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12 Aug 2022
Douglas
Tawn
Full Moon
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Aug 27th
Jul 28th
Device
After these lines from
John Webster’s The White Devil:
FRANCISCO
And by a vaulting engine.
MONTICELSO
An active plot;
He jump’d into his grave.
Prophecy is equivocal:
a rarefied hedging of bets
that pushes the customer to
beware of clauses transfixing
to insubordinate desire.
This encourages indifference:
opinion stretched from pole to pole
contrives to be predictably
unpredictable—all incensed
opium swings from mass to mass.
The vague fate of Britain’s elect
[CON: 42% (+4)]
turns on its axis: excess of
predestinarianism
spoils the fun but it can’t be helped.
Behind the poem...
Taken from Webster’s The White Devil, the lines from which this poem grew describe the murder of Camillo: assassinated while using a vaulting horse. Punning was closely linked in Webster’s time to political and religious subversion. Today, it’s more often dismissed with the same contempt Samuel Johnson expressed for Shakespeare’s ‘quibbles’. For Webster, however, such double meanings and ambiguities were deadly serious. The phenomenon of equivocation – by which a Catholic agent like Guy Fawkes could lie under oath – caused genuine panic in seventeenth-century England. In Device, I’ve considered contemporary indifference to political equivocation … and thrown in a few lame puns (just for good measure).
