This week’s poem is one of the several anonymous gems Roger Lonsdale found when mining the periodicals for his great Oxford anthology, Eighteenth-Century Verse. Lonsdale aimed to show that the 18th-century poem had a range beyond the canonical, and was not necessarily well-mannered and fashionably dressed. Ignotum per Ignotius dates from the early days of the century: it was published in the Diverting Post in 1705.
Your challenge this week is not only to help decipher the poem, but to name the author. I suspect it’s someone famous, the “Ignotius” of the title a joke to amuse the in-crowd. My 50-pence piece is on Matthew Prior. But there’s a host of lesser-known poets who may be considered bet-worthy. Not to mention, of course, the completely “unknown unknowns”. Over to you.
After you’ve enjoyed the crazy fables and non sequiturs, consider the rage, smuggled like a gun under that coat of many proto-surrealist colours. The poem was written at a time of political chaos in England. Parliament was in disarray, “mob violence” brewed. If read as political satire, Ignotum captures that bitterly divisive turbulence at the level of language. It does so without distortions of syntax or prosody, all the better to evoke political hierarchy and containment as illusion.
I’m drawn to the poem for several reasons: I like surrealism (and even blatant nonsense) and enjoy the interaction of homely utensils, foods, animals, unsavoury sticky substances and lofty abstract nouns – all evoked in a strikingly modern-sounding voice. The poem’s model, the Pindaric ode, allows a variegated metrical structure which makes for a lively, lurching, faintly seasick pace. The fact that there are only three stanzas means the pattern never quite “sets” into the expected. Above all, I like the way the poem resonates with Britain’s current constitutional crisis, or threat thereof, and seems to embody the helpless anger of “the people”. Even the first line reminds me of the British PM’s raucous “Do or die” assertion regarding Brexit, though “yielding” is very different from “doing”. Anonymous would probably have had in mind the dialogue between a soldier and Lucilius (“Yield, or thou diest”) in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
Pretentiousness, vanity, “cant”, hyperbole, toadyism, quibbling, betrayal – these are chief among the power-seeking sins allegorised but not thereby robbed of viciousness. The writer doesn’t relent: he builds dramatic intensity in each unfolding stanza, and signs each one off with a whiplash.
“The scouring eggshells all besmeared with blood / Inveloped [pr. invelopéd] in damned dry blows, / detached the sudorific mud / And brewed a pair of stiff mustachios.” Do these remarkable lines summon a particular historical individual? I’d like to find out who, if so, but the effect hardly depends upon it. We all know what political villains look like, with or without the “stiff mustachios”.
Some topical poems fade away with their moment. Not this one, The “fiery hogos” are still bequeathing us “their limping legacies”. And we can still join in with Anonymous to breathe some fire back at them.
