THE WOOL-GATHERER

EXTRACTS

Sample paragraphs from articles in THE WOOL-GATHERER and other pamplets.

...This poem is part of an irreconcilable debate Herbert had with himself over the paradoxes of religious poetry (art and music will be similarly affected). How does one steer between the Scylla of wasting a God-given talent and fobbing God off with less than one’s best, and the Charybdis of falling in love, Narcissus-like, with one’s own eloquence and using the medium to show off rather than harnessing it for a divine purpose? Other poems, like the ‘Jordan’ pair and ‘Dulnesse’ are on a similar theme. Does writer’s block matter if the foundation of your belief, ‘Thou art still my God’, is intact?...

'George Herbert and "The Forerunners"': does literary skill in a religious poem dignify the subject or feed the writer's vanity? (from WOOL-GATHERER 1 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...I think of Homer as a croupier: he deals the audience cards, which accumulate into a hand which gives you a complete story. Many of the cards are a bit dog-eared and faded – these are the formulaic building-blocks which do so much of the narrative donkey-work, the oft-handled devices of the ancient oral tradition with which he worked. But then, from time to time, he slips in a pristine card which takes your breath away when you turn it over, so fresh are its colours, so subtle the design....
'Rites of Passage': the coming-of-age of Telemachus in Homer's The Odyssey. (from WOOL-GATHERER 1 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...So what tasks are appropriate in Paradise? Pure intellectual activity worries Milton because speculation needs to be confined within bounds, and even the angels are unsure what limits have been assigned to humanity. Practical jobs are healthier, but are also restricted by the user-friendliness of the environment which is liable to render them redundant. Milton took his cue from Genesis, which states that Adam was put in the garden to ‘dress’ it....
'A Gourd of Grape-juice ...': gardening as moral behaviour - John Milton, George Herbert and Ruth Pitter. (from WOOL-GATHERER 2 for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...The precise historian may scoff, but I think they put something in the water in the 17th century. The whole country seems to have gone a bit loopy. Eccentric individuals, eccentric sects abound. How would you assess the sales potential of a poem in Latin describing the wanderings through the North of England of a fornicating tosspot? What if a translation in execrable doggerel is placed by its side?...
'Orcus Porcus and Good Times in Keighley': the eccentric seventeenth century picaresque poem of Richard Brathwait. (from WOOL-GATHERER 2 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...One of the most infuriating things about Bond is that, time and again, only he stands between the civilised world and a catastrophic assault on its values and existence, but he still finds the leisure to demonstrate his adroitness with bra-straps. Some may call it multi-tasking – I call it unprofessional. Looked at in a historical context, though, what he is displaying is a key quality in the Renaissance hero – sprezzatura. This is the art of exhibiting versatility without the appearance of effort. A gentleman could not be, or be seen to be, an anorak or a swot. You breezed adaptably through life, at home equally in the council-chamber, the battle-field, the casino and the boudoir....
'Universal Export: Still a Good Investment?' James Bond examined. (from WOOL-GATHERER 3 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

"...Sappho still haunts people two-and-a-half millennia on. The Greeks were champion chauvinists - at least Islamic culture has produced many tender love-lyrics - but even they recognised that she was a master. Everyone who discovers her soon discovers the melancholy fact that her collected works ran to nine volumes in the library at Alexandria, and now there are only glittering shards..."
'Always Read the Wrapping Paper ...': New discoveries in a poem by Sappho. (from WOOL-GATHERER 3 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...Follow me, if you will, as I flutter around a mountain that dominates the landscape of human thought, and alight briefly on a few outcrops. One of the most familiar ideas in philosophy is the notion that the human organism is a structure divided within itself, the angel vying with the beast for supremacy, or the soul at war with the body. Our immortal selves are trapped in a decaying but ferociously retentive envelope which demands its fulfilment in the darkness of food, sex and sleep, while our better half struggles to ascend towards the light. Christianity, and the Greeks before that, has made this a commonplace. When we weigh up different courses of action, selfish or altruistic, pragmatic or idealistic, immoral or virtuous, we conduct an internal debate. This dialogue has become its very own specialised artistic genre....
'Split Personalities': the battle between soul and body - Andrew Marvell, W.B. Yeats and Margaret Atwood. (from WOOL-GATHERER 4 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...One of the most intriguing parts of the Orkeyinga Saga is the pilgrimage to the Holy Land undertaken by Earl Rognvald Kali Kolsson. Rognvald was a predatory thug, naturally, otherwise his tenure would have been ephemeral, but he is one of a handful of characters in the catalogue of slaughters, vendettas and treachery to have a personality you can walk round. He has a sense of humour, with a taste for practical jokes; in a world of dizzying coup and counter-coup he has the rare quality of patience; he is a poet, much given to impromptu epigrams. Other Earls travel – to Shetland, Norway, Wales, Ireland, the Isles of Scilly – but only to plunder, or do some Machiavellian networking. The idea of a Norseman in the Mediterranean is odd enough; that it should be ostensibly for purposes other than murder, rape and pillage is odder still. What happens when North meets South?...
'A Holiday Romance': an intriguing clash of cultures in the Orkneyinga Saga and the poems of George Mackay Brown. (from WOOL-GATHERER 4 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...Now that most children are over- rather than under-fed, do they fantasise much about food any more? Or do the editors of comics deliberately censor greedy consumption as they have outlawed the corporal punishment which characters like Roger the Dodger and Minnie the Minx expected almost every episode? Purely in the interests of research, I bought a Beano to see if all was changed, changed utterly. Actually, its world was still reassuring and familiar, except that Roger the Dodger was ‘doing’, i.e. plagiarising, his maths homework on a laptop now, and Dennis the Menace was making a hoax call to the police on a mobile. But there was no food motif to be seen. Just chance, or confirmation of a theory?...
'Everything Tastes Better ...': Celebrating the picnic - Cuthbert Bede, Kenneth Grahame, E.M. Forster and The Beano. (from WOOL-GATHERER 5 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

...If true (and I only submit it tentatively), this theory that the play is a covert defence of Catholic patriotism and a plea for mutual religious toleration would support the contention that Shakespeare was himself a closet Catholic, and I have never seen any intrinsic problem with this. At least the theory gives some point and poignancy, and a bracing whiff of risk, to the otherwise feeble inconsequentiality of the way he treated such messy, intransigent political material....
'The National Debt': Political Themes and Undercurrents in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. (from WOOL-GATHERER 5 - for details of how to purchase CLICK HERE.)

... it is striking how regularly Claudio 'thous' Benedick and is 'youd' in return; this is not normal, because, however old Benedick may be, Claudio is certainly the junior and therefore more likely to be metaphorically patted o the head with informal address. Shakespeare is offering a helpful clue to their natures and their relationship which might otherwise be overlooked. Claudio is puppyish, looking up to Benedick as an older dog or big brother, but trying to assert himself with teasing and the assumption of matey equality. Benedick is keeping his distance - "you're an amiable fellow, but you ARE a bit of a puppy, and no one becomes my bosom pal quite so easily."
'ONLY FOUL WORDS - AND THEREUPON I WILL KISS THEE': formal and informal language in Much Ado About Nothing and The Merchant of Venice (for details of how to purchase, see SUBSCRIBE)

These young men have income from somewhere dress snappily and party a lot but that income is unlikely to be bottomless. They are Shylock's natural prey, and the classic escape route from brokers and debtors' prison at worst, or parading in your best suit with your stomach rumbling because you can't afford a meal, is - marriage. In the play, three of them strike lucky. These are not Venetians, but typical Elizabethan Englishmen of a certain class, which is an argument against scrabbling round for 'parallels' such as (tot take the most tempting one) Mussolini-era Fascism.
'MORALIA BY MOONLIGHT': essays on aspects of The Merchant of Venice (for details of how to purchase, see SUBSCRIBE)

It was the man, rather than the poetry, that did something to change my life. Roger Frith was singularly beautiful, with feminine outlines half-concealed by a powerful frame. He seems inseparable in my imagination from a wide-brimmed, natty if battered, felt hat, which I took to be an essential adjunct for a serious poet. He had a rich but light baritone, with a touch of huskiness and a melancholy, even plangent, tinge that never disappeared even when he was animated and amused. But none of this was the essential point. What mattered is that he was a Poet:

RESOLVE

Each causes ruth:
I was a poet, so I told the truth,
And overheard them talk of me and say:
“With what he does, he’ll never pay his way,”

Next time I lied: I was a ‘schoolmaster’:
“You have more money now, no poetaster;
keep from that arty lot, you always will –
and don’t come here unless you’re working still!”

A peacock butterfly upon my wall,
she suns herself, and so I must recall
what on her wings I read, and always will:
“Don’t watch me, unless you are a poet still...”
‘A Tribute to the Poet Roger Frith’

Kent intervenes with ‘Royal Lear’. Although the adjective takes out some of the sting, it is still a serious breach of etiquette to address the king by name, but he then becomes completely reckless: ‘be Kent unmannerly, / When Lear is mad.’ Can it get worse? ‘What would’st thou do, old man?’ – yes, it can. The ‘thou’ of affection is masked by the overt insolence, but that does nothing to make his language forgivable. Having ‘thoud’ his king once, he proceeds to do it seventeen more times before leaving the stage under banishment.

Lear can hardly speak as this scolding proceeds, and no wonder – everyone will be frozen with horror, and he can barely believe his ears either. His exclamation, ‘O, vassal!’ (161) shows his awareness of the enormity of Kent’s defiance, and, although Kent slips a last couple of ‘thous’ in at 180-1, it is likely that his attempt to deal with Lear as a human being rather than an icon has ended in the humiliation of kneeling: ‘Hear me, recreant! / On thine allegiance, hear me!’ (166-7) This is the unanswerable phrase, the drawing of a line which a feudal vassal can only cross to become a rebel and a traitor; it requires instant obedience and probably an act of homage.
‘You What?’: Shakespeare’s pronouns – an investigation of formal and informal language in King Lear.