In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  MINA GORJI: He imagines himself into the being of a ladybird, hiding in a cowslip pips – bell – cowslip bell, in a storm, and he imagines what it’s like to be this little ladybird buffeted by the tempest in a storm. And, on the one hand, it is an expression of his own feelings, but, on the other hand, which other poet imagines what it’s like to be a ladybird in that way, inside a cowslip bell? And it’s a beautiful poem:

  In the cowslip pips I lie,

  Hidden from the buzzing fly,

  While green grass beneath me lies,

  Pearled with dew like fishes’ eyes.

  That poem’s expressing a sense of menace, as well as the cosy safety of being inside the cowslip bell.

  Effectively, Clare was isolated from his family in the asylums, with a visit from one of his sons and no visit from his wife in the twenty-four years he was living there. He was not entirely cut-off from society, though, by any means.

  JONATHAN BATE: They let him go into Northampton, into the town, and he sits outside the church and he writes poems for local young men to give to their girlfriends on St Valentine’s Day in return for some tobacco. He’s got a little cottage industry going there.

  In many of the poems written at that time, there is a sense of being cut-off from nature, family and places that Clare knew. Fortunately, Jonathan Bate said, the enlightened asylum superintendent William Knight wrote them down, and many of them were published after Clare’s death.

  JONATHAN BATE: And probably the greatest of them all is this poem ‘I Am’. ‘I am the self-consumer of my woes.’ And it’s an extraordinary poem about loss:

  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

  Into the living sea of waking dreams,

  Where there is neither sense of life or joys,

  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;

  E’en the dearest – that I loved the best –

  Are strange – nay, rather stranger than the rest.

  [There is an] extraordinary sense of isolation there. And then, in the final stanza, he longs to go back to childhood, to be lying with the grass below, above the vaulted sky.

  Clare dropped out of fashion partly as, with the death of Byron, Romantic poetry petered out and there was a transitional period before Tennyson and Victorian poetry came along. He was talked about a lot, though, Simon Kövesi said, and, at one point, a rumour went about that he had died and this was discussed in newspapers, which gave the asylum superintendent a chance to raise a subscription to meet his fees.

  SIMON KÖVESI: Throughout the 1850s and ’60s, big Victorian writers, like Samuel Smiles, Edwin Paxton Hood, Eliza Cook, write really celebratory verse about Clare. A lot of people used Clare as an example and a warning to working-class people: don’t have literary aspirations because you’ll end up mad or drunk or dead. They’ll talk about Chatterton or Burns, and Clare becomes an example of that.

  Dickens did not think much of Clare, which affected Clare’s reputation, but he started to be promoted by twentieth-century poets such as Ted Hughes, Tom Paulin and Seamus Heaney. Until recently, he was not even one of the big six Romantic poets – Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron – who are taught in schools.

  JONATHAN BATE: It really has only been in the past twenty or thirty years that – largely because of the work of poets who’ve admired his extraordinary eye for detail – it’s only in that time that he’s come to be regarded as one of the absolutely central great poets of the nineteenth century.

  In the studio afterwards, Simon Kövesi confessed that he was one of the few Clare fans who did not like ‘I Am’, as, he said, it imagines a world without women, which was the opposite of what Clare would have wanted. Jonathan Bate mentioned Mary Joyce, Clare’s childhood sweetheart, whose father was a farmer who prevented their relationship, and it was towards Mary Joyce, his imaginary wife, Clare walked when he left the Epping asylum. Jonathan Bate also mentioned a letter a doctor had sent him after he wrote Clare’s biography a few years ago, in which the doctor linked Clare’s mental health to syphilis and the mercury given to treat it. There was mention of Clare’s relationship with enclosure, which Simon Kövesi said was not clean. He worked on the enclosure gangs for about four years, building walls and fences, and in a limekiln, which produced lime for recovering soil for agriculture on the newly enclosed land. We want Clare to be this great environmental protest poet, he said, but his socioeconomic position was such that he did not really have a position to resist it economically.

  EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  ‘He who saw the deep’ – that’s a quotation, the first words of the Epic of Gilgamesh, said to be the first great masterpiece of literature, a poem with roots more than 4,000 years old in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, and rediscovered in the nineteenth century. It tells of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who, with his best friend Enkidu, fights a giant and kills the Bull of Heaven and, alone, travels across the waters of death to meet the one man who survived the great flood in the vain hope of learning from him how to live for ever. In his adventure, Gilgamesh becomes a wiser man and a better king and learns to accept his mortality. We have much, but not all, of the ancient text from clay tablets gathered near Mosul and it is hoped more discoveries will continue to fill the gaps.

  Statue of a figure often identified as Gilgamesh from the palace of King Sargon II at Khorsabad in northern Iraq.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Epic of Gilgamesh were: Andrew George, professor of Babylonian at SOAS, University of London; Frances Reynolds, Shillito fellow in Assyriology at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford, and fellow of St Benet’s Hall, Oxford; and Martin Worthington, senior lecturer in Assyriology at the University of Cambridge and fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

  Andrew George took us back to the origins of the poem, which was written down on clay tablets in cuneiform script in the very first centuries of the second millennium BC, nearly 4,000 years ago, although this was probably once a poem told by bards before it came to be written down. The clay tablets are very durable, and pieces of the poem have survived that were created over a very long period, from about the nineteenth century BC down to 100 BC. The poem was not static, but evolved and developed over that time. It may well be that there was one creative genius behind the first written version, drawing on existing material and folklore. The version of the poem of which we have the oldest fragments has a different mood from the poem that is much better preserved, from 1,000 years later, which has a distinctive voice.

  ANDREW GEORGE: The mood changes from a poem about the glory of an epic hero, the glory of the greatest hero and king of old, to one that is essentially a meditation upon the facts of life and, particularly, on death. This, it seems to me, is an intervention in the poem that is very considerable and changes it completely, and then I would think that this is also the work of an individual.

  The poem largely fell out of human knowledge for 2,000 years, the story forgotten and the tablets lost or undecipherable. Then clay tablets started to come to light in the 1850s in their tens of thousands and the first great discovery, in 1850, resulted in 20,000 clay tablets with cuneiform script on them being sent to the British Museum in London. In 1866, George Smith started to study these and, within ten years, he was able to give a fair translation of the preserved parts of the epic. Since George Smith, there have been more discoveries.

  ANDREW GEORGE: We are essentially pioneers in Assyriology, recovering the world’s oldest literature. There’s not just Gilgamesh, but many other compositions. This is a work that continues. I’ve been the latest person to have had the privilege in bringing together the texts about Gilgamesh but it’s work that must continue. But our problem is that Assyriology is not very well financed and always vulnerable to cuts, so we’re not sure if this field has a future – we desperately hope that it has.

  The story of the poem is amazing, Frances Reynolds said, starting with a poetic prologue and a hymn before the narrative gets going.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: We h
ave Gilgamesh as a king in Uruk who’s abusing his power, it’s a period of tyranny, the city can’t function as it should. As a result, there’s an outcry, he’s preoccupying the people, particularly the young, in martial exercises, he’s abusing his rights. And, in response, the mother goddess creates a wild man, Enkidu, from clay to be a match to Gilgamesh. And the idea is that this will therefore absorb his energies, his aggression.

  After being moulded from clay, Enkidu is brought up with the herds, eating grass, drinking at the waterhole with the gazelles. In order for Enkidu and Gilgamesh to meet, there is a bridging device, which is Shamhat, a prostitute from the temple of the city of Uruk, a high-status cultic prostitute who was living in the heart of the city and is sent out to trap Enkidu. He goes on to meet Gilgamesh and they fight.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Hold on, I mean, let’s talk about the entrapment, it’s worth talking about. He comes, she seduces him. It’s very important that he is humanised through contact with a woman, which takes place unabashedly and unashamedly for seven days and seven nights.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: Absolutely.

  MELVYN BRAGG: And, in the end, he is humanised. He’s more of a human because of this particular sort of contact, particularly for so long.

  Enkidu cannot then live with the gazelles any more, Frances Reynolds said, and he has the intelligence and wisdom to connect with humans. Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight and the outcome is a draw; they become firm friends and set off to the Cedar Forest where they fight and kill the guardian, an ogre called Humbaba. This is an act of hubris, an offence to the gods. After that encounter, Gilgamesh and Enkidu carry on.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: When Gilgamesh is washing after the battle, the goddess Ishtar sees him and desires him and proposes marriage. We have a wonderful inversion then of the classical proposal of marriage from a man to a woman, with the goddess proposing marriage to Gilgamesh. However, Ishtar is the goddess of sex and violence – a proposal from her is an extremely dangerous matter. Gilgamesh rejects her advances.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Because her previous lovers have come to a very dire end, every one of them.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: Exactly. If one looks at her dating history, one is not encouraged to be the latest partner of Ishtar.

  Enkidu, in dreams, discovers he is going to die and these dreams come true, he does die, which causes great grief to Gilgamesh. In response, Gilgamesh sets off in the path of the sun to find a man who has survived a great flood, in the hope of discovering from him the secret of immortal life. Gilgamesh is given a test before being immortalised, which is to stay awake, but he falls asleep for seven days and the humiliation for this great king is that he cannot even conquer sleep, let alone death. Gilgamesh has also been given a plant of rejuvenation, but this is stolen while he is bathing. He then travels back to Uruk with the ferryman who had helped him cross the waters to reach the flood survivor.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: When he reaches his city, he is able to reach a reconciliation that, while every mortal individual will die, the human race is eternal, and he can see the city as an expression of humanity and of future generations. It’s the classic story of a journey that ends where it’s begun, but with different perception.

  Since it was first translated, the story has been called a poem and, if we are able to call it that rather than prose, it is because we are lucky, Martin Worthington told us. In Babylonia, when they wrote works that we call poems, they would lay them out in poetic lines, with each line a complete clause or sentence, syntactically complete, which was not the case for unvarnished prose, and this good fortune allows us to make the distinction.

  MARTIN WORTHINGTON: Also, what we call Babylonian poems have verses that are normally constructed around three or four nuggets of meaning, meaning one principal word. And this makes them tremendously economical. If you take a verse of Babylonian poetry and translate it into English, you often find the number of words doubles.

  The Babylonian poems do not have rhyme in the way that we might expect, and they do not have a rhythm in the way many English poems do, but there is a great force in the words and a lot of verbal artistry, so we can comfortably call Gilgamesh a poem, even if the Babylonians themselves did not seem to have talked about poems in the way that the western tradition does. There is also repetition, a feature of Mesopotamian poetry in general.

  MARTIN WORTHINGTON: It already starts in Samaria and it carries through to Babylonian. And it can take many forms. You can have the repetition of an entire passage, so ten lines appear here and then they appear later. You can have repetition within a line or you could, for example, have a string of lines that start with the same word. And, at different times, different poets use all of these strategies.

  We can speculate as to why this repetition happens, he said, based on our own literary sympathies, but it is a striking feature of Mesopotamian literature.

  The qualities of Gilgamesh the king are not static, they develop. He starts as king, a bad one, which was in line with political thought in Mesopotamia that, if a king were to exercise power properly and to everyone’s advantage, that king must be counselled.

  ANDREW GEORGE: Our problem with Gilgamesh – this great giant hero living in Uruk, whose mother is a goddess – is that he’s superhuman, he doesn’t have a counsellor. And therefore the story has to bring a counsellor to him and that’s one of Enkidu’s jobs, to make him a counsellor. But, later on in the poem, we discover that the kingship of Gilgamesh is not really at issue any more, that he becomes just one of us, and the reason this poem resonates for us is because we can identify with his human struggle as a man.

  Gilgamesh and Enkidu complement one another in several ways, Frances Reynolds said. They match physically, with their supreme beauty, their stature and, in the sense of their abilities, their aggression, their energy. Gilgamesh, for the first time, finds a peer, somebody with whom he can travel, with whom he can have these adventures. When Shamhat and Enkidu are on their way back to Uruk, they pass shepherds who tell Enkidu he looks like Gilgamesh. The word ‘love’ is used between them, too.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: This has been a matter of much debate, what the nature of the relationship actually was between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And this obviously also reflects the responses to the poem of the readers of the time. But it seems clear that, as well as a very close friendship, there was also a sexual relationship between them.

  Within the text, there are other indications of how Enkidu and Gilgamesh relate to each other, Martin Worthington told us. For example, Gilgamesh prefigured Enkidu’s arrival in dreams: first, where he saw a meteor; and, in the second dream, where he saw an axe. Meteors were an important source of iron at this time for tools and weapons. One way of looking at this would be to interpret the way that Enkidu had been created by the gods from a pinch of clay and then made human by Shamhat over seven nights.

  MARTIN WORTHINGTON: In the first dream, we have a meteor, i.e. a raw material that comes down from heaven, and, in the second dream, we have an axe, i.e. a humanised artefact made out of the raw material from the first dream. And so you can interpret these two dreams as a tacit prefiguration of Enkidu’s transformation.

  Also, Enkidu is going to be Gilgamesh’s axe because he is the friend at his side, he protects him. Once Enkidu is dead, suddenly Gilgamesh has an axe, a replacement for the lost Enkidu.

  There was no timber in ancient Mesopotamia, it had to be brought in from the mountains, so the Cedar Forest, which Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut down with an axe, was a well-known idea in ancient Mesopotamia. The poet of Gilgamesh visualises it somewhat differently from they way one might expect for a forest in this region.

  ANDREW GEORGE: Only recently a new manuscript has come to light that plugs a gap in the story and describes the Cedar Forest to us. It’s actually a jungle. It’s a jungle filled with the shrieks of birds, the cacophony of insects, and monkeys yelling in the trees, all entertaining the guardian, Humbaba, who lives in the middle, like a king, surrounded by his musicians.

  Gilgamesh and
Enkidu go to the forest to kill Humbaba and chop down his trees, but the poet brings ambivalence into this episode, which might be thought heroic and glorious until the heroes realise they are acting against the will of the gods.

  ANDREW GEORGE: Indeed, the new piece of tablet tells us, at the end, after Enkidu and Gilgamesh have chopped down the trees, that Enkidu looks back and he says, ‘My friend, we’ve created this wasteland, what shall we tell the gods when we get back home?’

  In that, there is awareness that humankind lives in an environment and can destroy and damage that environment, and that is wrong, and to invade someone else’s country and kill their king and pillage the resources is also morally wrong.

  It is after this important episode in the Cedar Forest that Gilgamesh has the encounter with Ishtar, when he rudely rejects her offer of marriage and she takes her revenge. She calls down the Bull of Heaven from her father, who is the sky god, to kill Gilgamesh and destroy Uruk.

  FRANCES REYNOLDS: This is a ferocious animal, its breath withers vegetation and pits open up in the earth; it can destroy anything that’s in its path. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu do prevail. And there’s a very nice codicil to that where Ishtar’s so angry she goes up on the ramparts of Uruk and is actually abusing the heroes. So Enkidu tears off the haunch of the bull, the hind leg, and throws it at Ishtar. And this is part of the aetiology for the constellation of Taurus and how it appears in the sky to have one leg missing.