'So, By a Calenture Misled'

I attribute it to impatient carelessness when reading. I encounter a new word, utterly unfamiliar, look it up and learn it is found in books I have already read, sometimes rather often. Take calenture. I was reading “Upon the South Sea Project,” a poem written in 1720 by Jonathan Swift about the South Sea Bubble and the ensuing bankruptcy of thousands of investors. I know nothing about economics but I know Swift. With the notes provided in The Complete Poems (1983) by the editor, Pat Rogers, I was making sense of Swift’s satire. Then I hit the sixth and seventh stanzas: 

“So, by a calenture misled,

  The mariner with rapture sees,

On the smooth ocean’s azure bed,

  Enamell’d fields and verdant trees:

 

“With eager haste he longs to rove

  In that fantastic scene, and thinks

It must be some enchanted grove;

  And in he leaps, and down he sinks.”

 

The OED, as usual, comes to my rescue: “a disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.” In other words, fatally convincing hallucinations. From the Spanish for fever. I never knew hallucinations could be so consistently similar in a given population as to earn a name of their own. Swift’s usage is cited, as is one I should have remembered:

 

“Yet even in this voyage I had my misfortunes too; particularly, that I was continually sick, being thrown into a violent calenture by the excessive heat of the climate; our principal trading being upon the coast, from latitude of 15 degrees north even to the line itself.”

 

That’s from Chap II of Robinson Crusoe, a novel I have probably read eight or ten times since I  was a kid. And yet I could swear I never saw it before. And the Dictionary informs me the word can also be found in Nashe and Donne, whom I’ve read fairly closely. Swift’s wording, and the OED’s, recall a disputed line in Henry V. At the start of Act II, Scene 3, a character named Hostess (probably Mistress Quickly from Henry IV) describes the death of Sir John Falstaff:

 

“…after I saw him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a' babbled of green fields.”

 

In 2008 I wrote a post about the Shakespearean line, Guy Davenport, Keats and Zagajewski.