Soiled Light

From the west sky, a wrathful shine -- all that wild March could afford in way of sunset --- had burst forth after the cloudy day,  flooding the tired and sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames.

-- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1892),  ch. XLVIII

Downtown Lost Angeles:

dawn comes upon this city

like a shitmist.

Will it burn off  before noon?

Will the sun  eventually  poke through ??

-- Hunter Thompson,  Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, p. 222

Twin Twilights

Dawn in the forest:

Day  at length   broke in the sky.

When it had been day aloft  for some little while,

it became day in the wood.

Dusk in the swede-field:

… till the leaden light   diminishes,

and marks  that the sun is down …

-- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1892)

Name of the Day: “Henery”

Back in 1965, when I still listened to the blandly homogenized pop medium known as Top 40 radio, a song soared onto the charts  that didn’t fit the rock & roll mold at all, and seemed to come from another world:  “I'm Henery the Eighth, I Am”.  It was harmless, charming, catchy.   Once ever you heard it, you could never forget it:

    I'm 'Enery the Eighth, I am,

    'Enery the Eighth I am, I am!

    I got married to the widow next door,

    She's been married seven times before

    And every one was an 'Enery

    She wouldn't have a Willie nor a Sam

    I'm her eighth old man named 'Enery

    'Enery the Eighth, I am!

Wikipedia (that fount of all that is good and true) provides the surprising background.  It is a British music-hall song dating back to as early as 1910 -- few indeed were the ditties of such venerable vintage that made it onto the pop playlists.  And yet -- scarcely to be credited:

In 1965, it became the fastest-selling song in history to that point when it was revived by Herman's Hermits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Henery_the_Eighth,_I_Am

~

What revived that memory  was a passage in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), referring to a simple workman of rural southwest England:

He always signed his name "Henery"—strenuously insisting upon that spelling, and if any passing schoolmaster ventured to remark that the second "e" was superfluous and old-fashioned, he received the reply that "H-e-n-e-r-y" was the name he was christened and the name he would stick to—in the tone of one to whom orthographical differences were matters which had a great deal to do with personal character. 

As kids, exposed to the ditty, we made no philological hypotheses concerning the trisyllabic name -- just something silly, metri causâ, we supposed.  But Hardy’s witness demonstrates that the pronunciation is time-honored among the English popular classes.

Yea indeed, still further up the scale:  for the regal name of Henry is trisyllabic in Shakespeare.

The medial schwa is not etymological, but the product of popular epenthesis (or anaptyxis, if you insist), like the pronunciation “ellum” for elm, or the by-form alarum from alarm.

Psycho-literary afternote:
This serial connubium, relentlessly running through no fewer than eight grooms, might be seen as a feminine revenge -- a payback with interest --  against the original polynubial King Henry, who actually limited himself to half a dozen.

"N-n-ex-x-x-t !!"

Thomas Hardy pep cheer / rebel yell

Far from the Madding

Far from the Madding

Far from the Madding

Crowd !

“Jesus wept” monostich

‘Yes,’    said  Tess.

[Source: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1892), ch. XXX.

 To appreciate the depths of yearning and foreboding in that simple word so spoken, you would have to have been reading the novel -- something well worth your time.]

Phrase of the Day: “skimmity ride”

I am currently taking-in an audiobook of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (18), expertly read by Mr. Simon Vance, whose mastery of various voices, and of the island dialects  (both Saxon and Scots)  adds much to the performance.

At one point in this densely plotted book, we learn of plans by the local lumpen, to subject a certain rather flighty/haughty  dame of the town (and her hardworking but enveigled husband) to what they call a “skimmity ride”. That turns out to be Dorset dialect (which, indeed, figures even as a plot-element in the book, when the ingénue professes herself ‘leery’ in the local sense, and is rated by her stepfather, who demands that she restrict herself to Hochenglisch) for this:

skimmington: one publicly impersonating and ridiculing a henpecked or cuckolded husband or his shrewish or unfaithful wife

-- Merriam-Webster

It is reminiscent of, but vastly milder than, the early American custom of tarring and feathering, and riding out of town on a rail (literary classics depicting this:  Huckleberry Finn; and Hawthorne’s haunting “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”)  since, here, the miscreants  are represented only in effigy.   Moreover, the practice enjoyed here no legal sanction, though the feckless local constables shrink from halting the procession.

As for what-all is involved in a skimmington, and the related charivari, you may top up the cup of your Wissbegierde  here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skimmington

In the matter of public shaming, devotees of literature (or high-school grads who had the book assigned) will recall Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.  But that stigma was imposed top-down; whereas (as Hardy makes clear) the skimmity-ride in Casterbridge  was instigated by a slyboots, and implemented by the dregs.

So much might put us in mind of a current practice, distantly related to the moral(istic) Tyranny of the Village:  anonymous online mobbing

-- public shaming by complete strangers -- capriciously, via the Twittering carrion-birds of the Erinyes.  Thus ratifying the paradoxical formulation of a “global village”.

Exercise for the student:  To develop this idea further, explore the traditional distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures.  The latter are specifically Judeo-Christian, and are generally reckoned an advance by those familiar with both.  Our own society is devolving toward that earlier standard:  not a sense of guilt, but of embarrassment;  not at having done wrong, but having offended anyone.