Monthly Archives: October 2024

Week 626: Sheath and Knife, by Anon

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This is one of the great incest ballads, Child #16.

The social history of brother-sister incest is an odd one. The ancient Egyptians seem to have had no problem with it, at least among members of the royal family, but in Europe it became a very strong taboo, and Germanic legend features heroes who slept, quite unwittingly, with a sister from whom they had been reared separately, and on finding out what they had done were driven to suicidal despair, a theme which is reprised by J.R.R. Tolkien in his tale of Túrin Turambar. Obviously we understand now that incest is a bad idea from a biological point of view, but you’d think it would be enough in such unintentional cases to say ‘Oops, sorry, sis, didn’t realise’ and not do it again.

The old ballad poets did not see it as their business to make overt moral judgments, but as far as one can discern the narrator’s attitude here it seems to be ‘All very sad, but what else was a chap supposed to do in the circumstances?’. Of course, in this ballad it is not clear whether there was foreknowledge or not, but even if there was the brother’s reaction (and the sister’s connivance) are surely a bit over the top: it was hardly the baby’s fault.

I give the slightly modernised version sung by Maddy Prior on her 1998 album ‘Flesh and Blood’.

Sheath And Knife

It’s whispered in the kitchen, it’s whispered in the hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
The king’s daughter goes with child, among the ladies all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

It’s whispered by the ladies one unto the other
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘The king’s daughter goes with child unto her own brother’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

He’s ta’en his sister down to his father’s deer park
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
With a yew-tree bow and arrow slung fast across his back
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘And when that you hear me give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Shoot from your bow an arrow, and there let me lie’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when that you see that I am lying dead
  The broom blooms bonnie, the broom blooms fair
Put me in a grave, with a turf all at my head
  And we’ll never go down to the broom any more.

And when he has heard her give a loud cry
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
A silver arrow from his bow he suddenly let fly
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And he has dug a grave both long and deep
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
He’s buried his sister with their babe all at her feet
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

And when he is come to his father’s own hall
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
There was music and dancing, there were minstrels and all
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

O the ladies they asked him, ‘What makes thee in such pain?’
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
‘I’ve lost a sheath and knife, I will never find again’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘O the ships of your father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can bring as good a sheath and knife unto thee’
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

‘All the ships of my father’s a-sailing on the sea
  The broom blooms bonny, the broom blooms fair
Can never ever bring such a sheath and knife to me’.
  And they’ll never go down to the broom anymore.

Anon

Week 625: October Fungi, by David Sutton

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October is the peak month for fungi in our local beechwoods, and it seems to be a good year for them, though like everything else in the natural world their abundance and variety are not what they were, and I have seen nothing since to equal one October afternoon back in the early nineteen-eighties that inspired the following poem of mine, when every stump, trunk and fallen log seemed to be covered with fantastic excrescences.

My mycological interest has just been rekindled by reading two excellent books on the subject, ‘Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind’ by Richard Fortey and ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake. The former is entertainingly anecdotal and concerned mainly with the visible fruiting bodies that we think of as the fungi, the latter more concerned with the role of fungi, and particularly their mycelia (the normally hidden underground parts), in the ecology as a whole. Both highly recommended.

October Fungi

They are back again, the people of the woods,
A travelling circus of freaks: they have pitched their camp
On meadows of moss between the boles of beeches.
There’s no concealment here: they loll on stumps
In sulphur tribes or swagger in the leaves
Scarlet as outlaws. Fear is in their names:
Destroying Angel, Deathcap, Sickener.
The darkness bred them, devilry’s their lore
And parody their style. There’s Dryad’s Saddle
Perched, a monstrous butterfly of leather;
This velvet sleek translucence is Jew’s Ear,
There’s blewit’s ghostly lilac, polypores
Rubber-tough or textured like meringue,
Smelling of peach and honey. So we meet
Towards another year’s end in the woods.
What shall I say to you, gay-sinister
Consorts of corruption? Welcome, life.
The slugs have gorged themselves on stinkhorn jelly
And here’s a puffball ready to explode,
A wrinkled cerebellum, parchment-yellow,
A rotted sack of flour that splits and spills.
The spores rise up, dream-delicate, like smoke.
They glint and dwindle down the shining air.

David Sutton

Week 624: Captain Carpenter, by John Crowe Ransom

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It is hard to know quite what to make of this stylishly subversive poem by the American poet John Crowe Ransom (see also weeks 50, 114 and 223). We like to believe, and perhaps need to believe, that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, and by and large literature supports us in this belief, or possibly delusion: we take it for granted, for example, that whatever happens in reality, Macbeth is not going to chop Macduff into pieces and continue with his blood-soaked tyranny nor, to take the literary register down just a notch, that Jack Reacher is going to get killed in the last chapter leaving the wicked to flourish like the green bay tree. But Ransom turns all this on its head, giving us a pathetically ineffectual hero who talks the talk to the point of braggadocio but is total incapable of walking the walk, losing every fight he engages in as he becomes more and more disfigured and dismembered.

I am tempted to see the poem as a parable of how people may start off in life full of idealistic zeal and a desire to change the world, but are gradually forced to compromise or even abandon those ideals and end up defending no more than their own small circle of light, till their death extinguishes that too. And yet the poem is not entirely downbeat: Captain Carpenter remains ‘an honest gentleman’, fighting to the end in a manner reminiscent of the hero in the old ballad who when his legs were hewn off fought on ‘upon the stumps’. And it is clear that though evil may triumph, the poet’s sympathies remain with the ineffectual but uncompromising Captain.

Captain Carpenter

Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she’d taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose for evermore.

Captain Carpenter mounted up one day
And rode straightway into a stranger rogue
That looked unchristian but be that as may
The Captain did not wait upon prologue.

But drew upon him out of his great heart
The other swung against him with a club
And cracked his two legs at the shinny part
And let him roll and stick like any tub.

Captain Carpenter rode many a time
From male and female took he sundry harms
He met the wife of Satan crying ‘I’m
The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms’.

Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind
I wish he had delivered half his blows
But where she should have made off like a hind
The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.

And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears
To a black devil that used him in this wise
O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years
Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.

Captain Carpenter got up on his roan
And sallied from the gate in hell’s despite
I heard him asking in the grimmest tone
If any enemy yet there was to fight?

‘To any adversary it is fame
If he risk to be wounded by my tongue
Or burnt in two beneath my red heart’s flame
Such are the perils he is cast among

But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose
Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose’.

It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady’s bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind
He wished to get his trophy and depart
With gentle apology and touch refined
He pierced him and produced the Captain’s heart.

God’s mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

But God’s deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
That got the Captain finally on his back
And took the red red vitals of his heart
And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

John Crowe Ransom

Week 623: From ‘The Prelude’, by William Wordsworth

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It is easy now to take Wordsworth for granted and to forget just how revolutionary he must have seemed, coming after an age of poetry dominated by Pope’s neat heroic couplets. Pope had famously said ‘The proper study of mankind is man’, and we can concede this up to a considerable point, but the concession is then diminished by the realisation that Pope means ‘man in society’ and that he has little interest in ‘man in the natural world’. Then along comes Wordsworth and all sorts of things start appearing in poetry: lakes, mountains, owls, hazel nuts, moons, stars, mysterious presences…

Here is the stolen boat episode from Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem, ‘The Prelude’ (see also week 242). If the strange terror the poet describes seem a little over the top – relax, William, it’s just a big rock – then bearing in mind that Wordsworth was a child, alone at night and feeling some guilt over his small theft, it all seems at least as understandable as the young Seamus Heaney having the heebie-jeebies over a pond full of frogs. Sensitive lot, these poets.

The ‘her’ in the first line refers to Nature as a sort of moral tutor.

From ‘The Prelude’

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,—
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

William Wordsworth