A Literary Love Song

Here is Justin Edvards from The Consultants' literary love song with my best transcription of the lyrics underneath. If you should happen to know the author in the third verse, please tell me e.g. in a comment.

Too Jane Austentatious

One wet Wednesday afternoon

I saw my lending library lovely.
Raven haired she stamped my Raymond Chandler,
my heart dissolved

So I stayed ‘till closing time,
I reckoned that to make her mine
I’d have to woo her bookishly;
I Danielle Steeled my resolve.

Oh, library lady, would you care to join me for a cup of T.
S. Eliot or perhaps a glass of Barbara Pyms and lemonade?
Harper Lee she gazed at me then locked the door
I took her Wilkie Collins in my hand and we began to promenade.

This was certainly a Mills & Boon,
had I been too Thomas Fool-Hardy?
But she shared my feeling
I was pretty damn Bernard Shaw.

So I told her how I felt,
she dimmed the lights I dropped my Orwells,
she grasped my dictionaries,
we fell J.K. Rowling to the floor

But the library hall is no place to seduce
it’s too Jane Austentatious.
It would be Rudyard Kipling there
we might get seen, Tom Clancy that

So we crept into the reference
section out of view
and there I lay down with my library lady
on the coconut mat

Oh, she said, this itchy floor
is bound to give me a thesaurus.
I built a bed of Mary Wesleys
upon which we could uncoil

With the photo copier light on,
for a pillow, Michael Crichton,
tenderly she placed her hands
upon my Conan Doyle.

She was Oscar Wilde in bed,
like a leaping Salman Rushdie head-
long into passion, personally I was
a bit too Jonathan Swift.

I could have done with a hardback edition
rather than my floppy old paperback Grisham,
but I gave her the full Brontë
And she didn’t seem too miffed.

But our affair had never lasted.
Something went Kingsley Amis.
She found another lover
with a larger print than mine

I was Graham Greene with envy
I was Somerset Maugham and I felt empty,
but my Philip Roth soon passed,
one day I ceased this futile cry.

Now I stand here feeling sorry,
grasping my Daphne du Mauri-
er a Dewey Decimal teardrop
on my cheek once more.

Occasionally I reminisce
and an Evelyn Waugh escapes my lips
remembering by Dickens
our lending library floor.

Two Satirical Poems About One Man

Jonathan Swift's A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General and Robert Southey's After Blenheim both take a satirical approach to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. One of Winston Churchill's ancestors, he served as a general in the British Army, most notably in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) where he famously won the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.

Both poems give interesting comments on war and warmongering contrasting the glory and skill of soldiering with the death and devastation of war. They both exhibit the tone which would appear more prominently in war poets such as Wilfred Owen two hundred years later.

A few notes...

A Satirical Elegy

• The poem is written in iambic tetrameter. In English, heroic verse, a form traditionally used in epic and dramatic poetry, is iambic pentameter. The missing iamb, then, signifies a lack and reflects the satirical content in form. The rhyme is masculine end rhyme in couplets (aabbccdd...)
• The elegy as a poetic composition usually laments and pays tribute to someone who has died. However, Swift does the opposite, making this the second formal reflection of satirical content. For my post on the mock-epic, click here.
• Swift's satires were, in general, Juvenalian ones. These are opposed to Horatian satires, which are gently mocking folly. Named after Horace, the Horatian satire is fairly sympathetic while Juvenalian satire, named after Juvenal, takes a more scornful view of its target, which is evil rather than folly. Juvenalian satires are more likely to use dark humour and sarcasm and see no hope where Horatian satires do. Swift's comments on Marlborough here are distinctly Juvenalian.
• A few explanatory notes:
• Swift takes a scornful view of the life and achievements of Marlborough which is shown amongst other things in the lines mentioned below.
• Line 6-8: This refers to the final judgement. According to Swift, Marlborough will not do well at the last trump.
• Line 16: Swift emphasises the physical and unpleasant for satirical effect. This he commonly did, perhaps most notably in The Lady's Dressing Room. For my discussion of this satire, click here.
• Line 17-22: Nobody grieves for him because he caused enough grief "in his day".
• Line 26: The praise of the general is like a bubble; seems substantial , but is hollow and easily undone.
• Line 32: This line refers to Genesis 2.7 albeit with a twist. While Genesis states that "[...]God formed man of the dust of the ground [...]", Swift claims that Marlborough sprung from dirt, which has slightly different connotations. See my note on line 16 in relation to this.

After Blenheim

• The poem is written in alternating iambic tetra- and trimeter. The final couplet consists of two lines of iambic tetrameter, decisively ending the stanza but also disrupting the metric pattern. The masculine end rhyme follows an abcbdd pattern in all stanzas, except the second which plays a disruptive role. Here, the word found is repeated in the fourth and fifth line, adding tension and changing the rhyme pattern to abcbbb.
• The ballad was originally sung, which accounts for the first four lines, corresponding to the four line ballad stanza. This, coupled with alliteration, also accounts for the relatively harmonious feel of the poem.
• Where Swift uses the properties of the elegy to create a sense of the uncanny and grotesque, Southey does so with those of the ballad. Incidentally, Freud's "uncanny" is discussed in these three posts.
• The effect of the poem stems largely from the combination of the peaceful, sunlit setting, the violent events discussed and the old farmer's repeated insistence that the victory was supposedly great and famous.

What do you think? 

In both these poems, structure is used as much to produce an emotional response as content. What do you think of this strategy? Is it a necessity of satire? Does it help the satire along or does it obscure the message of the poems and mar their content? On a slightly different note, do the reader have to be aware of standards of structure to be affected by the form of the poem? If so, how much awareness or literary competence is required?

The Tale of Sir Bob appreciates your input!

Barry Lyndon Plot Summary, Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1

• The Barries came to Ireland with Simon de Bary who was given a piece of land for his services during Richard II's military intervention. (This would have been in 1394-95)
• During Elizabeth I's reign, Roderick "Rory" Barry was in a feud and a passing band of English soldiers under Roger Lyndon offered to aid. Having successfully ended the feud, the English stay with the Barries, causing Rory's son Phaudrig to plot their deaths. His sister, however, who was enamoured of Lyndon warned him and the English killed the Barries and seized their land.
• Henry "Roaring Harry" Barry, protagonist Redmond Barry's father was famous for his skills at fighting, hunting and riding. He converted to Protestantism to be able to legally inherit the estate in the place of his older, Catholic brother who goes on to join the Jacobite uprising and feature prominently later in the novel. It also allows him to marry Bell Brady, the local beauty and Redmond's mother to be.
• On the point of being provided for by George II, Harry dies. Since he had spent the family fortune, Bell and Redmond returns to Ireland and is invited to stay with Michael Brady, Bell's brother at Castle Brady.
• When Bell's poverty becomes apparent she leaves Castle Brady on Mrs. Brady's insistence. In spite of this, his mother stays respectable, according to Barry.
• Barry is invited to stay at Brady's. Here, he is beaten by Mick, the oldest son, but fights back. He spends his days looking for and getting into fights.
• He claims he had great talents, but ran away from school because of the Latin lessons.
• He relates an interpolated episode where he meets Samuel Johnson, James Boswell and Oliver Goldsmith and bests them in discussion.
• He satirically comments on ladies' passivity in courtship and muses on a reversal of roles. In doing so he uses language of violence and conquest.
• Furthermore, he relates the story of his first love, his coquettish cousin Honoria Brady (christened by Jonathan Swift and eight years his senior).
• The country starts preparing for a possible French invasion and Barry meets a number of officers. Nora practices her coquetry on him, so much so that when she abandons him for the English Captain Quin, he takes desperate measures. He runs the horse he and Nora is riding into the river, nearly drowning them both and he ends up in a fever. While confined to his sick-bed, he writes poetry to Nora and discovers her and Quin together. He challenges him to a duel and Nora's reaction disgusts Quin, who tries to break off their relationship. At that moment, Mick, to whom Quin ows a sum of money, shows up and joins the fight.

Chapter 2

• Nora feigns a faint during which Quin escapes.
• Barry ponders his faith and bemoans his lot for some hours. Then, at dinner, he learns that Quin and Nora are in fact engaged to be married and in consequence, he flings a class of wine at Quin. This act serves as a duel challenge. Mick and his younger brother Ulick, who has tended to take Barry's side against his brother, follows Quin home, presumably in order to stop him from running away.
• Barry is followed home by another officer, Fagan, who unsuccessfully tries to dissuade him from duelling. Barry is offered to apologise and be paid by Quin to go to Dublin, but refuses the offer.
• At the duel, Barry is told to aim at Quin's neck. They use Quin's pistols and as Quin's death seems staged and Barry is urged to leave three times, the duel might be rigged.
• At Ulick's insistence, Barry adopts Redmond as a surname and leaves his mother's house for Dublin.

Source: Thackeray, W.M.: Barry Lyndon, Oxford Paperbacks, New Ed., 1999

"Mock-Epic" Literature

The mock-epic literary genre was especially prominent in 18th century literature. Central literary figures like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift used the mock-epic, also known as the mock-heroic, for satirical purposes. The use of Classical forms, doctrines and imagery either to emphasise or deliberately blow trivial events out of proportion offered an efficient method for satirising and elaborating on the object of their critique. THis could by illustrated by the quite similar excerpts from The Rape of the Lock by Pope (1712), Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room (1714) and Description of a City Shower (1710).

The Rape of the Lock and The Lady's Dressing Room both describe aspects of the ladies' toilet by using Classical myths and literal methodology. Where Pope draws parallels between the rites of beauty and the rites of mass, Swift uses imagery from Greek and Roman mythology (such as the myth of Celia and Strephon and the myth of Pandora's box). While Pope draws further parallels between Belinda's toilet and the Classical armor of a hero, the entire mock-epic satirically expands the petty squabble of two Catholic families into an epic struggle in the manner of the Iliad.

Swift's Description of a City Shower evokes biblical, diluvian imagery to rain scorn upon what he considers to be a corrupt and doomed city. Political conflict, which was slowly tipping in Swift's disfavour, prompted him to make use of imagery from the Aeneid, drawing parallels between Aeneas and Dido and Tories and Whigs sheltering from the weather. Also, the use of biblical references, such as describing dust (the biblical material for the first man) as evil further marks this out as a mock-epic.

Sources:
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 8th edition, New York and London: Norton, 2006
Goring, Paul: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, London: Continuum, 2008

Literary Characters - The Learned Lady and The Female Wit

To understand 18th century Britain's reaction towards the Learned Lady or the Female Wit, it is necessary to see how female sexuality and female knowledge was understood as linked.

The female wit of the Restoration stage had always incorporated an element of sexuality, as was natural for a character mirroring the rake. As the long 18th century rolled on, however, and attitudes to female sexuality changed so did those towards female wit. As female writers like Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood rose to prominence, satires suggested that having and flaunting knowledge would be the same as having and flaunting sexual knowledge. A woman writer, using the most public medium to "flaunt" her knowledge, was considered not only to "prostitute her mind" but also to appropriate male prerogatives. This made them unnatural women and unfit for the ideal role of a modest, virtuous and silent wife/mother.

Here it is important to distinguish the learned lady and the female wit from the other female characters. While these were characters of performance and sexual impropriety (qualities writers like Pope, Swift and Addison often ascribed to womanhood as a whole), the learned lady and the female wit neither put on a performance nor show off their sexualty.

Alexander Pope did not think highly of women of knowledge
and was subsequently targeted by women writers like Montagu and Burney

Although satires often linked them with sexuality, the real outrage of the display of feminine knowledge was the implication that women were capable of higher thought like men were. This was a perversion that went beyond mere authorship. Thus, this would be ridiculed e.g. with Charlotte Lennox' Lucy or Henry Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop struggling with difficult words and consepts they presume to master.

What became central to the discussion of female knowledge was education. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters argue that whatever could be found to be lacking in women's knowledge was due to faults in their education. (This is also the chief obstacle in Lennox' The Female Quixote.). Elizabeth Carter and Frances Burney tried to show how learning and femininity could be combined without subjecting the learned lady or the female wit to the scorn of contemporary society. These writers represented a trend in women's right to aquisition and presentation of knowledge which were to change literature and society.

Source: Elaine M. McGirr, Eighteenth-Century Characters: A Guide to the Literature of the Age (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)