The Merry-Thought | Page 2

primitive form of folk art produced as a more or less spontaneous act of play or passion, and achieving some small degree of respectability only when practiced by a respected poet and collected with his more serious verse.[2] Like modern "serial" graffiti, it could function as a form of communication since the first inscriptions often provoked those who followed to make their own contributions.
[Footnote 1: On the other hand, the willingness of publishers to bring out such material would have suited well enough with Pope's picture of heir heroic games. See Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James utherland, Twickenham Edition, 2d ed., rev. (London: Methuen, 1953), 97-306, bk 2, lines 17-220.]
[Footnote 2: See, for example, W. H. Auden's "Academic Graffiti," in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (London: Faber and Faber, 976), 510-18. Such a verse as the following is more clever than most raffiti, but like ordinary graffiti it remains essentially "unpoetic": Lord Byron / Once succumbed to a Siren. / His flesh was weak, / Hers reek."]
Indeed, one of the more interesting aspects of graffiti is that in an impermanent form it testifies to the continuance over the centuries of certain human concerns. Recent studies of graffiti have often focused on particular modern conflicts between races or nations, on drug problems, and on specific political commentary.[3] But such local matters aside, the content of modern graffiti is surprisingly like that of earlier periods: scatological observations, laments of lovers, accusations against women for their sexual promiscuity, the repetition of "trite" poems and sayings, and messages attributed to various men and women suggesting their sexual availability and proficiency. And if the political targets have changed over the years, many of the political attitudes have remained consistent. Graffiti is an irreverent form, with strong popular and anti-establishment elements. As actions common to all classes, eating, drinking, defecation, and fornication find their lowly record in graffiti-like form.
[Footnote 3: See, for example, Elizabeth Wales and Barbara Brewer, "Graffiti in the 1970's," Journal of Social Psychology 99 (1976): 115-23.]
On the most basic level, a writer will observe that the excrement of the rich differs in no way from that of the poor. Thus one poem, taken supposedly from a "Person of Quality's Boghouse," has the following sentiment:
Good Lord! who could think, That such fine Folks should stink? (Pt. 2, p. 25)
There is nothing very polite about such observations, and no pretension to art. These verses belong strictly to folklore and the sociology of literature, but they suggest some continuing rumbles of discontent against the class system, the existence among the lower orders of some of the egalitarian attitudes that survived the passing of the Lollards and the Levellers. Who were the writers of these pieces? Were they indeed laborers? Or were they from the lower part of what was called the "middle orders"? Is there some evidence to be found in the very fact that they could write?
Graffiti may, indeed, tell us something about degrees of literacy. One wit remarked that whatever the ability to read or write may have been at the time, almost everyone seemed to have been literate when presented with a bog-house wall: "Since all who come to Bog-house write" (pt. 2, p. 26). The traditional connection between defecation and writing was another comparison apparent to the commentators. One wrote:
There's Nothing foul that we commit, But what we write, and what we sh - - t. (Pt. 2, p. 13)
And the lack of some paper or material to clean the rear end provoked the following sentiment in the form of a litany:
From costive Stools, and hide-bound Wit, From Bawdy Rhymes, and Hole besh - - t. From Walls besmear'd with stinking Ordure, By Swine who nee'r provide Bumfodder Libera Nos---- (Pt. 4, p. 7)
Other types of graffiti, however, vary from the very earnest expression of affection to the nonexcrementally satiric. One of the more unusual is a poem in praise of a faithful and loving wife:
I kiss'd her standing, Kiss'd her lying, Kiss'd her in Health, And kiss'd her dying; And when she mounts the Skies, I'll kiss her flying. (Pt. 3, p. 5)
Underneath this poem, The Merry-Thought records a favorable comment on the sentiment. Even more earnest is the complaint of a woman about her fate in love:
Since cruel Fate has robb'd me of the Youth, For whom my Heart had hoarded all its Truth, I'll ne'er love more, dispairing e'er to find, Such Constancy and Truth amongst Mankind. Feb. 18, 1725. (Pt. 2, p. 12)
We will never know why she was unable to marry the man she truly loved; but her bitterness may have been short-lived. Just after this inscription comes a cynical comment identifying the lady as a member of the Walker family. And the writer insists that like all women she was inconstant, since he kissed her