Poem of the Day: ‘The Headache. To Aurelia’

It is a truth more or less universally acknowledged, though not by feminists, that nobody is more rapacious in the oppression of women than other women. Any girls’ school alumna will tell you that this is so. So will any member of a Facebook support group for mothers of young children. “Support” is a word which in that particular context means “a million backhanded ways to tell you you’re doing it wrong.”That women can be cruel to one other is hardly a fresh phenomenon of the social-media age. In Jane Austen’s novels, scenes of drawing-room cattery set the heroic Elizabeth Bennets apart from the mean-spirited Miss Bingleys, for the benefit of both the reader and the desirable man with ten thousand pounds a year. And in today’s Poem of the Day, the eighteenth-century poet Mary Leapor (1722–1746) observes the same trait in her imagined friend “Aurelia.” Aurelia delights in other women’s shortcomings, but especially in any sign of aging.The poet herself was hardly a denizen of the genteel drawing room. The daughter of a gardener, Leapor entered domestic service as a teenager, working mostly as a kitchen maid. A series of employers alternately encouraged her writing or dismissed her for versifying while the sauce curdled. After her death, from measles, at the age of twenty-four, a friend arranged for the publication of a volume of her poetry, by subscription, for the benefit of her widowed father.As today’s poem makes clear, Leapor was eager not to present herself as a “natural” or untutored poet. The arch humor of these tetrameter couplets, the invocation of classical names and allusions, all locate the poem in its era of neoclassical powdered-wig satire. Yet there’s something earthy in the way this speaker twits the imagined “Aurelia.” Aurelia, the poem suggests, has inherited her failings as a product of original sin, just as the speaker has inherited the habit of making rhymes. The two women make reparation for these “crimes” in suffering from menstrual “cramps and headaches,” which ironically will cease with the advent of gray hairs and wrinkles. For all the poem’s gentility of diction, that’s not exactly drawing-room conversation. Yet it too is a truth, which the poem doesn’t blush to tell.The Headache. To Aureliaby Mary LeaporAurelia, when your zeal makes knownEach woman’s failing but your own,How charming Silvia’s teeth decay,And Celia’s hair is turning grey;Yet Celia gay has sparkling eyes,But (to your comfort) is not wise:Methinks you take a world of painsTo tell us Celia has no brains.Now you wise folk, who make such a potherAbout the wit of one another,With pleasure would your brains resign,Did all your noddles ache like mine.Not cuckolds half my anguish know,When budding horns begin to grow;Nor battered skull of wrestling Dick,Who late was drubbed at single-stick;Not wretches that in fevers fry,Not Sappho when her cap’s awry,E’er felt such torturing pangs as I;Nor forehead of Sir Jeffrey Strife,When smiling Cynthio kissed his wife.Not lovesick Marcia’s languid eyes,Who for her simpering Corin dies,So sleepy look or dimly shine,As these dejected eyes of mine:Not Claudia’s brow such wrinkles madeAt sight of Cynthia’s new brocade.Just so, Aurelia, you complainOf vapours, rheums, and gouty pain;Yet I am patient, so should you,For cramps and headaches are our due:We suffer justly for our crimes,For scandal you, and I for rhymes;Yet we (as hardened wretches do)Still the enchanting vice pursue;Our reformation ne’er begin,But fondly hug the darling sin.Yet there’s a mighty difference tooBetween the fate of me and you;Though you with tottering age shall bow,And wrinkles scar your lovely brow,Your busy tongue may still proclaimThe faults of every sinful dame:You still may prattle nor give o’er,When wretched I must sin no more.The sprightly Nine must leave me then,This trembling hand resign its pen:No matron ever sweetly sung,Apollo only courts the young.Then who would not (Aurelia, pray)Enjoy his favours while they may?Nor cramps nor headaches shall prevail:I’ll still write on, and you shall rail.___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘The Headache. To Aurelia’

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