A random sonnet for the Bard’s birthday

I prefer Shakespeare the playwright to Shakespeare the poet, but I have a great edition of his sonnets. It has modern translations into Finnish by Kirsti Simonsuuri, with the facsimiles of the 1609 edition and annotations of each sonnet side by side with the originals. For Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, I chose a random sonnet from it. It turned out to be sonnet number 81, which I find it appropriate for the occasion with its sentiment of the poet’s loved one living on in his poems.

Or I shall liue your Epitaph to make,

Or you suruiue when I in earth am rotten,

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Altough in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortall life shall haue,

Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye,

The earth can yield me but a common graue,

When you intombed in mens eyes shall lye,

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,

And toungs to be, your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead,

You still shall liue (such virtue hath my Pen)

Where breath most breaths, euen in the mouths of men.

Musings on John Donne’s concept of time

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

Yesterday marked the death of John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and the Dean of St Paul’s. I have a particular interest in him. I wrote my master’s thesis about him, specifically about his concept of time.

Donne isn’t exactly known as a philosopher of time. I chose him because he was a prolific writer and the abundant material promised me an access to his mind. I wasn’t interested in a philosopher’s formulated concept of time anyway. I wanted to know how an ordinary Elizabethan Englishman understood it. And despite not being a philosopher, Donne’s texts had plenty of references to time – even from a philosophical point of view.

I have been interested in time ever since I started studying history. The early modern concept of time became my focus later on, especially in relation to the emergence of the modern concept of time. But I wasn’t interested in change when I studied Donne; I wanted to know how time was understood at a particular time in history.

Meticulously, I posed questions that seemed relevant back then about subjective and objective time, cyclical and linear time, secular time and timeless eternity. Unsurprisingly, Donne’s thinking didn’t easily yield to my systematic approach. It was linear and cyclical at the same time, as well as secular and sacred. He had a strong sense of decline, that the world was deteriorating towards the inevitable end, which was a fairly common view in Renaissance.

I seem to have concluded in my thesis, having read it for the first time in ages, that for Donne, the concept of time was a theological issue. He mostly wrote about it in his devotional material and he expressed views similar to theological thinkers, especially St Augustine. The bulk of his texts is devotional, however, so the data is slightly biased towards that interpretation.

His emphasis on sacred meant that time was irrelevant compared to the timeless eternity that was to follow. For example, he wrote in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), when he thought he was on his deathbed, that happiness shouldn’t be bound to time:

What poore Elements are our happinesses made of, if Tyme, Tyme which wee can scarce consider to bee any thing, be an essential part of our hapines? […] if this Imaginary halfe-nothing, Tyme, be of the Essence of our Happinesses, how can they bee thought to be? Tyme is not so; not so, considered in any of the parts thereof.

But he had more irreverent ideas too, especially in his poetry where he could bend time to his liking. In Womans Constancy he tells how a woman is unable to be faithful for longer than a fleeting moment:

Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day,

To morrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?

Wilt though then Antedate some new made vow?

Or say that now

We are not just those persons, which we were?

One couldn’t trust anything temporal.

The conclusions of my thesis are temporal too, bound to time. I stand by them, but they offer only a superficial understanding of Donne’s concept of time, and that of the early modern in general.

The pseudo medieval utopia of William Morris

Yesterday was the birthday of William Morris (1834-1896). To mark the occasion, I take a break from the early modern and venture forth to more modern utopian thinking. Morris is best known as a textile designer and a member of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was formed as a reaction against the industrial production and impoverishing design.

But Morris was a socialist and an author too. One of his best known books is a utopia called News from Nowhere (1891). It didn’t make a great impression at its time, mostly because it was overshadowed by Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887), a veritable bestseller. Morris’s book was written as an answer to Bellamy’s and the books are fairly similar.

News from Nowhere (or an Epoch of Rest) is a socialist utopia set in 21st century London. The protagonist, William Guest, wakes up one morning to find himself in the future. He sets out to study his new surroundings and is very impressed by what he sees. There is a common ownership of everything. There are no classes or cities. Labour has ceased to be painful and people work joyously. Work is recycled too, so that people do both manual labour and creative tasks like writing poetry. Everyone is expected to do all kinds of work.

As well as a socialist utopia that seeks to answer why people would work in communism, Morris’s book is an ecological utopia. Fed up with the level of pollution in the industrialised England, he imagined an idyllic society where the industrialisation has been stopped and reversed. The world has returned to a kind of pseudo medieval, agrarian society where people find pleasure in nature. The industry has ceased from polluting and the nature has been able to recover. Swimming in the Thames is possible, unheard of in Morris’s time. Along with nature, beauty is valued above everything else. Morris’s romanticised medieval ideal comes up in the clothing people wear, for example.

The story itself takes a form of a medieval romance, a quest for love and (communist) fellowship. The goal is Ellen, a working class woman emancipated under socialism, but also a benign nature spirit. However, the goal turns out to be unattainable for the visitor from the past.

While Morris’s utopia is set in a future world, it looks backwards to a world already lost – or a world that never really existed, an imagined pseudo medieval creation of Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. But while his book didn’t cause a stir, he had a right notion about the attractiveness of the romanticised past. His designs have had a lasting life, the romantic medieval spirit winning over new people generation after generation.

Questioning the immutability of God

Ranters was a Commonwealth era sect that wasn’t necessarily Utopian or apocalyptic as such. Some say it didn’t really exist either. I bring them up anyway, because they held some interesting beliefs that suggest the idea of change unlike any other during their time. Namely, that God wasn’t immutable.

Ranters came about around 1649. They adhered to a notion similar to that of Quakers, that Christ was present in every believer – or in all living creatures. While Quakers took this to mean that the believer existed in a sinless state when Christ was present in them, Ranters maintained that nothing could be sin while Christ was in them. This led to a behaviour that was judged amoral by their contemporaries, like cohabiting without marriage and multiple partners living in a marriage-like arrangement. Mosaic laws didn’t concern them either when they were in the state of grace.

Parliament considered Ranters to be a highly disruptive force that had to be destroyed at all costs. However, some modern historians argue that the group didn’t really exist, that they were created by the conservatives as the other to be feared. The middle view is that they were small disconnected groups without proper leaders. Whatever the true scope, they disappeared soon after the Restoration when the sects were being purged.

Even though the sect was never large or powerful, some texts are attributed to them. A Single Eye (1650) is a pamphlet by Laurence Claxton (1615-1667). In it, he questions the immutability of God. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one reason why Christians were unable to see the future different from the present was the notion that God and His word – in this case, the end of the world – were unchanging.

In the letter to the reader, Claxton states that he has seen God being worshipped in so many manners around the country that it isn’t possible He is the same for all. According to him, God “thou pretends to Worship, whether he be Infinite, or Finite; whether he be subject to passion and affection, … and whether he can be changed by thy prayers, so us to expiate a judgement, or produce a deliverance … is passionate, God is affectionate, and if either, then changeable.”

For Claxton, a god who could be one thing to one person, and completely different to another, was changeable. In a culture that believed in the immutability of God, the idea was radical. It’s also the kind of mentality that is prerequisite for the modern concept of time. I haven’t run into similar examples, however. As a unique text, it is intriguing, but doesn’t yet herald a new word view.

A Single Eye by Laurence Claxton, 1650.

Socialist apocalypse

One Commonwealth era apocalyptic Utopian sect was True Levellers that formed around Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1666) in 1649. Originally called True Levellers so that they wouldn’t be mixed with Levellers – an earlier group that aimed at social equality – they were soon given the name the Diggers.

Diggers were mostly landless and poor people. They were drawn to Winstanley’s idea of communal ownership and living, based in a verse in the Book of Acts that speaks for common ownership. Winstanley’s ideal community was to be a land-based equality, where the private ownership of land was to be abolished. This would happen peacefully, when the workforce left to farm the common land in Digger communes. The land thus freed would be divided among the landless.

Winstanley’s vision has been called a proto-Communist utopia. The new world order would be based on rural lifestyle and agrarian work. The aim was to return the humankind to the pure and sinless state it had been before the Fall, which would herald the Millennium. The society would be controlled with laws, and the task of the government would be to govern peoples’ manners.

Winstanley and his followers put the theory into practice, too, and began to farm the common lands. The land-owners reacted swiftly, and employed the army to dispel them. In the end, however, they resorted to the courts of law, where Diggers lost. Digger communities were small, scattered, and without strong leaders. Faced with the determined opposition, they dispersed and disappeared within a year.

The declaration and standard of the Levellers of England, 1649.

For the Valentine's Day: Loves Alchymie

Here’s a brief interlude for the Valentine’s Day, a poem by John Donne. It’s somewhat cynical take on love, but I like the imagery. Plenty of analyses exist about the poem. Mostly it’s seen as an analogy on how the search for spiritual love is futile. Donne doesn’t have a great notion about women in love either. They are “but, Mummy, possest”, a body without mind.

Loves Alchymie by John Donne

Some that have deeper digg’d loves Myne then I,

Say, where his centrique happinesse doth lie:

I have lov’d, and got, and told,

But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,

I should not find that hidden mysterie;

Oh, ’tis imposture all:

And as no chymique yet th’Elixar got,

But glorifies his pregnant pot,

If by the way to him befall

Some odoriferous thing, or medicinall,

So, lovers dreame a rich and long delight,

But get a winter-seeming summers night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honor, and our day,

Shall we, for this vaine Bubles shadow pay?

Ends love in this, that my man,

Can be as happy’as I can; If he can

Endure the short scorn of a Bridgegroomes play?

That loving wretch that sweares,

’Tis not the bodies marry, but the mindes,

Which he in her Angelique finds,

Would swear as justly, that he heares,

In that dayes rude hoarse minstralsey, the spheares.

Hope not for minde in women; at their best

Sweetness, and wit they’are, but Mummy, possest.

A portrait of Donne as a young man, c. 1595.

The godly utopia of the Fifth Monarchy Men

A large number of the sects that formed during the Civil War and Interregnum era were apocalyptic. They expected Christ to return and the world to end during their time. What would follow was a paradise on earth, a utopia of plenty and goodwill for all.

Some of these sects and movements didn’t settle for passively waiting for the end times to begin. They tried to actively work towards Christ’s return. Despite the Christian framework of these groups, some of them had more secular means to achieving their end. Some of them were very radical too.

One of these groups was the Fifth Monarchy Men that formed around 1649. It consisted mostly of craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices, but some powerful men belonged to it, too, and it had some political power. For a brief time, they even had Oliver Cromwell’s ear.

For the Fifth Monarchists, Millennium was first and foremost a political and social issue. Their aim was to make England a godly nation. Its apocalyptic nature came from the belief that the timing of the Interregnum was significant, because the year 1666 – the year of the Beast – was so near. According to them, four monarchies had already reigned, as prophesied by Daniel in the Old Testament, and now it had come time for the fifth and the last.

The godly rule was a hierarchy based on the piety of people and the Mosaic Law. The good, who were called Saints or Free Men, would rule, and the bad would be their slaves. The poor would be forced to work, and they would be provided for with what the government mines earned.

The supporters of the Fifth Monarchy movement believed that it was their duty to help God to bring about the new world order – with violence, if necessary. After the Restoration, they were kept a strict eye on, as they were thought to be a threat. Indeed, in January 1661, fifty Fifth Monarchists tried to take London in the name of "King Jesus," only to be caught, hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason. Some members planned to assassinate Charles II in 1666, but that come to nothing.

The Fifth Monarchists’ failure to take London tightened the laws against all sects, making it more difficult for them to operate. Although some events like the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London made it possible for the members to still believe that the end was near, they didn’t achieve anything visible that would have supported their faith. The passionate movement eventually wore itself out, and disappeared in the 1680s.