Washing Day

 

from Washing Day

The Muses have turned gossips; they have lost

The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase,

Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse,

In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on,

Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream,

Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire

By little whimpering boy, with rueful face --

Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day.

...

Then would I sit me down, and ponder much

Why washings were; sometimes, through hollow hole

Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft

The floating bubbles; little dreaming then

To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball

Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach

The sports of children and the toils of men.

Earth, air, and sky, the ocean hath its bubbles,

And verse is one of them--this most of all.

 

-Anna Laetitia Barbauld

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) was a poet, essayist, literary critic, and a pioneering author of children's books. She was from a Dissenting family in the Midlands. 

 

The measure doesn't seem at all 'slip-shod' to me, but quite a solid blank verse. You can decide if you think she's 'prattling on'--I might say yes, but in a very amusing and ironic way. I've only quoted a quarter of the poem--the very beginning and the very end. You can find the entire poem here. The Montgolfier brothers were pioneers of flight by hot-air balloon.

 

I came on this because I recently finished reading Daisy Hay's Dinner With Joseph Johnson, which came out in 2022. Very good! Joseph Johnson (1738-1809) was an important left-wing publisher, also from a Dissenting background, who, in addition to first publishing Barbauld, was also the publisher of Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin (Charles' grandfather), William Cowper, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Johnson published early Wordsworth and Coleridge, and was William Blake's primary employer. (Though Blake published a lot of his own books himself.) Johnson was famous for his weekly dinners--Benjamin Franklin would show up, until the American Revolution got under way, and Franklin left England--and when Johnson was imprisoned for selling books the government didn't like in 1799, he continued the dinners in prison.

 

I don't think I'd ever heard of Anna Laetitia Barbauld before, but part of the poem was quoted in the book--"Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day." and I decided I had to find the rest of it.