`Chains to Yoak a Flea'

Catalogues, not in the retail sense, are always ripe for comedy. Any list beyond three or four items begins to suggest a parody of the human mania for inclusiveness, the drive to identify and organize every damned thing. I’ve been reading Pope, a master list-maker, as in this passage from “The Rape of the Lock” (1712):

“For lo! The Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,
The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.
On shining Altars of Japan they raise
The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.
From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
While China’s Earth receives the Smoking Tyde.”

Pope satirizes the pretensions of polite society while exploiting another use for the catalogue – as a means of celebrating of the world’s bounty, the surfeit of things around us. As 21st-century readers, we get the joke and enjoy the contents of an 18th-century cupboard. We read and relish on at least two levels. This comes later in the poem:

“Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere,
Since all things lost on Earth, are treasur'd there.
There Heroe's Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,
And Beau's in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases.
There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found,
And Lovers Hearts with Ends of Riband bound;
The Courtiers Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs,
The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs,
Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea;
Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry.”

Here the list tips toward the satirical, and as a catalogue of types of moral failing it remains up-to-the-minute. The “Yoak a Flea”/”Casuistry” rhyme is priceless. For sheer visceral disgust, no one can outdo Pope’s friend Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels is heavy with scatological catalogues, as is the conclusion to “Description of a City Shower” (1710):

“Now from all Parts the swelling Kennels flow,
And bear their Trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all Hues and Odours seem to tell
What Streets they sail'd from, by the Sight and Smell.
They, as each Torrent drives, with rapid Force
From Smithfield, or St.Pulchre's shape their Course,
And in huge Confluent join at Snow-Hill Ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn-Bridge.
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.”

Other wizards of the catalog include Burton, Browne, Sterne, Whitman, Melville, Joyce, Beckett and Cole Porter (“You’re the Top”). Shakespeare’s best known cloud-watching scene comes in Hamlet, a duet between Polonius and the Prince, but Antony’s in Antony and Cleopatra (Act IV, Scene 14) is a solo in the form of a catalogue, and we don’t have to endure Hamlet’s snottiness. Antony mourns the loss of his Roman identity in Egypt, in a play dense with liquid, formless, gummy imagery (“The crown o’ th’ earth doth melt.”):

“Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't, that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs;
They are black vesper's pageants.”

And then:

“That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.”

I selected Antony’s from the hundreds of catalogues in Shakespeare for several reasons: 1. Antony and Cleopatra has gone from being a play I hardly noticed to one of my favorites. 2. More than a linguistic tour de force, Antony’s list is thematically rich. 3. “As water is in water” always reminds me of Keats’ “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Remember what Auden said in his lecture about the play:

“It won’t do as a movie at all. The play is exclusively about human history and the effects of human will. There is no background showing farmers ploughing fields, there are no conflicts between human beings and nature, no storms. The play is concerned with the desire for world power.”