Methinks and Middle-English

I still remember the first time I heard the word dullard. “Here,” I thought, “here at last is the word I have been searching for all my life.” To call someone a dullard is not so brazen as to call them an idiot, but neither is it so unsophisticated as to call them stupid. It sounds cleaner, like a sharp note on queue.

Anyone with an inkling for poetry will find this easy to follow. One peculiar word or a harmonious alignment of phrases excites some of us the way the first visage of a grand piano excites a musician. Something fundamental in our nature shivers with delight at the color of language.

The gift, vaguely dubbed an ear is, on the Christian view, part of the way God has formed some of his children. To some He gave apostles, to some prophets, and to some a man crush on John Keats. Without patting my own back, I think I can safely hoist my flag among the big eared, Dumbo-like personages with whom I find camaraderie. Of course, it does not follow that I have Millay’s or Dickenson’s talents, but it certainly follows that I’d take them both out on a date--so long as they promised to whisper their lines in my ear.

But dullards, if you remember its perfection in sound, is made even more perfect here as a description of those impoverished souls whose aesthetic range scarcely surpasses that of a block of cheese. There are two main types of dullards: those who can and don’t and those who don’t because they can’t. I’m not upset at the lame for losing marathons, so I’m not upset with those who have no tongue for tastes. What irks me are those who, for whatever reasons, disengage themselves from aesthetic experiences they are capable of indulging.

We listen to music because the aesthetic experience requires no effort, external instruments manipulate the internal self. Poetry, on the other hand, sometimes requires an effort akin to reading philosophy. The mind must actively engage, the imagination must be set loose like a dog on a leash. But we are lazy.

The resultant tragedy is the death of an artistic mode. Those outside of poetical circles will not consider this very tragic; they will probably prefer it, as they consider language in its use its only relevancy. But this trend is symptomatic of the whole modern tendency to strip a thing’s value down to its utility. In truth, calling Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 valuable because it is efficacious for producing piety among Christians is like calling caviar valuable because it fills our stomachs. You simply miss the point. Holy Sonnet 14 produces piety because it is beautiful; it is not beautiful because it produces piety.

Poetry’s not all methinks and middle English; it is a mode through which we engage reality. We who have a knack for it know this best. But we also know we are like the man with two arms trying to convince a one armed world that there’s more to the world than a handshake and a high five. There’s patty cake, and eating cereal while reading, and full embraces. It’s not until we demand a little creative effort on their behalf, and not until they break through their excuses, that they will partake in the tones and tastes, the amplifications and secrets of poetical ecstasy.

"Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons:
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns." -W. H. Auden

the K. H.