Getting the point

Christopher Howse

THE SPECTATOR BOOK OF EPIGRAMS edited by Dhiren Bhagat Pan, f5.99, pp. 266 In our impatient age it is time for the epigram to make a comeback, but as Sir Charles Sedley wrote at the beginning of the 18th century,

How shall we please this Age? If in a Song We put above six lines, they count it long; If we contract it to an Epigram, As deep the dwarfish poetry they damn... Let us write Satire then, and at our ease Vex th'ill natur'd Fools we cannot please.

Yes, that sounds like a good plan.

But what is an epigram? 'This, this, that, that: pointing is perhaps the easiest method of defining the many forms of epigram,' suggests Dhiren Bhagat in his introduction. Certainly, by the time you have read his collection you will begin to think in epi- grams, which need not be a bad thing.

I had no idea that Dhiren Bhagat had practically completed his anthology when he was killed in a car crash in 1988. I trust his shade will not mind my adapting Richard Corbet's epigram on the early death of his friend Beaumont: He, that can write so well that no one dare Refuse it for the best, let him beware: Bhagat is dead, by whose sole death appears, Wit's a disease consumes men in few years.

In a foreword, Charles Moore mentions Dhiren's 'love of the incongruous and the surprising'. That is half the point of epigrams, and very difficult to pull off it is too. The high point of the English epigram's popularity was in the 17th centu- ry, but many examples from that period are lame. Oddly enough it is from the 19th century, when hardly anyone wrote epigrams, that some of the sharper examples come, such as Walter Savage Landor's sensible girl's reply to Tom Moore's 'Our couch shall be roses all span- gled with dew':

It would give me rheumatics, and so it would you.

And 50 years earlier Blake is ploughing his own mystic furrow: He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy

'Married! But we've got nothin' in common.'

But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise.

Yet the unwary are caught by the diffi- culty of succeeding at the two ends of the spectrum: the sexual at one end and the divine at the other. One of the few to suc- ceed in divine epigrams was Richard Crashaw, whose best-known conceit is on the water turned into wine at Cana, con- cluding: The conscious water saw its God and blushed.

That is his own translation of his Latin version, Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubit.

The translation of Aaron Hill given here doesn't quite come up to it:

The bashful stream hath seen its God, and blush'd.

But I do not mean to pick holes in the selection. How should I when it includes verses such as James Michie's translation from Catullus?

I can remember, Lesbia, when you swore You were mine and mine only, called me more

Desirable than Jove. I loved you then, And not just in the way that other men Love mistresses, but as a father cares For his own sons and daughters, for his heirs. Now that I know you, you're much cheaper, lighter, And yet desire in me flares even brighter. `How can that be?' you say. In love deceit Freezes affection, though it stokes up heat.

On a more trivial note, I was delighted to discover an expressive word (unknown to the OED or to Fowler) in a poem from 1654 too obscene to quote here: grimbetilollelize. Sex is of course always con- temporary, but so can politics be, as in Thomas Bastard's epigram (1598) which might suit the Maastricht mishmash:

Westminster is a mill which grinds all causes And grind his cause for me then he that list: For by demurs and pleas, appeals and clauses, The toll is oft made greater than the grist.

I quote the verses as printed, but I must confess that I don't get the drift of the sec- ond line. Perhaps it would be improved by `this' for 'his', or something. Which brings me to a cavil which is none of Dhiren's fault; indeed I feel he might have prevent- ed it. I mean the copy-editing of the book, which is inexpressibly bad. So we find a footnote referring the reader to 'No. 693', though presumably at some later stage in publishing it was decided not to number the epigrams. In one place we get `Soame Jemyns' for lenyns', in another a reference to 'a Professor Porson', as if the Christian name of the famous textual scholar, epi-

grammatist and drunk were lost to history. Porson would have enjoyed Matthew Prior's lines on the Bibo, who complained to Charon the ferryman that he was not dead yet:

Trim the boat and sit quiet, stern Charon reply'd, You may have forgot. You was Drunk when You Dy'd.

By chance I found an epigram of sorts scribbled in the margin of a London Library book, addressed to careless copy- editors:

While up to heaven head The publican and harlot, Your proofs remain unread And all your sins are scarlet.