'Lord, Make Me Not Too Rich. Nor Make Me Poor'

“In spite of the Deconstructionists who say that communication is not really possible, we most of us manage to honor stop signs, and we all honor the dollar sign, whether or not we are willing to admit it.” 

In 1995, R.L. Barth published The Golden Calf: Poems of Money, edited by the poet Turner Cassity and Mary Ellen Templeton, a fellow librarian of Cassity’s in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta. The subject is a rare one among poets – so crass, after all, and so bourgeois. Contrast that absence with the ubiquity of the quest for wealth in the novels of the nineteenth century, from Balzac to Henry James and beyond. Even crime novels, whether pulpy or sophisticated, are frequently driven by the desire for loot. The editors have found moolah poems by thirty-three American and English poets writing between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, without including Ezra Pound’s crackpot ravings in the Cantos.

 

The statement at the top is drawn from Cassity’s introduction. As ever, his tone is arch, erudite, almost campy and very amusing. “[W]hile it has been easy to find poems about begging, borrowing, and stealing, as well as gambling and privateering,” he writes, “it has been very difficult to find poems about simply earning or making money.”

 

Many of us spend half our lives earning money, and yet few poets show much interest in the subject. “Human envy being what it is,” Cassity writes, “Erato and Mammon will probably never lie down together in any degree of comfort, but no topics as central as avarice and ambition can fail to engage a really serious writer, as the Renaissance, the 17^th, and the 18^th centuries were well aware.” Several of the poets and poems in C&T’s anthology are new to this reader. Take “Worldly Wealth” by the Welsh poet Rowland Watkyns (1616?-64), with the subtitle “Natura paucis contenta” (“Nature is satisfied with little”):

 

“Wealth unto every man, I see,

Is like the bark unto the tree:

Take from the tree the bark away,

The naked tree will soon decay.

Lord, make me not too rich. Nor make me poor,

To wait at rich mens’ tables, or their door.”

 

Given that money is often a pretext for comedy, some of the collected poems qualify as light verse. Take Ebenezer Elliott’s (1781-1849) “On Communists,” written while Karl Marx, who never held down a regular job and lived off the largesse of Friedrich Engels, was still alive:

 

“What is a Communist? One who has yearnings

For equal division of unequal earnings;

Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing

To fork out his penny and pocket your shilling.”

 

Here you’ll find well-known names too: George Herbert, Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, Rudyard Kipling and E.A. Robinson. Here is another poem by yet another non-job-holder, though not a sponger like Marx, Emily Dickinson:

 

“Because ’twas Riches I could own,

Myself had earned it -- Me,

I knew the Dollars by their names --

It feels like Poverty

 

“An Earldom out of sight to hold,

An Income in the Air,

Possession -- has a sweeter chink

Unto a Miser's Ear.”

 

Cassity provides an “Afterword,” his poem “A Dance Part Way Around the Veau d’Or, or, Rich Within the Dreams of Avarice.” It is collected in Hurricane Lamp (1986) and The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998).