Medieval Verse (2): A Hart there was...

[ This hitherto untranscribed text is by a hand unknown and no putative attribution to any earlier scriptor should be assayed. ]

Discovered inscribed in cursiva anglicana (Middle English

and Latin) by stylus on a wax tablet. Early 14th Century.

This tabletta (tabula or ceraculum), one of a number sealed in a carrying-pouch,
is in the personal possession of Catherine Eisner who has transcribed the 

orthographical variants, with reference to The Middle English Dictionary

and to The Index to Middle English Verse;

and within the limitations of current scholarship Eisner 

believes this text to be a faithful rendering.

                       A Hart there was, 

                                                    a Hart so grievous hurt,

                       A Cry there was, 

                                                    a Cry of Hounds astart,

                       A Death there was,

                                                    a Death of Beauty caught,

                       A King there was,

                                                    a King most desolate.

This verse appears to be a hazardous essay into lese-majesty,
almost certainly written in 1312 or shortly after, for in that year
the King’s Favourite, Piers Gaveston, described as ‘the Minion of
a hateful King’ was hunted down and executed by a group of nobles
led by the Earls of Lancaster and Warwick, who had long sought by
any means to eliminate the influence – considered meddlesome and
scandalously improper – the upstart Piers exercised over Edward II.

For a transcription of the First of these medieval verses by an unknown hand, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/03/medieval-song.html
For the Third transcribed verse, believed to be in chronological order, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-3-when-lief-churl.html
The Fourth verse, which ends the series (the succeeding wax tablets are irredeemably welded together) see:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2020/02/medieval-verse-4-praise-crown-restored.html

Occupation . . . Baghdad . . . Paris . . . Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose* . . .

  Dateline 1942:
‘In Hôtel Ampurias there is a respectably-sized arsenal of instruments for extracting information,’ Régine was warned on her first arrival in Paris. The place was said to echo with screams of a horrible significance.
  Locals called the street the Rue des Phalangistes, he’d added.
  The door Régine next entered had the Generalleutnant’s nameplate on it.  
  ‘A pleasant room with unpleasant uses,’ was Régine’s first thought.
  The elegant suite the general had chosen to occupy, with its magnificent gilded panels and cornices, marbled pillars and rich velvet, gold-tasselled drapes – an apartment that was never designed for a brigand chief – told the truth about him because of its lie. (Régine remembered tales of the Franco-Prussian War and of the fallen city and of imperial chaises longues chopped up for firewood by the marauding homo teutonicus.) 

From The Lost Hour – A Memoir of a Trauma

by Catherine Eisner 2016

  Dateline Paris 1942

Régine stared blankly at the figure seated at the general’s campaign desk
then read the name chalked on the roster board behind him :
Oberleutnant Reinhard von Heitmann. The young aide-de-camp, half hidden
by a card-index holder and dossiers of suspects, rose and removed a
file from the stack. Régine saw von Heitmann withdraw her identity card.

  Dateline Paris 1870

Anton von Werner’s 1894 painting Im Etappenquartier vor Paris

(A Billet outside Paris) at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

The painting depicts German troops occupying the Château de Brunoy

outside Paris on October 24, 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.

  Dateline Baghdad 2003 

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Chad Touchett, centre, relaxes with comrades
from A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment,
on April 7, 2003, after searching one of Saddam Hussein’s
palaces damaged by bombs in Baghdad.
( Photo: John Moore / AP )

  *The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Juvenilia . . . A Teenage Notebook . . .

A grief ago*

A grief ago

the fire burned itself out

where this small dog now

dares to paw the ashes.

I shall not shout

at one too meagre

to tempt my

 injustices.

In the Manner of Walter Savage Landor.

  O prosper not the past

that we may eat upon

a harvest lost, laid waste

    by our own carrion.**

*A coherent line from a word-salad-poem by Dylan Thomas.

** A reference to overpopulated London and the Thames, polluted since the early 19th Century.
The prince destined to be King Henry IX died, aged 18, from typhoid fever from a swim in the Thames
near Richmond in October 1612.

Invictus . . . Mother Courage . . .

          My shoe is old ; its story’s told,
          whatever shall I do?
          There’s no foothold ; the world is cold,
          I’ll walk without my shoe.

See also . . .
Grim Secrets of Room 101 which traces the horrors of the Ministry of Truth to their source in the works of the Hungarian,  George Tabori, whose autobiographical My Mother’s Courage records how his mother escaped the deportation of 4000 Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in July 1944. (Tabori was a Brecht expert and author of The Brecht File.) 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2018/06/grim-secrets-of-room-101-is-it-time-to.html
See also a student of Brecht, Horst Bienek . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/04/immured-mustard-field-found.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

Dramatick Verse, a Fragment : Horatius Holds the Bridge

             HORATIUS :       A rout no child would own!
                                      You speak catastrophe.
  
             MESSENGER :  They milled around in great alarm.
                                      No thought but for our missing.

             HORATIUS :      Scum!

             MESSENGER :  Sire!

             HORATIUS :      Animal invertebratum!

                                      Your duty was to find them!

The hero, Horatius, a junior officer in the army of the early Roman
Republic, who famously defended Rome at the Tiber Bridge from the
invading army of Etruscans in the late 6th century BC. By defending
the narrow end of the bridge, he — together with commanders
Herminius and Lartius — was able to ward off the attacking army
long enough to allow other Romans to destroy the bridge behind him,
blocking the Etruscans’ advance and saving the city. According to
Livy’s History of Rome (ii. 10.), Horatius’s ‘own men, a panic-stricken
troop, were deserting their posts and discarding their weapons’;  how-
ever, Horatius's courage manages to rally the defence of the bridge.

             

Variation on a Theme by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

‘Man is a fish that swims in its own sperm.’
             Imagine then a clean white linen napkin
wound firmly round an eel so muscular
             and strong, plunging and twisting in the palm,
that it’s difficult to hold; whereupon
             the knife you take, with which you tried to kill the
bread, neither this sombre iridescence slays:
             The eel rears from your grasp and smites your face. 

                  Catherine Eisner
                  with respectful acknowledgements 
                  to the Restaurant du Chat qui Pêche
                  by Edna St. Vincent Millay
                  (Century Magazine 1923)

Edna St. Vincent Millay bathing
(circa 1927).

Miss Emily Dickinson Communes with the Great Dictator Mr John Milton . . .

‘Do you ever yearn,’

she was asked,
on a whim,

‘to have been firstborn to
 that Master of the Poem?’

‘Daughter of blind Milton?

Why, it’s true,’
she’d shrugged with the coyest of smiles,
‘for then
I would have intimately known

the Fiend’s bade angels

were verily my own.’ 

Blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost
to his Daughter
by Eugène Delacroix (circa 1826).

Miltonic Homophones Make Mischief.

In emulation of Milton’s daughter, Miss Dickinson transcribed correctly line 344 of Book 1 of Paradise Lost, in countless editions falsely rendered thus:

                             So numberless were those bad Angels seen                                                
                             Hovering on wing under the Cope of Hell

for she recognised, unlike most – if not all – Miltonian scholars, that this dictated masterpiece contains many homophones and bad angels for bade angels is surely an example of the grave pitfalls that lie in wait for orality in versification. 

Even a fair reading of the transcript by Milton’s daughter would not necessarily have singled out the fault, however acute the blind task-master’s ear. And she . . . ? Well, Milton’s daughter – as Emily suspected – may have allowed the error to stand to colour this stern, forbidding, Epic Voice with her own mischievous girlish descant. 

                             Blind Milton: The meaning’s not mistaken, child?
                             Meek Daughter: Bade angels, bade as bidden, Father.

Do you doubt Emily’s insights; those of a preeminent bardic practitioner? Consider Milton’s verses some forty lines earlier, a narrative in which Satan arises from the fiery deep to issue rousing orders, bidding his Fallen Angels in a call to arms.  

On Hell’s. . . 
                             . . . inflamed sea he stood, and called 
                             His legions, Angel forms, who lay entranced . . .
                             Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen . . .
                             . . . Yet to their general’s voice they soon obeyed
                             Innumerable. [In other words, Bade Angels.]

After all, for every Production Line worker (in this case, over 10,000 lines!) there are bound to be a few moments for a little idle diversion.

Empress of Calvary.
Though, it has to be added, anyone who personifies themselves as ‘Empress of Calvary’ is perhaps in an invidious position when presuming to find a bum note in one of Christendom’s authentic God-given masterpieces. Except, maybe, after all, an Empress of Calvary should command Bad Angels, for they would certainly deserve to be at her impious imperious bidding. 

Or is that exactly what Emily meant?

Satan calling up his legions
by William Blake
(tempera and gold, circa 1800 - 1805)

 

 

For Great Dictators: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Barbara Cartland, Edgar Wallace and Co. . . . see . . .
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2012/09/great-dictators-henry-james-joseph.html

•

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html