One of the hazards of being a parent, particularly if you have a daughter, and particularly if your daughter favours shoulder-length, my-little-pony-ish hair, is that you pick up lice. It’s not an experience I would recommend. The tell-tale itching of the scalp, barely noticeable at first, then gradually forcing itself on your attention – the fateful discovery (in my wife’s case, when a louse dropped plumply out of her hair and landed on her computer keyboard) – the skin-crawling disgust, the perpetual distraction – and then the boring nightly ritual with the nit comb and the special shampoo. No, not to be recommended. Even typing these words causes my scalp to itch in sympathy and sends me scurrying to the bathroom to run the comb through my hair one more time .. just to be sure.
All this by way of preamble to the following poem, which I discovered in the stacks the other day (BL Harl MS 6947, for anyone who's interested). It’s a manuscript in an early eighteenth-century hand, and the note at the bottom, ‘This to be fairly writ on a Table, to Hang out at my Dore’, suggests that it’s a draft for a London shop sign.
Let None (The Loftiest Hee or Shee,
Of what Degree so’er They bee)
Thinke Scorne or show Themselves so Nice,
As to be Thought to Breed no Lice.
No, No! All know That Cannot be,
‘Tis an Impossibilitie;
Wee dayly See ‘tis Naturall
To Every Child, (both Boy & Girle)
Ev’n from the Cradle to the Tombe
Lice dayly Breed, Lice dayly Come,
Yea Sure, & will do, Till the Day of Doome,
Except some Better Meanes be known
Than Hitherto has Yet been Showne.
But Now, to Cheere & Comfort All Mankind
Loe! Here, The Perfect Remedy you’l Find.
Therfore be Wise; Take Good Advice,
Use wholsom Means to kill your Lice.
Whilst Here ‘tis to be Had.
Or Else the wise will Think you Mad.
Fare Well, if you will.
There's more lousy poetry than you might expect. The best known is Burns’s ‘
To a Louse’, the source of the famous lines ‘O, wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!’ (Most people who quote these lines probably have no idea of their context; Burns is admiring a pretty girl in church when he suddenly notices a louse crawling up her bonnet.) There is Rimbaud’s gorgeous, haunting poem ‘The Lice-Seekers’, in which a young boy sits by the window while his two sisters pluck the lice out of his hair. (French original
here; choice of English translations
here and
here. I think Jeremy Harding's translation is the better of the two.) My own favourite is St Teresa of Avila’s poem ‘
Pues nos dais vestido nuevo’ (‘Since thou giv’st us, King of Heaven / New clothes like these’). The nuns in Teresa’s convent found that their habits, made of frieze (a coarse woollen cloth), were infested with lice, and Teresa wrote this song for them to sing in procession. I like it because it doesn’t take itself too seriously:
Daughters, you’ve the Cross upon you;
Have courage too.
Since salvation He has won you,
He’ll bring you through.
He’ll direct you, He’ll defend you,
If Him you please.
CHORUS:
Do thou keep all nasty creatures
Out of this frieze.Drive away whate’er molests you
With fervent prayer;
Nothing else so surely tests you
If love is there.
God will help you if within you
Firm trust He sees.
CHORUS:
Do Thou keep all nasty creatures
Out of this frieze.‘From that day to this’, according to Teresa’s niece, not a single louse was ever found in any of the nuns’ habits. A miracle! I just hope I won’t need to put this to the test any time soon.