Tag Archives: Literature

What must you know of the author?

18 Friday May 2018

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There is a debate within literature study as to whether one must know about the author or not in order to make sense of the text. Here in the first essay in the Spectator, Addison places the question a bit differently: rather than speaking of “meaning” he writes of “pleasure”:

I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings, and shall give some Account in them of the several persons that are engaged in this Work. As the chief trouble of Compiling, Digesting, and Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do myself the Justice to open the Work with my own History.

That places the question of reading on a very different foundation: is this something in which you can take pleasure?

Edward Taylor, Meditation 25, “Why Should My Bells”, Stanza 6

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

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The conclusion of the poem. The prior entry is here:

 

I fain the choicest love my soul can get,

 Would to thy gracious self a gift present

But cannot now unscrew Love’s cabinet.

 Say not this is a niggard’s complement.

 For seeing it is thus I choose now rather

 To send thee th’cabbinet, and pearl together.

 

Paraphrase: The poet desires to send to God some gift as recompense for great gift (the glorious robes) he has received. But he cannot open himself and find something separate to give: he cannot separate his affection from himself — and so he gives himself with his affection.

This sentiment also appears in Isaac Watts’ Hymn “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed”:

But drops of grief can ne’er repay

      The debt of love I owe;

    Here, Lord, I give myself away;

      ’Tis all that I can do

Isaac Watts, The Psalms and Hymns of Isaac Watts. And in “When I Survey the Wond’rous Cross”:

    Were the whole realm of nature mine,

    That were a present far too small;

    Love so amazing, so divine,

    Demands my soul, my life, my all.

This payment of love is the chief duty of the Christian:

Mark 12:29–31 (AV)

29 And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: 30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. 31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.

Here we come to the point of the poem: the purpose of the great love of God toward him in Jesus Christ is to render love in return

A note on “niggard”: unfortunately, some people are confused by the the Middle English nyggard, stingy, miser. It has nothing to do with the racial slur.

Edward Taylor’s Meditation 25, “Why should my bells”

31 Wednesday Jan 2018

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Taylor’s mediation “25” begins as follows:

Why should my bells, which chime thy praise, when thou
My shew-bread, on thy table wast, my King,
Their clappers, or their cell-ropes want even now?
Or those that can thy changes sweetly ring?
What is a scar-fire broken out?  No, no.
The bells would backward ring if it was so.

This poem will speak to the poet’s inability to rightly praise God, he “cannot unscrew [open] love’s cabinet” (which holds his love and praise). It begins with this strange discussion of bells. (That image of bells will appear later as possibly tolling the poet’s death).

The first trick will be to understand the introductory question. It will help to understand the whole to break the subordinate clause:

Why should my bells, which chime thy praise, [when thou
My shew-bread, on thy table wast, my King,]
Their clappers, or their cell-ropes want even now?

Paraphrased: Why should these bells lack a clapper or rope when they should being playing in praise to you?

The rhythm is regular until the final turn of line three “even now”. That accent on the first syllable of “EVen” forces one to stop and underscores the point: At this moment — when I should be praising — I cannot.

The second line contains the image of “shewbread”:

Bread of the Presence. Loaves of bread placed on a special table in the sanctuary or Holy Place of the tabernacle and later in the temple. Two other terms in the OT are used to describe the “bread of the Presence,” which means bread that has been set before the Lord’s face (Ex 25:23, 30; 35:13; 39:36; 1 Kgs 7:48; 2 Chr 4:19). The term “showbread” (kjv shewbread) refers to the arrangement of the bread in rows on the table (1 Chr 9:32; 23:29; 28:16; 2 Chr 2:4; 13:11; 29:18). The term “continual bread” refers to its perpetual offering (Nm 4:7).

David W. Wead, “Bread of the Presence,” Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 379. By referring to the “shewbread” being on the Lord’s table, it is most likely that Taylor is referring to Lord’s Supper.

Thus, here at the moment where I am contemplating the great gift of God, I find that my praise lacks voice.

Robert Nares Glossary (1859) of idioms and phrases of Shakespeare and contemporaries explains “scar-fire” as “scar-fire or scarefire: an alarm of fire. The cry fire! fire!” It could also refer to the fire itself.

Example,

THE SCARE-FIRE.
by Robert Herrick

WATER, water I desire,
Here’s a house of flesh on fire ;
Ope the fountains and the springs,
And come all to bucketings :
What ye cannot quench pull down ;
Spoil a house to save a town :
Better ’tis that one should fall,
Than by one to hazard all.

Thus, the lines

 What is a scar-fire broken out?  No, no.
 The bells would backward ring if it was so.

Could mean there was a question as to whether a fire had broken out, or an alarm of fire. Either would support the meaning.

Why cannot the poet praise God? Is it because some fire had broken out and destroyed the bells? No, that would be impossible. The “backward” will be picked up in the next stanza.

The Relgion of Mrs. Clenham Part 2

10 Tuesday Oct 2017

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The previous post in this series concerning Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit may be found here.

Arthur Clenham comes home to the dismal, dark house of his childhood. The only decorations were framed  images of the Plagues of Egypt.  He and his father have in China on business for 20 years. His father died and has returned to London and the house of his bed ridden mother:

‘I am able,’ said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a tall writing cabinet close shut up, ‘I am able to attend to my business duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege. But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?’ ‘Yes, mother.’ ‘Does it snow?’ ‘Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?’ ‘All seasons are alike to me,’ she returned, with a grim kind of luxuriousness. ‘I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here. The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.’ With her cold grey eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her stony head-dress,—her being beyond the reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all changing emotions.

At this place we see more evidence the grim legalism of Mrs. Clenham. The Plagues are not seen from the perspective of God’s people as a glorious rescue. She sees them from the perspective of the judged slave masters, “The old articles of furniture were in their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls.” The Egyptians were plagued with flies; the flies are in this dark house ( darkness was also a plague).

She revels in her misery.  She bears her place with a false  humility: “a grim kind of luxuriousness.”

She is a sort of Medusa although her head is the one of stone.

The Religion of Mrs. Clenham, Part 1

28 Thursday Sep 2017

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Mrs. Clenham broods over Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit with her brutal Christless, graceless religion. Her heretical “Christianity” in the end is spurs the trouble which the Christianity of Amy Dorrit (“Little Dorrit”) resolves.

We are introduced to the religion through its effect upon her son Arthur. He has just returned from 20 years in China. It is Sunday morning and we hear the bells through his ears:

Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. 

‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. ‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!’

Arthur sees the paradox of his response: he thanks “heaven” that the call to church has ended; then he begs pardon that he hates the call.

The churches themselves abandon hope and continue in despair.

Dickens will later make plain that it is not Christ but this distortion which earns the rebuke. 

But what is this distortion; how was Clenham “trained” so?

There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition?—a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy—and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. 

We see first it is a religion of judgment of condemnation without redemption; justice without mercy. 

The Scripture tells us to forgive as we have been forgiven. Ephesians 4:32. But there is no forgiveness in Mrs. Clenham nor her religion.

Dickens continues:

There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. 

There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible—bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves—as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse. 

There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him.

Dickens lays the charge upon “her own construction” of the Bible. He charges construction with being only legal demands which could not be met and could not be escaped.

Moreover, it was not judgment on sin but on happiness and love!

as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse

These are no sin – quite the contrary- but these are condemned by Mrs. Clenham’s religion.

Thus, Arthur had

no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters

Her sin was condemned by Jesus in Luke 11:52:

“Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

Not only did Mrs. Clenham not convey true knowledge; she used the Bible to prevent such knowledge.

I ate umble pie

03 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Charles Dickens, Psychology

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The psychological observations of great writers are more useful than most of the “science” of psychologists (of all stripes). To prove that point consider the following section from David Copperfield by Dickens.

Uriah Heep is a fawning, scheming beast who has taken advantage of another’s sorrow and willingness to drink for solace. 

In this section, he explains himself. It is quite understandable when one knows that sin begets congruent sin:

‘I am not fond of professions of humility,’ I returned, ‘or professions of anything else.’ ‘There now!’ said Uriah, looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight. ‘Didn’t I know it! But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys; and mother, she was likewise brought up at a public, sort of charitable, establishment. They taught us all a deal of umbleness—not much else that I know of, from morning to night. We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters! Father got the monitor-medal by being umble. So did I. Father got made a sexton by being umble. He had the character, among the gentlefolks, of being such a well-behaved man, that they were determined to bring him in. “Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!’ It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed. ‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’ And he said all this—I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight—that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression.

James Russell Lowell: What Makes a Book “Classic”

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic.

I do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still unextinguished torch of intelligence, the lampada vitoe, to those who came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger’s French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them.

If poems die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination.

Take Aristotle’s ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live? Yes, Dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his death. Accordingly, I am apt to believe that the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut.

James Russell Lowell, Among My Books (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, n.d.), 126–127.

George Herbert: On Christian Worship in Song

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by in George Herbert, Music, Uncategorized, Worship

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This is a fascinating poem — which makes a profound point on the importance of singing in Christian worship. First, his poem “A True Hymn” begins with the observation –which any Christian has had– of singing joyfully partial lines and fragments of hymns. (The singer has created series of short phrases which he sings repeatedly):

MY Joy, my Life, my Crown !
My heart was meaning all the day,
Somewhat it fain would say,
And still it runneth muttering up and down
With only this, My Joy, my Life, my Crown !

Herbert tacitly concedes that the few lines are not great, but he then turns around and says “they may take part/Among the best in art”.  What makes the “few words” great is that the words perfectly accord with the soul:

Yet slight not those few words ;
If truly said, they may take part
Among the best in art :
The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords
Is, when the soul unto the lines accord.

Herbert is not saying that the songs of gathered worship should be poorly drafted (Herbert is one of the finest poets of the English language).  He is speaking about the joyful heart spontaneously bursting out lines. I think it would be turning Herbert on his head to argue that he would support poorly written songs as part of gathered worship.

But, we also must not make worship hang solely upon the artistry of the expression:

He who craves all the mind,
And all the soul, and strength, and time,
If the words only rhyme,
Justly complains that somewhat is behind
To make His verse, or write a hymn in kind.

Because, artistry is not alone the true measure of worship:

 

Whereas if the heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant,
God doth supply the want ;
As when the heart says, sighing to be approved,
“O, could I love !” and stops, God writeth, “Loved.”

An analogy may help here: Imagine two men who each write a letter to a young lady. One man writes without true love, without any actual desire for the woman, but he writes as well as Shakespeare. The second man writes with far less artistry, but he writes as well as his bursting heart can manage. The young lady knows the truth of both men: which man has successfully expressed love?

 

 

 

 

We had rather You shoved off.

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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gerasene

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as You call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in properity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably non-essential.

It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If You cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather You shoved off.

–Richard Wilbur, Matthew viii.28

Background. Wilbur is referring to the story of Jesus healing a demoniac. The demons leave the man and enter a herd of swine feeding nearby (Jews, of course, were forbidden to eat swine). The swine stampede into the lake and die. The people of the town seem to not care that a monster has returned to being a man. Instead, they are angry that they lost their pigs and blame Jesus.

Matthew 8:28–34 (ESV)

28 And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. 29 And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” 30 Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. 31 And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” 32 And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. 33 The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region.