Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil

by John Keats
Written: 1818
The Burial of Phocion, Nicolas Poussin (1648) [Wikimedia Commons]

[Considering the extreme length of this blog post I have foregone the typical fact-checking and appending of numerous links. Please forgive the omission.]

Against the background of the Plague, one of Giovanni Boccaccio's narrators in his Decameron chooses to impart to an audience of lords and fellow ladies the following cheerful tale :

LISABETTA'S brothers slay her lover, who appeareth to her in a dream and showeth her where he is buried, whereupon she privily disinterreth his head and setteth it in a pot of basil. Thereover making moan a great while every day, her brothers take it from her and she for grief dieth a little thereafterward

Even when expanded beyond the synopsis as Filomena tells it, the story is (in my opinion) irritatingly slight in spite of its tragedy. If the driving force behind the brothers' actions were a Greek god on an arbitrary rampage the tale would be far more sensible, and instead they appear to be merely a random act of psychotic violence which in the recounting appeals only to the commonest greed for sensation.

Admittedly one can nevertheless think of possible purposes to the tale. For instance, it might reflect the patriarchal excesses of medieval and Renaissance society, in which family means not protective affection but possessive tyranny. Or it can be a lament for the cruelty of the world toward star-crossed lovers in the Romeo and Juliet tradition. Or it could be an unsympathetic cautionary tale as to what happens when a young maiden has an affair outside the bonds of marriage and thereby thumbs her nose at the gods of expediency, i.e. the idols at whose altar society worships.

Either way, grave doubts as to its romanticness arise at the point where Lisabetta disinters Lorenzo and employs her knife to saw off the man's head for safekeeping. But it wavers back from time to time during the subsequent dubious step-by-step guide to tending a beloved gentleman's cranium:

taking a great and goodly pot, of those wherein they plant marjoram or sweet basil, she set the head therein, folded in a fair linen cloth, and covered it with earth, in which she planted sundry heads of right fair basil of Salerno; nor did she ever water these with other water than that of her tears or rose or orange-flower water. Moreover she took wont to sit still near the pot and to gaze amorously upon it with all her desire, as upon that which held her Lorenzo hid; and after she had a great while looked thereon, she would bend over it and fall to weeping so sore and so long that her tears bathed all the basil, which, by dint of long and assiduous tending, as well as by reason of the fatness of the earth, proceeding from the rotting head that was therein, waxed passing fair and very sweet of savour.

It isn't different in principle from Cinderella (Aschenputtel) watering her mother's grave with her tears in the Grimm fairy tale, but infinitely more disturbing. Which, considering that even over a century after Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, Leonardo da Vinci haunted cemeteries to dig up corpses for anatomical studies, and the peculiar ideas of criminal justice prevalent in those days, and altogether the pervasive mingling of death and life (vide the plague, which Boccaccio describes so pithily in the Decameron's introduction), probably fits into the times.

***
Isabella and the Pot of Basil, William Holman Hunt, 1868 [Wikimedia Commons]

Whatever the merits of the plot may be, it captured the imaginations of John Keats in the first quarter of the 19th century, and of Hans Christian Andersen and (in the painterly realm) the Pre-Raphaelites in the second and third quarters.

Keats's take on the matter is unapologetically soppy, a paean to the dewy-eyed love of youth. [Disclaimer: I skim the poem whenever reading it, so this treatment of it may lack depth.]

Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love's eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.

The second verse is fortunately improved by little touching details:

With every morn their love grew tenderer,
With every eve deeper and tenderer still;
He might not in house, field, or garden stir,
But her full shape would all his seeing fill;
And his continual voice was pleasanter
To her, than noise of trees or hidden rill;
Her lute-string gave an echo of his name,
She spoilt her half-done broidery with the same.

Though the unkind mind might suggest that Isabella must be as big as a whale to fill all her beloved's seeing. A picture of bucolic bliss, as exists only in the minds of those who read Christopher Marlowe idylls of shepherds and shepherdesses unironically, is drawn at length. After the early hesitancy is surmounted the two of them become lovers and

his erewhile timid lips grew bold,
And poesied with hers in dewy rhyme.

(At which point the reader may have difficulties keeping a straight face.) But then the maiden's brothers destroy their lover's paradise, in what a description of their trade might suggest is an allegory to the destruction of nature and rural harmony by the Industrial Revolution.

With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torched mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quiver'd loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip;—with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood,
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood.

This and the next verses could certainly be considered as a point on a line that leads from William Wilberforce and the Luddites through socialism and Charles Dickens to, let's say, Emile Zola's Germinal. In the disdain of filthy lucre and trade these verses are very suggestive, too, of the impecunious artist (and of snobbery).

In Keats's version of events the brothers' pride of caste leads them to abhor the thought that their subordinate should be their sister's beloved, and besides Lorenzo is an impediment to marrying her off to a rich aristocrat.

So the two brothers and their murder'd man
Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream
Gurgles through straiten'd banks, and still doth fan
Itself with dancing bulrush, and the bream
Keeps head against the freshets. Sick and wan
The brothers' faces in the ford did seem,
Lorenzo's flush with love.—They pass'd the water
Into a forest quiet for the slaughter.

After the deed is done, they considerately tell Isabella that her soulmate has sailed away to foreign lands.

In the mid days of autumn, on their eves
The breath of Winter comes from far away,
And the sick west continually bereaves
Of some gold tinge, and plays a roundelay
Of death among the bushes and the leaves,
To make all bare before he dares to stray
From his north cavern. So sweet Isabel
By gradual decay from beauty fell,

pining. Her brothers feel twinges of conscience as she becomes pathetically ill, but they go on lying to her. But the truth is revealed to her by Lorenzo's spirit through a dream. Among other things he remarks,

thy paleness makes me glad;
Thy beauty grows upon me, and I feel
A greater love through all my essence steal.

It may satisfy someone's artistic vision, but if a beloved wanted me to waste away and die amid great mental suffering, the first thing I would do once I've crossed the Styx is sock him in the chin.

There are lines here and there which tend to support the timid suspicion that Keats's verse is at times exceedingly feeble. Witness this fine specimen of rhyme, which describes Isabella's visit to the forest where Lorenzo was killed after she had seen the vision:

she took with her an aged nurse,
And went into that dismal forest-hearse.

Or, when the visit proves sadly successful,

At last they felt the kernel of the grave,
And Isabella did not stamp and rave.

Which is about as climactic (in my view) as "The Star-Spangled Banner" when the lyrics go "and the flag was . . . still there!" Keats then follows in Boccaccio's footsteps in elucidating proper grooming procedures for the skull of a defunct lover:

She calm'd its wild hair with a golden comb,
And all around each eye's sepulchral cell
Pointed each fringed lash; the smeared loam
With tears, as chilly as a dripping well,
She drench'd away:—and still she comb'd, and kept
Sighing all day—and still she kiss'd, and wept.

Whereupon she

withers, like a palm
Cut by an Indian for its juicy balm.

But the basil plant is doing well. The brothers, intent on ruining this questionable idyll too, kidnap it for further examination, and though "the thing was vile with green and livid spot" recognize in the skull the beneficiary of their homicidal activities, and decide privily to go into everlasting banishment.

And so she [Isabella] pined, and so she died forlorn,
Imploring for her Basil to the last.
No heart was there in Florence but did mourn
In pity of her love, so overcast.
And a sad ditty of this story born
From mouth to mouth through all the country pass'd:
Still is the burthen sung—"O cruelty,
To steal my Basil-pot away from me!"

* * *

Though Oscar Wilde or Edgar Allan Poe might appear to be fine candidates to give the story their own twist, given their macabre streaks and appreciation for Italy in bygone and undercivilized times, it was Hans Christian Andersen who took up the lance. Fittingly he sentimentalized it a great deal, and wrote it from the comparatively cuddly perspective of a rose-elf, in the eponymous tale "Elf of the Rose."

This elf wanders along the leaves of the roses, of which the veins serve as roads, so minuscule is his stature, and lives and flits between the flower buds. But once he is weary from his travels and the roses are shut against him before the impending night, so he turns to a honeysuckle arbour and sees a young pair of lovers who are bidding each other farewell. The lady gives the gentleman a rose and after a spot of kissing they part. The latter is pleased with his present, but the brother of the lady is not pleased with his dalliance, so

he drew out a sharp knife, and while the other was kissing the rose, the wicked man stabbed him to death; then he cut off his head, and buried it with the body in the soft earth under the linden-tree.

(On the plus side, the knife wasn't blunt or serrated, and the lady doesn't have to do the decapitating of the corpse later. I wonder, though, if linden trees have knobbly, shallow roots or a tap root, because if the former it would have been a major pain in the neck to bury a body right under one.) Meanwhile the elf has fallen onto a dead linden leaf which fell onto the assassin's head, and hitches a ride home in an understandably disconsolate frame of mind.

The brother visits his sister's bedroom to cackle evilly, the leaf falls out of his head, and during the night the elf serenades the unlucky woman with a recounting of her beloved's demise. As promised, she also finds the crumpled leaf on her bed to prove that the story was no dream. During the day the elf hangs out in a rosebush in her room, and the next night the lady sneaks out and finds the corpse. She takes home the skull and a little jasmine plant that has bloomed nearby, and plants them both in a generously proportioned flowerpot.

Her grief makes the elf too miserable, so he lives out of doors again and pays her regular visits. As in Keats's poem, the lady wilts away as the flora thrives, and as not in Keats's poem the homicidal brother grumbles at her. At long last,

one day she sat and leaned her head against the flower-pot, and the little elf of the rose found her asleep. Then he seated himself by her ear, talked to her of that evening in the arbor, of the sweet perfume of the rose, and the loves of the elves. Sweetly she dreamed, and while she dreamt, her life passed away calmly and gently, and her spirit was with him whom she loved, in heaven.

(At which point I will admit that despite the smothering sentimentality of the words a certain teariness threatens.) Her surviving relative is happy to inherit the jasmine and brings it to his room. The elf follows it and whispers the story of the man's misdeeds to the flower-spirits, who say that it's old news considering whose skull they're growing out of, so the tiny avenger discontentedly goes on to see the bees, who promise to kill the killer. As it turns out the jasmine had appointed itself as the horticultural hangman anyway, and that night the sentence is executed as the spirits give the murderer nightmares and poison him with their infinitesimal spears. The bees and the elf rush in the next morning to find their prey dead.

But the punishment is not complete enough. As people come into the room to gawk, the insects flock around the jasmine pot, and sting a man who lifts it in the hand, so that it crashes to the floor and reveals the skull.

And the queen bee hummed in the air, and sang of the revenge of the flowers, and of the elf of the rose and said that behind the smallest leaf dwells One, who can discover evil deeds, and punish them also.

[Cf. the similarly uplifting Grimm tale of murder inevitably revealed, "Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag."]

And, if all goes as intended, a young and overly literate child will go to bed trembling in his little boots, resolving never to stab people and cut off their heads and hide them under linden trees because otherwise our benevolent God (through his self-appointed earthly minions) will hound him to the gates of Hades.
From the Botanical Magazine (1787), Vol. I [Wikimedia Commons]
The End.

(To be fair, I first read the story at the age of nine or ten and wasn't too affected by it, theologically or otherwise, except in finding it gloomily fascinating.)

* * *

The Decamerone of Giovanni Boccacio [Gutenberg.org]
An e-text of John Payne's translation, which had originally been published in 1886.

Keats: Poems Published in 1820 [Gutenberg.org]
A volume of verse with a handy hyperlink to "The Pot of Basil" in the table of contents.

Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen [Gutenberg.org]
A translation of many of Andersen's tales by an unknown person.

Ode to the West Wind

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
First published: 1820

The first time I (knowingly — which is to say that I could have previously leafed past it in a poetry anthology) encountered "Ode to the West Wind" was in the last year of high school.* In hindsight this is equally fitting and ironic. It is ironic on the one hand because any schoolchild who bothers to think about it will probably find it peculiar to read a poem that has distinctly counterestablishment and freespirited tendencies in an academic environment. On the other hand it is fitting because the poem is an anthem of youth, and more specifically of the youth which enters university firmly believing itself possessed of unprecedented insights, of unique talent, and of the duty to change the world.
*(N.B.: At roughly the same time I was introduced to "Ozymandias" and "Ode to a Skylark," and every now and then have come across biographical sketches of Shelley, but aside from that my knowledge of the poet has mostly and quickly been picked up from the internet during the writing of this post. Caveat lector.)

When Shelley wrote the ode he was twenty-seven and evidently hadn't outgrown this phase. Though he had come so far as entering and surviving Eton, he was kicked out of Oxford in 1811 for a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, which episode bounded his formal education but certainly did not bound his enthusiastic espousal of objectionable sociopolitical ideas. After this point in life his family's visions of him as his father's successor as a Whig Member of Parliament became ever fainter, and even granting that the course set before a person by his parents is rarely calculated to realize a fully mature character, one might generally say that he never completed the natural progression into adulthood. He led an itinerant artistic existence, dabbling in society, earnestly provoking the ire of authorities and critics through his divers publications, and hobnobbing with the congenial Lord Byron. Despite a marriage, a (to put it bluntly) adulterous elopement eventually followed by another marriage, and children, he was evidently as far as ever from settling down by the time he died, still young, when his boat capsized off the Italian shore. (The circumstances of this drowning are still disputed but, though if homicide was the true cause it would be vexing that the perpetrators escaped with impunity, Shelley would probably have been pleased that he "departed this life" enwrapped in a romantic shroud of mystery.)

One advantage of such a Peter Pan existence is that Shelley's illusions and hopes about himself and the extent of his influence on an unfair and hostilely skeptical world probably remained intact. His arrogant proclamation that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" [N.B.: very unacknowledged indeed, and for good reason] set the bar of achievement rather too high; disappointment was inevitable. Besides he was doubtless happier off not knowing that, two hundred years later, he would principally and vaguely be remembered not as a dashing revolutionary artist, but as a stodgy "dead white male" poet whose most popular works are mainly and grudgingly read in schools.

***

("Krähen auf einem Baum," oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich, 1822)

The west wind, also known as Zephyr, is typically idealized as the wind of change, since it manifests itself when winter turns into spring — like a chinook in the North American prairies. The "Ode" itself therefore begins with a lyrical but peculiarly forceful nature-description, wherein Shelley departs from convention by envisioning the West Wind as a creature of autumn and not of spring, and one like Boreas in his potentially vicious destructive force. In addition Shelley's wind embodies not mere change, but liberty in all its facets: political, artistic, etc.

According to Shelley's note the ode was "conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began [. . .] at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions." (My mother and I once visited Florence and ascended a hill overlooking the Arno on whose crest there is a dense forest, in late October or November, and the scene did convey a peculiar sense of wilderness, but the weather was not windy.) And so the poem begins,

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave

— and here, finishing the line with the word "until" and then moving on, Shelley turns away from the autumnal Italian scene before him and paints a word-portrait of the gentler and earlier west wind, the "azure sister of the spring." Then he heightens the insistence with which he is addressing the West Wind by "calling" out: "Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear!"

The second canto broadens his scene-painting to an aerial view of the wind, which is necessarily ethereal in its imagery; and in the following extends the ocean-metaphor by tracing the wind to the Mediterranean shores. In both the poet indulges his tastes for Italy and Greece, classical and present, mythological and concrete. (These tastes are one way in which, like Keats, he is a link between — to exaggerate and generalize a little — the 18th-century and its love of antiquity and artificial nature with the 19th-century and its love of the medieval epoch and artistic nature.)

After that the poem briefly and weirdly resembles a hymn ("If I had the wings of a dove," or something like it) —

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee

— before the narrative voice recklessly steps over the divide between mortal and immortal being by entreating of the wind a share in its strength and itinerant self-sufficiency. (In Greek mythology such a daring request would likely lead the requester into the Aegean or a conflagration or some other sticky end.) Then Shelley, who is for all his atheism clearly not unwilling to take on Christian lore, flirts with outright blasphemy in a flamboyant bout of metaphor that sounds suspiciously Jesus-y particularly when it reaches this histrionic peak:

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Then, like any good essay-writer, Shelley recapitulates the thesis of his work, gradually and yet with a consistently warm enthusiasm:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy!

But — with a triumphant effect of culmination which even good essay-writers rarely achieve, he finishes on a sudden note of uncertainty:

O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

* * *

This poem came rather late for the French Revolution, although evidently not too late for the backlash against the Revolution. As Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote (in a preface to a collection of her husband's works) whenever he aired and publicly defended his radical politics her husband struggled against the "scorn and hatred with which the partisans of reform were regarded" in the light of that upheaval. But the ode's language and sentiments not only effortlessly outlived the writer and the withering atmosphere of conservatism but also (presumably) remained a fresh expression of the prevailing spirit as long as the Romantic movement lasted. As others have noted, this movement is still not entirely past, and elements of the "Ode" like Shelley's visions of destruction that paves the way for a better world resonate with more recent ideologies such as Bolshevism. Even now — though its style and vocabulary may feel antiquated — the confident, crusading, and youthful mentality and feeling which animate the Ode are as true to life as ever; one could say that the very qualities that made Shelley immature are the ones that made him immortal.

From: Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selected Poetry and Prose (10th printing), Intr. by Kenneth Neill Cameron (USA: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)

***

Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Gutenberg.org]
Printed in 1914, but it includes two prefaces and more notes by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from older collections.

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ode to the West Wind [RPO, University of Toronto online]
Annotated text of the ode.

A Defence of Poetry [Bartleby.com]
Shelley's essay defining the role and nature of poetry. It's the source of the "unacknowledged legislators" quotation, and from what I've skimmed of it you could say that it's the thesis of "Ode to the West Wind" in lengthy prose form.

Beowulf

By Unknown
First recorded: Late 10th/early 11th century

One of the problems of this blog is that I am "reviewing" works that are mostly so established in the literary canon, and whose worth is so entirely evident, that the praise seems presumption. But it's one thing to recognize the merits of a work and another to enjoy them, and it is the latter with which I am principally concerned.

Whether the old English epic "Beowulf" is well-known enough outside of literature courses to be in no need of trumpeting may, however, be questionable, despite the recent films and Seamus Heaney's fine translation. Its origins are obscure, reaching back to 1000 AD or even earlier, and though the consensus appears to be that the manuscript that remains to us was written by two monks, it is unknown whether it may not be rooted in an even hoarier tale that was passed on by Anglo-Saxon storytellers for centuries before it was finally transcribed and infused with Christian propaganda.

When we read excerpts of Beowulf in my high school English Literature class, my excellent teacher devoted a lot of time to giving us a conception of what life was like for the Anglo-Saxons. It was not a pleasant life, "nasty, short and brutish" as Thomas Hobbes put it, and overshadowed by the savagery and inexorable tedium of war, indigence, and hostile nature. The society was organized into clans which were led by cynnings, or ring-lords, and which formed alliances or enmities against each other as they saw fit. They lived in dark houses in a gloomy climate, and the untamed bogs and long winters as well as the uncertain seas made attempts at travelling into a fearsome ordeal. Beowulf itself testifies to the extent to which they mystified their environment; the bogs and the seas are peopled by all manner of outlandish monsters, and the whole is governed by the intangible and incalculable whims of wyrd, or fate.

Beowulf is in its way deeply preoccupied with fighting against the misery of the Anglo-Saxon world. It is too earthy and narrow in scope to be a convincing religious tract, in my point of view, but much like the Bible it records the history of a region's peoples and aims to distract its audience from the trials and imperfections of sublunary existence. Despite the loneliness that pervades the poem, it is obsessed with a sense of community. The kings and queens are set on pedestals as hazily perfect beings; the loyalty of the armed men to each other and to their leaders is implicitly extolled; the names and exploits of ancestors and distant acquaintances are summoned; and the dining-hall Heorot, a central setting of the tale, is a meeting-place not only for the Danes but also for visitors like the Geats [N.B.: pronounced "yats" according to my second-year English professor] under Beowulf. My high school teacher emphasized the exiled status of the first villain of the tale (the monster Grendel), his misery, and his resentment against "civilized" mankind. To be cast out from society was worse than death; the wild melancholy of that situation is also captured in the old poem "The Wanderer."

At any rate, the tale begins when the Danish king Hrothgar builds a mighty feasting-hall, named Heorot. At first all goes well, but then Grendel catches wind of its existence and, driven by his hatred of mankind, he prowls around at night and kills the men who frequent it, a couple at a time. Months pass, and from a place of rejoicing the hall has turned into a horrible abode of death. The news of these depredations eventually reaches the distant shores of Geatland (present-day Sweden, I think) and as a result Beowulf, a man of great courage and prowess, sails over with a company of men to provide assistance. The warrior is gratefully received and soon afterward fights singly with Grendel, who is immune to swords. With his bare hands Beowulf tears off the monster's arm and the monster betakes himself, bleeding copiously, to die pathetically in the depths of the swamp whence he came.

Grendel's mother is not pleased with these developments and comes marauding not long afterwards. But Beowulf, who evidently has the lung capacity of a zeppelin, dives down into the swamp and kills her with a magic sword he just happens to find there. Despite its implausibility, the mental images I have of this battle — the murky and mysterious and morbid waters, sunken treasures, hideous plants and monsters, and finally the fierce wrath of the ghastly and vengeful female — are deeply impressive. The third battle in the tale transpires when Beowulf has become king of Geatland, and he must fight a dragon that is laying waste to the countryside. He takes his followers with him, but, pursuant to the philosophy that "when the going gets tough, the tough get going," they run like the wind, with the sole exception of the comically nomered Wiglaf. The dragon and Beowulf both die and the tale ends with the grand obsequies of the defunct king.

The tale is told in typical Anglo-Saxon verse. Each line has four beats, which means that there are four syllables that are naturally emphasized, and this practice conveys a drumlike rhythm. There is no rhyming, but there is a lot of alliteration. The language is in my view rather pretentious and pompous, windbaggish to be precise, but I do like the kennings, which are essentially compound nouns that poetically describe objects, like "roof-tree" and "swan-road." I think it would be darnedly difficult to remember the whole poem, which is a couple thousand lines long and not precisely streamlined where the narrative is concerned, but it seems as if the ancient bards, or scops, managed it. Its tone is relaxed and rambling, as if the storyteller couldn't bear to end it and to leave the world in it. That world doesn't appeal to me and I find Beowulf a priggish ass, but it is undeniable that the tale is still weirdly compelling and likable.

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons

* * *

Resources for the Study of Beowulf [Greenehamlet.com]
An introduction and links to all sorts of online Beowulf texts and background reading.

Beowulf [Georgetown.edu]
A transcription of the original Anglo-Saxon text.

New York Times Film Reviews:
Beowulf & Grendel (2005), Beowulf (2007)

"Beowulf and Fate Meet in a Modern Poet's Lens" [New York Times]
A nice review of Seamus Heaney's translation by Richard Eder, from February 2000.

Ballade des Pendus

Even the experience of studying a poem for school or university often fails to dilute its potency, and such was the case for me with François Villon's "Ballade des pendus," or "Ballad of the Hanged." (In Georges Pompidou's Anthologie de la Poésie française, which I have at hand, it is entitled, "L'Epitaphe Villon.") Though I may have analyzed the structure and extracted themes, the poem was, and is, still painful and striking to read. At the time I came across a recording where someone (Louis Jouvet?) recites it in a mournful, aged and broken tone, like what I imagine the literary "mendicants' whine" must be, and it deepened the impression. Anyway, while it is not precisely uplifting, the theme of death and the afterlife is timely given that today is Pentecost Sunday.

* * *

Villon is one of the interesting villains of French literature. [N.B. I'm taking the following information from an eminently readable article on Villon available here.] Born in Paris, 1431, he lost his father at an early age, and thereafter his name and education were bestowed upon him by the canon Guillaume de Villon. In university, though intended to study theology, he became enmeshed not only in the turbulent politics of that setting but also, apparently, in the circle of the criminal "Coquillards," who marauded certain regions of France in that day. In 1455 he fatally wounded a priest, presumably of similarly dubious piety, in some dispute, and fled Paris only to return when his friends procured two royal pardons on his behalf. Upon his return he alternately dabbled in burglary, to some effect, and poetized, principally for an ethically undemanding audience of adolescent criminals. In 1457 he was established in Charles of Orleans's court, writing milder verses in honour of his host's newly-born daughter and then writing less mild verses in dishonour of his host's poetic pen-pal, the latter of which caused his swift ejection.

Long story short, he spent a couple of years being in fair or foul favour with divers authorities and writing reams of ballads, one of which was often the consequence of the other. Then at last he returned to Paris, professing much remorse likewise expressed in the form of ballads, which did not prevent him from dabbling in burglary again, albeit more modestly. The upshot of this lifestyle was that he was condemned to be hanged at the approximate age of thirty-two, after a brawl in which he ironically appears to have been an innocent bystander. Whilst thus imprisoned he wrote the "Ballade des pendus." Then, in a surprising act of mercy, the court commuted his sentence to ten years' banishment. He wrote two final poems, went out into the countryside in the midst of winter in early 1463, and was never heard from again as far as posterity is concerned.

The ballad is spoken by gibbeted corpses to passersby, describing in graphic detail the decay of the hung bodies, which seems to metaphorically express the poet's profound feeling of debasement, and pleading for pity. At least the sense that I have is that the narrators are metaphorically tugging at strangers' clothes, to force them to look at them and recognize that they are also humans, as they repeatedly invoke the doctrine that we are all sinners and all in need of divine mercy. The refrain is "Pray to God that He might absolve us all."

The idea that the society of Villon's time would manifest consideration toward dead, convicted criminals may seem implausible given the judiciary system before the Enlightenment. But one of the more gruesome tales of the Grimm brothers, "Die beiden Wanderer," indicates that a superstitious respect was accorded to the gibbet and its occupants; the dew that falls on hanged men restores the sight of a tailor whose eyes had been gouged out (by a psychopathic cobbler who didn't like the cut of his jib). Of course this tale was published much later, in the 19th century, so it is unlikely that it would faithfully depict the situation in France five hundred years earlier. In the ballad itself, the narrators' fear of laughter, harassment and mockery is not promising.

* * *

Frères humains qui après nous vivez,
N'ayez les coeurs contre nous endurcis,
Car, si pitié de nous pauvres avez,
Dieu en aura plus tôt de vous mercis.
Vous nous voyez ci attachés cinq, six:
Quant à la chair que trop avons nourrie,
Elle est piéça dévorée et pourrie,
Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et poudre.
De notre mal personne ne s'en rie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

Si frères vous clamons, pas n'en devez
Avoir dédain, quoique fûmes occis
Par justice. Toutefois, vous savez
Que tous hommes n'ont pas bon sens rassis;
Excusez-nous, puisque sommes transis,
Envers le fils de la Vierge Marie,
Que sa grâce ne soit pour nous tarie,
Nous préservant de l'infernale foudre.
Nous sommes morts, âme ne nous harie,
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

La pluie nous a débués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis;
Pies, corbeaux, nous ont les yeux cavés,
Et arraché la barbe et les sourcils.
Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis;
Puis çà, puis là, comme le vent varie,
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charrie,
Plus becquetés d'oiseaux que dés à coudre.
Ne soyez donc de notre confrérie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

Prince Jésus, qui sur tous a maistrie,
Garde qu'enfer n'ait de nous seigneurie:
A lui n'ayons que faire ni que soudre
Hommes, ici n'a point de moquerie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous veuille absoudre!

* * *

Here is what Pompidou has to say on the subject of Villon:

Le XVe siècle est un siècle triste. Comme toutes les civilisations à leur déclin, le Moyen Age s'attarde désespérément à ce qui fit sa grandeur ou son charme, et qui va mourir. De l'homme du Moyen Age, la poésie nous fournit deux types exemplaires. [. . .] Si Charles d'Orléans a toutes les grâces du Moyen Age, Villon en incarne les angoisses et les remords. Plus qu'une banale préfiguration des poètes maudits, cet étudiant bourgeois devenu bandit exprime la grande terreur du peuple médiéval en proie à la misère et à la maladie, angoissé par la mort et l'audelà, réconforté par les plaisirs élémentaires de la table et du lit et, parfois, par l'espérance. Il a peu écrit et encore y a-t-il dans son oeuvre beaucoup de vers inutiles. Mais les quelques centaines de vers qui comptent [. . .] suffisent à faire de lui l'un des grands parmi les grands, avant et avec Baudelaire, celui qui a su le mieux parler de la mort.

In English: "The fifteenth century is a sorrowful century. Like all civilizations at their decline, the Middle Ages linger desperately at that which constituted their greatness or their charm, and which will perish. Of the man of the Middle Ages, poetry furnishes us with two exemplary types. [. . .] If Charles of Orleans possesses all the graces of the Middle Ages, Villon incarnates its anguish and remorse. More than a banal prefiguration of the accursed poets, this bourgeois student turned bandit expresses the great terror of the medieval people — preyed on by misery and maladies, anguished by death and the beyond, comforted by the elementary pleasures of the table and the bed and, at times, by hope. He wrote little and in his work there are many useless verses still. But the several hundreds of verses which count [. . .] suffice to make of him one of the great ones among the great, before and with Baudelaire — he who knew best how to speak of death."

Source: Anthologie de la Poésie française, Georges Pompidou, ed. (Hachette: 1961), pp. 22-23

* * *

François Villon [Poesies.net]
Collected works of Villon (French)

"Ballade des Pendus" [Textatelier Hess von Biberstein]
The French text of the poem, followed by a German, Basle-region dialect, and English translation, and then a biography of the poet.

Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual

"The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual"

(From: The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle



First published: 1893

Among my favourite works, the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes have figured for a very long time. To the devotee of Victorian (or Edwardian) England it is of course fascinating in every respect. To the non-devotee, the yarns are often rippingly good, the characters and style of course well fleshed out and distinctive, and as a treasury of zeitgeisty detail it is scarcely surpassable. What helps preserve the illusions of the fine Victorian order is that colonialism is relegated to a distance, spatially and temporally,* and that the criminal underworld is held firmly in its place.
[* I am thinking especially of The Sign of the Four, in which the scenes on the Andaman Islands are depicted as flashbacks.]

Nor are the Sherlock Holmes tales especially unsettling, despite the pervasiveness of crime in Conan Doyle's society – the perpetrators are beggars and baronets, country mice and city mice (or, as the unkinder French has it, rats), gentlemen and ladies, circus folk to bank clerks. In inviting contrast to the murder and mayhem that are beamed into our living rooms by the television nowadays, the reader is spared tales of sexual violence (which is at least in my view nastier than the other kind), nor is he requested to inspect maggots or attend post-mortems, nor are all possible pains taken to make the crime real to him. The hero, heroine, victim, and perpetrator are set up as reliably and distinctly as the dramatis personae in a play, and this play is fitted out with a scenic backdrop, a declaration of chronological and geographical setting, costumes, and extras with conscientious regularity. Then the recounting of the events is filtered through the sensible and stolid perspective of Watson, or the analytically detached and cool one of Holmes. In short, there is a formula. So one never forgets it is fiction.

If there is any agenda underlying the tales, I have failed to discern it. Clearly Conan Doyle was not opposed to capital punishment, as the deaths of many a culprit show, though neither death row nor the gallows appear anywhere, and it seems that a swift demise by gunshot is the preferred mode of disposal. Of course it is implicitly clear that crime does not pay, that retribution may be slow on its feet but is heavy on its impact, and (despite Holmes's amused contempt for the blundering policeman) that the law enforcement system works decently. Only when he writes of international crime organizations, like the sinister American freemasonry or the Italian mafia of his day, does Conan Doyle posit that there are forces against which individual resistance and the criminal justice system are impotent.

Among the screen versions of the tales, Jeremy Brett's television Sherlock Holmes is, of course, a classic, though to my recollection it is a little tedious in its relentless lack of true humour. I saw a portion of a recent film with Rupert Everett and thought it too self-conscious and sensationalist. Basil Rathbone oddly enough has left no impression whatsoever, perhaps due to my bad taste or to the fallacious tendency to expect absolute fidelity to the original character. My youngest brothers have watched the Russian Hound of the Baskervilles and evidently liked it; for a while afterwards they would greet each other with hearty slaps on the back, in imitation of the overly effusive Sir Henry character (whose manners were apparently formed in the Canadian logging industry), and exclaim, "Sir Genry!" The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which is of course a modern psychoanalytical take on the franchise, I liked, though at present I only remember the scene where Holmes is locked in a ring with the threateningly advancing Lippizaner horses. The Dudley Moore take on The Hound of the Baskervilles was diluted Monty Python for me, meandering and self-indulgent and not especially hilarious. But British humour is an acquired taste, after all. As for the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, my family used to watch it regularly and it was very entertaining if not eminently intellectual. Its premise: the detective, having been pickled in honey, is revived in the far future, in a London where cars fly and women work at New Scotland Yard.

At any rate, to turn from generalities to specifics, the Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual is one of Sherlock Holmes's earliest cases, "before Watson's time" as he likes to put it. The detective visits a college chum at his countryside seat, and this chum, Reginald Musgrave, promptly presents him a riddle in the shape of a disappeared butler and maid. At the unsuspected heart of the issue is the Musgrave family ritual, in which each heir must recite a string of questions and answers:

"Whose was it?"
"His who is gone."
"Who shall have it?"
"He who will come."
"What was the month?"
"The sixth from the first."
"Where was the sun?"
"Over the oak."

etc.

Since the lineage has not borne the brightest bulbs, it is Holmes who (aside from the butler) first recognizes that the ritual is an enigma that points to the location of a treasure. A thorough session of triangulation and rapid deduction later – mathematics are apparently a useful life skill after all – a corpse has been discovered, the flight of a further person clarified, and the superficially anticlimactic booty duly retrieved from its hiding-place. This is what happens when servants Forget Their Place! (I'm joking, obviously.)

Last but not least, this story contains one of my favourite passages in Sherlock Holmes, which I and those of my siblings who have read the tale enjoy (partially) quoting at each other:

I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an armchair, with his hairtrigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.

Illustration by Sidney Paget, taken from Wikimedia Commons. The quotations are taken from a Penguin edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1976). The story is likewise available at gutenberg.org.

Donne's Meditation XVII

[Source: Wikimedia Commons]

John Donne is a staple of English Literature classes, as I know from personal experience. In my Lit class during the last year of high school we devoted a good day or three to the works of this so-called "metaphysical poet." The reign of Elizabeth I had ended, and Shakespeare was on the point of dying, when Donne flourished. But the "New Learning," the late English incarnation of the Renaissance, was unfolding a new leaf of learning and science, and a peculiar but fruitful intermingling of religion (vide George Herbert) and a fascination for science and exploration ensued in the arts. There was likewise already a strain of the earthiness and weighty seriousness which were, in my view, to distinguish the 17th century at its height.

The tale goes that John Donne was, when a young man, very fond of women and a trifle wild, and his breathlessly animated poetry of that period duly reflects it. What is indubitable is that he was also very fond of metaphysical "conceits." Maps and compasses, astronomy and metallurgy, and so on and so forth, furnish the metaphors which he, like his contemporaries, employed elaborately and lavishly in his verse to illustrate, almost as abstractly as possible, the felt and seen realities of life. Peculiarly enough he was no armchair traveller, but did in truth go on seafaring expeditions, and even whilst in England go to Oxford, study law at Lincoln's Inn, earn his bread as a secretary and diplomat, and otherwise lead a diverse and interesting life. Then he married. This was initially awkward, given the hearty un-consent on the part of the bride's father and a resultant stint in the clink, but the couple was happy and their children numerous.

Later, his wife having died and he being left alone, he became a minister of the church, and the passionate intensity with which he once celebrated love was redirected into the worship of God. Fortunately his sense of religion appears to have been a large-minded and open one, so that he did not figure among those who

Compound for sins they are inclin'd to,
By damning those they have no mind to.

The "holy sonnets" that he wrote after this conversion are interesting especially due to this intensity, which in some cases appears to be inspired as much by the old passion as the new. There is the very famous one, "Death be not proud," and then this one:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

[Poetry Foundation: John Donne]

Which sounds not a little masochistic; still, de gustibus non est disputandum, after all.

So far, at least, my favourite work is Meditation 17, which is famous in its own right as well as in its capacity as Ernest Hemingway's (last-minute) source for the book title, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Like the bells of a church, phrases of this sermon have the effect of echoing in one's memory long after one has encountered it, or at least that has been my experience. The thesis of the sermon is that we, as humans, are connected to each other, and that the good or bad that befalls one of us in a way befalls us all. So we cannot remain unmoved by the lives of others, and nor should we, and nor is it in our moral interest to do so. Donne is also of the opinion that "tribulation is treasure," i.e. that suffering improves us. [N.B.: This is not an opinion that I share; to me it's how we react to our suffering or happiness that improves us.]

At any rate, I should like to post the meditation in its entirety, but it is quite long, so here is an excerpt:

[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

This is probably the most famous passage:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

* * *

Meditation XVII [Online-literature.com]
An e-text of the Meditation.

John Donne [Poetry Foundation]
An overview of Donne's life and writings, and links to much of his verse.

* * *

N.B.: To add a trivial note about Holbein's Ambassadors at the top of this post, it was one of the paintings in London's National Gallery that I already knew; so when my sister and I went there, I paid special attention to it and was shocked by the vivid, electric green of the curtains in the background. It was one instance where it may have been preferable if the painting were left in its natural, unrestored state. At any rate, I've included it for the sake of its concise illustration of the intellectual pursuits and scientific devices which fascinated Donne's contemporaries, and because my Lit 12 textbook employed it on the same grounds.
[The portrait of John Donne is likewise available at Wikimedia Commons.]

The Editor, the Watchmen, and the Housewives

In newspapers and magazines there tends to be, as everyone is probably aware, a good deal of mass-produced writing, which duly begins with a hook, is duly written in a conversational tone, and is duly polished, without there being very much originality or sincere enthusiasm discernible. Of course, it's a job, and the spring of the inspiration does not spout forth with clockwork regularity like Old Faithful. But then there are extremely well-written articles, and even writers who consistently bring something fresh and characteristic.

Reading the Globe and Mail online, a writer whom I've particularly come to admire is Elizabeth Renzetti, who first impressed me in the quietly friendly, observant, and intelligent sketch of John Le Carré, which was published in connection with Le Carré's latest book, A Most Wanted Man. In contrast to the snide belligerence or lavish adulation or prying impudence that unpleasantly tinge most interviews or sketches of the sort, it was very refreshing. More recently she wrote a portrait of the editor Diana Athill.

In the New Yorker the articles I most consistently read are the film reviews by Anthony Lane, which are delightfully satirical but not, or so I think, fundamentally mean-spirited. Whereas I like A.O. Scott's and Manohla Dargis's reviews in the New York Times, too, these do tend to differ in kind, and vague philosophizing riffs on a film are not nearly as helpful or satisfying as a reasonable overview of plot and a more serious and detailed look at the entire work. If they dislike or like the film, which in itself is at times not clear, it's nice to know why. On the other hand, they often implicitly refuse to pronounce a last, dogmatic opinion on a work, thereby perhaps admitting that the appreciation of films is to a great degree subjective. It should also be noted that they must publish reviews at a far greater rate than either of the critics at the New Yorker.

In any case, the last Lane review I've read is of the comic book-based film The Watchmen. The film has received very good reviews and very unfavourable reviews, but Lane's assessment seems to hit the nail on the head. The following quote may not altogether be very characteristic of his style, but in terms of the enjoyable snobbery and the trenchant insight it is.

Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights.

As for blogs, the writing I so far admire most has been in the Parisian cooking blog Chocolate & Zucchini, which is exquisite, and in the New York-based gossip website Gawker. Gawker's contributors each have their moments, but I especially like Richard Lawson's reviews of second-rate television programmes like The Hills and Gossip Girls and Real Housewives of New York. Evidently fuelled by a deep resentment against having to watch the tripe, but not entirely unsympathetic to the plights of the unreal or real or pretend-real characters, he gives free rein to his imagination. Even if one doesn't watch the shows, the "recaps" are like very, very amusing (though a little ribald) bedtime stories, where non- and fiction seamlessly come together. Richard's masterpiece so far is, I believe, this synopsis of the latest Real Housewives of New York episode.