You know what you’re in for just by reading the title and acknowledging the author: “A Love Song in the Modern Taste” (1733) by Jonathan Swift. For once, the excremental stuff is absent. The poem amounts to a catalog of clichés about love, a sort of anti-Valentine’s Day card. Here is the first of its eight stanzas:  “Fluttering spread thy purple pinions, Gentle Cupid o’er my heart; I a slave in thy dominions; Nature must give way to art.”   No scatology. Just the beau of Vanessa and Stella mocking the conventional romantic sentiments of the day. Pat Rogers, editor of Swift’s Complete Poems (1983), likens the poem to one of his prose works, Polite Conversation (1738), in which he mocks the banality and garble of so much talk, as in “I won’t quarrel with my bread and butter” and “I hate nobody: I am in charity with the world.” Rogers notes of the poem: “The joke lies in slotting together so many familiar ideas in a more or less coherent sequence.”     Swift’s most notorious exercise in scatology, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” written in 1732, was his most popular poem with the public during his lifetime, reproduced as a pamphlet and reprinted in newspapers in both England and Ireland. Readers familiar with Swift’s “cloacal obsession” (a phrase once applied by critics to another Irishman, James Joyce) will know what to expect. Strephon is investigating the dressing room of his “goddess,” Celia, after she has spent five hours at her toilette: “And first a dirty Smock appear’d, / Beneath the Arm-pits well besmear’d . . .”  . Swift devotes 144 octosyllabic lines to Strephon’s inventory. His growing sense of disgust mirrors the reader’s. When he spies a “reeking chest,” he lifts the lid and the contents    “Send up an excremental Smell To taint the Parts from whence they fell. The Pettycoats and Gown perfume, Which waft a Stink round every Room.”   Some poets might conclude the poem with those lines, but not Swift. He continues:   “Disgusted Strephon stole away Repeating in his amorous Fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”   Swift the lover, writer and man is the subject of J.V. Cunningham’s “With a Copy of Swift’s Works” (written in 1944; published in The Judge is Fury, 1947; collected in The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, edited by Timothy Steele, 1997):   “Underneath this pretty cover Lies Vanessa’s, Stella’s lover. You that undertake this story For his life nor death be sorry Who the Absolute so loved Motion to its zero moved, Till, immobile in that chill, Fury hardened in the will, And the trivial, bestial flesh In its jacket ceased to thresh, And the soul none dare forgive Quiet lay, and ceased to live.”   “The soul none dare forgive” complements Swift’s self-penned epitaph: “Ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit” (“Where savage indignation no more can lacerate his heart”). In his gloss on the poem Steele writes: “Because of the rebarbative nature of his satire, Swift was reviled as no other major English author had been or has been since.” Nor was Cunningham a writer of conventional love lyrics. Here’s an epigram Swift might have signed his name to:   “Here lies my wife. Eternal peace Be to us both with her decease.”   And this:   “I married in my youth a wife. She was my own, my very first. She gave the best years of her life. I hope nobody gets the worst.”

In 1993, I was assigned to write about the opening of a Buddhist “peace pagoda” in Grafton, about twenty miles east of Albany, N.Y. A photographer accompanied me, a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and decades of work at the newspaper. We parked and approached the stupa, a dome-shaped structure that resembles an oversized pith helmet with a spike on top. I was greeted at the door by one of the monks who asked me to remove my shoes before entering. While I was taking them off, the monk asked the same courtesy of the photographer, who refused and started an argument. Soon he was shouting and refusing to enter the building. I asked him to cool off and photograph the exterior of the temple while I went inside and talked to people. I apologized to the monks, did my interviews and we drove back to the office where I wrote my story. I never had a solid explanation for the photographer’s behavior.  I’ve been reading Sir Thomas Browne again and remembered the embarrassing incident described above in Book V, Chapter VI of his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Vulgar Errors (1646). The passage describes ancient customs associated with Passover: “The custom of discalceation, or putting off their shoes at meals, is conceived to have been done, as by that means keeping their beds clean.” Here is the OED’s definition of the rare word: “The action of taking off the shoes, esp. as a token of reverence or humility.” Some Masonic organizations also require discalceation during certain rituals.   A coda of sorts: One morning I had to work an early shift at the newspaper. While still in the hall outside the newsroom I heard shouting – not an unusual event around the city desk. The photographer I mentioned above and a reporter, also a Korean War veteran, were hollering at each other – very loud and angry. I walked over to referee. They quickly settled down and I asked what the problem was. They explained that they had a difference of opinion over the proper operation of a flamethrower. Even they had to laugh.

For the observant – those who revere good prose and other accomplishments of civilization -- February 12 is doubly a holy day. In 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Hodgenville, Ky. Across the Atlantic, on the same day, Charles Darwin was born in a Georgian-style mansion in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. (Yes, a Shropshire lad.)  Dr. Amit Majmudar is a poet and novelist who works as a diagnostic radiologist near Columbus, Ohio, and is a one-man repudiation of C.P. Snow’s tired old notion of the “two cultures.” In his essay “Voyaging with Charles Darwin on the Beagle," Majmudar mingles autobiography, comparative religion, history and literary criticism. As a medical student he read The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Darwin’s account of his five-year voyage (1831-36) around the world, including exploration of the Galapagos Islands. At the same time, Majmudar was doing research into a receptor protein associated with multiple sclerosis (while also reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, another artist-scientist). He contrasts his research with the great biologist’s:   “Darwin’s research happened in an environment nothing like the stainless steel basins and glass panes and microscope-slide-nudging quiet of the modern laboratory. We have to imagine the father of evolutionary science clambering over volcanic landscapes, reeking of sweat, covered in dirt and beetles, like some kind of animistic shaman communing with the wilderness. Darwin got to evolutionary theory by traveling very far indeed—deep into the stubbornly prehistoric, pre-human rockscapes of these islands off the coast of nowhere.”   Majmudar is an observant Hindu and acknowledges the revolution Darwin’s theories triggered among the faithful:   “I thought about modern-day Darwinists—the slick academics and symposium atheists, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and all the self-certain undergraduate ramen-slurpers who scoff at traditional religion in his name. Darwin’s Darwinism feels earned in a way these campus Darwinisms don’t.”   You will notice Majmudar has a sense of humor, unlike so many strident followers of Darwin, who wave his theories like the battle flags of a conquering army. He observes that Darwin possessed “an intellectual fearlessness that mirrored the physical fearlessness involved in boarding the Beagle.”   [Out of sheer intellectual decency, let’s remember Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist who, in a wonderful act of synchronicity, arrived at the theory of evolution through natural selection at the same time as Darwin. I suggest you read Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1869), another gem of travel and science writing.]   Majmudar notes that only the “Abrahamic monotheisms” display “truly bitter resistance to evolutionary theory . . . (Every Hindu I know, for example, seems quite at ease with the idea).” Non-scientists, believers and nonbelievers can read Darwin’s major books – The Voyage, The Origin of the Species (1895) and The Descent of Man (1871) -- without cognitive dissonance. He is a writer of vigorous prose, apart from his obvious accomplishments as a scientist. I see him as one of those ambitious, larger-than-life, hyper-energetic Victorians – think of John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot – with the temerity to conquer worlds and who by doing so create new worlds of their own. Here’s a sample of Darwin’s prose (not cited by Majmudar) chosen from Chapter V, “Bahia Blanca,” of The Voyage. Darwin has been cataloging the fauna of Argentina:   “The Trigonocephalus has, therefore, in some respects the structure of a viper, with the habits of a rattlesnake: the noise, however, being produced by a simpler device. The expression on this snake’s face was hideous and fierce; the pupil consisted of a vertical slit in a mottled and coppery iris; the jaws were broad at the base, and the nose terminated in a triangular projection. I do not think I ever saw any thing more ugly, excepting, perhaps, some of the vampire bats. I imagine this repulsive aspect originates from the features being placed in positions, with respect to each other, somewhat proportional to those of the human face; and thus we obtain a scale of hideousness.”   Read this with Abraham Lincoln’s prose in mind. Each man, in his respective field, displays a certain forcefulness, clarity and gravitas, an absence of clutter. Here’s how Jacques Barzun describes the writing of the sixteenth president in his 1960 monograph “Lincoln the Literary Genius”:   “[H]is style, the plain, undecorated language in which he addresses posterity, is no mere knack with words. It is the manifestation of a mode of thought, of an outlook which colors every act of the writer’s and tells us how he rated life. Only let his choice of words, the rhythm and shape of his utterances, linger in the ear, and you begin to feel as he did – hence to discern unplumbed depths in the quiet intent of a conscious artist.”   Lincoln is conventionally read as a politician and Darwin as a scientist, but both can be read as literary artists, as can Majmudar, who writes in the voice of civilized discourse:   “I chose radiology because I wanted to be a writer and I didn’t want my day job to bleed into my time outside the hospital. It’s hard to take the CT appearance of Stage IV cancer home with you; it’s natural to remember the face of the 36-year-old woman who got the news from you. I chose radiology to insulate myself from the realities of medicine—from life and death and human suffering, basically—so that I could create art about . . . life and death and human suffering. It’s paradoxical, I know. I chose detachment over compassion, sterile lab work (office work, technically) over the messy surgical ‘field.’ I preferred to be Siddhartha in the climate-controlled palace, not Buddha in the mosquito-ridden forest. Much less Darwin on Tierra del Fuego."   [Majmudar’s essay is collected in The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), which also includes the best thing I have ever read about the poet Kay Ryan.]

My nephew has introduced me to the practice of “pebbling,” not to be confused with “stoning.” Sorry to say the psychologists and sociologists got their hands on it first, but there’s nothing new about so simple a human gesture. The word is adopted from the courtship rituals of two species of penguins. The male gives the female he is attracted to a small stone. If interested, she responds by giving him one of her own, and so on. Soon, they have a nest.  Among humans, pebbling has come to mean giving a friend or family member small gifts unrelated to a birthday or other holiday. My nephew used the example of sending a video to someone we think might enjoy it. It doesn’t necessarily represent a prelude to romance. I don’t even think of such things as gifts. Despite evidence to the contrary, we are social animals and some of us enjoy pleasing others.   To pebble as a transitive verb has been around since Shakespeare’s time: “to pelt with or as with pebbles,” according to the OED. The first citation is from George Chapman’s 1605 play Eastward Hoe or Eastward Ho!: “Wee’d so peble ’hem with snowe bals as they come from Church.” That, by the way, is Keats’ Chapman. The second definition, dating from the nineteenth century, is “to pave or cover with pebbles or pebble-like objects.” The final one is “to treat (leather, vinyl, etc.) with a patterned roller to produce a rough or indented surface, such as might be produced by the pressure of pebbles.”   Inevitably, I’m reminded of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Pebble” (trans. Peter Dale Scott and Czeslaw Milosz):   “The pebble Is a perfect creature   “equal to itself mindful of its limits   “filled exactly with a pebbly meaning   “with a scent that does not remind one of anything  does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire   “its ardour and coldness  are just and full of dignity    “I feel a heavy remorse   when I hold it in my hand   and its noble body   is permeated by false warmth     “--Pebbles cannot be tamed   to the end they will look at us   with a calm and very clear eye”   Herbert suggests we probably ought to be envying pebbles. As Whitman says about animals, “They do not sweat and whine about their condition.”