Notes From My Knapsack 5-20-07
Jeff Gill

Imagine a sailor, long away from England.

His last leave-taking turned awkward, and our Roger was estranged from three brothers.
Forty years passed, and he returned from the ocean trade wealthy, looking to retire quietly in his home county. There were three nephews, a niece, and a cousin once removed who lived a bit of a recluse life in the forest.

Roger said to himself, as people say in poems of the year 1801:
“Yet hold! I’m rich; - with one consent they’ll say,
‘You’re welcome, Uncle, as the flowers in May.’
No; I’ll disguise me, be in tatters dress’d,
And best befriend the lads who treat me best.””

You’ve heard these kind of stories, no doubt. Roger goes as a beggar to the three nephews and is roughly treated and ill-used by each; even the niece shrieks and shies away.

When he wanders into the woods to search for “surly John,” where Roger finds him and says “I hunger, fellow; prithee, give me food!”
John does not run him off or condemn him for the “sin” of poverty, but simply replies:

“Give! am I rich? This hatchet take, and try
Thy proper strength, nor give those limbs the lie;
Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal;
And while that hand is thine, and thine a leg,
Scorn of the proud or of the base to beg.”

Our incognito wealthy sailor is delighted by the answer, reveals himself, and shares his fortune, saying to John “With beef and brandy (we’ll) kill all kinds of care;
We’ll beer and biscuit on our table heap,
And rail at rascals, till we fall asleep.”

When John dies, Roger leaves the rest for the benefit of the poor, but still none as inheritance for his relations. Or at least, that’s the story.

If you have walked from Denison’s lower campus along Granville’s Broadway, across College and up to “the Hill,” the gate next to Cleveland Hall carries an inscription on either side.

On the left, many laugh at the sentiment, proper for a long, long stairway leading up a steep hillside, speaking of “The heights by great men reached and kept/ Were not attained by sudden flight,/ But they, while their companions slept,/ Were toiling upward in the night.” a piece from Longfellow’s “The Ladder of Saint Augustine.”

The right hand inscription sticks in the imagination of many a DU grad, but the source is little known. It is two lines from a 2,400 line poem (filling around 58 standard pages) called “The Parish Register,” written in 1801 and published in 1807 by one George Crabbe.

Students are directly admonished: “Work, feed thyself, to thine own powers appeal,/
Nor whine out woes thine own right-hand can heal.”

Crabbe is little known today but indirectly; his poems were a major influence in Thomas Hardy’s novels, and a segment from another long poem, “The Borough,” was the basis for Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”

Already a century old and obscure in 1906, these lines stuck in the memory of one of Denison’s better read presidents, and they a literate bunch, to be sure. Emory Hunt was president at the college from 1901 to 1912, and was the first occupant of a new president’s home he named “Beth Eden,” or “House of Peace” in Hebrew. Oriental and English literature were all one to President Hunt, and when new ornamental gates to join upper and lower campuses were planned early in his administration, he personally selected the inscriptions, leaving an impression on students that continues today.

There is a second inscription-flanked gate which contains quotes from Franklin’s “Poor Richard” and another mysterious source, which will be another column anon.

The soft limestone of the panels had worn dangerously over the decades, and President Blair Knapp renewed them with sterner stuff in the 1960’s, but the cryptic quotes remained the same.

As honorary degree recipient Douglas Holtz-Eakin, economic adviser to the McCain campaign and former head of the Congressional Budget Office, said to the graduating DU class of 2007, “Your first task now is: Get a job.” He got the applause of many parents on the lower campus lawn last weekend, and I thought of George Crabbe, and hoped he was smiling.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; while approving of pastors who write poetry, he’s not so sure about a 58 page poem. Send him anything but a 59 page poem to knapsack77@gmail.com.