When Pleasure’s transient roses fade,
And wither in the tomb;
Unchang’d is thy immortal prize,
Thy ever-verdant laurels rise
In undecaying bloom.
‘Ode to Wisdom’
Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806)
(Published in Poems on Several Occasions, 1762)
Wisdom: it’s something the world could do with more of. Evidently Elizabeth Carter felt the same way in the early eighteenth century. Her ‘Ode to Wisdom’ is a powerful, personal expression of both praise and longing for wisdom. It begins with ‘The solitary bird of night’ (the owl), a creature associated with the classical Greek deity of wisdom, the goddess Pallas Athene. Using the first stanza to set the scene, Carter creates an atmospheric image of an owl, having roosted alone all day in some ruinous ‘time-shook tow’r’ now flying through the mysterious darkness of the night.
The persona of the poem hears the ‘solemn sound’ of the owls flight, and via this symbolic link to classical wisdom, she offers obeisance to the imagined throne of Wisdom. In the third stanza, therefore, the opening pronoun ‘She’ now functions as a personification of Wisdom founded upon the Greek image of Pallas Athene: the owl is, after all, referred to as the ‘Fav’rite of Pallas’. Wisdom, Carter writes, ‘loves the cool, the silent eve, / Where no false shews of life deceive’. Here the darkness of night-time is used as a visual and moral leveller, a time when truth can no longer be disguised.
The fourth stanza continues the praise of Pallas, identifying her, and therefore also wisdom, as the ‘queen of ev’ry art, / That glads the sense, and mends the heart’. It is wisdom, Carter claims, that is the ‘source of purer joys’. The longing of the poetic persona to achieve true wisdom is then crystallised in the subsequent stanza, in which she figures herself as a ‘modest suppliant’ whose ‘vow’ to Pallas Athene is more of a request to be ‘taught by thy [Pallas’s] unerring rules, / To shun the fruitless wish of fools’ and to instead aim at ‘nobler views’.
In the pursuit of this wisdom, the poet rejects ‘Fortune’s
gem, Ambition’s plume’ and ‘Cythrea’s fading bloom’ (in case you’re wondering
Cythrea is just another name for Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love). All of these goals are simply ‘glitt’ring
toys’, childish trinkets far beneath the aspirations of this poet who seeks
instead ‘Each moral beauty of the heart, / By studious thoughts refin’d’. The only ‘Power’ this poet hopes for is ‘An
empire o’er the mind’.
To express the transience of material triumph, Carter then examines the effects of time upon these competing qualities:
When Fortune drops her gay parade,
When Pleasure’s transient roses fade,
And wither in the tomb;
Unchang’d is thy [wisdom’s] immortal prize,
Thy ever-verdant laurels rise
In undecaying bloom.
By choosing Wisdom as her moral specialism, the poet will be ‘protected’ from the ‘ignorance and spite’ of those who seek to mock through the ‘pointed ridicule / Of undiscerning wit’. A means of escaping ‘From envy, hurry, noise and strife’, embracing wisdom enables the poet to rest in ‘the peaceful groves’ where only the spirits of clever philosophers such as Plato may be found. The following stanza continues in praise of Plato, referencing his ‘philosophick theme / Of Perfect, Fair, and Good’. Upon arrival in Athens, this philosophy ‘Reclaim’d, her [the city’s] wild licentious youth’ as under the influence of wisdom ‘The Passions ceas’d their loud alarms’.
Returning once more to addressing wisdom directly, the poet lists how:
Thy breath inspires the Poet’s song,
The Patriot’s free, unbiass’d tongue,
The Hero’s gen’rous strife’
But before the poet gets too carried away in praise of classical deities – at a time when Christianity was the predominant European religion – she adds a deft and subtle twist upon the classical model. ‘No more to fabled Names confin’d’, she writes, ‘To the supreme all-perfect Mind / My thoughts direct their flight’. Obliquely indicating her acknowledgement of Pallas Athene as a ‘fabled Name’, she now identifies wisdom as the ‘gift’ of ‘the supreme all-perfect Mind’ (an implicit allusion to the Christian God). Thus it is also with an address to this ‘supreme all-perfect Mind’ that the poem ultimately concludes, as Carter bids this power to ‘send her [wisdom’s] sure, her steady ray, / To regulate my doubtful way’. For it is:
Beneath her clear discerning eye
The visionary shadows fly
Of Folly’s painted show:
She sees thro’ ev’ry fair disguise.
That all but Virtue’s solid joys
Are vanity and woe.
Happy Reading!
You can
find this poem:
http://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o5154-w0420.shtml(This fantastic free copy of the poem is the source of the quotations given in this blogpost, and a superb resource!! Definitely worth having a shufty around the rest of the site too!!)
(Was recently introduced to this site by a senior academic, and it’s absolutely fab! Follow this link and find Carter’s ‘Ode to Wisdom’ on page 84. Or you could just start at the beginning if you’re enjoying her poetry!)
You can find
out more about Elizabeth Carter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Carter
(Wikipedia!!!)
(Another shockingly short biography for such an influential writer. It does have all the main dates and events of her life, though, so a useful starting point at least)
(this page has a short bibliography of references to Carter in published
