'Plain in Thy Neatness'

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediately nullified by his own incompetence. Why take the word of a critic who can’t write? This was a matter of fundamental things like noun-verb agreement, spelling and the refusal to resist a cliché. 

There’s nothing new about this, of course. In the issue of The Tatler published on September 28, 1710, Jonathan Swift sets up his essay with a letter he received complaining of “the deplorable ignorance that for some years hath reigned among our English writers, the great depravity of our taste, and the continual corruption of our style.” Swift, of course, is the letter’s author, as he is of the letter excerpt included by the first fictional correspondent – a parody of illiterate prose, followed by this commentary:   

 

“[T]hese are the beauties introduced to supply the want of wit, sense, humour, and learning, which formerly were looked upon as qualifications for a writer. If a man of wit, who died forty years ago, were to rise from the grave on purpose, how would he be able to read this letter?”

 

I often have similar thoughts: How would Swift react to a comparable contemporary bit of gobbledygook? Or, more recently, Yvor Winters or Michael Oakeshott, masters of prose clarity? Swift's letter continues: 

 

"I should be glad to see you the instrument of introducing into our style that simplicity which is the best and truest ornament of most things in life, which the politer ages always aimed at in their building and dress, (simplex munditiis) as well as their productions of wit. It is manifest, that all new, affected modes of speech, whether borrowed from the Court, the Town, or the theatre, are the first perishing parts in any language, and, as I could prove by many hundred instances, have been so in ours.”

 

Simplex munditiis, “elegant in simplicity,” is a Horatian tag used by Ben Jonson as the title of a poem:

 

“Still to be neat, still to be drest,

As you were going to a feast;

Still to be powder'd, still perfumed:

Lady, it is to be presumed,

Though art's hid causes are not found,

All is not sweet, all is not sound.

 

“Give me a look, give me a face

That makes simplicity a grace;

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:

Such sweet neglect more taketh me

Than all th' adulteries of art;

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.”

 

It’s also the title of a poem by Yvor Winters: 

 

“The goat nips yellow blossoms

shaken loose from rain—

with neck extended

lifts a twitching flower

high into wet air. Hard

humility the lot of man

to crouch beside

this creature in the dusk

and hold the mind clear;

to turn the sod,

to face the sod beside his door,

to wound it as his own flesh.

In the spring the blossoms

drown the air with joy,

the heart with sorrow.

One must think of this

in quiet. One must

bow his head and take

with roughened hands

sweet milk at dusk,

the classic gift of earth.”

 

Around 1930, Winters famously changed his poetic style. This poem dates from that period. We might call it late early Winters or early late Winters. The title is from Horace’s Ode I, 5, rendered by Milton as “Plain in thy neatness.”

 

Winters’ poems are sometimes autobiographical but not in the banal sense. The poet kept and milked goats and raised and showed Airedales. For so formidably intellectual a man, he had an earthiness about him. He was drawn to the elemental, in language and life, suggested by the intermingling in his poem of joy and sorrow. Here is my favorite line, the most evocative, implying the fear of madness or “The Brink of Darkness” (the title of his only published fiction): “One must think of this / in quiet.” The bowing of the head while milking, leaning against the goat’s flank, suggests prayer and “Hard / humility.”