List, recipe, spell, wizard's farewell
Hello,
I’ve been very quiet on here. I’ve had an awful summer — you know that absurdly long post I did about trying to get help for addiction? It’s just been MORE of that. An absolute brick wall of it.
Maybe, I am thinking, I should get it out of my head that things I post here have to be, like a few thousand words long; or even that I have to feel like I could defend posting them. What if sometimes they can just be short and silly. In that spirit, here is a brief note today about something I read last night.
I hope you are all well. Tx
Last night I found a very good list:
roots
seeds
flowers
leaves
stalks
juice
This is how it looked, originally:
There boyled she the rootes, seedes, flowres, leaves, stalkes and juice togither
Which from the fieldes of Thessalie she late had gathered thither.
List, recipe, whatever it is — I love the way it seems to slalom through the metre. It feels to me like it isn’t quite going to make it, but it does. This is ‘Golding’s Ovid’ (Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Metamorphoses) whose twelve thousand lines scan all like this: seven iambs strung together in these relentless ‘fourteeners’. I love it. It’s in fifteen books, of which I’ve only ever managed to read one end-to-end — let alone the whole thing — my attention span may never handle that — but it is such a great book to dip into. Among my favourites. And actually, it’s rare that I spend any time in this book without sharing something of what I found.
So this is Golding’s Ovid, and ‘she’ is Medea. I think she is preparing to conjure a spell which causes sleep, but maybe someone can correct me on that. I’m aware that it’s probably an easier read, this sort of thing, if you actually do it in the right order — or know the stories in advance. Her spell — this is a hard book to excerpt from, but I’ll try — contains a moment which Shakespeare rewrote and gave to Prospero in The Tempest:
Before the Moone should circlewise close both hir homes in one
Three nightes were yet as then to come. As soon as that she shone
Most full of light, and did behold the earth with fulsome face,
Medea with hir haire not trust so much as in a lace,
But flaring on hir shoulders twaine, and barefoote, with hir gowne
Ungirded, gate hir out of doores and wandred up and downe
Alone the dead time of the night. Both Man, and Beast, and Bird
Were fast asleepe: the Serpents slie in trayling forward stird
So softly as ye would have thought they still asleepe had bene.
The moysting Ayre was whist. No leafe ye could have moving sene.
The starres alonly faire and bright did in the welkin shine
To which she lifting up hir handes did thrise hirselfe encline:
And thrice with water of the brooke hir haire besprincled shee:
And gasping thrise she opte hir mouth: and bowing downe hir knee
Upon the bare hard ground, she said: O trustie time of night
Most faithfull unto privities, O golden starres whose light
Doth jointly with the Moone succeede the beames that blaze by day
And thou three headed Hecate who knowest best the way
To compasse this our great attempt and art our chiefest stay:
Ye Charmes and Witchcrafts, and thou Earth which both with herbe and weed
Of mightie working furnishest the Wizardes at their neede:
Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing)
I have compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.
By charmes I make the calme Seas rough, and make the rough Seas plaine,
And cover all the Skie with Cloudes and chase them thence againe.
By charmes I raise and lay the windes, and burst the Vipers jaw.
And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees doe draw.
Whole woods and Forestes I remove: I make the Mountaines shake,
And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully to quake.
I call up dead men from their graves: and thee lightsome Moone
I darken oft, though beaten brasse abate thy perill soone.
Our Sorcerie dimmes the Morning faire, and darkes the Sun at Noone.
The flaming breath of firie Bulles ye quenched for my sake
And caused their unwieldie neckes the bended yoke to take.(Golding’s Ovid, Book VII)
Although, the way Shakespeare redeploys this moment, slightly compressing the summoning and removing the extra ofs:
Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
(The Tempest, V.i)
— especially with how ‘brooks’ falls, the slight strain there to the scansion — it somehow appears a lot more taut while also seeming a lot more precarious; as if Prospero’s spell, to begin with at least, is only just wobbling out as fragile pentameters which might not surive unless (and this does straightforwardly seem to me to be advice to the actor) those commas are taken to be really dilatory; it must be delivered slowly and grandly — so slowly that the underlying pentameter is stretched out til it is barely there.
Not that I mean barely there in any ghostly or vanishing way, though: the delivery must be less like the local contours of spoken verse, sure, but the pulse is still present, always — almost like the landscape, as if even the geology on this island is iambic. Metre which is as present as weather or ocean currents, so that a wizard trying to get something magical going must pause from speech, slow down to work with those vast rhythms, really hear and feel them, before he can speed up again and harness them. As Prospero’s speech goes on he does seem to take up control of the metre again, regain it from the weather, and his power flows through it in great long lists and subclauses — yet he does relax that control again. After all, he’s not doing a spell; he’s just reminding us that he could, and did, a lot — before in this moment abandoning magic forever.
That said: this first line — Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves — also seems to have become a lot more like that recipe/list from Medea’s recipe, a few lines later. Words quickly hammered together in a rhythm. [The] rootes, seedes, flowres, leaves, stalkes and juice togither. (Without the two feet of ‘There boyled she’, it is an iambic pentameter — which seems a silly observation to make, but it’s true!)
What I am enjoying I suppose is that we tend to read out items in a list with equal emphasis, so that when they are forced into this iambic fabric their equality of stress wants, as we read them in that context, to buckle the metre: but the metre is too strongly present. I suppose that's what versification is, in some sense, the ductility of a line-unit and its evident rhythmic texture being put to the test, syllable by syllable. It just strikes me that cramming into the middle of a seven-beat line a list of SIX single syllable items is more of a wrench than you usually get. And I think it’s funny what a drastically different effect it can have in Golding’s metre from Shakespeare’s. I’m being over the top about both but you'll cut me some slack, it’s been years since I enjoyed doing anything like close-reading.
Here’s a photo I took of some potential recipe/spell ingredients, including a morel, by the canal. It’s been rotated.