Some Old England Pictures Vaguely in Honor of Pope

These are from 1999, randomly chosen with the exception of Pope's birthplace site and the last one. 1. Plough Court, off Lombard Street, City of London. Birthplace of Pope. Plough Court is an alley of which the black wall in the above picture constitutes one side. There is a plaque on this wall commemorating Pope but unfortunately it did not come out in the picture. The sunny street to the right with the old-looking church (many of the old-looking churches in this part of town are actually reconstructions, the originals having been bombed out; I don't know whether this one is a reconstruction or not) is Lombard Street.

The area known as the City, which is now the financial district and has hardly any residents, was until about 1800 pretty much the whole of London, and thereafter constituted the more downmarket but heavily populated Cockney homeland until the bombing wipeout in 1940-41. As a result, it is an area that was home to tons of writers and numerous legendary historic places, including pretty much everyone and everything before the 19th century, most physical reminders of which, however are gone. Nonetheless, a few things are still around, such as St Paul's Cathedral and other churches, Samuel Johnson's house, the Cheshire Cheese Tavern, etc. Many of these are dismissed as tourist traps I guess, though if you have some feel for the 18th century atmosphere these relics can still speak something to you.

2. Rye, Sussex. Plaque Commemorating the Former Position of Henry James's Garden House, Destroyed by Bombs, 1941. Not a flattering portrait, but you can't run from the truth forever. I was 29 here. By 29, or thereabouts--the 30th birthday is not an absolute deadline, but it seems to be pretty close to one--you have either become a genuinely serious, more or less realized person or that destiny has at last become inaccessible to you, and you are effectively marking the hours--thanks to the advances of modern medicine hideously many hours--until you come to your physical end. I am pretty sure I still harbored hope I was going to be able to sneak in under the wire at this point, but now I look at this picture and see it was pretty much...

Despite the unfortunate fate of the garden house, the actual Georgian House where Henry James lived, to the perpendicular right of the wall in the photo here, still stands, and is sometimes open to the public, though it was not when we were there.

3. 39 Cornhill, City of London, With Steeple of St Michael's Church in Background. This building, formerly, and perhaps presently, a bank, was built on the site of the poet Thomas Gray's birthplace (1716). Gray was commemorated on one the lower floors with a nice embossed plaque and a few lines from the "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard".

We took this little walk around the City on a Sunday morning, when the place was more or less deserted. The plane had landed around 6 or 7 am and we weren't able to check into our hotel until sometime after noon. Very little was open--in the 90s at least, Europe was still effectively closed on Sunday, especially before mid-afternoon/evening--even the ATM machines didn't work for our bank cards until noon--so although we were very tired we passed the time by walking around the old City and yes, crossing a few items off one of my myriad lists, but there is supposed to be a purpose to the lists, they are intended to arouse my curiosity and awareness of more elevated modes of living by placing me among scenes which have spawned or inspired or impressed great cultural and historical figures...Oh well. 4. View From the Bell Tower in the Old Church (St Mary's?) in Rye, Looking Over a Field of Sheep in the Direction of the English Channel, Which May or May Not be Faintly Visible in the Distance. Rye is perhaps a little too perfect of a quaint old English town to be perfectly enjoyable--it's very wealthy, has a preponderance of shops selling jam and teapots and such, has no edge, the whole presentation seems stilted--but it was still pretty.

5. Canterbury Cathedral. Worth the trip. I liked Canterbury town too. More lively and stimulatingly laid out than Rye. I think there might be a university of some kind, or perhaps just the cathedral's tony high school. Anyway, there were a lot of vaguely academic-seeming young people around.

6. In the Penthouse Suite in Portsmouth, England. Not right on the strand, but the Channel was only a few blocks away--Can't you smell it? The room is humble but as you can see it was fairly clean by the standards of a cheap English seaside hotel. Portsmouth is more of a city, population of 200,000 or so, and while there is a long promenade with fish and chip shops and the like and a sort of small rocky beach, I didn't notice much sand, at least near where we were. The holiday crowd tended towards the hooligany side but I didn't encounter any difficulties with them, and I actually enjoyed it there. We did see a few things there and then caught the overnight ferry to Le Havre in France (arriving there on Sunday morning as well, which is even deader than Sunday morning in England, and again with no access to cash until after noon).

Pope/Essay on Man--Part 2

This was a picture of a Bourgeois Surrender-type pretty girl (mousy black hair, black long sleeve blouse, scowling expression) drinking from a bottle of Miller High Life at a dingy bar. But I guess I am not going to be allowed to steal it. Pope takes great pains to press his argument for a supernatural power's having organized the animal kingdom in a manner designed to produce the highest good. There is another long excursion into this line of thought in Epistle III:

"Who bade the stork, Columbus-like, explore
Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before?
Who calls the council, states the certain day,
Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?" (ll. 105-8)

Here at least we have the questions prettily put, if angling for answers in a direction that later rigor would find unsatisfactory.

ll. 263-6. On the age of superstition which preceded the Christian era:

"Then sacred seem'd the ethereal vault no more;
Altars grew marble then, and reek'd with gore:
Then first the flamen tasted living food;
Next his grim idol smear'd with human blood..."

A flamen usually refers to a priest of an ancient, presumably false deity, especially Roman. I had to look the word up myself, which is why I note it here.

Epistle IV, ll 127-8. On the immutability of the natural laws recently enunciated by Pope's man Newton:

"When the loose mountain trembles from on high,
Shall gravitation cease if you go by?"

ll. 137-40, on the difference of human opinion:

"One thinks on Calvin Heaven's own spirit fell;
Another deems him instrument of hell;
If Calvin feel Heaven's blessing, or its rod,
This cries, There is, and that, There is no God."

ll. 149-50. It made me laugh:

"'But sometimes virtue starves, while vice is fed.'
What then? is the reward of virtue bread?"

ll. 153-6. An often-forgotten point following up the last one. Note the alpha/beta male comparison used in framing the argument:

"The knave deserves it, when he tempts the main,
Where folly fights for kings, or dives for gain.
The good man may be weak, be indolent;
Nor is his claim to plenty, but content."

ll. 167-9, 173-4. If only I could still believe it:

"What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy,
The soul's calm sunshine, and the heartfelt joy,
Is virtue's prize: a better would you fix?...
Weak foolish man! will Heaven reward us there
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here?"

ll. 219-22:

"Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From Macedonia's madman to the Swede (ed.--Charles XII);
The whole strange purpose of their lives to find
Or make an enemy of all mankind!"

ll 237-8:

"What's fame? A fancied life in others' breath,
A thing beyond us, even before our death."


As I stated in the other posting, I look forward, in a mechanical sort of way, to Pope and other authors of his time even though I don't really study or think about them very earnestly anymore. The early 18th century has become almost a comfort genre for me, like teenager movies of the 1930s and 40s. I still vaguely believe that Pope is good by some standard of goodness--as well as of the significance of that goodness--that was impressed on me years ago and which I cannot yet wholly disavow, though it seems to mean ever less and less in that large part of life that exists outside of my memory. Nonetheless I continue to carry out, mainly now from habit, a form of a persona I once aspired to much and pursued fairly diligently, that of a person knowledgeable about books and European history and culture especially; all of the other models desirable to me seeming at this point even more inaccessible of attainment.

Pope is not one of your universal writers I suppose, though to me he represents an atmosphere through which the English language had the good fortune at one age to pass, especially as my sense of the course of history indicates to me that there was nothing necessitating its taking this particular passage. He has an excellent style, and one that is really not like anyone else's before or since his time, which is a rather remarkable achievement in any language, to say nothing of one with the voluminous literary history that English has. Nonetheless his stature has seemed to be continually in decline, or at least perceived to be in decline, ever since the outbreak of the Romantic era. The internet age, with its love of hard data, and seeming lack of feeling or appreciation for poetic expression, seems especially unlikely to revive the idea of him as any kind of giant. I am beginning to feel more comfortable lately regarding my suspicion (hope?) of the internet's not having a more salutary or improving effect on the intellect compared to reading good books, but the general drift of events does not seem to be towards my position. Pope still endures, albeit in a minor way, such that one isn't sure how many people feel that his poetry has contributed to a meaningful enhancement of their experience of life. I suspect not many, even in comparison to 50 years ago, and this is the main value that literature ancient or modern has to offer. So while I still look forward to Pope, and still can imagine my pleasure in contemplating and sensorially experiencing life enhanced by reading him, I also cannot help but to often suspect that these perceptions of the worlds of life and thought that I have long nourished in this naive and quaintly old-fashioned way are in fact devoid of all living substance and utility, as I have understood them anyway.

Alexander Pope--Essay on Man (1733-4)

Time has softened much of the edge of Pope's misanthropy. We are no more happy among our fellow men than Pope was, but his talent, the beauty of his literary age with its strong, precise sentiments, and the targets of his contempt belong to a remote and particular enough milieu that I usually take a good deal of pleasure in his poetry. The world, as doubtless Pope himself knew, is not even in its delusions so neatly defined and comprehended as it is presented in this poetry. This however is its primary appeal, and the appeal of much classical art of high technical accomplishment, however short of the highest rank among human productions it falls on intellectual grounds. When I read it it takes me back to various of my own previous and now rather fondly remembered mental states, when things like existence, art, history and the like seemed real and comprehensible, which is not a confidence or attitude I have had towards anything in probably 7 or 8 years.

Like most of Pope's work this is good in parts. I found a lot of the metaphysical conceits difficult to decode and follow to their logical conclusion. This is may be because I am too distracted at this point to do so, though it may also be because Pope is not as great of a metaphysician as he is a poet. This is the poem in which he set out to "vindicate the ways of God to man", by the way, for the benefit of anyone who had forgotten. My notes are unfortunately once again very sloppily written, and don't look as if they will be much help to me. There are a lot of great rhymes though that I want to commisserate over with my worldwide network of unknown but sympathetic spirits. Before diving right into the humorous lines, I feel I ought to establish some philosophical context against which to set them. Here then to start are some highly pleasing images of early rationalistic and mathematical-inspired Deism (ll 57-60):

"So man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;
Tis but a part we see, and not a whole."

From this relative seriousness we go right into an examination of man's confusion regarding the potential purposes of various beasts and how that where his own purpose is concerned must be so many times greater (63-66):

"When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,
Is now a victim, and now Egypt's god:
Then shall man's pride and dulness comprehend
His actions', passions', being's use and end..."

I do find these verses and images genuinely clean and pleasing.

ll. 81-2, on the wisdom of God's grand plan:

"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?"

l. 95 is one of the dusty immortals in English poetry's Hall of Fame, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" (its rhyme is "Man never Is, but always To be blest"), which I must confess I had thought was from Shakespeare and did not recognize as Pope's.

ll. 193-4. This is veering on absurdist territory:

"Why has not man a microscopic eye?
For this plain reason, man is not a fly."

This is in section VI of Epistle I which attempts to explain why it would not befit man to have a higher sensitivity to nature. I would have assumed that an improvement in perception would result in a proportionate adjustment of all of the other faculties in league with it, though I suppose experience suggests that increases in intellectual capacity in man actually result in decreases in that of physical attunedness.

ll. 225-8. Epigram for me:

"Remembrance and reflection, how allied;
What thin partitions sense from thought divide;
And middle natures, how they long to join,
Yet never pass the insuperable line!"

ll. 291-2. Not a modern sentiment, though probably essential for a sentient person's achieving any kind of religious acceptance:

"All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good."

Epistle II. My unintelligible note: Time (of history) generally bullish on (ceperites?)/feats(?) of man.

II. 31-34. Pope loves to make Newton references--Remember 'All Nature's secrets lay hidden in night/God said 'let Newton be!' and all was light'?--This one is even more outrageous.

"Superior beings, when of late they saw

A mortal man unfold all Nature's law,

Admired such wisdom in an earthly shape,

And show'd a Newton as we show an ape."

ll. 61-64. On self-love (61) and reason (62):

"Man, but for that, no action could attend,

And, but for this, were active to no end;

Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,

To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot..."

Much like Crabbe's "The Village", Epistle II is not as strong as Epistle I, and indeed Epistle I is the only part of the poem reprinted in most anthologies. The ideas are not as clear and generally weaker throughout the rest of the poem.

221-224: "But where the extreme of vice, was ne'er agreed:

Ask where's the north? at York, 'tis on the Tweed;

In Scotland at the Orcades; and there,

at Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where."

261-262. I don't know that everyone finds his bliss:

"Whate'er the passion, knowledge, fame, or pelf,

Not one will change his neighbor with himself."

Epistle III now, ll. 27-30. More comedy:

"Has God, thou fool! work'd solely for thy good,

Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?

Who for thy table feeds the wanton fawn,

For him as kindly spread the flowery lawn..."

43-44. More absurdity:

"Know, Nature's children shall divide her care;

The fur that warms a monarch warm'd a bear."

65-70. The animal rights advocates would take issue with Pope's argument that even though many animals end up as men's dinner, they are in fact treated little less beneficently than men by God:

"Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast,

And, till he ends the being, makes it bless'd;

Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain.

Than favour'd man by touch ethereal slain.

The creature had his feast of life before;

Thou too must perish when thy feast is o'er!"

He is straining to make this case, methinks, even before you factor in the necessity of shaping it into heroic couplets.

Maybe I'll do one more short post on this. I only have a few more quotations, but I want to try some kind of essay vaguely related to the various subjects suggested by this particular book.

Ambrose Philips--First Pastoral (1709)

Samuel Johnson, when given the task of writing the life of Ambrose Philips, dispatched of the subject--and dispatched is definitely the operative word--in eight pages. Of the Pastorals, he says they "might have long passed as a pleasing amusement, had they not been unhappily too much commended"; of Philips's career as a whole, that "he has added nothing to English poetry, yet at least half his book deserves to be read." Philips was friends with and of the same (Whig) political faction, passions being especially feverish at the time on both sides, as Addison and Steele, who praised and promoted his literary efforts in the Spectator and other of their papers. From around 1709-13 he was "high in the ranks of literature. His play (The Distressed Mother, "almost a translation of Racine's Andromaque") was applauded; his translations from Sappho had been published in The Spectator; he was an important and distinguished associate of clubs witty and political...", and for a time the mortal archenemy of the then very young and brash Pope. His fame faded quickly. He brought out a couple of tragedies in 1722, The Briton and Humphry Duke of Gloucester, the first of which, Johnson wrote in 1778-9, was "now neglected" and the second "only remembered by its title." In 1726 Philips took a position as Secretary to Lord Chancellor in Ireland, and went on to be a Prerogative Judge and an MP for Ireland--all patronage jobs, of course, before returning to his native country a year before he died of a palsy at age 74 in 1749. He does not seem to have added much substantial writing to his corpus during the last 27 years of his life.

Picture 1. There are no pictures of Ambrose Philips in circulation on the internet that I can find. A search for his name turns up these girls, among other unrelated things. I have a tendency to linger sometimes over the biographical details of such writers as I come across who once had a name and for a time a not insignificant place among the leading lights of their day, but had already faded into near total obscurity in the consciousness of the world long before they died. That I have read Philips's short book--the whole poem is about 20 pages long--myself is a matter of mere dumb luck. There is a passage from the poem in the GRE book which I take my reading list from which is not identified--the purpose of the question is to identify what type of poem the various selections are, lyric, elegiac, pastoral, etc. If it weren't for the internet, which the book I use predates, I would never have found out where it was from, and indeed, could not have read it, for I have never seen a copy of it in print anywhere, and the copy which is reproduced online looks to be the edition which Johnson wrote the prefaces for (I would link to it, but the URL is the length of a city block). While it is a much abused work, and probably not really worth reading unless you are undergoing a kind of lifelong graduate program in English literature, I liked it. To read it is not to get an especially vivid picture of a singular personality, or even of an historical period, but it does help to fill in one's sense of what the background was like, and against and out of which the striking literature and historical movements of the time arose.

A small selection of my favorite lines:

45-6: "The jolly grooms I fly, and all alone/To rocks and woods pour forth my fruitless moan"

73-76: "Nor will I cease betimes to cull the fields
Of every dewy sweet the morning yields:
From early spring to autumn late shalt thou
Receive gay girlonds, blooming o'er thy brow."
In Facebook parlance, I noted that I liked this.

53-4, we get the usual stuff of the genre, though the forgiving reader welcomes it as an old acquaintance so long as it is one he only has to come across once in a while:

"Thy virgin-bloom will not forever stay,
And flowers, though left ungather'd, will decay..."

A couple I found humorous:

23-6: "And now the moon begins in clouds to rise;
The brightening stars increase within the skies;
The winds are hush; the dews distil; and sleep
Hath clos'd the eyelids of my weary sheep..."

105-8: "O, killing beauty! and O, sore desire!
Must then my sufferings, but with life, expire?
Though blossoms every year the trees adorn,
Spring after spring I wither, nipt with scorn..."

A little of this is rather pleasant in small doses, with one's ice cream or snifter of brandy before bed.

Picture 2. This is the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street in Mayfair, London, where Philips was, and I presume still is, buried, though you never know (Laurence Sterne's grave, for example, was relocated in the late 1960s when they paved over the cemetery where he had orignally been laid). I haven't been there, but either the angle is good or that is one nice-looking street for modern-day London.

In the competitive and manly world of 18th century English poetry, Philips was given the appellation of "Namby-Pamby" for the apparent low levels of testosterone that fueled most of his work, especially his lighter verses. The bestower of this appellation most scholars believe now to be Henry Carey, a work of whose we will be getting to ourselves very shortly. Johnson seemed to think it originated from Pope, or his circle. Pope, you will recall, was around 4 foot 8 and a very fragile 90 pounds or so at his most robust, but the vitriol he was capable of extending towards his rivals certainly belied this apparent disadvantage. Philips, while an inferior poet, at least did not suffer these insults like a wuss. Johnson notes that "Of his personal character all I have heard is, that he was eminent for bravery and skill in the sword, and that in conversation he was solemn and pompous". Oh, and he "hung up a rod at Button's (presumably a coffeehouse), with which he threatened to chastise Pope." Pope then called him a rascal in print. Time, however, has rendered these once raging animosities rather quaint. It is true though, in most fields, that it is a good sign of health when the most prominent people in it are dissing their rivals incautiously and giving them derogatory nicknames. The most prominent ornery person in this regard on the comptemporary scene is probably the critic William Logan, but one doesn't even see him threatening to club Billy Collins outside of Fitzgerald's pub or wherever the poets go nowadays. There are a lot of angry contemporary poets, it is true ("I long to murder the anonymous white male sitting beside me"), but their open anger at least seems to be directed out towards society and the anonymous inchoate masses rather than towards each other--one can't alienate one's network for grants, awards, teaching posts, fellowships, and the like, I suppose.

"Men sometimes suffer by injudicious kindness; Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends, who decorated him with honorary garlands, with the first breath of contradiction blasted." (Johnson again).

I do owe this to my friends, that if I make myself ridiculous it is entirely my own doing. They have no part in it whatsoever.