THE CANAKIN CLINK (1)
02-18-2010
A time out of mind ago when I was an adolescent in high school, the works of Wm. Shakespeare were presented to me in a pedagogical manner. I attacked them in my fervor to command English literature. But the plays were too mature for my emotional understanding. The sonnets were dense to the point of being forbidden, as my mind was unable to penetrate them. The poems I considered not really written by Shakespeare; or, they appeared to be ancillary to him, written in a fit of absence in between work on the plays.
Ah, but the songs were a different order of composition. I have always loved Shakespeare’s songs. I have had a copy of them at my bedside for as long as I can remember. Their magic lyricism represents the perfection of sound and sense. They define English verse along with the Nursery Rhymes, the English and Scottish Ballads and the pre-Chaucerian poems and fragments.
I thrill even now at “Who Is Sylvia?” (The Two Gentlemen of Verona) It is one of the poems I committed to memory. (I use the spelling and punctuation from Simon, Henry W., editor, The Complete Sonnets, Songs and Poems of William Shakespeare, New York, Washington Square Press, 1963.)
Who is Sylvia? what is she?
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she;
The heavens such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness:
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness;
And, being help’d, inhabits there.
Then to Sylvia let us sing,
That Sylvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling;
To her let us garlands bring.
There resides a complete poetics in the subtlety of the final line of this song.
I recall with care “O Mistress Mine” (Twelfth Night) as all educated college students did in case it would help in a seduction of a coed.
O mistress mine! where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love? ‘tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure;
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
It is to be followed at the end of an evening with “Take, O Take.” (Measure for Measure)
Take, O take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again, bring again,
Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.
I indulge in primitive rebellion with Caliban in his song, “Caliban’s Song.” (The Tempest)
No more dams I’ll make for fish;
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring;
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish:
“Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
I rehearse often in mind the song that everyone in the educated universe knows, “Full Fathom Five.” (The Tempest)
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ---
Ding-dong, bell.
What could be better metaphors through the centuries: bones as coral, and eyes as pearls? (The Tempest is my favorite of the plays.)
Over the years, these songs sounded and resounded in my mind. My mind grew to full maturity with them. They grounded my perception and are integral to it. They are so perfect that they make my eyes moist when I recite them even now as a mature man. I could wish to mumble these verses on my deathbed.
A few years ago, one song struck with such insistence in my psyche that it forced itself into immediate consciousness. That song is the “Drinking Song” of Iago in The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.
(I praise Shakespeare’s art, and not his villain. But as to villainy in Othello, Iago is not the only one, and perhaps not even the primary one. Othello may be the ur-drama of deception and evil, but that is the subject of another essay.)
And let me the canakin clink, clink;
And let me the canakin clink:
A soldier’s a man;
O, man’s life’s but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.
I began hearing that “clink,” “clink” at all hours. I recited the song in memory, and aloud, relentlessly and obsessively. I wondered what it meant. I conclude that it arouses a primal verbalism of mind, and indicates a verbal facility and the primitive enabling of versification, ---the source of language and thus of humanity. I delighted in it.
The sound of “clink” itself is significant. I understand that mugs or tankards in Elizabethan times may have been made of wood as often as metal, but the material of Iago’s cup was made of metal, or was held together with metal bands and bosses. “Clink” is the noise of tight metal on metal when drinkers would punch their mugs together, or bang them on the studs in the tables. The word appears a second time in Othello, again by Iago in Act II, Scene iii where, speaking to Montano about Cassio, he says “For that I heard the clink and fall of swords,… .” Swords are made of tight metal, and their clashing makes the sound “clink” in English like canakins and from Shakespeare to us. It is the voice of the master through the centuries, whomever he may finally turn out to be. It has to be “clink.” It cannot be “clank,” “clonk,” or “clunk,” as these are the sounds of loose metal, heads and wood knocking against each other, respectively. (“Clenk” is an indeterminate sound, unless you mean “clench,” perhaps appropriate to the way both mugs and swords are grasped.)
That “clink” echoes in my mind as the wherewithal of poetry. It is a harsh sound made sweet by verse. All poems must have it. I connect it to the lines of T.S. Eliot in the “Burnt Norton” episode of his Four Quartets.
“My words echo
Thus, in your mind.” (Lines 14-15)
All poems must echo with that “clink”. I am indifferent to the format of a poem, the style, mode, poetics, or prosody of it. If it does not have that psychic “clink” that echoes and re-echoes in the mind, I will turn away from it. Until it returns to the sweetness of our English verse, our poetry will remain stuck in an age of unflowering. (I am not advocating a return to traditional verse.) If you do not get it, not understand what I say then you will never get anything in poetry. Our beloved English language evolves with us and contains metrical resources yet to be discovered, explored and displayed. It is poetically an indefinitude. Look to it.
As a start, I would suggest you read the songs of Shakespeare with intensity.
(T. R. CATANZARITE)
