Error, Milton, Coleridge and the Opiate of Influence

On the contrary, it means a wandering.

Once upon a time there was a happy little Latin word errare, which meant to wander. That is why a wandering knight is a knight errant, and also why a knight errant is necessarily erratic. Indeed, he is an aberration, so long as he is wandering away from something, which he couldn't reasonably help doing, I suppose. A knight errant is therefore also erroneous, he errs, he is in error.

That's why, back in the seventeenth century, Milton could write in the fourth book of Paradise Lost that streams flowed through the garden of Eden:

With mazy error, under pendant shades

By an extraordinary coincidence Coleridge used mazy to describe the flow of a stream through a garden in Kubla Khan:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Funny that. Not that there's much more connection. I mean, it's true that both poems have a river flowing through a garden and that both rivers flow underground:

Southward through Eden flowed a river large
Nor changed its course, but through the shaggy hill
Passed underneath engulfed

and

Thence united fell
Down the steep glade, and met the nether flood,
Which from his darksome passage now appears

While Coleridge has:

Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

But there isn't much more in common between the "fertile ground" of Milton's Garden of Eden and the "fertile ground" of Coleridge's poem. I mean, Milton's garden has

Groves whose rich trees wept odorous gums and balms

While Coleridge's is a place where:

Blossomed many an incence-bearing tree

Which is a completely different wording. Nor could Coleridge's

Abyssinian maid . . .
Singing of Mount Abora 

have much to do with Milton's

Nor where Abyssin Kings their issue Guard,
Mount Amara,

Could it? And as for the bit in Milton where a moonlit demon comes across:

...a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access denied; and overhead up grew
Insuperable height of loftiest shade,
Cedar. . .

That couldn't have anything to do with

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover.

Kubla Khan is often described as a pure vision that sprang from Coleridge's unconscious. It's not. Most of the imagery, right down to the ancestral voices, comes from Book 4 of Paradise Lost. This is rather important from a critical point of view.

Where is Mount Abora and what does it represent? Is a less perplexing question when you realise that it's just a misspelling of Mount Amara.

Are the river and the chasm Freudian symbols of semen and vagina springing from Coleridge's sex-starved psyche? Well, I admit that Coleridge was a bit screwy on the subject of sex, but the images come from Milton, not from his dreams.

What does it mean to have drunk the milk of Paradise? It means you've read Paradise Lost.

P.S. There's a slight controversy over where errant comes from, which I have ignored.
P.P.S. Full text of Kubla Khan here. Read it!

Which John Milton?

According to the news, a dirty poem has been discovered with John Milton's name attached. The poem runs:

Have you not in a Chimney seen
A Faggot which is moist and green
How coyly it receives the Heat
And at both ends do's weep and sweat?
So fares it with a tender Maid
When first upon her Back she's laid
But like dry wood th'experienced Dame
Cracks and rejoices in the Flame.

Though it comes from a 1709 collection of verses, not even Dr Batt, who found the poem, believes that it's by Milton. The working theory is that somebody attributed it to Milton in order to sully, smear and besmirch his reputation. That seems a trifle unlikely to me. By the standards of the late sixteenth century this isn't a particularly dirty rhyme. Certainly if your main aim was to traduce Milton by writing the muckiest rhyme you could imagine, you could have done something an awful lot saucier.

It might be worth noting that John has always been one of the commonest Christian names in England, and Milton one of the commonest surnames. Any medieval chap from a town with a mill could acquire the moniker. Wikipedia has four John Miltons, Facebook two thousand.

Faggot, of course, used to be a pejorative term for a woman, until in the early twentieth century the baton was passed to homosexuals. The poem is also quite neat in its misapplied words: in the first half the wood is, improbably, coy; and this is answered in the second half by the experienced dame's cracking (although at the time a fallen woman could be referred to as a crack).

Milton was rather keen on rumpy-pumpy, but I don't think he would have made a joke about it. The beast with two backs was to him a sacred animal. There was solemnity in his sexuality, if not grandeur in his groin.

They're also a kind of food

Saturn

Until the eighteenth century Saturn was considered the last and farthest planet, the full stop to creation's great sentence. As Milton put it:

Here Nature first begins
Her farthest verge and chaos to retire,
As from her outmost works a broken foe,
With tumult less and with less hostile din.

Just as Jupiter was the father of Mercury, Venus and Mars; so Saturn was the father of Jupiter. And in direct contravention of all the rules of good parenting he used to try and kill all his kiddies by eating them. Jupiter, however, avoided such digestion, overthrew his father and imprisoned him. That is why Saturn wanders such a long and melancholy track, and why those born under his influence are miserable and saturnine.

This is particularly so on Saturn's special day, Saturday, when everybody is unhappy. As Saturn is the god of lead (Mars=iron Venus=copper), saturnism is lead poisoning.

Beats McDonald's

Imbosk

Imbosk means to hide, usually in a wood. As Milton put it:

They seek the dark, the bushy, the tangled forest, they would imbosk.

A sibling word is bosky, as in bosky glades.

The Most Quoted Lines of Poetry: Now With Added Graphs!

This post originally went up back in February, but it deserves another outing because the Antipodean has very kindly gone through and added some explanatory graphs, which are now attached at the bottom.

The idea of the post is simple. When you type a phrase into Google, Google tells you how many hits that phrase gets on the Internet, or how many pages contained that exact line. 

It should be stated before we begin that Google is, for a computer program, often strangely illogical and inconsistent, but it's the best we've got. The number of hits is listed after the line. Click on the author's name for the full poem. 

Counting down from number fifty...

50. The mind is its own place, and in itself/[Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n] 403,000 Milton
49. Full fathom five thy father lies 438,000 Shakespeare
48. If you can keep your head when all about you 447,000Kipling
47. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways 467,000Elizabeth Barrett Browning
46. If music be the food of love, play on 507,000 Shakespeare 
45. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers 521,000Shakespeare
44. What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare 528,000 W.H. Davies
43. The moving finger writes; and, having writ,/Moves on571,000 Edward Fitzgerald
42. They also serve who only stand and wait 584,000 Milton
41. The quality of mercy is not strained 589,000 Shakespeare
40. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 594,000 Coleridge
39. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears 615,000Shakespeare
38. Shall I compare thee to a summers day 638,000 Shakespeare
37. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness 641,000 Keats
36. A thing of beauty is a joy forever 649,000 Keats
35. Do not go gentle into that good night 665,000 Dylan Thomas
34. Busy old fool, unruly sun 675,000 John Donne
33. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone 741,000 Auden
32. Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality 891,000 T.S. Eliot
31. O Romeo, Romeo; wherefore art thou Romeo 912,000Shakespeare
30. The lady doth protest too much, methinks 929,000Shakespeare
29. The old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est 990,000 Wilfred Owen
28. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose 1,050,000 Gertrude Stein
27. When I am an old woman I shall wear purple 1,060,000Jenny Joseph
26. I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree. 1,080,000 Joyce Kilmer
25. Hope springs eternal in the human breast 1,080,000 Alexander Pope
24. When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes 1,100,000Shakespeare
23. I grow old... I grow old.../I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled 1,140,000 T.S. Eliot
22. 'The time has come', the Walrus said,/'To talk of many things'1,300,000 Lewis Carroll
21. A narrow fellow in the grass 1,310,000 Emily Dickinson
20. Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all 1,470,000 Keats
19. To be or not to be: that is the question 1,640,000 Shakespeare
18. In Flanders fields the poppies blow 1,640,000 John McCrae
17. The proper study of mankind is man 1,770,000 Alexander Pope
16. A little learning is a dangerous thing 1,860,000 Alexander Pope
15. But at my back I always hear 2,010,000 Marvell
14. Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker 2,150,000 Ogden Nash
13. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun 2,230,000Shakespeare
12. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold 2,330,000W.B.Yeats
11. Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me 2,360,000 Emily Dickinson
10. Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all 2,400,000 Tennyson
9. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair 3,080,000 Shelley
8. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield 3,140,000 Tennyson
7. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams 4,860,000 W.B. Yeats 
6. Not with a bang but a whimper 5,280,000 T.S. Eliot
5. And miles to go before I sleep 5,350,000 Robert Frost
4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 8,000,000 Wordsworth
3. The child is father of the man 9,420,000 Wordsworth
2. I am the master of my fate 14,700,000 William Ernest Henley
1. To err is human; to forgive, divine 14,800,000 Alexander Pope


Shakespeare doesn't make the top ten and Gertrude Stein is more quoted than Byron. Bet you didn't see that coming.


And many, many thanks to the Antipodean for these (click to enlarge):

Our rules were that:
1) it had to be a  whole line of poetry (minimum 8 syllables) that
2) hadn't become famous as a title (e.g. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind)
3) or as a song (e.g. And did those feet in ancient time)
4) or is pretty exclusively for children (e.g. I do not like green eggs and ham).
5) The phrases were googled in "inverted commas", which gives you only pages with the precise phrase.
6) No more than one line per medium sized poem.
Originally I didn't allow tetrameters, or at least required a couplet, however "The child is father of the man" changed our minds as it's the second place on its own and nowhere when linked with the adjacent lines. These rules have been broken a few times at our discretion.
P.S. Google is sometimes eccentric on the number of hits, which can vary by clicking refresh. This is because it keeps adjusting to deal with spam and people trying to fool Google in to high rankings for their page. So sometimes it does odd things with line-breaks or even gives more results when there are more words in the search, which is utterly illogical. They also seem to vary slightly by country. Robert Frost's lines dipped slightly (or I noted them down incorrectly). The final arbiter has to be what pops up on my screen when I try the line in inverted commas.

Tennis, Eggs, Love and John Milton

When a cricketer fails to get a single run, a zero is written next to his name on the score sheet. This numeral of shame came to be referred to a duck's egg, and then simply a duck. That is why cricketers are out for a duck, and until they score that first run they are trying to break their duck.


I had always fondly believed the same to be true of love in tennis. I was told when I was a boy that love came from l'oeuf, which is French for the egg. I was, I fear, wrong. The idea of love as a vacuity comes not from Gallic ova, but from the idea of doing something purely for the love of it, or in other words for nothing.


This makes tennis a lot less fun than I thought. It would be more bearable if tennis weren't called tennis. You see tennis is the name of the old French game, real tennis as it's now called, and derives dully from tenez, meaning hold. Lawn tennis, the game that everybody knows now was invented by an Englishman called Major Walton Clopton Wingfield. He didn't call it tennis. He called it Sphairistikè, which was Ancient Greek for ball skill (as in sphere tech). 


But love and Greek are vanished. So I must console myself with the fact that John Milton was the first person to use the sporting sense of advantage:


For if the Scripture be for reformation, and antiquity to boot, it is but an advantage to the dozen, it is no winning cast.


Oh, and there's this Shakespearean gem, where Pericles, washed up on a beach, meets two fishermen and introduces himself to them as:


A man whom both the waters and the wind,
In that vast tennis-court have made the ball
For them to play upon, entreats you pity him:
He asks of you, that never used to beg.

Mrs M spots a typo

The Dog Days

The Dog Days start today. Well, it depends who you ask, really. But if you ask the Book of Common Prayer the Dog Days start today, and that's good enough for me.

Dog Days have nothing directly to do with dogs: they are named after the Dog Star, also called Sirius, which is the brightest star in all the heavens (excluding the sun). Back in Roman times the Dog Star rose with the sun during late summer and it was believed that it was this conjunction of the two brightest stars in the sky that caused the heat of July and August.

If you want to know what the next couple of months will be like, you need only consult Hesiod's Works and Days:

In the season of wearisome heat, then goats are plumpest and wine sweetest; women are most wanton, but men are feeblest, because Sirius parches head and knees and the skin is dry through heat. But at that time let me have a shady rock and wine of Biblis, a clot of curds and milk of drained goats with the flesh of an heifer fed in the woods, that has never calved, and of firstling kids; then also let me drink bright wine, sitting in the shade, when my heart is satisfied with food, and so, turning my head to face the fresh Zephyr, from the everflowing spring which pours down unfouled, thrice pour an offering of water, but make a fourth libation of wine.

Which is, verbatim, what I'm going to say the next time I see a waiter.

That Sirus heats the earth is not true scientifically, but it is true poetically; and poetry is Much More Important than truth. If you don't believe that principle, try using the two methods to get laid.

Shakespeare mentions the Dog Days in Henry VIII. He describes a red-nosed fellow by saying:

There is a fellow somewhat near the door, he should be a brazier by his face, for, o' my conscience, twenty of the dog-days now reign in's nose;

Milton appears to mention the heat of Sirius in Lycidas:

Ye valley low where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks

Pope complains that "The Dog Star rages". But my favourite reference to the Dog Days is, for some reason, Fons Bandusiae by Horace. It's only a passing reference and it's in Latin but it translates very roughly as:

Sabine spring, as clear as glass,
Where the floating flowers pass,
Take tomorrow’s sacrifice
In your water cold as ice:

(For it grew its horns in vain,
For it will not breathe again)
Let the kid-goat’s hopeless blood
Mingle with your perfect flood.

No: the Dog Days’ horrid heat
Cannot touch you. Oxen’s feet
Stray from ploughshare to your pool,
Wander, rest there, and are cool.

Fame is yours, for I shall write –
And eternity recite
In perpetual murmuring tones –
Of the oak upon your stones.

However, as I said, the Dog Days have nothing to do with dogs and nothing whatsoever to do with Hamlet's comment that:

Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

Coming, I Saw and Conquered

Contemplate the title of this post. It is less natural than the original. It is less clear than the original. It is less snappy than the original. In short, it is worse.

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, Moptop has been complaining about a novel filled with sentences like this:

Doing something, he did something else.

That structure is extraordinarily common in written English, and rare in spoken. Sometimes the order is reversed and you get:

He did something, doing something else.

Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant. "I'll give you £100 pounds for the trunk," cried the Inky Fool, flicking frantically through a dog-eared book of recipes.

There are two problems with sentences like this. The first is well known, indeed it's one of the few bits of grammar that still get taught in schools: the dangling modifier.

In the sentence "Puffing meditatively on his pipe, Aloric shot an elephant" we understand that it is Aloric who is doing the puffing. The participle belongs to the first noun after the comma.

Therefore, in the sentence "Walking up the street, my mobile phone began to ring" it is technically my mobile phone that is walking up the street.

That sentence is on the cusp of alrightness. Grammatically it's wrong, but it would be hard to misunderstand. Indeed it would require a small effort of will. Some dangling modifiers are so much part of the language that they cannot be faulted.

Speaking of which, the weather's nice today.

You would have to be a pedant of Himalayan proportions to ask how the weather could speak. Indeed, if you asked me that, your body might never be found*. The problem with danglers is not one of Absolute Grammar, the problem is that they can be unintentionally comic or offensive.

Beautiful yet simple, the Inky Fool will perform Fur Elise in the bakery at midnight.

Is, to be honest, correct however you read it. Bill Bryson cites this lovely line from Time magazine.

In addition to being cheap and easily obtainable, Crotti claims that the bags have several advantages over other methods.

Which makes poor Crotti a cheap slut.

The second problem with such sentences was rather nimbly pointed out in a comment on yesterday's post. The Antipodean was correcting one of my myriad typos.

"Prophecy?" she says, sipping from her chipped fine bone china coffee-mug. Actually I probably wouldn't talk and sip at the same time, but you get the gist.

The participle implies synchronicity. This means that you have to be dreadfully careful about what actions you yoke together. Sloppy novels are filled with lines like: "Skidding to a halt, he leaped out of his car", which is simply a dangerous and irresponsible way of parking, especially on the school run. One of the sentences Moptop cited on Dear Dogberry ran:

Opening his eyes, he watched Lazar.

The frustrating thing about that sentence is that it could so easily be recast.

He opened his eyes and watched Lazar.

Is that so hard? Is that so odd? As I said at the beginning of this post, these participle sentences are pretty rare in spoken English. People tend to chat in short simple sentences connected by conjunctions (speech, if you listen carefully, has very few full stops)**. It is only when a fellow sits down to write that he suddenly starts converting every other verb into a participle. As well as sounding slightly unnatural, this exposes him to the dangers described above and is Utterly Unnecessary.

It is so easy to avoid these dangers. It is so much more natural to have two verbs connected by and. Here are the other sentences Moptop cited along with the natural alternative:

Standing over him, Zoya raised the knife.
Zoya stood over him and raised the knife.

Hearing the guards at the window, Malysh picked up a slate.
Malysh heard the guards at the window and picked up a slate.

Standing up, she glanced into the hallway.
She stood up and glanced into the hallway.

That's how you'd say it, so why not write it that way?
 
Of course there are times when the actions are simultaneous. More specifically, there are times when one continuous action acts as the background for a shorter one. "Reading Hamlet, I came across this line" should not be recast, because the actions are not consecutive. One occurs during the other and so the participle is dandy and fine. I am not attempting to outlaw the practice, merely to observe the overuse and the risk.
 
I once read (and cannot now find) an essay by Clive James on writing for the radio. He observed that English is a basically linear language. Perhaps a more inflected language like Latin or German would allow for more grammatical complexity, but it is unnatural for English. Though we can subordinate our clauses we tend not to. This, he said, counts doubly for the radio. The reader of a book can always check back to the beginning of a sentence to work out who or what is doing the verb, a listener cannot. So sos, ands and buts beat commas.


Sell participles and buy conjunctions. Or: selling participles, buy conjunctions.

However, I should conclude by saying that the rules of English are neither hard nor fast. Consider the following from Paradise Lost. Brave young grammarians, intent on making a name for themselves, have set off into this sentence hoping to find a main verb and never been heard of again. But it's wonderful. This is a fallen angel addressing Satan in Hell.

"If thou beest he--but O how fallen! how changed
From him who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine
Myriads, though bright!--if he whom mutual league,
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the glorious enterprise
Joined with me once, now misery hath joined
In equal ruin; into what pit thou seest
From what height fallen: so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder; and till then who knew
The force of those dire arms?"

The Inky Fool contemplating a typo

*Although I might post it back, piece by piece, to your nearest and dearest.
** Far commoner is "I was walking down the street when my mobile began to ring". However, neither of the dangers described in this post can apply to such sentences.