Poem of the Day: ‘Wedlock: A Satire’

Indisputably, the Wesleys of Epworth, Lincolnshire, were remarkable. To begin with, the paterfamilias, Samuel (1662–1735), was extraordinary: a religious dissenter turned Anglican cleric and a poet (though at least one critic reported being “lulled to sleep” by his verses). He was also, by all reports, an irascible man, devoted to controversy, who once abandoned his wife and children for more than a year, over some minor marital dispute buried and forgotten under the accrual of centuries.It goes without saying that the mother, Susanna (1669–1742), was remarkable as well. She might have been remarkable simply for surviving nineteen childbeds (ten children survived to adulthood), and for making do on her husband’s long absences and short finances. But she also organized an effective education for her many children, to commence the day after a child’s fifth birthday. According to her plan, that first day began with the alphabet, learned in its entirety in the first six hours of the child’s life as a pupil, and progressing rapidly to Latin and Greek. Her Sunday-afternoon family devotions, meanwhile, consisting of psalm singing and the reading-out of her husband’s sermons, were meant for her children’s edification but, over time, attracted as many as two hundred people over and above the already-large family.Inevitably, some of the children of this large family were also remarkable. How could they not have been remarkable? The three surviving sons, John, Charles, and Samuel, all followed their father into the Church of England. John and Charles we know as the founders of Methodism, initially a renewal movement within Anglicanism but eventually a separate Christian denomination. Charles and Samuel were poets, Charles becoming famous for his hymn texts: “O, For a Thousand Tongues to Sing,” “Christ Whose Glory Fills the Skies,” “Come On, My Partners in Distress,” among many others. How six of the seven surviving daughters shouldered their burden of being remarkable Wesleys, we don’t know. But we do know about Mehetabel.The older sister of John, Charles, and Samuel, she was a bright child: well educated by her mother, reading the Greek New Testament by the age of eight. As a witty, vivacious teenager, she attracted admirers, none of whom were remarkable enough for the remarkable Wesleys. At twenty-seven, fed up with remarkableness and ready for something a little more elemental, she ran away with one of these admirers. When she came home again, alone and pregnant, her father disposed of her in marriage to a local glazier and plumber, William Wright, effectively disowning her. The union was not a happy one. The child Mehetabel brought to the marriage survived less than a year. When her children with Wright also died in infancy, she blamed his glazing work, with its constant lead exposure, for their deaths. She despised her husband as her social and intellectual inferior. And she wrote poems, passed about among her family and friends but never published in her lifetime. Many were heartfelt laments for her children: “A Mother’s Soliloquy Over her Dying Infant,” “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth.” Others, like today’s Poem of the Day, were simply bitter. “Wedlock: A Satire” is a comic poem, with its hyperbolic rants against the tyranny of marriage and its gratuitous swipes at the Jesuits. In tetrameter couplets, it’s a tight little exercise in the art of the rant. And yet, and yet. Mehetabel Wright was one of those remarkable Wesleys. But her cultured wit became the flash of anger, her intellect a stew of sorrow and resentment. Indisputably, she was remarkable. But the more you know, the less you want to laugh. Wedlock: A Satireby Mehetabel Wesley WrightThou tyrant, whom I will not name,Whom heaven and hell alike disclaim;Abhorred and shunned, for different ends,By angels, Jesuits, beasts and fiends!What terms to curse thee shall I find,Thou plague peculiar to mankind?O may my verse excel in spiteThe wiliest, wittiest imps of night!Then lend me for a while your rage,You maidens old and matrons sage:So may my terms in railing seemAs vile and hateful as my theme.Eternal foe to soft desires,Inflamer of forbidden fires,Thou source of discord, pain and care,Thou sure forerunner of despair,Thou scorpion with a double face,Thou lawful plague of human race,Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth,Thou serpent which the angels fly,Thou monster whom the beasts defy,Whom wily Jesuits sneer at too;And Satan (let him have his due)Was never so confirmed a dunceTo risk damnation more than once.That wretch, if such a wretch there be,Who hopes for happiness from thee,May search successfully as wellFor truth in whores and ease in hell.___________________________________________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: ‘Wedlock: A Satire’

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