To Miss Charlotte Pulteney
In her mother’s arms, May 1, 1724
Timely blossom, infant fair,
Fondling of a happy pair,
Every morn and every night
Their solicitous delight;
Sleeping, waking, still at ease,
Pleasing, without skill to please;
Little gossip, blithe and hale,
Tattling many a broken tale,
Singing many a tuneless song,
Lavish of a heedless tongue;
Simple maiden, void of art,
Babbling out the very heart,
Yet abandon’d to thy will,
Yet imagining no ill,
Yet too innocent to blush;
Like the linlet in the bush,
To the mother-linnet’s note
Moduling her slender throat,
Chirping forth thy pretty joys;
Wanton in the change of toys,
Like the linnet green, in May,
Flitting to each bloomy spray;
Wearied then, and glad of rest,
Like the linlet in the nest.
This thy present happy lot,
This, in time, will be forgot;
Other pleasures, other cares,
Ever-busy Time prepares;
And thou shalt in thy daughter see
This picture, once, resembled thee.
To Miss Margaret Pulteney
Daughter of Daniel Pulteney, Esq, in the Nursery
Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling,
All caressing, none beguiling,
Bud of beauty, fairly blowing,
Every charm to nature owing,
This and that new thing admiring,
Much of this and that enquiring,
Knowledge by degrees attaining,
Day by day some virtue gaining,
Ten years hence, when I leave chiming,
Beardless poets, fondly rhyming,
(Fescu’d now, perhaps in spelling),
On thy riper beauties dwelling,
Shall accuse each killing feature
Of the cruel charming creature
Whom I knew complying, willing,
Tender, and averse to killing.
This week, POTW invites you on a rare trip into the infantile. Don’t forget to bring the baby wipes.
These two nursery odes by Ambrose Philips, AKA Namby-Pamby, were composed in 1724 and 1727 respectively. The Charlotte and Margaret addressed were the daughters of Daniel Pulteney and Margaret Deering Tichborne. I’ve twinned the poems here only for the purposes of discussion and comparison.
To Charlotte Pulteney, with its opening bow towards the “happy pair”, assumes a proud parental eye overlooking the text. It starts out promisingly fresh, the unexpected trot of the trochaic tetrameter contrasted with some soft alliterative effects: “infant”, “fair”, “fondling”, “blossom”, ”solicitous”.
On the other hand, the child/flower symbolism is commonplace. It’s even shared across both poems. Charlotte is a “timely blossom” (“timely” matching the child and the May Day dating) and Margaret’s blossomy beauty, despite her infancy, is implied in the second poem’s third line. (A plant “fairly blowing” is one that has opened out, or produced a mass of flowers.) It’s all very pretty, of course, but utterly conventional.
Philips’s “linlet/linnet” similes seem undecided as to whether Charlotte resembles the fledgling “linlet” or the darting adult, “flitting to each bloomy spray”. His eye may be flitting between the child at rest and the child at play, or between infancy and toddler-hood. “Linlet” is an attractive word, one of a number of diminutives lost to modern English, and a nested linlet isn’t a bad image of a child in its mother’s arms. I like, too, the idea of the young bird imitating the mother’s song ( “Moduling her slender throat”). The reference to “toys”, however, seems misplaced in the linnet context, and the final couplet’s fast-forward is surely altogether too easy in assuming future motherhood and a girl-child for Charlotte.
I prefer the address to Margaret. Yes, its idiom is more childish: it could almost have been written for a child to read. That adds to its interest. The alliterative nursery language seems to me a mark of Philips’s genuine sympathy with his subject. It’s short and simple, with fewer ambitions regarding poetic figure than the poem to Charlotte, and a lighter, triter account of passing time. The Spenser-loving Phillips seems to view the world sometimes from the perspective of a courtly Elizabethan. That image of the little girl transformed into a young woman whose beauty slays her “beardless” young suitors may be stereotypical but, at the same time, the narrative is amusingly imagined and spritely in technique. The preceding portrait of a bright, enquiring child – “This and that new thing admiring, / Much of this and that enquiring” – is well observed and ideally suited to the metre, whereas some of the antitheses drummed up for Charlotte are comparatively clunky. (I’d make an exception, though, for “Pleasing, without skill to please”.)
The vocabulary is interesting. “Dimply” might have raised a satirical eyebrow, but who with any sense of humour could seriously object to “dimply damsel”? “Fescu’d” is nice: it seems to mean “scolded” in the context. If the young poet is “fescu’d in spelling”, his spelling is subjected to the teacher’s pointer, and therefore at fault – through the effects of love, perhaps.
Henry Carey’s mockery in “Namby-Pamby” still has a bright little life of its own. His criticisms are sharp, and not merely literary, when he claims that Philips “Rimey-pim’d on Missy Miss … / That her father’s Gracey-Grace / Might give him a Placey Place”. Carey was a remarkably gifted writer and composer, who deserves his own lasting place in literary history.
Phillips’s most distinguished opponent was Alexander Pope. Pope had a variety of motives, including the party-political (Philips was of the Whig persuasion). Both men published sets of pastorals in the same year, and Philips’s set attracted favourable attention. But Pope’s satire is far from trivially personal, and it’s hard to question his surgical judgment. In his treatise on Bathos, there’s a whole, Philips-inspired section on The Infantile, “when a poet grows so very simple, as to think and talk as a child”.
Fair comment, or will you extend more indulgence to Ambey and his baby-babble? Do his verses foreshadow the treatment of domestic and personal subjects of our own time, and perhaps form a tiny but outwards-opening window in the grand structures of Augustan verse? Or are they just a lot of Pilly-Piss?
