The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound

After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.


“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” by Ezra Pound. Public domain. (buy now)

On this date in 1215, England’s barons delivered an ultimatum to King John, which ultimately led to the Magna Carta.

In 1215 England was on the brink of civil war. King John had taxed the church and the barons heavily to fund the Third Crusade, defend his holdings in Normandy, and pay for unsuccessful wars. The barons met in January 1215 to discuss the matter, and agreed to “stand fast for the liberty of the church and the realm.” It wasn’t the first time that noblemen had risen up against an English king, but in the past the aim had been to put a new man on the throne. This time the barons aimed to change the nature of the monarchy itself. Over the next few months they wrote up a list of demands.

The charter limited the monarchy’s absolute power and paved the way for the formation of Parliament, and it is the nearest thing to a “Bill of Rights” that Britain has ever had. It guaranteed, among other things, that “No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or deprived of his property, or outlawed, or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor shall we go against him or send against him, unless by legal judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

King John met the barons at Runnymede in June and set his seal on the “great charter.” He had no intention of upholding the document, however, and it was repealed almost immediately on the grounds that he gave his seal under duress. But it’s harder to kill an idea, and that original document became the basis for the British legal system, as well as the legal systems of most of the world’s democracies.

Today is the birthday of the artist and writer Edward Lear (books by this author), born in the London suburb of Holloway (1812). Most people know him today as a nonsense poet and a master of the limerick, a humorous poetic form that had been gaining in popularity since the early 1820s. He was the 20th of 21 children born to Ann and Jeremiah Lear, and he suffered his first epileptic seizure when he was about five or six years old. He felt a lot of embarrassment and guilt because of his seizures, and referred to the disorder as “the Demon.” He also suffered frequent bouts of depression, which he called “the Morbids.” When his father went bankrupt, Edward’s upbringing became his much older sister Ann’s responsibility.

When he was 15 his father was sent to debtors’ prison, so Lear began working as an artist and illustrator to help pay his family’s expenses. He was very gifted at drawing birds and animals and got a job with the London Zoological Society. In 1832 Lord Stanley, the Earl of Derby, invited Lear to come and paint the exotic animals in his menagerie. Lear ended up living at Stanley’s estate at Knowsley for several years. When he wasn’t working on his drawings and paintings he would entertain the youngest members of the Stanley family with silly stories and verses. A Book of Nonsense, which he published in 1846, sold very well and helped make the limerick verse popular.

Lear’s most famous poem is “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1867). He dedicated it to the children of the Earl of Stanley. He also published several travel books. The paintings and illustrations he made of the Stanley menagerie were published as Gleanings from the Menagerie at Knowsley Hall (1846).

It’s the birthday of American novelist and poet Rosellen Brown (books by this author), born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1939. Her novels include Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and Half a Heart (2000), which tells the story of a white, Jewish woman who is reunited with the biracial daughter she abandoned during the sixties. Her family moved around a lot when she was a child, and Brown began reading writers like Turgenev and Dostoevsky. She said, “I was nine when words began to serve their extraordinary purposes for me: I was lonely and they kept me company, they materialized whenever I called on them, without an argument or a competitive leer.” Brown, who is white, taught at a black college in Tougaloo, Mississippi, during the civil rights era, and began to write politically charged poetry.

She said, “I still write for the same reason I wrote when I was nine years old: to speak more perfectly than I really can, to a listener more perfect than any I know,” and “Writing, getting something down on the page, is a gratification that, like a child faced with a candy bar and an empty stomach, I have trouble postponing.”

Brown has published eleven books – novels, short stories, poetry, and essays.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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