'I Hope This Explanation Is Wrong'

One of life’s unsolved puzzles, especially for readers and writers: How can certain arrangements of words encountered in childhood or youth, and revisited regularly for a lifetime, still inspire delight, while others, in effect, evaporate before we hear them? In the latter category fall most talk of politics, routine idle bombast (which I associate with the guy sitting at the end of the bar) and virtually all complaints on any subject. 

While rereading Cymbeline for the nth time I’ve reencountered one of the loveliest poems in the language, a funeral song, a mere six lines long, thirty-seven 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 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.”

 

Lovely, yet I’m unable to tell you precisely what it means, which confirms T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante”: “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era (1971) confidently explains:

 

“’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 . . .”

 

After presenting the evidence he has mustered, Kenner dismisses it: “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.’”

 

Perhaps. Shakespeare certainly knew his wildflowers and their folklore. 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.

 

The English Literary scholar A.D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker (2007) tells us he 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.”

 

I remain an agnostic, uncertain whose explanation is correct, though I’m rooting for Nuttall. If it amounts to more than a mere decoding of signs on a page, reading is a species of communion with the world, permitting us to enter conversations that started centuries ago. Another voice in that conversation is Dr. 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.”