Laudator Temporis Acti

William Allingham, By the Way: Verses, Fragments, and Notes, arranged by Helen Allingham (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 75:

"Laudator temporis acti" is a very old jest or taunt; and no doubt the world looks brighter to most of us at twenty than at sixty; nevertheless a man must have leave to say, if he think so, that the world—even supposing general progress to be a necessary doctrine—is not at all points improving. Nay, does not history teach us that the praisers of the good old times must have been sometimes in the right of it, at least in the comparison of one generation with another?

Hat tip: Stephen Pentz.

Life of St. Amand, tr. by J.N. Hillgarth in The Conversion of Western Europe, 350-750 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), rpt. as Christianity and Paganism, 350-750: The Conversion of Western Europe (Philadelpha: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 139-148 (at 147-148):

[24] The faithful testimony of the venerable priest Erchangelisus should not be passed over. When the man of God Amand was preaching in the county of Beauvais he came to a place called Ressons on the River Aronde. There was a blind woman there, who had lost her sight a long time ago. Entering her house the man of God began to ask her how this blindness had come upon her. She replied that the only reason was that she had always venerated auguries and idols. She then indicated the place where she used to pray to her idol, a tree dedicated to the demon. The man of God said: "I am not amazed that you became blind for this folly but I wonder that the mercy of God has sustained you so long. For when you should adore your Creator and Redeemer, you adore demons and dumb idols, who cannot do you or themselves any service. Now take an axe and cut down this abominable tree by which you have lost your bodily sight and your soul's salvation. I trust that, if you firmly believe, you may receive the sight you once had from the Lord." With her daughter leading her by the hand the woman hastened to the tree and endeavored to cut it down. Then the man of God called her to him, made the Sign of the Cross on her eyes and, invoking Christ's Name, restored her to her former health, instructed her how she should act, and left her. Changing her life for the better, she spent the rest of her days chastely and soberly.

Latin text of Vita S. Amandi, ed. B. Krusch, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptorum Rerum Merovingicarum Tomus V (Hannover: Hahn, 1910), pp. 428-449 (at 447):

[24] Nec illud quoque preatereundum putavi, quod, presbitero quodam nomen Erchengiliso venerabili atque fideli viro narrante, didici. Quadam die, dum vir Domini Amandus in pago Belloacinse verbum Domini praedicaret, pervenit ad quendam locum, cui vocabulum est Rosonto, secus Oronnam fluvium, eratque ibi mulier quaedam caeca, quae longo iam tempore, amisso lumine, nil praeter tenebras agnoverat. Ingressus autem vir Dei domum illius, coepit percunctari ab ea, qualiter ei haec caecitas evenisset. Respondente illa, quod non ob causam aliam ei ipsa caecitas evenerat, nisi quod auguria vel idola semper coluerat, insuper ostendente ei locum, in quo praedictum idolum orare consueverat, scilicet arborem, quae erat daemoni dedicata, vir Domini ait: 'Non miror, si pro hac stultitia caeca facta sis, sed admiror clementiam Domini, qui te tamdiu exspectando sustenat, ut, cum factorem et redemptorem tuum adorare debeas, adoras daemones et idola muta, quae nec tibi nec sibi possunt prodesse. Nunc igitur accipe securim et hanc nefandam arborem quantotius succidere festina, per quam et lumen amisisti corporis et animae perdidisti salutem; confido enim, si firmiter credideris, lumen pristinum a Domino consequi possis. Educente autem illa puellae suae manibus, ad arborem citius mulier perrexit atque eam excidere conabatur. Tum vir Domini Amandus eam ad se advocans, signum crucis super oculos eius inprimens, invocatoque Christi nomine, pristinae reddidit sanitati; instructamque, qualiter se agere deberet, relinquens, omnibus diebus vitae suae caste atque sobrie se exhibuit, et correctiorem vitam deinceps gerens, moresque commutavit in melius.

Saint Amand, patron saint of brewers, lived from approximately 584 to 675.

Labels: arboricide

Thoreau, Journal (October 23, 1855):

Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one's head and shoulders. But I cannot excuse myself for using the stone. It is not innocent, it is not just, so to maltreat the tree that feeds us. I am not disturbed by considering that if I thus shorten its life I shall not enjoy its fruit so long, but am prompted to a more innocent course by motives purely of humanity. I sympathize with the tree, yet I heaved a big stone against the trunks like a robber,—not too good to commit murder. I trust that I shall never do it again. These gifts should be accepted, not merely with gentleness, but with a certain humble gratitude. The tree whose fruit we would obtain should not be too rudely shaken even. It is not a time of distress, when a little haste and violence even might be pardoned. It is worse than boorish, it is criminal, to inflict an unnecessary injury on the tree that feeds or shadows us. Old trees are our parents, and our parents' parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others. The thought that I was robbing myself by injuring the tree did not occur to me, but I was affected as if I had cast a rock at a sentient being,—with a duller sense than my own, it is true, but yet a distant relation. Behold a man cutting down a tree to come at the fruit! What is the moral of such an act?

Labels: arboricide

From John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, VI (June 1, 1871):

When I only opine things, I hold my tongue; and work till I more than opine—until I know them. If the things prove unknowable, I, with final perseverance, hold my tongue about them, and recommend a like practice to other people. If the things prove knowable, as soon as I know them, I am ready to write about them, if need be; not till then.

It's good advice, although I'm not sure the prolific Ruskin always strictly followed it.

Wikipedia, s.v. Coulrophobia:

Coulrophobia is abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns....The prefix "coulro=" comes from the Ancient Greek κωλοβαθριστής (kōlobathristēs), "one who goes on stilts".

Questions arise:

1. Whence comes the r after the l?
   
2. Why is Greek omega transliterated as English ou?
   
3. Why is -phobia attached to only the beginning of the Greek word?

Coulrophobia started to pop up in English in the late 1990s. There is a spurious 1997 example in Google News Archives (actually from 2008). The earliest example in Google Books is Mary Ann D'Onofrio and Elizabeth D'Onofrio, Psychiatric Words and Phrases, 2nd ed. (Health Professions Institute, 1998), but this is a "no preview" book. The word has recently started to show up in French and German as coulrophobie.

No ancient Greek word starts with κουλρο- (koulro-), and no other English word starts with coulro-. It's a meaningless prefix, so far as I can tell, and the word coulrophobia should be avoided.

According to Liddell-Scott-Jones, κωλοβαθριστής is a rare word, occurring only in Hesychius. It and its rare cousin κωλόβαθρον (kōlóbathron = stilt) apparently come from κῶλον (kōlon = limb, member).

The standard ancient Greek word for clown is γελωτοποιός (gelōtopoiós, literally laughter-maker), e.g. Xenophon, Symposium 1.11, etc. See S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1910), s.vv. buffoon, clown, and jester. Woodhouse s.v. buffoon also gives βωμόλοχος (bōmólochos) as a possibility.

If psychobabble needs a sesquipedalian word for abnormal or exaggerated fear of clowns, gelotopoiophobia or bomolochophobia would be better than coulrophobia.

Labels: lexicography

Porphyry, On Philosophy from Oracles, quoted by Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, tr. E.H. Gifford (4.23, on evil spirits):

[T]hey also force men to fall into inarticulate noises and flatulence by sharing the same enjoyment with them.

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, Eng. tr. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), §§ 882-886 (pp. 393-394), discusses the rhetorical device known as praeteritio, defined as "the announcement of the intention to leave certain things out." The intention is ironic, because by alluding to and enumerating the things to be passed over, the speaker actually draws attention to them.

A classic example is Cicero, Against Catiline 1.14 (tr. C. Macdonald):

Or again, shortly after you had made room for a new bride by murdering your former wife, did you not compound this deed with yet another crime that defies belief? I do not dwell on this and readily allow it to be glossed over in silence lest it be thought that this state has allowed so heinous a crime to have been committed or to have gone unpunished. I pass over the total ruin to your fortune which you will feel hanging over you on the coming Ides.

Quid vero? nuper, cum morte superioris uxoris novis nuptiis locum vacuefecisses, nonne etiam alio incredibili scelere hoc scelus cumulavisti? quod ego praetermitto et facile patior sileri, ne in hac civitate tanti facinoris immanitas aut exstitisse aut non vindicata esse videatur. Praetermitto ruinas fortunarum tuarum quas omnes proximis Idibus tibi impendere senties.

There is also an amusing example in Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Our Parish IV (The Election for Beadle):

He would not allude to individuals (the ex-churchwarden continued, in the celebrated negative style adopted by great speakers). He would not advert to a gentleman who had once held a high rank in the service of his majesty; he would not say, that that gentleman was no gentleman; he would not assert, that that man was no man; he would not say, that he was a turbulent parishioner; he would not say, that he had grossly misbehaved himself, not only on this, but on all former occasions; he would not say, that he was one of those discontented and treasonable spirits, who carried confusion and disorder wherever they went; he would not say, that he harboured in his heart envy, and hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. No! He wished to have everything comfortable and pleasant, and therefore, he would say—nothing about him (cheers).

Thoreau, Journal (February 14, 1855):

I said to Therien, "You didn't live at Smith's last summer. Where did you live? At Baker's?" "Yes," said he. "Well, is that a good place?" "Oh, yes." "Is that a better place than Smith's?" "Oh, a change of pasture makes a fatter calf."

There is a French proverb to this effect—"Changement d'herbe réjouit les veaux." According to Littré, it "se dit pour exprimer que les changements plaisent d'ordinaire aux jeunes gens." Eugène Rolland, Faune Populaire de la France, Tome V (Les Mammifères Domestiques), Deuxième Partie (Noms Vulgaires, Dictons, Proverbes, Contes et Superstitions) (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1882), p. 49, gives the following English equivalent—"Change of pasture makes fat calves."

Alex Therien was French Canadian, and I wonder if he had this French proverb in mind when answering Thoreau's question.

On the relations between the two men, see Robert W. Bradford, "Thoreau and Therien," American Literature 34 (1962-1963) 499-506.

In the novel Cradock Nowell: A Tale of the New Forest by R.D. Blackmore (1825-1900), Bull Garnet is the steward of Sir Cradock Nowell. Bull likes nothing more than tree-felling, but his young son Bob hates nothing more. Chapter XII shows the two in conflict:

Why Bull Garnet so enjoyed the cutting down of a tree, none but those who themselves enjoy it may pretend to say. Of course we will not refer it to the reason assigned in the well-known epigram, which contains such a wholesale condemnation of this arboricidal age. In another century, London builders will perhaps discover, when there are no trees left, that a bit of tuck-pointing by the gate, and a dab of mud-plaster beside it, do not content the heart of man like the leaves, and the drooping shadowy rustle, which is the type of himself.

Bull Garnet stood there in the October morning, with the gate wide open, flung back by his strong hand upon its hinges, as if it had no right to them. The round bolt dropped from the quivering force, dropped through the chase of the loop, and bedded deep in the soft, wet ground.

With much satisfaction the gate brought up, and felt itself anchored safely; Bull Garnet gave the bolt a kick, which hurled all the rusty screws out. Then he scarcely stopped to curse the blacksmith; he wanted the time for the woodcutters. At a glint from the side of his vast round eyes—eyes that took in everything, and made all the workmen swear and believe that he could see round a corner—he descried that the axemen were working the tree askew to the strain of the ropes. The result must be that the comely young oak, just proud of its first big crop of acorns, would swerve on the bias of the wind, stagger heavily, and fall headlong upon the smart new fence. There was no time for words—in a moment he had kicked the men right and left, torn off his coat, and caught up an axe, and dealt three thundering strokes in the laggard twist of the breach. Away went the young oak, swaying wildly, trying once to recover itself, then crashing and creaking through the brushwood, with a swish from its boughs and leaves, and a groan from its snaggy splinters. A branch took one of the men in his face, and laid him flat in a tussock of grass.

"Serve you right, you lubber; I'm devilish glad," cried Bull Garnet; " and I hope you won't move for a week."

The next moment, he went up and raised him, felt that his limbs were sound, and gave him a dram of brandy.

"All right, my fine fellow. Next time you'll know something of the way to fell a tree. Go home now, and I'll send you a bottle of wine."

....

The boy leaped the new X fence very cleverly, through the fork of the fingers, and stood before his father in a flame of indignation. Mr. Garnet, with that queer expression which the face of a middle-aged man wears when he recalls his boyhood, ere yet he begins to admire it, was looking at his own young life with a contemplative terror. He was saying to himself, "What cheek this boy has got!" and he was feeling all the while that he loved him the more for having it.

"Hurrah, Bob, my boy; you're come just in time." Mr. Garnet tried very hard to look as if he expected approval. Well enough all the time he knew that he had no chance of getting it. For Bob loved nature in any form, especially as expressed in the noble eloquence of a tree. And now he saw why he had been sent to the village on a trifling errand that morning.

"Just in time for what, sir?" Bob's indignation waxed yet more. That his father should dare to chaff him!

"Just in time to tell us all about these wonderful red-combed fungi. What do you call them—some long name, as wonderful as themselves?"

Bob kicked them aside contemptuously. He could have told a long story about them, and things which men of thrice his age, who have neglected their mother, would be glad to listen to. Nature, desiring not revenge, has it in the credulous itch of the sons who have turned their backs on her.

"Oh, father," said Bob, with the tears in his eyes; "father, you can't have known that three purple emperors came to this oak, and sat upon the top of it, every morning for nearly a week, in the middle of July. And it was the most handsomest fifty-year oak till you come right to Brockenhurst bridge."

"Most handsomest, Bob!" cried Mr. Garnet, glad to lay hold of any thing; "come along with me, my son; I must see to your education."

Near them stood a young spruce fir, not more than five feet high. It had thrown up a straight and tapering spire, scaled with tender green. Below were tassels, tufts, and pointlets, all in triple order, pluming over one another in a pile of beauty. The tips of all were touched with softer and more glaucous tone. But all this gentle tint and form was only as a framework now, a loom to bear the web of heaven. For there had been a white mist that morning—autumn's breath made visible; and the tree with its net of spider's webs had caught the lucid moisture. Now, as the early sunlight opened through the layered vapours, that little spruce came boldly forth a dark bay of the forest, and met all the spears of the orient. Looped and traced with threads of gauze, the lacework of a fairy's thought, scarcely daring to breathe upon its veil of tremulous chastity, it kept the wings of light on the hover, afraid to weigh down the whiteness. A maiden with the love-dream nestling under the bridal faldetta, a child of genius breathing softly at his own fair visions, even an infant's angel whispering to the weeping mother—what image of humanity can be so bright and exquisite as a common tree's apparel ?

"Father, can you make that?" Mr. Garnet checked his rapid stride; and for once he admired a tree.

"No, my son; only God can do such glorious work as that."

"But it don't take God to undo it. Smash!"

Bob dashed his fists through the whole of it, and all the draped embroidery, all the pearly filagree, all the festoons of silver, were but as a dream when a yawning man stretches his scraggy arms forth. The little tree looked woe-begone, stale, and draggled with drunken tears.

"Why, Bob, I am ashamed of you."

"Father, so am I of you."

Labels: arboricide

Excerpts from Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I:

1.2.209-212 (Prince Hal):

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

1.3.260 (Hotspur):

...this prince of smiles...

1.3.247-248 (Earl of Worcester to Hotspur, a useful retort at family gatherings):

Farewell, kinsman. I will talk to you
When you are better tempered to attend.

2.2.24-26 (Falstaff):

Eight yards of uneven ground is threescore and ten miles afoot with me...

2.3.6-10 (Hotspur):

"The purpose you undertake is dangerous"—Why, that's certain! 'Tis dangerous to take a cold, to sleep, to drink; but I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.

2.4.129-131 (Falstaff):

If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.

2.4.133 (Falstaff):

A bad world, I say.

2.4.239-244 (Falstaff):

What, upon compulsion? Zounds, an I were at the strappado or all the racks in the world, I would not tell you on compulsion. Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.

2.4.330-332 (Prince Hal to Falstaff):

Here comes lean Jack; here comes bare-bone. How now, my sweet creature of bombast? How long is't ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?

2.4.407-411 (Falstaff masquerading as Henry IV to Prince Hal, add to collection about children resembling fathers):

That thou art my son I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me.

2.4.453-465 (Prince Hal masquerading as Henry IV to Falstaff masquerading as Prince Hal):

There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of an old fat man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting hutch of beastliness, that swoll'n parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuff'd cloakbag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years? Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? wherein neat and cleanly, but to carve a capon and eat it? wherein cunning, but in craft? wherein crafty, but in villainy? wherein villainous, but in all things? wherein worthy, but in nothing?

2.4.475-476 (Falstaff masquerading as Prince Hal to Prince Hal masquerading as Henry IV):

If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!

3.1.57-59 (Glendower and Hotspur):

Glen. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hot. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

3.1.139-145 (Hotspur):

I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers.
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turned
Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,
And that would set my teeth nothing on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

3.1.165 (Hotspur):

...such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff...

3.1.171-176 (Hotspur, about Glendower):

O, he is as tedious
As a tired horse, a railing wife;
Worse than a smoky house. I had rather live
With cheese and garlic in a windmill far
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom.

3.2.17 (Prince Hal):

...base newsmongers...

3.3.2-4 (Falstaff, to be said when hungry):

Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle? Why, my skin hangs about me like an old lady's loose gown! I am withered like an old applejohn.

4.2.64 (Prince Hal):

I did never see such pitiful rascals.

4.3.59-60 (Hotspur):

The King is kind; and well we know the King
Knows at what time to promise, when to pay.

5.1.75-83 (Henry IV):

...To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine colour that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents,
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurlyburly innovation.
And never yet did insurrection want
Such water colours to impaint his cause,
Nor moody beggars, starving for a time
Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.

5.1.133-143 (Falstaff):

How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he bear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism.

5.2.85-88 (Hotspur):

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.

William Wordsworth, The Prelude 4.354-357:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

Related posts:

• Description of a Recluse
  
• Timon
  
• I Was My Best Companion
  
• Solitude and Society
  
• Be Able To Be Alone
  
• Horace on the Popularity of Cell Phones
  
• Nietzsche on the Popularity of Cell Phones

Ecclesiastes 1.2-4:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill (1628)

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (Down the River):

No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss. He will understand what the captive Zia Indians meant when they made a song out of their sickness for home:

My home over there,
Now I remember it;
And when I see that mountain far away,
Why then I weep,
Why then I weep,
Remembering my home.

The translation of the song is by Herbert J. Spinden (1879-1967), "Home Songs of the Tewa Indians," The American Museum Journal 15 (1915) 73-78 (at 73). See also his Songs of the Tewa (New York: Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, Inc., 1933). There is a biographical sketch of Spinden by Frederic W. Gleach in Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (Arlington: American Anthropological Association; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), pp. 73-76.

John Ruskin, letter to Susan Beever (December 17, 1873):

What translation of Aristophanes is that? I must get it. I've lost I can't tell you how much knowledge and power through false pride in refusing to read translations, though I couldn't read the original without more trouble and time than I could spare; nevertheless, you must not think this English gives you a true idea of the original. The English is much more "English" in its temper than its words. Aristophanes is far more dry, severe, and concentrated; his words are fewer, and have fuller flavor; this English is to him what currant jelly is to currants. But it's immensely useful to me.

Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), p. 41 (tr. T.G. Rosenmeyer):

We find it difficult to understand how the gods of one's faith could be subjected to Aristophanic jests. But laughter is part of the meaning, the fruitfulness, the positive side of life, and it is therefore, in the eyes of the Greeks, more godlike than the sour solemnity which we associate with piety.

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 133:

The occasional fun poked at the gods in comedy is no evidence against the religious conservatism of the common man; it is when religion is sure of itself that such amusement is permitted.

Richard Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary, Volume IV: Books 13-16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 170 (on 14.153-353):

Few Greeks ever took their gods wholly seriously: this is, perhaps, the Greeks' greatest gift to civilization.

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Tales XI (The Bloomsbury Christening):

Mr. Nicodemus Dumps, or, as his acquaintance called him, "long Dumps," was a bachelor, six feet high, and fifty years old: cross, cadaverous, odd, and ill-natured. He was never happy but when he was miserable; and always miserable when he had the best reason to be happy. The only real comfort of his existence was to make everybody about him wretched—then he might be truly said to enjoy life.

Ambrose Bierce, The Man Out of the Nose:

The bearing of the man was one of profound dejection; indeed, the unsympathetic youth of the neighborhood, with that keen sense for visible characteristics which ever distinguishes the young male of our species, sometimes mentioned him among themselves by the name of Spoony Glum.

Cole Porter, "Brush Up On Your Shakespeare," from Kiss Me, Kate:

The girls today in society
Go for classical poetry
So to win their hearts one must quote with ease
Aeschylus and Euripides.
One must know Homer, and b'lieve me, Bo,
Sophocles, also Sappho-ho.
Unless you know Shelley and Keats and Pope,
Dainty debbies will call you a dope.
But the poet of them all
Who will start 'em simply ravin'
Is the poet people call
The bard of Stratford-on-Avon!

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
Just declaim a few lines from "Othella"
And they'll think you're a helluva fella.
If your blonde won't respond when you flatter 'er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer.
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing,
What are clothes? "Much Ado about Nussing."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
With the wife of the British embessida
Try a crack out of "Troilus and Cressida."
If she says she won't buy it or tike it
Make her tike it, what's more, "As You Like It."
If she says your behavior is heinous
Kick her right in the "Coriolanus."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now.
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow.
If you can't be a ham and do "Hamlet"
They will not give a damn or a damnlet.
Just recite an occasional sonnet
And your lap'll have "Honey" upon it.
When your baby is pleading for pleasure
Let her sample your "Measure for Measure."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
Better mention "The Merchant Of Venice"
When her sweet pound o' flesh you would menace.
If her virtue, at first, she defends—well,
Just remind her that "All's Well That Ends Well."
And if still she won't give you a bonus
You know what Venus got from Adonis!
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
If your goil is a Washington Heights dream
Treat the kid to "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
If she then wants an all-by-herself night
Let her rest ev'ry 'leventh or "Twelfth Night,"
If because of your heat she gets huffy
Simply play on and "Lay on, Macduffy!"
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow,
We trow, and they'll all kowtow.

Brush up your Shakespeare,
Start quoting him now,
Brush up your Shakespeare,
And the women you will wow.
So tonight just recite to your matey,
"Kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Kate, kiss me, Katey."
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they'll all kowtow.

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All translations are by Richmond Lattimore.

Iliad 4.482-487 (Simoesios, slain by Aias):

He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top:
one which a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining
iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river.

ὃ δ᾽ ἐν κονίῃσι χαμαὶ πέσεν αἴγειρος ὣς
ἥ ῥά τ᾽ ἐν εἱαμενῇ ἕλεος μεγάλοιο πεφύκει
λείη, ἀτάρ τέ οἱ ὄζοι ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῃ πεφύασι·
τὴν μέν θ᾽ ἁρματοπηγὸς ἀνὴρ αἴθωνι σιδήρῳ
ἐξέταμ᾽, ὄφρα ἴτυν κάμψῃ περικαλλέϊ δίφρῳ·
ἣ μέν τ᾽ ἀζομένη κεῖται ποταμοῖο παρ᾽ ὄχθας.

Iliad 5.559-560 (Orsilochos and Krethon, slain by Aineias):

Such were these two who beaten under the hands of Aineias
crashed now to the ground as if they were two tall pine trees.

τοίω τὼ χείρεσσιν ὑπ᾽ Αἰνείαο δαμέντε
καππεσέτην, ἐλάτῃσιν ἐοικότες ὑψηλῇσι.

Iliad 13.389-391 (Asios, slain by Idomeneus) = 16.482-484 (Sarpedon, slain by Patroklos):

He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar,
or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters
have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship timber.

ἤριπε δ᾽ ὡς ὅτε τις δρῦς ἤριπεν ἢ ἀχερωῒς
ἠὲ πίτυς βλωθρή, τήν τ᾽ οὔρεσι τέκτονες ἄνδρες
ἐξέταμον πελέκεσσι νεήκεσι νήϊον εἶναι.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (Down the River):

While we dream and drift on the magic river the busy little men with their gargantuan appliances are hard at work, day and night, racing against the time when the people of America might possibly awake to discover something precious and irreplaceable about to be destroyed.

                              ...Nature's polluted,
There's man in every secret corner of her
Doing damned, wicked deeds.

The verse quotation is from Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death's Jest-Book, or the Fool's Tragedy, Act II, Scene III.

Excerpts from John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter V (May 1, 1871):

That telegraphic signalling was a discovery; and conceivably, some day, may be a useful one. And there was some excuse for your being a little proud when, about last sixth of April (Coeur-de-Lion's death-day, and Albert Durer's), you knotted a copper wire all the way to Bombay, and flashed a message along it, and back.

But what was the message, and what the answer? Is India the better for what you said to her? Are you the better for what she replied?

If not, you have only wasted an all-round-the-world's length of copper wire,—which is, indeed, about the sum of your doing. If you had had, perchance, two words of common-sense to say, though you had taken wearisome time and trouble to send them;—though you had written them slowly in gold, and sealed them with a hundred seals, and sent a squadron of ships of the line to carry the scroll, and the squadron had fought its way round the Cape of Good Hope, through a year of storms, with loss of all its ships but one,—the two words of common-sense would have been worth the carriage, and more. But you have not anything like so much as that to say, either to India, or to any other place.

....

There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the Gods there morning and evening—Apollo and all the sweet Muses of the light—walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for Gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley—you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange—you Fools Everywhere.

....

A man and a woman, with their children, properly trained, are able easily to cultivate as much ground as will feed them; to build as much wall and roof as will lodge them, and to spin and weave as much cloth as will clothe them. They can all be perfectly happy and healthy in doing this. Supposing that they invent machinery which will build, plough, thresh, cook, and weave, and that they have none of these things any more to do, but may read, or play croquet, or cricket, all day long, I believe myself that they will neither be so good nor so happy as without the machines.

....

There are three Material things, not only useful, but essential to Life. No one "knows how to live" till he has got them.

These are, Pure Air, Water, and Earth.

....

You can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of death, to any extent. Toil might easily vitiate it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as would end all of you. You or your fellows, German and French, are at present busy in vitiating it to the best of your power in every direction;— chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal and vegetable ruin in war: changing men, horses, and garden-stuff into noxious gas. But everywhere, and all day long, you are vitiating it with foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nests, which you call towns, are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease.

On the other hand, your power of purifying the air, by dealing properly and swiftly with all substances in corruption; by absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures; and by planting in all soils the trees which cleanse and invigorate earth and atmosphere,— is literally infinite. You might make every breath of air you draw, food.

Secondly, your power over the rain and river-waters of the earth is infinite. You can bring rain where you will, by planting wisely and tending carefully;— drought, where you will, by ravage of woods and neglect of the soil. You might have the rivers of England as pure as the crystal of the rock;— beautiful in falls, in lakes, in living pools;— so full of fish that you might take them out with your hands instead of nets. Or you may do always as you have done now, turn every river of England into a common sewer, so that you cannot so much as baptize an English baby but with filth, unless you hold its face out in the rain; and even that falls dirty.

Then for the third, Earth,— meant to be nourishing for you, and blossoming. You have learned, about it, that there is no such thing as a flower; and as far as your scientific hands and scientific brains, inventive of explosive and deathful, instead of blossoming and life-giving, Dust, can contrive, you have turned the Mother-Earth, Demeter, into the Avenger-Earth, Tisiphone — with the voice of your brother's blood crying out of it, in one wild harmony round all its murderous sphere.