Poem of the week - A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn by Sir Peter Lely

Playwright, poet and novelist Aphra Behn was the first woman to make her living as a writer. Not much is known about her early life, but most commentators agree that she was born Aphra Johnson, some time around 1640, the illegitimate or foster daughter of Lady Willoughby, whose husband was the founder and governor of the South American colony, Surinam. Behn certainly lived for a time in Surinam; she draws on the experience in her novel, Oroonoko, a colourful, action-packed page-turner containing digressions that reveal a gifted travel diarist. On her return to England she was briefly married, probably to a Dutch merchant. She became a spy for Charles II in Belgium, and, insufficiently recompensed by the King, subsequently spent time in a debtors’ prison. These unusual experiences must have helped foster her independent outlook, providing an additional perspective from which to satirise English courtly behaviour.

Her verse shares the elegance and wit of the Restoration comedy-of-manners to which she was such a brilliant and prolific contributor. But poetry affords her an opportunity to explore sexual behaviour and gender politics in a more personal and combative way than the plays. Under cover of pastoral conventions, Behn writes observant, searching poems about her complex personal relationships with other male and female writers in her coterie, or “cabal”, and her satires on male sexual behaviour are astute, if at times a shade melancholy.

This week’s poem, appropriately set in the “holy time” of Lent, is one of the jauntier satires. “A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation” ostensibly sympathises with its male addressee. “Poor Damon” is on a strict diet, but not for reasons of piety or vanity. He is suffering from the pox.

The real identity of “Damon” remains uncertain. Janet Todd suggests it may be the playwright Edward Ravenscroft. If Behn is not simply using comic exaggeration, he must have been unusually young-looking: “I durst have sworn thou hads’t thy pusillage” implies he appeared to be too young for sexual activity. Behn’s own footnote tells us she had been hoping he would write a prologue for one of her plays. We should clearly infer a professional rather than personal relationship.

The rake-hero was a favourite character in Restoration comedy, but in the poem he is the anti-hero. The unpleasant treatments for syphilis in the 17th century are described in mocking detail. “Tabernacler” refers to the regimen of the sweating-tub, a kind of fumigation. (Tabernaclers were originally those worshippers who used the temporary structures that replaced the churches burnt down in the Fire of London.)

Behn fast-forwards in the second stanza to “Blooming May”, and enjoys elaborating on the spring-time celebrations from which the unhappy “swain” must be excluded. The satirical tone from now on steadily sharpens. Damon, naturally, will blame a woman for his condition, and Behn scathingly hands him the weapon: “And ‘tis but just thou shouldst in Rancor grow/ Against the sex that has confined thee so.” Pretending to take the man’s side, she declares she could “curse this Female” but there is no need to do so, since “She needs it not, that thus could handle you.” The woman in question is already cursed – and perhaps not only because she herself has the infection. Male inconstancy is one of Behn’s perennial themes. As she says elsewhere, “The roving youth in every shade/ Has left some sighing and abandoned Maid,/ For ‘tis a fatal lesson he has learn’d,/ After fruition ne’re to be concern’d.”

The rhyming couplets nip along in a characteristically lively and unforced manner. Behn has honed her rage against misogyny to an elegant, almost airy point. Although we have only a sketchy sense of the poem’s context, there is plenty of vivid detail, and an unmistakable emotional charge. The inscription on Aphra Behn’s tombstone in Westminster Abbey reads, “Here lies a proof that Wit can never be/ Defence enough against Mortality.” Behn’s poetry suggests otherwise. “The Incomparable Astrea”, as she was sometimes called, stands as a landmark satirist at the beginning of the Augustan age – and her clear, knowing, distinctive voice rings out directly from that vantage-point to our own.

A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation Poor Damon! Art thou caught? Is’t ev’n so? Art thou become a Tabernacler too? Where sure thou dost not mean to Preach or Pray, Unless it be the clean contrary way: This holy time I little thought thy sin Deserved a Tub to do its penance in. O how you’ll for the’Aegyptian Flesh-pots wish, When you’r half-famished with your Lenten dish, Your almonds, currans, biskits hard and dry, Food that will Soul and Body mortifie: Damn’d Penetential Drink, that will infuse Dull Principles into thy Grateful Muse. - Pox on’t that you must needs be fooling now Just when the wits had greatest need of you. Was Summer then so long a coming on, That you must make an Artificial one? Much good may’t do thee; but ‘tis thought thy Brain E’er long will wish for cooler days again. For Honesty no more will I engage: I durst have sworn thou’dst had thy pusillage. Thy Looks the whole Cabal have cheated too; But thou wilt say, most of the Wits do so. Is this thy writing Plays? who thought thy Wit An interlude of Whoring would admit? To Poetry no more thou’lt be inclin’d, Unless in Verse to damn all Woman-kind: And ‘tis but Just thou shouldst in Rancor grow Against the sex that has confined thee so. All things in Nature now are Brisk and Gay At the Approaches of the Blooming May: The new-fletched Birds do in our Arbors sing A thousand Airs to welcome in the Spring; While every Swain is like a Bridegroom drest, And ev’ry Nymph as going to a Feast: The Meadows now their flowry Garments wear, And ev’ry Grove does in its Pride appear: Whiles thou, poor Damon in close Rooms are pent, Where hardly thy own Breath can find a vent. Yet that too is a Heaven, compar’d to th’ Task Of Codling every Morning in a Cask. Now I could curse this Female, but I know, She needs it not, that thus cou’d handle you. Besides, that Vengeance does to thee belong, And ‘twere injustice to disarm thy Tongue. Curse them, dear Swain, that all the Youth may hear, And from thy dire Mishap be taught to fear. Curse till thou hast undone the Race, and all
That did contribute to thy Spring and Fall.

Poem of the week - A Letter to a Brother of the Pen in Tribulation by Aphra Behn