"Bare Ruin'd Choirs"

In 1534, Henry VIII (1491 to 1547), King of England, broke with the Church of Rome, ostensibly because the Pope refused to grant him an annulment of his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon. (The marriage had given him no male heirs.) That same year, Parliament declared him the Supreme Head of the Church of England. To this day, Queen Elizabeth II holds the title, "Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England."

Between 1536 and 1541, Henry enacted the "Dissolution of the Monasteries," which called for Roman Catholic church lands, monasteries, priories, convents, and friaries in England, Ireland, and Wales to be forfeit to the crown. Some of the properties Henry sold for ready cash; some he granted to his favorites; and a few he gave to the Church of England to be used as churches or cathedrals.

In the course of this process, many of the buildings were plundered for building materials and fell into ruin.

Now, as I happen to know from a footnote or commentary for Sonnet 73 that I read in college, "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," is, among other things, a reference to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, for the choir is the part of the church where the choristers sat or stood during Mass.

Curiously, I can find no reference to this, which I take as a valid interpretation, in internet commentaries on the sonnet. A valid interpretation, and possibly a poignant one, if Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) did in fact have Roman Catholic roots or beliefs, as some scholars think.

Sonnet 73

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

  William Shakespeare

Francis Towne, Netley Abbey, 1809. Tate Britain.

The Wicker Cage

Suppose I am a prisoner of war being held by the Viet Cong. I have nothing to do. I have little to eat or drink. Worst of all, I have nothing to read. A little dramatic? Maybe. But as a word nerd I feel the need to plan for times like these.

When I was in grade school and high school, my teachers, who had had to memorize and perform set pieces like Chaucer's prologue, "whan that aprille with his shores soote," Shakespeare's Hamlet's speech "to be or not to be," or the last nine lines of Bryant's "Thanatopsis,"made an important change in American pedagogy, one of several changes which, to my mind, have not been for the better.

Students were no longer required to memorize famous passages.

Why? I don't know. Memorizing a famous passage is not easy and reciting it in front of people, at least for me, harder still. (Is it my turn yet? Oh, God, do I go now?) Maybe my teachers experienced this same kind of performance anxiety.

They also seemed to think that memorization was not a challenging mental activity. A parrot could do as much.

And they already had the shards of our civilization knocking around in their pockets and nobody was sure which ones were important and which ones were not and maybe it was time to let all that go.

But memorization is good practice, and of a different kind than other kinds of learning. (Give it a try, if you don't believe me.) As Sherlock says in "The Long Fuse" (Season 1, Episode 8, November 29, 2012, Elementary, CBS, Television) "The brain is a muscle, Watson, and needs to be exercised regularly, lest it turn flabby."

And the passages you learn by heart when you are young, will, if you are fortunate, stay with you. Or, as I have done with a scant few, can possibly be recovered if you study them again. Then you will have a little piece of beauty to take out and admire from time to time. For those times you find yourself suspended in a wicker cage in the middle of a jungle with nothing to read.

The Castle Ad

Progressive is running an ad on TV, the "Castle Ad." In the course of the dialogue, Marge remarks, "We have broughteth a bounty of discounts to our customers."

What she should have said, of course, is "We have brought a bounty of discounts to our customers," because the verb bring has never taken the form, "broughteth," whether during the period castles were built or now. But that doesn't sound archaic enough.

Now, I say to my little-old-lady teacher within, why should we care? People will think we are carping needlessly about something that is meant to be silly. Can't we just go along with the joke?

Well, of course. And if you think so too, then my blog is not for you. Just say, get a life and be done with it.

But if you are like me, this is your life and you cannot be done with it. You start thinking things like, what if readers come to Chaucer and Shakespeare and expect language to be a free-for-all, instead of the foundation of the grammar, rhetoric, and usage we still use today?

What if somebody thinks bring has a very fluid form, instead of a real conjugation?

And other questions of equal gravity.