I like to try to pay attention to the blogs that post snippets along side my own blog writings on my Google Blogspot page. One such is The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor and his assistants. Today's post is a poem called "A Child's Evening Prayer" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I have heard of that poet many times but have not read much of his work nor about his life and times. I am interested in the perspective of children so I read the poem.
It begins with the line
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
Sometimes a single line really says a great deal. Take for instance one of my current favorites, the response to a woman he is dating by the never-married 39 year old PhD in genetics, Prof. Don Tillman, in The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion. The woman has suggested they go to a coffee shop and Tillman replies
"Oh, I never drink coffee after 3:58 PM because of the half-life of caffeine"
I learn quickly that Prof. Tillman is likely a bit of a nerd and somewhat insensitive to the moment. He may not be much of a romancer.
The line beginning a child's evening prayer was written by Coleridge in about 1807. He is noted as one of the founders of romanticism in England, often said to be a type of art and thought that arose in response to enlightenment's discovery of and focus on classical sources of philosophy and art. In general, from the limited amount I know, I can summarize the romantic drift by saying they focused on the idea that human emotions and feelings matter. They wanted to celebrate feelings and explore them, to feel.
I was surprised to read scientists trying to create directions to keep safe stores of radioactive materials worried about stating directions in any language that would last for 10000 years. There is some thought that human speech is not much older than 25000 years. Thinking that English, for instance, changes quite a lot in only 1000 years, they pointed to Chaucer's language and our difficulties with that.
Today's fashions and themes would be quite likely to steer a man trying to write a child's evening prayer away from beginning with "Ere I …" even if he were trying to set the scene for a child in 1800 in England. We might say something like "before I lay down" (I think we are losing the bothersome distinction between "lay" and "lie" as we seem to have done with "will" and "shall") but check with language people if you are interested. To get a current reaction to the language of 1800, look up Coleridge's poem and see if you can read the whole thing without impatience or irritation. It is one way to see that times change and so do styles.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
