'Our Whole Life Is an Irish Sea'

Because of something I wrote, an old friend tells me he is reading at last, in his seventies, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton’s prose compendium of marvels. There’s a category of books with little in common except their uncommon eccentricity – Montaigne, Browne, Sterne, Boswell, Landor and Doughty wrote them too. They’re not for everyone, not even every ambitious reader, but for some sensibilities, those that relish a lifetime of autodidactically acquired knowledge, they stand among the great rewards of the reading life. Burton is scholarly but never blandly academic. After four centuries, a person could build a respectable education around The Anatomy. 

It was fifty-six years ago next month, as a university freshman, that I discovered Burton on the library shelf. I don’t know what attracted me to this fat volume dense with interpolated quotations, many in Latin. I don’t think I had ever heard its title or author’s name. Soon I had to buy a copy of my own. It's the Platonic ideal of a family of books Max Beerbohm dubbed “Bedside books. Dippable-into.” Pick them up at any idle moment and enjoy.

 

We know the book grew by accretion, like a coral reef or a galaxy. The first edition contained 353,369 words.  In each subsequent edition, Burton added more material. The sixth, published posthumously in 1651, with corrections and additions made before his death, contained 516,384 words. Burton’s prose, to use a word he favored, is anfractuous: “winding, sinuous, involved; roundabout, circuitous; spiral,” according to the OED, which cites Burton’s usage as the earliest in the language. His prose mirrors his mind, which was curious and accumulative. He loved catalogs and redundancy never bothered him. A characteristic passage begins, “Our whole life is an Irish sea, wherein there is nought to be expected but tempestuous storms and troublesome waves, and those infinite,” and continues:

 

“[W]e bangle away our best days, befool out our times, we lead a contentious, discontent, tumultuous, melancholy, miserable life; insomuch, that if we could foretell what was to come, and it put to our choice, we should rather refuse than accept of this painful life. In a word, the world itself is a maze, a labyrinth of errors, a desert, a wilderness, a den of thieves, cheaters, &c., full of filthy puddles, horrid rocks, precipitiums, an ocean of adversity, an heavy yoke, wherein infirmities and calamities overtake, and follow one another, as the sea waves; and if we scape Scylla, we fall foul on Charybdis, and so in perpetual fear, labour, anguish, we run from one plague, one mischief, one burden to another . . .”

 

I quote at length to give you a taste of the way Burton’s brain works. It’s helpful to remember that he chose Democritus Junior as his persona in homage to the Laughing Philosopher. Mike, enjoy Burton’s grab-bag of gifts.

'Consulting Other Understandings'

Dr. Johnson in The Adventurer on August 28, 1753:

“. . . I shall, therefore, venture to inculcate to my ingenious contemporaries, the necessity of reading, the fitness of consulting other understandings than their own, and of considering the sentiments and opinions of those who, however neglected in the present age, had in their own times, and many of them a long time afterwards, such reputation for knowledge and acuteness as will scarcely ever be attained by those that despise them.”

 

Not all our forebears were idiots or barbarians. This will come as news to those trained in detesting Western civilization, one byproduct of which is mass literacy. Johnson is writing at a time when printing was becoming widely available. Books and newspapers flourished. Even then there were naysayers. Johnson writes:

 

“An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.”

 

Johnson uses “lumber” in the earlier sense of “useless or cumbrous material” (OED). As Alexander Pope writes in “An Essay on Criticism” (1711): “The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, / With loads of learned lumber in his head.” For a sense of how Johnson, even as a young man, used books, see W. Jackson Bate’s biography:

 

“Balked by the school procedure from reading either for substance or even for style in any genuine sense, his immense curiosity found outlet in independent dipping into books and skimming them. And his habit of instantly ‘relating’ one thing to another, which Mrs. Thrale rightly thought one of the secrets of his mental superiority, enabled him to get a point quickly, to see its ramifications, and to anchor it to a growing corpus of general thought that was imaginatively and fertilely alive.”

 

Only by reading can we learn from the past – “other understandings” -- and avoid the folly of “presentism” and blinkered self-reliance. In his essay “On the Death and Consolations of Reading,” Theodore Dalrymple reminds us that the equation Reading many books = Moral enlightenment is false and dangerous:

 

“But are books necessary to moral development? We may dismiss their sufficiency in this regard straight away; no one would expect the person who had read 100 books to be necessarily twice as good, or even only slightly better, than someone who has read 50. Indeed, reading the wrong books can probably make you worse than you would otherwise have been; nor does it follow from the fact that books can make you worse that they must also be able to make you better. It is easier to corrupt than to correct.”

'What Form So Much Thought Unfolds'

Weeds I can’t name crowd the front garden, adding to the lushness of our greenery. In Houston, if you’re not picky, gardens grow themselves, without our assistance. Windborne seeds take care of the job. Of course, most of us are botanical snobs, imposing a hard Manichean judgment on plants: flowers, good; weeds, bad. Chesterton loved weeds. In the final chapter of his Autobiography he writes: 

“[W]hat I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed.”

 

I wouldn’t go that far but I get it. The center of our garden we’ve conceded to the weeds. Maryann Corbett tells us the Venerable Bede noted that the ancient Anglo-Saxons gave August the name weodmonath, “month of weeds,” which makes perfect sense. Corbett includes a photo of a monarch caterpillar on a milkweed leaf, their favored food source. At the center of our weed patch is a tall cluster of milkweed, the species known locally as butterfly weed, Ascelapias tuberosa, which sounds like the name of one of the minor Roman emperors. We didn’t plant them but we’re pleased they attract monarch butterflies.

 

I often find their chrysalises hanging from plants throughout the garden. It occurs to me that each stage of the monarch’s life cycle is beautiful -- egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, adult – and each is radically different from the others. I take this as a reminder that many things in nature have appearances serving some evolutionary advantage while granting us the gift of seemingly gratuitous beauty. In her poem “Butterfly Unit,” Corbett memorably describes monarch caterpillars:

 

“On fat leaves, Danainae

bug-adolescents

 

“hunch, gorging, brainless

motor-mouths on sixteen legs”

 

The monarch is Danaus plexippus and belongs to the subfamily of butterflies Danainae. Corbett memorably describes the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis:

 

“Clown-clad and ridiculous,

writhing their own rules,

 

“in the end they close

off all contact, lacquered to

one long, studied pose—

 

“held, the way one holds

breath, waiting to see what form

so much thought unfolds.”

 

All thanks to weeds. I like Louise Bogan’s endorsement of weeds in “The Sudden Marigolds” (A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan, 2005):

 

“What was the matter with me, that daisies and buttercups made hardly any impression at all. . . . As a matter of fact, it was weeds that I felt closest to and happiest about; and there were more flowering weeds, in those days, than flowers in gardens. . . . Yes: weeds: jill-over-the-ground and tansy and the exquisite chicory (in the terrains vagues) and a few wild flowers: lady’s slipper and the arbutus my mother showed me how to find, under the snow, as far back as Norwich. Solomon’s seal and Indian pipe. Ferns. Apple blossoms.”

'That ’Twas Wonderful to See'

Here’s a book I haven’t read in some sixty years: Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His ‘Little Animals’ by Clifford Dobell, published in 1932 by Harcourt, Brace and Co. Reading it was the product of childhood obsessions colliding: biographies and microscopes. In some volume of potted lives I learned of Van Leeuwenhoek’s pioneering contributions to microscopy and microbiology. I remember reading that he was likely to have been the first person in history to have examined his own blood using a microscope. I was given a microscope for my twelfth birthday and looked at almost anything under its lenses: a butterfly wing, dirt from under my fingernails, creek water, cottage cheese and, yes, my own blood. 

I remember Dobell’s book being the kind I like, filled with interesting tidbits of information, the sort of thing some will describe as “trivia.” For instance, Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to suggest that motility – OED: “the power of active movement” -- is indicative of life. The microscopic “animalcules” he observed could move, therefore they were living things. Dobell writes: “Leeuwenhoek’s observations on the free-living Protozoa probably began with his discovery of certain ‘very little animalcules’ which he saw in fresh water in the year 1674.” Then he quotes from a letter the Dutchman sent from Delft to the Royal Society in London. There’s a childlike excitement in Van Leeuwenhoek’s observations that I find charming. I’ll quote some at length:

 

“[A]mong these there were, besides, very many little animalcules, whereof some were roundish, while others, a bit bigger, consisted of an oval. On these last I saw two little legs near the head, and two little fins at the hindmost end of the body. Others were somewhat longer than an oval, and these were very slow a-moving, and few in number. These animalcules had divers colours, some being whitish and transparent; others with green and very glittering little scales; others again were green in the middle, and before and behind white; others yet were ashen grey. And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various, upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see: and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I, have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.”

 

I see Dobell dedicated his book to two writers I would come to read years later: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of On Growth and Form (1917), discovered thanks to Hugh Kenner, and Paul de Kruif, author of Microbe Hunters (1926). In No End in Strangeness: New and Selected Poems (Cormorant Books, 2011), the Canadian poet Bruce Taylor includes a ten-page poem, “Little Animals,” a lyric with the narrative drive of a good short story and the free-wheeling discursiveness of an essay or one of those marvelous prose curiosities from Van Leeuwenhoek’s seventeenth century – Religio Medici or The Anatomy of Melancholy. Looking through his microscope at the roiling ocean of life in a drop of water from the pond, Taylor writes:

 

“And there is no end to them,

no end in numbers,

and no end in strangeness,

no end to their appetites, and all of it

exactly as van Leeuwenhoek

described it to us all those years ago,

when he, being the first to look

became the first to see

that what the wise men said was wrong,

what gnaws at our lapsed and sinful

world is not death at all,

the old machinework mannequin

swinging his scythe, he is not there.”

 

Taylor’s poem is, among other things, a hymn to reading. He gives “Little Animals” an epigraph from Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”: “On bokes for to rede I me delyt.”

 

Van Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 (the same year as another Dutch lens grinder, Baruch Spinoza) and died on this date, August 26, in 1723.

'Again, Great Season'

Like the rest of us, poets often favor certain times of the year. They return to a season or month they find thematically or emotionally rich. Keats, obviously, was an autumn man. Winter I associate with Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. Howard Nemerov sub-specialized in autumn blurring into winter. In the North, that signifies October, with early echoes, some years, in September. At that time, out in the fields, the golden rod is tall and turning brown. The goldfinches are busy harvesting thistle seeds. The asters grow dense and bend to the ground. They will survive until after the first snow. I can remember snow falling on my birthday, October 26, when I was a kid in Cleveland. Here is Nemerov’s “Again” (The Western Approaches, 1975): 

“Again, great season, sing it through again

Before we fall asleep, sing the slow change

That makes October burn out red and gold

And color bleed into the world and die,

And butterflies among the fluttering leaves

Disguise themselves until the few last leaves

Spin to the ground or to the skimming streams

That carry them along until they sink,

And through the muted land, the nevergreen

Needles and mull and duff of the forest floor,

The wind go ashen, till one afternoon

The cold snow cloud comes down the intervale

Above the river on whose slow black flood

The few first flakes come hurrying in to drown.”

 

A single long sentence across fourteen lines, moving like the season itself, inexorably. In Texas, I miss the drama of seasonal change. Here it’s still high summer, near one-hundred degrees every day. This could last for months. Nemerov’s theme is change, nature’s perpetual self-renewal.

 

Duff is Homer Simpson’s beer of choice, a common surname and Arabic for “drum,” but the OED gives seven definitions -- four nouns, an adjective, two verbs – from “dough, paste” to “the buttocks, the backside” (as in “Get off your duff”). “Up the duff,” we learn, means “pregnant,” and “duff” in golf means “to perform (a shot) badly” (thus, “duffer”). Best of all, “duff” is the stuff on the ground in a forest, decaying leaves, needles, branches and bark, midway between living biomass and soil. This is Nemerov’s sense. Richard Wilbur uses it this way in “To Ishtar”:

 

“It is all we can do to witness

The waste motions of empty trees,

The joyless tittering duff, the grass-mats

Blanched and scurfy with ice.”

 

Here is another of Howard Nemerov’s poems dedicated to change and the arrival of his favorite time of year, “The Crossing” (Gnomes and Occasions, 1973):

 

“September, and the butterflies are drifting

Across the sky again, the monarchs in

Their myriads, delicate lenses for the light

To fall through and be mandarin-transformed.

 

“I guess they are flying southward, or anyhow

That seems to be the average of their drift,

Though what you mostly see is a random light

Meandering, a Brownian movement to the wind,

 

“Which is one of Nature's ways of getting it done,

Whatever it may be, the rise of hills

And settling of seas, the fall of leaf

Across the shoulder of the northern world,

 

“The snowflakes one by one that silt the field . . .

All that's preparing now behind the scene,

As the ecliptic and equator cross,

Through which the light butterflies are flying.”

'Much to Enjoy and Admire'

I think we both sensed it might be our final conversation. We talked about the Cleveland we knew as kids – the main library downtown on Superior Avenue, Kay’s Books over on Prospect, a bar called Hernando’s Hideaway on Chester by the Greyhound station, Grabowski’s Music Studio where Ken started playing clarinet at age seven. And our Uncle Harry who, back in the Sixties, had wired his pickup truck for sound so, from blocks away, we heard him blasting polka music. And our cousin Lenny who had an electric guitar, though the only tune he knew how to play was the Twilight Zone theme. In retrospect, I see that what these random things had in common was some degree of amusement. No resentments or regrets. We weren’t recalling the miseries, painful and trifling. This wasn’t a conscious strategy. We shared the memories that bubbled to the surface. 

Sitting beside his bed in hospice, something moved me to bring up Montaigne, author of essays that are of central importance to me. Ken had never read the Frenchman. I spoke from memory, mostly half-remembering one of the early essays, “That our happiness must not be judged until after our death”:

 

“There are gallant and fortunate deaths. I have seen death bring a wonderfully brilliant career, and that in its flower, to such a splendid end that in my opinion the dead man’s ambitions and courageous designs had nothing so lofty about them as their interruption. He arrived where he aspired to without going there, more grandly and gloriously than he had desired or hoped. And by his fall he went beyond the power and the fame to which he had aspired by his career.”

Ken died in hospice on August 24, 2024. He had stopped talking several days earlier and entered a blank, frozen, apparently painless state. His son and I played music for him. Donald Frame writes in his biography of the great essayist: “Montaigne finds much to enjoy and admire wherever he goes.”

[The Montaigne passage is from Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957). He is author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]

'Nothing is Redundant, Nothing Wanting'

In 1950, the poet J.V. Cunningham translated from the French a work by the seventeenth-century Jansenist Pierre Nicole, “An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in Which From Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams.” The essay originally served as the introduction to an anthology, Epigrammatum delectus (1659), intended for use in classrooms. It omitted some poems by such epigrammatic masters as Martial and Catullus because they were “quite filthy and obscene,” Cunningham tells us in his introduction. He continues:

 “Young people are led by curiosity to read these, and losing all chastity of mind enter upon a progressive corruption of life. It would be best if they could be kept wholly from such books; but there is a good deal in them of genuine profit and literary merit, which makes it difficult to keep them wholly out of the hands of youth.”

 

We sense Cunningham, an epigrammatic descendent of Jonson and Landor, and translator of Martial and Catullus, is having a good time here. His own epigrams could be rather salty, as in “Epitaph for Someone or Other”:

 

“Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,

And naked was my pastime in between.”

 

And “The Lights of Love”:

 

“The ladies in my life, serially sexed,

Unscrew one lover and screw in the next.”

 

Epigram is from the Greek epigramma, “inscription,” from a related verb meaning “to write on, inscribe.” For the Greeks, epigrams started as brief verses written on votive offerings or monuments to the dead. The epigram’s appeal, for this reader, is terseness and wit. It means something and is about something -- rare qualities in poetry today.

 

Another gifted epigrammist, R.L. Barth, republished Nicole’s essay in Cunningham’s forty-four-page translation, with notes, in 1997. Bob and Cunningham would concur with this passage near the conclusion of Nicole’s essay:

 

 “[O]f all the special capabilities of the epigram none is more difficult to realise or more rarely achieved than the adroit handling, the suitable and easy unfolding, of the subject so that nothing is redundant, nothing wanting, nothing out of order, obscure, or tangled up in verbiage, and yet at the same time nothing too unexpected, nothing not adequately prepared for. Martial is pre-eminent in this; he develops his subjects so aptly, clearly, and perceptively that he obtains for ideas of no special note otherwise a good deal of distinction by the charm of the handling.”

 

Cunningham translated Martial’s 4.33:

 

“You write, you tell me, for posterity.

May you be read, my friend, immediately.”

 

Here is Barth’s version of the same epigram:

 

“Your manuscripts are stacked, bookcases groan,

And yet you’ve published nothing of your own.

‘My heirs will publish . . .’ What? After you’re dead?

Sosibianus, it’s past time you’re read.”

 

Cunningham was born on this date, August 23, in 1911, and died in 1985 at age seventy-three.

 

[The books to get are The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, ed. Timothy Steele, 1997) and The Complete Essays of J.V. Cunningham, Wiseblood Books, 2024). Barth’s versions of Martial are collected in Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]