Well, if this were a poetry reading in Dublin, Ireland,
in a saloon, this would be the moment in the evening
when somebody in the back of the room
would bawl out to the type up front making like a poet,
ah, shut up and give us a song, you blatherer.
[LAUGHTER]
And it's always struck me as curious the poetry
that we read on the page is often
got so far away from song.
There was a time, of course, when the all poems in English
were sung.
And back in Shakespeare's day, every courtier
could turn a song lyric.
Well, I guess it's one of the things you
try to do if you still like a rhyme and meter which
have stuck around in songs of course.
And since this is such an intellectual crowd here
tonight, I thought I would give you a really high class
intellectual song which takes us through a few centuries
of intellectual history in Western
Europe in a few minutes.
This song is called Great Chain of Being,
and I sort of made the tune up.
Now Great Chain of Being is, of course, an old received idea.
Back in the late Renaissance I guess, most people in Europe
who thought about it would accept
this idea of the great chain of being,
a metaphor if you like, a way of explaining the universe.
And I don't need to refresh many of you who
find this idea in Shakespeare's plays
even then what the great chain of being was,
but you know everything in the universe
is arranged in a sort of hierarchy
like links going down a chain.
At the top you have God, the Father,
then going down the chain of being a little more you
have angels underneath God.
Going farther on down you have man.
Then the next link down would be woman.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not arguing for the great chain of being,
I'm just trying to remember what the heck it was.
And then underneath women you had children,
and then underneath all these human links
you would have all important animals,
higher mammals, rhinoceros, giraffes down
to unimportant animals like newts, and slugs, and worms.
And then continuing down the chain and importance then
you come to plants.
I suppose high in the chain would be a giant Redwood trees
and low on the chain would be Brussel sprouts or pond scum.
And then, going down the chain still further.
So you have minerals.
High up would be gold and jewels, precious stones.
And low down would be mud, dung.
And everything has its place in this hierarchy.
And everything's connected together.
That's just the way they looked at the universe.
And of course, as we recall, it was a universe
with the Earth at the center and sun, moon, stars, planets
all circling the Earth attending on us.
Then of course in the Renaissance
something happened to this symmetrical view of things.
So the song's sung by a guy who wonders:
whatever happened to the great chain of being
and what if anything have we got today to take its place?
[SINGING] Drinking smooth wine in a castle or digging potatoes
knee deep in dung.
Everybody in creation knew just how high
or how low he hung on that ladder with Lord God
at the top, dumb mud at the bottom rung.
Great chain of being, great chain of being.
Well no, man was top dog on Mother Earth
and woman was his marrow bone.
And a woman giving suck to a child cut more ice than a woman
alone.
And the cruddiest of sparrows glittered
more than any precious stone in hierarchy, in hierarchy.
Well then, Copernicus picked up his hammer,
Galileo held the spike and they hit that great chain
a wallop just as pretty as you like.
Old Earth went flying from its center
like the sprocket out of a bike.
All its spokes busted, all its spokes busted.
Well, nowadays every creature goes rattling around worked
loose from that golden chain.
And the angle worm and the angel can't connect with each other
again.
And me I'm fixing to let myself play out in the pouring rain.
Snapped off and dangling, snapped off and dangling.
Well now, I wonder who's been sitting in the good Lord's
old arm chair.
I wonder if they're still snakes down below
and a blessed mother up there keeping an eye on me
or just the credit bureau and Medicare.
Is seeing believing?