The Columbia History of British Poetry (75 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 317
lower orders. Such a miscellany of supporters would not have been imagined in 1670, or even 1700. Mary Leapor arrived posthumously in Parnassusor in Grub Street.
This proliferation of writers is just what Pope is complaining of in the
Dunciad
. The divine calling of poet, the Virgilian vocation, ought not to be claimed by all and sundry, the ragtag and bobtail. Pope had to squint his eyes to prevent himself from seeing that it was precisely that print culture, that chaotic Grub Street republic of exchange and proliferation of the word, which had enabled him, the socially and physically disadvantaged son of a Roman Catholic draper, to make a stir in the world and win not only the fame of posterity but the more solid blessings of (rented) house and garden, medical attention, books, travelall the things so lacking in the life of, for instance, Mary Leapor.
In the
Dunciad
Pope constantly and with emphasis equates Dulness with femininity and the female principle, and with Night. Dulness also causes (or spawns) the terrible maggotlike mass of pullulating writers and their writings; she presides over the copiousness and diversity of those who have new access to the print world. But the tyranny of Church and King that Pope officiously despises in Book III (of both the 1728 and 1744 versions), the various padlocks on the mind, are going to be opposed only in such a tumult and controversy and noise, such a clattering morning as Grub Street offers. Without the publicity of this very public, impertinent, daylight world, Pope could not have survived.
Pope was dead and in his chest before Mary Leapor died and her poems were published. Judging by Pope's reaction in the
Dunciad
to other lower-class writers such as Defoe, or to female writers such as Eliza Haywood, Mary Leapor might have figured in a new
Dunciad
, had Pope lived long enough. Mary Leapor's own poems exhibit the longing of the lonely and deprived person to join the exchange of current poetry and thought, as well as a refreshing and witty skepticism about these exchanges and their forms and formulae of expression. Her mode is sensuous and comic, if ostensibly self-deprecatory.
  'Tis twenty Winters, if it is no more,
To speak the Truth it may be Twenty four:
As many Springs their 'pointed Space have run,
Since 
Mira
's eyes first open'd on the Sun.
'Twas when the Flocks on slabby Hillocks lye,
And the cold Fishes rule the watry Sky:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
Page 318
You see I'm learned, and I show't the more,
That none may wonder when they find me poor.
Yet 
Mira 
dreams, as slumb'ring Poets may,
And rolls in Treasures till the breaking Day:
While Books and Pictures in bright Order rise,
And painted Parlours swim before her Eyes;
Till the shrill Clock impertinently rings,
And the soft Visions move their shining Wings:
Then 
Mira 
wakesher Pictures are no more,
And through her Fingers slides the vanish'd Ore.
Convinc'd too soon, her Eye unwilling falls
On the blue Curtains and the dusty Walls:
She wakes, alas! to Business and to Woes,
To sweep her Kitchen, and to mend her Clothes.
                            ("An Epistle to a Lady," 632)
The poet, as "Mira," mocks her poetic position, defining herself in the favored, bardic category ("as slumb'ring Poets may"), while steadily undercutting not only her own position (she is a houseworker) but the imagined position of "Poet." She is redefining the idea of "Poet," and her redefinition works because of her arresting sensuousness, the aptness with which she can reassemble images of the lived-in world. Her world is a world of odd and sordid things"slabby Hillocks,'' "dusty Walls." The deglamorization of everything is an important part of her procedure. Yet such deglamorization is a common activity among poets of the period, certainly not excluding Pope himself. Homely images, things of a startling ordinariness, even ugliness, may all get included in poetry: "Yet eat, in dreams, the custard of the day"; "On once a flock-bed, but repair'd with straw."
Mira's day world, which she confronts with such rueful vigor, is not a place of comfort or reassurance. She, too, points to the need for the night world, for the pleasure of escape, retreat, relief. In her case, the reality is in dreams, and the dreams are pointedly nonspiritual, indeed materialistic dreams of things that to others (such as most of her readers) would be commonplace possessions. She destabilizes our middle upper-class vision by making us realize that what is ordinary pleasure to us is fantastic luxury to others.
Leapor, however she too may wish for the relief of night, is one of the Enlightenment investigators, determined to bring all the elements of common lifeseen and unseen, unconscious as well as conscious
 
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to our attention. In one of her longest poems, "Crumble-hall," she takes us through the house and grounds of gentlefolk in a startling and subtly humorous variant on the country-house poem so well established since Ben Jonson wrote on Penshurst. Donna Landry has written a fine and searching analysis of this poem which sufficiently shows that the powerful innovation of this piece arises from "a diffusion of the servant's perspective throughout the text" and points to the fact that Mira's unawed vision not only includes the workers on the estate, the servants' lives and their rooms, but also takes in "incongruous disclosures that undermine Crumble-hall's pretensions to awesome gentility." Landry makes us fully aware of the extent to which Leapor's poem is a satire, even a parody, of Pope's
Epistle to Burlington
.
I wish to stress the extent to which Leapor in her original and playfulaggressively playfuldescription exhibits diversity in her copiousness and unstoppability. Variousness and copiousness emerge through the very persistence with which the heroine digs into odd nooks and quarters (such as but not only the servants' quarters) and finds what is kept hidden from view (including of course the fact that the servants have a life). She looks through lumber rooms and indulges in one of the favorite conventions of the period, the catalogue:
Old Shoes, and Sheep-ticks bred in Stacks of Wool;
Grey 
Dobbin
's Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow:
Wheel-spokesthe Irons of a tatter'd Plough.
                                                                (99101)
The italicizing of Dobbin's name gives the old horse briefly and comically the status of a person, and the now unusable "Plough" in being "tatter'd" turns from hard to softfrom iron to something very like cloth. Wool breeds ticks, and horses get sick and need drenching-horns to force medicine down their throats. Nature is not only prosaic but in conflict with itself, productive of discomforts.
Leapor, here as elsewhere, remorselessly lets light in upon the disregarded, the discarded, and the disguised. Both male and female poets of the period, Grub Streeters or countryfolk, gentles or ungentles, are constantly engaged in this activity, letting in the light. Yet the strain of the light tells on women as well as men. "A regular contributor to the
Gentleman's Magazine
from the 1730s when she first met Johnson"so Lonsdale describes herElizabeth Carter wrote a number of poems, as well as her famed scholarly translation of Epictetus. Her best known
 
Page 320
poem is the "Ode to Wisdom," which Samuel Richardson in effect stole in 1747 to print in his
Clarissa
. This "Ode to Wisdom" is really an Ode to Evening or to Night:
The solitary bird of night
Thro' the pale shades now wings his flight,
    And quits the time-shook tow'r,
Where shelter'd from the blaze of day,
In philosophic gloom he lay,
    Beneath his ivy bower.
With joy, I hear the solemn sound,
Which midnight echoes waft around,
    And sighing gales repeat.
Fav'rite of 
Pallas
! I attend,
And, faithful to thy summons, bend
    At Wisdom's awful seat.
She loves the cool, the silent eve,
Where no false shows of life deceive,
    Beneath the lunar ray.
Here 
Folly 
quits each vain disguise
Nor sport her gayly-colour'd dyes,
    As in the beam of day.
The images at the outset are similar to those in parts of Gray's Elegy, and both Gray and Carter look back to Shakespeare and to Milton without ever truly imitating either. Both are interested in expressing the value of the individual, of the personal self in undictated imagination and meditation. For Carter, as for Young and others, the nighttime is to be identified as the time of contact with the deeper self who cannot appear in the daylight's social regime. It is interesting to see how Carter subverts Milton here. There is a strong echo of the tempting words of Satan to Eve in her vicious dream:
Why sleepst thou 
Eve
? now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling Bird . . .
                                                       . . . now reigns
Full Orb'd the Moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowie sets off the face of things.      (V.3843)
Eve is very wrong (even if just in dream, she seems already to have fallen) to listen to the glowing voice praising the Night, and then to get up

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