You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Take a POETS Day. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, a little verse.

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This week I turned cartwheels in the surf. I exuberated. One passer-by was heard to exclaim, “By Goodness! He’s filled with beans.” Another called upon me to have decency and quiet the ruckus.

What catalyst, you ask, set off such an uncharacteristic reaction? I found John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Vol I. I can’t share on these pages, intended, for the most part, for public readings and sharing with our less deviant peers, the extomysis I experienced when recalling the wise admonishments of Frank Thomas, my ninth grade English teacher in explaining how to properly structure arguments: “You cannot have an ‘A)’ without following it later with a ‘B)’ or you look like an idiot [In the 80s you could call students idiots.] Write ‘First’ to open a paragraph and one of the next better damn [You could also say “damn” at them] well begin with ‘Second.’”

To whit: If there is a Brief Lives, Vol. I, there must follow a Brief Lives, Vol II. And there does.

Aubrey was a 17^th century philosopher and an archaeologist of sufficient renown that there are holes in rocks at Stonehenge named after him. Most interestingly from my angle, he was a hangover biographer. He gave to ruins and mental conundrums the hours of clarity and sobriety, but in the early mornings of the day, while his aristocratic palls slept off the previous night’s aristocrating, he dragged himself from bed to desk and wrote Schediasmata, as he called them, or “pieces written extempore, on the spur of the moment” as Wikipedia translates. The great bulk of these spur-of-the-moment writings were biographical sketches; notebook entries really. Swaths of the published volumes read like the marginalia notes of a separate work undergoing proofreading.

Endearingly, Aubrey has no compunction against hearsay, though he’s up front about sources. If a dock worker told him the Duke of X and Lady Y had a tryst behind the fishmonger’s, Aubrey makes sure we get the story and the dockworker gets the blame for telling it first. It’s a wonderful book that reminds me of Ezra Pound’s quip about ABC of Reading, his slapdash and barely-organized collection of commentary on poetry and prose: “I can’t believe people are buying my notebooks.” Or something like that. I’m paraphrasing.

Aubrey starts with Chaucer (“He taught his sonne the use of <the> astrolabe at 10; prout per his treatise of the Astrolabe.”) and goes on through what must be three- to four-hundred names. If you were an Englishman who made a stir before Aubrey’s death in 1697, odds are good you’re in there. Most of the names I don’t recognize, and those are probably just as interesting as the few known to me I’ve perused: Sir Thomas More (“His discourse was extraordinary facetious.”), William Shakespear (“…when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade [butcher], but when he kill’d a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech.”), Sir Walter Raleigh (“I remember that Mr. Thomas Child of Worcestershire told me that Sir Walter borrowed a gowne of him when he was at Oxford (they were both of the same College), which he never restored, nor money for it.”), and on and on. Trivial gossip should sell the book, but there’s decent history in there too. Verified stuff.

Today’s featured poet is Sir John Suckling, a cad, but a clever one (“I have heard Mris Bond say, that Sir John’s father was but a dull fellow (her husband, Mr. Thomas Bond, knew him): the witt came by the mother.” – Aubrey). He was sharp, witty, and described as a brilliant conversationalist. He was a soldier poet in the court of Charles I, and so counted among those known as the Cavaliers. The praised anonymous biographers at Poetry Foundation add emphasis: “A popular label for many poets in 17th-century Britain has been ‘Cavalier,’ and the person who usually comes first to mind is Sir John Suckling.”

It’s hard to classify these Cavaliers in modern terms. They were jock, wit, philosopher, and libertine. Suckling’s name means “landowner with tenant farmers.” His great-grandfather chose the name, changing from Esthawe, which means nothing I’m familiar with. As implied, Suckling was born to a landed family, but spent his time adventuring and skirt chasing. As a soldier he fought in various of Charles’s civil wars, in the Low Country, and in Germany. Apparently there was one-upmanship involved in aiding the King against the Scots. Nobles spent lavishly to impress. Suckling outdid all comers, spending £12,000 on horse and cavalrymen in silver and gold trimmed livery. His units were trounced and became something of a well turned out joke (“But Sir John Menis made a lampoon of it.” – Aubrey).

“He was the greatest gallant of his time, and the greatest gamester,” writes a hungover Aubrey, “both for bowling and cards.” He was considered by some to be the finest cricket bowler in England, but I’m not sure that “finest” is what Aubrey means by “greatest” as the word is split to cover cards as well, and our soldier/poet regularly sold off properties to pay gambling debts. Maybe by “greatest” he means “most game.” There are report of Suckling spending days in bed practicing and strategizing at cards. Most credit him with inventing the game cribbage. And here’s another reason to doubt his card prowess: As gifts, he sent decks of cards to a number of noble houses that he enjoyed playing at. Had his strategizing and practicing been fruitful, he wouldn’t have had to mark the decks he sent, but he did, so they weren’t. It’s reported he won over £20,000 with his crooked decks. That’s nearly fitty-leven billions pounds in today’s dollars.

“Anno Domini 163- there happened, unluckily, a difference between Sir John Suckling and Sir John Digby (brother to Sir Kenelme) about a mistresse or gameing, I have now forgott,” Aubrey tells us. Suckling really stepped in it with this one:

 “Sir John was but a slight timberd man, and of midling stature; Sir John Digby a proper person of great strength, and courage answerable, and yielded to be the best swordman of his time. Sir John, with some 2 or 3 of his party assaults Sir John Digby goeing into a play-house; Sir J. D. had only his lacquey with him, but he flew on them like a tigre, and made them run. ‘Twas pitty that this accident brought the blemish of cowardise to such an ingeniose young sparke. Sir J. D. was such a hero that there were very few but he would have served in the like manner.”

If it were gambling, this stands as the only consequence of Suckling’s cheating at cards I can find. That’s odd. That he was a cheat doesn’t escape any biographer be they hungover, praised anonymous, Wiki-vulture, or regular. All agree about the marked cards and scheming. If it was so well known, why was it so seemingly tolerated?

He made enemies in romance as well, so Aubrey may be forgiven for forgetting what piqued Digby. Suckling vied for the hand of Anne Willoughby, probably because she was rich and he piled on debt. Per the praised anonymous PF folks, “The Willoughby affair became complicated, with other suitors involved, opposition from her father, legal injunctions, duels, and a brief imprisonment in November 1634.” He is believed to have carried on with his cousin Mary Cranfield, the Countess of Dorsett, and others. Several of his poems reveal a rogue’s eye towards the ladies. I highly recommend a few minutes reading the Poetry Foundation page for Suckling if for no other reason to take in their brief treatment of his poem, “Soldiers,” where they inform:

“Perhaps it should be pointed out that the “New Oaths” in this context are the protestations of true love in order to seduce a woman, that the “forty Healths” are not only toasts of ale (“stout”) but imply a lifetime (“forty”) of seduction and sex as well as bodily trials (“Healths”) when combined with “bear,” that “doe” means to have sexual intercourse and “bullets” also means ejaculation. The age-old motif of Venus and Mars, love and war, was a staple of the Cavalier poets.”

Here he is pretending a particular woman stays his caddish nature; less suggestive than “Soldier”… unless I missed something.

The Constant Lover
Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings,
Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.

But the spite on’t is, no praise
Is due at all to me;
Love with me had made no stays,
Had it any been but she.

Had it any been but she,
And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
A dozen dozen in her place.

There’s a lot made of the Cavaliers’ allegiance to King Charles. They were said to be loyal folks. This put many in opposition to Parliament and their allies in Scotland as tensions grew that would eventually erupt into the First English Civil War. Suckling got himself into real trouble in what we now call the Army Plots of 1641.

The King’s advisor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, sat imprisoned in the Tower. Suckling either conspired to, or supported those who did, march troops loyal to the King south from York to threaten Parliament. Though not marching with the army, Suckling and Henry Jermyn planned to separately attack the Tower and free Strafford.

Everything went agley. Suckling and his allies fled to France. Depending on who you believe, Suckling was set upon by a servant intent on robbing him and died from an infected wound gotten in the fray or, having envisioned a poverty-stricken life on the run, as per Aubrey, “tooke poyson, which killed him miserably with vomiting.”

He took risks in every aspect of his life. There’s something admirable in that even when acknowledging how he cast people as means to personal ends. I still think John Wilmot holds the title as least reputable of POETS Day poets, but we have a first alternate now. Guys like this are why I read biographies. God love the childlike short sighted immediacy junkies blessed or cursed with immeasurable confidence.

He had a good ear, too.

A Doubt of Martyrdom

O for some honest lover’s ghost,
Some kind unbodied post
Sent from the shades below!
I strangely long to know
Whether the noble chaplets wear
Those that their mistress’ scorn did bear
Or those that were used kindly.

For whatsoe’er they tell us here
To make those sufferings dear,
‘Twill there, I fear, be found
That to the being crown’d
T’ have loved alone will not suffice,
Unless we also have been wise
And have our loves enjoy’d.

What posture can we think him in
That, here unloved, again
Departs, and ‘s thither gone
Where each sits by his own?
Or how can that Elysium be
Where I my mistress still must see
Circled in other’s arms?

For there the judges all are just,
And Sophonisba must
Be his whom she held dear,
Not his who loved her here.
The sweet Philoclea, since she died,
Lies by her Pirocles his side,
Not by Amphialus.

Some bays, perchance, or myrtle bough
For difference crowns the brow
Of those kind souls that were
The noble martyrs here:
And if that be the only odds
(As who can tell?), ye kinder gods,
Give me the woman here!