Emily Dickinson, Belts & Buckles

So I’m back to reading Dickinson and reading Sewall’s biography. Maybe because it’s autumn? Or maybe it’s because Dickinson’s poems are all like riddles? I love sorting out what a poem means, so long as it’s not deliberately obscure or obfuscates. Dickinson is great that way. I don’t get the sense that she thought of her poetry as obscure. Rather, the difficulties of her poetry are like that of one who is writing to a confidant with a shared background and assumed knowledge. Truth is, many of her poems found their way into her letters. Even if we aren’t sure of what she’s talking about, there’s no evidence—that I’m aware of—that her correspondents didn’t know. It’s possible that she wrote many of her poems assuming a shared knowledge. And that brings me to the poem below (and by indirection) because what led me to this poem was another Dickinson poem (which I’ll talk about in another post) called Promise This When You Be Dying. The poem begins with these two stanzas:

Promise This — When You be Dying —
Some shall summon Me —
Mine belong Your latest Sighing —
Mine — to Belt Your Eye —

Not with Coins — though they be Minted
From an Emperor’s Hand —
Be my lips — the only Buckle
Your low Eyes — demand —

Once more, Dickinson is describing a viewing of the recently deceased. She describes “belting” the deceased’s eye and of her lips (a kiss?) being “the only Buckle”. To which I say: Wait, what? That sent me on a search through Victorian funeral rituals, belts and buckles, because Victorian burials were—an event—full of ritual, production and display. Was there a funerary ritual surrounding belts and buckles? And that sent me to this poem:

He put the Belt around my life
I heard the Buckle snap—
And turned away, imperial,
My Lifetime folding up—
Deliberate, as a Duke would do
A Kingdom's Title Deed—
Henceforth, a Dedicated sort—
A Member of the Cloud.

Yet not too far to come at call—
And do the little Toils
That make the Circuit of the Rest—
And deal occasional smiles
To lives that stoop to notice mine—
And kindly ask it in—
Whose invitation, know you not
For Whom I must decline?

[FR-330]

And this poem sent me to my favorite Dickinson website, the prowling bee, where Susan Kornfeld, not unreasonably, interprets Dickinson’s belt and buckle as a corset, writing:

“The poem begins in an almost shocking image: God putting a belt around a woman and then snapping it tight. This is an overt act of domination. We put a collar on a dog and snap it to a leash. But unlike many dog owners who bend down to pat the dog and give it an “atta boy” encouragement, God then turns away, ‘imperial.'”

And that brought about another—Wait, what?—moment. So, does that mean that when Dickinson is describing the viewing of the corpse, she wants to put a corset round the corpse’s eye?—then cinch it up with a kiss?

I’m here to suggest another, and I think much more likely, explanation.

But first, there are problems with interpreting the belt and buckle as a corset, let alone a subjugating corset. The biggest problem is Burnadette Banner. Burnadette Banner (who I love) is to period Victorian clothing what I’d like to be to poetry. And one of her pet peeves is the notion that corsets were an uncomfortably oppressive article of clothing so tightly laced that they caused Disney heroines—see Pirates of the Caribbean—to faint off the sides of cliffs. She will tell you that that’s utter nonsense. In fact, corsets were bespoke articles of clothing that were exceedingly comfortable and were not meant, in any way, to unnaturally constrict a woman’s figure. In fact, the corset was meant to support and give structure to her clothes, not her body. Banner argues that our current perception of corsets is a modern myth. For this reason, I think it very unlikely that Dickinson would have used the corset as a metonym or analogy for oppression or subjugation. The evidence argues that this is an anachronistic interpretation. The second problem is that, as far as I know, corsets were not buckled; they were laced. If you see a buckle on a corset, then it’s a modern corset that, typically, is exceedingly uncomfortable (as demonstrated by Banner).

So what was Dickinson referring to by belt and buckle? I’m glad you asked.

Buckle Jewelry. As it happens, buckle jewelry was a thing in Victorian times, and wildly popular. As the International Antique Jewelers Association goes on to explain:

“The buckle rings were made of precious metal that was sometimes embellished with chasing, engraving or other treatments. Sometimes they had a few gemstones adorning the ring. Buckle rings reached the pinnacle of popularity during the mid 1800s, which could have something to do with the other meaning of buckle rings: Mourning jewelry. The link between the buckle and the belt signified strength and connection during the mourning period, which in Victorian England lasted at least one year.”

Voila! Mourning jewelry. There’s your belt and there’s your buckle. They also apparently made buckle bracelets and buckle earrings. They were, in a sense, glorified friendship bracelets. And if you’ve read enough Dickinson, then you know that what at first glance might seem like an erotic love poem to a dear friend, very often turns out to be a corpse or death personified. When in doubt, assume she’s in the graveyard.

Now, knowing that, a bit like having the right key to the lock (which is very often all you need to understand a Dickinson poem), let’s reread “He put a belt”:

  He put the Belt around my life
  I heard the Buckle snap—
  And turned away, imperial,
  My Lifetime folding up—
  Deliberate, as a Duke would do
  A Kingdom's Title Deed—
  Henceforth, a Dedicated sort—
  A Member of the Cloud.

Kornfeld interprets this as God, but since Dickinson, to my knowledge, never personified God, only Death, I’m more apt to say that Dickinson is once more personifying Death (especially given Buckle Jewelry’s association—if the IAJA site is to be accepted—with mourning). I also like this because it lends to the poem Dickinson’s typical pixie-ish sense of humor. In fact, I find the poem to be full of laughter. Buckle Jewelry was also given between lovers. So, if you think about it, Death, with a sort of imperious and self-satisfied ego, has “gifted” little Emily Dickinson with, maybe, a lover’s belt and buckle “friendship” ring which, given the giver, also, and ironically, serves as mourning jewelry—folding up her lifetime just like that (thanks a lot, right?). So, to spell it out, the humor is that getting a lover’s friendship bracelet from Death will be a short affair.

What is Emily to do? Death, assuming Emily’s gratitude, ‘turns away’ once he’s buckled his jewelry round her neck, or finger or wrist—as a self-satisfied Duke would do (she is his new Kingdom and the jewelry is effectively his Title to that Kingdom). I tentatively read the last three lines this way: Death fastens his jewelry to her “as a Duke would do A Kingdom’s Title Deed” making Emily “a Dedicated sort”—and here she thought she was going to live forever!—who will become yet another “Member of the Cloud”. (ED is not “dedicated”, in the sense of being committed to an action, but is dedicated, by Death’s “Title”, in a legal sense.) One could interpret “Member of the Cloud” as a reference to Death, but I read ED as describing the friendship/mourning jewelry as the Title Deed that claims her as another “Member” in Death’s Kingdom (the Cloud).

So. That’s just great. Emily continues:

  
  Yet not too far to come at call—
  And do the little Toils
  That make the Circuit of the Rest—
  And deal occasional smiles
  To lives that stoop to notice mine—
  And kindly ask it in—
  Whose invitation, know you not
  For Whom I must decline?

Susan Kornfeld, at the prowling bee, interprets this passage as Emily’s description of her own behavior, which is possible, but I’m inclined to read it as a continuation of the first stanza and her description of Death’s obliviously egotistical behavior. Death has turned away, says Emily, but “not too far to come at call”. How nice of him. How decent of him. And while doing so, like an entitled lothario, Death sees to his little “Toils” and makes a “Circuit of the Rest”. Read, More dead Victorians. Death graciously smiles at those, “To lives” Emily writes, who stoop to notice his new—what would you call it?—possession?—to which he’s buckled his ring, bracelet, necklace or what have you. The others, knowing no better, kindly ask “it” in. The idiots. Know you not? Emily asks. When Emily is also invited, she politely declines, disgusted with the whole affair, understanding that this new-found “royal interest”, this so-called friendship bracelet (let’s say) is not something to be celebrated. It’s quite possible to read this as Emily’s very pointed critique of the Victorian Era’s “death cult” (as it is sometimes called). You would almost think these people are looking forward to the next death, says Emily, the way they all but invite “the Duke” into their houses with their excessive rituals and displays of grief. They treat him—”it“—like royalty.

And that’s my reading of that. A good poem for Halloween.

And if Death offers you any candy, come Friday, I suggest you politely decline.

Duni’s Song | Thistledown

May gossamer meadows be your pillow
And sing to you the weeping willow.
  Lay down your head and close your eyes
  And I will sing you lullabies.
Sleep take you where the angels billow.

Your dreams be light as thistledown
And woven stars bedeck your gown.
  Lay down your head and close your eyes
  And I will sing you lullabies;
A wreath of kisses be your crown.

Thistledown
by me, Patrick Gillespie, October 26 2025

Another of Duni’s songs, a lullaby for her adopted daughter, Odaii, from the fourth book of my Fantasy Epic, WistThistle, called The Tree of Life. I loosely based the song on the famous lullaby by Thomas Dekker, Golden Slumbers—famous because it was made into a song on the Beatles Abbey Road. Thomas Dekker, if you don’t know, was a contemporary playwright of Shakespeare’s. He wrote the Shoemaker’s Holiday, which remains one of the finest non-Shakespearean plays of the Elizabethan Era. Dekker was a gifted poet and dramatist, whose drama and poetry suggest a gentle, good-humored and observant personality. His imagery is notable for drawing on nature, and in that respect is closer to Shakespeare than any of Shakespeare’s peers, but debt plagued him and landed him in debtor’s prison for seven years. While capable of writing compelling drama, his surviving plays also bear marks of haste, lax character development and, in the words of later scholars, “moral slovenliness” (implying that he was too tolerant of his character’s faults from a dramatic standpoint).

A Touch of Dickinson in Eliot

A correspondent asked me to discuss the following three stanzas from TS Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (from Part 2 of the fourth part of the Four Quartets). First think I should say, is that the best online criticism of TS Eliot’s poetry, in every sense, is by Nasrullah Mambrol at Literary Theory and Criticism. This is the best and most readable site of its kind and, as far as I’m concerned, Mambrol offers the best (most useful and informative) analyses of Eliot’s poems that I’ve found.

Scholarly sources write that The Four Quartets is Eliot’s masterpiece, but for me the poem reads like TS Eliot garrulously imitating TS Eliot. The Four Quartets reminds me of a comment made by Alfred Einstein (Albert’s brother) regarding Mozart’s 26th piano concerto:

…It is very Mozartean, while at the same time it does not express the whole or even the half of Mozart. It is, in fact, so ‘Mozartesque’ that one might say that in it Mozart imitated himself—no difficult task for him. It is both brilliant and amiable, especially in the slow movement; it is very simple, even primitive, in its relation between the solo and the tutti, and so completely easy to understand that even the nineteenth century always grasped it without difficulty…. 

Likewise, I might write that The Four Quartets is undeniably Eliotesque. It is brilliant (even amiable in a way that The Waste Land is not) but it is, in fact, so Eliotesque that one might say: ‘In it, Eliot imitated himself’ (having already written the quintessential “Eliot poem” with the The Waste Land).

The other reason I personally don’t care for the poem—as much— is that I’m not a Christian. The Christian allusions add a layer that goes right over my head, but they’re not missed by the likes of The Modern Age: A Conservative Review, (which will once again inform us that this is Eliot’s greatest poem):

…Eliot set to work writing what would become his greatest poem, Four Quartets. The ambition of that four-part sequence was to provide the fullest account of the truly Christian life the modern world had yet seen. Having diagnosed the inadequacy of devotional poetry on several occasions, Eliot’s poetic sequence would avoid them. Rather than expressing a feeling, the poem provides us the dramatic moments as well as the full intellectual architecture of faith necessary for us to feel.

Elsewhere, one will read that The Four Quartets‘s universality transcends its Christian grounding; but one wonders if it’s mainly or wholly Christians writing that. For a reader like me (for whom the Christian allusions are meaningless) these parts of the poem just don’t land. And then there’s the poem’s obscurity. Debating whether a poem should be comprehensible without footnotes and index is mostly an academic exercise at this point. It’s mostly accepted that some poems are incomprehensible without cabooses full of critical exegesis behind them (which effectively become a part of the poem).

Or not.

Nasrullah Mambrol, in a section of his analysis (of The Four Quartets) called Approaches to Reading The Poetry (which in itself should be a tip off), will dedicate one thousand seven hundred and thirty two very fine words explaining why it’s not necessary for readers to understand the poem (the length of which rather begs the question); but I wasn’t persuaded. Mambrol goes on to close the section by asserting that the “Four Quartets must be read again and again in order for the poem finally to become an experience of truth and of beauty…” But that did not and never worked for me. Before the invention of the internet, I had —no idea— what Eliot was nattering on about, and reading the poem twenty times over didn’t change that one whit. It wasn’t until I read something like Mambrol’s brilliant analyses that I began to “experience” its “truth and beauty”. Until then, The Four Quartets was full of ‘high astounding terms’ but otherwise meaningless. One wonders whether Eliot, ultimately, would have been satisfied with being read but not comprehended.

But now that I’ve horrified TS Eliot cognoscenti, I can say that what I love about the poem, Eliot’s inimitably and beautiful poetry. And that brings me to the following three stanzas (as requested by my correspondent):

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house-
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
      This is the death of air.

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
      This is the death of earth.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
      This is the death of water and fire. 

My first observation is that Eliot has momentarily detoured into Hymn Meter (or more strictly, Ballad Meter), the favored meter of Emily Dickinson. I’m sure there’s an analytic reading of this poem that will find it ‘significant’ that Eliot, at this moment, writes “Hymn Meter”, but I leave that speculation to those with a foot in Christianity. The meter is a (very loose) 6,8 meter (referring to the number of syllables in the lines), or a Compound Meter ending with with a 6,6 couplet; but, again, the many variant feet make it a ballad hymn. (Bold = Accented)

Ash on | an old | man's sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.
Dust in | the air  | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.
Dust | in breathed | was a house-
The walls, | the wain | scot and | the mouse,
The death | of hope | and despair,
      This is | the death | of air.

The meter is varied by trochees, anapests and feminine endings and the monosyllabic first foot, but enough of the metrical pattern (by modern standards) is left undisturbed so that the reader/listener recognizes the meter (subliminally or otherwise).

There | are flood | and drouth
Over | the eyes | and in | the mouth,
Dead wa |ter and | dead sand
Conten |ding for | the up |per hand.
The parched | evisc |erate soil
Gapes at | the va |nity | of toil,
Laughs  |without mirth.
      This is  |the death | of earth.

• Notice how Eliot uses personification: “The parched eviscerate soil/Gapes…Laughs without mirth”. This is Eliot having learned a trick from Shakespeare. The personification of the inanimate world was intrinsic to Shakespeare’s art and his instinct for drama. In other words, it’s not just the characters in the play acting out the play’s drama, but also (in a sort of pscyho-dramatic sense) the world itself. Eliot, who was nothing if not a bardolator, adopts this trick of Shakespeare’s to draw the world itself into the human drama.

Eliot keeps the same pattern apart from the seventh line. I don’t know how to read that as other than a disyllabic line, but it’s close enough to trimeter that that overall pattern is recognized. There is also a pyrrhic foot.

Water | and fire | succeed
The town, | the past |ure and  |the weed.
Water | and fire | deride
The sac |rifice | that we | denied.
Water | and fire | shall rot
The marred | founda |tions we | forgot,
Of sanct |uar |y and choir.
      This is | the death | of wa |ter and fire. 

• Shakespeare again: What and fire deride…

Once again, Eliot largely hews to the 6,8 pattern. The final line breaks the pattern, being tetrameter, but since Eliot was less interested in form than content (like Emily Dickinson), he was content to break the pattern already broken in the previous stanza.

Here is Nasrullah Mambrol’s brilliant analysis of this passage, from here:

The ash that falls “on an old man’s sleeve” as the second section begins is clearly the soot and dust in the air from London’s nightly fires in the present moment as the city endures the constant German air attacks. Where there was a house and the lives lived in it, there now is nothing. “This,” the speaker tells us, like a bell tolling the final hour, “is the death of air.” The litany of doom and terror continues as in each succeeding stanza the speaker makes the reader painfully mindful of the tragedies unfolding all around him. Existence collapses into its absence, which is death. There are the dead at sea washed up on sandy shores and the dead in the mud of the water-filled craters the bombs have left in their wake. “This is the death of earth.” There are the bombed-out churches, their ruins still smoldering, the foundation drenched and flooded with water, gone both “sanctuary and choir. / This is the death of water and fire.”

The world and all its glory having been thus reduced to its elemental baseness, which is dead, inert matter, the speaker suddenly finds himself on a foot patrol searching for smoldering fires through the ruined and deserted city streets after the bombing has ended but still during “the uncertain hours before the morning.”

Structurally, the stanzas are mostly composed of semantically distinct rhyming couplets. Each couplet is essentially added to the next like a brick, one atop the other (not meant to be a disparaging).

Ash on | an old | man’s sleeve
Is all | the ash | the burnt ros | es leave.

Followed by the wholly separate:

Dust in | the air | suspended
Marks the | place where | a stor | y ended.

• Just want to take a moment to beat a drum I’ve often beaten. There were other ways to write these stanzas without meter or rhyme. Eliot could have written free verse or defaulted to prose, but more than half the power of these verses is not just in their semantic content, but in the aesthetics of the language. The rhyme and meter add a cogency and beauty to the semantic content that neither free verse (nor prose) can match. Simply can’t be done. The formal aspects add emphasis to the content. Eliot understood this and understood that these stanzas would take on additional resonance by virtue of being bracketed by less structured verse. Each verse form burnishes the other. Current and aspiring poets can learn from this.

Anyway, the second and third stanzas break this pattern when the semantic sense runs through the couplets (in the last four lines of each). The effect, after the diffuse free verse, is of sudden focus. The meter and rhyme focus the reader’s attention, drawing attention to the horror’s being described by the narrator. There’s also an element of irony in using the flowing, lilting feeling of the hymn/ballad meter (some might associate it with nursery rhymes) to describe the observed horrors. One could argue that this is the narrator’s way of processing what he sees—a desperate, if failed, retreat into innocence. These stanzas will be followed by blank verse (in my copy —The Poems of TS Eliot Vol. 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems—formatted like tercets and possibly meant to echo Dante). This could be interpreted as the narrator trying to pull it together, but the blank verse also feels strained and artificial—possibly signalling a failing(?) attempt to comprehend the violence (to structure it) through the distancing formality of a bygone age—the verse of Shakespeare and Milton. The blank verse is followed by Part 3, and a return to (strongly iambic) free verse, in which Eliot will write, perhaps tellingly:

  We cannot revive old factions
  We cannot restore old policies
  Or follow an antique drum.

It’s possible that “antique drum” is a reference to the meter of blank verse.

I have read that TS Eliot wanted to write something in verse that would be equivalent to Beethoven’s achievement in his late quartets—hence the name given to the poem — The Four Quartets. What’s interesting though, is that I find Little Gidding to be more like Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, Piano Sonata 29, Opus 106. If you’re curious to know what I mean, go to this video (and go to 35 minute mark in case the link doesn’t land you there). After the slow movement, there’s a fascinating preamble, where Beethoven seems to recapitulate the history of music. First come octaves, then toccata-like scale passages of 32nd notes, then at 36:34, we go from the Renaissance/Early Baroque to Bach, with a contrapuntal and imitative passage between the right and left hand, then to another toccata-like flourish that ends in an explosion of emphatic Beethoven. All this is followed by a massive fugue—one might almost call it a free-verse fugue. There’s a comparison to be made between this passage and what TS Eliot did. TS Eliot goes from the simplistic ballad hymn, to blank verse, and then to free verse, as though recapitulating the history of poetic forms (and by extension the history that led to this moment of war), but then again this might be reading much too much into the formal aspects of the poem.

But anyway, that’s all I have to say on that.

by me, October 26th 2025

Did you slap a Jungle Masher today?

Going completely out of my comfort zone today (being an almost Emily Dickinson level introvert) I attended one of the many No King protests. To be clear, I am anti-fascist, stand for Democracy, for the Rule of Law, for the Constitution and the 1rst Amendment. In other words, I am opposed to the Republican Regime and their titular leaders in executive, legislative and judicial branches (who consider American citizens involved in the demonstrations to be ‘America haters’—and by America they mean Republicans—and anyone who opposes fascism—and by fascism they mean Republican policies—to be terrorists).

The generation of my grandparents (by whom I was raised) all fought against the Nazis.

They told me their stories.

And I’ve often wondered what they would think of a party that is, at this very moment, struggling —struggling— to respond to other Republicans who wrote things like “I love Hitler” and who proudly display American flags with Nazi swastikas on them. Among these “young” Republicans who were not ^{[said Elise Stefanik blatantly lying]} “even candidates for elected office”, was elected Vermont state Sen. Samuel Douglass (R). A mere 27 years of age and just out of diapers. He just resigned.

But, as I was saying, I was asking myself what my grandparents would have thought.

Is it any coincidence, then, that during recycling this morning, a newspaper dated from May 12th, 1943, showed up. Among the many articles about America’s fight against the Nazis, was this cartoon. Americans trying to escape a Nazi prison (analogies anyone?).

I have no idea what a Jungle Masher is but, apparently, it merits you a go-straight-to-hell-Nazi slap.

Do you believe in coincidence?

While the Republican Party struggles —struggles— to respond to swastikas and “I love Hitler” ^{[and the vice-President defends them]} I’m certain in thinking my WWII fighting grandparents, aunts and uncles would not have struggled—at all. I mean, just look at her. And I’d like to think my demonstrating today, along with many of you, was a slap in the face to the Jungle Mashers running our country.

The Stranger’s Case

I also thought I’d once again post what our greatest poet had to say as regards intolerance and cruelty toward immigrants—today being a good day to do so.

Say now the king
(As he is clement, if th’ offender mourn)
Should so much come to short of your great trespass
As but to banish you, whether would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,
Nay, any where that not adheres to England,⁠—
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper,
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But chartered unto them, what would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case;
And this your mountanish inhumanity.

This passage was Shakespeare’s contribution to a collaborative play called Sir Thomas More. The play was neither performed nor published in his lifetime and is possibly the only extent example of Shakespeare’s handwriting.

The image comes from this post. Then, just as now, there was anti-immigrant sentiment. You can read about Shakespeare and Elizabethan era immigration sentiment here.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature gets Sober

So, because I can’t help myself, I have two version of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. I find them for 50¢ at book sales and can’t resist a backup copy to my backup copy. For some reason I was interested in Thomas Carew, and so I looked him up in the older anthology. Here was the brief bio.

“Bright, talented, and idle, Thomas Carew (pronounced Carey) carefully avoided serious work of all sorts; everything he did, and writing poetry particularly, seemed to be the diversion of his empty hours. Yet he was the first poet (and remains, with Marvell, one of the two poets) to unite the intellectual toughness of metaphysical verse with the polish and elegant lightness cultivated by the followers of Jonson.
As the son of a distinguished lawyer, Carew was himself destined for the law, but the Middle Temple dismissed him for idleness. He tried the diplomatic corps, but was sent home in disgrace for “levity”. He became a hanger-on around the court, and ultimately (his most solemn employment) a gentleman of the bedchamber; his diversions were pretty girls, bowling, and versifying—apparently in that order. Yet when his poems were collected, after his death, they turned out to include some of the wittiest and most elegant verses in the century.
Everything that the Puritans despised in “wit” was epitomized in Carew. He had no high spiritual seriousness at all; he was not, in the solemn sense, “sincere.” Many of his poems were obvious bits of light persiflage, “mere” amusements. He was not only clever, he was by 17th century standards (and even more by those of the 19th century) obscene. Yet somehow this libidinous trifler managed to say more true things in his Elegy on the Death of Doctor Donne than criticism would be able to enunciate in the next three hundred years. And in A Rapture he expressed, naturally and joyously, a side of life that Puritanism would, to the best of its ability, swathe in black crape and hypocrisy for an equivalent length of time.

Now that, by God, is an obituary worth dying for.

I’ve never wanted to read a poet’s works so much in my life. It’s clear that the editor who wrote this little introductory bio had an axe to grind, especially as regards religious prudery. But, at the same time, he also seems nonplussed that an idle ne’er-do-well like Carew—a carouser, womanizer of pretty girls (are there any other kind?), “libidinous trifler” and mere gentleman of the bedchamber—was also a surpassingly fine poet and keen judge of the times. How? How?—the tirelessly toiling Salieris of the world ask, can it be that God’s idle triflers, the ones with “no high spiritual seriousness”, the undeserving hangers on who are sent home in disgrace for “levity” (think Mozart, who was literally kicked in the ass on his way out the door by the arch-bishop of Salzburg) are the ones on whom God bestows such an excess of genius that they can write their poetry as a diversion during their “empty hours”.

In the editor’s appraisal, there’s the hint of that resentment that sends many ambitious but less recognized artists into fits of apoplexy—and that resentment is called “talent”. There really is such a thing as talent and no amount of practice and devotion is going to turn you into a Mozart or a Micheal Jordan (that study has been debunked). Carew may have been dissolute and a chaser of pretty girls, but he also had a tremendous and unearned talent. Meanwhile, the graveyard of poetry is littered with the works of men who diligently wrote their entire lives, who never once chased a skirt, whose high moral, ethical and spiritual seriousness went unquestioned, but whose unimpeachable hours didn’t translate into a shred of talent.

But, apparently, this lively and gossipy bio just wouldn’t do for the new editors of the Norton Anthology, because when they wrote the new bio, they decided to be far more informative as regards Carew’s output, while studiously removed anything that might hint at Carew’s personality. In short, they made their bio as academically informative and flavorless as they possibly could.

Thomas Carew is perhaps the Cavalier poet with the greatest range and complexity. He gained his BA at Merton College, Oxford, studied law (his father’s profession), held several minor positions in the diplomatic and court bureaucracy, fought for his King in the ill-fated expedition against the Scots (the First Bishop’s War, 1639), and died of syphilis. A brilliant, dissolute young man, he was a favorite with Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
His poems (1640), published posthumously, are witty and often outrageous, but their emphasis on natural sensuality, and the need for union between king and subjects encodes a serious critique of the Neoplatonic artifice of the Caroline court. Carew’s spectacular court masque, Coelum Britannicum, performed at the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall on February 18, 1633, was based on a philosophical dialogue by Giordano Bruno. It combines a dramatization of serious social and political problems in the antimasque with wildly hyperbolic praise of the monarchs in the main masque. As a love poet Carew sometimes plays off Donnean situations and poems; elsewhere, as in “Ask no more where Jove bestowes,” he imitates Jonson’s most purely lyric vein. But his characteristic note is one of frank sexuality and emotional realism. “The Rapture,” probably the most erotic poem of the era, describes the sexual act under the sustained metaphor of a voyage. He also wrote country-house poems that, unlike Jonson’s “To Penhurst,” describe Saxham and Wrest as places of refuge from the mounting dangers outside their gates. Carew’s poems of literary criticism provide astute commentary on contemporary authors. “To Ben Jonson” evaluates Jonson with Jonsonian precision and judiciousness in weighing out praise and blame. His famous “Elegy” on Donne praises Donne’s innovation, avoidance of classical tags, “giant fancy,” and especially his tough masculinity of style, a feature Carew imitates in this poem’s energetic runover couplets, quick changes of rhythms and images, and vigorous “strong lines.”

Admittedly, more informative as regards Carew’s output, but also less interesting or informative as regards Carew himself. There’s a sense of humor to the older bio that has been expunged from the revised Norton. But I don’t know. I suppose there will be readers who prefer the revised Norton, but not me. I don’t read enough modern criticism to say definitively, but I do get the feeling that “scholarly” writing isn’t as free-wheeling as it used to be. Interestingly, when the latest Oxford Shakespeare was released with a separate Authorship Companion, the latter Companion was much commented on and not because of the content, but because of the way it was written. Reasoning that the dry, struffed-shirt academese was off-putting to younger students, the editors decided to introduce generational colloquialisms and anecdotes into the their writing. Just imagine the horror of your grandparents showing up at a frat house in a mini-skirt, Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and lei. This seems to have been the impression the essayists made on horrified students. Shakespeare scholars who had spent a lifetime perfecting academese were now going to shed that industrial-grade affectation with a smattering of hip colloquialisms?

Anyway, while my country descends into full-blown fascism, these are the little tempests that amuse me.