Thou Blind Man's Mark
Gaudy Night Allusions #4
We come now to the epigraph of Chapter 1:
Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self-chosen snare,
Fond fancy’s scum, and dregs of scattered thought,
Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care;
Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought:
Desire! Desire! I have too dearly bought
With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.
These are first six lines of a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney, which apparently appeared on one of the AP English exams in the last decade.1 The full text, though the punctuation here is different that the punctuation Sayers uses,2 is as follows:
Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self-chosen snare,
Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought ;
Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care ;
Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought ;
Desire, desire ! I have too dearly bought,
With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware ;
Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,
Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare.
But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought ;
In vain thou madest me to vain things aspire ;
In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire ;
For virtue hath this better lesson taught,—
Within myself to seek my only hire,
Desiring nought but how to kill desire. (source)
The chapter to which this epigraph is attached is the very opening, in which Harriet Vane reflects on the memory of her undergraduate days at Shrewsbury and then returns to find that the place has changed — in part because all things change, and in part because she has changed in relation to it.
The key phrase in this epigraph is the sentiment that the speaker has paid too high a price — has mangled his own mind — in the pursuit of what desire offers (which is worthless). Harriet feels at the beginning of the chapter that her mind is “mangled”, that she has paid a terrible price. She is cut off “as if by swords” from the edenic garden of her education.3
I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that Sayers chooses her epigraphs precisely for the words that are in them, and rarely if ever for the allusive power that they carry to their own larger context. However, there might be a case to be made that Sayers is drawing on the rest of the poem, or at least the two lines which follow the epigraph: “Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought / Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare.” Desire, the speaker of the poem says, ought to lead us to higher things. The poem closes with the speaker’s boast that, although although he has paid the price of mangled mind before, he has now won a kind of victory — to seek reward only from within himself, and to desire now the death of desire. He is numbing himself against the evils of desire even though he knows that it has the capacity to pull him upward.4
This is, I think, a description of the state of Harriet’s mind at the beginning of the novel. She has been dwelling on her mistakes, feeling unworthy of any of the nobility she once knew and valued. She feels that she ought to desire higher things, the sort she encountered at Shrewsbury, but she recognizes that pursuing her own impulses has not led to the kind of interior peace she seeks. When she decides to attend the Gaudy, she says to herself to herself “Nothing can hurt me worse than I’ve been hurt already. And what does it matter after all?”
The rest of the chapter is about her arrival, her reunion with old friends, and her encounters with the very different Types of relationships to that old college life. She discovers that she is not as badly mangled as she imagined. She finds classmates who have gone full nudist, or who have remained pathetically attached to the past; she sees two very different specimens of the academic type (Miss Lydgate and Miss de Vine). She learns that the faculty enjoy her novels, when she had imagined that they would upbraid her or find her career unworthy of her background.
Harriet begins the novel precisely in the mindset of the Sidney poem, but by the end of the first chapter she is beginning to see things differently.
The top Google result is this page which opens “What do you think of when you hear the word desire?” —an opening about as bad as the one Dr. Dimble complains about in That Hideous Strength (I’m probably mis-remembering the quotation but in my head it runs “I have to go listen to an essay on Milton that begins ‘Milton was born.’”)
I’ve seen the movie Wit enough times to know that the difference between a comma and a semicolon is significant.
Just before she thinks of the swords, she conjures the image of flames: “tall spikes of dephinium…quiveringly blue like flames, if flame were ever so blue.”
This is a rush-job poetry analysis, so I have no idea if this is the standard take or not. He says that desire sought his ruin, that desire made him aspire to vain things, and that’s why he’s rejecting it. But he also upbraids it for not doing its job, which is what I want to focus on.