What I Wrote on September 11, 2001
In Praise of Contented Mind
According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, “In Praise of Contented Mind” was one of the most popular Elizabethan ballads, and was published anonymously (as ballads often were at the time). Ironically (referring to the contents of the ballad), several aristocratic poets are most often suggested as its author, but nobody famous. There are many versions of this ballad as well (also not unusual), and this one is from the “Inner Temple” manuscript, whatever that is.
In Praise of a Contented Mind
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
That world affords or grows by kind.
Though much I want which most men have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
No princely pomp, no wealthy store,
No force to win the victory,
No wily wit to salve a sore,
No shape to feed each gazing eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall.
For why my mind doth serve for all.
I see how plenty suffers oft,
How hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those that are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all;
They get with toil, they keep with fear.
Such cares my mind could never bear.
Content I live, this is my stay;
I seek no more than may suffice;
I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look what I lack my mind supplies;
Lo, thus I triumph like a king,
Content with that my mind doth bring.
Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more.
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store.
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.
I laugh not at another’s loss;
I grudge not at another’s gain;
No worldly waves my mind can toss;
My state at one doth still remain.
I fear no foe, nor fawning friend;
I loathe not life, nor dread my end.
Some weigh their pleasure by their lust,
Their wisdom by their rage of will,
Their treasure is their only trust;
And cloaked craft their store of skill.
But all the pleasure that I find
Is to maintain a quiet mind.
My wealth is health and perfect ease;
My conscience clear my chief defense;
I neither seek by bribes to please,
Nor by deceit to breed offense.
Thus do I live, thus will I die.
Would all did so as well as I!
Several people set the ballad to music between 1581 and 1700, and it was popular enough to be published as a broadside as well. If my lack of knowledge of it is any indication, it is now almost completely forgotten. But for over 100 years, families hung the lyrics on their walls, and on the street people sang this to each other and quoted it from memory.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the concept of “the contented mind” (or otium) was something of a fad (if one can conceive of a self-help fad that lasted a century and a half) reflecting an idealization of idyllic simplicity and the noble savage and holy Mother Nature, etc.
My intuition is that a lot of its popularity was related to the fact that many people at the time were obviously more noble than the Nobles, but had nothing and would always have nothing—and that several rather nasty people had most of everything. It’s the kind of song the Dalai Lama might sing. The Norton Anthology refers to other poems in this genre such as Surrey’s “My Friend, the Things That Do Attain.”
The Greek philosopher Lucretius’s writings were quite popular with Elizabethan playwrights and poets. One of his most popular ideas concerned “mutability.” From what I can understand, Lucretius believed that everything was in a constant state of change and that there is no central core to a thing or a person that is always true and true in every part (and so exists nowhere). According to Lucretius, not understanding this basic fact is the cause of most of the pain and suffering we experience. For him, this meant that we should celebrate being alive, and our highest moral obligation, then, is to be super-kind to everything alive, since we are all more or less in the same leaky boat.
When I read Lucretius, I wanted to go into the streets and give everything I had away. I got nauseous when I saw people spending money on frivolous things, luxuriating in their carelessness about wasting money, despite thousands of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters–most often children–starving to death every hour of every day. I wanted to go into nursing homes and listen to everyone’s stories before they disappeared.
Lucretius’ Elizabethan popularity led to a crisis in the Christian Church, since it gave parishioners a measure by which to question how the Church spent “its” money. The Church’s response was to preach that everyone possessed an immortal soul (which was invisible and eternal, but also mutable), and the only thing that was immutable was God, and that we were both one with God and that the pains of life were actually the result of our distance from God. In this system, suffering was good for your soul as a means of purgation and moral instruction, and so the more suffering you experienced, the better your chances of purifying your soul. And at the end of this very short life spent in this “fallen” world, there was going to be a judgment, and how well you lived your moral life determined whether you spent all of eternity in endless torment or in a perfect, unchanging heaven.
Edmund Spenser tried to integrate these two opposing concepts—of mutability and an immutable and invisible and increasingly improbable God—into what’s come to be known as the “Book VII: Two Cantos on Mutabilitie” from The Fairie Queen (a runaway bestseller in its day). What he wrote was essentially the seventh and eighth (or central) cantos of a planned twelve-canto sequence. Spenser eventually abandoned this “book” and it was published incomplete in 1609, ten years after his death.
In Christian and Hindu theology there is more than one God, or at least there are Gods with different characteristics. In Christianity, for instance, Christ is mutable (in that he became human, and was later restored to full God-hood), and God the Father is unchanging. In Hindu theology (and Greek and Roman for that matter), the main characteristic of Gods is their ability to change shape. There are also gods and demons separate from humans in both Hinduism and Christianity, and the good guys are often hard to tell from the bad guys, because the world has been created in order to deceive us, and the pleasures of the flesh and earthly life are dangerous.
Spenser’s attempt to reconcile Lucretius with what was coming from the pulpits—his “Mutabilitie Cantos”—presents a lot of discussion of life’s disappointments (115 9-line stanzas of them) before he pulls God out of his hiding place and sort of waves him around. His argument goes something like this: God—and our souls—are outside of time, but a part of us lives in mortal time, and our immortal soul is somehow attached to it. It has been put asleep (more or less) and attached to a body that exists in a dream world where good and evil are very difficult to tell apart. Suffering, for example, is explained by the Church as a reward if undeserved, and a punishment if deserved. The world is a sort of anthropomorphized imaginary world whose sole purpose (and it was intentionally designed for this) is to trick us into believing in it. And then, when we do, it saps the goodness from our souls and corrupts us, and before we know what’s happened, our life is taken away from us while we (usually) remain completely unconscious of what’s actually happened (although sometimes it is apparently revealed to us in a dazzling final revelation scene). And if we don’t see through the visible world’s (changing) illusions and repent to an invisible God before we die, we will spend the rest of eternity in torment.
Further complicating things (to my mind) is the nature of “Grace” in Spenser—which sounds very much like the pagan idea of Fortuna, but much more personal. With Grace, God sometimes rescues people who have done nothing to redeem themselves on their own; but God also (apparently) fails to bestow this gift on the majority of those who are suffering undeservedly. This God apparently lacks the sense of pity that would motivate even the lowest and most degraded of humans into action.
In literature, a metaphysical answer to a physical problem is called a “deus ex machina.” When Greek dramatists couldn’t reasonably reconcile their plot and the moral standard of the day—most commonly Euripides, and most famously his “Medea”—they would write a final scene where a God or Goddess descends from the rafters in a basket and restores the apparent imbalances of the plot. It would be as if in a modern cliffhanger Jesus appears out of a cloud not to save the hero but one of the darker elements in the play. For Euripides, a kind of blindness was necessary in order to live among the social contradictions and moral inequities of ones time. By the time Euripides gave a coherent voice to decadent madness in “The Bacchantes,” (which was only performed after his death), Athens was falling apart.
I’m not sure where Spenser was headed in “The Mutabilite Cantos.” Although it’d be too much out-of-his-time for anything other than God to triumph in the end (and the theology of “The Fairie Queene” is much stricter than the Bible’s), Spenser seems particularly despondent about mutability. He never apparently began the final cantos of the sequence; the ones that would have explained God’s part in all of this.
Thomas Gray, a poet popular during the time of ‘”In Praise of Contented Mind,” was fond of quoting Pindar (but in the original Greek): “Comprehensible to the intelligent; for the world at large needing interpretation.” Sometimes I get the feeling that Spenser is winking at his readers (as Virgil and Homer did before him). At other times I get the feeling that explaining mutability defeated him, and sometimes I get the feeling that in the monologues of The Mutabilitie Cantos he argues a bit too persuasively (as Milton does for the fallen angels in “Paradise Lost”) for the darker side not to have explored it fairly thoroughly on his own.
But how does this fit in with idyllic peasants and the nobility of simplicity, where we began? Ezra Pound was probably pretty close to the truth, as he almost always is in The Cantos, when he says (I’m paraphrasing): “How do we stand it? With a painted paradise at the end of it. Without a painted paradise at the end of it.”
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