Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, part 2

Argent, charnel, osier, sable, zeugma.

What do these words have in common?

I had to learn all of them on my first day in the Graveyard School of Poetry.

*** This is the second installment of my series on Graveyard Poetry. For the first entry, go here.

This was not an actual school in the modern sense, referring instead to a style of English poetry that emerged in the early 1700s and lasted until roughly 1785. The poets were all deeply religious men. Most of them knew Latin, half of them were preachers, and quite a few were named Thomas. (A coincidence I’m sure, but it makes me laugh.)

Graveyard poetry, which is characterized by the melancholic contemplation of mortality, can be seen as a response to the extravagance and corresponding moral decline generally attributed to the intrusion of mainland Catholicism into English culture.

I learned most of what I know about Graveyard Poetry in an elective course on the topic that I took on a whim when I went back to school for writing. In that class and elsewhere, I have studied the religious turmoils of England and western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries in greater depth than your average Wisconsinite, although I’m no expert. I myself was raised Catholic, although I no longer consider myself as such. Being a practicing atheist, I disagree with the Graveyard Poets’ reasoning as to why we should live our lives in the ways that they suggest, but I’ve seen enough moral corruption and shameless accumulation of wealth in my short life to see the merits of their sermons. These poems contain some of the most profound ideas I’ve ever encountered, and that’s why I want to share them with you all.

So let’s keep going, shall we?

Today I’m looking at the second verse of Thomas Parnell’s Night-Piece on Death, from 1722. Here it is—and you’ll remember that our narrator has just stepped out of his house into the cold night air.

     How deep yon Azure dies the Sky!
     Where Orbs of Gold unnumber'd lye,     10

The rules of spelling were different in those days, evidenced by the reversal of the letters i and y in “die” and “lye,” which of course are now spelled “dye” (as in, to change color) and “lie” (to lie down, to wait). The uncountable golden orbs are the stars in the sky, which must have been incredible to see in the time before electric light pollution.

     While thro' their Ranks in silver pride
     The nether Crescent seems to glide.
     The slumb'ring Breeze forgets to breathe,
     The Lake is smooth and clear beneath,
     Where once again the spangled Show     15
     Descends to meet our Eyes below.

Imagine how it must have felt to see the same unbelievable star-scape reflected in the surface of the lake.

     The Grounds which on the right aspire,
     In dimness from the View retire:
     The Left presents a Place of Graves,
     Whose Wall the silent Water laves.          20
     That Steeple guides thy doubtful sight
     Among the livid gleams of Night.

Parnell, who was in fact a preacher as well as a poet, is setting the scene for his midnight epiphany: on the right there’s a garden, too dark to see now. On the left the lakeshore leads to a cemetery. The church itself is front and center, but we won’t be going inside.

     There pass with melancholy State,
     By all the solemn Heaps of Fate,
     And think, as softly-sad you tread          25
     Above the venerable Dead,
     Time was, like thee they Life possest,
     And Time shall be, that thou shalt Rest.

To die is every human’s fate, and after a burial, the dirt of the grave is displaced upwards by the body of the deceased, resulting in a slight mound or heap. Walking past these Heaps of Fate you realize: there was a time when these people were alive… and like them, your own time will be over soon enough.

…And that’s all the time I have for Graveyard Poetry today. But don’t worry—there’s MUCH more to come. As you will see, poems from the Graveyard School can be quite long (one of them is a shocking 801 lines). I will cover the remainder of this poem in two more installments, and I plan to share about four more after that.

Until next time,
-Jon

Graveyard Poetry: First Post

One of the earliest Graveyard Poems was Thomas Parnell's Night-Piece on Death, published posthumously in 1722. I'll be looking at the whole thing in depth over the next few days. Here are the first eight lines:

     By the blue Tapers trembling Light,
     No more I waste the wakeful Night,
     Intent with endless view to pore
     The Schoolmen and the Sages o'er:
     Their Books from Wisdom widely stray,        5
     Or point at best the longest Way.
     I'll seek a readier Path, and go
     Where Wisdom's surely taught below.

So far, fairly obvious. The first thing to notice is that the writing does not follow modern rules for capitalization or punctuation. Going forward we will also see irregular spellings and archaic vocabulary. Our narrator has a candle, he's been studying, he's sick of reading the classics, thinks he's better off learning for himself. In the last line when he says "below," he means both down the front steps into the pitch black night, and below ground level, where the bodies are. Content warning: if death is a touchy subject for you, you should probably avoid the Graveyard School of Poetry.

More soon,
-Jon

Camp Nano April 2020: Stay in the Tent Edition

Well everybody, it's that time of year again: you guessed it, Jon's favorite time of the year: Nano! Which of course is short for Nanowrimo, which in turn is short for National Novel Writing Month. Which is, and always has been, the month of November. In fact, some of you may remember that I already wrote 50k words of rough draft material for this book JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO, so why am I doing it again?! This may come as a surprise, but there are now three different national novel writing months, every single year. YAY!!!!!

I'm in a virtual writing group on there called Magic Crystals, and it's for people writing sci-fi stories with any kind of weird technology that lets you explain away all sorts of awesome $#!+. The point is, I've been writing quite a bit on the message board over there, and I just had a great idea: I should post some of that over here as well. So here's what I was writing about tonight (after a brief run at my Nano project, of course).

The thing is, people on Nano are always talking about word sprints and writing prompts. But those have never really been my style. When I went back to school for writing a few years ago I learned about something much better for me: the in-depth writing exercise. These things blow those silly little prompts out of the water.

Here's my favorite one, one that I use all the time: it's called 100 Sentences. Write your story, chapter, or scene in 100 short, simple sentences. If you tend to think in long sentences with multiple clauses, learn to break it up into shorter chunks. You can put them back together later, in editing. Right now we only care about the ideas, not the final form of the grammar and vocab.

If you write by hand, number each line. If you prefer typing, start typing a numbered list. Either way, it may help to begin by writing sentences #1, 50, and 100 before any others. (The beginning, middle, and end of whatever part you're working on.) Then start from the beginning and start adding sentences. It's a good idea to write every-other-line first, so you can go back and add ideas in between later. That way, on the second pass you can check for what's missing (which in my case is usually setting, gestures, and 5 senses).

Like I said, you can do this for any level of your story. Taking a macro overview will help you generate a long-form synopsis, which can give you a clearer understanding of how to write your story. Take an existing scene that's too short and make it longer. Take a dead end, change something, and let yourself go.

The key thing to remember is that you're not committed to any particular line, phrasing, or word. You may surprise yourself with a really great-sounding line, but that should be secondary to the story. The more helpful thing would be to find new connections and new directions to take.

(OK Jon that's good enough, hopefully somebody will find it helpful.)

-Jon

By the way, the third Nano month, after November and April, is July.

Random High School Memory

When I was a kid I went in the ditch once, in a blizzard. I put the car in the ditch, is what I mean. And not even all the way in, really. Slid off the side of the road, the front right tire went over the edge, the bumper caught on the crust, the car went off balance. Tires were spinning, couldn’t go anywhere, and it was still coming down hard. I turned off the engine and sat there thinking for a minute, and that’s when I saw the big shiny pickup truck coming over the hill. Oh good, I thought. Maybe this guy has a cellular phone. Cell phones were a new thing at the time, most people didn’t have one, but I thought there was a chance. Well, this guy didn’t have a cell phone, but what he did have was a big shiny chain, with some nice big hooks on the ends. Held ‘em up as he climbed out of his cab. I was about sixteen or seventeen, never experienced this kind of thing before. He was probably twenty-three. He had a neon snowmobiling jacket and a piss-colored rat-tail for a haircut. I bet my older brother knew him, not that they would have been friends necessarily. He eyed up the situation, asked if I wanted the help, I said yes. I asked if I could do anything, he said no. He hooked up the chain and had me outta that ditch less than five minutes after I’d seen him coming over the hill off the county highway.

Well, I was sitting there behind the wheel, window rolled down, and he was standing there in the road, in the snow, and I said, “Thanks a lot, mister.” And he said, “Well I bet you could reach down into that little wallet of yours and find a nice twenty for me.”

And I said, “What? You want my money?”

And he said, “I expect I ought to be compensated somehow for pulling you out of that there ditch.”

“Well jeez,” I said, “Haven’t you ever heard of just doing something nice for somebody?”

And you know what he said? He said, “Why I ought to just push your little car right back into that damn ditch. I could do that in about one second.”

And I said, “Go ahead. I’ll just walk home, it’s only ten minutes from here. I’ll just come back with the truck later, like I was going to do in the first place.”

He turned real cross and looked like he was trying to think of something to say, but I guess he lost his nerve because he just got back in his truck and drove away without a word.

I sat there another minute, processing what had just happened, wondering if I had made the wrong decision. I did have about ten bucks on me, I remember. I drove the mile and a half home in weird silence. Told my dad what had happened, and he said that he supposed I should have paid the man. Never could decide what to think about that. I knew something was wrong with this picture, that a person ought to be able to expect that her or his fellow human will help out in time of need, without expectation of reward. But I didn’t know where the problem lay, in the workings of our society. If this guy could afford such a nice big truck, what was a measly ten bucks, or twenty? And if this was the unspoken system of the backroad farm-country folk, that they were all handing each other cash in exchange for simple favors, what did that say about our economy, not to mention our morality?