The Gods have made me most unmusical,
With feelings that respond not to the call
Of stringed harp, or voice – obtuse and mute
To hautboy, sackbut, dulcimer, and flute;
King David’s lyre, that made the madness flee
From Saul, had been but a jew’s harp to me:
Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars,
Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars;
I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float
Upon the captive air; I know no note,
Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say,
Of the strange mysteries of Sol and Fa;
I sit at oratorios like a fish,
Incapable of sound, and only wish
The thing was over. Yet do I admire,
O tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire,
Thy painful labours in a science, which
To your deserts I pray may make you rich
As much as you are loved, and add a grace
To the most musical Novello race.
Women lead men by the nose, some cynics say;
You draw them by the ear – a delicater way.
CHARLES LAMB
The son of a lawyer, Lamb was born in Crown Office Row in the Inner Temple, London. He went to school in nearby Fetter Lane, and later entered Christ’s Hospital, where he met and befriended Coleridge. In 1789 he worked as a clerk in the South Sea House, and subsequently at the East India House, where he was an accountant until his retirement in 1825. Four of Lamb’s sonnets appeared in Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects (1796), and another ten in his Poems of 1797. Through Coleridge he became acquainted with Wordsworth, but later distanced himself from both. Several members of Lamb’s family were mentally unstable, and his sister Mary Ann Lamb murdered their mother in 1796, was confined to an asylum and finally released into her brother’s care. Lamb too was prone to fits of insanity – hence his sympathetic poem on Cowper’s mental state, ‘To the poet Cowper – on his recovery from an indisposition. Written some time back’ (1796). Several of Lamb’s works were written for children: Tales from Shakespear (1807), which he wrote in collaboration with his sister, The Adventures of Ulysses (1808), Beauty and the Beast (1811), Prince Dorus (1811) and his Poetry for Children (1809) which anticipates Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Lamb also tried his hand, unsuccessfully, at drama, and Mr H., a farce, was hissed off the stage at Drury Lane in 1806. He wrote a number of essays and articles between 1810 and 1820, including a perceptive study of Wordsworth’s The Excursion. From 1820 to 1823 he made regular contributions to the London Magazine, and a number of these essays were published as Essays of Elia in 1823; a second series, The Last Essays of Elia appeared a decade later. Though Lamb had little interest in critical theory, he was a sympathetic and highly readable reviewer of poetry and plays, and his letters also contain many acute observations on literature.
By myself walking,
To myself talking,
When as I ruminate
On my untoward fate,
Scarcely seem I
Alone sufficiently,
Black thoughts continually
Crowding my privacy;
They come unbidden,
Like foes at a wedding
In better guests’ places,
Peevish and malecontent,
Clownish, impertinent,
Dashing the merriment:
So in like fashions
Dim cogitations
Follow and haunt me,
Striving to daunt me,
In my heart festering,
In my ears whispering,
‘Thy friends are treacherous,
Thy foes are dangerous,
Thy dreams ominous.’
Fierce Anthropophagi2,
Spectra, Diaboli,
What scared St. Anthony,
Hobgoblins, Lemures3,
Dreams of Antipodes4
Night-riding Incubi5
Troubling the fantasy,
All dire illusions
Causing confusions;
Figments heretical,
Scruples fantastical,
Doubts diabolical,
Abaddon6 vexeth me,
Mahu7 perplexeth me,
Lucifer teareth me –
Jesu! Maria! liberate nos ab his diris tentationibus Inimici.8