For the last of these recycled essays, a piece on insect poems from last September, just after the national synchronised return to school and work at the start of the month (la rentrée) and just before we moved in a hurry. I wish when I wrote it I’d known Edward Taylor’s poem ‘Upon a Wasp Chilled with a Cold’, which is a rather perfect addition to the sequence. If are you interested by the taste of Sarbiewski in this post and would like to know more, you might also like this piece on him (and also on Abraham Cowley and Isaac Watts). Two of my versions of Sarbiewski were published this week in the online journal The Brazen Head as part of a set of poems, versions and translations from Sanskrit and Latin (follow this link and scroll to the end for the Sarbiewski); another is in the latest issue of Interpret.
Summer is lingering in Paris: everyone’s back at school and at work, but the afternoons are still very warm, and the apartment buildings holding the heat. It’s rather insecty weather, the tail end of summer: moths and wasps and even the odd persistent mosquito. Probably because I am almost overwhelmed by sorting out our last minute move (next Wednesday!), my mind is running on poems I’ve known the longest, so let’s start with Hardy, ‘An August Midnight’:
1A shaded lamp and a waving blind,And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:On this scene enter — winged, horned, and spined —A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;While ’mid my page there idly standsA sleepy fly, that rubs its hands . . .2Thus meet we five, in this still place,At this point in time, at this point in space.— My guests besmear my new-penned line,Or bang at the lamp and fall supine.‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why?They know Earth-secrets that know not I.
Hardy was where I learnt the word ‘dumbledore’ (it means a bumble-bee) and, though I may well be wrong, I have long assumed that Hardy is where J. K. Rowling found the word too, for her heroic headmaster. Hardy uses the word quite often so it might not have been this specific poem, but I have always wondered whether it was: ‘They know Earth-secrets that know not I’ seems a rather good summary of that sense of the mystery-behind-the-ordinary of the Harry Potter world and other similar stories. (I am too old to have read Harry Potter as the right age, but I have never forgotten reading Diana Wynne Jones’ more morally and historically sophisticated version of the trope in Witch Week.)
I’ve been reading a lot of Hart Crane recently, and one of his early poems, ‘A Name for All’, has an essentially similar sort of shape to Hardy’s. His insects are ‘moonmoth and grasshopper’ and for Crane as for Hardy they — along with all creatures without language — have access to something men do not:
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our pageAnd still wing on, untarnished of the nameWe pinion to your bodies to assuageOur envy of your freedom — we must maimBecause we are usurpers, and chagrined —And take the wing and scar it in the hand.Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;But we must die, as you, to understand.I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sangAs only they can praise, who build their daysWith fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fangStruck free and holy in one Name always.
Crane’s poem is more ambitious and less, I think, successful than Hardy’s. The middle stanza is quite awkward to say and not always easy to follow, and the first two stanzas don’t do quite enough to set up the Yeatsian sublime of the final verse, beautiful and moving though it is (‘I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang’). But the sense of strain is itself appropriate. Crane’s response to these smallest creatures is to feel shut out from something simple and extraordinary (‘free and holy’). The difference, for him, between humans and other animal — consciousness? or perhaps something more like original sin — is, at least in this mood, a source of pain and regret. Hardy’s insects are much more real: but they are observed with tenderness and curiosity, not jealousy.
There’s a long tradition of course of setting the brevity of an insect life against our own. Early modernists might think of Richard Lovelace’s poem ‘The Grasshopper’, first published in Lucasta (1649), or Cowley’s somewhat less well-known poem of the same title. Both of those have links to a short lyric found in the Anacreontea, a collection of late Greek verse attributed to (but not actually by) Anacreon, which was fashionable and widely-read, especially in stylish Latin translations, in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Anacreontea was widely taught, and in fact I’m not sure why we don’t teach it more often now, because the poems are charming and the Greek is mostly straightforward.
Lovelace, however, probably derived his particular grasshopper most immediately from a poem by the enormously popular Polish Latin poet Casimir Sarbiewski: his Odes 4.23, ‘Ad Cicadam’ (‘To a Cicada’). Sarbiewski’s ode is influenced by the Greek poem as well as by Horace, his main overall model:
O quae populeâ summa sedens comâ,Caeli roriferis ebria lacrymis,Et te voce, CICADA,Et mutum recreas nemus.Post longas hiemes, dum nimium breuisAestas se leuibus praecipitat rotis,Festinos, age, lentoSoles excipe iurgio.Vt se quaeque dies attulit optima,Sic te quaeque rapit: nulla fuit satisVmquam longa voluptas,Longus saepiùs est dolor.
There are many English translations of this poem.1 Here’s one perhaps slightly wordy but overall effective version from the early 1680s by John Chatwin:
Thrice happy Thou! Who on the Poplar’s Boughs,Sit’st drunk with Heav’n’s Ambrosial Dews.And with thy Notes thyself, dost please,And all the num’rous Throng of list’ning Trees.After long Colds and odious Winters past,On nimble Wheels the Summers hast;Blame its unkindness, gently say —The Sun too soon withdraws his chearing Ray.As ev’ry happy Day itself does show,So in a trice it leaves us too,No pleasure over long remainsFor short-liv’d joys we meet with lasting pains.
Sarbiewski was an extraordinary — and extraordinarily influential — Latin poet whom I shall write about again another time. But there’s a neat line between Sarbiewski’s tipsy cicada, singing despite the encroaching autumn, and my last late summer insect, in Edwin Muir’s ‘The Late Wasp’, prosaically drunk on marmalade:
You that through all the dying summerCame every morning to our breakfast table,A lonely bachelor mummer,And fed on the marmaladeSo deeply, all your strength was scarcely ableTo prise you from the sweet pit you had made, —You and the earth have now grown older,And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change;They have grown colder;And it is strangeHow the familiar avenues of the airCrumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold,All cracked and perished with the cold;And down you dive through nothing and through despair.
I like Muir’s poem very much, and it shares with the Hardy a tang of reality that the others do not: his persistent breakfast wasp is as immediately present to us as the insects clustering around Hardy’s lamp and slipping in his ink. Muir was surely well aware of the long tradition to which he was contributing (as he himself put it, ‘Into thirty centuries born, / At home in them all but the very last, / We meet ourselves at every turn / In the long country of the past’).2 All the same, I can’t share his wasp’s despair: I’m positively looking forward to a bit of a chill.
For a collection of English translations of Sarbiewski, see Krzysztof Fordoński and Piotr Urbański, Casimir Britannicus: English Translations, Paraphrases and Emulations of the Poetry of Maciej Cazimierz Sarbiewski (London: MHRA, 2010, rev. edn). Sarbiewski was so popular that there are many more extant manuscript translations which have not been printed.
From a lyric beginning ‘Into thirty centuries born’.
Lovely selection of poems, the Hardy is one of the first poems I learned and loved in my English literature class at school, and the Edwin Muir poem is amazing.
I've been told though that JK Rowling got all the names for her characters from Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh, though that may just be a marketing ploy used by the graveyard. Certainly that's where she got a lot of her names
Enjoyed this very much. The Muir poem is new to me, and wonderful.