Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret
Welcome, dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let thou and I contented dwell!
But say, O whither hast thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.
Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.
Was it for This, O graceless Child,
Was it for this you learn’d to spell?
Thy face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.
I wonder how thy time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climbed the Monument?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?
But now I’ll keep you here secure:
No more you view the smoaky Sky:
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.
This week, we revisit the working-class Northamptonshire poet Mary Leapor (1722-1746) with a work from her posthumously published collection, Poems Upon Several Occasions. You can read it here, with the text of the ambitious Roman drama in question, The Unhappy Father, a Tragedy.
It was her friend and mentor, Bridget Freemantle, who had tried and failed to have the play staged by London’s Covent Garden theatre. The claret stains on the rejected manuscript may be a comic invention: Leapor’s anger, filtered through allegory, clearly is not.
It’s plain, if we jump to the fifth stanza, that her scorn includes the weight of London against the provinces. “I wonder how thy time was spent,” the narrator says to the personified Play. “No news (alas!) hadst thou to bring. / Hast thou not seen the Monument? / Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?” The Monument, designed by Christopher Wren to commemorate the Great Fire of London, and the Lion statuary would have been essential symbols of British power to burnish the regional visitor’s itinerary, though a view of the king (then George II) was clearly less than likely. There’s satirical bite in the mocking tone of the narrator’s question, as well as a hint of pathos.
Personal literary disappointment is hardly a promising subject for poetry, but the way Leapor tells of hers is thoroughly entertaining. She imagines the Play as her prodigal son, and heartily welcomes him home in the first stanza. Quickly, she realises his face is red with alcohol, a “sottish dye” he has contracted, like an infection, from the dissolute, surely aristocratic company he must have been keeping. In the fourth stanza, she lets rip. “Was it for this, O graceless Child! / Was it for this you learn’d to spell?/ Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d: / Go drown thyself in yonder Well.” Funny though the exaggeration is, you can imagine at the same time the disappointed writer, from a class mostly excluded from the skills of “spelling” and literacy, might be addressing herself. Perhaps her own hard-earned and tenuous literary Credit has now been “spoil’d”?
She rallies, of course, puts a travel ban on the “Son” and proclaims, in rougher grammar, the solidarity of the “Idiots, like Thee and I” against the circle of close-guarded privilege. In real life, she went on writing, and Bridget Freemantle persisted in championing the poems, till she’d raised the subscriptions required for their publication, an event Leapor sadly didn’t live to see. Today, she doesn’t lack for readers and admirers: her Credit is healthy. She could be a fierce class critic, certainly, but there’s a sense of sheer enjoyment in her writing, the control and “attack” of it proof that verse came naturally to her – and rewarded her with a deeper satisfaction than fame at Court.
