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By Root 828 0

as a reference for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the changes in domestic fiction brought about by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, or the observations of the early modern astronomer, ethnographer, and translator Thomas Harriot when he traveled to the Americas with Walter Raleigh in 1585–86—all of these became focal points for important scholarship in English and American literature and culture. But every practice is prone to its own excesses, and over time it has occasionally been the case that the historical fact took preeminence over the literary work. When history is regarded as the “real” of which the poem, play, or novel is (merely or largely) a reflection, something crucial is lost, and that something is literature.

The Poetry Cure

Some early examples of English poetry exhibit a striking kind of fictive usefulness, embedded in the artifice of poem-making. In these cases, the poem—or the rhyme, or the perfect word—comes to the poet as inspiration, whether from God or from the muse of poetry, supplying words where they were lacking, and changing or healing the speaker. These stories are legendary and exemplary. Here are three examples, one from the earliest-known English poem, another from a religious lyric, and a third from a love sonnet.

The story of “Caedmon’s Hymn” is told, movingly, by the monk and scholar known as the Venerable Bede. Caedmon was a lay brother who worked as a herdsman at the monastery. Once, when the monks were feasting and singing, he retreated to sleep with the animals because—says Bede—he knew no songs. He dreamed that “someone” came to him and told him to sing a song of the beginning of creation. At first he demurred but then began to sing the short—and beautiful—poem known as “Caedmon’s Hymn.” The next day he reported these events to the monastery, was asked to write another poem, and, having complied, was invited to take monastic vows. He became—again according to Bede—a prolific poet of religious verse, all composed, like the hymn, in the vernacular—that is to say, in Old English, not in Latin. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which reports this, is, however, written in Latin.

Like all foundation myths, this one can, if we choose, be regarded as an invention, a fiction, an allegory, an embellishment of fact, or any other species of instructive story. But the hymn exists in a number of dialect versions, and what it records is a story of literary inspiration. “Sing,” the command given to Caedmon, remains throughout much of the history of English—and earlier—literature the figure inviting or initiating poetic performance (Virgil’s Aeneid famously begins “Arms and the man I sing”). The moment of inspiration (after a period of mute or stumbling incapacity) is not infrequently restaged in later poems as a birth, or rebirth, of song and creative fluency.

Consider, for example, George Herbert’s poem “Denial,” which begins

When my devotions could not pierce

Thy silent ears,

Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:

My breast was full of fears

And disorder.

and ends

O cheer and tune my heartless breast,

Defer no time;

That so thy favors granting my request,

They and my mind may chime,

And mend my rhyme.

The mended rhyme comes with the word “rhyme,” which accords with “chime” and “time,” and repairs the loss of rhyme in the previous stanza, which ends in “disorder.” Herbert expertly deploys the final lines and stanzas of his poems to perform this kind of mind-mending, in poems like “The Collar,” “Love (III),” and the “Jordan” poems, among others. As with Caedmon, the literary fiction—whatever the spiritual reality—is that of divine assistance, inspiration, collaboration.

A more secular version of this trope—for it is a trope, a figure of speech—is on display in the first of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sonnets, where the lover, seeking words to describe his passion, turns dramatically from rhetoric to spontaneous feeling:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she dear she might take some pleasure of my pain:

Pleasure might cause her read, reading