“An Epicurean Ode” by John Hall
Art thou a Stoic or art thou confused?
Pardon the joke, but when someone so bravely claims to be writing “An Epicurean Ode,” I cannot resist.
John Hall (1627–1656) was a young man in his career, a young man in his writing, and a young man in his death. Associated with such robust English institutions as St. John’s College, Cambridge and Gray’s Inn of London, Hall may have been something of a Republican if I could find the smoking gun of his political evolution over his short but formidable career.
Today, however, we are reading his poem “An Epicurean Ode” from 1646. Behold:
Since that this thing we call the world
By chance on Atomes is begot,
Which though in dayly motions hurld,
Yet weary not,
How doth it prove
Thou art so fair and I in Love?
Since that the soul doth onely lie
Immers’d in matter, chaind in sense,
How ran Romira thou and I
With both dispence?
And thus ascend
In higher flights then wings can lend.
Since man’s but pasted up of Earth,
And ne’re was cradled in the skies,
What Terra Lemnia gave thee birth?
What Diamond eyes?
Or thou alone
To tell what others were, came down?
A poem of many questions! Let us examine the first. Hall begins his poem asking “how doth [Epicureanism] prove” that his love is “so fair” and that he is “in Love.”
Wait a second; this man has sense enough to know that Epicureanism is false! The rhetorical strategy here is that Epicureanism cannot give an account neither for beauty nor for love. I am not so sure, but I agree that it would not be an account of either phenomena that preserves their non-precreative aspects (See the fourth book of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura).
Hall continues to suggest that Epicureanism also cannot account for the fact that he and “Romira” both were able to transcend their earthly aspects and fly together. The poem ends with Hall claiming that Romira is from Lemnian earth, soil from an island of Greece that was thought by the Ancients and Moderns alike to hold miraculous curative properties, including a cure for the Black Plague.
Romira! Who is this Romira? As I read this poem on the University of Michigan Early English Books database, I thought that Romira might have been the mistaken-rendering of a different word. Is it a name?
Hall describes her as angel who “came down” from above to tell others what she was. One might imagine that she was really quite something, as she also proves to be something of an argument against an entire philosophical system by virtue of her existence.
Hall’s loverly poetry serves several functions. First, it establishes his rejection of Epicureanism, and his embracing of the kind of Christian classicist that would be befitting of his education and peerage. Second, it acts as a rather lousy love poem, as no woman in her right mind would much care that this gentlemen knew what classical theories of matter existed, nor that she and Hall had flown up into the heavens upon an earlier romance. A worthy exercise, but a writer uneducated in the ways of love.
