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The Happy Prince in Reading Gaol

by Wendy MacIntyre

Sentenced to two years’ hard labour for so-called “gross indecency, Oscar Wilde spent his first month in prison bound to a treadmill. Six hours day, he laboured up the same short, steep incline, with five minutes’ rest every twenty-five minutes − activity lacking all purpose other than degradation. His next punishment, carried out all day alone in his cell, was picking apart tarred rope to extract the fibre known as oakum. This work split open the flesh of his hands.

He suffered regular bouts of dysentery and diarrhoea as a result of the wretched prison diet and unsanitary living conditions. An ear infection, which prison authorities refused to treat, left him partially deaf. The glittering, self-created dandy who delighted in outraging convention was no more. Gaunt, with shaven head and coarse prison garb, he had come to resemble the statue in his children’s story, The Happy Prince, rendered repulsively drab once his jewels and gold leaf covering were stripped away.

Wilde wrote The Happy Prince and other fairy tales to read aloud to his young sons at a time long before his trial, when he still had a home life with his children and his wife Constance. The story is a retelling of Buddha’s awakening. The Prince grows up in the walled Palace of Sans-Souci, insulated from the world’s woes. It is not until his death, when he is made into a statue atop a high column, that he is able to see all the suffering in his kingdom: the seamstress with her ailing child, who must work all night to embroider passion flowers on the gown of a heartless client; the writer, faint with hunger in his freezing garret, who lacks the strength to finish the play due at the theatre the next morning; the barefoot match girl who has dropped her wares in the gutter and whose father will beat her if she comes home empty-handed.

The Prince’s agent in bringing aid to those in need is a swallow, who one night seeks shelter between his feet. The little bird’s companions have already departed for Egypt. He was late in joining them because he had fallen in love with a beautiful reed and was reluctant to leave her. But with winter coming, he must fly immediately to the land of the Nile. The Prince’s impassioned plea for help persuades the swallow to stay one more night, and then another and another….

On the first, the Prince asks the swallow to pluck the great ruby out of his sword hilt and take it to the slumbering seamstress. But on the nights following, the little bird initially refuses the Prince’s order that he prise out his sapphire eyes, one for the starving dramatist in his garret, and the other for the little match girl. I cannot, the bird insists, for you will be quite blind then.

Swallow, little swallow, do as I command you.

Then I will stay with you always, the bird replies. It is a decision tantamount to suicide for already the cold is depleting his strength. With what energy he has left, the swallow obeys the Prince’s command and removes leaf after leaf of the fine gold embellishment to distribute to the poor of the city. He has then only strength enough left to fly to the Prince’s shoulder to say good-bye. The Prince is overjoyed the swallow is leaving for Egypt at last. It is not to Egypt I am going, the bird replies. But to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep is he not? These are lines that moved me to tears as a five-year-old, and can do so still.

When God commands his angels to bring him the two most precious things in the city, they bring him the statue’s leaden heart and the dead bird. It is an ending that celebrates compassion and self-sacrifice − themes Oscar Wilde would not explore again in depth until after his own prison ordeal. He began his poetic masterpiece, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, two years after his release. In every line, it might be the Happy Prince we hear describing for the little swallow the misery he sees and yearns to alleviate. The Ballad’s narrator is a prisoner whose experience mirrors Wilde’s own:

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,

We turned the dusty drill;

We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,

And sweated on the mill;

But in the heart of every man

Terror was lying still.

His compassionate eye focuses in particular, on a fellow prisoner condemned to be hung for the murder of his wife. Striving to wrench from within himself an understanding of the man’s crime, he comes to the insight that “each man kills the thing he loves,” some “with a bitter look, some with a flattering word and some with a sword.” In his refusal to judge and revile the murderer, the narrator wholly embodies the way of the Buddha.

Throughout the Ballad, Wilde’s narrator feels the agony of all his fellow prisoners: We were as men who through a fen/ of filthy darkness grope. The voice here belongs to a man, who like his Happy Prince avatar, has been stripped of everything but his essence. His is an urgent lamentation that something be done to ameliorate penitentiaries’ dehumanizing conditions.

After his release from Reading Gaol, Wilde wrote to the Editor of The Daily Chronicle documenting the many cruelties of prison life and advocating reform. He censured the treatment of children in particular: The terror of the child in prison is quite limitless…A child is utterly contaminated by prison life. But the contaminating influence is not that of the prisoners. It is of the whole prison system – the governor, the chaplain, the warders, the lonely cell, the isolation, the revolting food. The way children are treated at present is really an outrage on humanity and common sense.

It is telling that Wilde does not focus on his own misery during his two years’ hard labour, but rather on the most vulnerable of the prisons’ population. Broken, impoverished, infamous, separated from his own children whom he would never see again, he repudiates self-pity and embraces empathy. Through his experience of Reading Gaol, he became, for a time, as selfless as the Happy Prince and the swallow whose story he offered his sons.

Jennifer and the Flower Fairies

by Wendy MacIntyre

One of my most treasured childhood books, Jennifer and the Flower Fairies, is all in pieces. The pages have come away from the buckram spine. Pages 41/42 have fled altogether. In an historic raid, one of my younger siblings tore page 49 in half and defaced many of the delicate line illustrations with crayoned scrawls. Fortunately untouched is the flyleaf inscription in my mother’s small, neat hand: “To Wendy on her fifth birthday, with love and best wishes.”

The book’s cover is also still exactly as I keep it in memory, a deep blue border embellished with buttercup yellow drawings of the characters one will meet inside: Alfie the gnome with his teasel duster, the handsome Bluebell Prince in his billowing cape, the silly, arrogant high-hatted Lords and Ladies who fancies himself a fairy knight, and of course Jennifer herself, soaring on her newly acquired wings. Inset in this blue border is a photo portrait of the teenage Jennifer Gay, the host of BBC’s Television Children’s Hour. She has a lovely open face and smile, and a smooth pageboy hairdo secured by a red Alice band. She wears a flocked print dress of yellow-green with an immaculate white collar.

It was likely Jennifer’s photo image that immediately attracted me to the advertisement for the book in my parents’ News of the World Sunday paper. She looked, as I at five, wished one day to look. That I asked for this book and actually received it for my birthday was a piece of magic in itself. The tiny advertisement which had compelled my attention turned into the actual object in my hands.

I reread the book recently, revisiting the particular scenes that have lodged in my memory so strongly − like Alfie’s appearance in the BBC studio when Jennifer has closed her eyes, thinking how wonderful it would be if there really were fairies the size of her hand. And suddenly, there he is on her outstretched palm, weighing as much as “a rather heavy feather.” I loved Alfie’s rudeness and how he told Jennifer, when she first sees him, not to gulp like a fish in a bowl. He was my first experience of an external perspective on human beings, subjected to a purely critical eye. In Alfie’s opinion, we are noisy, dusty and of course much too big. “A horrible size, like a great mountain,” he tells Jennifer, as he gives her a pill to make her small enough to enter the fairy realm.

Alfie entices her there with dreams, whispering in her ear of how he can stand on his head inside a foxglove or visit the children of the Moon. These imagined visions have stayed with me subliminally, whereas Jennifer’s running through the air to reach the television camera – dizzy, knees shaking – has remained with me as a visceral sensation. As has Alfie’s softening of the camera lens so that they can both push through to his world.

I had not forgotten the ruined pink marble fairy palace. However, the thought-arrows the Bluebell Prince seeks hidden away there had completely slipped my mind. Armed with these, Jennifer returns to the mortal world on a fairyland commission. She is charged with confronting and dissuading a group of boys from destroying a bluebell wood. I had interiorized the pictured image of the wood itself, and am quite sure that my mother and I had at some point visited a real one outside Glasgow. That remembered luxuriance likely seeded my enduring love for blue flowers of all kinds.

Perhaps above all else, Alfie’s little song has stayed with me, a charming reworking of the Golden Rule, with enough silliness to catch a child’s attention: Do as you would be done by, do as you would be did. A boiling pot is mighty hot, so don’t sit on the lid.

With the help of Google, I have learned that Annette Mills, the author of Jennifer and the Flower Fairies, was also the creator of the Muffin the Mule stories. A YouTube video allowed me to hear at last Jennifer Gay introducing Children’s Hour on the BBC. I had not seen the program in Scotland because my parents did not own a television. Her articulation is as one would expect, immaculate as her white collar. She sounds very like the young Queen Elizabeth. Jennifer is every bit as lovely and quietly confident in this archival video as she is on the cover of my childhood treasure. I yearn to be like her still, even with the passing of so many decades.

A Japanese Tree in Scandinavia

by Wendy MacIntyre

In this time of pandemic and primeval fear, it is bracing to revisit Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, where one man’s potent prayers reverse the world’s destruction.

We first meet the aging actor Alexander on his birthday. He and his young son, Little Man, are planting a leafless Japanese tree on the shore of the remote Scandinavian island. “It looks dead,” Alexander says half-ruefully, then tells his son the tale of an Orthodox monk who planted a dead tree on a mountainside and instructed his apprentice to water it every day. The novice did so dutifully, until one morning he found the mountainside covered with blossoms.

This wondrous flowering is not the first miracle to which the film alludes. The opening credits have already unspooled over an image of the new-born Christ child in Mary’s lap, his tiny right hand raised in blessing and his left touching the kneeling wise man’s vessel of myrrh. These three figures – mother, child and magus – are the tranquil centre of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Adoration of the Magi, which the artist left unfinished at the underpainting stage of browns and yellows. The work’s sole colour is the dark green of the leaves of the tree beneath which Mary and her baby sit.

Alexander has a reproduction of the painting on the wall above the daybed in his study. Its powerfully executed figures, albeit seen through a glass darkly, reappear throughout the film, sometimes superimposed upon the action. Otto, the local postman and former history teacher, confesses he finds the picture sinister. “I’ve always been terrified of Leonardo,” he tells Alexander.

In fact, da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi overturns the hallowed serenity we associate with the event. The coming of the three Oriental kings has attracted a vast throng of onlookers whose faces are contorted by anguish and confusion. They crowd each other. They stare in opposite directions. There seems to be a frantic energy is on the loose, a frenzy the horses in the background absorb, pawing wildly at the air.

The Madonna, the Christ child and the magus make up the still point in this churning world. All around them is a reality as sinister as the one the postman intuits. Otto is a collector of people’s paranormal experiences. He perceives what others do not. In an insightful prediction, he tells Alexander: “You’re so gloomy. You’re grieving, waiting for something.”

And to Little Man, Otto says: “But you are mute, mute as a fish,” a simile that reveals the import of the bandage the child has around his throat. We come to understand the boy has recently undergone surgery, whose cause is never explained. His doctor, Viktor, who arrives for Alexander’s birthday celebration, assures Little Man the incision is healing well.

With Viktor’s coming, the household’s secrets begin to be exposed. Alexander’s wife Adelina is so clinging and effusively affectionate with him it is evident the two have had an affair. Yet she seems unaware of the palpable erotic tension between Viktor and Marta, Alexander and Adelina’s adult daughter. A former actress given to histrionic gestures, Adelina is almost entirely self-obsessed, pacing while loudly bemoaning the fact Alexander has chosen to leave the stage and their glamorous life in the city. She is callously demanding of their maid Maria, a woman of striking beauty, with a childlike open face. Maria hides her hair under a black headscarf. Her long dress resembles a nun’s habit. Otto the postman pays humble court to her, smoothing his thinning hair. He perceives her purity to which the others are oblivious. Maria simply stares through him, and after her work is done, leaves her employers’ house, where everything is about to change.

The apocalypse announces itself through the trembling of crystal goblets on a tray, a disturbance that might at first be a playful poltergeist causing minor havoc. Then a terrible roaring erupts above the house, a ripping open of the skies. A tall jar brimful of milk bursts out of the china cabinet, spilling its contents in a thick white stream. On the shortwave, an affectless government spokesperson urges citizens to stay calm and remain where they are. His tone makes clear the roaring has ushered in the End of Time. After the transmission goes dead, Adelina’s hysterical cries pierce the briefest cleft of silence. Her naked terror takes the shape of a prolonged corkscrewing wail, perilously infectious, that tests our endurance as viewers.

Only the sedative Viktor administers in a hypodermic syringe can quieten her. We are grateful for the respite of silence and for the camera’s lingering on the peacefully sleeping child, sealed away from mortal panic and despair between immaculate lace-edged sheets. Little Man’s metal bed frame, with its spare grid at head and foot, takes on the gleam of a Platonic form, unsullied by sin and worldliness. The gauzy white curtain at his open window bells in and out with the soft wind, a visible breath of spirit blessing the child.

Alone in his study, Alexander falls to his knees in abject prayer, watched over by The Adoration of the Magi. He implores God to deliver them from this terrible time, and his children, wife and friends from looming death. If only God will make everything once again as it was early that morning, Alexander promises to relinquish all that he loves. He will even destroy his house and give up Little Man.

The force-field of his impassioned prayer summons Otto who tells him there is one last chance to save the world. Alexander must go to see the maid Maria and make love with her. She is a witch in the best sense, Otto insists. Alexander is at first reluctant to follow this apparently absurd and adulterous course. But he soon yields, intuiting he is about to enter a ritual that has the power to redeem the world and all its species. He takes a last look at Little Man in his innocent slumber, and goes out an upper window and down a wooden ladder.

His descent is haunted by monochrome visions of the earth deliquescing beneath his feet, and of the frantic inhabitants of a devastated city colliding with one another in a roiling panic. As he sets off on the bicycle Otto has left for him, we see superimposed over the trees the Madonna and child at the centre of da Vinci’s unfinished work. Alexander’s bike veers wildly on the winding road, and he falls, injuring his leg and hand.

Because Maria has no radio, she has no idea a third world war is underway. Alexander holds the news of coming destruction in abeyance, first playing a Bach prelude on Maria’s organ; then relating a story of how his mother used to sit in the same chair by the window each day, looking out with pleasure at her overgrown garden. When she became ill, and could not leave her bed, he decided to tidy it up, working two solid weeks with shears and scythe. Once he had finished, he bathed and put on fresh clothes, and sat down in his mother’s special chair to savour what he had made for her. What he saw disgusted him. He had destroyed the natural beauty of the garden, leaving only evidence of violence − a cutting parable on an earth ruined by human weaponry.

“Can you love me?” he asks Maria. “Love me, I beg you. Save us.” She refuses, telling him with her habitual gentleness, to go home. In desperation, Alexander puts a gun to his temple as the bombers bearing the nuclear weapons roar over her roof.

Maria succumbs to his pleading, perhaps out of pity. “I know she is wicked,” she says of Adelina. “Do not be afraid, poor man.” The scene of their lovemaking is a leap into the impossible, a defiance of gravity, as their bodies levitate and rotate – a living fulcrum that will transform the fate of every creature on earth.

When Alexander wakes in the morning on his daybed beneath da Vinci’s Adoration, his first clue to the changed world is that the electricity is working again. He puts on the shortwave which is broadcasting music and not the fatal warnings of the day previous. His prayers have been answered and now he must keep his promise to God. He puts on his black silk Japanese kimono embossed with the yin/yang symbol.

His wife and children and Viktor are all out, gone for a walk on a faultless morning. Alexander is therefore free to assemble a tottering tower of bamboo chairs inside the house, which he then sets alight. The fire swiftly takes hold, his exquisite retreat ablaze from every window. Outside he runs back and forth, lopsidedly, because he is limping still from his fall from his bicycle. He resembles deranged King Lear on the heath, meandering and raging at the storm. Except that Alexander is silent, even when Adelina and Viktor and Marta come running, aghast to see the conflagration and his inane circling.

An old-fashioned ambulance van arrives to take him away, just as Maria comes running. He kneels at her feet. “Let him be,” she cries. Alexander runs and the ambulance attendants give chase. He seems at this point infantile, forlorn and lacking all dignity. Yet he has the sovereign assurance of a commitment kept: a yielding up of self that has enabled the world to draw back from the brink. The last thing we see Alexander do is scramble out of the back of the ambulance to embrace Otto, the inspired instigator of his ritual with Maria.

The film’s final scene belongs to Little Man. The ambulance passes the boy as he is making his unsteady way, carrying two pails. He waters the tree he and his father planted the day before and lies down beneath it. Little Man then speaks for the first time, his question addressed to the absent Alexander: “In the beginning is the Word. Why is that, Papa?”

The boy’s question goes to the crux of the Christian faith – the mystery of the Word made flesh, crucified to redeem humankind. In a last lingering take, the camera leaves the prone child and moves up to dwell on the tangle of bare twigs stark against the chill-blue Scandinavian sky. They resemble Christ’s crown of thorns, yet simultaneously, the Zen brushstrokes of naked branches quivering on the edge of blossom.

We observe this indwelling paradox to the accompaniment of Bach’s “Erbame dich, Mein Gott” from the St Matthew Passion. “Have Mercy, my God, for the sake of my tears.” It is Alexander’s prayer, answered through the child beneath the tree and the thriving world that lies all about him, reclaimed from annihilation by his father’s sacrifice.

Postcards from Rhona

by Wendy MacIntyre

In my copy of Simone Weil’s Waiting for God I keep an art postcard given me by my friend Rhona. It is a colour photograph of a group of sculpted figures atop an interior column of a Spanish Romanesque church. The church is St. Martin of Fromista, a traditional pilgrimage stop on the Camino de Santiago.

Rhona and I visited there together, spending a lavishly quiet hour looking up at the hundreds of human and animal figures the eleventh-century artisans carved into the stone capitals. Some of these stone-beings tell us stories we immediately recognize, like that of the naked Eve and soberly attired Adam beneath the tree with its enticing, and one fatal, fruit. But there are other figures, joined together in either torment or ecstasy, whose stories are long lost, gone with the medieval artists and worshippers who knew their plots intimately.

Among these enigmatic groupings are the seven huddled men on my postcard. What strikes one first is that the sculptor has deliberately made their heads overlarge, as he has their widened eyes. They are looking outward, mesmerized by some event that has welded them together, in a shared awe or terror or combination of the two. The disproportion the artist has given their faces and eyes underlines the fact they are transfixed. As observers, looking up at them from below, we are correspondingly caught up in the mystery of what they see, although we will never know exactly what it is they behold, whether the End of Days, the Lamb of God, the blazing star above Bethlehem, or some other wonder or cataclysm.

The second remarkable feature of the seven, who wear meticulously pleated robes, is their evident friendship and trust in one another. The three most central of the men join hands, while the two at the extreme left hold each other. The smaller of these two shields his companion’s eyes with his right hand, aware that whatever they witness sheds more radiance than his friend can bear. The remaining two men hold curved staffs, which might be either shepherds’ crooks or bishops’ croziers. We cannot know.

What we do not know without doubt is that the seven are caught in an awe so overwhelming they press close, clasp hands and comfort each other. This is why I had pointed them out to Rhona, adding I was sorry the little kiosk in St. Martin did not have their image among the postcards on sale. It was typical of her kindness and attentiveness that the next day she presented me with the postcard of the seven companions. She had found it in a local shop. She was very good at finding things.

The second postcard from Rhona is kept in the inner pocket of one of my working notebooks, full of the gleanings that sustain me. She found this one in the National Gallery in London and gave it to me two years before she died, when she was still able to walk and travel freely. It is of Leonardo da Vinci’s Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, also known as “The Lady with an Ermine.” Although Rhona’s Master’s thesis was on Lorenzo Lotto’s dramatically perplexing A Lady as Lucretia, da Vinci was the Renaissance artist she esteemed above all.

Her favourite painting was his Madonna of the Rocks in London’s National Gallery. Like the Madonna in her craggy grotto, Cecilia Gallerani’s gaze is calm and meditative. One could not conceive of a more gentle face, nor a more tender touch than those long fingers cradling the ermine’s back. The contrast between the animal’s lean, predatory jaw and Cecilia’s delicate mouth, nose and chin is startling, even unsettling. Yet the whole they make is sublime. They both look to the left, their heads held at virtually the same angle, the wild creature and the eminently cultivated woman in perfect balance.

It is an extraordinary achievement of this painting, and other of da Vinci’s portraits, that the subject’s gaze is so alive and serenely focused. The intensity of this meditative gaze suggest movement. We sense the approach of an ineffable mystery.

I am reminded of Rhona’s many years of dedicated Buddhist meditation, a learned stillness and wisdom that helped her bear the severe trials of her last days. She had always that same gentle gaze, one she bestowed generously on her friends, as she listened closely, interested, encouraging and gracious. Her rare courage drew on her loving attention to beauty in its many forms. In the face of sore tribulations, she found shelter and nourishment in books, music and artworks whose treasures she shared with her friends, like postcards of the spirit sent out unfailingly over the years, transformative and rich in hope.

by Wendy MacIntyre

Anne Carson and the Charcoal Burners

For nine years now, I have been haunted by images from a poem by Anne Carson as enigmatic as they are unforgettable. Called Burners Go Raw, it opens with Carson’s nightmare vision of medieval charcoal burners’ forlorn, accursed existence.

Burners medieval dark mud on a road a dark morning/ falling back through memories a faint pain, dark uphill/ way the usual alone and gavel picking my step out where/ nothing, out hoping, hope sinking, slope rising, that dark/ colour, almost rain, a thing impending…

What is impending is an apocalyptic blow that will make the “dark mud” engulf the seen world “past the end of the soundtrack.” “And then we’ll see and then we’ll spend, then/we’ll be the burners” Carson says. Her tone is fatalistic, as if wholly accepting of the devastation to come.

Since first reading this poem, I have learned more about the difficult lives of the medieval charcoal burners. They were ostracized by the communities who relied on the fuel the burners produced − for centuries the only one available to generate the high temperatures needed for iron smelting and glassmaking. Rather than being grateful, people of the Middle Ages accused the burners, who lived and worked alone in the woods tending their kilns, of secrecy and evil practices. In fact, theirs was a painstaking and demanding occupation, one of the oldest human crafts. Because the process of carbonizing the wood inside the teepee-shaped kilns could take up to eight days, the charcoal burners had to keep watch constantly to ensure the fire never went out, and that the burning alder wood did not get totally consumed. Some burners sat on a two-legged stool through this crucial labour so that if they fell asleep, the stool would topple over, waking them. They knew the charcoal was ready when blue smoke rose from the kiln.

Perhaps it was the extreme reclusiveness the craft required that made its practitioners seem furtive and somehow polluted to outsiders. Whenever charcoal burners appear in Russell Hoban’s dystopic masterpiece, Riddley Walker, for example, Riddley makes the “Bad Luck go a way syn.” In Riddley’s grim and often brutal world, with its post-nuclear-holocaust medieval conditions, the English language and humankind’s myths and legends have been fractured and remade; yet people’s ancient fear of the charcoal burners remains unchanged.

Anne Carson’s nightmare dark-mud world, where “we’ll be the burners,” seems as bleak a place as the mutually hostile communities of Riddley Walker where one crosses a fence at one’s peril. Then almost miraculously, she returns us to the lamplight of home with the poem’s middle hinging stanza. Its opening image has a simple purity and rousing power. “Go snow woke me.” This wonderful phrase, with its consoling assonance, conveys to us the light of new-fallen snow that Carson sees as “pawing in through blinds/through eyelids.”

As the mysterious snow-glow wakes her from the nightmare’s grip, she is able to delve into the roots of the desolate dream. “I thought you would outlive me,” she declares. So we begin to understand the dark mud where all hope sinks as the torment of personal loss.

In the third and final stanza she conjures up the daring idiosyncratic person whose death she mourns: “one day you/climbed in the kitchen window poured raw rubies out on/the table from a drawstring bag at your hip.” Those raw rubies return us to the abrasive adjective of the poem’s title. The loss of the beloved creates a wound that seems at first to defy all healing, eternally raw, like the scapegoated burners.

The poem’s anguished repeated end line paradoxically opens the way to assuage the rawness and mend what has been shattered: “and when you left I sat/at the table in my life. I sat at the table in my life”

Tellingly, the poem forgoes any final punctuation, the terminating period we would expect. This is because an unending writerly process has begun. Sitting at the table In her life, taking the position of the writer, the poet reworks the fragments plucked from the mudslide’s devastation. Like the charcoal burners at their lonely labour watching for the blue smoke that crowns their process, or Riddley Walker making a travelling show out of ancient puppet figures, like Punch and Judy that have survived nuclear disaster, Anne Carson forges images of spilled rubies and doe-like snow from her raw pain. She pulls hope from the burners’ dark mud, reclaims the rising slope.

http://wendymacintyreauthor.ca/2019/04/09/1071/

Of Basilisks — Both Kings and Lizards

by Wendy MacIntyre

illustration of a writers quill

I must confess it took me several months to read the 42 pages of King James VI and I’s treatise on the ideal monarch, Basilikon Doron (The King’s Gift). James composed this gift for his eldest son and heir, Prince Henry, as a practical guide on how a king should govern wisely and judiciously. My stumbling blocks were not so much the sixteenth-century Scots spellings where u’s are written as v’s and vice-versa (enuie, neuer, vundestand), as my deep unease with James’s unshakeable conviction that anointed kings are tantamount to gods:
God giues not kings the stile of Gods in vain
For on his Throne his Scepter doe they swey

My reading was slowed as well, by the flagrant inconsistency between James’s stated principles and his own historical record. Given what we know of his craving for effusive flattery in the later years of his reign, his condemnation of this vice comes across as nakedly hypocritical: “Choose for servants men of known wisdom, honestie and good conscience, but especially free of that filthie vice of flatterie, the pest of all princes…” And of course I bridled at Basilikon Doron’s description of how the perfect relationship between a king and his consort ought to unfold. Even allowing for historical relativism, James’s opinion of women’s capabilities is here damningly restrictive: “command her as her Lord, cherish her as your helper, rule her as your pupil, and please her in all things reasonable; but teach not to be curious in things that belong her not: Ye are the head, she is the body; it is your office to command and hers to obey…suffer her never to meddle with the Politic government of the Commonwealth, but hold her at the Economic rule of the house, and yet all be subject to your direction.”

As an antidote to the rigid, often troubling views James advances in Basilikon Doron, I turned to Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Plumet Basilisk”, dedicated to a most remarkable lizard found in Costa Rica, southern Mexico and Panama. Also known as the plumed basilisk, this “living firework”, as she describes him, can run on top of the water, as agile there as on land. “He leaps and meets his/likeness in the stream. and king with king/helped by his three-part plume along the back, runs on his two legs.”

“One of the quickest lizards in the world,” Moore calls the basilisk. “If beset, he lets go, smites the water, and runs on it…” In his firework quickness on land and water, “the basilisk portrays/mythology’s wish/to be interchangeably man and fish.” Had James VI and I been more open to such supple interchangeability, conceiving of himself as both man and king rather than god and king, England might have been spared the bloodiest internecine conflict in its history, and the regicide that brought down the House of Stuart.

Prince Henry, for whom James wrote Basilikon Doron, died at age 16, a brave, soldierly, graceful young man adored by the people. Had he lived to become king, Henry might well have moderated his father’s unyielding doctrines on a king’s equivalence with god. His younger brother Charles, who succeeded James as Charles I, was to carry the divine right of kings espoused in his father’s treatise to such lengths England was plunged into civil war and Charles himself beheaded by Oliver Cromwell’s executioners.

Is it fanciful to wonder if Charles I’s obdurate resistance and refusal to compromise with Parliament was rooted in a failure of the imagination? Convinced of his own divine right to rule absolutely, in accordance with his father’s indoctrination, he was unable to envision another legitimate form of governance.

“As near a thing as we have to a king,” Marianne Moore calls the mind’s crucible of human imagination where all transformative thought is born. It is an insight that might well have helped James leaven his own unyielding vision of what kingship means and averted the years of horrific suffering that were its direct consequence.