The Cardinal Virtues

The Cardinal Virtues sat hand in hand
Upon one throne ranked.
Uppermost sat Prudence, the guide of all Virtues beneath her.
Below came Justice, then Fortitude, then Temperance.
And under Temperance, her handmaidens: Humility and Meekness;
Humility's task to summon and present the beasts and fowls
Assembled there, with their gifts of submission,
and award them to the greater Virtues.

Bid to come forward first, the angry Lion gave his paw,
Which Prudence consented to Meekness.
The fearful Hare, called next, submitted her ears, which, as law decreed,
Humility handed to Fortitude.
The jealous Turkey had brought his coral-chain,
Which was Temperance's to gain.
The Fox, who was that day absent – he had lately met with an accident -
Bestowed on Justice his brain.

The Crow, who had accompanied the token of the unfortunate Fox,
Now took his turn, with a beautiful Peacock plume.
This being spied by the beasts and fowls in-waiting,
Made them set up a roar of cries and twitters.
For that used to buy favour was not the Crow's own property:
It was, they lamented, not his by rights to give;
He should, they said, have to forfeit an eye instead,
And fell to fighting.

Humility, forced to stand, with plume in hand,
Commenced to weep - she had no stomach for scenes of animosity,
And with tears trembling down her cheeks
Declared the Session-day ended:
I hold here what you prize so dear!
To the next bring double the gifts, the Virtues have decided.
To which the beasts and fowls, broken apart yet still panting fast,
And looking sadly ruffled and downcast, echoed praises. 

Picture credit: Allegory of the Virtues, Correggio (source: WikiArt).

A rewriting of George Herbert's Humility, written on the anniversary of his birth the 3rd April (2021).

Honoured

Sometimes we cannot know what a man is until after his death but then the honours come too late. Sometimes we honour the man whilst living but on his death those honours die with him. Sometimes we honour the man, whilst alive, mistakenly, not seeing his true hidden character until death has occurred. Sometimes the man is honoured towards the end of his life when it is though welcomed too late for him to reap the benefits. Sometimes the man is overlooked until years and years after his demise, only then is his worth recognised. Sometimes the man honoured, deceased or alive, has honours removed from him, as if the marriage between the subject and the loyalty of the public has been annulled. Sometimes the man honoured is accused and found guilty of heinous crimes; sometimes honours are removed due to the honoured man's views which the public or the times no longer chime with. The honoured man is publicly disgraced, stripped of any honour awarded him, living or dead. The man once honoured ruined, and his words denied a voice of their own, for they can't possibly stand apart, alone, from this once honoured man. Sometimes honours (and the man and the works awarded them) stand the test of time; sometimes they do not.
Death is the Judge. And the public are his Jury.
That honoured has a time: a time that fades and then returns, a time that goes away and doesn't come back, a time that lasts...and lasts...and lasts.
The man revived for good and bad. The man praised and criticised. The man brought back to life. Eternal life found through death.
This task - of revival, of endurance – often falls to historians, as well as any biographers who have a regard for the deceased, for they can give their subject a fair account, a fair hearing. They can balance the scales: this is the good, this is the ill. This is what this honoured man was like as a man; this is what he was like as a leader, or a Caesar. This is his history – family and civil and military career; these are some of his quotes. These are his deeds, and this is what the people thought. And here are some of the honours conferred upon him, during and after, followed perhaps by a description of his private life, his character and his domestic fortunes, from his youth down to his last day, in the manner, and set formula, of Suetonius, the Roman historian who wrote during the early imperial era of the Roman Empire, and whose most important surviving work is The Twelve Caesars. The man who, I presume, was honoured to be the secretary to Hadrian, who perhaps (I do not know) like the Caesars before him had inconsistent behaviours, and who in the giving of punishments could be mild or brutal, and who was also troubled more by his marriage and adopted children than by the governing of his wide empire.
But an honoured man is Father of His Country.
Though that country may not be a land, not in the sense it can be geographically placed, but a land of art in some form. A country each honoured man has made for himself and peopled with followers. In that land, he is honoured.

Picture credit: Victory, a Knight Being Crowned with a Laurel Wreath, Frank Dicksee (source: WikiArt).

Adapted from a journal entry, March 2021.

Sitting So Far Off

I appreciate my own work from a distance, sometimes short, sometimes long, and wonder at and about the self that created them. I, the 'I' of now, couldn't do so now. They belong to a different moment. And yet it frequently seems that from far away I gain an insight into a period, even as close as that of last year. A short measure of time but still a shift can be seen: in thought and creativity; in interests pursued; in language used.
How can I acknowledge that person to be me? The thoughts, the notions aren't alien, but I wonder I had them at all, or even where some came from? By what means? Of what was I inspired? And why do more moments now seem to be dry? Did they then appear so too? Do I only recognise their fruitfulness after? Does everything then – all that happens in the present - require distance and reflection?
I think it does.
And I worry we do that less now.
We do not give events the distance, the reflection, the deliberation they deserve. We want answers, or justice, straight away; we move on, or attempt to, too quickly. Or try to capture something so momentous, so affecting – in words, in pictures – before adequate time has passed and the dust has settled a little. We compare to a previous time or event, with no due consideration given to the age itself, or any victims or descendants of, instead of assessing the occurrence in its own time and place. We, like others before us, want to record and forget. Let others after us remember. It somehow being more important that they learn what we do not, but will they from what we leave, if such accounts were too hasty in their making, and perhaps never later returned to to redress and clarify?
We may have some bright minds, but we are, I think, becoming far less wise, as to facts and details, and even the assimilation and dissemination of our thoughts and feelings.

Accompanied by a portrait of Francis Bacon (by Pourbus the Younger, 1617; source: Wikipedia) since it was in the course of reading his History of  the Reign of King Henry VII that this short piece was written, February 2021.

A Fable, A Satire, Or What?

Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary of the English Language defines 'a tale' thus: 'A narrative; a story. Commonly a slight or petty account of some trifling or fabulous incident'. A definition which suggests the reading of such a work so defined will be straightforward and afford pleasure, when often, though it may supply the latter, the former is anything but! For that called a tale could also be referred to as an account, a myth, a fable, a short story, an anecdote, a yarn, a legend, a rumour, a report, a saga, an exaggeration (of the false and actual), the elements of which are various, each with their style in the telling, or a tale might include all these and then it might be called a novel, for nothing so fantastical could be so short. Or perhaps it will defy all definition, so that regardless of its length, the reader will question what is it? which is it? How should it best be described? and yet find a descriptive label for the work remains elusive. Johnson's own novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia defied categorisation, and also presented its readers with another dilemma, for it failed to deliver what it promised and yet delivered more. It was no simple tale with its philosophic musings, nor did it have the morals of a fable, nor the magical elements of a fairy or folk tale or the foreign, it was other, still widely read but with perhaps some disappointment, and incomprehension, even.
Readers now, although the same species, are a different beast. We have seen with our own eyes more lands, the world has opened up in every way: in commerce, in knowledge, in literature, and we have the advantage of lecturers on eighteenth-century authors who provide us with a greater understanding of the life and times, of possibly the author's motives and their thoughts behind or contained within the work. The lecturer, the scholar, the expert gratifies the reader with this come-to-be-expected instruction. The reader feels superior, for he knows more than the readers of that time and place, and from this distance appreciates the author differently. His mind replete with different images, which he, like much-travelled Imlac, Johnson's philosopher, 'can vary and combine with pleasure', perhaps solely for learning's sake, for he can amuse himself in 'solitude by the renovation of the knowledge', even as some fades from memory and he sets about acquiring still more. And as he renovates and acquires he realises the truth of wise Imlac's words: '...the first writers took possession of the most striking objects for description, and the most probable occurrences for fiction, and left nothing to those that followed them, but the transcription of the same events, and new combinations of the same images.' All new and later writers can do is imitate and polish them.

Picture credit: Arabian Poet (Persian), 1886, Gustave Moreau (source: WikiArt).

See The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson (Penguin Classics, with introduction and notes by Paul Goring).

Adapted from a journal entry, February 2021.

This Faculty As Possessed By This Particular Individual

The mind retains more than we realise or acknowledge. Within it there are deep recesses which store all past sensations, thoughts and knowledge, that learned (by eye, by ear, from books) and that experienced (direct mental and physical involvement), and yet the sum of these can never be recalled all at the same time. Some will never be recalled at at all, for we never knew they were retained and no further need has ever arisen for them. Others will rise, unbidden, just the once and then sink again to the depths; some will repeat this motion often, though its repetition will never be the same as the time before or the time before that. A new sensation, a new understanding will appear. The facts, too, (as you perceive them) will appear altered. And what the mind doesn't remember or choose to store, the body might, and bring with it a new level of sensation to memory. Of its own gathered scars it will recollect what the body was like previously and attempt to, if it's part of its destiny, return to its original, perhaps happiest, design; or if age be a barrier draw from the mind what the body then felt like to inhabit. In the mirror traces might be seen of the old face, the old outlines.
The living person will call up their times: those they lived through, the events they experienced, the people they knew, and perhaps still do. They will recall how they were and how others were and compare past to present. 'Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.' Everything clean forgotten: thoughts and passions demand to be written down, yet in writing may be different to the past you thought you were remembering. Things may not be, in their remembering, any clearer, only different. Writing, with pen or fingers, probes old wounds, and makes work. There's memories and thoughts to sift and sort like seeds, separate into piles. An army of ants, in single file, carry some of these away like treasure.
I have become C.S. Lewis' Orual. His retelling of a myth has taken hold of my mind; has taken my memory as its possession. My realities are fiction, my life passes in dreams. Such images dance before me, filled with ghosts of events and people, some of which happened and some of which didn't. I half inhabit life, I half inhabit dream. I expect magical instances, like those in books, to happen. Destiny needs no effort, no input. The lines have blurred.
My memory tyrannises, my mind plagiarises more accomplished writers' work, and gives their words new twists and turns to convey a different meaning, a different message. One which I or anybody else won't, should I or they chance upon these words at some later date, appreciate, let alone comprehend. There is only one moment, the moment in which something is written. The meaning, the message later will mean something else entirely, or nothing, even.
More time passes in silent speculation, more spectres float before eyes, more words take me to places unvisited and enable me to revisit the old.

Picture credit: Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid, 1664, Claude Lorrain (source: WikiArt). 

Adapted from a journal entry, February 2021. Quote from Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis.