'A Plaything Lent Me for the Present'

A pleasing and serendipitous convergence: I was listening again to the Sinatra/Jobim recordings from 1967, including their arrangement of “Baubles, Bangles, & Beads,” from Kismet. I always associate “baubles” with Alexander Pope, especially “The Rape of the Lock.” Later I was reading William Cowper’s “Yardley Oak,” one of the great tree poems in English, and encountered these lines: 

“Thou wast a bauble once, a cup and ball

Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay,

Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin’d

The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down

Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs

And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp.”

 

That’s Cowper addressing an acorn. (See “Acorn, Yom Kippur” by Howard Nemerov.) Looking further I found a letter Cowper wrote to his friend the Rev. John Newton on May 3, 1780. Cowper expresses gratitude with a cascade of metaphors. He has entered one of his manic phases:

 

“I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the earth—what are the planets—what is the sun itself but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more.”

 

The OED define bauble as “a small ornament, piece of jewellery, decorative accessory, etc., that is showy or attractive but typically inexpensive or of little value; a trinket, a knick-knack.” In other words, a showy trifle or geegaw, a shiny tchotchke that might attract a magpie or a child. Cowper continues:

 

"I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself: ‘This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.’”

 

A bauble for Cowper is a pretext for a sermon on humility.