Notes to stanzas 6-12
6.4 Cloudcuckooland:* Aristophanes’
The Birds is a very important source in this work. Despite the clear analogy of the role of the pub ‘The Black Swan’ (and indeed of Birmingham itself) as a place of pivotal revolutionary possibility—the headquarters of a ‘counter-society’, the reason for this may be as dubious as the fact that ‘bird’ is a slang term for a woman in contemporary English: a fact which reverses wholesale the definitively phallic/masculine sexual overtones of the birds in Aristophanes. It is adult male birds, and not the females, who are the preening, gaudy, screeching characters of erotic display, as Aristophanes was well aware. Colloquial urban English therefore turns the word into another ‘counter.’ The many references to birds (especially in the deleted ‘dawn’ stanzas, 68-78, and in reference to the heroine’s entourage) therefore carry symbolic overtones of the wider instability of sex in the poem. It is the symbol of the flamingo, however: the upside-down pink bird, the leader of the Aristophanic chorus, the phoney phoenix, a pan-cultural emblem of sexual deviance with a name that has one of the language’s most dubious foreign etymologies (see 175.2) which carries the greatest force in the poem. Given time, I shall explore this topic further.
6.7 pleasure dome:* Coleridge’s ethereal ‘pleasure dome’ of ‘Kubla Khan’ (1797) was in Xanadu: or Xuang-du, the summer capital of the Mongol Empire in China. This place has echoes in Yeats’ imaginary Byzantium. (In ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ he originally intended to include the words: ‘Saint Sophia’s sacred dome… Mirrored in water.’) Nowhere could sound more dissimilar than that most unromantically named English village, Porlock. One suspects Coleridge of inventing the whole anecdote of ‘the man on business from Porlock’ in order to assert this geographical juxtaposition.
We cannot ignore the history though. In 1797 rumours abounded of French Revolutionary forces plotting to stage an invasion of England. The North Somerset coast was singled out for particular attention when the government was asked by locals to investigate mysterious figures who had been heard speaking a foreign language and roaming the moors around the coast, near to Porlock, taking notes. These suspected French spies turned out to be the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge who were just rambling on Exmoor and writing poetry, as was their wont. They had, of course, been outspoken supporters of the revolution of 1789 but had become sufficiently disillusioned by the reign of terror no longer to be taken seriously as a revolutionary fifth-column. The suspicion was quashed.
A crucial upshot of the environment of national paranoia that led to this misunderstanding, however, had been (earlier in the year) a run on the Bank of England. Such a large number of people had demanded the redemption of their bank-notes for bullion that the Government was forced on February 26th to suspend the principle of redeemability and enforce a ‘fiat’ money system. Naturally enough, it was this event which led to the great Bullion debates of the period, which set British monetary policy for a century. This cannot have been far from Coleridge’s mind when he wrote his famous fragment. The legend of the Kubla Khan was, of course, originally brought to the West by Marco Polo. Immediately after describing the opulence of the tyrant’s summer palace in Xuang-du, the Venetian explorer includes the following chapter (ed. H. Yule 1871. pp. 378-80)
How the Great Kaan Causes the Bark of Trees,
Made into Something Like Paper,
to Pass for Money...
Now that I have told you in detail of the splendour of this City of the Emperor’s, I shall proceed to tell you of the Mint which he hath in the same city, in the which he hath his money coined and struck, as I shall relate to you. And in doing so I shall make manifest to you how it is that the Great Lord may well be able to accomplish even much more than I have told you, or am going to tell you in this Book…the way [the Emperor’s mint] is wrought is such that you might say he hath the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes his money after this fashion.
He makes them take of the bark of a certain tree… What they take is a certain fine white bast or skin which lies between the wood of the tree and the thick outer bark, and this they make into something resembling sheets of paper, but black. When these sheets have been prepared they are cut up into pieces of different sizes… All these pieces of paper are issued with as much solemnity and authority as if they were of pure gold or silver; and on every piece a variety of officials, whose duty it is, have to write their names, and to put their seals. And when all is prepared duly, the chief officer deputed by the Kaan smears the Seal entrusted to him with vermilion, and impresses it on the paper, so that the form of the Seal remains imprinted upon it in red; the Money is then authentic. Anyone forging it would be punished with death. And the Kaan causes every year to be made such a vast quantity of this money, which costs him nothing, that it must equal in amount all the treasure of the world.
With these pieces of paper, made as I have described, he causes all payments on his own account to be made; and he makes them to pass current universally over all his kingdoms and provinces and territories, and whithersoever his power and sovereignty extends. And nobody, however important he may think himself, dares to refuse them on pain of death. And indeed everybody takes them readily, for wheresoever a person may go throughout the Great Kaan’s dominions he shall find these pieces of paper current, and shall be able to transact all sales and purchases of goods by means of them just as well as if they were coins of pure gold…
When any of those pieces of paper are spoilt—not that they are so very flimsy neither—the owner carries them to the mint, and by paying 3 per cent. on the value he gets new pieces in exchange. And if any baron, or any one else soever, hath need of gold or silver or gems or pearls, in order to make plate, or girdles, or the like, he goes to the Mint and buys as much as he list, paying in this paper money.
The image of a palace of unsurpassed opulence created entirely out of air by the quasi-divine process of ‘decree’ finds neat analogues in the idea of the Khan’s invention of the great economic fiction: ‘promissory’ money. The fact that England was in the throes of a national debate about precisely the same monetary system at the time of writing should not go unnoticed by critics, however ‘new’ they think themselves to be.
Xanadu seems, quite wrongly, to have become conflated in the popular imagination with the oriental idyll of Shangri-La. The latter derives from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933). Quite unlike the magnificent but ironic epitome of imaginative human ambition in Coleridge’s vision-fragment, it is a rather more homely centenarian’s paradise, supposedly in the mountains of Tibet, which reminds the hero "very slightly of Oxford" (page 212): a resemblance which I find it difficult to imagine today, despite the view through my window of the neatly tended quad.
7.1 Jodrell Bank:* By a rather staggering coincidence this place was mentioned in a copy of a popular scientific journal I recently came across in the neighbouring classroom. If I remember rightly, it is a botanical research site owned by the University of Manchester, 20 or so miles to the south of the city, on which an astronomer called Lovell (the Kubla Khan of the piece) is planning to construct the world’s largest ‘radio-telescope’: which is not a wireless set through which one can see the
Jolly Roger of an approaching pirate ship, but an enormous rotating dish with the surface area of a football pitch that looks for all the world as if it were designed as a docking-place for one of the ‘flying saucers’ piloted by extra-terrestrial aliens about which the scaremongers have recently found it impossible to hold their peace.
7.2* P. Y. Gerbeau: ze tent. [Poet’s note]
One assumes the above to be an incomplete bibliographic citation. The Cutty Sark is, of course, the old tea clipper moored at Greenwich quay. The name comes from Burns’s ‘Tam O Shanter’ where it is used to refer to the revealingly short-cut dress worn by one of the witches who accost Tam on his drunken ride home. Quite what the title of the book might be is hard to make out: it looks like ‘ze tent’, but that makes no sense in any language of which I am aware. ‘Zee’ (with two <e>s rather than one) is Dutch for sea—which would seem, on the surface at least, to have a direct connection with the sailing vessel—but that is about as far as my knowledge of that language stretches and it might just as easily be read as the American rendering of the last letter of the alphabet; besides, it seems much more in keeping with the poem’s thematic focus on cheap, flashy temptation and resistance of the demonic fake feminine that the poet would choose to cite a reference to the Burns rather than the ship. Burns, Burns, Burns.
7.5-6 Sea Life tank, The Eden Project… centerparc:* Dreary Science-Fiction jargon for futuristic public buildings. One imagines the glass-sided edifices so beloved of modern visions of the city. It is the most memorable architectural characteristic of Zamyatin’s ‘dystopia’ We, for example, that all buildings are transparent, thus banishing privacy entirely. The most memorable narrative characteristic is its opening (like this poem) in a heavily ironic vein, narrated by an ardent supporter of the society it depicts. This man, who is called simply D-503, tellingly refers to ‘One-State’ as a ‘Golden Eden.’ Titles like ‘The Eden Project’ and ‘Centerparc’ (with its amphibious combination of American and French misspellings) would not be at all out of place in Zamyatin’s innovative work. ‘Sea Life tank’ one presumes to be a massive aquarium of aquatic animals bred in captivity; the actual sea being so polluted or built-over in this era that it can no longer support life.
8.6* As the following stanza explains, the word ‘Birmingham’ (meaning counterfeit) was introduced into the language in the 1670s when the number of fake groats brought into circulation from the workshops of that town became so large that it seriously threatened the national economy. The word very quickly became transferred to the Whigs in Parliament, ostensibly via an abbreviation of ‘Birmingham Protestant’ as a denunciation of their claims to the religious high-ground. In my opinion, however, this epithet stands much more tellingly as an affirmation of the genetic connection between the radical side of the political divide and the non-conformist capitalism lingering in the dingy midlands since the Civil War: bitterly resentful of the Restoration and now intent on revolution via these insidious means.
It is quite fitting that the second of the poem’s ‘Birmingham Alexandrines’ is chosen as the line in which to introduce this usage of the word. The Alexandrine is generally denounced by English poets:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along
(Pope Essay on Criticism 358-359)
Pope is caricaturing the pompous habit of finishing a poem of pentameters with a gratuitous six-foot line. He is almost certainly thinking of the imitators of Spenser, whose stanzas routinely end in a hexameter. In particular, this example recalls the last line of the following stanza in The Faerie Queene (XXX.xi.28. Smith, 1909: p.498):
For round about the wals yclothed were
With goodly arras of great maiesty,
Wouen with gold and silke so close and nere,
That the rich metall lurked priuily,
As faining to be hid from enuious eye;
Yet here, and there, and euery where vnwares
It shewd it selfe, and shone vnwillingly;
Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares.
This is an erotic tapestry seen by Britomart in the hallway of the burning house of the tyrannical Busyrane, and by Scudamore beyond the flames through which (unlike his virtuous female counterpart) he cannot pass. Britomart—both a version of the Minoan goddess of chastity, Britomartis, whom Spenser would have read about in Virgil’s epyllion Ciris, and a chivalric elision of Britain and Mars—was self-evidently a literary model for the revival of the figure of Britannia in the C17th. Spenser likens the violent lust depicted in the tapestry, and the treacherous lustre lent to it by the use of gold thread, to the fire burning around the house and the ‘hidden snares’ of the snake in the grass. The phrase ‘faining to be hid from envious eye’ is crucial to Spenser’s examination in Book 3 of the perils of the dissembling æsthetics of seduction. Just like our poet, Spenser uses his Alexandrine to mimic the enemy. The multiple alliterative stresses of ‘long bright burnisht back declares’ serve to ‘wound’ the iambic flow of the line so that it ‘drags its slow length along’. The effect on the reader is one of suddenly discovering the snake crawling in his mouth. Britomart is the embodiment of resistance to such insidious influences. Her travesty in The Birmingham Quean is quite the opposite, of course. burning, burning
It is important to remember that the Mediæval French ‘Alexandrin’ was originally not a hexameter at all, but a line consisting of two hemistichs of two trisyllabic feet. The Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris—from which the form gets its name—has a rhythm much more akin to the triplets of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ than to anything consonant with the stately tread of iambic pentameter.
It was Ronsard who first identified the Alexandrin with the resonant hexameter of classical epic. He was at great pains to keep his six feet in line. Spenser, at the highpoint of this Renascence hybridisation of medieval romance and classical epic, quite naturally incorporates these newly classicized Alexandrines into his verse. He understood very well, however, that the medieval metre ‘lurkèd privily’ in the rhythmic weave and that its ‘discolourd’ stresses could ‘shine unwillingly’ at moments of this kind.
Pope was aware of precisely the same thing. The second hemistich of his ‘needless Alexandrine’:
drags
′its slow
′length a
′long
but also drags its
′slow length a
′long
and even ′drags its slow
′length along
(Shedding its skin of iambic pentameter)
The Alexandrine is therefore correctly used, in my opinion, not to refer to unproblematic hexameter, but only to those instances of dodecasyllabic lines which carry this threat of metrical disturbance. Clearly, this line is an example. The possibility of a triplet rhythm is overtured by the trisyllabic rhyme (manu)facturing / fracturing in lines 2 and 4 and is consolidated in line 6 by the central dactyl ‘Birminghams’. Consequently, it is difficult not to read this line as dactylic; something which emphasizes the irony of ‘backed the King’ (to be undercut by ‘Into a corner’) by tempting the reader to skip blithely over the normal emphasis on ‘King’.
Despite considerable evidence that the poem was begun with the intention of ending each stanza on a disruptive Birmingham Alexandrine of this kind, the extant ‘hexameters’ appear almost exclusively (as here) in the sixth line of the octave. The effect is a bathetic one. A kind of rubato sensation is created—or perhaps its opposite: an acceleration, like the pattering steps of a long-jumper approaching the take-off board—before the stanza tumbles headlong into the comic couplet. It is a rhythmic effect similar to the semantic one via which Tamburlaine’s most transcendent speech collapses (like Phæton pranging the chariot of the sun, and Icarus splashing down in the Ægean) into ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne.’ (1590: II.vi.69)
For a discussion of how this effect brings together the bathos of comic doggerel with the sense of a vulgar poetics of prescience we need to turn to De Quincey:
as Grecian taste expanded, the disagreeable criticisms whispered about in Athens as to the coarse quality of the verses that proceeded from Delphi. It was like bad Latin from Oxford. Apollo himself to turn out of his own temple, in the very age of Sophocles, such Birmingham hexameters as sometimes astonished Greece, was like our English court keeping a Stephen Duck, the thresher, for the national poet-laureate, at a time when Pope was fixing an era in the literature. Metre fell to a discount in such learned times. (‘Style’ Part II: D. Masson [ed.] 1890, Vol X., p.171. My emphasis.)
He resists using the word Alexandrine for the obvious reason of avoiding an anachronism, but the ironic attachment of this idea of ‘discounted’ hexameter to the figure of Alexander the Great is crucial to the hermeneutic reading this poem demands. It was Alexander the Great, we should remember, who first understood the importance of a bimetallic standard to the stability of empire. He did not hoard the gold he won from Darius; instead, he minted the first truly abundant gold stater, whose value he fixed in relation to that of the Attic standard of the silver drachma. Alexander it was who also took the fateful step beyond the innovation of his Great Grandfather, Alexander I of Macedonia (of inscribing his name on his coins) by posing himself for the portrait of Herakles. He was therefore legendarily the first ruler whose image appeared on his own coinage. After his death, those who sought to capitalize on his supposed divinity transposed the portrait from the drachma to the stater. Thus was Alexander reified.
The bitterest intellectual opponent of Alexander’s reign was the Cynic philosopher Diogenes:
the son of a disreputable money-changer who had been sent to prison for defacing the coinage… His aim in life was to do as his father had done, to ‘deface the coinage’, but on a much larger scale. He would deface all the coinage current in the world. Every conventional stamp was false. The men stamped as generals and kings; the things stamped as honour and wisdom and happiness and riches; all were base metal with lying superscription.
(Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1925, p.117)
Every schoolboy knows the story of Diogenes replying, when asked what the emperor could do for him, simply ‘stand out of my light’: a particularly caustic remark when one considers Alexander’s traditional identification with Apollo, not just on the disc of the gold stater but also on the face of the sun whose light it reflected. Never was envy of inherent nobility so loathingly expressed. Diogenes, the presumptuous son of a coiner, is truly the progenitor of the sneering hypocrisies of the Puritans and the Birmingham non-conformists who eventually came to see themselves as the future leaders of a Capitalist Empire of America.
Like Diogenes, the persona of this piece seeks to ‘deface the coinage’ with its Birmingham Alexandrines: to ‘back the Queen into a corner with a counterfeit’.
9.1 something cheap and fake:* Southey demonstrates neatly just how and why the name of this city continues to be synonymous with the blasé illegality and infernal ingenuity in the cheap replication of valuable objects (in this case, objects of literary art and the symbols of nation and civilisation) which define both the mimetic method and the thematic nub of the poem (
op. cit.: Letter 36, p.198):
In some parts of Italy, the criminal who can prove himself to be the best workman in any business is pardoned in favorem artis, unless his crime has been coining; a useful sort of benefit of clergy. If ingenuity were admitted as an excuse for guilt in this country, Birmingham rogues might defy the gallows. Even as it is, they set justice at defiance, and carry on the most illegal practices almost with impunity... The officers of justice had received intelligence of a gang of coiners; the building to which they were directed stood within a court-yard, and when they reached it they found that the only door was on the upper storey, and could not be reached without a ladder: a ladder was procured: it was then some time before the door could be forced, and they heard the people within mocking them all this while.When at last they had effected their entrance, the coiners pointed to a furnace in which all the dies and whatever else could incriminate them, had been consumed during this delay… An inexhaustible supply of halfpence was made for home consumption, till the new coinage put a stop to this manufactory: it was the common practice of the dealers in this article, to fry a pan-full every night after supper for the next day´s delivery, thus darkening them, to make them look as if they had been in circulation.
9.2 rash of dodgy groats:* The image of coins as plague-sores is a gruesome favourite of Thomas Dekker’s (
News From Gravesend 1604, in Wilson [ed.] 1925: p.37, ll. 17-30):
For then the Vsurer must behold
His pestilent flesh, whilst all his gold
Turns into Tokens, and the chest
(They lie in,) his infectious brest:
How well heele play the Misers part
When all his coyne sticks at his heart?
Hees worth so many farthings then,
That was a golden God mongst men.
And tis the aptest death (so please
Him that breath heauen, earth, and Seas)
For euery couetous rooting Mowle
That heaues his drosse aboue his soule,
And doth in coyne all hopes repose,
To die with corps, stampt full of those.
9.6 taxes:* Specifically, the Hearth-Money of 1662-1689. This was a property tax levied by Charles II. According to popular belief—in thrall to puritans who likened it to his father’s infamous ‘Ship Money’—this tax was used exclusively to fund the complex naval wars between England, Holland and France (through which Dryden steers a steady course in
Annus Mirabilis.)
It was actually a fair and simple tax, at least in its drafting: a fine example of legislative success during the early Restoration. The charge was biannual, collected on Lady’s Day and Michaelmas, at 2 shillings per chimney in each dwelling. All households with 2 chimneys or less, and all hearths used as forges or what have you, were to be exempt. Thus the tax would not affect the poor, and neither could anyone say the King was avenging himself against the Parliamentarian armourers.
The tax’s only fault lay in the decision to farm collection out to profiteers. These private bailiffs were often unscrupulous and tended to ignore the exemptions. The people hardest hit were the small metal-workers in towns like Birmingham and Sheffield. In a broadside petition of 1680 made by the Hallamshire Company of Cutlers to Parliament, Birmingham is the only town mentioned by name:
At Brimmingham are Sword-Smiths, Cutlers, Spurriers, Bridle-Bit Makers, Naylers, and divers other Handicrafts Men who live by Manufacturing of Iron and Steel, are very Poor, have numerous Families, moſt of them Working at 6 d. or 8 d. a day Wages, cannot make any Work without Blowing, and therefore muſt have Blowing-Forges in their Houſes… ſome of them (though the pooreſt Men of all) have Two or Three…
For ſeveral years after the Act, and Additional and Explanatory Acts, and Votes and Reſolves aforeſaid concerning the Duty of Hearth-Money paſſed, there was no demand made of theſe poor People of any duty for their Forges.
But ſince the Collectors of the Chimney-Money have made Demands upon all thoſe poor People of 2 s. a Forge, (which is expreſly againſt the Letter of the Acts and Votes aforeſaid) and for non-payment have made Diſtreſſes, taken away their Goods, to their great prejudice, whereby they are diſcouraged from continuing to work any longer. And which is moſt ſevere, they commonly deſtrain upon their Working-Tools, which for want of Money they cannot ſometimes redeem in four or five days; all which time ſtand ſtill, and muſt loſe the getting much more than might have paid the Duty.
(‘The Case of the Company of Cutlers… etc.’ Parliamentary Archives HC/PO/JO/1680)
This is, I think, the first document to be produced by a revolutionary industrial ‘Trades Union’ movement. Do not be fooled by the apparent humility of the plea. There is a thinly veiled threat here. These men-not-working, because of the tax they refuse to pay, are men who can (and have) made swords and guns when organized together. The appeal to Parliament, and Parliament alone, is telling. There is no mention of the King, which serves only to imply some collusion between The Crown and those who defy their ‘Votes and Reſolves’. (The King had recently dissolved Parliament; an exclusive appeal like this was quite provocative.)
It is easy to see how the Whigs might use a seething underbelly of Parliamentarian discontent in the heartland of industrial non-conformism as a threat to wave under the noses of Court during the Exclusion. Many still carried scars from brummagem blades and balls. The ‘divers Handicrafts Men’ of that town might find it just as obvious a choice to exact revenge with a bit of coining.
9.7-8 axe the Monarch’s head… some tin instead:* The thoroughgoing ironies of this piece are of course reliant upon the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which T. S. Eliot discovers in the work of all English poets after Milton (‘The Metaphysical Poets’). This is perfectly fitting however; the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is the central theme of the entire piece and Mr Eliot is himself a progenitor of the kind of irony employed to dramatize this theme. It is an irony that may be called historical: the ignoble present is suddenly thrust into contrast with the noble past.
The poet is identifying Byron as the epitome of the genetic heritage of this Miltonic, regicidal poetics and Birmingham as the epitome of the same violent dissociation of value in the country’s economics. To elucidate, I think the poet (quite rightly) conflates the severance of face value and intrinsic value in the coinage with the severance of sense and sensation in the national language and poetry. He dates the moment of this severance (as does Eliot) to the execution of the King in 1649. It would not be a surprise to learn that the axe-head used to carry out this awful deed was made in Birmingham. What is certain is that the Non-Conformist weapons manufacturers in that place resorted, at the Restoration, to coining as a way of ensuring that the King’s head (as a stamp of value) was kept apart from the economic body-politic and that the words of their burgeoning industrial dialect contained precisely the same dissociation of value. In the long-run this slower and more insidious axe-swing has been much more devastating.
10.1 Brum:* short for ‘Brummagem’ of course. The minor variations on the names of this definitively treacherous, unstable and dissembling location are of much greater numbers than any other town in England. They include (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) (Hamper 1868: Vol 1., p.502) [I recommend the use of a magnifying lens to read them]:
Baernegum,
Barmegam, Beringham,Berinygham, Berkmyngham, Bermechagm, Bermengeham, Bermengham, Bermgham, Bermicham, Bermicheham, Bermigham, Bermimgaham, Bermincham, Bermingeham, Bermingham, Bermingheam, Bermyncham, Bermynehelham, Bermyngam, Bermyngeham, Bermyngham, Berningham, Bernynghem, Berringham, Birmincham, Birminghcham, Birmingecham, Birmingeham, Birminghame, Birmingingham, Birmingyhame, Birmygham, Birmyncham, Birmyngeham, Birmyngehame, Birymincham, Bormingham, Bormycham, Bormyngeham, Brammingham, Breemejam, Bremecham, Bremicham, Bremichem, Bremingem, Bremingham, Bremiseham, Bremisham, Bremmencham, Bremygiam,
Bremyngham,
Brennyngeham,
Brimcham,
Bremiechame,
Brimichm,
Brimigham,
Brimingeham,
Brimingham,
Brimisham,
Brimmidgeham,
Brimmigham,
Brimmingham,
Brimyncham,
Brinnicham,
Brinningham,
Bromedgham,
Bromicham,
Bromichum,
Bromidgham,
Bromidgome,
Bromincham,
Bromingham,
Bromisham,
Bromwicham,
Bromycham,
Brumageum,
Brumegume,
Brumicham,
Brumidgham,
Brumidgum,
Brumigam,
Brumigham,
Brumingham,
Brummagem,
Brummejam,
Brummidgham,
Brummigham,
Brummingham,
Brummingsham,
Brumwycham,
Brunningham,
Brymecham,
Brymedgham,
Brymicham,
Brymingecham,
Brymingham,
Bryminham,
Brymmynegeham,
Brymmyngham,
Brymmyngiam,
Brymycham,
Brymyecham,
Brymygeham,
Brymyham,
Brymymcham,
Brymyncham,
Brymyngeham,
Brymyngham,
Brymyngiam,
Brymynham,
Brymycham,
Brymyscham,
Brymysham,
Byringham,
Burmedgeham,
Burmegam,
Burmegham,
Burmegum,
Burmicham,
Burmicheham,
Burmigam,
Burmingham,
Burmucham,
Burmycham,
Burmycheham,
Burmygham,
Burmyncham,
Burmyngcham,
Burmyngeham,
Burmyngham,
Burymynham,
Byrmegham,
Byrmicham,
Byrmigcham,
Byrmincham,
Byrmingeham,
Byrmingham,
Byrmycham,
Byrmyncham,
Byrmyngcham,
Byrmyngeham,
Byrmyngham,
Byrmyngyhame
The illiteracy of the inhabitants has no-doubt played a role in this, but one suspects the reason to be more disturbing and deliberate. Disguise, resistance of authority, and the shoddy mass reproduction of decorative goods are the hallmarks of the place. The city seems, to this day, to churn out lazy, metathesized versions of its name just as it always churned out cheap variations of the sovereign coinage, in absolute contempt of all who try to regulate its anarchic dialects and forges. Hence its aptitude to the Exclusion debates:
Flaſh. Gentlemen, ſhall not I come in for a ſnack among ye? I have a Puppet-ſhow of Religion in me too. Gentlemen, let me know what it is you’ll be at? I’m for any thing in the world to pleaſe ye: wold you have me a Papiſt? Gentlemen, your humble Servant: would you have me a Mahometan? Gentlemen, I’m yours. A Jew, a Heathen, a No-Religion-man, one that ſhall Fear God, and Honour the King, and do neither? Gentlemen I am for who bids moſt; I love to be Complaiſant.
Fly-blow. Thou put’ſt me to a little kind of a puzzle: what art thou call’d? haſt thou got never a Name as well as we?
Flaſh. Yes, yes, they tell me I am a thin braſs Proteſtant ſilver’d over; but for brevity ſake though, they call me a Brummegeum, which is my Chriſtian name, but my Sirname is Flaſh. At preſent my Religion is built moſtly upon Intereſt; if that can but make me Rich and Great, I have as much as I deſire in this world, without putting my ſelf to the trouble of a thought for the next. I’m juſt like a piece of ſoft wax, and can (as a Conſcientious man ſhould do) receive any impreſſion of Religion that takes well with the Times.
(Popish Fables etc. [anonymous broadside] London: John Spicer, 1682)
Brummegeum Flash could easily be the name of the persona of this poem.
10.2 mint:* I mint what I said. I made an absolute meant. [Poet’s note]
It is fundamental to this poem that
money,
meaning and
moaning are cognate forms, and that the dialect used forces them back into a single vulgar ‘utterance’ of Brummagem coinage. I will return to this point.
10.4 Cash-forges:* This play on ‘forge’ reminds us that the usage ‘make in fraudulent imitation’ derives from the older sense (from Latin fabricare) ‘to manufacture’, most often used in English to refer to precisely the trades of smithying and metalworking which led to Birmingham becoming the spiritual heartland of coining. The rather nice distinction made in contemporary English between ‘counterfeit’ and ‘forgery’ in reference to the illegitimate reproduction of money (the former being reserved for coin and the latter for bank-notes) is therefore rendered meaningless by etymology. Unfortunately, this appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy embedded in the language; this differentiation, which required such a distinction to be made by legislators, between intrinsically valuable coinage and the promissory bank-note has all but disappeared. It is ‘forgery’ (of capital and power) which has made this happen.
Like so much else to be regretted about the breakdown of stable values of nobility, the forges of Birmingham can be identified as the infernal source:
Assignats were forged here during the late war… The forgery of their own bank notes is carried on with systematic precautions which will surprise you. Information of a set of forgers had been obtained, and the officers entered the house: they found no person on any of the lower floors; but when they reached the garret, one man was at work upon the plates in the farthest room, who could see them as soon as they had ascended the stairs. Immediately he opened a trap door, and descended to the floor below; before they could reach the spot to follow him, he had opened a second, and the descent was impracticable for them on account of its depth: there they stood and beheld him drop floor to floor till he reached the cellar, and effected his escape by a subterranean passage.
(Southey Letters from England, Letter 36. 1951: p.199)
10.4 by dint (of):* The word ‘dint’ (it is another version of ‘dent’) has progressed from meaning
the action of striking through
the force of a blow to
the impression left by a stroke: i.e.
an indentation. It is only in the construction ‘by dint of’, used here, that it retains an older sense of
force or
power. The poet is playing on the contradictory ideas of the impression stamped on a ‘blank’ to make a coin and the idiom glossable as ‘as a result of’ in a way which calls into question the processes of transitivity involved in the poem. We should ask ourselves whether the voice of the poem is the thing impressed (the blank) or the thing that impresses (the stamp)? Is the poet? Is the reader?
This is another example of a ‘counter’: it is impossible to say which way the ‘dint’ is to be administered (and even—as we shall see—which way the effigy itself is therefore supposed to look) because (like Janus) the word (the world) faces in both directions. This is not, one suspects, merely a matter of ‘quiddity’. The power to act (and to ‘impress’) and the moral responsibility for actions (which create these ‘impressions’) are at stake. The poet is presenting us with a dreadful future in which free-will and moral accountability have been eroded (as has the sense of stable transitivity in—and even
of—semantics) by a collapse of the stable dichotomies of civilisation into a monstrous amphibology: black and white, good and evil, male and female, self and other, adulthood and childhood, the watcher and the watched, the subject and the object…
11.1 never join the Eurozone:* This refers, presumably, to the proposed alignment of sterling with the decimal systems of European currency: tantamount to a surrender to Napoleon or Adolf Hitler.
11.3 St Edward’s Throne:* This is usually called ‘St Edward’s Chair’. It is the throne built around the Stone of Scone for Edward I after he had captured it from the Scots. It is housed in Westminster Abbey and has been used in every coronation ceremony since Edward II (except that of Mary I, who provocatively had another throne blessed by the Pope) as the chair on which the Sovereign sits for the physical act of crowning. The recent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was no exception, I presume. (I have yet to see the film of this occasion of national pride.) Crucially, it does not ‘glitter’ much at all. There was a time when it was intricately decorated with gilded gesso and pounced, but this detail has long since disappeared. No doubt this has something to do with its muscular removal from the Abbey (the only time this has ever happened) for use in Westminster Hall during the installation of Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1653. One cannot imagine Oliver Cromwell resting his warts-and-all buttocks on a seat embossed with birds and foliage and the image of a seated king. Unlike the other two St Edward pieces used in the coronation—the crown and the staff—the chair was not refurbished in 1661 for the return of the King. Notwithstanding the gilded lions which support it, the chair is therefore puritanically drab. A typical piece of republican Americanized sarcasm on the part of the ‘voice of BTV.’
11.6 A royal sun:* ‘Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York.’
Aside from the usual complex connotations of Christ in the pun on ‘sun’—the pagan resurrection of the sun at the equinox with, superimposed upon it (as Frazer implies), the resurrected son at Easter—there is also a very strong numismatic thread to Gloucester’s opening speech. The personal heraldic symbol of Edward IV, which had appeared on his standard at the decisive Battle of Barnet against The Kingmaker (the Earl of Warwick) on Easter Day 1471, was the ‘white rose en soleil’; and this had also been chosen as the image for the reverse of the new standard gold coin, the ryal (from the Spanish; it was known in the vernacular as the ‘rose-noble’) in Edward’s fundamental reformation of the coinage in 1465.
Edward’s strong, stable and fair economic policy was part and parcel of his success as a King and a military commander; the new Ryals and Angels of the 1465 recoinage stand as the most lasting icon of his legacy. By contrast, coins from the short Protectorate and reign of Richard III are notoriously dubious and poor in quality. (C. Blunt, 1935: ‘Some notes on the coinage of Edward IV…’, in British Numismatic Journal 22.) ‘I that am rudely stamped’ continues Shakespeare’s Gloucester (16) ‘… I that am curtail’d of this fair Proportion,/Cheated of Feature by dissembling Nature,/Deform’d, vn-finish’d, sent before my time/Into this breathing World, scarse halfe made vp…’ (18-21) ‘Haue no delight to passe away the time,/Vnlesse to see my Shadow in the Sunne/And descant on mine owne Deformity.’ (25-27).
This carries quite uncontroversial numismatic overtones. Where I read Yeats as holding one of the new Irish coins when (in the original draft) he begins ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ with ‘This is no country for old men’, I think a film adaptation of Richard III might find it quite effective to have Richard holding up a Ryal to the light when he says ‘this sun of York’.
To play Richard as a hunchback is, I think, rather over-literal. This is a moral deformity expressed in terms which liken him as much to a counterfeit as to a cripple. Surely Richard (like the boar that is his own symbol on the coinage) is simply ugly: more ‘nasty, brutish and short’ than he is physically disabled. One might argue that, like Yeats, he is implying impotence and the consequent rejection of ‘such sensual music’ as ‘the lascivious pleasing of a lute’, but his later scenes with Anne suggest the opposite.
It was Henry Tudor, Richard III’s successor, who introduced the Gold Sovereign in 1489; and, in the great recoinage of 1560, which once again restabilized the national economy after the incremental debasements that had been the result of the upheavals of the Reformation, Elizabeth I took the crucial step of differentiating the Sovereign (worth 30s) from the smaller ‘one pound coin’ (worth 20s) and thereby dealt with the relatively high gold value as compared to silver at the time. Shakespeare would therefore have been well aware of how the links between tyranny and debased coinage, and between usurpation and counterfeiting, are not simply metaphorical. The two plays written at the time of the uncertainty surrounding the succession of James I, Hamlet and Measure for Measure, are shot through with this same metaphoric quality, like a seam of gold that the delving critic can mine.
The relatively high value of Elizabethan coins—their purity, mass and fine striking—is a given in English numismatics. It is, for example, the basis for the plot in Addison’s ‘Adventures of a Shilling’ (cf. 14.6). This is a direct result of the introduction, in the great 1561 recoinage, of England’s first ‘milled’ coins. In fact, these coins were ‘pressed’ rather than ‘struck’ using technology first described by Leonardo Da Vinci (who was no doubt influenced by Gutenberg’s printing press) and built by the French moneyer Eloye Mestrelle, which employed mill-horses to turn the wheel: hence ‘milled’. The Company of Moneyers was extremely suspicious of this alien technology and their influence was behind Mestrelle’s sacking in 1572. Six years later he was hanged for counterfeiting.
The fact that this poet travesties the ‘pound coin’ of Elizabeth II makes this very biting numismatic satire. The use of ‘royal sun’, with the glinting pun on ryal and real, is every bit as sarcastic as Gloucester’s.
11.8 Shinola:* A proprietary name for a brand of boot polish in the United States. An American colleague once colourfully demonstrated to me that not to know sh*t from Shinola is that country’s equivalent of the idiom not to know one’s arse from one’s elbow.
In England, we say sugar instead of sh*t, where the French say merle (‘blackbird’) rather than merde, when we (and they) would rather avoid profanity. ‘Shinola’ is also an American equivalent; the idiom having a second meaning—not to know the difference between saying ‘sh*t’ or ‘Shinola’. It is a shame, perhaps, that this poem could not employ a few more of these controlled expressions in place of the vulgar epithets. This would no doubt weaken the excremental effect of the satire, however. All that is gold does not glitter.
12.1 The Swan:* The name of the pub is poetically apt. The OED has:
The name was app. applied orig. to the ‘musical’ swan, having the form of an agent-noun f. Teut. swan-:—Idg. swon-: swen-, represented by Skr. svánati (it) sounds, L. sonit (it) sounds, soněre, later sonāre, Ir. sennaim I make music, OE. geswin melody, song, swinsian to make melody.
Cynewulf plays on this idea in ‘The Phoenix’—Shakespeare’s ‘bird of loudest lay’ whose song in the Old English poem marks the hours like a magnificent cuckoo clock: think of the peacock timepiece of James Coxe in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, so reminiscent of Yeats’s clockwork bird, (he may well have recently seen it depicted in Eisenstein’s Bolshevik film October, 1927). For Cynewulf, it is as if the feather of the swan were the very substance of transcendent birdsong:
ne magon þam breahtme byman ne hornas,
ne hearpan hlyn, ne hæleþa stefn
ænges on eorþan, ne organan,
swegleoþres geswin, ne swanes feðre
ne ænig þara dreama þe Dryhten gescop
gumum to gliwe in þas geomran woruld.
(‘The Phoenix’ from The Exeter Book, li 134-9.
Krapp & Dobbie 1936: pp.97-8)
In Riddle 7 of the Exeter Book the swan says ‘Frætwe mine/swogað hlude ond swinsiað’, but only in flight. I dream of a Ledæan body
Cynewulf is, however, paraphrasing the Latin ‘Carmen de ave phoenice’ which has olor moriens ‘the dying swan’ rather than any reference to the West Wind in the sygnet’s wings. The fact that the swan-song (which turns out to be a pleonasm in English) is heard only on the point of death is disconcerting:
‘So on Meander’s banks when death is nigh / The mournful Swan sings her own Elegie’ (Dryden, Dido to Æneas ll. 3-4): a typically polished piece of Augustan translation which perfectly summarizes this archetype of the Ovidian Heroïdes. Pope wittily incorporates the suggestion of a melodramatic alternative into the ‘battle scene’ of the ‘Rape of the Lock’: ‘Thus on Meander’s flow’ry Margin lies / Th’expiring Swan, and as he sings he dies’ (canto V 61-2).
Perhaps the poet intends some hidden warning. We are to be taken inside the ‘Th’expiring Swan’—not the melodious White Swan, but the dissonant Black Swan: an obvious symbol of death and chaos—and we are not just to hear, but to participate in its grating song.
12.1 back-yard:* This is presumably a territorial epithet used by the kind of people likely to have such an uncultivated patch of waste-ground at the rear of their homes (properties they are actually quite unlikely to own themselves) to refer to areas that come (as it were) under their jurisdiction. In the jargon of the police force in metropolitan areas I believe this is sometimes referred to as a ‘manor.’ Traditionally, of course, the public house has always been the focus of territorial influence amongst the criminal classes, who—in the dreadful vision of this poem—seem to have inherited the Earth.
12.4 snobbish:* Like so many crucial theme-words in this poem, ‘snob’ has undergone a semantic reversal. Originally it meant a cobbler’s apprentice, and (by figurative extension) any honest hard-working person of the lower classes free of vulgar pretensions to status: like Willie Mossop in Hobson’s Choice [Harold Brighouse, 1916].
(‘Hobson’s choice’ as an idiom derives from the Cambridge carrier, Tobias Hobson who Milton tells us allowed his clients to choose from amongst his horses but only as long as their choice concurred with his own. The contemporary version of this is Henry Ford’s infamous statement that customers of his new Model T: ‘can have any colour you like, as long as it’s black.’ Three things occur to me: firstly, this idea reveals the hegemonic, imperialist desires embedded in the fiction of industrial/capitalist ‘choice’—it is no coincidence that Henry Ford, the inventor of the ‘production line’, is as much a hero in the Soviet Union as he is in The United States; secondly, a surface level reading of this poem would seem to present the reader with a Hobson’s Choice between two sides of the same ideological dialect—the cynicism of Diogenes and the dictatorship of Alexander; thirdly, Hobson’s Choice is, I think, cockney rhyming slang for ‘voice’—especially in reference to someone with a particularly brazen one—and might therefore be quite apt if used to signify the utterances of this persona.)
In Cambridge, the word ‘snob’ was used until very recently (and not without a certain connotation of respect) to refer to men of the town, rather than the gown. These days—I suspect under the influence of insidious Bolshevism which has sought to recast the honest hardworking Englishman with no desire to upset the social hierarchy as an apologist for the bourgeoisie and hence used the word as a synonym for ‘blackleg’ (originally a turf swindler)—it has come to mean precisely the opposite: a person displaying overt and sneering pretensions of nobility, education or rank. This progressive degradation of semantics and society towards the increasingly indelicate, ostentatious and dishonest is the fundamental characteristic of a malignant revolutionary process of history capable of creating the kind of future this dystopia depicts.
12.6 Bob Porter:* Robert Porter was the most infamous of the Parliamentarian armourers at Birmingham in the Civil War. When Prince Rupert fired the town in 1643—the event which led to the city’s first great flurry of publications (uniformly vehement anti-royalist propaganda), one of which was authored by Porter himself—it was specifically in order to put a halt to this man’s operations. Before the Battle of Birmingham, it was estimated that he had produced over 15,000 swords for Cromwell’s army. It was very difficult to stop the activities of the cutlers and gunsmiths, however. The loss of Porter’s factory was only a temporary setback in the town’s weapons manufacture. We should not snigger at Birmingham; we should shudder at its irrepressibility. (Wise and Johnson ‘The Changing Regional Pattern During the Eighteenth Century’, in Birmingham and its Regional Setting 1950 p.175)
12.7 The Oak:* One imagines this to be another (rival) public house in the area, with a rather less unpatriotic and amoral clientele: definitively not ‘our bird’s back yard’.
