'Sound Well and Go Well When Spoken'

I used to think that everyone knew it -- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” -- the same way everyone knew “And what is so rare as a day in June?” and “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.” Of the three, only the second, from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal,” was memorized as a school assignment, in eighth grade English. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Tennyson were absorbed by osmosis. I don’t remember consciously memorizing those poems, the way I would lines by T.S. Eliot and Allen Tate, but they stick even after sixty years. 

I’m remembering Browning rather guiltily because June 29 is the anniversary of her death in 1861 and I know little of her work apart from #43 in Sonnets from the Portuguese:

 

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.”

 

Her sonnets, especially #43 (safely out of copyright), were stitched on pillows, printed in greeting cards and in little booklets with sequins and sewn-in bookmarks. Truly, I’m not making fun of such things. They recall a less cynical time, when a young man could declare his love for a woman, and vice versa, with poetry. Browning’s sonnet is conversational. Nothing in it would strain recitation. The only archaism is the repetition of “thee,” but it works. Most of the poem consists of monosyllables. I can pull out this poem while out for a walk or doing my exercises in PT.

 

I’m reminded of what Kingsley Amis wrote in his introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter, the anthology he edited in 1978. He wished to include “poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style, a style very far indeed removed from any of those to be found at that (alas!) characteristically twentieth-century occasion, the poetry recital, with all its exhibitionism and sheer bad art.”

 

In tribute to Browning, here is her “Love”:

 

“We cannot live, except thus mutually

We alternate, aware or unaware,

The reflex act of life: and when we bear

Our virtue onward most impulsively,

Most full of invocation, and to be

Most instantly compellant, certes, there

We live most life, whoever breathes most air

And counts his dying years by sun and sea.

But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth

Throw out her full force on another soul,

The conscience and the concentration both

Make mere life, Love. For Life in perfect whole

And aim consummated, is Love in sooth,

As nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole.”

'A Terrible Thing, Time, Nevertheless'

“With all his gifts, he had of imagination not one spark. Fancy and wit he had in his earlier work; and grace he never lost; but for the rest he had only an immense quantity of that ‘cleverness’ which to the creative artist is of all qualities the most repellent.” 

Let’s thank Max Beerbohm who, like an entomologist identifying a previously unknown species of mosquito, renders the definitive description of a familiar literary type. The merely clever writer, skating across the surface of life, lives for immediate gratification. The reader snorts in appreciation and shares the gag with his spouse, who smiles politely. Beerbohm is writing in 1928 about a once-prominent critic and collector of fairy tales, Andrew Lang, who died in 1912. Today, a clever writer is Billy Collins or many associated with The New Yorker. None is evil, nor was Lang, but the satisfactions they offer, if any, are fleeting.  

 

In “A Very Critical Gentleman,” published in the June 1928 issue of Vanity Fair, Beerbohm describes his two meetings with Lang. The first, at Edward Gosse’s house in 1896, occurred shortly after he published his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm. With Lang safely dead, Beerbohm, on most occasions an almost courtly gentleman (except when writing about Rudyard Kipling), assumes a harsher tone. He makes Lang’s voice sound like Elmer Fudd: “‘Ve-wy amusing,” he faintly added.” Here is a very Beerbohmian put-down:

 

“I have heard from people who knew him intimately that he was a really kind man. He may even have had the wish to please. But it is certain that one had to know him intimately before his wish could, in regard to oneself, be gratified.”

 

Beerbohm approaches true nastiness in judging Lang as a critic: “For Browning and Meredith and Swinburne, for Henry James, for Bernard Shaw, for any spirit that was new or vital in current work, he had at best a chilly tolerance. Himself remote by nature, he could enjoy masterpieces only at a distance: their proximity jarred him. He loved ‘Mr. Thackeray,’ but he loved Jane Austen more: she was further off. And Homer he loved most of all, because Homer was further off than anyone.”

 

Beerbohm’s portrait of Lang – as usual, when dealing with a sufficiently complex or conflicted character, one adapted to Beerbohm’s elastic sense of irony – is both clinical and amusing. The essayist reflexively includes himself in any sardonic summation while making a larger point – in this case, about the relationship between critics and writers. Beerbohm often deploys a tone that is difficult to precisely identify. It mingles disapproval, tact, wistfulness and an indeterminate quantity of irony. Here is his conclusion to the Lang remembrance: “A terrible thing, Time, nevertheless.”

'Those Irritants That Get Into Our Shoes and Sting'

Yet again, an English word surprises me with its multiple meanings. A reader complimented the “scruples” I apply to writing. I thought I knew the meaning of that word but wanted to check. Dr. Johnson doesn’t include scruples in his Dictionary but for scrupulous he gives: “nicely doubtful; hard to satisfy in determinations of conscience.” For the singular form, scruple, the OED gives ten definitions, starting with: 

“A thought or circumstance that troubles the mind or conscience; a doubt, uncertainty or hesitation in regard to right and wrong, duty, propriety, etc.; esp. one which is regarded as over-refined or over-nice, or which causes a person to hesitate where others would be bolder to act.”

 

Given that definition, I’ll accept the compliment. I look upon every word as a conscious choice. When I’m writing, especially simple subject-verb-object sentences, most words come automatically, at least through the first draft. I review what arrived without effort, read it aloud and decide what stays and what goes. It’s remarkable the gibberish you can produce on first pass. Here’s another related OED definition of scruple: “a doubt or uncertainty as to a matter of fact or allegation; an intellectual difficulty, perplexity, or objection.” This post started with a scruple about scruples.

 

Subsequent definitions in the OED: “disbelief or doubt” (thus, Shakespeare: “Whereat I, wretch, / Made scruple of his praise . . .”), “suspicion,” “a quibble, fine distinction,” “disbelief or doubt.” Scruple is even a verb: “to doubt, question, hesitate to believe.” It comes from Latin by way of French: “diminutive of scrūpus rough or hard pebble, used figuratively by Cicero for a cause of uneasiness or anxiety.”

 

Writing, even something simple as a blog post, involves a thousand minute decisions about sound and sense, and taking many pains. Judging from “Scruples” (The Calligraphy Shop, 2003), Ben Downing understands:

 

“Chipped off the Latin for

‘small sharp stone,’ they are

those irritants that get

into our shoes and sting

our feet until we stop,

stoop, and dump them out.”

 

Unwanted words are irritants, those “small sharp stones” in our shoes.

'Nearly Silent. Knowing.'

R.L. Barth has sent me a copy of his first book, Forced-Marching to the Styx: Vietnam War Poems, a chapbook of twenty-one poems published by Perivale Press of Van Nuys, Calif., in 1983, when Bob was already the poet laureate of that war (not that there is much competition for the title). In 1968-69 he was a Marine serving as a patrol leader in the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion.

Bob is by temperament and gift an epigrammist. His poems are usually brief and terse, though this collection contains several longer works, including “A Letter to My Infant Son.” At forty-three lines it is by Barthian standards a veritable epic. He claims to dislike it but it’s a favorite of his wife. The opening poem is one of his finest, “Reading The Iliad.” It hints at the French colonial past of Southeast Asia and leaves the dead and those who killed them unidentified. It suggests a sense of solidarity among soldiers separated by millennia:

“Volume and desk, coffee and cigarette

Forgotten, the reader, held in Homer's mind,

Looks upon Greeks and Trojans fighting yet,

The heroes and foot soldiers, thin and blind,

 

“Forced-marching for the Styx. But suddenly

Stunned by the clamor under smoky skies,

Boastings and tauntings, he looks up to see —

Not the god-harried plain where Hector tries

 

His destiny, not the room; instead, a mountain

Covered with jungle; on one slope, a chateau

With garden, courtyard, a rococo fountain,

And, faces down, hands tied, six bodies in a row.”

 

The chapbook’s closing poem is here titled “Postscript,” later retitled “Fieldcraft”:

 

"At last, the senses sharpen. All around,

I listen closely. Under the dull sound

Of distant artillery, and the shrieking planes

Diving with napalm; under the dry crack

Of automatic rifles; at the back

Of consciousness, almost, one sound remains:

Mud sucking at bare feet as they are going

Between the rice shoots. Nearly silent. Knowing.”

 

As the epigraph to the chapbook Barth uses a line from Graham Greene: “One did not question during the war why one fought: one waited till the war was over for that.”

 

[A partial bibliography of Barth’s work: Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003); Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Broadstone Books, 2021); That Mad Game (Scienter Press, 2025); Pleasing the Diners: Translations from the Latin of Martial (Contubernales Books, 2026).]

'A Few Good Sentences'

Much of my working life was spent among writers indifferent to the precision, clarity and stylishness of what they wrote. They flung words on the page (or screen) the way a bored child throws mud at the wall to see what sticks. They were abetted by editors concerned only with meeting deadlines and avoiding libel. These practices permitted a sort of reverse snobbery to thrive in the newsroom. A concern with writing good prose – not fancy, not “poetic,” just clear, accurate and cliché-free -- was judged effete. I haven’t worked fulltime as a journalist in more than twenty years, but all of this came back to me when I found this sentence on the Eric Hoffer Book Award site: 

“If anybody asks me what I have accomplished, I will say all I have accomplished is that I have written a few good sentences.”

 

No source is given but it sounds like Hoffer (1902-83). I credit him with inspiring me to become a newspaper reporter and learn to write clearly. His “Reflections” column was syndicated in U.S. newspapers, including The Cleveland Press, from January 1968 to April 1970 – my high school years. I read the columns, clipped them and pasted them in a scrapbook, then moved on to Hoffer’s books, beginning with his first and most influential, The True Believer (1951). What moved me and still moves me were Hoffer’s commonsensical ideas, his lack of pretentiousness and snobbery, the clarity of his prose, his gift for aphorism, his hatred of Communism and other tyrannies, his pro-Israel sentiments and his working-class origins. Not that I could necessarily have identified any of those qualities when I was sixteen.

 

I no longer read newspapers but I see the same indifference to good writing and simple clarity online. Clarity in prose implies clarity of thought. If I don’t understand something, if I’m confused or just plain ignorant, I can orient myself by writing about it. The simple act of arranging words sensibly contributes to understanding. If it doesn’t, I should probably keep my mouth shut until it does.   

 

The “longshoreman philosopher” had a brief notoriety in the late 1960s. He worked on the docks in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He never went to college. He credited a volume of Montaigne’s essays, found in a second-hand bookstore, with inspiring him to write. This is what appealed to me about Hoffer. I was the first in my family to go to college. My father and his brothers were ironworkers. All of my mother’s brothers were housepainters. I had no models for being a writer, a lover of ideas, an intellectual – a term Hoffer detested. But a working-class guy who read Montaigne and Tolstoy and formulated his thoughts in memorable words made sense to me and he still does.

'Time, We Both Know, Will Decay You'

An old friend, just months older than me, is taking longevity hard. We’re not that old – he just turned seventy-four, I’m still seventy-three – but he frets about decrepitude, pain and death. I remind him there’s an alternative to a long life but he sniffs away such a reminder as impertinent: “Not funny!” 

W.H. Auden wrote “Talking to Myself” (Epistle to a Godson, 1972) in April 1971, when my friend and I were freshmen roommates at the university. Auden dedicates the poem to his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks and addresses it to himself or rather his body, in the second person. The poet (b. 1907) would die just two years later but a lifetime of Benzedrine, alcohol and tobacco was already taking its toll. In the seventh of the poem’s fifteen stanzas, Auden writes:

 

“Seldom have You been a bother. For many years

You were, I admit, a martyr to horn-colic

(it did no good to tell You – But I’m not in love!):

How stoutly, though, You’ve repelled all germ invasions,

But never chastised my tantrums with a megrim.”

 

Auden was a devoted reader of the Oxford English Dictionary. Horn-colic is antiquated slang for an involuntary erection and megrim is an obsolete term for a migraine, the subject of Sacks’ first book. In 2015, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sacks published in The New York Times “My Own Life,” in which he wrote:

 

“My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”

 

Sacks would die on August 30, 2015, at age eighty-two. Here is the final stanza of Auden’s poem:

 

“Time, we both know, will decay You, and already

I’m scared of our divorce: I’ve seen some horrid ones.

Remember: when Le bon Dieu says to You Leave him!,

Please, please, for His sake and mine, pay no attention

To my piteous Don’ts, but bugger off quickly.”

'An Absurd Depravity'

While reading Sir Thomas Browne again it occurred to me that an epidemic of envy seems to be loose in the land. Envy is an emotion I like to joke about, sort of. I’ll see a photo of someone’s bookshelves – old university press editions, multi-volume sets, no paperbacks – and I’ll experience a rush of another of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust, followed immediately by the more temperate, longer lasting, easier to ignore sin, Envy. I can say I covet the books and give the craving a silent ha-ha, thus pretending I’m getting myself off the hook. But I really want those damn books. I encountered this in Browne’s “A Letter to a Friend” (written in 1665, published posthumously in 1690): 

“Let Age, not Envy, draw Wrinkles on thy Cheeks: be content to be envied, but envy not, Emulation may be plausible, and Indignation allowable; but admit no Treaty with that Passion which no Circumstance can make good. A Displacency at the good of others, because they enjoy it, altho we do not want it, is an absurd Depravity, sticking fast unto humane Nature from its primitive Corruption . . .”

 

Again: “which no Circumstance can make good.” Politics today seems driven overwhelmingly by envy. People want what others have, whether or not they worked for them or otherwise deserve to possess them. Envy has displaced gratitude for what is already ours. I see no cure, no moral foodstuff to ease the hunger. It seems irredeemably human, like the rest of the Deadly Sins. Joseph Epstein concludes his monograph Envy (Oxford University Press, 2003) like this:

 

“If theological thinking is unavailable to you, if the very notion of ‘sin,' original or unoriginal, as damning simply makes no sense to you, I would invite you instead to consider envy less as a sin than as very poor mental hygiene. It blocks our clarity, both about oneself and the people one envies, and it ends by giving one a poor opinion of oneself. No one can see clearly anything he or she envies. Envy clouds thought, clobbers generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart—reasons enough to fight free of it with all one’s mental strength.”