Had to post this old favourite.... NO, there is no subtext to the posting of it.... NOTE: Odd-numbered lines should read as they are; even numbered lines should be indented, but HTML always erases tabs and extra spaces. Grr. Or *I* don't know how to keep HTML from simply sliding indentations back. If anyone knows a way that isn't overly laborious, I'd appreciate learning how. ;-)

The Fornicator. A New Song

Ye jovial boys who love the joys,
The blissful joys of Lovers;
Yet dare avow with dauntless brow,
When th' bony lass discovers;
I pray draw near and lend an ear,
And welcome in a Frater,
For I've lately been on quarantine,
A proven Fornicator.

Before the Congregation wide
I pass'd the muster fairly,
My handsome Betsey by my side,
We gat our ditty rarely;
But my downcast eye by chance did spy
What made my lips to water,
Those limbs so clean where I, between,
Commenc'd a Fornicator.

With rueful face and signs of grace
I pay'd the buttock-hire,
The night was dark and thro' the park
I could not but convoy her;
A parting kiss, what could I less,
My vows began to scatter,
My Betsey fell -- lal de dal la lal
I am a Fornicator.

But for her sake this vow I make,
And solemnly I swear it,
That while I own a single crown,
She's welcome for to share it;
And my roguish boy his Mother's joy,
And the darling of his Pater,
For I boast my pains and cost,
Although a Fornicator.

Ye wenching blades whose hireling jades
Have tipt you off blue-boram,
I tell ye plain, I do disdain
To rank you in the Quorum;
But a bony lass upon the grass
To teach her esse Master,
And no reward but for regard,
O that's a Fornicator.

Your warlike Kings and Heros bold,
Great Captains and Commanders;
Your might Cesars fam'd of old,
And Conquering Alexanders;
In fields they fought and laurels bought
And bulwarks strong did batter,
But still they grac'd our noble list
And ranked Fornicator!!!

--- Robert Burns (1785)

Probably Not of Interest: Old Notes On John Dryden to RK: Here for archive purposes only.

Also: Wanted to archive these notes on Dryden before they disappear permanently from the Net, b/c I don't think I have my own copy of them anywhere. They were written in response to some notes made by RK on Dryden.

"Just happened to read your blog on the idea of order. Quite good. Got me thinking, though, that one of the particular strengths to reading Dryden is his ability to coalesce the reasonable and orderly with the emotionally-aware, evidenced so clearly in the romantic clarity of All For Love, and in his ultimate preference for Shakespeare over the more rationally obedient writers (like, say, Ben Jonson). I think, in a way, this ability to coalesce those two 'pulls,' for want of a better word, may be (in part) why he was able to perfect the heroic couplet as well as he did-- and, indeed, better than just about anyone after, including Pope. Admittedly, much of his writing is of the intellectual sphere (primarily the satires, but elsewhere, of course), but that emotional sense always remains, and that sense is often manifest in the resonance of his rhymes. I think, for example, of the closing lines of "Song for St Cecilia's Day," with its "And in that last and dreadful hour / This crumbling pageant shall devour," and the triplet, "The Trumpet shall be heard on high / The dead shall live, the living die, / And Musick shall untune the sky." The completeness of the rhymes-- that is, the evasion of half-rhymes, the solid choice of sounds like 'our' and 'aye'--- manages a double task, of technical matching (and careful ordering) as well as achieving a rousing use of metrical structures. This is not of the 'forced' rhyme ilk, and the simplicity of the language ensures an emphasis on the rhythmical bases. This all sounds kind of airy-fairy, I know. But it's rather as if there's an emotional crescendo building, first in the turning of hour to de-vour (with that 'v' sound upping the verbal ante), and the following triplet capitalizing on the rhythm building. I'd also note, here, the beautiful mixing of directions: high/die/sky does rather an effective job of sending our poetic eyes inclining (high) then declining (die) then ascending once again, on the fixating image of the sky. Dryden manages to escape the tendency toward turgidity that often goes with rhyme, in part because his verse is aware of ordering sensibilities but is not desensitized by them.

It's pretty easy to see what so attracted Eliot to Dryden-- the clarity of language and poetic structure, but also the freedom from the binary pulls of the overly-rational and the emotionally slithering. A key word for this is 'untune,' a negative of an otherwise simple word which otherwise links up nicely with other key words in the poem (c.f., 'from harmony to heavenly harmony'), but which neither overstates nor understates the situation: in describing an otherwise apocalyptic moment, he uses deliberately unapocalyptic language, giving the final action of the poem to a metaphor of music, even if that metaphor is collusion of the apocalyptic and the harmonic. And yet the metaphor is decisive rather than querulous, and that adds to the solidity of the image: it functions so effectively because it unites the rational with the imaginative, without subsuming one to the other, and without investing too much in the symbol entire. That decisiveness -- or certainty, or whatever one chooses to call it-- seems reflective of a unified mind, not just in relation to the image described, but of poetic technique. All in all, those lines strike me as a kind of poetic masterstroke which few others mastered. I also wonder if Eliot would consider Dryden a practitioner of 'objective correlativity,' though I think the 'untuning' example I mentioned above would have caught praise from Eliot. So hard to find decent editions of Homage to JD these days....

This is all, of course, highly ironic, given Dryden's own internal divisions (his conversion, his dumping by the government, his final years lived in relative poverty). Dryden, I'm fairly sure, would have grown increasingly awkward with trusting patterns and impulses of order, though he'd certainly not have been a champion of emotionalism or an outright challenger of order, whoever was in charge. The poet, ultimately, is a verbal musician, a comparison appropriate too (in part) to his work for the stage, as mixed as that often was, especially as the years passed. And poetry, like music, was inevitably conceived as a fusion of emotional sensibilities with highly technical structures, whether metrical, lexical, rhetorical, or whatever. Dryden, more than he's now credited for doing, negotiated how that fusion could be done within a 17th century context. And it often seems that Dryden, at his best, could build emotional momentum, and then constrict it, and then open it up again, and then constrict it again, depending on the needs of any given poem or play. Just when order seems to become a burden, he tends toward the emotional; just when the emotional or the extra-rational seems to become a burden, he tends toward the rational; and the pulls react in relation to one another, and the result is a kind of 'measure for measure.' Even in the more intellect-driven verses like the satires, when allegorical references may seem to those of our age drawn for rational purposes, the carefully-reasoned choices for analogues (esp. in Absalom) are, or were, emotionally effective, and the two compulsions work in tandem with one another. Reading Dryden (again, at his best) is rather like watching a champion skier crest down a slope. Like any poet, he doesn't always accomplish the slope as well he would like, or as we watching would like.

I'm inclined to think of Dryden as a poet-- in Wallace Stevens' terms-- struggling to order words of the sea, 'the blessed rage for order.' But rage is an emotion (or an emotional action) and order is an abstract idea (or an action to make of things that exist to approximate that idea). And for Dryden, the impulse toward order is dominant, or more prominent, but the emotional impulse is always at work, and given a more significant place than in a lot of writing of the time. It makes me wonder how much Dryden's poetics was a result of watching the aftermaths of division and capriciousness and volatility; it also makes me wonder how much he came to see order as a self-legitimizing concept, especially in the wake of the battles for the governance of England. I wonder, too, how much Dryden learned, or tried to learn, from Milton's experiences with the above. Dryden may not have possessed Milton's sense of 'fire' or 'poetic rage' or 'righteousness,' but he was certainly not the emotionally-bankrupt, super-rational rhymester (and dead white guy) that recent criticism tends to suggest.

Or that's my current thinking, which may just be bunk, or which I might discard when I can look again at Dryden, all of my copies of whom still remain in my office since the poetry comp. Dryden was obviously not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, but he was certainly not given to the unidimensionality of which he is often unfairly criticized. Someone once described Wallace Stevens as a 'real' poet-- highly Romantic as he was (despite his Modernism), he was a man who worked during the day, and kept poetry for his own time, and who didn't lean on the image of the Byronic suffering poet. He felt, but he organized and dealt with emotions in a manner that was 'professional,' and, in some fashion, orderly. Dryden, I suspect, was of a similar ilk, 250 years prior, except for Dryden writing was his profession.

D represented passions, indeed, as well as anyone could expect in the same days as Nahum Tate. D was tidy but not a desperate maker of order, as Tate most certainly was. And D's attempts for a tidying of emotions within the capacities and possibilities of the rational and logical were more genuine attempts to grapple with the difficulty of that situation. All of this suggests to me why D is a much greater poet than he's now given credit for being. Or, again, I may be entirely off my rocker. Alas, to have the experience to flesh out thoughts on Dryden.... "