,
Only for he was a philosopher.
Abhor, contemn, despise these damned snares.

WILL SUMMERS:
Out upon it, who would be a scholar? Not I, I promise you. My mind always gave me this learning was such a filthy thing, which made me hate it so as I did. When I should have been at school construing, Batte, mi fili, mi fili, mi Batte, I was close under a hedge, or under a barn-wall, playing at span-counter or jack-in-a-box. My master beat me, my father beat me, my mother gave me bread and butter, yet all this would not make me a squitter-book. It was my destiny: I thank her as a most gorgeous goddess, that she hath not cast me away upon gibridge. O, in what a mighty vein am I now against horn-books! Here, before all this company, I profess myself an open enemy to ink and paper. I'll make it good upon the accidence body, that in speech is the devil's Pater noster. Nouns and pronouns, I pronounce you as traitors to boys' buttocks. Syntaxis and prosodia, you are tormentors of wit, and good for nothing, but to get a schoolmaster twopence a week. Hang copies; fly out, phrase-books; let pens be turned to pick-tooths! Bowls, cards and dice, you are the true liberal sciences! I'll ne'er be a goosequill, gentlemen, while I live.

Early Childhood Education

2009-06-24T04:43:00.002-05:00

H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, tr. George Lamb (1956; rpt. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 143 (footnotes omitted):

The Ancients would have laughed their heads off if they could have seen our infant-school and kindergarten specialists, Froebel or Signora Montessori, gravely studying the educational value of the most elementary games. In Greece, of course, there were no infant-schools. These did not appear until quite recently—out of the barbarous womb of the Industrial Revolution, when the employment of women in factories meant establishing day-nurseries, so that mothers could be "free" to respond to the sound of the factory whistle. In antiquity the family was the centre of the child's early education.

I know that the Greeks had a few serious people among them too. Their philosophers worried about time lost in these early years. Plato wanted to make children's games an introduction to the professions, and even to science. He wanted children to go to school earlier—at the age of six instead of seven. Aristotle went one better and said five. Chrysippus went two better and said three. There was no time like the present, apparently, for these theorists! Fortunately these were advanced opinions which the average family recognized as such, and went on its own sweet way.

The old way of life went on unmoved, and throughout antiquity children were left to develop in the most delightfully spontaneous manner; their instincts were given free range; they grew up in an atmosphere of freedom. The general attitude towards them was one of amused indulgence—it was all so unimportant! To educate children for themselves alone, for the sake of their childishness, as our modern educators are determined to do, would have seemed to the Ancients absolutely pointless.

A Masterpiece

2009-06-24T04:14:00.003-05:00

Van Meter Ames, Introduction to Beauty (New York: Harper & Bros., 1931; rpt. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 151:

The great yea-sayers find beauty in the most unexpected places and put it in their books where we can see it when we cannot find it elsewhere.

John Updike, The Beautiful Bowel Movement:

Though most of them aren't much to write about—
mere squibs and nubs, like half-smoked pale cigars,
the tint and stink recalling Tuesday's meal,
the texture loose and soon dissolved—this one,
struck off in solitude one afternoon
(that prairie stretch before the late light fails)
with no distinct sensation, sweet or pained,
of special inspiration or release,
was yet a masterpiece: a flawless coil,
unbroken, in the bowl, as if a potter
who worked in this most frail, least grateful clay
had set himself to shape a topaz vase.
O spiral perfection, not seashell nor
stardust, how can I keep you? With this poem.

Cf. Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God (London: Heinemann, 1987), p. 21:

A healthy human bowel movement, so I was later to be told in the Royal Army Medical Corps, went 'twice round the pan and was curly at both ends'.

See also Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks (December 1803):

What a beautiful Thing Urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped shadows on the Bottom.

Related post: Primal Pleasures (W.H. Auden's The Geography of the House).

Homo ferox

2009-06-23T04:09:00.005-05:00

T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn:

"Homo ferox," continued Merlyn, shaking his head, "that rarity in nature, an animal which will kill for pleasure! There is not a beast in this room who would not scorn to kill, except for a meal. Man affects to feel indignation at the shrike, who keeps a small larder of snails etc. speared on thorns: yet his own well-stocked larder is surrounded by herds of charming creatures like the mooning bullock, and the sheep with its intelligent and sensitive face, who are kept solely in order to be slaughtered on the verge of maturity and devoured by their carnivorous herder, whose teeth are not even designed for those of a carnivore. You should read Lamb's letter to Southey, about baking moles alive, and sport with cockchafers, and cats in bladders, and crimping skates, and anglers, those 'meek inflictors of pangs intolerable.' Homo ferox, the Inventor of Cruelty to Animals, who will rear pheasants at enormous expense for the pleasure of killing them: who will go to the trouble of training other animals to kill: who will burn living rats, as I have seen done in Eriu, fit order that their shrieks may intimidate the local rodents: who will forcibly degenerate the livers of domestic geese, in order to make himself a tasty food: who will saw the growing horns off cattle, for convenience in transport: who will blind gold-finches with a needle, to make them sing: who will boil lobsters and shrimps alive, although he hears their piping screams: who will turn on his own species in war, and kill nineteen million every hundred years: who will publicly murder his fellow men when he has adjudged them to be criminals: and who has invented a way of torturing his own children with a stick, or of exporting them to concentration camps called Schools, where the torture can be applied by proxy ... Yes, you are right to ask whether man can properly be described as ferox, for certainly the word in its natural meaning of wild life among decent animals ought never to be applied to such a creature."

Here is an excerpt from the letter of Charles Lamb to Robert Southey (March 20, 1799):

I love this sort of poems, that open a new intercourse with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I think this vein may be further opened; Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge, less successfully, hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein only following at unresembling distance Sterne and greater Cervantes. Besides these, I know of no other examples of breaking down the partition between us and our "poor earth-born companions." It is sometimes revolting to be put in a track of feeling by other people, not one's own immediate thoughts, else I would persuade you, if I could (I am in earnest), to commence a series of these animal poems, which might have a tendency to rescue some poor creatures from the antipathy of mankind. Some thoughts come across me;—for instance—to a rat, to a toad, to a cockchafer, to a mole—people bake moles alive by a slow oven-fire to cure consumption. Rats are, indeed, the most despised and contemptible parts of God's earth. I killed a rat the other day by punching him to pieces, and feel a weight of blood upon me to this hour. Toads you know are made to fly, and tumble down and crush all to pieces. Cockchafers are old sport; then again to a worm, with an apostrophe to anglers, those patient tyrants, meek inflictors of pangs intolerable, cool devils; to an owl; to all snakes, with an apology for their poison; to a cat in boots or bladders. Your own fancy, if it takes a fancy to these hints, will suggest many more. A series of such poems, suppose them accompanied with plates descriptive of animal torments, cooks roasting lobsters, fishmongers crimping skates, &c., &c., would take excessively. I will willingly enter into a partnership in the plan with you: I think my heart and soul would go with it too—at least, give it a thought. My plan is but this minute come into my head; but it strikes me instantaneously as something new, good and useful, full of pleasure and full of moral. If old Quarles and Wither could live again, we would invite them into our firm. Burns hath done his part.