These are not the dog days – they come in August when the dog star, Sirius, is rising – but, by heaven, they feel like it. It's proper hot, as we say around here, and more to come tomorrow. At least the butterflies are loving it – to the extent that a Silver-Washed Fritillary paid a fleeting visit to the garden the other day: they sometimes do this, flying far from their usual haunts, when the weather gets really hot. But talk of dog days inevitably leads me to this, one of Auden's best – so good it even impressed Randall Jarrell...
Under Sirius Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar’s brain
Under his great hat,
Drug though She may, the Sybil utters
A gush of table-chat.
And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,
Lying in bed till noon,
Your bills unpaid, your much advertised
Epic not yet begun,
Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish
Some earthquake would astonish,
Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing
Unlock the prisons and translate
The slipshod gathering.
And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
Ah! how the cannons roar,
How jocular the bells as They
Indulge the peccant shore.
It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe
That all in the end shall be well,
But first of all, remember,
So the Sacred Books foretell,
The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown,
When the insurrected eagre hangs
Over the sleeping town?
How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorcerers shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
How will you answer when from their qualming spring
The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,
And out of the open sky
The pantocratic riddle breaks –
"Who are you and why?"
For when in a carol under the apple-trees
The reborn featly dance,
There will also, Fortunatus,
Be those who refused their chance,
Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,
And mawkish in their wits,
To whom these dull dog-days
Between event seemed crowned with olive
And golden with self-praise.
Fortunatus was a sixth-century poet of the Merovingian court, who wrote in Latin and became a Christian bishop (and was venerated after his death). 'Soodling' means dawdling, 'baltering' tumbling along. The 'three wise Maries' are three variously identified Maries from the Gospels who, according to medieval legend, made landfall in Provence after travelling from the Holy Land. 'Sossing' is simply onomatopoeic. An 'eagre' is a kind of tidal wave, commonly known as a 'bore' – which would not have sounded quite as good: 'the insurrected bore'!
On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...
McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...
'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June – Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon – That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation. His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham, But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'
Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...
June 1966
Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park while the legs and voices of my children pass seeking, seeking: I remember how on the 13th of June of that simmering 1940 I was conscripted into the East Surreys, and, more than a quarter of a century ago, when France had fallen, we practised concealment in this very bracken. The burnt stalks pricked through my denims. Hitler is now one of the antiques of History, I lurk like a monster in my hiding place. He didn't get me. If there were a God it would be only polite to thank him.
More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.' Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull.
I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Soul', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it? Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good. Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both.
I've only just realised, with a start, that today is National Beer Day. The date was chosen because it's the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which has something to say about standard measures of beer and other drinks – and also, one would like to think, represents our traditional liberties, of which the drinking of beer, preferably in a pub, is a pretty good embodiment. Johnson was a great advocate of what we now call the pub: 'There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.' I think he would have loved Wetherspoon's, that most convivial of national institutions – and famed for its cheap, well kept beer. National Beer Day enjoins us to raise a glass at 7pm in a national Cheers to Beer toast. I'll drink to that.
Nige, who, like Mr Kenneth Horne, prefers to remain anonymous, was also a founder blogger of The Dabbler and a co-blogger on the Bryan Appleyard Thought Experiments blog. He is the sole blogger on this one, and his principal aim is to share various of life's pleasures. These tend to relate to books, art, poems, butterflies, birds, churches, music, walking, weather, drink, etc, with occasional references to the passing scene. His book, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matters of Life and Death, is available on Amazon or direct from the author.
