Thirty-Seven Words

While reading the chapter about the late plays in Shakespeare the Thinker, by A.D. Nuttall, I came upon one of the loveliest poems in the language, a funeral song, a mere six lines long, 37 words, from a tragedy masquerading as a comedy, or is it the other way around? The song goes on for three more stanzas, but I always think of the first as a self-contained poetic unit. Here is Cymbeline, Act IV, Scene 2, lines 258-263:

“Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun.
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

Nuttall, too, loves the poem, and permits himself a digression from the scholarly to the personal:

“I first heard these lines when I was about eight years old. They ravished me at once and have haunted me ever since. I knew nothing about Shakespeare. I suppose that if today someone were to ask me, `What is the finest lyric poem in the English language?’ I would point to this. And yet I do not understand the lines. Why `chimney-sweepers?’ It has been suggested that this is an old-fashioned word for dandelions. I hope this explanation is wrong.”

Nutall goes on to explain why he judges the dandelion explanation wrong, but read his book, pages 337-338 for details. I’m convinced the chimney-sweepers represent flowers, in part because that explanation was my introduction to the poem and the play it’s drawn from. In 1971, I was a college sophomore and had already read most of Shakespeare but not Cymbeline, or The Winter’s Tale. That year, as soon as it was published, I read The Pound Era, by Hugh Kenner. It remains one of the great books published in my lifetime, essential to my ongoing education, and one of its minor accomplishments was to introduce me to Cymbeline and the funeral song. In the chapter titled “Words Set Free,” Kenner writes:

“As language changes something happens to old poems, the range of whose words changes...How do words found in 1611 stir us now?”

After quoting the poem, he continues:

“`Golden lads’: fine words to caress our post-Symbolist sensibilities. English lads, perhaps, with yellow hair; `golden,’ because once precious when they lived; `golden,’ touched with the nobility and permanence of gold (that royal metal, colored like a cold sun, in which wages are paid), as now, gone home, they receive the wages of immortality; `golden,’ in contrast to `dust’: a contrast of color, a contrast of substantiality, a contrast of two immemorial symbols, at once Christian and pagan: the dust to which all sons of Adam return, the gold by which human vitality braves time…”

And so on for six more lines of ingenious explication, before this:

“Yet a good guess at how he [Shakespeare] found it [`golden’] is feasible, for in the mid- 20th century a visitor to Shakespeare’s Warwickshire met a countryman blowing the grey head off a dandelion: `We call these golden boy chimney-sweepers when they go to seed.’”

In his notes, Kenner identifies the visitor as William Arrowsmith, the scholar-poet-translator, who reported the story to Guy Davenport, who reported it to Kenner. I number Davenport and Kenner among my reading teachers, supplementing the work my first-grade teacher, Miss McClain, started in 1958, at Pearl Road Elementary School. Reading, if it amounts to more than a mere decoding of signs on a page, is a species of communion with the world, permitting us to enter conversations that started centuries ago. Another voice in that conversation is Samuel Johnson, who had harsh things to say about Cymbeline but glossed the final couplet of the funeral song like this:

“All human excellence is equally subject to the stroke of death.”