Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/09/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Poem of the Day: Richard Lovelace

To Althea, from Prison

When Love with unconfinéd wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The gods that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round,
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free,
Fishes, that tipple in the deep,
Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlargéd winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

--Richard Lovelace

Sometimes I'm surprised that anyone survived the 17th century, what with poets being sent to prison and all. But that enforced leisure sometimes made for wonderful verse. Lovelace did two spells in stir, in 1642 and again in 1648-49. "To Althea" was written during the first one. Althea may or may not have been a woman named Lucy Sacheverell, and she may or may not have been the same woman he called Lucasta, in his other "familiar quotations" poem, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars." (The one with the lines "I would not love, dear, so much, / Loved I not honor more." I've always wondered if the writer named Honor Moore had parents with a literary sense of humor.) And then there was Amarantha, whom he wanted to dishevel her hair. In short, Lovelace wasn't. But he wittily turned his love poems in ardently idealist directions, celebrating freedom and honor.