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Friday, July 20, 2007
Dryden’s pyramid
Dryden’s marvellous long poem Annus Mirabilis (1667) records the various events of the ‘year of wonders’, 1666. About two thirds of the work is given over to the naval toing-and-froing of the second Anglo-Dutch War: English losses during the Four Days Battle (1-4 June 1666), and their military success but strategic failure to follow-up at the later St James’ Day Battle (4-5 August 2006 1666). The rest of the poem covers, with great vividness and power, the Great Fire of London. The city burns for days, until finally God takes pity on the suffering metropolis and puts the fire out. This is how Dryden describes it:
280
At length the Almighty cast a pitying eye,
And mercy softly touch’d his melting breast:
He saw the town’s one half in rubbish lie,
And eager flames drive on to storm the rest.281
An hollow crystal pyramid he takes,
In firmamental waters dipt above;
Of it a broad extinguisher he makes,
And hoods the flames that to their quarry strove. [ lines 1117-24]
Wonderfully odd image, that crystal pyramid; and surely the first time in literature that God is troped as a firefighter. First and maybe last. What’s going on?
Contemporaries seem not to have liked the image. Samuel Johnson‘s opinion was that in this poem Dryden ‘seems not yet fully to have formed his versification, or settled his system of propriety’, and he considered the pyramid image ‘unexpectedly mean’—low, in other words, and unfitting as a description of the supreme being. The anonymous owner of one of the first editions, now in the possession of Trinity College Cambridge, scribbled a parody of this stanza in the endpapers of his volume:
An Hollow far-fetcht Metaphor he takes
In non-sense dipt his fantastick braine
Of which a broad extinquisher he makes
Which hoods his witt & stifles all his flame.
To which we may properly say, ho-ho.
So, why a pyramid, of all things?
As far as I can see, seventeenth-century firemen had nothing to do with pyramids. They used buckets, firehooks, or if they were very up to date they used handpumps. Here’s a picture of the latter from an account of the Great Fire:
Isn’t that the coolest, suavest fire-fighter you ever saw? He’s fancy. But a pyramid? It’s not even very clear in my mind’s eye exactly what Dryden’s getting at. Does the image mean that God took hold of a pyramid without a base (which is to say, open at the bottom) and used it as a highfalutin bucket, tossing its contents through the sky? Or is the pyramid supposed to have a nozzle at its apex such that, inverted and filled with water, it can sprinkle water downwards? Or is the pramid not supposed to be inverted at all? [Is it, as Rich suggests in the comments below, a giant invisible candle-snuffer-outer?]
It may be that Dryden has Egyptians on his mind, although it’s not clear why, at this point. The only two places in the poem where Egyptians are specifically mentioned are rather contradictory. Near the beginning King Charles (for whom, in large part, Annus Mirabilis is a panegyric) is praised for his steadfastness in going to war:
45
He without fear a dangerous war pursues,
Which without rashness he began before:
As honour made him first the danger choose,
So still he makes it good on virtue’s score.46
The doubled charge his subjects’ love supplies,
Who, in that bounty, to themselves are kind:
So glad Egyptians see their Nilus rise,
And in his plenty their abundance find. [lines 177-84]
So Charles is the Nile, and the English are kind-of Egyptians. But later, during the naval Battle of Lowestoft Egypt is the Dutch enemy to England’s Israel. (‘He’ in these lines is the English admiral the Duke of Albemarle):
91
He drew his mighty frigates all before,
On which the foe his fruitless force employs:
His weak ones deep into his rear he bore
Remote from guns, as sick men from the noise.92
His fiery cannon did their passage guide,
And following smoke obscured them from the foe:
Thus Israel safe from the Egyptian’s pride,
By flaming pillars, and by clouds did go. [lines 361-68]
So the semiology of ‘Egypt’ in the poem is both positive and negative. What else?
Well, I suppose one reason the image doesn’t necessarily strike a modern reader, as it did Johnson, as intrinsically low or inappropriate is that there is a commonly-held modern day sense that there is a connection between divine mystery and power and the pyramid. It isn’t necessarily an Egyptian thing either. Think of the backside of the Great Seal of the United States, also reproduced on the, frankly, spooky US Dollar bill:
Alas there is no evidence that Dryden was a freemason; nor than he was involved with the illuminati. In addition, this is an anachronistic intertext; the Great Seal wasn’t designed until after 1776; although we might at least say that it speaks to a broader context in which divine power and pyramids are connected.
Here’s my theory about Dryden’s pyramid, although unfortunately for me I don’t have anything that might be considered proof to support it. Now, rather than illustrate the case at great length (which, believe me, I could) I’ll simply state it: Annus Mirabilis is, verbally, an intensely playful piece of writing; its conceits are consistently ingenious—too much so, for readers like Johnson—and its language is alive, fluid, awake to the manifold possibilities of punning and play. Here’s the death of Vice-Admiral Sir John Lawson, early in the piece:
Lawson amongst the foremost met his fate,
Whom sea-green Sirens from the rocks lament; [81-82]
Lawson died of gangrene. That ‘sea-green’ seems almost a cheap-gag echo of the fact; except that the word gangrene is originally Greek; and ‘ga’ in Greek means ‘earth’, so the word appears to straddle an inverting pun (Gangrene, Earth-green, Sea-green). There are dozens of examples of this sort of thing in the piece as a whole.
The point is that the entire poem is structured on both the large and the small level around the opposition of (on the one hand) water, and (on the other) fire. The first section, concerning the naval war, obviously locates itself in the idiom of water, upon which fire repeatedly plays:
Two grappling Ætnas on the ocean meet,
And English fires with Belgian flames contend. [335-6]
The second section moves the idiom to fire, as London burns, and Dryden’s favoured strategy here is to set the flames against the shrinking water of the Thames:
230
In vain: for from the east a Belgian wind
His hostile breath through the dry rafters sent;
The flames impell’d soon left their foes behind,
And forward with a wanton fury went.231
A quay of fire ran all along the shore,
And lighten’d all the river with a blaze:
The waken’d tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.232
Old father Thames raised up his reverend head,
But fear’d the fate of Simois would return:
Deep in his ooze he sought his sedgy bed,
And shrunk his waters back into his urn.233
The fire, meantime, walks in a broader gross;
To either hand his wings he opens wide:
He wades the streets, and straight he reaches cross,
And plays his longing flames on the other side. [917-32]
I particularly like fire ‘wading the streets’; Dryden has put his poetic finger in precisely the fluid quality that fire possesses, despite being the driest and most desiccating of phenomena. I think this explains the odd choice of ‘pyramid’:
An hollow crystal pyramid he takes,
In firmamental waters dipt above;
Of it a broad extinguisher he makes,
And hoods the flames that to their quarry strove. [1121-24]
The important feature, for Dryden’s quicksilver poetic imagination, is the pyr in the pyramid: the reference to fire in the very name of the object. That a fire-structure should become the object by which water is disseminated and fire extinguished is wholly fitting. My case, in other words, is that it’s the ‘pyr’ in ‘pyramid’ that ignites his imagination, feeding that image into the logic of inversion (fire, water) that shapes the whole poem.
Comments
their military success but strategic failure to follow-up at the later St James’ Day Battle (4-5 August 2006)
should be
“their military success but strategic failure to follow-up at the [much] later St James’ Day Battle (4-5 August 2006).”
Perhaps it doesn’t matter, but, do you think that Dryden specifically chose the word ‘pyramid’ as useful in furthering the fire/water pattern of symbols in the poem, or, do you think that he came to the pyramid-as-waterbucket device in the throes of composition?
I have a completely different mental image of how this extinguisher was supposed to work. The line about hooding the flames immediately made me think of a candle extinguisher—typically a metal cone attached to a metal rod, used by putting the cone over the candle flame and thereby cutting off its air and extinguishing it. That would fit the “hollow crystal pyramid”: it would be a empty shell with no bottom that God would put over the city to enclose it.
Admittedly the stanza does mention waters, but there is no mention of waters running through the city, as there would be if the fire was being put out by flood. Also, water wouldn’t really hood the flames. And finally, the Great London Fire was supposed to have been put out in part by strong winds dying down, not by rain.
I think that the “firmamental waters dipt above” were possibly supposed to be used to form or harden the crystal pyramid in some way, like dipping a forged piece of iron in water to cool it.
Finally, I really like the anonymous pardoy stanza. Whoever that person was did a good job.
Rich, your reading of the pyramid had literally not occurred to me; but now that I think about it surely you’re right. The water threw me off the mark, but I’d say Dryden is talking about an of enormous crystal (which is to say invisible) divine candle-snuffer.
John: oops.
Newton’s prisms could have been on his brain as well:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/newton/index.html
Not sure Newton was well-known enough in 1667 for this to be a reference; but it’s interesting ... and the site is nicely Dark Side of the Moon.
Hi, sorry, didn’t mean to suggest it was “a reference.” The influence, if there is any, would have operated obliquely at the level of vehicle rather than content. “Memetic influence,” as the kids say these days.
I guess I took your question to be the following: “Why, of all possible metaphors for a Godly water bucket / candle snuffer, pick a translucent pyramid?”
The answer could be, “strange translucent pyramids were causing quite a stir in Cambridge and the Royal Society in those days.”
Not, ultimately, that there’s very much there there, other than a possible plot line for a Neil Stephenson novel that has already been written.
. . . And any intent to memetically inspire Dark Side of the Moon thoughts with the original post was . . . purely accidental, of course. . .