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“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
This week, I find myself wondering how ACCURATE our “memory of a well-spent life” really is.
I’ve been researching Sarah Cleghorn, who wrote that other poem from 100 Great Poems by Women that I really liked.
The Golf Links
by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
The Golf Links turns out to be four lines
from “a larger work” called
Through the Needle’s Eye, which multiple searches have found mentioned in many places, yet I couldn’t find a copy of this larger work. It wasn't even listed in the extensive collection of her papers at the University of Vermont.
So I started with a mystery.
It’s not that other material on Sarah Cleghorn isn’t out there. There’s lots of her poetry and other writing referenced and still available, as well as her birth dates and biographical information. She wrote poems and articles about socialism; child labor; women's rights; vegetarianism; against the use of animals in scientific and medical experiments; became a Quaker because of her Pacifist beliefs; was a popular writer who was a victim of the first "red scare" after WWI, so she turned to teaching -- there's a lot of data.
But her “most famous poem,” is part of something larger that I can’t find, and I’m not even certain if it’s a longer poem, or a collection of poems.
I could find the four lines of The Golf Links translated into Italian:
« Il campo da golf è così vicino al mulino
che quasi ogni giorno
il bambino al lavoro guarda
e vede l'uomo che vi gioca »
Delightful, but not really useful in my search.
Then there’s:
Comrade Jesus
THANKS to St. Matthew, who had been
At mass-meetings in Palestine,
We knew whose side was spoken for
When Comrade Jesus had the floor.
"Where sore they toil and hard they lie,
Among the great unwashed, swell I: --
The tramp, the convict I am he;
Cold-shoulder him, cold-shoulder me."
The Dives' door, with thoughtful eye,
He did tomorrow prophesy: --
"The Kingdom's gate is low and small;
The rich can scarce wedge through at all."
"A dangerous man," said Caiaphas,
"An ignorant demagogue, alas!
Friend of low women, it is he
Slanders the upright Pharisee."
For law and order, it was plain,
For Holy Church, he must be slain.
The roops were there to awe the crowd:
And "violence" was not allowed.
Their clumsy force with force to foil
His strong, clean hands he would not soil.
He saw their childishness quite plain
Between the lightnings of his pain.
Between the twilights of his end
He made his fellow-felon friend:
With swollen tongue, and blinding eyes,
Invited him to Paradise . . .
This poem is mentioned in more than one source as connected to
The Golf Links and
Through the Needle’s Eye. These references would make me think that “Through the Needles’ Eye” was a collection of poems, but other references say that
The Golf Links is part of a longer poem called
Through the Needle’s Eye, and one reference even seemed to indicate that
Comrade Jesus was another section of the same poem.
And there’s this word – “roops” – “The roops were there to awe the crowd…..” Must be a typo, right? Surely she meant “troops” – I mean, what in Hades is a roop? Yet there it is, in version after version of the poem online.
When you look up "roop," it is a word, which means a shout, an outcry, a roar, or secondarily, hoarseness.
Well, I suppose that “shouts were there to awe the crowd” could be what she meant, but does that seem as awkward to you as it did to me? So I dug deeper, and found a facsimile of her book Portraits and Protests which included Comrade Jesus and sure enough, it says: “The troops were there to awe the crowd…”
One of the problems with ancient verse like Homer is that it was passed down orally, and human memory is often faulty, so there are conflicting versions of parts of his poems, and debates about what is or isn't part of the originals. This isn’t so surprising because nobody knows exactly when or even if Homer lived, or how long after these poems became part of oral tradition that they were first written down. Some recent research suggests that the Iliad and the Odyssey could be dated somewhere around 760–710 BC. You would expect some errors to creep into the text over a period of almost 3000 years, especially through translations into multiple languages.
But here we have poems which were published in the 20th Century, written by a woman who lived from 1876 until 1959, reprinted in their original language, and we have a pretty obvious typo in one poem being reproduced over and over again on websites dedicated to poetry, and worse, almost all of a major work completely missing.
Then I couldn't find a photograph I could say for certain was of THIS Sarah Cleghorn.
There were many photographs of a current-day actress of that name, and a number of portraits of Dorothy Canfield, who was associated with Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn.
A few pictures came up which might have been this particular Sarah Cleghorn, but none of them actually had her name tagged to it, and when the clothing looked like a particular era, the faces seemed either too old or too young to be hers.
But most of the pictures that came up in my image search for a picture of Sarah Cleghorn seemed totally random: a recent photograph of a young black man named Kieran Roberts, or Edward Steichen's famous 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson shot through black lace, for instance.
The Internet is a powerful tool, and it has brought many works that have long been covered in the dust of obscurity back into the light, but it is prone to human error, just like all human endeavors.
And that brings me back to Cicero:
“The life given us, by nature is short; but the memory of a well-spent life is eternal.”
This is a translation into English from Latin – now I wonder about the comma – is it really Cicero’s?
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