Both Love and Hate fell in a great dispute,
And hard it was each other to confute,
Which did most good, or evil most did shun.
At last with frowning brows Hate thus begun
If you are the type of person who professes to hate poetry, then you should immediately adopt Margaret Cavendish as your poetic godmother. Untrained, unschooled, uninterested in the finer art of revision and unaffected by the wealth of imagination-killing mechanism which are simply part of the part of the academic process, her poetry rested solely upon the power of her creativity. It is far from perfect when it comes to all those terms which is at the case of why people hate poetry: meter, rhyme, rhythm and all the various assorted lesser-known elements of constructing verse. Instead, what the reader gets is poetry that is fun to read and filled with the stimulant of a person blessed with a natural ability to acquire the needed to accomplish the goal in mind. The organically trained philosophical state of mind of Cavendish is here display in an example that is listed as neither poem nor fancy, but along with other verse categorized as Dialogues.
In every brain there do loose atoms lie
Those which are sharp, from them do fancies fly.
Long airy atoms nimble are, and free,
But atoms round and square are dull and sleepy.
Part One of this book features a series of poems about atoms. In fact, it would not be going too far to say that it features a lot of poems about atoms. Among the titles accompanying this short example are those of longer or equal length include: “A World Made of Atoms,” “Of Atoms that Make Flame,” “What Atoms Make Heat and Cold” and even “What Atoms Make a Palsy or Apoplexy.” To put it simply, Cavendish was obsessed with science. She was not just the first British women to ever publish a book of poetry, she is also a progenitor of the genre that would come to be known as science fiction. Cavendish also holds the honor of being the first women invited to attend a meeting of England’s national academy of sciences, the Royal Society. Her atomic poems are a blast.
The head of man’s a church, where reason preaches,
Directs the life, and every thought it teaches,
Persuades the mind to live in peace and quiet,
And not in fruitless contemplation’s riot.
Under the category of “Fancies” can be found a collection of titles which compare one thing to another: the tongue to a wheel and birds to a ship as well as titles indicating a more directly metaphorical relationship such as “Nature’s Dress” and “The Soul’s Garment.” They may be called “Fancies” but in structure they differ not from either the “Poems” or “Dialogues.” And that’s what makes reading this work of Cavendish an exploration of the pleasure of poetry for anyone who has trouble with it. None of the works in this collection are adventures in abstraction that try to disguise the meaning of the poem. They are what they are; the Lady delivers the goods.
When a reader comes to the poem title “The Pastime and Recreation of the Queen of Fairies in Fairyland, the Center of the Earth” you can bet that the subject of the verse is how those occupants in Fairyland located deep within the earth spend their free time. On the other hand, “Of Fairies in the Brain” is not an intellectual exercise in metaphor, but an explicit hypothetical consideration of whether fairies existing in the brain are the actual cause behind dreams, visions and the production of imaginative ideas.
