John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"Why, then," said Charles, fetching two pipes from a rack over the fireplace, "I believe we may call't established that you are not for hire. Let's have a pipe on't, and then pray state your business."

The two men filled and lit their pipes, and Ebenezer returned to his theme.

" Hire I care naught for," he repeated, "but as for employment, there's another matter quite, and the very sum and substance of my visit. You enquired a moment past, What trade is the poet's, and to what work shall he be put? For answer let me ask you, sir, by'r leave — would the world at large know aught of Agamemnon, or fierce Achilles, or crafty Odysseus, or the cuckold Menelaus, or that entire circus of strutting Greeks and Trojans, had not great Homer rendered 'em to verse? How many battles of greater import are lost in the dust of history, d'you think, for want of a poet to sing 'em to the ages? Full many a Helen blooms one spring and goes to the worm forgot; but let a Homer paint her in the grand cosmetic of his verse, and her beauty boils the blood of twenty centuries! Where lies a Prince's greatness, I ask you? In his feats on the field of battle, or the downy field of love? Why, 'tis but a generation's work to forget 'em for good and all! Nay, I say 'tis not in the deeds his greatness lies, but in their telling. And who's to tell 'em? Not the historian, for be he ne'er so dev'lish accurate, as to how many hoplites had Epaminondas when he whipped the Spartans at Leuctra, or what was the Christian name of Charlemagne's barber, yet nobody reads him but his fellow chroniclers and his students — the one from envy, t'other from necessity. But place deeds and doer in the poet's hands, and what comes of't? Lo, the crook'd nose grows straight, the lean shank fleshes out, French pox becomes a bedsore; shady deeds shed their tarnish, bright grow brighter; and the whole is musicked into tuneful rhyme, arresting conceit, and stirring meter, so's to stick in the head like Greensleeves and move the heart like Scripture!"

" 'Tis clear as day," said Charles with a smile, "that the poet is a useful member of a Prince's train."

"And what's true for a prince is true for a principality," Ebenezer went on, stirred by his own eloquence. "What were Greece without Homer, Rome without Virgil, to sing their glories? Heroes die, statues break, empires crumble; but your Iliad laughs at time, and a verse from Virgil still rings true as the day 'twas struck. Who renders virtue palatable like the poet, and vice abhorrent, seeing he alone provides both precept and example? Who else bends nature to suit his fancy and paints men better or worse to suit his purpose? What sings like lyric, praises like panegyric, mourns like elegiac, wounds like Hudibrastic verse?"

"Naught, that I can name," said Charles, "and you have quite persuaded me that a man's most useful friend and fearsome foe is the poet. Prithee now, fellow, dispense with farther preamble and deliver me your business plainly."

"Very well," said Ebenezer, planting his cane between his knees and gripping its handle firmly. "Would you say, sir, that Maryland boasts a surfeit of poets?"

"A surfeit of poets?" repeated Charles, and drew thoughtfully upon his pipe. "Well, now, since you ask, I think not. Nay, in good faith I must confess, entre nous, there is no surfeit of poets in Maryland. Not a bit of't. Why, I'd wager one might walk the length and breadth of St. Mary's City on a May afternoon and not cross the tracks of a single poet, they're that rare."

"As I reckoned," said Ebenezer. "Would you go so far as to suppose, even, that I might be hard put to't, once I establish myself in Maryland, to find me four or five fellow-planters to match a couplet with, or trade a rhyme?"

" 'Tis not impossible," admitted Charles.

"I guessed as much. And now, sir, if I might: would't be mere gross presumption and vanity for me to suppose, that haply I shall be the absolute first, premier, unprecedented, and genuine original poet to set foot on the soil of Terra Mariae? First to pay court to the Maryland Muse?"

" 'Tis not in me to deny," replied Charles, "that should there breathe such a wench as this Maryland Muse, you may well have her maidenhead."

"Faith!" cried Ebenezer joyously. "Only think on't! A province, an entire people — all unsung! What deeds forgot, what gallant men and women lost to time! 'Sblood, it dizzies me! Trees felled, towns raised, a very nation planted in the wilds! Foundings, stragglings, triumphs! Why, 'tis work for a Virgil! Think, m'lord, only think on't: the noble house of Calvert, the Barons Baltimore — builders of nations, bringers of light, fructifiers of the wilderness! A glorious house and history still unmusicked for the world's delight! Marry, 'tis virgin territory!"

"Many's the fine thing to be said of Maryland," Charles agreed. "But to speak plainly, I fear me that virgins are rare as poets there."

"Prithee do not jest!" begged Ebenezer. " 'Twere an epic such as ne'er was penned! The Marylandiad, b'm'faith!"

"How's that?" For all his teasing manner, Charles had grown thoughtful in the course of Ebenezer's outburst.

"The Marylandiad!" repeated Ebenezer, and declaimed as from a title-page: "An epic to out-epic epics: the history of the princely house of Charles Calvert, Lord Baltimore and Lord Proprietary of the Province of Maryland, relating the heroic founding of that province! The courage and perseverance of her settlers in battling barb'rous nature and fearsome salvage to wrest a territory from the wild and transform it to an earthly paradise! The majesty and enlightenment of her proprietors, who like kingly gardeners fostered the tender seeds of civilization in their rude soil, and so husbanded and cultivated them as to bring to fruit a Maryland beauteous beyond description; verdant, fertile, prosperous, and cultured; peopled with brave men and virtuous women, healthy, handsome, and refined: a Maryland, in short, splendid in her past, majestic in her present, and glorious in her future, the brightest jewel in the fair crown of England, owned and ruled to the benefit of both by a family second to none in the recorded history of the universal world — the whole done into heroic couplets, printed on linen, bound in calf, stamped in gold" — here Ebenezer bowed with a flourish of his beaver — "and dedicated to Your Lordship!"

"And signed?" asked Charles.

Ebenezer rose to his feet and beamed upon his host, one hand on his cane and the other on his hip.

"Signed Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman," he replied: "Poet and Laureate of the Province of Maryland!"

"Ah," said Charles. "Poet and Laureate, now: 'tis a new bit of bunting you'd add to your name."

"Only think how 'twould redound to Your Lordship's credit," urged Ebenezer. "The appointment would prove at a single stroke both the authority and the grace of your rule, for 'twould give the Province the flavor of a realm and the refinement of a court to have a bona fide laureate sing her praises and record in verse her great moments; and as for the Marylandiad itself, 'twould immortalize the Barons Baltimore, and make Aeneases of 'em all! Moreover, 'twould paint the Province as she stands today in such glowing colors as to lure the finest families of England to settle there; 'twould spur the inhabitants to industry and virtue, to keep the picture true as I paint it; in sum, 'twould work to the enhancement of both the quality and the value of the colony, and so proportionately ennoble, empower, and enrich him who owns and rules her! Is't not a formidable string of achievements?"

At this Charles burst into such a fit of laughing that he choked on his pipe smoke, watered at the eyes, and came near to losing his campaigner: it required the spirited back-thumping of two body servants, who stood nearby, to restore his composure.