Suffering and Woe

Jozef Israëls. A Jewish Wedding (not in Bombay)

Note: This was one of my last columns intended for The Wagon Magazine of Chennai, before the editor’s sad departure late last year. 

I was recently asked to do a reading at a wedding – the ‘reading’ being a relatively new, but already fairly well-established concept in English weddings. In England’s old Christian marriages, the ‘readings’, if there were any, were from the Bible, and reinforced the wedding liturgy, which focused on the sacred importance of marriage, the finality of its vows and the rather intimidating idea that two people were now irrevocably one flesh. The official text of the wedding, like the ceremony itself, had centuries’ of usage behind it, and the weddings presided over by men who had practised them all their working lives. We moderns with our readings, by contrast, are basically making it up as we go along. The results are bound to be mixed.

I have seen many forgettable readings at weddings over the years, and a few that were memorable for the wrong reasons. Perhaps the best was a reading of the poem ‘She Walks in Beauty’ By Lord Byron:

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

Meet in her aspect and her eyes;

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

That is about three parts enchantment and one part flattery – a nice mood to strike on a wedding day, and a clever move to make to start off a marriage. It was read by the mother of the groom – and presumably on behalf of the groom – and was the right poem for that occasion. Not for mine, however: the wedding in question was my younger sister’s.

Not wanting to befuddle the wedding guests, I thought it best to read something in a reasonably modern idiom. And yet I couldn’t help noticing that a lot of the poems about weddings from the 20^th century evoke disenchantment. The most famous wedding poem of the last century sees Philip Larkin, on a train through the English Midlands in the late 1950s noticing party after party of wedding guests, brides and grooms among them, on the streets of the towns he passes through, and there is little about them that ‘walks in beauty’.

mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest

In Larkin’s profane post-war England, any sense of the enchantment of matrimony has departed, and the ‘parodies of fashion’ that the girls use to brighten up the day do little to recapture it. Nissim Ezekiel strikes a somewhat less scornful note in his ‘A Jewish Wedding in Bombay’ – as well he should, as he is describing his own wedding. There are scenes of joy there – notably the bride’s brothers stealing his shoe for a laugh. But again, we see little in the way of transcendental beauty – the religious element of the wedding is described as prosaically as the theft of a shoe:

I remember a chanting procession or two, some rituals,
lots of skull-caps, felt hats, decorated shawls
and grape juice from a common glass for bride and
bridegroom.

The Jews of Bombay seem to be as pragmatic in their way as the nominally Christian Englishmen of the East Midlands. The title of Larkin’s poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ refers to the English name of the feast of the Pentecost, for it is this Sunday, seven Sundays after Easter, that the weddings take place, and in doing so he is drawing a contrast between the fading religious traditions of England’s past and the profane, secular atmosphere of the present: the only explicit reference to religion in the poem is in this rather strange line describing the brides heading to the south coast for their honeymoons:

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding

‘Religious wounding’ is Larkin’s way of describing the consummation of the marriage – in those days most girls would have at least pretended to be virgins before their wedding night. The action is religious because it is religion that has made the girls wait for it, or because they expect something transcendental. It is wounding because, well, it might hurt. Ezekiel’s wife describes the most likely aftermath, however: ‘Is that all / there is to it? She had wondered.’

For 20^th century glumness about marriage nobody quite beats Robert Lowell’s To Speak of Woe that is in Marriage’ which describes a point in a marriage at which:

My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,

and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes

Though later the narrating wife says she spends each night ‘gored by the climacteric of his want.’ Gored by the climacteric of his want? It’s not as bad as all that, is it? There’s much more going on in that poem than I have cared to, um, delve into, but plainly 20th-century poetry, though written in an accessible idiom, is not the place to find a nice reading for one’s sister’s wedding.

Still, Lowell, with his heady climacteric, got me on the right track. The title of the poem is from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, probably the most famous commentary on marriage in English Literature:

Experience, thogh noon auctoritie

Were in this world, is right inogh for me

To speke of wo that is in marriage.

For lordinges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,

Thonked be God that is eterne on live,

Housbondes at chirche-dore I have had five

A very literal ‘translation’ into modern English goes: ‘Even if there were no authority [on the topic of marriage] in the world, my experience is quite enough for me to speak of the woe that is in marriage, for Gentlemen, since I was twelve years of age, thanks be to God who lives eternally, I have had five husbands at the church door.’ This run of bad luck (for her husbands, not her) has allowed the wife to amass a wealth of cynical wisdom that quite scandalizes her audience. Again, not quite the best material for the wedding of one’s sister (whom I hope does not marry five husbands), but a nod in the right direction – that is, to ditch the attempt to enchant altogether and give some brotherly – and brother-in-lawerly – advice.

The very right advice was to be found again in Chaucer, this time in a modern translation and – because I didn’t have all the time in the world to prepare for it – in an anthology of poems fit for weddings. The section is from the Franklin’s Tale – a franklin is a landowner, somewhere in the lower-middle ranges of England’s Mediaeval class system – and his advice, as practical as can be, betrays awareness of all the difficulties of marriage that Larkin, Ezekiel and Lowell allude to, and gives a solution – indeed, the only possible solution:

Looke who that is moost pacient in love,

He is at advantage al above.

Pacience is an heigh vertu, certain,

For it venquisseth, as thise clerkes seyn,

Things that rigour sholde nevere atteine,

For every word men may nat chide or pleine;

Lerneth to suffer, or else, so moot I gon,

Ye shul lerne it wherso ye wole or non.

Which I would render: ‘See how he most patient in love is at an advantage above all others. Patience is a high virtue, to be sure, for it vanquishes, as the experts say, things rigour never will. Men cannot every time chide or complain. So learn to suffer, or as I live, ye will learn it whether you want to or not.’ Or, as in the anthology’s translation, in a line I quite enjoyed reading at the wedding:

So, learn to suffer, or I swear you’ve got

To learn the hard way, if you like it or not.

 

Credits

‘She Walks in Beauty’ by Lord Byron is in the public domain.

So are the works of Chaucer, though the versions used are from the Penguin Version, Ed. Jill Mann, London, 2005 and the last couplet from the Franklin’s Tale was from Penguin’s Poems for Weddings, Ed. Laura Barber, Penguin, London, 2014 (translator uncredited)

Excerpts from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, in Collected Poems, Philip Larkin, Faber and Faber, London 1988

‘A Jewish Wedding in Bombay’ can be found in Collected Poems, Nissim Ezekiel, OUP India, 2005

‘To Speak of Woe that is in Marriage’ in Selected Poems by Robert Lowell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976

 

Picture credit: By Jozef Israëls – From Jewish Art, edited by Grace Cohen Grossman, ISBN 0-88363-695-6, page 146. Scanned with an HP ScanJet 6200C at 400DPI. Downsampled to half-resolution in The Gimp to get rid of moire effect, and saved as JPEG at quality 95., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1857797

 

Welcome, Summer

Bohemian waxwing, via wikipedia

Chaucer celebrates the beginning of summer in February – hang on…

I was walking with my family through our local park the other day when I noticed a flock of a waxwi – no wait: some readers find that boring, right? I’ve noticed posts that start with my walking through my local neighbourhood don’t tend to get a lot of views.

I guess people think – what do I care about this guy’s local park, or some damn birds or something? Tell us something useful, or at least partway interesting.

I shall start instead with an interesting fact for the trivia-loving general reader: the below short poem, written in the late 14th century, includes the first known reference to Valentine’s Day in relation to romance. There’s an interesting factoid to tell your loved one over your Valentine’s dinner this Wednesday, to break the ice and possibly lead the way to intimate, um, things. But what exactly links Saint Valentine, the 3^rd Century Roman martyr, to romantic love? Not very much, apparently, but I have a theory about that, and it is all to do with birds, and broken ice, and the below poem. So let’s go ahead and read it…

 

Now welcome, Somor, with sonne softe,

That hast thes Wintres wedres overeshake,

And drevine away the lange nightes blake.

Saynt Valentine, that art full hye alofte,

Thus singen smal fowles for thy sake.

 

Now welcome, somor, with thy sonne softe,

That hast this Wintres wedres overshake.

 

Wele han they cause for to gladen ofte,

Sethe ech of hem recovered hathe hys make;

Full blisseful mowe they singe when they wake.

 

Now welcome, Somer, with thy sonne softe

That hast this Wintres wedres overeshake

And drevine away the lange nightes blake!

 

From Medieval English Lyrics, Ed. R.T. Davies, Faber and Faber, London, 1963

Overeshake – overthrown, fowles – birds, seethe – since, make – mate, mowe – may

Although there are certainly conventional elements in the poem, it is one of the most beautiful things that Chaucer wrote, and it feels like its images and sensations are pulled straight from nature not from other art (The editor of the book I took it from, called it typical of the ‘freshness’ or ‘immediacy’ of certain Middle Englsih poetry). One feels like Chaucer is someone who has really contended with the long dark nights of winter, and is really glad for the soft sun of summer.

Summer, you say, in February? That makes little sense when some of us are still clearing snow from our driveways or drying our shoes beneath the radiator. But in Middle English, the word carries something of the meaning of spring, so, it is at least a little less premature. The weather in February is still pretty cold – and that sense of warm weather battling and overcoming cold weather – that wouldn’t make sense in June, would it? The first heralds of spring, or the end of winter – which add up to the same thing, do appear in February if your senses are open to them: the lengthening of days, the first drooping snowdrops in the corner of your garden and the birds starting to return to their nesting grounds. I had a vivid reminder of this last sign just the weekend past when I was (yes), walking in our local park with my family and my son pointed out to me a little flock of birds in a tree that, on closer inspection, turned out to be waxwings, with their distinctive Mohican-style crests. I have encountered these birds this time of year on either side of the Eurasian continent, and they are doing the same thing – following the thaw back towards their nesting sites in the great cold forests of the north – Russia and Scandinavia.

This fragment is from a longer poem of Chaucer’s called the Parlement of Fowles, that is, the Parliament of the Birds. The parliament in question is an assembly of birds, convened by nature in which they all choose their mate (except for the poor old eagle, who has to wait a year), at the end of which this joyous song is sung. The choice of theme may have been partly political – it is thought that this poem may have been written to celebrate the marriage of Richard II to his wife, Anne of Bohemia.But in any case, it is the association of February with mating birds, and the association of birds with love, that won Saint Valentine – whose day just happens to be in February – his enduring association with love. That’s my theory, anyway.