A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness podcast

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage about the Great Fire of London from Annus Mirabilis by John Dryden.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/69_The_Great_Fire_of_London_from_Annus_Mirabilis_by_John_Dryden.mp3

Poet

John Dryden

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

The Great Fire of London, from Annus Mirabilis

By John Dryden

Such was the rise of this prodigious fire,
Which, in mean buildings first obscurely bred,
From thence did soon to open streets aspire,
And straight to palaces and temples spread.

The diligence of trades and noiseful gain,
And luxury more late, asleep were laid:
All was the night’s; and in her silent reign
No sound the rest of nature did invade.

In this deep quiet, from what source unknown,
Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose;
And first few scattering sparks about were blown,
Big with the flames that to our ruin rose.

Then in some close-pent room it crept along,
And, smouldering as it went, in silence fed;
Till the infant monster, with devouring strong,
Walk’d boldly upright with exalted head.

Now like some rich or mighty murderer,
Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold;
Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,
And dares the world to tax him with the old:

So ’scapes the insulting fire his narrow jail,
And makes small outlets into open air:
There the fierce winds his tender force assail,
And beat him downward to his first repair.

The winds, like crafty courtesans, withheld
His flames from burning, but to blow them more:
And every fresh attempt he is repell’d
With faint denials weaker than before.

And now no longer letted of his prey,
He leaps up at it with enraged desire:
O’erlooks the neighbours with a wide survey,
And nods at every house his threatening fire.

The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend,
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice:
About the fire into a dance they bend,
And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.

Our guardian angel saw them where they sate
Above the palace of our slumbering king:
He sigh’d, abandoning his charge to fate,
And, drooping, oft look’d back upon the wing.

At length the crackling noise and dreadful blaze
Call’d up some waking lover to the sight;
And long it was ere he the rest could raise,
Whose heavy eyelids yet were full of night.

The next to danger, hot pursued by fate,
Half-clothed, half-naked, hastily retire:
And frighted mothers strike their breasts too late,
For helpless infants left amidst the fire.

Their cries soon waken all the dwellers near;
Now murmuring noises rise in every street:
The more remote run stumbling with their fear,
And in the dark men jostle as they meet.

So weary bees in little cells repose;
But if night-robbers lift the well-stored hive,
An humming through their waxen city grows,
And out upon each other’s wings they drive.

Now streets grow throng’d and busy as by day:
Some run for buckets to the hallow’d quire:
Some cut the pipes, and some the engines play;
And some more bold mount ladders to the fire.

In vain: for from the east a Belgian wind
His hostile breath through the dry rafters sent;
The flames impell’d soon left their foes behind,
And forward with a wanton fury went.

A quay of fire ran all along the shore,
And lighten’d all the river with a blaze:
The waken’d tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.

Podcast transcript

This is an extract from a long poem by John Dryden called Annus Mirabilis, which covers the period 1665-66 and describes a series of naval battles between the English and Dutch fleets, followed by the Great Fire of London. The poem was published in 1667, just a year after the Great Fire.

Why did Dryden publish so soon after the event? And why was it called Annus Mirabilis, which means ‘a year of miracles’? Surely a year that included the destruction by fire of the capital city was more of an Annus Horribilis? Especially as it was also the year of the Great Plague of London – which for some reason, Dryden fails to mention in his poem.

Samuel Johnson claimed that Dryden called it a year of miracles, ‘because it was a wonder that things were not worse’. Which sounds like a pretty extreme case of seeing the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. But in fairness to Johnson, it’s a pretty accurate description of Dryden’s attitude. Later in the poem, when considering the aftermath of the fire, Dryden presents it as less of a problem than an opportunity:

Methinks already from this chymic flame
I see a city of more precious mould,
Rich as the town which gives the Indies name,
With silver paved and all divine with gold.

So on one level this is a thoroughly pragmatic framing of the situation, as a chance to ‘build back better’, with modern architecture and new commercial opportunities, that will pave the streets with silver and gold. And this was indeed what happened – the fire was a disaster in the short term, but it did clear out a lot of the old ramshackle medieval wooden houses which were then replaced them with modern buildings of brick and stone.

But this stanza uses the language of alchemy as well as the language of commerce – the ‘chymic flame’ was the chemical fire that alchemists believed would purify the contents of the ‘precious mould’, and produce not only gold but also spiritual transformation.

But why did Dryden take this stance, when so many of his contemporaries were grieving the loss of their property to the fire and their family and friends to the plague?

Because at this stage of Dryden’s career he was a confirmed Royalist, a supporter of King Charles II who had been restored to the throne in 1660, after the Civil War and the Interregnum, when England was effectively a republic. So he was determined to exonerate the King from any blame for the disaster, and certainly to counter Puritan suggestions that this was God’s judgment on the King and the established Church.

The scholar Edward Hooker pointed out that in the early 1660s a series of rebellious pamphlets was published, using the title Mirabilis Annus, describing ‘strange apparitions and prodigious events’ and prophesying the judgment of God upon the King and his Church, in order to stoke the fires of discontent among his majesty’s subjects.

Hooker argued that it was no coincidence that Dryden took the title of these pamphlets, Mirabilis Annus, turned it back to front and used it for his poem, Annus Mirabilis. He describes Dryden’s poem as ‘a piece of inspired journalism’, which was speedily published in the same format as the seditious pamphlets, and was therefore a part of the ‘pamphlet wars’ of the time.

So whether or not the poem helped to stave off a revolution, it is probably also no coincidence that in 1668, the year after he published Annus Mirabilis, John Dryden was appointed Poet Laureate to Charles II.

So the poem was political in origin, but I’m not reading it to you today because of that. I’m sharing it as a magnificent and memorable poetic description of a major historical event.

And I wish there was time to read you more of it, but it’s nearly 400 lines long, which is far too long for the podcast. But here is a link to the full version, so you can read the rest of it if you want to.

OK turning to the poem itself, it’s written in quatrains, four-line stanzas, in very regular iambic pentameters, tiTUM tiTUM tiTUM tiTUM tiTUM, and rhymed ABAB; in other words the first line rhymes with the third line and the second line with the fourth line.

At the time it was more fashionable to write in rhyming couplets, which we looked at a couple of months ago, in Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which was written around the same time. In fact couplets were so popular that Dryden felt obliged to explain his choice of quatrains in the Preface to Annus Mirabilis:

But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found the couplet verse most easy, though not so proper for this occasion: for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the poet; but in quatrains he is to carry it further on, and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together.

In other words, he felt that quatrains gave him more room to expand on each thought. And he was very much working on the assumption that each quatrain should contain a single thought or scene, that was brought to a conclusion by a full stop, at the end of the stanza.

For instance, here’s the first stanza of the passage I’ve just read:

Such was the rise of this prodigious fire,
Which, in mean buildings first obscurely bred,
From thence did soon to open streets aspire,
And straight to palaces and temples spread.

So we can hear how the stanza contains a single thought, in this case also a single sentence, which is clearly and elegantly expressed, and then concludes with the full stop after ‘straight to palaces and temples spread.’

And notice how Dryden describes the progress of the fire in very balanced terms, starting in the ‘mean buildings’ of the poor and lowly, before spreading to the ‘palaces and temples’ of the high and mighty. This tendency to balance and order was very characteristic of Dryden and the other poets of his age.

Then the next stanza presents us with a new thought, and a new scene, which builds on the previous one, like small panels in a larger painting, or even a comic strip:

The diligence of trades and noiseful gain,
And luxury more late, asleep were laid:
All was the night’s; and in her silent reign
No sound the rest of nature did invade.

Once again, we find opposites brought into play and balanced out in the measured syntax; in this case, Dryden contrasts gainful employment, ‘The diligence of trades and noiseful gain’, with ‘luxury’, which in the 17th century meant ‘debauchery’, indulgence in illicit pleasures. Which is a rather convoluted way of saying that everyone was asleep, including those who had been working hard all day and those who had been drinking and carousing into the night.

And I don’t know about you, but when I hear these lines:

All was the night’s; and in her silent reign
No sound the rest of nature did invade.

I can’t help remembering:

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

There’s that same sense of anticipation, isn’t there? Because we know what’s coming next:

In this deep quiet, from what source unknown,
Those seeds of fire their fatal birth disclose;
And first few scattering sparks about were blown,
Big with the flames that to our ruin rose.

Then in some close-pent room it crept along,
And, smouldering as it went, in silence fed;
Till the infant monster, with devouring strong,
Walk’d boldly upright with exalted head.

So instead of the divine birth of Christmas, we have the ‘fatal birth’ of the ‘infant monster’. And of course the personification is very artificial and contrived, but I think it’s also very effective, we really do see the monster stand up and walk ‘boldly upright with exalted head’.

Then Dryden’s infant monster suddenly grows up into an adult criminal:

Now like some rich or mighty murderer,
Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold;
Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,
And dares the world to tax him with the old:

So ’scapes the insulting fire his narrow jail,
And makes small outlets into open air:
There the fierce winds his tender force assail,
And beat him downward to his first repair.

It’s an odd phrase isn’t it, ‘rich or mighty murderer’? Why should a murderer be ‘rich or mighty’? But it’s wittily resolved in the next line:

Too great for prison, which he breaks with gold;

The suggestion is that if you’re rich and mighty, you can buy your freedom, ‘break’ out of prison ‘with gold’. And of course the joke here is that it’s the gold flames that are breaking this particular murderer out of prison.

There was also something of a cult of the heroic criminal among Londoners, as described by Peter Ackroyd in his book, London: The Biography. The most famous of the London jailbreakers was the thief and highwayman Jack Sheppard, who became a local celebrity fifty years after the publication of Annus Mirabilis, by escaping from Newgate Prison no less than six times. These lines might have been written for Jack Sheppard:

Who fresher for new mischiefs does appear,
And dares the world to tax him with the old:

Then the poem’s antihero encounters some resistance, in the shape of the winds that impede his progress:

The winds, like crafty courtesans, withheld
His flames from burning, but to blow them more:
And every fresh attempt he is repell’d
With faint denials weaker than before.

The ‘crafty courtesans’ were high-class prostitutes, associated with the ‘luxury’ of Charles II’s court. And this is a witty take on the old idea that the flames of desire can be fanned by refusal, such as the ‘faint denials’ of the courtesans. There’s also quite a rude pun in this stanza – if you didn’t spot it, then you may congratulate yourself on your virtuous character; if you did, then no sniggering at the back please.

OK moving swiftly on, as indeed the fire is doing by this point, we get this delightfully ghastly scene, on London Bridge, which is where the severed heads of traitors were displayed:

The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend,
With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice:
About the fire into a dance they bend,
And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice.

I have to say that compared to this, London Bridge is a bit boring these days. I’m guessing that ‘sabbath’ here refers to a witches’ sabbath, rather than the Judeo-Christian version. That seems to be the implication of the following stanza, where ‘our guardian angel’ looks at the scene in horror and flees, ‘abandoning [the city] to its fate’.

OK, so far Dryden has given us a high level view of the fire, ornamented with images of monsters and ghosts and angels, but now he zooms in on the people of London who are waking up to their fate:

At length the crackling noise and dreadful blaze
Call’d up some waking lover to the sight;
And long it was ere he the rest could raise,
Whose heavy eyelids yet were full of night.

The next to danger, hot pursued by fate,
Half-clothed, half-naked, hastily retire:
And frighted mothers strike their breasts too late,
For helpless infants left amidst the fire.

So fortunately for the people in the houses around him, a lover was awake, presumably about lovers’ business, and he shouted to wake ‘the rest’, ‘Whose heavy eyelids yet were full of night.’.

And then we get this charming glimpse of the waking citizens ‘Half-clothed, half-naked’ – logically, of course, this is tautology, saying the same thing twice, because if you are half clothed, then by definition you must be half naked. But poetically, it works so much better, doesn’t it? It somehow conjures up the confusion of a throng of bodies, or bits of bodies, in various states of undress, as they flee the fire.

And is it heartless of Dryden to casually wrap up the stanza with this image of babies left behind like forgotten possessions?

And frighted mothers strike their breasts too late,
For helpless infants left amidst the fire.

Or maybe it’s just a brutally abrupt description of the brutality of the fire?

Then Dryden continues the action, with this wonderfully precise description of the townsfolk awakening, with the commotion spreading from street to street:

Their cries soon waken all the dwellers near;
Now murmuring noises rise in every street:
The more remote run stumbling with their fear,
And in the dark men jostle as they meet.

Notice that there are no visual images in this stanza: Dryden evokes the scene using first sound, the ‘cries’ and ‘murmuring noises’, and then movement and touch, with people running, stumbling and jostling in the dark streets. It’s a subtle and skilful way of evoking the terror and confusion they must have felt, being woken by yelling voices and then running around in the crowded streets in the dark.

Then we get an artful simile, as Dryden compares the Londoners to ‘weary bees’ in a hive, who are roused to action when a ‘night-robber’ tries to steal their honey:

So weary bees in little cells repose;
But if night-robbers lift the well-stored hive,
An humming through their waxen city grows,
And out upon each other’s wings they drive.

This whole sequence gives us a remarkable high-level vista of the poor humans scurrying about their city. The point of view is like that of Gulliver towering over the tiny Lilliputians – in a poem published 60 years before Jonathan Swift’s famous Travels.

But not all of the Londoners are just running about in a panic. Some of them are leaping into action to fight the fire:

Now streets grow throng’d and busy as by day:
Some run for buckets to the hallow’d quire:
Some cut the pipes, and some the engines play;
And some more bold mount ladders to the fire.

And yes, that’s right, this is a description of an early fire engine. Peter Ackroyd quotes a contemporary description of ‘an Engine or Instrument’, which ‘with the help of tenne men to labor’, could pump more ‘than five hundred men with the helpe of Bucketts and laydels’. And I love the way this stanza concludes with the line:

And some more bold mount ladders to the fire.

So that the line ends, and the whole stanza ends, with the image of the silhouetted figure at the top of the ladder leaning out over the abyss of fire.

But alas, the fire-fighters’ efforts are ‘in vain’, according to the next stanza:

In vain: for from the east a Belgian wind
His hostile breath through the dry rafters sent;
The flames impell’d soon left their foes behind,
And forward with a wanton fury went.

It had to be a foreign wind, didn’t it? 17th century England was a very xenophobic and jingoistic place, so in the aftermath of his descriptions of sea-battles against the Dutch, it’s not surprising that Dryden can’t resist calling the east wind ‘a Belgian wind’.

And then we get the final magnificent stanza of today’s passage:

A quay of fire ran all along the shore,
And lighten’d all the river with a blaze:
The waken’d tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.

The imagery here manages to be simultaneously daring, precise, horrifying and beautiful. He’s saying that as the fire spread rapidly along the shore of the River Thames, it became ‘a quay of fire’, ‘And lighten’d all the river with a blaze:’, which is a quite extraordinary metaphor.

And the effect is heightened by the contrast between the attributes we would normally associate with a stone quay – solidity, darkness, cold, steadiness – with the attributes of fire – light, heat, ephemerality, destructiveness. A normal quay is a haven for ships and a platform for commerce; this is a place of terror.

And if this image weren’t amazing enough, Dryden tops it with this startling change of perspective, where he give us a fishes’ eye view of the fire:

The waken’d tides began again to roar,
And wondering fish in shining waters gaze.

You know, Dryden has often been criticised for being too prosaic; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed Dryden and Pope as ‘prose classics’, but to me this is really remarkable poetry. There are lots of fascinating accounts of the Great Fire of London, but it takes a poet to wonder how it must have looked to the fish in the River Thames.

And I could go on, because Dryden does, at some length – he describes the progress of the fire, the King awakening and doing his best to save his subjects; the miraculous moment when God uses rain-clouds as a fire extinguisher; the scorched aftermath; and the vision of a modern city rising like a phoenix from the flames. So I do encourage you to have a read of the rest.

And before we hear Dryden’s account again, I’d like to read you some of Samuel Pepys’ famous description of the Great Fire of London, so we can see how the two writers took a very different approach to the same subject:

Sunday 2 September 1666

(Lord’s day). Some of our mayds sitting up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City. So I rose and slipped on my nightgowne, and went to her window, and thought it to be on the backside of Marke-lane at the farthest; but, being unused to such fires as followed, I thought it far enough off; and so went to bed again and to sleep. About seven rose again to dress myself, and there looked out at the window, and saw the fire not so much as it was and further off. So to my closett to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge. So I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower, and there got up upon one of the high places, Sir J. Robinson’s little son going up with me; and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge; which, among other people, did trouble me for poor little Michell and our Sarah on the bridge. So down, with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it begun this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding-lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish-street already. So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steeleyard, while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

This is terrific too isn’t it? And it’s completely different to Dryden’s approach. Instead of the big picture, Pepys give us the first-person perspective, of being woken up in the middle of the night and looking out the window, then getting up and going out into the streets and climbing up to a higher place to get a better view. And we get all the little details, of Pepys’ nightgown, and the names of streets, and glimpses of ‘poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another’. And those pigeons hovering ‘about the windows and balconys’ until their wings were singed by the fire.

By contrast, Dryden presents himself as an omniscient narrator, giving us a panoramic view of the city and the fire, zooming in on particular details and then zooming out again. Pepys gives us glimpses of real people, but the figures in Dryden’s account are more like a catalogue of types, carefully chosen, as we’ve seen, to balance out low and high status characters and give arepresentative sample of society – workers and merchants, revellers, murderers, courtesans, traitors, lovers, mothers, infants, and fire fighters.

Whereas Pepys gives us the breathless first-hand account, with all its vividness, Dryden is more artful, both politically, as we have scene, and also poetically. It’s an unashamedly artificial style of writing, where we sense that every element has been carefully considered and composed. Pepys is reporting the fire, but Dryden is using it, even wielding it – it’s as if the poem is narrated by a giant holding up a burning torch to reveal the ancient wooden medieval city of London, illuminating it for a few shining moments before it vanishes forever.