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Per occasionem cuius I framed the sonnet; observe its elaborate construction. I was four days about it.
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THE GYPSY'S MALISON Suck, baby, suck, mother's love grows by giving,
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;
Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.
Kiss, baby, kiss, mother's lips shine by kisses,
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;
Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses
Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings.
Hang, baby, hang, mother's love loves such forces,
Choke the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;
Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging.
So sang a wither'd sibyl energetical,
And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.
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Barry, study that sonnet. It is curiously and perversely elaborate. 'Tis a choking subject, and therefore the reader is directed to the structure of it. See you? and was this a fourteener to be rejected
by a trumpery annual? forsooth, 't would shock all mothers; and may all mothers, who would so be shocked, bed dom'd! as if mothers were such sort of logicians as to infer the future hanging of their
child from the theoretical hangibility (or capacity of being hanged, if the judge pleases) of every infant born with a neck on. Oh B.C., my whole heart is faint, and my whole head is sick (how is it?) at this
damned, canting, unmasculine unbxwdy (I had almost said) age! Don't show this to your child's mother or I shall be Orpheusized, scattered into Hebras. Damn the King, lords, commons, and specially
(as I said on Musell Hill on a Sunday when I could get no beer a quarter before one) all bishops, priests, and curates. (158-60)
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The Letters of Charles Lamb. Vol.V.
Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1906.
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A Widow
Replaced Lamb's "The Gypsy's Malison" for the 1829 Gem
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Accompanied by an engraving, "The Widow" (24) |
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Hath always been a mark for mockery:--a standing butt for wit to level at. Jest after jest hath been huddled upon her close cap, and stuck, like burrs, upon her weeds. Her sables are a perpetual
"Black Joke."
Satirists — prose and verse — have made merry with her bereavements. She is a stock character on the stage. Farce bottleth up her crocodile
tears, or Iabelleth her empty lachrymatories. Comedy mocketh her precocious flirtations — Tragedy even girdeth at her frailty, and twitteth her with "the funeral baked meats coldly
furnishing forth the marriage tables."
I confess, when I called the other day on my kinswoman G.— then in the second week of her widowhood — and saw her sitting, her young boy by her side,
in her recent sables, I felt unable to reconcile her estate with any risible associations. The Lady with a skeleton moiety — in the old print, in Bowles's old shop window
— seemed but a type of her condition. Her husband, — a while hemisphere in love's |
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world, — was deficient. One complete side — her left — was death-stricken. It was a matrimonial paralysis, unprovocative of
laughter. I could as soon have tittered at one of those melancholy objects that drag their poor dead-alive bodies about our streets.
It seems difficult to account for the popular prejudice against lone women. There is a majority, I trust, of such honest, decorous mourners as my kinswoman: yet are Widows, like the Hebrew, a
proverb and a byeword amongst nations. From the first putting on of the sooty garments, they become a stock joke — chimney-sweep or blackamoor is not surer — by
mere virtue of their nigritude.
Are the wanton amatory glances of a few pairs of graceless eyes, twinkling through their cunning waters, to reflect so evil a light on a whole community? Verily the sad benighted orbs of that noble
relict — the Lady Rachel Russell — blinded through unserene drops for her dead Lord,— might atone for all such oglings!
Are the traditional freaks of a Dame of Ephesus, or a Wife of Bath, or a Queen of Denmark, to cast so broad a shadow over a whole sisterhood? There must be, methinks, some more |
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general infirmity — common, probably, to all Eve-kind — to justify so sweeping a stigma.
Does the satiric spirit, perhaps, institute splenetic comparisons between the lofty poetical pretensions of posthumous tenderness and their fulfilment? The sentiments of Love, especially affect a high
heroical pitch, of which the human performance can present, at best, but a burlesque parody. A Widow, that hath lived only for her husband, should die with him. She is flesh of his flesh, and bone of
his bone; and it is not seemly for a mere rib to be his survivor. The prose of her practice accords not with the poetry of her professions. She hath done with the world, — and
you meet her in Regent Street. Earth hath now nothing left for her — but she swears and administers. She cannot survive him — and invests in the Long
Annuities.
The romantic fancy resents, and the satiric spirit records, these discrepancies.
By the conjugal theory itself there ought to be no Widows; and, accordingly, a class, that by our milder manners is
merely ridiculed, on the ruder banks of the Ganges is literally roasted.
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C. Lamb
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