found

I am presenting here the result of some research I've carried out on what I consider to be a novel discovery. In short, I've found what appears to be an early instance of familial strife brought on by a child of indeterminate age undergoing a gender transition, as instantiated by a poem. Below I reproduce the poem and offer an introduction to it in addition to some critical notes. I am not a scholar, but I trust the following will be of some interest to those who are.

A few weeks ago I was taking a little roadtrip up the coast and decided to take a look at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. I had always had some curiosity about the place, but never enough to stop and look around. The environs are enchanting, the physical infrastructure so often obscured by thick dark forest and winding paths. The school of course has its reputation, but I was interested in its day-to-day functioning as a place of learning, growth. 

I wandered across the Linguistics department, and though I found the door to be locked, out with me in the hallway was a table bearing the load of a number of old books, apparently free for the taking. Most were of recent vintage and concerned teaching English as a second language: not something that interests me. But a murky red spine caught my eye and I opened it to find a collection of Early Modern English poetry. I am casually fascinated by this era: The foul seed of early capitalism taking root in the uncanny soil of the north of Europe, the bitter fruit we are compelled to eat from the result to this day. I slipped the book into my purse wandered on. 

I entered the woods and found a table to sit at, opened the book, and found this:

          Squeaking Anthony

1        The Bird of Spring was spurr'd to bring

          A Lord and Wife awarded Life.

          With fed Souls, Heads full

          Of vernal Dawns, eternal Fawns,
5        That May met they
          Their one boon Joy, their dear June Boy.

          Yet in Sight quickly, he is quite sickly.
          The Womb's bleak Bloom's weak.
          His Guardians hope he's hardy and copes
10      But Hope wanes through Woe, Pains,

          And Dread reigns. Red drains

          From Child's meek, mild Cheeks.

          As Seasons roll Reason's sole

          Design to rot, resigned ought

15      A Wife her Role, still rife and whole,

          Claime and hold, though lame and cold.

          Patient Grace at gradient Pace

          A Faith so true for Traites so few.

          Inspired and hale from a Priory Sale, 

20      We tried a pail of Friars' Ale. 

          Desire she wails. Fie Ire to Hell! 

          A lyre swells, a choir, bells

          A higher Spell for their Pyre veiled.

          But Sire he fails, his Spire is frail.

25      They lie there still. 

                                          Heir, Stay little. Thy

          Sweet, tender, Tweet Sender

          Was no Deity's Love, nor Laity's Dove.

          The Devil lies with leveled Eyes

30      Sent in a Demon by Dint of Semen.

          —

          Dear Mother, mirrored Other,

          Four Years your Feares

          That some Deed of Yore bore your dumb Seed

35      Made haunting Days a daunting Haze.

          You hated it well and I waited to tell

          You bore no Blame, just Luck's blown Aim

          Here we are now, how we are near

          And in the whorled Wood, as the World would,

40      

          Bury me and merrie be

Notes:

The title: At a surface level, the title straightforwardly nods to the child depicted in the piece (presumably assigned the name Anthony at birth) and their avian provenance and/or their arguably pathological means of communication. This may well be one of the intended readings of the title, but I propose that it is at least also bears a relation to the contemporaneous work of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" (The poem is unattributed, nor does it have a date, so it is not clear which work is referencing which, the poem the play, or the play the poem). In Act 5, Scene 2 of that work we find the following:

CLEOPATRA

        Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors
        Will catch at us, like strumpets; and scald rhymers
        Ballad us out o' tune: the quick comedians
        Extemporally will stage us, and present
        Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
        Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
        Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
        I' the posture of a whore.

Here we see our Ant(h)ony as invert Cleopatra and the squeaking as a variety of cross-gendered vocalization. Shakespeare is wryly commenting on his own or future era through the mouth of his  creation locked in the fictionalized past, on the page. But staged, what exactly would this be Cleopatra enacting? 

Line 1: The passive mood is used here, obscuring the agent of the event of 'spurring', much like the current ambiguity concerning the etiology of transgender impulses.

Line 6: A "June boy" that arrives in May indicates, at first glance, a baby that was what we would nowadays consider "premature". I think pressing beyond this superficial reading reveals a more fundamental interpretation wherein the child does not meet the parent's high expectations, but they nevertheless insist on clinging to their hopes and pre-conceived (or pre-conception?) notions despite reality. In this sense, the deluded desperation is found not in "June", but in "Boy".

 

Lines 19-24: Up until this point, this piece has been loyally spooneristic, perfect or slant. But here we find that system breaking down and a disorienting swirl of near-rhyme and assonance reaching a perhaps drunken pitch. This bacchanal scene between the parents, followed by profound sexual disappointment, serves as warped, bitter microcosm of their larger hopes and disappointments with their child, complete with concerns about genitalia.

Line 25-26:  Here we find a jarring break after the crescendo of the previous stanza. It is not clear whose voice begins line 26, though the vocative "Heir" can be seen as an indication that it is the voice of a parent, and the remaining lines would further point to the frustrated mother. What interests me however is the further break from rhyme and assonance, and the utter obliteration of the spoonerism schema above. These two lines, when represented phonetically, appear to instead be near phonetic anagrams of each other as represented in the sketch provided below:

Of note here are a few things. First, this is an anagram not of the letters, as is commonly the case, but of the letters given breath and spoken aloud, indicating a transcendence beyond the rigid and dead written word. Second, this interpretation demands an abbreviated pronunciation of 'little', more akin to the cutesy 'lil'. Such infantilization is a common means of expressing trans-misogyny (or perhaps a means of expressing ones own gendered experience). Third, the phonetic anagram is off, incomplete, as there is an extra (or missing) ð ("th") sound. This can be seen as intentional distancing from (or highlighting of) the stereotypical "gay lisp". 

Additionally, what does it mean for the child to "stay little" (or "stay [lil]")? Death is one way to stay little, be it physical or in the mind of a parent who is unaccepting of their child's true gender. 

Line 27:  Thus resumes the spooneristic cadence with a saccharine reference to the misapprehended bird of spring from the outset. Surely this "Tweet Sender" can be no prescient allusion to the modern parental worries of children being enticed away from traditional gendered behavior via so-called social media, though I must admit that despite my better, rational, judgment, this explanation has its appeal. Of course this being true would demand a reappraisal of our understanding of both poetry and reality. 

Lines 29-30: Further supporting the possibility of some anachronistic index of contemporary fears of social media, we find the familiar hysteria surrounding the sex act acting as a conduit for devilry. In this instance it is the trans subject deviating from the plan of some infallible god, lured astray down an electronic path by, well,

Line 31: In Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella Die Marquise von O.... we are greeted immediately in the title with a familiar sort of typographical alchemy, the ellipsis. In an inert string of dots, we are invited to envision the unknown, or unspeakable. This practice of course persists in various guises including sitcomdom's yadda-yadda-yadda (which in turn recalls the Semitic jodh and Greek iota characters, the smallest meaning-bearing letters in their respective abjads and alphabets, as well as the Jewish yad pointing tool and in turn the typographical ☞) and etc. Of course the more infamous use of typography to indicate the unsayable is found in Kleist's use of the em-dash to represent/index what Grant McAllister of Wake Forest deems "the most-delicately accomplished rape in our literature": Hier – traf er [...]. This novella reflects our Anthony in its traffic with the undesired causes and effects of pregnancy. A modernization of this story was released exactly 200 years later in the form of the 2008 motion picture Il Seme della Discordia (Eng. The Seed of Discord), whose title finds resonance with lines 30 and 34.

        On line 31 we find a similar dash, one that seems to indicate a dividing line between speakers, akin to the break after line 25.

Line 35: If it is indeed the child speaking here, it is not clear how they would have access to their mother's experience. The child has no access to what it is to be an adult woman, having (probably) never been one before. Any sort of dolorous haze must be: a delusional fantasy of the child, a personal experience expressed via maternal ventriloquy, or something else altogether.

Line 37: "Luck's blown Aim" recalls (or anticipates) Love's Easy Tears, a recording from the Scottish musical group "The Cocteau Twins". 

Line 38: "Here we are now" inevitably recalls the famous exhortation to "entertain us" issued by the pop-rock group Nirvana, fronted by Kurt Cobain. Much has been made of Cobain's gender identity and this link is a compelling addition to that speculation (see also line 28's "Love", common noun or surname?). Now, assuming a certain, common, conception of the passage of time, it would certainly be absurd to suspect that the author of this 17th century poem was somehow ex ante aware the 20th century song, but it would likewise be outside the scope of this investigation to explore this possibility further, so I will drop it. Another, perhaps more likely, explanation is that Cobain, during his extensive time in Olympia, WA, came across this very book and was influenced by this poem. Regardless of the truth, this line will undoubtedly inform future scholarly work on the gender identity of Cobain.

Lines 40-41: The text to these lines is apparently lost, rendering the motivation to "bury" the child unknown, although lines 38-39 would seem to indicate that a universally agreed upon course of action is at hand. Though even that is not unambiguous. The "now" in Line 38 has a special deictic property that allows it to point any contextually salient present. And in light of the likely time-warped intended reading presented here, I think it's fair to say it might point to a personal now, like the one I experienced that day at that table in the forest. It may be beyond my bounds as, I suppose, curator of this piece of work to suggest what might precisely have existed in this gap. But I am a casual spoonerist myself, not to mention trans, so please excuse my attempt:

with a bold eye get that old guy bit 

to be my sister as I missed her

through sorcery fey, we force him say: