`Who For the Rapier Drop the Cudgell'

In 1858, Walter Savage Landor published a collection of epigrams he titled Dry Sticks, Fagoted. Please understand that fagoted (or faggoted) refers to sticks bundled or bound together for use as fuel. I remember our tenth-grade giggles over all the attention devoted to “gathering faggots” in The Return of the Native. Landor’s title is self-deprecatingly perfect. In his brief preface he writes:

“Among the Dry Sticks many are so slender that they seem to have been cut after a few years’ growth; others are knottier and more gnarled than are usually carried to market, but give out great heat and burn longer . . . . Here are light matters within; twigs, broken buds, and moss: but who, in taking up a volume, has not sometimes had reason to complain of a quality the reverse of lightness? and who is ignorant that the lightest is the best part of many?”

I’m reading the epigrams as collected in Vol. VIII of the nine-volume Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (1876). Only one do I remember reading before:

“Around the child bend all the three

Sweet Graces: Faith, Hope, Charity.

Around the man bend other faces;

Pride, Envy, Malice, are his Graces.”

Landor can be grim-minded, and some would say cynical, so he is well-suited to the writing of epigrams. There’s little sweetness in him, or happy talk. He was hot-headed and contentious, given to tantrums. He possessed the gift of offending almost everyone he met, though Carlyle, who knew bile and crankiness when he saw it, perceived in Landor “stirring company: a proud irascible, trenchant, yet generous, veracious, and very dignified old man.” In “Old-Fashioned Verse,” Landor traces his poetic family tree:

“In verse alone I ran not wild

When I was hardly more than child,

Contented with the native lay

Of Pope or Prior, Swift or Gay,

Or Goldsmith, or that graver bard

Who led me to the lone church-yard.

Then listened I to Spenser’s strain,

Till Chaucer’s Canterbury train

Came trooping past, and carried me

In more congenial company.

Soon my soul was hurried o’er

This bright scene: the `solemn roar’

Of organ, under Milton’s hand,

Struck me mute: he bade me stand

Where none other ambled near . . .

I obey’d, with love and fear.”

In Landor: A Replevin (1958), Malcolm Elwin reports the poet first wished to call his volume of epigrams Dry Leaves, and then Dry Sticks Fagoted by the late Walter Savage Landor, though he lived for another six years after publication. For some of the poems in Dry Sticks he was sued for libel, prompting him to return to Italy for the remainder of his life. Landor could never walk away from a fight, or he walked away too late. His wit was savage and often amusing, though he knew little of moderation or tact. Here is “My Wit Scanty”:

“I have but little wit, all they

Whose brains are close and curdy say;

They relish best the broadfaced jokes

Of hearty, burly, country-folks,

And are quite certain those must judge ill

Who for the rapier drop the cudgell [sic].”

      

I’m reminded of another gifted writer of epigrams, R.L. Barth, whose “Don't You Know Your Poems are Hurtful?” is collected in Deeply Dug In (2003):

“Yes, ma’am. Like KA-BAR to the gut,

Well-tempered wit should thrust and cut

Before the victim knows what’s what;

But sometimes, lest the point be missed,

I give the bloody blade a twist.”