Gold oft tried and ever new

For my mother, at whose knee I learned to love John Donne. He wrote this 9th of his Elegies, “The Autumnal,” for George Herbert's mother Magdalen, his patroness, to whom he also dedicated his Holy Sonnets. Happy Mothers' Day, Ma.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace

As I have seen in one autumnal face.

Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,

This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.

If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame;

Affection here takes reverence's name.

Were her first years the golden age? That's true,

But now she's gold oft tried and ever new.

That was her torrid and inflaming time,

This is her tolerable tropic clime.

Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence,

He in a fever wishes pestilence.

Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were,

They were Love's graves, for else he is no where.

Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit

Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorit;

And here till hers, which must be his death, come,

He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.

Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev'rywhere

In progress, yet his standing house is here:

Here where still evening is, not noon nor night,

Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.

In all her words, unto all hearers fit,

You may at revels, you at council, sit.

This is Love's timber, youth his underwood;

There he, as wine in June, enrages blood,

Which then comes seasonablest when our taste

And appetite to other things is past.

Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree,

Was lov'd for age, none being so large as she,

Or else because, being young, nature did bless

Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.

If we love things long sought, age is a thing

Which we are fifty years in compassing;

If transitory things, which soon decay,

Age must be loveliest at the latest day.

But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,

Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack;

Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade;

Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made;

Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,

To vex their souls at resurrection:

Name not these living death's-heads unto me,

For these, not ancient, but antique be.

I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay

With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.

Since such love's natural motion is, may still

My love descend, and journey down the hill,

Not panting after growing beauties. So,

I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.

A hundred billion bottles

Since writing the previous post, I've had occasion to think again about the message and its meaning. I've remembered that I wasn't in fact schooled by the New Critics, though my sensibility might suggest otherwise, but in post-modernism, in multiplicities of meaning, and in the sway of cultural materialism. Here, then, in deference to my schooling, are some alternative readings.

1. The message as evidence of a late twentieth-century crisis of masculinity. Jonathan, incapable of relationship and even of conversation, has recourse to a wild gesture of evasion. Like so many women of her generation, Mary waits in vain for the fulfilment of his promise. But he is in the end a child and not a man.

2. The message as modern tragedy - this is the reading Beth and Brad seem to advocate. In classical tragedy, pathos arises from the hero's innate greatness and nobility, whereas in modern tragedy, the hero is precisely unheroic, ordinary, even ignoble. He is frail and contemptible, neurotic, unreliable, self-absorbed and self-destructive. In a film version, Jonathan might be played by Paul Giamatti. Or, if it were a Wes Anderson film, by Jason Schwartzman.

3. The message as psychoanalytic biography. We know that the wreck of the Titanic was discovered in 1985 off the coast of Newfoundland, not far from Nova Scotia, so it's highly likely the note is connected to that episode in some way, certainly symbolically if not actually. Perhaps our protagonists worked together on the discovery. A tendre develops, but Mary's feelings are not reciprocated. In fact, Jonathan is gay, but the rigid cultural mores of rural Canada in the mid-1980s make it impossible for him to confess this to Mary. Instead, he promises friendship and corresondence, then returns to Nova Scotia, leaving her on Newfoundland. He writes as promised, but sending the letter feels like the final act of deception. Instead he encloses it in a bottle, thus 'bottling up' his emotional authenticity, and hurls it into the North Atlantic, in the general direction of both Mary and the shipwreck that brought them together, that now symbolizes both the 'wreckage' of Mary's hopes and the repression or 'burial' of Jonathan's true self.

4. The message as literary artifact. There are a number of internal contradictions in the structure of the message which give clues to its provenance. There's a shift between the first two lines and the second: "I hope we can keep in correspondence" carries a very different connotation from "I said I would write"; a prospective hope followed by a statement of past undertakings minimally fulfilled. This suggests the message was begun in one frame of mind, and finished in another. "Your friend always" has a note of finality, as though he didn't expect a continuance of the correspondence; which, indeed, his method of correspondence would seem to confirm. Finally the date, written diagonally across the bottom left corner: only a year, no day or month, which suggests that the message was destined to be a relic, consigned to the deep waters of history, rather than one of a series anchored in particularity.

5. The message as hoax. The name and date attached to the message are intended to deflect inquiry from its real author, Francis Bacon.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

My eye was caught by the story of a message in a bottle, washing up on a Croatian beach after spending 28 years crossing the Atlantic. What could be more romantic than this unlooked for redemption of a human voice, a human appeal, from the unregarding years, the oblivious depths? Unfortunately, the message was a deep disappointment for anyone of a romantic turn of mind. Here's what it said:

Mary

You are a really great person.

I hope we can keep in correspondence.

I said I would write.

Your friend always,

Jonathan

Nova Scotia ’85

Against this inconsequential blather, so miraculously preserved, the soul cries out: How utterly banal! How bland! How jejune! And, the soul might add, how '80s. I'm sure it was not Jonathan's intention to offend; quite the reverse. His subtext is patently "Hey, let's just be friends. But I'm too chicken to tell you that in person so I'll just throw this into the sea." There is an insult to Mary in that, but there's also an insult to language and its innate poetic possibility. There's an insult to mystery and the mind's imaginings; an insult flung out against the great romance of the turning world. It's as if we translated the Rosetta Stone and it revealed itself as mere doggerel or drivel. Or as if we saw from afar some writing on the moon, and when we looked more closely it said "Buzz woz here '69".

Humans, it seems, have more capacity for inconsequence, as well as for consequence, than any other creature. If the '80s bore witness to this, how much more our present moment, when texts you wouldn't cross the street to read, let alone an ocean, are preserved still more carefully and irrevocably than by the crude method of an ocean-going vase? Seeing our words and works are likely to last, perhaps unto immortality, we should take care that they should be worth the lasting.

My heart is like an apple-tree

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me. 

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

Is come, my love is come to me.

Christina Rossetti, "A Birthday," April 1861.

Aubade for Anzacs

Now from the gently-swelling flood profound

The sun arising, with his earliest rays

In his ascent to heaven smote on the fields

When Greeks and Trojans met. Scarce could the slain

Be clear distinguish'd, but they cleansed from each

His clotted gore with water, and warm tears

Distilling copious, heaved them to the wains.

But wailing none was heard, for such command

Had Priam issued; therefore heaping high

The bodies, silent and with sorrowing hearts

They burn'd them, and to sacred Troy return'd.

(From William Cowper's translation of Homer's Iliad)