Posts Tagged ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins’

Stanford’s William Mahrt, a leading scholar in early music, died today at 85. He conducted Gregorian chant for more than 60 years and inspired and guided generations of scholars. He directed Stanford’s Early Music Singers and St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola. He was also a personal friend. This is an article I wrote for Stanford Report about Bill Mahrt on October 2nd, 2007.

For nearly two millennia, the sound has been a regular pulse beneath the skin of Western civilization. It reverberated through Dante’s mind as he scratched out the cantos of the Purgatorio. It was the inaudible vein of thought running beneath the chords of Mozart’s Requiem. Crusaders trudged to the East with these melodies in their heart, but they were too late – Jerusalem had echoed with it centuries earlier. It was ubiquitous, universal – that is, until about 40 years ago.

William Mahrt directs the St. Ann Choir, which he says has had a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” 

The tide may be turning, and, if so, it will be William Mahrt’s moment in the sun.

The origins of Gregorian chant are enigmatic. It appears to have its roots in fourth-century Jerusalem. The link with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) is the byproduct of early spin, based on what is probably an erroneous assumption that he composed and collected early chant.

The otherworldly effect of the music is hard to describe, but Mahrt, an associate professor of music at Stanford, recently gave it a try: “It is what we call monophonic – that is to say, it’s a melody that’s unaccompanied,” he said. “A free rhythm has an ability to evoke eternal things, more than passages tied down to regular time. It’s a sprung rhythm that has a freedom to it – like Hopkins’ poetry.”

Mahrt has conducted Gregorian chant for more than 40 years without a break. He is the director of Stanford’s Early Music Singers and of the St. Ann Choir, a Gregorian schola at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto. He instructs singers in the mysteries of “the chant,” as well as the glorious polyphonic music that came after it. In fact, it’s possible that there is more chant sung in Palo Alto than anywhere else in the country, with the possible exception of monastic communities. Mahrt has inspired and guided generations of scholars and singers.

One of his star students, Kerry McCarthy, now an assistant professor of music at Duke University, is the author of Liturgy and Contemplation in Byrd’s Gradualia and one of the world’s leading scholars on William Byrd, the preeminent English composer of the Renaissance.

“One of the best decisions I’ve made in my life was to come to Stanford and work with Bill,” McCarthy said. “The things I learned from him here I could not have learned anywhere else. Not just in the classroom, but in performance. Especially in performance.”

Acclaimed music writer and jazz scholar Ted Gioia recalls going to hear the St. Ann Choir, composed of students and members of the community at large, when he was studying for an MBA at Stanford. Often he found only a few fellow listeners in the pews.

“The thing I most miss about Palo Alto is going to those Gregorian Masses,” he said. “It’s so energizing. That was the best-kept secret in Palo Alto. Bill was the person who really opened my ears to that. He had a profound influence on my conception of music – through the force of his example.”

Mahrt’s work has indeed been quiet. Furthermore, he has encountered resistance from a church that has not always valued its own heritage.

“There’s a huge resistance from the clerical establishment to doing any of this,” said Stanford alumna Susan Altstatt, who has been a member of the St. Ann Choir since 1967. “Bill has lived a charmed life in this regard. Bill has managed to do what he’s doing by talking to bishops and priests and knowing what he’s talking about. He’s a hero, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mahrt explained the resistance: “Gregorian chant went out of style when the language was changed” – that is, when the universal Latin was changed to the vernacular English. “In the absence of any good solution about what to replace the chant with, I would say commercial interests stepped in and hawked a progressively cheaper and cheaper music, and the commercial interests still prevail today.”

For example, one of the leading publishers of “missalettes,” the flimsy and disposable paperbacks that include “new” church music, distributes 4.3 million of the quarterly copies a year and owns 10,000 music copyrights. That’s a lot of commercial interests.

The result was summarized by one disgruntled reviewer on Amazon.com: “The Roman Catholic Church, seeking to be more ‘relevant’ to its flock in the antispiritual climate of the second half of the 20th century, abandoned its ancient Latin liturgy and dignified music in favor of poorly worded vernacular texts and worse music. This music usually tends toward banal couplets set to insipid tunes strummed on ill-tuned guitars and whined into a microphone to the banging of a tambourine.”

Mahrt said there is a reason for the ill-tuned guitars and whining: “The standard of performance in recorded pop music is very high. A little combo in a church can’t possibly keep that standard. There isn’t the same standard for chant. Its whole criteria are different. Singers can master it in a different way.”

Unlike other kinds of music, McCarthy said, “You don’t have to have to have wonderful technique and learn to breathe from your diaphragm and so forth and have 20 years of voice lessons. It’s on a very human scale. It’s really self-regenerating. You can sing especially psalms for hours without getting tired, and there aren’t many kinds of music you can say that about.”

According to Mahrt, the St. Ann Choir has created a “fruitful interaction” with Stanford’s doctoral students of musicology, who find it “a very wonderful laboratory for the study of the music of history.” Members of the choir, which performs the year-round cycle of chant, are perhaps the staunchest advocates of the music anywhere: “This is one of the major cultural landmarks of Western society,” Altstatt said. “Its preservation is very important. It has to be sung – it has to come through the human voice. You have to be taught, in a living tradition. You can’t get it through a book. You get hooked on it, you internalize it and need to do it. It’s a splendid thing.”

In recent years, a younger audience, seeking music with a little more history and meaning than its usual fare, has become hooked in a different way: A generation has snapped up Gregorian chant and made recordings into crossover hits. In the last decade, the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos’ Canto Gregoriano would become one of the world’s biggest-selling classical compact discs, with worldwide sales topping 6 million.

But the commotion and hoopla miss the point, Mahrt said. “Chant does arise out of silence, and it goes back to silence,” he said. “In our own culture, we sometimes don’t have any silence. I think among students, for instance. They go into the dorms and the walls are thumping 24 hours a day. There is never a chance to be alone, in silence, within your own residence. But the fact is, I think, myself, the best location for the contact with God is in silence.

“When silence occurs, then you can look interiorly and find an order and a purpose that the noise of the media running day and night obscures. So, likewise, the chant, which is pure, a single melody, is not complicated, arises out of silence and goes back into it, as a way of returning to that interiority.”

Early interest

Mahrt grew up in a small farming community in eastern Washington – a place where “church music” meant sentimental hymns sung by a “little choir of ladies who sang to a harmonium.” His University of Washington master’s thesis as a pianist was the work of Robert Schumann. Mahrt discovered the chant at the University of Washington. Dominican friars, who were Catholic chaplains at the university, desperate to augment their choir, told him, “You have to sing chant for Holy Week.”

“It’s the hardest chant of the year in some ways. So we did it,” he recalled. “And I said this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I joined the Cathedral Choir and sang chant there for the next two-and-a-half years.”

He headed to Stanford to study Mozart and also joined the St. Ann Choir, which had been launched by one of the university’s mathematics professors in 1963. A year later, the professor departed for another university and handed the reins to Mahrt. The year was a landmark in chant in another way: That was the year the Catholic Church began using local languages in the liturgy, and the chant was all but abandoned.

“Our choir was started one year before the language changed – if we had tried to start one year later, we might not have been able to do it,” Mahrt said. “I saw this music becoming less and less popular with people who were entranced with folk music.”

The leap from Mozart to the chant was not as radical as might be supposed; Mahrt points out that “certainly Mozart grew up knowing chant – a very 18th-century chant.”

“Most composers through the 19th century – in Austria, France, Italy – simply had chant in their background, and in their daily experience of church. It’s something the history books don’t tell you,” Mahrt said.

Mahrt carried on for the next 40 years largely alone. He said he knew his decision to dedicate his life to chant’s preservation would meet conflict, struggles and disappointments. “It’s worth it. Somebody’s got to keep it. It has to be kept alive in various places throughout the world. So we’ve got to do it.”

His persistence may be paying off. Pope Benedict XVI, himself a musician, has taken an interest in restoring musical traditions, as well as encouraging the Latin Mass. The 1,700-year-old Gregorian chant might be an idea whose time has come again. In fact, it might be an idea rather hard to kill.

“One wonderful thing about chant is it’s almost viral,” said McCarthy, who has started her own chant group at Duke. “People who learn it tend to go somewhere else – academics, especially, tend to be migratory birds. When we move to the new place, we start a chant group ourselves. I calculate that in about 60 years, we’ll have taken over the world.”

Mahrt’s group has spawned spinoffs across the United States, besides the one at Duke. Alstatt’s daughter Alison, who is doing doctoral work in medieval music at the University of Erlangen in Germany, joined the St. Ann Choir when she was 11 and has started a group in Berkeley, where she had been a student at the University of California. There are now groups in Los Angeles, Cleveland and Arkansas.

Mahrt has even found a substitute to direct the choir – finally allowing him to take a more active role in promoting chant nationally and internationally, given the recent renewal of interest. Does he feel free at last, after four decades of being tethered to the annual cycle of chant? Mahrt looks up in wonderment at the question: “It’s a fulfillment, not an oppression. I miss it when I go away. It is a routine, but the music and liturgy are all part of the rhythm of life.”

Postscript from jazz scholar and Substacker Ted Gioia on January 1, 2025: “Not many knew that Gregorian chant and medieval/Renaissance polyphony flourished in Palo Alto — but I’d be there, and I’d see René Girard there too. It was all because of William Mahrt—a beatific soul (who also encouraged my jazz teaching at Stanford, at a time when some were skeptical about its legitimacy). He we beloved by those who knew him.”

The tributes continue to pour in:

From David A. Lawrence: “Bill’s unprecedented accomplishments as both a scholar and the leader of the St. Ann’s Choir are well-documented. What I feel compelled to add, in the wake of my shock at the news of his passing, is what an entirely sweet human being he was. In a profession that does not lack competition for awards, accolades and promotions, Bill was kind to everybody. In my 50 years at Stanford I never once heard anyone mention a harsh word about him. In addition, he was a superb teacher. In my early years on the faculty I would disguise myself as a student and sneak into his classes. Of course Bill knew about it, and had absolutely no problem with it. I was particularly struck by the fact that, while his primary focus may have been on a composer like Guillaume de Machaut, nobody taught the music of Johannes Brahms with greater insight and sensitivity than Bill. I will miss him terribly—both professionally and personally. Rest in peace, dear man.

From Patrick Hunt: “As usual, Cynthia Haven’s insight, gentle appreciation and honed writing go to the heart of a matter, in this case Mahrt’s beloved legacy on medieval chant. I was always struck by Mahrt’s meditative quietude and humility, never one to seek attention even when so well deserved. Well done, Cynthia!”

From John O. Robison: Bill came to Stanford as a young professor in September 1972, when I had just finished my MA and was beginning the doctoral program. I always thought that hiring Bill was one of the Stanford Music Department’s greatest accomplishments! He was such a tremendous teacher and mentor during my doctoral years at Stanford, and most of my research projects were done under his guidance. Whenever it was time to delve into a new research project, he would simply say “Okay, what do you want to do next?” and let me pursue that topic (anywhere from c. 1000 to 1800) to its fullest potential. I flew out to California for his 80th birthday party in March 2019, gave him one of my Ralph Marlin fish ties as a small present (which I am sure he never wore), and had a nice time explaining how important his mentorship has been to me as a performing musicologist working in vastly different areas of research. He was a very kind person, one who was incredibly dedicated to chant and Catholic church music, and whose presence will live on through all who were fortunate enough to know him. – John O. Robison, Prof. of Musicology, University of South Florida

We’ve written about Berkeley poet Chana Bloch before (here), but it’s been a few years since I spoke with her at the university, so I was happy to get an update at the “Talking Writing” website. Poet and translator Bloch, who has just released a “new and selected” Swimming in the Rain this year, was a longtime professor at Oakland’s Mills College. This first question (or rather, a comment, really) caught my eye – I’m constantly chastising myself because I’m not the fastest, most prolific, most profound writer in the English-speaking world. Apparently I’m not alone. Then I was caught by her list of favored poets.

Excerpt from her Q&A with Carol Dorf:

TW: I’m a slow writer.

CB: Slow is not necessarily bad. There’s no point in wanting to be a different kind of a writer than you are, though I must admit I’ve envied poets who are quicker, more prolific. I myself rarely stay with my early drafts. I tend to go over and over a poem—revising, distilling, trying to get at the essence.

TW: Most of your poems are brief lyrics. How do your longer sequence poems function compared with those that represent a single moment?

CB: I tend to write very short poems. Most of them fit on one page. Sometimes, a group of those poems asks to be stitched together. For example, I wrote a number of poems about my experience of ovarian cancer in 1986 that were then published in various journals. At some point, I realized that, by bringing them together in a sequence I called “In the Land of the Body” (from The Past Keeps Changing, Sheep Meadow Press, 1992), I could offer differing perspectives on the experience: that of my then-husband, our children, the radiologist, the surgeon.

TW: Which poets have been especially important to you?

CB: George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Yehuda Amichai, Tomas Tranströmer, Elizabeth Bishop, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Charles Simic, Gerard Manley Hopkins—not necessarily in that order.

George Herbert was an early influence. In grad school, I fell in love with his work. We made a very odd couple. I was a Jewish girl from the Bronx, and he was a seventeenth-century Anglican minister. But his poetry was about the inner life, and that drew me. There was a human depth in his poems that I found very appealing. He wrote about the self with an unsparing candor—about his irresolution, his inner contradictions. And I loved the music in his poetry.

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation about his work, and then a book—Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (University of California Press, 1985)—about how he transforms the biblical sources in his poetry. Seeing him take a verse from the Bible and combine it with something from his life was like watching a mind in the very process of creation.

Read the whole thing here.

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Geoffrey Hill, who turns 82 this month, is on a roll. His first Collected Poems of 1985 was less than a fifth of the length of Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 – that’s an unusual degree of late-life productivity. “It is a bumper harvest later and richer than anybody dared hope for,” writes Daniel Johnson over at Standpoint. Hill is now the Oxford Professor of Poetry; his lectures are available as podcasts. Johnson is the founding editor of Standpoint and former literary editor at The Times.His excellent article, “Geoffrey Hill and the Poetry of Ideas,” is a must-read for any user of the English language … or any language.

A few excerpts:

As I entered, the Professor of Poetry was reciting: not verses, but extracts from Lincoln‘s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King‘s “I have a dream” speech. He went on to explain that his theme was “Monumentality and Bidding” — terms of art taken from one of his heroes of prosody, Gerard Manley Hopkins — and that his argument was that enduring, not to say great, poetry and prose must combine these two qualities. Monumentality speaks for itself, but by “bidding” Hopkins meant speaking directly to the reader and keeping his attention, “making it everywhere an act of intercourse” — “social intercourse”, Hill interjected with a wry smile. … The great speeches of Lincoln and King, a sonnet by Hopkins, the music of Purcell: each was analysed minutely, with frequent reference to the Oxford English Dictionary. It was all of a piece and, in its endearingly idiosyncratic way, “Hillian”.

***

In his March Oxford lecture, he scandalises the audience by questioning the most revered of the war poets: “To say that [Wilfred] Owen wrote two of the great poems of the 20th century, in ‘Sensibility’ and ‘Spring Offensive’, but that some of his poetry, even some of the most loved, is a bit sloppy . . . well, if one had a career to lose it would lose one one’s career, I suppose.” If language is, as he believes, the last repository of meaning, “it is essential to apply the most rigorous technical demands to these sanctified objects of public worship.”

This leads Hill to the gravamen of his charge against much of the poetry of today: “It is public knowledge that the newest generation of poets is encouraged to think of poems as Facebook or Twitter texts — or now, I suppose, much more recently, as selfies.” The mention of such an improbable neologism from such a source elicited an embarrassed titter from the audience, as if Hill had caught his academic peers indulging a secret vice. “The poem as selfie is the aesthetic criterion of contemporary verse,” he continued. “And, as you know, in my malign way I want to put myself in opposition to this view. That is to say, the poem should not be a spasmodic issue from the adolescent or even the octogenarian psyche, requiring no further form or validation.” Hill came back to the theme in his vindication of Hopkins, whose sonnets did not, he expostulated, deserve the condescension of posterity: “I do not think that they are Hopkins’s selfies.”

The underlying reason for Hill’s rejection of poetry as pure self-expression is that he sees such narcissism as beneath the dignity of his calling. He preaches, rather, what he has practised ever since his youth: a poetry of ideas. It is this determination to place ideas at the heart of his work that sets him apart from even his most celebrated contemporaries. Disputing Auden‘s claim that “art is a product of history, not a cause”, he argues that the true poem is “alienated from its existence as historical event”. To capture the realm in which it exists over and above history, he proposes the notion of “alienated majesty”, the invisible repository of ideas, values and faith. “Alienated majesty signifies a reality, however, even if not an actuality.”

***

For Hill, we who are privileged to dwell in the land of Shakespeare and Milton are in danger of squandering our most precious inheritance: our literature, and especially our poetry, which is the enduring source of our national identity. “The writing and criticism in depth of poetry is an essential, even a vital practice,” he told the Oxford audience. “We are in our public life desperately in need of the energy of intelligence created by these pursuits.” Only poetry and its rigorous criticism can discern “how the uncommon work moves within the common dimension of language”. Politics is no less dependent on language than poetry, but it is a great deal less attuned to the uncommon work. Poets, if they could only raise their sights from their navel-gazing, could and should be the unacknowledged legislators of our hearts.

***

For Hill, a poem must be “at once spontaneous and exacting” and “simultaneously wild and strict.” He said, “This is a quality which somehow must be brought back into English poetry this century, or English poetry will die.”

 

Read the whole thing here. It’s worth it.

Literature is “the living voice of our inner lives.” That’s one reason why, according to Stanford author Robert Pogue Harrison, “when everyone is stumped, invariably we turn to the poets.”

He addressed a small evening crowd at Piggott Hall as part of the “How I Think About Literature” series last week (Stanford prez John Hennessy was the previous speaker; we wrote about his visit here). Though we’ve written about Robert before (oh, here and here and here, among other places), the pleasure never palls. He always presents stuff we didn’t know before and a p.o.v. we hadn’t previously considered.

For example, his discussion this time hinged on the “deponent verb” of ancient Greek, which Robert described as “a verb with an active meaning that takes a passive form.”  Hence, the speaker “is not the author or generator of thought.”

“A text like Ovid‘s Metamorphosis thinks me,” he said. The Dante scholar, referring to the Divine Comedy, said that “the whole poem may seem bizarre, medieval, superannuated” even after you study its historical and philological roots. The key is that deponent verb again: “you have to allow it to think you, to recognize yourself in it. … Let the poem do the thinking through me.”

Much of the talk was enjoyably digressive: He added that students must understand the theology of the poem. “I will not be able to read the Divine Comedy in a way that renders it pertinent if I don’t know it’s theology. That’s different than subscribing to the theology that subtends the poem.” Here’s the fun part: he cited Eric Auerbach‘s insistence that, despite its title, The Divine Comedy is a poem of the secular world. Robert noted that “historical individuals pervade it. He’s always on earth – he can’t let it go. Even Paradiso is filled with despair about the state of the secular world.” So true. Robert thought modern readers would have a natural affinity with Paradiso, “if there’s anything most present in the world, it is religious intensity.” (Funny, he said to a class a few years ago that “we live in the Infernal City.” Robert must be having a good year – here’s one reason why.)

Back to deponent verbs: No surprise that the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization and Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition says that “nature does most of my deep thinking,” and that this particular muse is understandably gagged and silent in a place like New York City (except for Central Park).  Nevertheless, “literature thinks me in a way that nature doesn’t.”

“Literature is a response to the injunction of the Delphi oracle, ‘Know thyself,’” he said. Literature is a “crusade of self-knowledge.”  A book such as Emma Bovary, he said, teaches us “how much more in us than circumscribed by egos or identities.”

“Philosophers do not illuminate much, but literary authors do,” said Robert, who is a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. “I believe that literature knows what philosophy attempts,” and reveals it “in a compelling and full-bodied way.”

He ought to know. He has deep roots not only in literature but in philosophy, since he says he was steeped in Martin Heidegger as a student. He also had a chance to see firsthand the inhibiting effect of philosophy as as a student at a “very Derridian” Cornell in the 1980s, as fans of the French philosopher duked it out with the aficionados of the school of hermaneutics. The domination of Derridian discourse gave him a sense of “claustrophobia … a closed indoor room where verbal games were being staged. … The verbal choreography did not excite me as much as it excited my peers and professors.”

He said that the movement Jacques Derrida fostered was “the quintessential academic enterprise,” an observation confirmed “by the fierce determination and lengths it went to secure and hold onto institutional power, especially in the U.S.”

“For me, I wanted literature to remain an adventure … new encounters that were utterly singular.” For that reason among others, he said, “I don’t practice literary theory – I always resisted it as a graduate student.” He said you won’t find a literary theory promulgated in his books. “Where it fails is that it does not provide a model for emulation. That can do students a disservice” because he offers no tools to apply or replicate his line of thought.

The problem with literary theory, he said, is that literary theorists know in advance what they’re going to find, even though “animosity toward theory can blind you.” He added that “there’s a lot of confusion in graduate schools that doing theory is a way of doing philosophy … it’s a very sorry way of doing philosophy, because it’s not embedded in the discipline.”

Most of the talks in the “How I Think About Literature” series have been monologues. But Robert sat on a stool and chatted with grad student Dylan Montanari, who doubles as Robert’s production manager for his popular radio show, “Entitled Opinions.”  We always complain about boringness of lecture format, he said, but we still deal in “deadening monologues” most of the time.  “The dialogical format liberates thinking,” he said.  “It takes it out of the straitjacket.”

Robert also told us a little about his forthcoming book, Juvenescence, slated for release later this year by the University of Chicago Press. “The book poses a simple question that has no simple answer: How old are we?”  While our cultural age is “the ground of time,” for each of us as individuals, “aging changes perception.” He cited another philosopher, Immanuel Kant, adding that “time is not the same form of intuition in youth as in age.”

Giacomo Leopardi, too, wrote about how things appear differently to perception with age.  Youth perceives the  “infinite promise in nature – but nature is unspeakably cruel,” said Robert. Hence, Leopardi lamented to nature: “Why do you deceive your children so?”

“Literature defines the laws of chronology,” he added, which gives us a chance to get our own back. “Where does the future reside in a text? What is still unspoken and unthought?” he asked. “Literature is much more pregnant with the unspoken than philosophy” which “doesn’t have and many pockets of futurity.”

“The whole history of poetry is about age, but not about inhabited age,” Robert said. “Poetry offers an abundance of phenomenological insight.” The child is father to the man – a cliché – but Wordsworth took it to an offbeat conclusion: that the adult is dependent upon, and answerable to, the child that accompanies it throughout life.

He used Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to a young child, “Spring and Fall” as illustration. And just because it’s public domain (and also because it’s beautiful), we’ll use it to conclude this loosely strung concatenation of quotes and thoughts from one of our favorite Stanford maestros.

Spring and Fall

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

As you enter the darkened room,  a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio is to your right.  Enigmatic scraps of a poem by Sappho, circa 2nd century A.D., are to your left.  And all around you the wonders of the world: weighted with heavy seals, a 1217 “engrossment” of the Magna Carta is nearby (it was reissued under Henry III); so is a 1455 Gutenberg Bible.  In the corner of one glass case –  an exquisite 18th-century miniature scroll of the Bhagavad Gita, which shines like a cache of jewels, somehow pressed and rolled into paper.

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library,” Jorge Luis Borges famously said. And here, in the Bodleian Library’s current exhibition, “Treasures of the Bodleian,” 30 Sept. – 23 Dec. 2011, everyone could see that, well, he had a point.  The exhibition anticipates a permanent gallery in the Weston Library in 2015.  The exhibition shows some of the Bodleian’s rarest, most important, and most evocative rarities.

To wit:  In a corner, a single page of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley‘s Frankenstein describes the ominous night of the creature’s creation. Her scrawled text is corrected and amended by her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.  Other handwritten manuscripts are the work of Jane Austen, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Others are the work of a brush rather than a nib: an exquisite 17th-century picture scroll of the sad Tale of Urashima, a classic Japanese fairy tale which I had read as a child.

For Sir Thomas Bodley, who basically created the museum that opened its doors in 1602, the Shakespeare first folio did not seem like the greatest find. According to the exhibition guide, he “would likely have dismissed this as one of the ‘idle books, and rife raffes’ that had not place among the Library’s predominantly theological collections.”

The volume left the library under mysterious conditions in 1674, and resurfaced only in 1905.  By that time, “the Bodleian was prepared to pay the unheard-of sum of £3,000 to buy back ‘its original long-lost copy of the First Folio of Shakespeare.'”

I visited the exhibition in the company of my friend, Oxford’s Eliza Tudor, and we gravitated towards our favorites.  Hers seemed to be J.R.R. Tolkien‘s brilliant golden watercolor of Bilbo Baggins, rendered invisible by a magic ring, as he converses with a dragon.  She also took a liking to the Selden map of China, from the Ming era – the earliest Chinese map to show not only shipping routes, but also to depict China as part of a greater East and Southeast Asia. And for me … well, what a choice!  Perhaps I’ll plump for one of the earliest editions of Dante‘s Divine Comedy, fully illustrated, made within decades of his death (see video below).

But there are littler treasures, too – Mohandas Gandhi wrote to his friend, the Anglican missionary Charles Andrews, in a 1932 prison letter exhibited in the collection: “I can therefore never say beforehand what will occupy my attention exclusively or for the most part at a given moment and since a civil resister bargains for the punishment he receives for his resistance, he must not fret over it. Therefore and to that extent I am content with my lot.”

Eliza arrived with her young son Fabian, who was mildly ill and did not attend school that day. His own choice was no surprise.  The exhibit that intrigued him the most was one of the earliest – about the same era, perhaps a little later, as the Sappho fragments: on a sheet of papyrus, an Egyptian schoolboy Theon complains to his father:

Theon to his father Theon, greetings. A nice thing to do, not taking me with you to the city. If you refuse to take me with you to Alexandria, I shall not write you a letter or speak to you or wish you good health. So: if you go to Alexandria I shall not take your hand or greet you ever again. If you refuse to take me, this is what happens. And my mother said to Archelaos, “He’s upsetting me, take him away!” A nice thing to do, sending me these grand presents, a hill of beans. They put us off the track that day, the 12th, when you sailed. Well then, send for me, I beg you. If you don’t send for me, I shan’t eat, I shan’t drink. There! I pray for your health.