The other day, for no reason in particular, Old Ken found himself reading some of the cultural criticism of early eighteenth century writer Joseph Addison. Most famous for his magazine
The Spectator, Addison was a clever, sophisticated character. Take, for example, his distinction between true and false wit from
Spectator 62 (May 11, 1711):
As true wit generally consists in the resemblance and congruity of ideas
, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity, sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics ... and sometimes of whole sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars.
I'm sure our friend, the great Carolingian encyclopedist Hrabanus Maurus (whose work we see above), would have had a bone to pick with Mr. Addison on these claims! As indeed does Old Ken. For what Addison goes on to critique is, I think, one of the most witty pieces of Restoration English poesy—a period with no shortage of cleverness.
Let me back up for a moment and tell you about a friend named Abraham Cowley. Then, you'll finally see what Old Ken was on about with all the business about lemons from the get-go. Above, we see Cowley depicted by the irrepressible Peter Lely in around 1666-7 as a genteel
philosophe in rural retirement. Yet, being a man cut from the Royalist cloth, Cowley had spent much of the Civil War era acting as a spy, communicating messages in cipher and other encryptions between members of England's exiled, Stuart-supporting community.
This context certainly informs one of his most clever poems called "Written in Juice of Lemmon." The poem opens with the narrator penning a letter to his mistress, and doing so in blindness:
Whilst what I write I do not see,
I dare thus, even to you, write Poetry.
Ah foolish Muse, which do’st so high aspire,
And know’st her judgment well
How much it does thy power excel,
Yet dar’st be read, they just doom, the Fire.
Writing in the invisible medium of lemon juice, the poet pens a secretive missive that will have to be burned to reveal its truth. Destroyed by the flame that makes its message perceptible, the letter will either prove "an Heretick" in this auto da fe or a true martyr if the mistress reciprocates the feelings it bears.
But, as the sun’s vernal heat produces vegetation on earth — "A sudden paint adorns the trees/ And all kind Natures Characters appear" — so the warmth of flame to paper slowly causes individual written characters to flower into legibility:
"Here buds an A, and there a B / Here sprouts a V, and there a T /And all the flourishing Letters stand in Rows." What is more, in a lovely fantasy addressed to the paper itself, the act of burning required to render the text visible is imagined as making the mistress-reader into the author or the agent behind this seduction:
Silly, silly Paper, thou wilt think
That all this might as well be writ with Ink,
Oh no; there’s sense in this, and Mysterie;
Thou now maist change thy Authors name,
And to her Hand lay noble claim;
For as She Reads, she Makes the words in Thee.Ultimately, then, the poet calls upon the paper to consume itself in open flame before the mistress's eyes as a sacrifice to the gods of love. I don't know about you, but Old Ken is pretty smitten by all that.
Not so Mr. Addison. Part of Addison's beef was probably political. He was a big advocate of the Whig-identified cult of politeness to which Cowley's crytograms and Royalism would have likely appeared tarred with the thick brush of Toryism. But, putting aside these speculations, what does he actually say about Cowley? Critiquing the monotonous obsession with symbolics of fire in Cowley's poetry, Addison complains of the mixing of metaphors: "Cowley, observing the cold regard of his mistres's eyes, and at the same time their power of producing love in him, considers them as burning-glasses made of ice; and, finding himself able to live in the greatest extremities of love, concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. When his mistress has read his letter written in juice of lemon, by holding it to the fire, he desires her to read it over a second time by love's flame ..."
Here, then, is the substance of the critique: "The reader may observe in every one of these instances, that the poet mixes the qualities of fire with those of love; and, in the same sentence, speaking of it both as a passion and as real fire, surprises the reader with those seeming resemblances or contradictions that make up all the wit in this kind of writing." Ultimately, these strange slippages offen Addison's sense of literary form. Ambiguous shifting between symbolism and object-reference should, he claims, be confined to epigrams and not allowed to spread through the range of poetic form at which Cowley tried his hand.
Not surprisingly, this is where Old Ken and Mr. Addison part company. Surely, one of the most delicious features of seventeenth century wit—and thinking more broadly—is this ubiquitous mingling (dare I say generative confusion) between the idea being explored and the objective vehicle used to pursue that exploration. In other words, Addison: don't be such a sour-puss!
Labels: Abraham Cowley, Lemons, Poetry
