New Science

“New Science “Great poetry has three tasks: (1) to invent sublime myths which are suited to the popular understanding; (2) to excite to ecstasy so that poetry attains its purpose; and this purpose is (3) to teach the masses to act virtuously, just as the poets have taught themselves. The natural origin of this human institution gave rise to that invariable property, nobly expressed by Tacitus, that frightened people vainly ‘imagine a thing and at once believe it’, fingunt simul creduntque.” – Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). 

Divinity, divinari
To understand either what is hidden from men,
The future,
Or what is hidden within them,
Their conscience.

My science proceeds
Like geometry
From basic elements
Arises
Its own world
Of measurable quantities.

But the orders of human affairs
Are, axiomatically, more real
Than points, lines, surfaces,
And figures.

And so we can divine
This poetic wisdom
From the crude
Metaphysical tree

Out of which the branches stretch
The poetic sciences.
Down one side one finds
logic and its languages, fabulous and mute.
ethics and its heroes,
economical families, and
great cities of politics

On the other, physics,
the divine principles of all things,
and her daughters
cosmography, who could envision a universe of gods,
and astronomy
Whom herself begat,
time-reckoning chronology
and geography, who describe the world

Indeed

A family of certainty.
Wallowing in faeces
Naked and in faeces
Wallowing wallowing
Growing inborn into giants
Scat scattered
Across the earth

Brutish Wanderers
In the New World.

I hear the sun at night as it passes by the sea,
Which Neptune rides, while Cybele stretches on her lion.
And, see, I see the gods, objects of my wonder.

All things are full of Jupiter,
Small and light,
Eagle-carried into flight
Lightning bolts and thunder claps

Believable impossibilities
The bloody mad-eyes of vines
Lights of home
Fruit’s flesh and bone
Pitcher’s lip and saw tooth
The plants comb their beards with the ribbed tongue of the sea
A hand of poison chokes the river’s throat
Fir trees weep


Thunderstruck.

Archetypes

“These archetypes – which is what myths are in essence – were created by people endowed with vigorous imaginations but feeble powers of reasoning. So they proved to be true poetic statements, which are feelings clothed in powerful passions, and thus filled with sublimity and arousing wonder. We further find that poetic expression springs from two sources: the poverty of language, and the need to explain and be understood.” – Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). 

Still,
In the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity
There shines
An eternal and inextinguishable light
And under the shadow wing of influence,
The Investigators, a soul band:
Galileo Bacon Descartes Epicurus
Lucretius on sax

corso et ricorso

Four Horsemen ride
Metaphor, Synechdoche, Metonymy, Irony
Master Tropes of Rhetoric
Shape our apprehension of the world.

Axiom 63

“Still, in the dense and dark night which envelops remotest antiquity there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind.” – Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). 

Because of the senses, 
The human mind naturally 
tends 
to 
view 
Itself externally in the body 
And it is only with 
Great difficulty that 
It can understand itself 
By means of 

Reflection. 

This axiom offers us this 
Universal principle of etymology 
In all languages: 
Words are transferred 
From physical objects and their properties 
To signify 
What is conceptual 
And spiritual.

New Science

“In seeking the basic principle of the common origins of languages and letters, we find that the first peoples of pagan antiquity were, by a demonstrable necessity of their nature, poets who spoke be means of poetic symbols.” – Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). 

Gods 
The age when pagan peoples swore 
Divinity did reign 
And all they did commanded 
By auspices and oracles 
Who spoke their readings of murmurations 
In mute words and hieroglyphs 

Heroes 
The age when those superior 
By nature ruled the peons 
Whose devotion was like a plant to the sun 
Symbolic of servility 

Men 
When all did recognise equality 
Democracy and Monarchy 
And spoke in notes vernacular 
Of business, jest, and love. 

The Lucky Chance

“All I ask, is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me, (if any such you will allow me) to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in, to take those Measures that both the Ancient and Modern Writers have set me, and by which they have pleas’d the World so well. If I must not, because of my Sex, have this Freedom, but that you will usurp all to your selves; I lay down my Quill, and you shall hear no more of me, no not so much as to make Comparisons, because I will be kinder to my Brothers of the Pen, than they have been to a defenceless Woman; for I am not content to write for a Third day only. I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero; and if you rob me of that, I can retire from the ungrateful World, and scorn its fickle Favours.” – Aphra Behn (1640-1689).

It’s an old saw, an old song,
An old never-ending scandal:
A stage of indecencies
Unfit for Ladies,
Whose ears should not prick
but for the nib of the Critick
Who censures in satiable
Masculine Strokes.

Stuff ‘em!
Screw ‘em!
There is nowt obscene in
The joyfull’st Woman alive.

The Dutch Lover

“For waving the examination, why women having equal education with men, were not as capable of knowledge, of whatever sort as well as they: I’ll only say as I have touch’d before, that Plays have no great room for that which is mens great advantage over women, that is Learning.”–  Aphra Behn (1640-1689).

Good, Sweet, Honey, Sugar-candied reader,
You little Link-Boy ribalding,
Thick-larded with unseasonable oaths,
impudent and defiant before your Lord,
Mayor of Purge Town
Vomit County,
Clad in Scarfe & Feather
Whose Academick frippery
And musty rules of Unity
Throw up and out in arms
And get your leg o’er the Moon
For she is fine tonight.

Of Dramatic Poesy

“Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare.”–  John Dryden (1631-1700).

Shakespeare,
with whom, of course, we must begin,
Was a massive soul
(that clenches)
Not satisfied that you should see
But that you must also feel
The cypress rise above the bending shrubs.

Jonson, strong and sullen and saturnine
Robbing foreign bodies like a conqueror,
Wrote to life mechanic people,
And, frugally witty, gave them
heads and hearts and liquid courage.

Ben was that mountain
Bill cuts through like a river.

Three Unities

“It is easy for critics to be severe; but if they were to give ten or a dozen plays to the public, they might perhaps slacken the rules more than I do, as soon as they have recognised through experience what constraint their precision brings about and how many beautiful things it banishes from our stage”– Pierre Corneille (1606-1684).

The unity of action
Of plot or peril
One that is complete
Which leaves serene
The mind of the spectator
After rounds of pleasant suspense.

The rule of the unity of time
Is that the tragedy ought to enclose
The duration of its action
Within a single circuit of the sun
Twenty-four or twelve or two?
But with the signal fires
smoking in the mountains
Leave the matter of duration
To spectators’ imagination.

As for the unity of place
The Attic minds are silent
But whether you find me in my boudoir
Or in the public square
Or even in my little office
In the Department of Rivers and Forests
Still shall I carry away your corpse from here with me
And I shall follow you tomorrow by a new road
And thereby make the ancient rules agree with modern pleasures
While the machine plays.

Hornpipes and Funerals

“So that since the ever-praiseworthy poesy is full of virtue-breading delightfulness, and void of no gift that ought to be in the noble name of learning; since the blames laid against it are either false or feeble; since the cause why it is not esteemed in England is the fault of poet-apes, not poets; since, lastly, our tongue is most fit to honor poesy, and to be honoured by poesy, I conjure you [… if] you be born so near the dull-making cataract of Nilus that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry; if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of poetry, or rather by a certain rustical disdain will become such a mome as to be a Momus of poetry; then […] thus much curse I must send you in the behalf of all poets; that while you live, you live in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a sonnet, and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph.”– Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

That delightful teaching
which is the end of poesy
is found to reside

Between Lion and Ass
Between delight and that
Stirring laughter in
Sinful things

To jest at strangers
Tongue-tied by
The Tower’s curse

Suffocated for the lack of
breathing place

caesura

in our midst.

But such
Ink-wasting toys –
tinkling with their
planet-like music –

They cannot save nor raise those satisfied
with their cursèd and dull earth-creeping mind.

Great Again

“Scurrility possesseth many leaves of the poets’ books: yet think I, when this is granted, they will find their sentence may with good manners put the last words foremost, and not say that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry.”– Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

You want to Make Us
Great Again
Return us to our
Golden Past

When our fine fettle nation
Had set their heart’s delight
Upon deed, action, quest and not

imagination

When men, real men,
instead of writing things fit to be done,
would do things worthy to be written.
I volunteer my librarian’s
neck to the noose,

and urge my countrymen to brace
the walls of their wisdom
against the chain shot charged,
released, now tearing through,
the flesh and bone of
All our learning.