The Pope is Dead

Alexander Pope is, as this blog has established, the most quoted English poet. He died 266 years ago today and two people wrote poems on the subject. Here they are:

On the Death of Mr. Pope

Seal up the book, all vision's at an end,
For who durst now to poetry pretend?
Since Pope is dead, it must be sure confessed
The Muse's sacred inspiration's ceased;
And we may only what is writ rehearse:
His works are the apocalypse of verse.

And, as Pope was such a satirist:

Spoken Extempore on the Death of Mr. Pope

Vice now may lift aloft her speckled head,
And front the sun undaunted: Pope is dead!

Fits and Starts and Leaps and Bounds

An American* chap called Barack Obama gave a speech yesterday in which he lyrically waxed upon the origins of things like liberty and the rule of law, but not upon the origins of phrases. It was his analysis of developing economies that caught my ear:

And that is why countries like China, India and Brazil are growing so rapidly -- because in fits and starts, they are moving towards the market-based principles that the United States and the United Kingdom have always embraced.

Because:

Countries like China, India, and Brazil are growing by leaps and bounds.

Fits and starts and leaps and bounds! What strenuous movements!

Fits and starts goes back to a sermon of 1620 by a chap called Robert Sanderson who compares Christian virtue to actually having a fit thusly:

A man of a cold complexion hath as much heat in a sharp fit of an ague, as he that is of a hot constitution, and in health, and more too; his blood is more inflamed, and he burneth more. But whether do you think is the more kindly heat, that which cometh from the violence of a fever, or that which ariseth from the condition of a man's temper? . . . Then for constancy and lasting,—if the heat come by fits, and starts, and paroxysms, leaping eftsoons and suddenly out of one extreme into another, so as the party one while gloweth as hot as fire, another while is chill and cold as ice, and keepeth not at any certain stay, that is an ill sign too, and it is to be feared there is an ague either bred, or in breeding...

Personally, I do everything by fits and starts, except for having a fit, which I do constantly. I live in a semi-permanent fit of poetic inspiration, which is no good, because as Nicolas Boileau pointed out in his L'Art Poetique:

A Poem, where we all Perfections find,
Is not the work of a fantastick [crazy] Mind:
There must be Care, and Time, and Skill and Pains;
Nor the first heat of unexperienced Brains.
Yet sometimes artless Poets, when the rage
Of a warm Fancy does their Minds engage,
Puff'd with the vain Pride, presume they understand,
And boldly take the Trumpet in their hand;
Their fustian Muse each Accident confounds;
Nor can she fly, but rise by leaps and bounds,
'Till their small stock of Learning quickly spent,
Their poem dies for want of Nourishment.

Well, obviously that's not what Boileau wrote. He was French, poor chap. But luckily for him John Dryden and Sir William Soames produced that translation in 1694. Which one of them actually wrote the words leaps and bounds is unknown, but I like to think it was Soames as I can't find anything else about him.

Nicolas Boileau's Art of Poetry, even in the Dryden and Soames translation, isn't a classic. Sensible: yes. Famous: no. Voltaire liked it and so did Dr Johnson. But in Dr Johnson's opinion it was nothing as compared to Pope's translation of the Iliad which was (apparently): "a performance which no age or nation could hope to equal".

That's absolute hogwash. Chapman's Homer is much better, but we'll let that pass. I've written about Iliad translations before and the only reason I mentioned Pope's was that he uses the phrase leaps and bounds twice: first in the introduction where he says of those who would translate Homer:

Methinks I see these different followers of Homer, some sweating and straining after him by violent leaps and bounds (the certain signs of false mettle), others slowly and servilely creeping in his train, while the poet himself is all the time proceeding with an unaffected and equal majesty before them.

And then in Book 21 when a river is trying to drown Achilles (and no: that shouldn't be passive):

High o'er the surging tide, by leaps and bounds,
He wades, and mounts; the parted wave resounds.
Not a whole river stops the hero's course,
While Pallas fills him with immortal force.

It is Pope's poem that, I suspect, made the phrase famous and slyly inserted into the language. As this blog proved a year ago, Pope is the most quoted English poet by quite some way, even if he is scandalously underread in these seedy times.

So Obama's speech about the basis of democracy is itself based upon John Dryden, Alexander Pope and God.
*Although I have compelling evidence he was actually born in Tring.

Paracelsus, Gnomes, Sylphs and the Rape of the Lock

Paracelsus was an alchemist, chemist, medic, and all-round egg-head of the sixteenth century. Paracelsus was not his real name of course: that would be ridiculous. His real name was Phillippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim. Paracelsus was a moniker he acquired for being the equal of the Roman writer Celsus.

Why shed foolish ink for a chemist? Because, dear reader, Paracelsus invented words. Sometimes he invented words for things that existed: he named zinc zinc because it forms into jagged crystals and zinke is Old High German for sharp. Sometimes, though, he invented names for things that he had merely imagined. And, amazingly, they caught on.

Gnomes, for example, are the children of Herr Von Hohenheim's imagination. There were no gnomes until Paracelsus dreamed them. He wrote a (serious) book describing them as being about a foot tall. He contended that just as fish move through water, and we through air, so gnomes can move through solid earth.

It seems likely, therefore, that gnome would be a shortening of genomos (earth dweller) and the poor creatures have no etymological truck with gnomic utterances, which are wise.

Paracelsus also invented sylphs. As gnomes are earth dwellers, so sylphs are spirits that of the air, and, according to him, are mortal but soulless, like Frenchmen. Nobody's sure where he got the name. It might be something to do with sylvan nymphs, but it might not, and Paracelsus is far too dead to answer questions.

Both gnomes and sylphs arrived in our language through the absurd humour of the most quoted poet in history: Alexander Pope. The Rape of the Lock (aside from having a title that makes keys uncomfortable) is a mock epic about a pretty girl having a lock of her hair cut off. Like any good epic it needed a supernatural element, so Pope took up the absurd Paracelsian spirits and made them central to his story.

Pope explains that sylphs are the spirits of women so vacuous and vain that they could not properly go to Heaven. Gnomes, on the other hand, are the spirits of prudish women, descended into the earth. The two camps fight futilely and invisibly around the heroine as she suffers her sly tonsure.

Pope's work was so popular that the words gained currency in English. Sylphs had, occasionally, been mentioned before by Paracelsian fans, but the English language had never known a gnome before Pope wrote his poem.

So, if it weren't for the combined efforts of Pope and Paracelsus, journalists would have no cliché to describe slim girls, and garden gnomes would not exist.

Incidentally, garden gnomes commit suicide.

Loving St Catherine's Butterfly

Today is the commemoration of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth century lady who said that she would only marry a man who was prettier, posher, wealthier and wiser than she. She ended up being metaphorically and mystically married to Jesus and was then martyred by being broken on a wheel.

She is therefore commemorated to this day as a firework.

Being broken on a wheel was a nasty business. Essentially you were tied to a wheel and then smashed - in the thoroughly literally and rather painful sense of being hit with a club. After this, as an added extra, your mangled members could be woven between the spokes and then left as breakfast for the birds.

The practice of letting the birds eat the dead is called a sky burial. It is also the completion of the famous phrase wear your heart on your sleeve. In the first scene of Othello, Iago mocks the impracticalities of honesty thus:

For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at.

Daws are, of course, jackdaws.

Anyway, to return to execution by wheel, it is a practice that is famously unnecessary for lepidopterists. Pope (the most quoted poet in English) pointed out that such a grisly and gruesome method of execution is needless when it comes to butterflies, and thus spawned a proverb. The butterfly Pope was talking about was John Hervey, a camp courtier to Queen Caroline, whom he nicknamed Sporus:

Let Sporus tremble — "What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings,
This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys,
Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys,
So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite.
Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid Impotence he speaks,
And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks;
Or at the Ear of Eve [Queen Caroline], familiar Toad,
Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad,
In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes,
Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.
His Wit all see-saw between that and this,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile Antithesis.
Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,
The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart!
Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board,
Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.
Eve's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest,
A Cherub's face [see picture, above right], a Reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.

Hervey was not universally unpopular. Dr Johnson was so fond of Hervey's entire family that he once announced:

Call a dog Hervey and I shall love him.

N.B. Hervey is pronounced Harvey.

A Hymn To Sheila

Today, as all Australians must be aware, is Sheila's Day. That is because Sheila is merely the Irish equivalent of Cecilia, which is the female equivalent of Cecil, which ultimately derives from the Latin caecus, which meant blind.

Anyway, today is St Cecilia's day, and St Cecilia is the matron saint of music. Thus this day is devoted to the muses.

Sheila (as I like to call her) only obtained this honour through a misunderstanding. She was a martyr of some sort in the second or third centuries, and an early account of her death said that she was stifled by being locked in her bathroom which was then overheated with air from red hot pipes, or candentibus organis. This seems to have been misread as cantatibus organis, which meant she was stifled while the organ played.

Anyway, writing hymns to St Cecilia has been a standard poetical business for years. Poets must describe music, which is a lot harder than you think. You get some lovely lines, like these by Pope:

Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

Or these from Auden:

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,

But the best are the closing lines of John Dryden's , which given his usual mediocrity is a miracle attributable only to the intervention of a saint.

So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.

And here is the whole Auden poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.



P.S. St Cecilia's body is, allegedly, in a church in Trastevere which I visited a couple of months ago. I would have knelt and prayed but somebody was playing the organ very, very badly, and it quite put me off.

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.

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.