I remembered what the other subject was, though now it will have to wait.
One month later, October 8, my mind is as blank as an empty sheet of typewriter paper. What is a typewriter? I wrote my doctoral dissertation on an Olympia typewriter my parents bought for me when I was an undergraduate. Then I paid a young lady a dollar a page to type a clean copy, and an other young lady to xerox it on a certain type of paper where it now rests in the Berea library, or at least used to. And the University of Michigan library and the Ohio University library. Michigan, as far as I remember, put all dissertations then on microfilm. Heady stuff. Time for bed. At least I said something, wrote something. The title of my dissertation is, "Images of Evil in the Formal Verse Satire of Hall, Marston, Donne, and Pope." When I am dead and gone, my kids may find it and wonder. The chapters are critical essays on the four writers. It took me three summers in Berea and a number of migraine headaches to get it written. Bill Schafer, one of my colleagues here at the time, took it to his home over a weekend and made suggestions and corrections which I incorporated and it was done. I was and still am very grateful to Bill for his help. Heady stuff so very long ago in dog years especially. 1967 to 1970. The dissertation: My ticket to self respect and a tenure track position at Berea. I was: Dr. Startzman. I always felt like a real fraud in the classroom, for I knew what I didn't know which was vast. Now it is fifty years later and 4:30 a.m. Time for bed for certain.
Though here I am again, still knowing nothing, trying to learn fluency in Spanish, not having much luck. My friend, Fred, and I read carefully and prayerfully a Psalm a day till we finish the 150; then we start over. I do not know how many years we have been doing this, but today, Fred sent me a poem that is apt to our project:
Rex Iudae
David, I say your songs
and live to right my wrongs,
doing so every day.
Yours is the text I pray.
"The days of man are grass"
so swiftly do we pass.
Compared to yours, my sins
mere barkings of my shins,
but depth of our belief
in God as our relief,
that is the faith we share,
our shield against despair.
Renewed, reborn, restored,
"Wait, wait for the Lord."
Tim Murphy
This poem was one of those works that fit my/our situation precisely. Today we are on Psalm 76. The two quotes in the poem should be in italics, but I did not know how to do that. Amen!
Well, this text will not let me go back and insert a comment. What I thought was really interesting about this genre and these works was that Alexander Pope took 2 of John Donnes satires and rewrote them in heroic couplets, the standard verse form for eighteenth century poetry, especially Pope. The last chapter of the dissertation is an extensive, brilliant and insightful critical analysis (ha!) of Pope's "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," the best formal verse satire of the genre. I haven't thought about this work in a long time, forty eight years. My director wanted me to turn several chapters into articles. I didn't want to think about it every again. So, I let it sit, taught, and wrote about other things.
However, what was at the heart of the work was the way the images of evil changed from the English Renaissance to the eighteenth century, from Donne to Pope.