When a poet really, really gets it wrong…
I’ve been reading a very handy 1956 thesis – happily available on microfilm – Conventions and Characteristics of the English Funeral Elegy of the Earlier Seventeenth Century, (University of Missouri). And I just had to share what the author, H.H. Hale, describes as the “most graceless” example, Francis Beaumont’s “Elegy on the Lady Markham” a relative of the influential Lucy, Countess of Bedford.
The poet tells his readers that although he never saw Lady Markham in life he fell in love with her corpse, and likes the fact he can now…
Her grassgreene mantle, and her sheet display,
And touc her naked, and though th’ envious mould
In which she lies uncovered, moist and cold,
Strive to corrupt her, she will not abide
With any art her blemishes to hide…”
He directs the worms to gently eat her flesh, to eat into her ear-lobes to form holes for earrings, and finally to eat her epitaph upon her forehead: “Living, she was young, faire, and full of wit / Dead, all her faults are in her forehead writ.”
p. 38-39
Seriously sick!
Stumble it!
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What’s the world coming to, when a guy can’t express his love for a decaying corpse without being called sick?
… on the other hand, gross.
Comment by Brett — July 9, 2006 @ 5:02 am
That is, possibly without exception, the worst poem I’ve ever heard of that wasn’t intentionally written to be bad poetry….
Comment by Ahistoricality — July 9, 2006 @ 5:12 am
Is it possibly parodic? Beaumont, after all, is the author of The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
Comment by Hieronimo — July 10, 2006 @ 12:28 am
I can’t be sure to be honest, since I haven’t gone deep into the original context. I just pulled if from the thesis, whose writer certainly thought it was meant to be serious. Anyone know anything about the context?
Comment by Natalie Bennett — July 14, 2006 @ 12:03 am
A wonderful and rather clever poem working on a number of levels.
An attack on poets (like the impoverished Donne, ‘un-Donne’ by his marriage) writing elegies on people they didn’t know (including in Donne’s case, Lady Markham) to curry favour with their wealthy rellies (note the ‘metaphysical’ aspects of the verse, use of the extended conceit, and deliberately gross subject matter).
Also a comment on the disparity between love sought in poetry, and reality (the bills, the nagging, the mood swings, the headaches). A ‘be careful what you wish for’ poem.
The two meet in Donne’s marriage, which led to his financial suffering, and his need to write elegies.
Can’t write more as my Donne is still in a removals box.
The whole Beaumont poem is here:
http://www.ex.ac.uk/~pellison/BF/poems/markham.htm
Comment by Clanger — August 14, 2006 @ 7:02 pm
This may be useful, although it is likely to have been rendered obsolete by online databases if you have access to them:
Starnes, DeWitt Talmage.
“A Bibliography of the Funeral Elegy in England from 1500 to 1638.”
PhD. Univ. of Chicago, 1920.
xx, 127pp.
[U.Chicago: PR9999 Starnes.]
Comment by Clanger — August 17, 2006 @ 6:38 pm
Thanks Clanger. Lovely to have you back! When I presented my first academic paper I’m afraid I didn’t actually say “thanks to Clanger” (it would have sounded a little odd…) but I thought it!
Comment by Natalie Bennett — August 17, 2006 @ 6:46 pm
If you are working with EM verse, it is worth noting that we really don’t know for sure who wrote most of it. There is a good exemplary analysis of this problem here:
Ringler, William A. ‘The 1640 and 1653 Poems: By Francis Beaumont, Gent. and the Canon of Beaumont’s Nondramatic Verse’, Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), pp.120-140
And see: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/cmps/Projects/CELM/index.htm
…which continues the work begun with the “Index of English Literary Manuscripts”.
Most lit crit produced in the 20thC on this verse was working with verse that may have been misattributed. That has profound implications.
The sheer extent of what now needs to be done, and what can be achieved (or could be if the academic databases were free to access online, rather than embargoed for the privileged under subscription) becomes evident.
In such circumstances, wasting the precious time and resources available to faculties of Eng.Lit. with low-value jargon-rich theoretical studies distanced from the texts is little short of an academic crime.
The field is wide open for good, new, fresh textual criticism based on the latest bibliographical scholarship, now that we can finally handle the corpus of printed and ms. work that remains using the benefits of computers and the net.
It should be a new age of lit. crit., but universities are stuffed with academics trying to engage the borderline moronic in their classes, pander to cultural and political issues of the day in what they say and how they say it, and publish heavily jargonised theoretical studies to satisfy their contracts.
Complete madness.
The really good stuff is increasingly written by people working outside of the academic environment, or within the few protected pockets of spirited resistance within faculties still willing to do the right thing by scholarship, regardless of industry pressures.
Comment by Clanger — August 18, 2006 @ 1:44 pm
[...] For some reason there’s been a lot of rhyme and unreason this summer. At Philobiblon, Natalie brought us an elegy not for the squeamish (which sparked a fascinating discussion about what the poet was up to). Meanwhile, Inkhorn at Blogging the Renaissance offered up a seventeenth-century dirty joke. [...]
Pingback by Early Modern Notes » Carnivalesque 18 — August 27, 2006 @ 7:12 pm
Gosh, this took me back: years ago I had a sabbatical term in which I blithely proposed to edit the poems of Francis Beaumont. I gathered microfilms world-wide (this poem was dismayingly popular), and thought that I would be able to assemble a ‘stemma’ from my data. Could I heck! Ever since that defeat I have sourly regarded all manuscript family trees showing descent from lost originals as the editorial equivalent of fabulating genealogy. I guess I still have all that useful data I collected on some Amstrad floppy disks… (talk about labour in vain).
Comment by Roy Booth — May 27, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
Thanks Roy – you taught me a new term – hadn’t previously come across stemma.
Might be time to transfer from those Amstrad disks?
Comment by Natalie Bennett — May 27, 2007 @ 10:27 pm