One of the delightful things about being a poet who inherits a long tradition is that you can play with it and you don’t have to explain everything to your readers. You don’t even have to justify yourself, so long as your art can carry you along. So then, let’s think about the situation that begins the Odyssey. Suppose the chief of the suitors, Antinous, wasn’t venal and treacherous, as Homer portrays him, but courtly and gallant. Suppose then that one day he asks Penelope to dance with him, and she says no, she’d rather not, because dancing is all “disorder and misrule,” a newfangled thing that their wiser and soberer forefathers wouldn’t allow. Then suppose Antinous must defend the goodness and the beauty of dancing itself. What shall you do?
That’s the dramatic situation our poet this week, Sir John Davies, sets himself. The tone has to be just right — we can’t be thinking of Odysseus or Telemachus, but only of a man and a woman, and the proposal, to dance. Of course, that’s our Word of the Week, dance. But for Davies, the question is a universal one. What we’re really about is not whether Penelope should agree to dance with Antinous, but what kind of world we live in. That’s both the physical universe, and the world of man — the social world. Is that too serious? Sure, it is! So Davies has to treat it with a light heart and a light touch. You don’t want to be ponderous while you’re twirling a pretty lady on the dance floor, do you? Certainly not. Davies couldn’t just use Antinous and Penelope as a frame for a philosophical discussion. That wouldn’t work. Yet he did want to have that discussion. So his stanzas are swift and clear, like a crisp breeze or a sprightly melody on a guitar. He uses what’s called “rhyme royal,” seven lines of iambic pentameter that rhyme ABABBCC, ending on a nice couplet to wind things up, but not getting tangled in anything too long or too intricate. Chaucer used the pattern and so did Spenser, and I think Davies has made the right choice, as I hope you’ll hear.
Shakespeare so towers over everybody else who ever held a pen in his hand, it’s too easy to suppose that English literature of the late Renaissance is the Bard, the Bard, and the Bard. Now, you can’t find a greater admirer of Shakespeare than I am, but he was the greatest light in a world of great lights: a supernova, when there were many authors around him shining as bright as the sun. Davies wasn’t as great as Spenser or Sidney or Donne, but he didn’t pretend to be; and he did shine bright. He was pretty important as a statesman, too, though I guess most Irish people wish he hadn’t been, since it was he who arranged things for the settling of Englishmen in Ulster, in the northern reaches of Ireland.
Our selection today comes near the beginning of Orchestra, when Antinous will begin defending the dance by asking Penelope to consider the motions of the heavenly bodies. He’ll go on from there, after our selection, to talk about the true Love — the true Cupid, as an allegory of the Love that binds men and women together in marriage and in society. So it isn’t just astronomy, not by a long shot. Notice, though, that Davies here says that there are some sleepy-heads who believe that the world is made up of atoms, “motes,” teeny-tiny particles that can’t be divided, which is what the word “atom” means, so he’s well aware of what we’d call materialism, but he, or rather Antinous who is speaking, turns that philosophy back on itself, because someone, GOD, had to set those motes a-dancing in their order. The world is a cosmos, a beautifully ordered whole, not a chaos. Because it’s beautiful and orderly, the beauty up above is reflected and made manifest in beauty down below. How did the Amphion raise the walls of Thebes? By playing on his lyre and singing. Why should the boy and girl dance? Because Love rules the world. As soon as there was time, there was motion in order: there was dancing. So what are we waiting for?
"Sole heir of Virtue and of Beauty both, Whence cometh it," Antinous replies, "That your imperious virtue is so loth To grant your beauty her chief exercise ? Or from what spring doth your opinion rise That dancing is a frenzy and a rage, First known and used in this new-fangled age ? "Dancing, bright Lady, then began to be When the first seeds whereof the World did spring, The fire, air, earth, and water did agree, By Love's persuasion, Nature's mighty King, To leave their first disordered combating ; And in a dance such measure to observe, As all the world their motion should preserve. "Since when, they still are carried in a round, And changing, come one in another's place; Yet do they neither mingle nor confound, But every one doth keep the bounded space Wherein the Dance doth bid it turn or trace; This wondrous miracle did Love devise, For Dancing is Love's proper exercise. "Like this, he framed the gods' eternal Bower, And of a shapeless and confused mass, By his through-piercing and digesting power, The turning vault of heaven formed was ; Whose starry wheels he hath so made to passe, As that their movings do a music frame, And they themselves still dance unto the same. "Or if this All which round about we see, (As idle Morpheus some sick brains hath taught) Of undivided motes compacted be, How was this goodly Architecture wrought ? Or by what means were they together brought ? They err that say they did concur by chance : Love made them meet in a well-ordered dance. "As when Amphion with his charming lyre Begot so sweet a siren of the air ; That with her rhetoric made the stones conspire The ruins of a city to repair -- A work of wit and reason's wise affair -- So Love's smooth tongue the motes such measure taught That they joined hands, and so the world was wrought. "How justly then is Dancing termed new, Which with the World in point of time begun ? Yea, Time itself (whose birth Jove never knew, And which indeed is elder then the sun), Had not one moment of his age outrun, When out leapt Dancing from the heap of things, And lightly rode upon his nimble wings. "Reason hath both their pictures in her treasure, Where Time the measure of all moving is, And Dancing is a moving all in measure ; Now if you do resemble that to this, And think both one, I think you think amiss: But if you judge them twins, together got, And Time first-born, your judgment erreth not. "Thus doth it equal age with age enjoy, And yet in lusty youth for ever flowers ; Like Love his sire, whom painters make a boy, Yet is the eldest of the heavenly powers ; Or like his brother Time, whose winged hours Going and coming will not let him die, But still preserve him in his infancy."
