We’d swarm around my old neighborhood on BMXes with one or two banana seat hand-me-downs trying to keep up. There were a thousand kids kicked outside until dark every summer morning along four suburban parallel streets we considered our patch. Tractors came in 82 or 83 and clear cut a huge swath of wooded land; seven or eight football fields worth to build an office park. It was glorious.
We’d sit on the hill watching all afternoon and then descend when they broke for the day around three or four. Daylight Savings left us four- or five-hours sunlight to slop through upturned roots, climb hulking yellow diggers frozen like Bilbo’s trolls, and color blue jeans rusty with Alabama clay. I got my foot stuck in that clay one time and it took two other guys to pull me loose. Somewhere under the Embassy Suites with obligatory Ruth’s Chris that stands there now is a ten-year-old boy sized red Converse All-Star, the right one I think. Couldn’t get it out.
Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make it a POETS Day, go outside and play while there’s still four or five hours of daylight left.
First, some verse.
***
I know very little about Yvor Winters, but from what I’ve read he liked to think himself immune to or outside the influence of popular opinion. He’s tagged as eccentric and a proponent of clarity and precision in form. Over his thirty-plus years as a professor of English at Stanford, he had to contend with giants. You can’t ignore the greats, but he seemed to get a kick out of championing lesser-known poets.
Winters reportedly included the following by Philip Pain in his 1968 anthology, Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English.
Meditation 8.
Philip Pain (~1640-1667??)Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other’s dead; and to my ear
Me-thinks it is no news: but Oh! did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to die,
My Pulses all would bear, I should not be
Drown’d in this Deluge of Securitie.
It reads like some of the better Modernist navel-gazing, though obviously Pain composed his sentiments independent of trenches and mustard gas. It is an entirely obscure selection. There’s one original copy of Daily Meditations: Or, Quotidian Preparations for and Considerations of Death and Eternity, the book “Meditation 8.” is taken from, in existence, housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. A few selections show up in the 1976 New Oxford Book of American Verse, but that’s post-Winters’s book. Before him, I couldn’t find a mention of him in any of my anthologies and Grok (so hit or miss) claims he’s not included in any of the better known collections. I typed “Philip Pain” into the Project Gutenberg search bar and got Christmas in Storyland by Maud Van Buren and Katharine Isabel Bemis, which doesn’t have any Philip Pain in it. No idea what was going on there.
One Yvor Winters fan site claims that “Meditations 8.” Is found in The Oxford Book of Short Verse, but neither Amazon, Gutenberg, Grok (so hit or miss), nor Oxford University Press acknowledges the existence of such a title. I’m sure there’s a collection he’s included in somewhere, but it looks like Winters plucked Pain from obscurity. My bet is that the 1976 anthology wouldn’t have thought to consider Pain but for Quest for Reality.
Very, very, very little is known about Pain. His Daily Meditations book’s front matter tells us “By Philip Pain: Who lately suffering Shipwrack, was drowned.” That’s all the available biographical information on the man. The rest is divined from his single short book of short poems.
It begins with this forward.
The Porch.
To live’s a Gift, to dye’s a Debt that we
Each of us owe unto Mortality.
What though the dead do ghastly look, and We
Like Children frighted are even but to be
Spectators of a dying man or woman?
Yet nothing’s to be fear’d that is so common.
It is not Death that we in them do see;
It’s but the Mask wherewith ’twill vailed be.
Yet where’s the man or woman that can look
Death in the face, as in some pleasing book?
Can we contented be to view our face
In such a dreadful, doleful Looking-glass?
O where’s the man or woman that can cry,
Behold I come, Death I desire to dye?
O where’s the man or woman that can say,
Lord, I desire my dissolution day?
And what’s the reason ’tis so hard to dye,
To leave this World so full of vanity?
What makes it terrible? nought but the sense
Of guilt & sin: Break down this potent fence,
And then be sure for aye you shall enjoy
Joyes everlasting, Everlasting joy.
– P.P.
What follows are a series of sixty-four “Meditations,” identical in form to “Meditation 8.” above: tight, relentlessly precise iambic pentameter with aabbcc rhymes, a few of which require vowel shift dispensation and a few of which, like “…face/…Looking-glass” above, you have to shake your head at.
From the poems, anonymous biographical blurbs scattered about on study aid sites and blogs tell me we can surmise Pain was young, moderately religious, and a seaman. It’s assumed he’s American, though I’m not sure why. He’s said to have died at sea, and it seems, since his book was published by S. G. and M. J. of Cambridge Massachusetts, he drowned somewhere off a nearby coast.
The early poems contain allusions to or images of ships and the sea. There are missing words and lines, represented by “__________.”
Meditation 3.
Down to the grave I must ere long descend,
Leave all my friends behinde; thither I bend
And steer my wearied Course unto that Port,
To which all sorts of Nations do resort.
When I cast Anchor, grant, O Lord, that I
May safely ride where Christ himself did lye.Meditation 4.
This World a Sea of trouble is, and Man
Is swimming through this vast wide Ocean.
The Billows beat, the Waves are angry, and
‘Tis seldome that he __________ a helping hand
To buoy his head __________ O great God, let me
Be kept from sinking into misery.
To me he seems more than moderately religious and obsessed with death. Irony of irony, death came for him so young, and at sea, as he happened to allude to so often on the earlier Meditations.
In 2008, Margaret Seltzer put out Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones. It was a salacious tell all of victimhood and overcoming adversity, which we love. The more adversity overcoming the better. Margaret wrote about growing up an orphaned mixed race white/Native American, forced by poverty and the streets of Los Angeles to work for less-noble-but-by-circumstance drug dealers. All the usual NPRs loved it. The New York Times did a profile of the pseudonymous author with a photo.
Unfortunately for Seltzer, her sister saw the NY Times profile, recognized the photo, and gave her own tell all in a call to the book’s publisher, Riverhead Books. The sister’s story wasn’t as marketable. Seltzer grew up in Sherman Oaks, attended private school, was raised by her very boring white biological parents, and volunteered as a community helper person where she came in contact with people who told more interesting, easily liftable, life stories. Margaret B. Jones, radio interview adopted street accent and all, was a fraud. The book sold very well until Riverhead recalled as many copies as they could.
Enough asides. Back to the guy who wrote about sailing and doled out wise pentameter aphorisms about getting right with God and not fearing death before he tragically – but buck up because he had an attitude about life, its transitory nature, and an understanding of why we must obey the will of God which we should strive to emulate – got “shipwracked,” as S.G., M.J., and Margaret B. Jones would say.
After the first ten or so, Pain stops alluding to the sea and gets repetitive, and not just in form. He hopes he’s goin’ up to the spirit in the sky, but he’s a little nervous. That’s where he wants to go when he dies. When he dies and they lay him to rest, he wants to go to the place that’s the best, so he’s wondering if he crossed all the Ts. He shifts ideas around and repeats.
Meditation 49.
In Heaven are eternal joyes; and sure
In that place there are Remedies to cure
Our here Sin-sick’ned Souls: but Oh shall I
Be made a Patient of this Remedy?
Lord, I believe a Heaven there is; but this
The Question is, Shall I enjoy that bliss?Meditation 50.
In Hell are Torments, Torments without end;
And them I must endure, if that no friend
I have of Jesus. O my Soul, must I
Go from PAIN here, to Pain eternally?
I know there is a Hell: Lord, grant that I
May go from Earth to Heaven when I die.
Near the end, he remembers to cleave to his impending tragic end and pulls out shanty words again.
Meditation 62.
How is it that I am so careless here,
And never minde how I my Course do steer
For an Eternal Port? and never thinks
That at the last my leaky Ship will sink?
Lord, guard me from those Pirats that would catch
My Soul, do thou (Lord) be their over-match.
There’s a postscript written by M.J., listed, as I mentioned, as one of Daily Meditations’s publishers. My theory that Philip Pain, an important historical footnote for having been one of America’s first published poets, never existed, is threatened by the postscript.
Pain’s precise six line iambic pentameter meditations look very much like the precise six line iambic pentameter stanzas in M.J.’s “Postscript.” One might be tempted to say both were written by the same hand. Outside of “Meditation 8.”, which gets a boost from Winters’s imprimatur, there’s nothing memorable, not even a clever turn of phrase in the whole sixty-four lot. It’s sentimental sermon fodder. Not a lot of individuality to it. There’s nothing distinctive about the postscript either. Until you notice.
Starting with the introductory poem and all through the Meditations, it’s couplets. Then look at the postscript. Meditations rhyme aabbcc. That’s practically a fingerprint. “Postscript” rhymes ababcc. I want to say that M.J. wrote the whole; invented Pain as a marketing tool. But there’s a different rhyme. Surely there must be a second poet.
A mystery for the ages.
from A Postscript to the Reader
Of Hell he’s not forgetful; but with dread
And trembling thinks & speaks thereof: doth give
Warming to Eving ones, they should not plead
For Sin, which brings a Hell without reprieve:
Excites to Prayer, Repentance, and to stay
By Faith on Christ for Life which lasts for ay.But his most sweetest Contemplation
Takes wing below, and up to Heaven doth soare:
There’s matter for deep Meditation,
Where Pleasures do abide for evermore,
Which neither Eye t’re saw, Ear heard, nor __________
Enter into the Heart of any man.
