A Self-divided Poet
A Self-divided Poet
Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
By
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS
A Self-divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse Of Thomas Hood, by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe
This book first published 2006 by
Cambridge Scholars Press
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-070-1
In memory of my beloved mother, Lilian Ruth Edgecombe
25th July 1911 – 2nd September 2006
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood ................................................. viii
Chapter One .........................................................................................................1
Hood and the Mock-Heroic Ode: The Odes and Addresses to Great People
Chapter Two ......................................................................................................33
Hood and the Capriccio: Whims and Oddities. First and Second Series
Chapter Three ....................................................................................................67
Hood's Session Poem: "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies"
Chapter Four ....................................................................................................117
Hood's Epyllion Redivivum: "Hero and Leander"
Chapter Five.....................................................................................................146
Hood and the Juvenalian Mode: "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg"
Notes ................................................................................................................190
Bibliography ....................................................................................................211
Index ................................................................................................................227
PROLOGUE: THE DIVIDED SELF OF THOMAS
HOOD
In a penetrating article on Thomas Hood, Sara Lodge has argued that it's:
only possible to reconcile the synchronicities of Hood's Keatsian odes and his
comic send-ups (his transmogrification, for example of Gray's 'Ode on a Distant
Prospect of Eton College' into the wonderful 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of
Clapham Academy') if we allow that imitation and parody are points on the
same continuum, and realize that Hood's work in the 1820s and 30s is
continuously involved in a process of self-definition which establishes not only
debts to Romantic and pre-Romantic writing, but also substantive critical
difference.1
This effort to find an overarching coherence in Hood's output has much to
commend it. But while there is no doubt that parody and imitation do in fact
occupy points of the same continuum—both forms keep their eyes on a
secondary model, the first in an act of homage, the second with a motive of
subversion—an essential difference of outlook pushes them apart even as they
line up for correlation. And there lies the fission that bedevils any effort to
integrate Hood's different personae.
D. H. Lawrence observed that we all have several selves clamouring
for primacy—"You are you? How many selves have you? And which of these
selves do you want to be"2—so I shan't even try to unite the oppositional
elements of the poet's writing. Instead, I shall face the split head-on—the split
between the serious and comic aspects of his sensibility, the weighty and the
slight, or (to align Lodge's terms with this antithetic pattern) the imitator and the
parodist. To do this, I have lined up samples of Hood's different modes for close
analysis, examining them on their own terms. Since I haven't spurned the
"serious" poems as failed Keats, nor the weightier comic ones as trivia too smart
for their own good, I have, to that extent at least, been inspired by Lodge's
approach, for she is unique in placing relatively equal value on both poles of
Hood's personality, and in pointing out how the one services the other. Other
commentators have, by contrast, taken sides with the sides, and the majority
have favoured the comic at the expense of pathetic.
There are exceptions, however. An anonymous critic in the Times
Literary Supplement observes that:
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
ix
Hood's name cannot be left out of the catalogue of humorous poets, and he takes
a leading place there; yet the regret remains that his inclusion should have been
purchased so dearly. It is fortunate for us that while playing the Merry Andrew
for a living, Hood could still be himself: a poet of distinct individuality and
delicacy of inspiration. "Hero and Leander," "Lycus the Centaur," "The Plea of
the Midsummer Fairies"—these were early works, and in some degree inheritors
of the poetical spirit of Keats, Coleridge and the Elizabethans; but they have
Hood's own stamp and, read today, surprise afresh that poetry so pure and simple
could possibly spring in the mind of one so busy with oddities and
whimsicalities.3
The very title of the article from which this extract comes—"Hood: The Poet
Behind the Jester's Mask"—acknowledges a division of selfhood, and even hints
at tragedy by half-alluding to the jester in The Yeomen of the Guard ("It's a song
of a merryman, moping mum, / Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was
glum"4) and the clown in Pagliacci—"Left alone, Canio faces the fact that
despite his private tragedy he has still to be the clown and amuse his public: 'On
with the motley' (Vesti la giubba)."5 However, as we shall see when we turn to
the poems from the 1827 collection, Hood's debt to Keats is not nearly as
extensive as commentators have claimed, while the "serious" pieces often rely
on verbal mannerisms akin to the surface glitter of the comic material. The
dichotomy subsists less between Hood's "Merry Andrewism" and "the poetical
spirit" than between his light and serious verse, and it's over this crux that
evaluations of his achievement tend to wobble.
In 1825, even before "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" had left the
press, B. W. Procter thought that Hood had frittered his talent on the Odes and
Addresses: "What a pity it is that Hood should have given up serious poetry for
the sake of cracking the shells of jokes which have not always a kernel!"6 The
idea of his having given up serious poetry was purely notional, however, for he
had so far done nothing in that line. Procter was either relying on hearsay in this
regard, or his regret might simply have sprung from his own conventional —
which is to say, Romantic—idea of the poet's vocation, whether it be the
"Aeolian visitations"7 that Wordsworth records near the start of The Prelude, or
Keats's earnest resolution in "Sleep and Poetry"—
O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven—Should I rather kneel
Upon some mountain-top until I feel
A glowing splendour round about me hung,
And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?8
—or the even more oracular moment in the proem to Shelley's "Alastor":
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Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns,
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.9
One can guess what Procter meant by "serious poetry" from paradigms such as
these.
But there were also older forces at work here than Romantic fashion.
Prejudice against the genres into which Hood poured most of his energy was as
old as Aristotle, who had claimed that poetry at one point:
diverged in two directions, according to the individual character of the writers.
The graver spirits imitated noble actions, and the actions of good men. The more
trivial sort imitated the actions of meaner persons, at first composing satires, as
the former did hymns to the gods and the praises of famous men. 10
Although this judgement would be challenged by the achievements Horace and
Juvenal, Aristotle carried such weight with the neo-classical critics that his
exaltation of epic and tragedy almost inevitably brought with it the implicit
degradation of the other kinds. Satire might have lost the stigma of "triviality,"
but light verse didn't, and it was to light verse that Hood often hitched his star.
Such verse might appear to be a recent development in literary history,
but it was almost certainly there all along. Commenting on the selective corpus
of Anglo-Saxon poems, for example, George Sampson remarks that:
Old English literature is the literature of men, not of women. We need not doubt
that there were songs of other kinds—common songs and comic songs, songs
about women and songs about drink; but such songs had a purely oral life and
perished because they were never recorded.11
Orality, and the simple expression with which it was associated, haunted the
wings of literature over the centuries, and sometimes caught the spotlight by
default. Horace, while confirming the hierarchical genre prejudice of Aristotle—
"A theme for Comedy refuses to be set forth in verses of Tragedy; likewise the
feast of Thyestes scorns to be told in strains of daily life that well nigh befit the
comic sock"12—also admitted that "in Tragedy Telephus and Peleus often grieve
in the language of prose," and that each hero must throw aside "his bombast and
Brobingnagian words, should he want his lament to touch the spectator's heart"
(459). Writers could therefore skirt the exigent demands of tragedy and epic by
writing simply and by scaling down, a choice that resulted in what Alastair
Fowler has called the "'systole' of epigram":
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xi
Its effect was pervasive, yet worked in partly determinate ways. Thus, elegy,
madrigal, and even epithalamium incorporated distinct parts of the epigram
repertoire: plain diction, pointed concetti (especially in the closure), variety of
topics, concision.13
By shrinking their matrices, poets could better accommodate the "plain diction"
that the higher forms discouraged, and, by taking advantage of the focus
achieved in that newly narrowed space, could "point" and pack materials to a
degree of meaningful saturation called "multum in parvo." While "plain diction
and pointed concetti" remained the staples of light verse, they were also the key
elements in the Metaphysical lyric, making it necessary for us to add another
differentia to our definition, viz., a certain bourgeois cosiness.
The sorts of poems that now qualify as light verse were often produced
by writers temperamentally unsuited to what Walter Scott called the "Big Bowwow strain" of the epic—writers who, even so, could manage the "exquisite
touch, with renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting."14
They negotiated a space for their miniature productions by self-deprecation and
quiet defiance. An example is afforded by the poetry of Robert Herrick, who
pretends to defer to the primacy of epic, while actually cocking a snook at its
thirst for scale:
The important thing about these generic phrases, taken as it were from the
grammar of epic in this case, is that they imply each other; we can reverse the
business too: "Arma virumque" implies "cano," and we must await Milton's "I
sing" at the end of the long, complicated clause with which Paradise Lost
begins. Such reliance takes a genre-system for granted, as donnée: from genre so
interpreted Monteverdi borrowed. Within its securities, Robert Herrick,
supremely a poet of the little in subject and form, can write his variations.15
Herrick's project brings lightweight subjects into the ambit of an epic posture—
"I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers"16—but in such a way that
these brooks, blossoms, birds and bowers don't suffer the indignity associated
with the mock-heroic mode. He is in fact mounting an apologia for the lyric—a
form distinguished from the "light verse" it otherwise resembles by intensity and
emotional range. Not that it always enjoyed this critical cachet, as witness Sir
John Harington's defence of poetry against charges of "lightness and
wantonness" (even though "lightness" here implies a moral rather than an
aesthetic quality). He was forced by the Elizabethan Zeitgeist to concede that "of
all kinds of poesy the heroical is least infected therewith," unlike "the pastoral
with the sonnet or epigram."17 And if, despite its reserves of pathos and passion,
the lyric suffered the contagion of "lightness" in Elizabethan times, what hope
for light verse that, while it shared its scale, had none of its emotional power?
xii
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
But hope there was, it was mediated through the mock-heroic, which,
being incapable of epic intensity—the "mock" made sure of that—belonged to
the realm of degagé entertainment. Light verse likewise deals with social issues
in a superficial way, skirting the vigour and passion of satire. The Dunciad and
The Rape of the Lock stand poles apart, and if it's the latter that offers a
prototype for the verse that Hood would later make his own, it's because Pope
was also "singing" trivial things, but (unlike Herrick) singing prosaic, topical
minutiae. We have moved from "brooks, blossoms, birds and bowers" to "Puffs,
Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux,"18 from emotional depth to dispassion.
When John Evelyn made a record of the bedroom's fashionable appointments in
Mundus Muliebris, or The Ladies' Dressing Room Unlock'd & her Toilette
Spread—
Vasas of silver, porcelan, store
To set, and range about the floor:
The Chimney furniture of plate
(For iron's now quite out of date);19
—a new boudoir mock-heroic was in the making. It must be distinguished (for
it's quite different in tone and scope) from its more public and more obviously
heroic avatars—Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, Tassoni's Secchia rapita and
Boileau's Lutrin. We have only to glance at Swift's account of unglamorous
levées—
She stretches, gapes, unglues her eyes,
And asks if it is time to rise;
Of headache and the spleen complains;
And then, to cool her heated brains,
Her night-gown and her slippers brought her,
Tales a large dram of citron-water.20
—and at Pope's comparable picture of domestic dishabille and afternoon risings
in The Rape of the Lock, to become aware of something new in the air.
In all these foreshadowings of light verse, one senses occasional
glances, be they defiant or anxious, in the direction of Ronsard and other neoclassical critics. Theoretically ensconced at the top of the generic food chain,
epic and tragedy still frowned down on the "trivial" bottom feeders in these early
days. But as the embourgeoisement of the mock-heroic proceeded, and light
verse as we know it came into being, the "cultural cringe" vanished altogether.
This strain of poetry migrated from the study to the parlour, and versified the
conversation and the fireside entertainments it found there. In "A Long Story,"
an even closer prototype of the "Hoodian" jeu d'esprit than The Rape of the
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xiii
Lock, Gray pretends to have written a curtal epic ("Here 500 stanzas are lost"21),
but has dashed it off in a distinctly unepical manner, with many touches of
decorous slang ("Bounce," for example, is half an expletive, half a verb). His
heroines are on a mission that faintly recalls Paradise Lost ("who shall tempt
with wand'ring feet / The dark unbottom'd infinite Abyss / And through the
palpable obscure find out / His uncouth way"22), but the recollection is so faint
that the mock-heroic charge amounts to no more than a flicker, and, as soon as it
fizzles out, we are left with what we have—women on a social visit:
The heroines undertook the task;
Through lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured,
Rapped at the door nor stayed to ask,
But bounce into the parlour entered. (147)
This is verse on the verge of being novelized, delighting in the fact of its
accidentality, taking as its province the unspectacular lives of ordinary people.
Light verse achieves its lightness not only by keeping to that
ordinariness, but also cannibalizing the riddles, puns and jokes with which the
middle class entertained itself. While Gray was making his "Long Story" as short
as possible to fire up his joke, other poets of Sensibility were exploring equally
facetious ways of handling ordinary subject matter, and so widening the
definition of light verse to encompass not only a new bourgeois content but also
the sleights and tricks and puzzles that we now call "parlour games." One
example would be the relentless lapalissades of Goldsmith's "Elegy on the Death
of a Mad Dog," and his elegies on Mrs Mary Blaize and the the Right
Honourable *** ("Heroes themselves had fallen behind! / Whene'er he went
before"23). And when, in Book I of The Task, Cowper applies the epic "cano" to
a sofa, and replaces the lineage of Homeric heroes with the lineage of domestic
furniture, the result is much less mock-heroic joke than a poet's assertion of
entitlement to do just that—sing a sofa.
No longer in the lyric territory of "Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and
Bowers," we have entered that space of bourgeois contentment, the parlour, and,
with that, light verse has come into its own. Its raison d'être for Cowper was the
escape it offered from the terrible tenets of his Calvinism, but it served to
distract far more people than the poet himself. The primary purpose of such
poetry was diversion, and in The Task at least, it introduced the facetious,
entertaining circumlocution that later figured so prominently in Victorian comic
prose. Cowper doesn't skirt commonplace reality by mandate of poetic diction,
but rather because elevated language issues in riddles, clothing the ordinary in an
elaborate verbal husk that affords the reader the pleasure of cracking it open:
xiv
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
At length a generation more refin'd
Improv'd the simple plan; made three legs four,
Gave them a twisted form vermicular,
And o'er the seat, with plenteous wadding stuff'd,
Induc'd a splendid cover, green and blue,
Yellow and red, of tap'stry richly wrought,
And woven close, or needle-work sublime.24
While these developments were underway in middle-class drawing
rooms, the stream of popular culture flowed unabated through the streets of
London and through its taverns, its "lyric of the folk"—Cecil Day Lewis's
phrase—counterpointing the "the lyric of the few":
By the end of the fifteenth century, the minstrels had virtually disappeared, their
function of disseminating verse taken over by the invention of printing. Folk
lyric, through chapbook and broadsheet, flourished for another three hundred
years, then slowly faded into the Victorian street ballad, renewed itself in the
music-hall and finally has become the pop song of our own time.25
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, however, light verse created a
new tributary, a via media between the perceived "coarseness" of the street
ballad and the more demanding refinement of the art lyric. Brick walls separated
its gentility from the rough and tumble of the pavements outside, but it shared
with popular poetry its immediacy and lack of complication. Before long, it
found a vector in the Christmas annual—that now forgotten, once-celebrated
institution of early Victorian culture. Peter Morgan has stressed its centrality in
Hood's creative life, the profit motive behind it and the debasement that that half
implies:
He participated in the commercialized movement which produced the literary
annuals of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This phenomenon has
not received a great deal of attention, though many of the literary men of the
time were involved in it, and one wonders whether it is not a particularly
characteristic creation of an age of cultural uncertainty yet growing wealth.26
William Empson did devote attention to these annuals, however, and came to a
trenchant conclusion:
The nineteenth-century punster is quite another thing; to begin with he is not
rude; I suppose he came in with the Christmas Annuals, and supplied something
which could be shown to all the daughters of the house, which all the daughters
of the house could see (at a glance, without further information) was very
whimsical and clever. Apart from this it is difficult to see why a man like Hood,
who wrote with energy when he was roused, should have produced so much
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xv
verse of a trivial and undirected verbal ingenuity; trivial, not because fitting
together phrases wholly separate, drawn from everyday life, or lacking in their
own emotional content, but because, so far from 'being interested in mere
words', he used puns to back away from the echoes and implications of words, to
distract your attention by insisting on his ingenuity so that you can escape from
sinking into meaning. It is partly, perhaps, a result of the eighteenth-century
contempt for 'quibbles' (so that the verbal acrobat must be desperately
unassuming) and partly a result of profound changes in the attitude to life of the
Duke of Wellington's England; of a nervous Puritanism which had had quite
enough of unrest and the Romantic Revival, and felt, if the girls must read verse,
let us see they get something that cannot possibly go to their heads.27
If we remember that Cowper addressed his Task to a mistress of a
house, these "daughters of the house" represent a further narrowing of range, a
curtailment of experience, and a shrinkage of verbal power. For, as Donald Gray
remarks in his essay on "Victorian Laughter," more "interesting than this taste,
or tolerance, for frivolous laughter is the readiness with which many critics and
entertainers, and presumably many in their audiences, agreed that laughter
should properly try for nothing more than innocuous amusement."28 That
innocuousness was secured by inoculation, by tiny, measured administrations of
reality that secured the subjects' immunity to life in all its fullness. Indeed the
"daughter of the house" would continue to limit the range and neutralize the
saltiness of English letters for years to come. In 1864 Dickens was still
inveighing against the conformism of Britain's literary culture and its impact on
the novelist's choice of subject and mode:
A certain institution in Mr Podsnap's mind which he called 'the young person'
may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter. It was
an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring everything in the universe
to be filed down and fitted to it. The question about everything was, would it
bring a blush to the cheek of the young person? And the inconvenience of the
young person was that, according to Mr. Podsnap, she seemed always liable to
burst into blushes when there was no need at all.29
It is therefore significant, in view of the prudery and prettiness of the Christmas
annual that, when applying for a pension, Hood presented himself as a bastion of
middle-class primness—"I have not devoted any comic power I may possess to
lays of indecency or ribaldry" (630).
Since there was no striving for exaltation or even for improvement, the
very name of the annuals acknowledged their ephemeral nature. They lasted no
longer than the flowers that shared their tenure. Light verse was their staple—
verse begotten by topical journalism on metric facility. As Leslie Marchand has
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Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
pointed out, journalist and artist were interinvolved in Hood's identity—or rather
in the Hoodian self that took light verse as its métier:
In the main Hood was an entertaining letter writer. He had a journalist's sense of
the interest that lies in common things and an effervescent love of fun which was
constantly bubbling over in his most casual composition as well as in his
published work.30
And the very ratio of "serious" to facetious utterance that F. O. Ward's recorded
in the poet's conversation before his death applies (as a sort of parable) to his
output as a whole: "He conversed for about an hour in his old playful way, with
now and then a word or two full of deep and tender feeling."31
If Empson is right in suggesting that the Christmas annual ethos, more
than anything else, engendered the lightness of Hood's light verse, what
inferences should we draw from this? First of all, that there was the grinding
compulsion to feed an insatiable market, and this necessarily meant a sacrifice
of quality. Journalists can't write on impulse; they have deadlines to meet. The
light verse of Gray and Goldsmith and Cowper had been voluntary, and owed
its charm precisely to its lack of premeditation. In Hood's, on the other hand,
one senses the presence of formula, and a readiness to dash off whatever comes
to mind, verse turned "boilerplate" to fill the blank spots of a page. In a letter
addressed to George Rollo, the poet remarked that "it [is] more friendly to meet
you en déshabillé than to deny myself to you," summing up the plight of the
versifying journalist or journalistic poet. Dishabille had been a keynote of light
verse ever since it had turned its back on Aristotelian high-mindedness. Its
principal aim was relaxation and blandishment. We must also note how, even as
he presents himself "en déshabillé," Hood lays bare the mechanism of his craft
on occasions such as these. He invites Rollo to "put those stops which I cannot
stop to put," a chiasmus that unfortunately qualifies as a "joke without a kernel,"
insofar as its irrelevant pattern deflects our attention from the issue at hand. To
"put a stop" means to end (as opposed to inserting—putting in—a full stop), but
since that extra "in" would spoil the design, Hood leaves it out at the cost of
coherence. But even that is not the point. If we scan the letter, we find that the
punctuation is perfectly orthodox, and quite unlike the eccentric dash-ridden
procedure he had followed in an exchange with the same correspondent the year
before. The déshabillé to which he is referring centres on questions of
improvisation rather than on punctuation, but the desire for a joke has
supervened and thrown him off course. In this respect more than in any other,
one is reminded of Martial II 12.4. —"That you always smell so agreeably,
Postumus, make me suspect that you have something to conceal. He does not
smell pleasantly, Postumus, who always smells pleasantly."32 One can't help
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xvii
suspecting that some (if only some) of Hood's dexterity had an occlusive
function, verbal perfume to hide a faint staleness in the matter to which it has
been applied.
Another regrettable effect of the Christmas annual was the trap of
suffocating domesticity it laid for all who ventured into its ambit. A sentence
from Hood's letters provides an epigraph for this limitation: "This is the picture
that I saw on Monday at Little Britain,—with all the drawing room for its
frame" (35). There is so much that a drawing room frame will accommodate and
no more. The bedroom might be implicit in one or two flirtatious exchanges, but
implicit only. And if we glimpse the kitchen or the servants' quarters, it's only
when the maid brings in the tea tray. The view from its windows will be limited
to the comfortable suburb in which it stands, and if flowers and trees are present
at all, they will have been potted or bedded into tameness. Drawing rooms aren't
mountain tops. People convene there for social pleasantries, not to traffic in
strenuous revelations. Writing to Dickens in about 1840, Hood remarked that
"As a domestic Author, I beat those of Douglas and the Iliad—Home—
Homer—Homest.—and if ever I go mad—(as you did)—I feel persuaded that I
shall fancy myself some piece of household furniture—most probably a chair".33
To be the superlative of "Home" is to have reached the apogee of Christmas
annual culture. But once again, pattern has forced meaning into second place,
since one can't make any sense of "Home—Homer—Homest" at any level
beyond its phonetic design and nonce inflections of comparative and
superlative. It's a verbal arabesque squiggled in for its own sake.
Not that being a domestic writer necessarily entailed the blind
celebration of hearth and home. Alvin Whitley has suggested that both Hood's
"Song of the Shirt" and his "Bridge of Sighs," while they obviously didn't
qualify as instances of the "domestic epic" to which, by hostile extrapolation,
Arnold had reduced Clough's concern with "general wants, ordinary feelings,
the obvious rather than the rare facts of human nature," still represented
"modern personages in contact with the problems of modern life, moral,
intellectual and social".34 They point, indeed, to an altogether different capacity
in Hood, one that his Christmas annualism partly stultified with cosiness and
comfort.
Even so, cosiness and comfort tended to prevail. When Hood remarks
that he "must now put [his] riddles here—& will find other snug little corners
for my kindnesses" (57), one again senses the drawing-room frame that he
threw around a tableau in Little Britain. Wordplay in early seventeenth-century
verse is heuristic; in the light verse of the early nineteenth, it's epideictic. No
discoveries are made in Hood's riddles, only facile linkages that are ends in
themselves: "Why is a towel like a snake—Because it's a wiper.—Why are
horses like Sentimentalists—Because they like to indulge in wo" (57). There
xviii
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
they are in prose, and they have only to enlisted as punchlines and placed in a
metrical context, and, voila, a Christmas annual offering is conjured from the
sleeve like a string of magician's handkerchiefs or bunch of feather flowers.
Here, by way of example, is "December and May":
Said Nestor to his pretty wife, quite sorrowful one day,
'Why, dearest, will you shed in pearls those lovely eyes
/away?
You ought to be more fortified;' 'Ah, brute, be quiet,
/do,
I know I'm not so fortyfied, nor fiftyfied, as you.![']35
Once the "fortified" converts to "fortyfied" (with the "fiftyfied" as an
explanatory footnote), the verse has nothing left to offer. The tears/pearls
metaphor is both too worn and too perfunctory to suit its context (sub-acid
gossip), and every other word in the stanza is working toward the set-up and
release of the joke, and has neither time nor energy to spare from that task.
Hood could, in the right circumstances—in "Hero and Leander" or "The Plea of
the Midsummer Fairies"—fashion appealing pastiche conceits from pearls and
tears. Here there's little point in making one, so the comparison is made and left
in all its baldness.
Returning to Procter's sense that a potentially serious talent had
frittered itself in silliness, we can see how such judgements were compounded
by the ascendancy of Matthew Arnold in the second half of the nineteenth
century. His cult of high seriousness, embodied in such observations as that
about "the contemporary rubbish which is shot so plentifully all around us" that
"we can, indeed, hardly read too little,"36 his conviction likewise that "all great
poets affect their hearers powerfully,"37 his disqualification of Dryden and Pope
from that power for conceiving and composing their poetry "in their wits," as
opposed to "genuine poetry" which "is composed in the soul,"38 and his
definition (in the essay on Heine) of literature as "the most beautiful,
impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things"39—this high
seriousness conspired to strengthen the charge of triviality that Procter had
brought against Hood, and it was under Arnold's influence that F. T. Palgrave
abridged the text of "The Death-Bed" in The Golden Treasury—"Two
intermediate stanzas have here been omitted. They are very ingenious, but, of all
poetical qualities, ingenuity is least in accordance with pathos"40—prompting N.
Hardy Wallis to ask (in refutation) if "these verses [are] less poetical because
they are true to a moment of crisis?"41 And it was under the same Arnoldian
pressure that Arthur Quiller-Couch advanced the "serious" Hood in preference
to the "light," much to Auden's irritation:
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xix
Consequently, when he has to represent Thomas Hood, he takes it for granted
that he must select from Hood's 'serious' poems and these, unfortunately, are his
weakest productions. When Hood (whom I, by the way, consider a major poet)
tries to write a 'serious' poem, at best he produces an imitation of Keats, but
when he is writing as a comic poet he is like nobody but himself and serious in
the true sense of the word.42
Establishing the "majority" of a poet is very much a "he said/she said"
affair, but it no doubt helps when an unequivocally major poet such as Auden
asserts the significance of a predecessor. Observe, however, that we once more
stumble against the inescapable polarity of the Hoodian selves. Auden invites us
to choose between them instead of embracing them as complementarities. In fact
it isn't entirely certain whether he is here setting "serious" in opposition to
"comic" or to "light." The qualities might invite equation in some respects, but
are magnet poles in others. "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg" qualifies
as a comic poem, but it has a satiric weight and gravamen otherwise absent from
his light verse.
So, when all's said and done, one must acknowledge that Hood essayed
very different things in the course of his career as illustrator, editor, essayist and
sketcher, novelist, purveyor of travelogue and poet. As a poet, moreover, he
showed an equally impressive range, picking and choosing different kinds of
verse on impulse. One doesn't sense that resolute, self-conscious effort at
perfecting and consolidating an art that we find, say, in Keats—no unremitting
effort at "excelsior" and therefore no real evolution. That requires concentrated
effort, and Hood never had the necessary time nor stamina. Give and take some
nuance and shading, his poetic career traces a kind of double parabola like the
MacDonald's logo. It's a pattern of visitation rather than integration, of
successive tryings-on-for-size. We start with the mock-heroic odes—the Odes
and Addresses to Great People of 1825 and the closely related capriccios of the
Whims and Oddities, the "First Series" of which appeared in the following year,
and the "Second Series" the year after that. They constitute the upstroke of the
M. Then, in 1827, Hood published his only collection of non-comic verse, The
Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur, and
Other Poems—the downstroke—followed by its comic "rebound," the
Juvenalian vigour of "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg" (arguably his
best—because most impassioned—comic verse) and the many lesser jeux
d'esprit that surround it. The M figure ends, rather lopsidedly, on the
(interspersed) verse of social protest written in his twilight years. "The Song of
the Shirt (1843) and "The Bridge of Sighs" (1844) were extremely popular in
their day, and came close to countervailing the "frivolity" of the light verse, but
shifts in taste have lessened their impact, and few (if any) contemporary readers
xx
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
would agree with Thackeray that "The Song of the Shirt" is the "finest lyric ever
written."43
The overarching pattern of comic and serious upstrokes and
downstrokes has a certain adventitiousness. Hood took it as it came, and acted
on very different poetic impulses over the years. In this book, I have sampled
those various impulses, not taking sides with the divided self, but rather finding
merit in its different aspects. Some might follow Auden and claim that, in the
right (which is to say comic) métier, Hood achieved greatness, while others
might incline to the anonymous critic in the TLS poetry and wonder that poetry
"so pure and simple [as that evinced in the serious poems] could possibly spring
in the mind of one so busy with oddities and whimsicalities." Such debates
centre too much on matters of taste to be capable of resolution. Suffice it to say
that Hood was a very accomplished poet, capable of greatness when the occasion
arose, and that, more to the point, he was extremely versatile—perhaps too
versatile for his own good, for his different kinds of excellence have encouraged
partisanship and playings-off of one against the other. Here we can draw a
parallel with another artist altogether. Arthur Sullivan's reputation has likewise
been bedevilled by the conflicting challenges of the light and the serious, and he
himself:
was aware that his best light music would never have been written but for
Gilbert, that in some obscure way Gilbert "called the tune," and the knowledge
troubled him. It made him feel only half a man, and he would try his hardest to
believe that he had put his real self into his serious work. "I think this is the best
thing I've done, don't you?" he anxiously enquired of Ethyl Smyth, presenting
her with full score of The Golden Legend. Truth compelled her to say that The
Mikado was his masterpiece. "Oh, you wretch!" he cried, and though he laughed
she could see that he was disappointed.44
This anecdote bears comparison with a letter Hood wrote to William Gaspey:
To be candid, I have always fancied like Mr Liston, & other so called
comedians, that my performances in the serious line were the most worthy of the
public approbation. In fact, I have more than once thought of testing my powers
in the tragic, by the composition of a Tragedy in Five Acts. If you will take the
trouble to refer to some of my more popular effusions you will find that
'Farewell Nancy Gray' was a Pathetic Ballad—so was 'Mary's Ghost'—and the
Dream of Eugene Aram, generally taken as a joke, was certainly intended to be a
serious production. My Portrait alone, if you saw it, would indicate that my forte
is pensive. (481)
It's doubtful, however, that Hood would have shared Sullivan's
disappointment at the eclipse of his serious by his comic reputation. Try as he
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
xxi
might to redress the popular judgement on his strengths as a poet, the tone of the
letter to Gaspey is less touchy than that of the composer's response to Ethyl
Smyth. Hood remains, in the last resort, a Rorschach Blot. On the one hand you
might agree with Helen Eden that he "versifies like a fencer and stabs at the end
of the line in the manner of Cyrano de Bergerac,"45 and applaud the mobility and
panache of his wordplay. On the other, the detachment it presupposed sometimes
impaired the feeling it was sometimes trying to render: "He could not refrain
from being playful; and there is nothing as certain to dowse the white heat of
invective as a stream of puns."46 Alternatively, like Susan Wolfson, you might
want to straddle the fence, weighing interpretative options without settling for
one or the other: "Depending on temperament, readers have admired the extra
verbal sense of may and must or have been put off by the tonal rupture—the
random grammatical jest of punning these nouns into verbs as a way of
enforcing the grimly deterministic wit."47
We should remember that Hood's contemporary reputation was
primarily founded on his capacity for puns. From the moment that Coleridge
picked up the Odes and Addresses—
Thinking Lamb had written [them], Coleridge wrote to him to call his bluff: I
have read them over again, and I understand why you have anon'd the book. The
puns are nine in ten good—many excellent—the Newgatory transcendent.48
—through to the anonymous "poetical portrait" in Blackwood's five years later,
this facility occupied critical attention almost to the exclusion of everything else.
Blackwood's attempt at out-Hooding him on home ground blandished him with
the sincerest form of flattery:
In Blackwood's Magazine for April, 1830, there appeared in thirty-four quatrains
a series of "Poetical Portraits," "signed A Modern Pythagorean." The series
opened with Shakespeare and closed thus with Hood—
"Impugn I dare not thee
For I'm of puny brood
And thou would'st punish me
With pungent hardiHOOD."
(Jerrold 257)
The typographical fuss that flags this scattergun of puns—not very adept ones at
that—shows how wordplay of this kind is a function of appearance, how it
necessarily skates across on the surface of poetry instead of plumbing its depths.
But this is not Hood; it is a hack trying to be Hood, and Hood, even at his
lightest, was very much better.
xxii
Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood
My assessment of the poet's duality, and the pull of contrary impulses
that shape the M of his career graph is "accidentally" summed up by Hood
himself. There are times, as Lodge points out, when these impulses converge:
Have you read the account of Photogenic drawing or Lightography? . . . 'Tis a
mercy light does not write; but perhaps that will be done hereafter, and Phoebus
will not only be a patron of poets, but a poet himself, and deal, like me, in Light
literature. (389)
The capitalized "Light," like the laboured typographical flaggings of the
Blackwood's parody, is designed to point the pun, but it also comes close to
Platonizing light literature. Hood turns into the archetype of lightness, and,
exalted by the power of typification, comes close, even in that levity, to the
vigour and commitment of the serious verse over which Phoebus traditionally
presides.
CHAPTER ONE
HOOD AND THE MOCK-HEROIC ODE:
THE ODES AND ADDRESSES TO GREAT PEOPLE
In a letter to John Wright, Hood asked his friend to "congratulate Moxon . . . on
having an article on his sonnets in the 'Quarterly', where I have never had a line
though I write odes!"1 His regret was jocular, of course, for he knew well
enough that most of his odes subverted the genre, whereas the great odists
before him had modelled their efforts on its Pindaric and Horatian templates—
even if some had indeed traduced the form with mock-heroics. In fact, freestanding satiric odes are hard to come by before the eighteenth century, even
though precedents and approximations abound in other matrices, like crystals
lodged in chemically different rock.
One can even find them in non-poetic contexts, since odes are given to
sustained apostrophe, and a prolonged second-person address (whether in a
novel or an essay) will cause the prose to crystallize into rhythmic clausulae.
And the moment they turn grotesque or tautologous, mock-heroic odes will
spring fleetingly to life. Plays stuffed with fustian, given as they are to repeated
invocations, will also sometimes carry an unwitting mock ode or elegy in the
folds of a speech—the lament for Sophonisba in Thomson's drama by that
name—or witting ones like those that Shakespeare embedded in "Pyramus and
Thisbe:
O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night, alack, alack, alack,
I fear my Thisbe's promise is forgot!
And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,
That stand'st between her father's ground and mine;
Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne.
(A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.168-75)
2
Chapter One
Most odes rely heavily on peristasis, the scheme in which, according to
Erasmus, "we enlarge by expounding the circumstances of our subject, its
cause, occasion, instrument, time, mode, etc.",2 and Bottom's "ode" is nothing if
not peristatic. But because domestic walls don't figure in the repertoire of heroic
topics; because "sweet" is not an epithet warranted even by the best of them;
and because "chink" has ribald implications, his address trips up on its own
grandiloquence. Furthermore, since walls by their very nature divide up space,
the clause "That stand'st between her father's ground and mine" is partly
redundant, and the clause in "O night, which ever art when day is not!"
hopelessly so.
Inductive tautologies of this kind have a close association with the
mock-heroic ode. In the sixteenth century, soldiers at the battle of Pavia
composed an ode to Jacques de Chabannes, Seigneur de la Palice, and gave
birth to the lapalissade—
Monsieur de La Palice est mort,
Mort devant Pavie;
Un quart d'heure avant sa mort,
Il était encore en vie3
—a mock-heroic device that was still serving Goldsmith two centuries later, as
witness his own odal parodies:
Let us lament, in sorrow sore,
For Kent-Street well may say,
That had she lived a twelve-month more,—
She had not died today.4
Because tautologies are logical merry-go-rounds, arriving back at one's point of
departure after a journey nowhere, they can be used to mock the ode's fondness
for apostrophe, which, in this respect, often creates the sense of going nowhere
slowly. What better way to expose this foible than by patterns of banal
induction?
Not that inductions, though necessarily static, need necessarily be dull.
Rochester's virtuosic ode "Upon Nothinge" proves that much:
Nothinge, thou elder brother, even to a shade,
Thou had'st a beinge ere the world was made
And (well fixt) art alone of endinge not afrayd.
Ere tyme and place weere, tyme and place were not,
Where primitive nothinge somethinge straite begot,
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
3
Then all proceeded from the greate united what.5
This goes through the motions of odic magnificence, even to the point of
constructing a genealogy as Milton had in "L'Allegro":
Whom lovely Venus at a birth
With two sister Graces more
To Ivy-crowned Bacchus bore6
But the baroque solemnities collapse because, the topic being absence, there is
nothing to support them. These aren't the earnestly banal lapalissades in which
would Goldsmith specialize, nor even the kind that Rabelais trotted out some
seven years after the battle of Pavia:
DEAD IS THE NOBLE BADEBEC
WHO HAD A FACE LIKE A REBEC;
A SPANISH BODY AND A BELLY
LIKE A SWISS FRAU; SHE DIED, I TELL YE
IN CHILD-BED. PRAY TO GOD THAT HER
HE PARDON WHEREIN SHE DID ERR.
HERE LIES HER BODY, WHICH DID LIVE
FREE FROM ALL VICE, AS I BELIEVE,
AND DID DECEASE, POOR SIMPLE BRIDE,
THE YEAR AND DAY ON WHICH SHE DIED.7
While this lament climaxes in an anti-climactic tautology, it also employs other
devices that would come to typify the mock-heroic ode. Chief amongst these are
its grotesque or surreal similes, "absurdism" avant la lettre that distinguishes
Rabelais' mock-dirge from classical precedents by Catullus and Ovid. The joke
in the former's lament for a sparrow centres on the disproportionate wailing of
the gods ("Lugete, o Veneres Cupidinesque"8), and while Ovid's tilts more
emphatically toward the grotesque—his birds tear out feathers instead of hair
("horrida pro maestis lanietur pluma capillis"9)—even that concordia discors
can't match "A FACE LIKE A REBEC," which Rabelais has set in the naive
upper case of gianthood.
Gargantua and Pantagruel also gives us a glimpse of the mock-heroic
ode during the visit to Ennasin, where formal greetings repeatedly founder on
their homeliness:
As I went on, I saw a lecherous fellow who greeted his female relative as, 'My
mattress', and she called him, 'Eiderdown', and indeed he looked a downy old
bird. One man called his girl: 'Sweet doe', to which she answered: 'Old Crust',
'Shovel' and 'poker'; 'clog' and 'slipper'; 'boot' and 'shoe'; 'mitten' and 'glove',
4
Chapter One
were other names exchanged between relatives of different sexes. One man in
particular called his woman his rind, to which she replied: 'Dear bacon': and their
relationship was that of bacon to rind.10
Grotesquerie of this kind also characterized the flytings, and we would not be
wrong to regard that of Dunbar and Kennedy as a suite of mock-heroic odes:
Thow lazarus, thow laithly lene tramort,
To all the warld thow may example be
To luk upoun thy gryslie peteous port;
For hiddowis, haw and holkit is thyne ee,
Thy cheik bane bair, and blaiknit is thy ble;
Thy choip, thy choll, garris men for to leif chest;
Thy gane it garris us think that we mon de:
I conjure the, thow hungert heland gaist!11
[You Lazarus, you loathsome, meagre corpse
May you be held up as an example to all the world
That it may view your grisly, lamentable mien;
For your eye sockets are hideous, livid and hollow,
Your cheek bones are fleshless, and your complexion pale;
Your jaw and your jowl inspire people to live pious lives;
Because your ugly face is a memento mori:
I thus exhort you, you starving Highland ghost.]
In flytings the rallentando of odal apostrophe turns into a complete halt or
fermata, and a prolonged shouting match ensues. Here the canons of restraint
give way to perergia, which, according to Quintillian, is "Superfluous
elaboration," differing "as much from its corresponding virtue much as fussiness
differs from industry, and superstition from religion."12
Rabelais, with a motive similar to Dunbar's, but choosing a different
form to embody it, also satirizes the stasis-prone ode in his address to the
scrotum, which halts the narrative with an impenetrable road-block of
vocatives:
'Cheer me up a little, old cock,' he said. 'I feel quite down
in the dumps from that benighted idiot's claptrap. Listen
my dainty ballock ball-bag:
stumpy b.
lumpy b
dumpy b.
plaited b.
leaded b.
milky b.[']13
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
5
And so on. This satirical perergia still had life in the twentieth century, for a
more compact and colourless version of Rabelais' joke also figures in Lolita:
"Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full,
printer."14 The satiric energy devoted to scrotum and an undistinguished child
amuses us not because it is so exhaustingly exhaustive but also because, like
Bottom's wall, and Rochester's "nothing," the subjects are also painfully
"unodal" and undeserving of the effort.
Perhaps the same could be said Byron's "ode" to the vagina that he
secreted into Don Juan. Bernard Blackstone has pointed out that:
Fitz-Fulke blatantly, but also Adeline and Haidée and Aurora in different
gradations of subtlety, are moving wombs, living organisms built around the
voracious matrix. The theme is first sounded in its starkness in the amusing
address to the vulva in Canto IX which Byron composes as a fantasia above the
ground-bass of Horace's 'O tu teterrima causa' . . . .15
I'm not altogether sure that it's a fantasia, though. Rather, Byron has used Horace
as a stalking horse to approach a topic that an era more repressive than Rabelais'
and Nabokov's would have judged obscene. Here is the springboard from which
he bounces his discourse:
nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus taeterrima belli
causa, sed ignotis perierunt mortibus illi,
quos venerem incertam rapientis more ferarum
viribus editior caedebat ut in grege taurus.
[For before Helen's day a wench was the most dreadful
cause of war, but deaths unknown to fame were theirs
whom, snatching fickle love in wild-beast fashion, a man
stronger in might struck down, like the bull in a herd.]16
Here "cunnus" means a woman, even though the word can also signify the
female member. Byron, however, leaves out both the appositional noun and the
defining personal context, and, quoting only "taeterrima belli / causa," opens the
path to his risqué ambiguity.
As so often in mock-heroic odes, the discourse moves on two planes at
the same time, so that "death," the traditional antonym of "life," also hints at the
"petite mort" of orgasm, while the "life" to which the vagina provides a gate is
on one level the new-born child that passes through it, but also rampant male
desire, since men need sex as a "matter of life and death":
O thou teterrima causa of all belli—
Thou gate of life and death—thou nondescript!
6
Chapter One
Whence is our exit and our entrance,—well I
May pause in pondering how all souls are dipt
In thy perennial fountain;—how man fell, I
Know not, since knowledge saw her branches stript
Of her first fruit; but how he falls and rises
Since, thou hast settled beyond all surmises.
Some call thee 'the worst cause of war,' but I
Maintain thou art the best; for, after all
From thee we come, to thee we go, and why
To get at thee not batter down a wall.
Or waste a world, since no one can deny
Thou does replenish worlds both great and small;
With or without thee, all things at a stand
Are, or would be, thou sea of life's dry land!17
Blackstone observes of this matricial ode that:
The naughtiness of the play on 'stand' and 'fall' should not divert us from the
serious Fall theme which, running as it does through the whole of Don Juan, is
here narrowed to a specifically sexual context which will persist through the
remaining Cantos with little relief from Nature's benisons or even from man's
inhumanity to man.18
However, the wide-ranging tones of Don Juan are also meant to entertain us. By
displacing the walls of Troy with the hymen, and, by using the word "batter,"
Byron recalls such eighteenth-century erotica as John Cleland's Fanny Hill,
which also depicts coitus in military metaphors:
Being now too high wound up to bear a delay, he unbuttoned, and drawing out
the engine of love-assaults, drove it currently as at a ready-made breach. Then!
then! for the first time did I feel that stiff horn-hard gristle battering against the
tender part; but imagine to yourself his surprise when he found, after several
vigorous pushes, which hurt me extremely, that he made not the least
impression.19
Even as he drives desire home, Cleland mocks those Petrarchan images of
frustrated assault that we find, for example, in Turberville: "But since I see her
stony heart / Cannot be pierced with pity's lance."20
The mock-heroic ode necessarily pits flesh against spirit, experience
against convention, just as Sancho Panza's basic appetite and sober vision frame
and place the idealism of Don Quixote. But, unlike Sancho Panza, who supplies
the bifocality of the mock-heroic, some satiric odes leave their ideal apparatus
intact, and, instead of dismantling it, focus on the realistic alternatives that their
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood
7
high-minded counterparts ignore or deplore. A mock-odal moment in Horace's
sixth satire in Book II achieves this duality through language, explaining its own
magniloquence with a built-in footnote to ensure that the god will recognize
himself beneath the verbiage: "Matutine pater, seu 'Iane' libentius audis" ("O
Father of the dawn, or Janus, if so thou hearest rather").21 Shakespeare also
makes a joke of this kind in Love's Labour's Lost when Don Armado dallies with
"[his] excrement, [his] mustachio" (V.i.95-96).
On other occasions, though, the sobering match of the real with the
glamorized is more a question of content than of style. One example of an "ode"
that turns the ideal into a taste-enhancing condiment (instead of dismissing it out
of hand) is Shakespeare's 130th Sonnet:
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.22
John Dover Wilson has observed that this:
sonnet tells us, as no one who pauses to consider the final couplet can fail to see,
. . . that none of the ladies that Petrarch and the conventional sonneteers sing can
compare with Sh.'s lady for beauty. And incidentally, if not primarily, it is a
parody of their love-poetry.23
In other words, the ideal collapses the moment we espouse the real, since satire
is a thing of measurement, bent on cutting to size anything it finds. A poet has
only to yank the basis of assent, and the cards come tumbling down.
Shakespeare doesn't indict Petrarchan formulae in his sonnet on the dark lady; he
simply turns his back on them.
In another option provided by the mock-heroic ode, a poet might
choose to celebrate the trivial through a notionally grand form, as Cowper does
in the poem inscribed "To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut on Which I
Dined This Day." However, the poet leaves his satiric intention standing at the
front door, and only the title discharges a mock-heroic task. Within the body of
the poem, we are conscious only of Cowper's habitual (and unmocking) empathy
with animals:
Where hast thou floated, in what seas pursued
Thy pastime? when wast thou an egg new-spawn'd,
Lost in the immensity of ocean's waste?
Roar as they might, the overbearing winds
8
Chapter One
That rock'd the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe—24
There is a hint, here, perhaps, of the anguished interrogations in "Lycidas"
("Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Clos'd o'er the head of
your lov'd Lycidas?"25), but the Sturm und Drang serves only to establish the
strength and resilience of the minikin. As in the Shakespeare sonnet, Cowper's
negations silhouette a positive, but a positive rather different from that exalted
by heroic literature:
And in thy minikin and embryo state,
Attach'd to the firm leaf of some salt weed,
Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and rack'd
The joints of many a stout and gallant bark,
And whelm'd them in the unexplor'd abyss.26
A tiny fish survives where huge vessels founder. That is realism of a reassuring
kind.
More often, however, mock-heroic odes prefer a more discomfiting
hyper-realism—that disgusting magnification of the ordinary that makes
Brobdingnag so unpleasant. At its outer reaches is the Juvenalian, anti-romantic
squalor that we find in Rochester's "[Satyr]":
For this abuse, the Rump-fed-Runts shall mourn,
Till slimey Cunt, to grimey Arse hole turn.
By her Caves Mouth, a verdant Mirtle grows,
Bearing Loves Trophies, on his sacred Boughs.27
Other kinds of mock-heroic realism can prove less scabrous. For example, tavern
drink displaces the tired conceit of the Hippocrene in Butler's Hudibras, a
substitution prompted less by anti-classical Schadenfreude than by a
documentary urge toward the truth, the same urge that prompted Shakespeare's
hymn to the "dark lady":
Thou that with Ale, or viler Liquors,
Didst inspire Withers, Pryn, and Vickars,
And force them, though it were in spight
Of nature and their stars, to write;28
This is the world that Goldsmith would depict in "The Description of an
Author's Bedchamber" and that Carl Spitzweg would render in his three versions
of The Poor Poet. It is a world continuous with, but wholly removed from, the