“To entertain this Starry Stranger”1: Jane Taylor, William Blake, Edward Lear and Mem Fox in Martha Nussbaum’s Classroom

Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” when mentioned early in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, strikes Martha Nussbaum as epitomising the fancy and wonder that most reliably spark and guide whatever moral imagination a child comes to own. Nussbaum explains that

The infant’s fancy of the star’s inner life portends its maturer supposition of another person’s inner life. Both feats are imperative because all things and persons are from the beginning so unlike and so remote from each other that only fancy and wonder can leap the abysses between, securing each line of communication by a grappling hook of compassion that conducts sympathy, like moral electricity, from positive to negative pole. But Nussbaum and Dickens miss the poem’s meaning in their haste to make it serve an immediate instructive need. What they see as its moral meaning eclipses its mortal meaning, its disclosure of a basic way of being human that we seldom note even though it informs every way of our being this or that particular human being caught in this or that particular situation, including this or that moral dilemma examined by Nussbaum or Dickens.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star” first draws the child’s notice to the star not as a person or an object in itself but as a sign, twinkling as if to advertise its significance.3 If love be involved, it is love for a sign whose capacity and care to signify we cherish. Cherishing something as a sign involves imputing to it a capacity to communicate with us, a feat of prosopopoeia, and discerning its likeness or unlikeness to another sign, a feat of metonymy or metaphor. This is a personal matter because a person is the kind of being to whom signs address themselves and who addresses him or herself to them and shares them with other persons. This sharing and interfusion of signs is of a more primordial character than the obdurate separateness of individuals on which Nussbaum and Dickens insist, which is, however recalcitrant, contingent on particular circumstances, as pertain in A Tale of Two Cities: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.”4

“Let them be for signs” says Genesis of the stars, about which the prophet Jeremiah bids us “be not dismayed”. Knowingly or not, Jane Taylor follows to the letter Mosaic and Neoplatonic teaching in her reading of the heavens, as before her do the Metaphysical poets, Henry Vaughan noting that stars “As beauteous shapes, we know not why, / Command and guide the eye.”5 In effect, the child’s attention is drawn to an asterisk marking an especially important matter in the language of the heavens, to twinkling starlight that attracts us as do flickering fire and rippling water in whose patterns, according to Immanuel Kant, we suspect meanings as deep as those in the rhythmical patterns of language. The star is a citation, a punctuation mark, marking off one phenomenon from all others as Johann Gottfried von Herder imagines language does from the beginning.6

By encouraging the infant to fall in love with the signs of sleep the singer hopes it may fall in love with sleep itself. As a lullaby, the poem tries to persuade to sleep a child reluctant or unable to. Sleep it explains as a state in which the child will lose sense of itself and of its caregivers for a while but not forever, reassuring the child that sleep differs from the death it resembles and foreshadows, a difference that the caregiver will feel more or less keenly as particular threats and general mortality rates wax and wane. The lullaby means immediately to smooth the child’s way to sleep and ultimately its way to death after as long as possible a postponement by assuring it that it will wake up next day, with its sense of itself, now briefly in jeopardy, punctually and reliably revived.

The singer tells the child that its consciousness will come and go, outshining all else during the day, shrinking almost to nothing at night. Its consciousness will twinkle, its incessant fluctuations like a star’s and its own eyes’. A year after Taylor’s poem appeared, a sleepless Wordsworth published three sonnets about sleep in which he compares such “twinklings of oblivion” to a fly skittering over the “fretful stream” of time and calls sleep the “blessed barrier between day and day”.7 The lullaby tries to persuade the child that unconsciousness, so close to nothingness, is not only not inferior to consciousness but for hours at a time superior to it, its trustee, even progenitor, certainly not its thief.8 The child is “the traveller in the dark” grateful for “the tiny spark” of its own being that persists during every lapse of its own sense of it. To the “little star” and its fellows is entrusted the child’s being, whenever the child cannot care for itself and however its being transcends self-care, “Like a diamond in the sky”. Taylor might, following Milton, have written “Adamantine in the sky”, or less musically but more bluntly “Adamantly in the sky”, as “diamond” still echoes, however faintly, its Greek antecedent meaning “unconquerable”, endowing the infant’s organic being with mineral durability.9 The vagaries of the child’s circadian rhythm are steadied and synchronised with the twenty-four-hour cycle (the nycthemeron) through which all worldly phenomena move. That the sign to which the child is attracted is “Like a diamond” affirms the surpassing beauty of its being. If we may hear “die” sotto voce in “diamond”, the prospect of the darkness of death is thereby transfigured into a brilliant entelechy, which the child cannot comprehend until death, before which it can only “wonder” but “know not what you are”. Nussbaum mistakes “what you are” as “how you are”, whereas the child is invited to wonder ontologically about its own and its world’s “whatness”, not sociologically about someone else’s “howness”.

The star guides the sleeper, a kind of traveller, through the night in which it twinkles continuously. The child can shut its eye because the star never shuts its, peeping through the curtains of the child’s chamber as through the lids of the child’s eye, with which the child entrusts it, the vigilance of one enabling the somnolence of the other. One’s being abides with its bailees and trustees. Simultaneously, the sun between its setting and rising shines upon nothing, as the sleeper becomes such a nothing, yet still somehow, though only just, someone. The star is both a diminution of the blazing light of consciousness and a magnification of the infinitesimal spark within unconsciousness, a kind of contranym binding them together. By assuring the child that this difference sustains its psychic integrity rather than triggers its disintegration, the caregiver singing the lullaby obeys an ethical imperative to equip it for life by acquainting it with the nothingness at the heart of its somethingness,10 an imperative far removed from the lesson in civic virtue to which Nussbaum would reduce it:

Nussbaum reduces prosopopoeia to anthropomorphism and metonymy to representation. But the child comes to see in “The Star” the “personlike” shape of itself, without which insight it can know no one else. The monad of the psyche’s own society eludes Nussbaum, though not Dickens, who peers into Stephen Blackpool’s soul in the very part of Hard Times in which starlight figures most brilliantly, Rachael his Star of Bethlehem unnoticed by Nussbaum.12

The poem highlights the rhythmical repetition and variation of words, sounds and similes, the diamond-like twinkling of every facet of its language, each element of which flashes, vanishes, then flashes again. In this, the poem’s catalectic trochaic tetrameter plays a crucial part. All but two of its lines are in this meter, supplying at the end of each a pause we come to expect and to relish. This consistently repeated absence of sound is interrupted by the poem’s only two iambic tetrameter lines (“He could not see …” and “And often through …”), which will disappoint us by the very continuity of the duple rhythm that joins them to their antecedents because we have come to enjoy the repetitious intermittency introduced by the pervasive catalexis. We come to hear sound as the absence of silence, to which we ascribe a positive value and substance. Nussbaum will not allow herself to be distracted by this twinkling of language, even though its intermittences, of many kinds and at many scales, sensitise us to the tempi of our being. Proud of her tin ear, Nussbaum denigrates the very poet most devoted to the twinkling of the English language. Conceding that “there are features of rhythm and sound that play a large part” in lyric poetry and “that these are to some degree separable from the representation of human beings and human life”, Nussbaum concludes that

The rhymes of the poem’s final couplet, its tenth, echo those of its first in reverse. Likewise, the rhymes of its penultimate couplet echo those of its fifth in reverse. But the rhymes of its third last couplet echo those of its second in their original order. Two of these three echoes evoke a contrast. Wonder in the second line gives way to ignorance in the penultimate (nineteenth); the diamond in the fourth line gives way to the sun in the sixteenth. Only the fifth and ninth couplets are in complete accord, the reciprocity between the star’s tiny spark and the traveller in the dark confirmed, the traveller taking the initiative in the fifth, the tiny star taking it in the ninth. Largely on the evidence of these “features of rhythm and sound”, duality and dichotomy shape equally the psyche’s sense of itself and its world. Furthermore, the diphthong aI occurs four times in the first and last stanzas, twice in the second, once in the third, and thrice in the fourth, ensuring that “I” and its rhymes resound at the outset and the end. The vowel u: occurs once in the first, second and last stanzas, twice in the third, and four times in the fourth, ensuring that “you” and its rhymes resound just before the end as it subsides in favour of aI. Finally, the vowel α: occurs twice in the first and third stanzas, not even once in the second, once in the fourth, and four times in the last, ensuring that the “star” or “spark” resounds as loudly as does “I” at the end, the asterisk settling finally on what it will enduringly mark, concluding the dance through which the persons of the psyche move to the lullaby’s tune. These “features of rhythm and sound” tell us exactly “How I wonder”, referring as much to the degree to which, as to the way in which, wonder works on the mind. Aptly enough, Taylor’s brother Isaac recalls that she composed many of her poems in an attic study whose “window commanded a view of the country, and a ‘tract of the sky’, as a field for that nightly soaring of the fancy of which she was so fond”, catching in them, according to her nephew Josiah Gilbert, the natural world’s “infinite suggestiveness” in the “contemplative, and curiously inquiring manner” she shared with Isaac.14

Teaching Hard Times to a law school class, Nussbaum solicited and received from a student a response to “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” she took to corroborate her view that literature fosters liberality and liberalism in its students:

The student speaks to the entire genre of which “The Star” is for him less mesmerising an instance than others. His description is closer to Stephen Blackpool’s in Hard Times of Rachael as the Star of Bethlehem and to Don McLean’s in his song “Vincent” of a night sky colourfully ablaze with stars than to Taylor’s tiny spark.16 By grafting the star’s spark into the eyes of his cocker spaniel, the student tethers and domesticates a free and airy being, in effect reducing the Dog Star, brightest in the sky, to a dog, and elevating himself to the status of Orion, hunter worthy to be so spanieled. The student does not so much discover his pet dog’s devotion as demand of it such devotion as its proper way of being with him, teaching it tort law. Neither Nussbaum nor the student wonders if the star’s vigilance or the dog’s does not endow them with their humanity, both presuming they possess the privilege of endowing others with humanity rather than the privilege of receiving theirs as an endowment from others. Neither concedes that their being may be heteronomous, given significance only by a whole world, the “dark blue sky” asterisked by the “little star”.

To interpret star and sky thus is to admit the possibility that they may be otherwise, to forfend oneself against the very persecutory paranoia Nussbaum dismisses when insisting that the diamond-like star offers “the prospect of friendship” rather than presaging “a missile of destruction”, ignoring the world-perturbing power that stars have always wielded, to which the prophet Jeremiah bids us inure ourselves. Children’s bedtime stories and lullabies try to excite such paranoia almost as often as they try to allay it. The reassurance offered by Taylor’s “The Star”, William Miller’s “Wee Willie Winkie”, James Ferguson’s “Auld Daddy Darkness” and Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” is countered by the exhilarating dread inculcated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Elf-King” and E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman”.17 Tempering nerves of steel, the nursery rhyme “Now I lay me down to sleep” suggests children quietly accept the possibility of death every time they fall asleep.18 Although Nussbaum contends that “the moral and social aspects of [the] literary scenarios” presented to older children become “increasingly complex and full of distinctions”,19 the complexity and subtlety of “The Star” and of volumes of verse addressed to infants and very young children such as Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song and R.L. Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses can hardly be surpassed.

To regard “The Star” and its like primarily as lessons in moral and civic virtue is more than to mistake the cart for the horse. It is to miss the horse and mistake the cart for it. That these poems can be dragooned into such service indicates that the capacity of prosopopoeia and metaphor to shape us has been impressed so deeply into us that it disappears into intuitive immediacy. This is so even and especially in lullabies that appear to address us in moral and civic terms, as does William Blake’s “A Dream”, which among other poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience may inform Jane Taylor’s poems.20

We can easily enough take or mistake “A Dream” as a parable of charity recalling Christ’s of the good Samaritan and anticipating fables such as the children’s night-time voyage in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter21 only because, immediately and intuitively, we already understand its more basic evocation of the nature of our worldly being. The star that helps “light the ground” as we “look abroad to see” while wandering “wildered and forlorn” through the night is at once a teardrop and a glow-worm, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms of the sense of sight localised in a glistening eye, the “watchman of the night” who comes to our rescue when we lose our way like the emmet,22 whose calls for help elicit calls in reply that together direct the wanderer home like sonar, imagined as “the beetles hum”. The acoustic field is that of the sense of hearing localised in an echo-filled ear, which comes to our rescue when bidden by the voice embedded in a mouth guarded by a spirit (Angel) and moved by a dream that becomes ours.

To our usual way of thinking, this kind of ontological psyche-analysis may seem laborious and tendentious, but, on the contrary, our usual way of thinking is more intractably so. The prosopopoeic and metonymic liaison of eye, tear and glow-worm, of crying mother and humming beetle, and of one call and caller with all other calls and callers is the elementary stuff of the poem, from which any further significance, of whatever kind, must be drawn or extorted. “A Dream” reveals that each of us is an ensemble of members bound together in conjugal intimacy and genial fellowship, caught in a recurring cycle of discomposure (“All heart-broke”) and re-composure, much like the composite persons depicted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Salvador Dalí, and in a manner that anticipates Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method.23

Yet, recruiting lullabies and nursery rhymes to her cause, Nussbaum warns that

To imagine compassion is not to feel it; to introduce “the compassionate imagination” as a theme rather than to bestow it as a companion is nugatory; and to manipulate children’s sympathies rather than respect unreservedly their intellectual autonomy, which one must presume to equal or exceed one’s own, is to betray one’s calling.

Better be taught, as were Lord Stanley’s children and grandchildren, by Edward Lear than by a teacher following Nussbaum’s curriculum. In limericks such as “There was an Old Man with a gong” and “There was an Old Man with a poker”, children contemplate with perfect equanimity the violent propensities of individuals who attack groups, and of groups that attack individuals, whose behaviour is annoying or offensive enough to serve as pretext for an attack first verbal then physical.25 Individuals’ mere individuality is enough to provoke groups’ taunts, each equally likely to triumph physically over the other in play, as the limericks and their accompanying cartoons are jokes, in which human relations can be contemplated repeatedly, safely and freely, not hobbled by any peremptory demand that sympathy decide the issue before the issue can be savoured in all its possible forms with all possible outcomes. For Lear, sympathy is the child’s sovereign right to bestow or not as it pleases, not the teacher’s to coax or extort from it by appealing to sentiment. Lear treats the Stanley children’s rhadamanthine proclivities as jokes, seizing household objects such as gongs and pokers as “missiles of destruction” in mimic, metonymic battles in which identical rhymes, like scare-quotes, estrange things from themselves and their quotidian significance. Exceeding the bounds of identification and representation to which Nussbaum would restrict them, Lear’s licentious prosopopoeia and metonymy evoke the disinterestedness of the “Kantian and post-Kantian formalist tradition” of aesthetics and anticipate the “moral relativism deriving from French postmodernist philosophy” that Nussbaum deplores.26

Citing “The Star” in Hard Times, Nussbaum wonders what happens “When a child and a parent begin to tell stories together”. Had she wondered what happens when a child and a grandparent begin to tell stories together, her reflections would apply with equal accuracy to Mem Fox’s The Tiny Star, especially if we heed Fox’s account of its composition. Fox recalls that she and her grandchild

Nussbaum and Fox agree on the primacy of ascribing humanity to strangers and strange things, offering them sympathy, joining one’s neighbours in doing so, realising one’s own humanity by such acts, and coming to understand them as the foundation of moral and civic virtue. Yet although writers may be moved to write and readers moved to read in this way, no story’s compositional and interpretive history can adequately account for it or regulate it.

Throughout The Tiny Star, the star resists personification. Invariably designated “it”, it serves as a sign of personhood rather than of any particular person.28 It characterises personhood as a heavenly condensate, come from afar and soon to recede afar, conferred by general acclamation, and not (primarily or at all) a biological fact. As such, the tiny star leads us along a string of metonyms: the foundling whose bright disposition enlivens its adoptive kith and kin; the Star of Bethlehem signalling Christ’s Incarnation; the starry apotheosis conferred on the illustrious dead; the path of a hyperbolic comet; and the nucleosynthetic origin of the chemical elements or “stardust” of which the human body is composed. The tiny star serves as the asterisk for this train of thought about human being.29

The Tiny Star is an ephemeris of an astronomical entity, tracking its variable magnitude (tiny, rounder, smaller, tiny once more), declination (taller), trajectory (falling to earth, returning to the heavens), and occultation (vanishing and then twinkling again).30 The most important character of its earthly transit is given it by its finders, who take it home

This ceremony of robing is important enough to be repeated verbatim later in the star’s mundane life.31 The quilt figures in fourteen of the eighteen illustrations of the incarnate star, one of which is of a framed photograph reminiscent of the Holy Family, and in two illustrations on its own after the star’s apotheosis, reminiscent of the Girdle of Thomas left behind after the Assumption of the Virgin. Emphatically covered “all” over with stars, the quilt is an earthly miniature of the Milky Way swaddling the whole world, identifying the tiny star, and hence a human being, as a monad, an element of the cosmos that contains within it the entire cosmos. Invested with constellating power, the star transforms everyone’s relations with everyone else around it, serving as their palladium and perhaps capable of serving as their vexillum as well, had they need of one, like the Star of David. The star emerges from its cosmic quilt and then recedes back into it as a sign comes to mind and then slips from it. As the public cloak of the tiny star, the quilt also renders visible during the day the cosmos of which sunlight deprives us, as a sign reminds us of what we cannot see.

The wonder evinced by The Tiny Star in the nature and power of signs transcends the immediate needs of the civics lesson to which a teacher such as Nussbaum would apply it and inspires Fox’s Radical Reflections, in which she insists that the “power of words, the heat of meaning, depends to a great extent on where words are placed” according to “the right rhythm” that fosters and sustains the mind’s ability to shape its thoughts.32 In The Tiny Star, the star’s expansion and contraction evoke, in the form of anaphora, the mind’s power of circumspection and, in the form of epistrophe, its power of concentration. Its associative energy evokes, in the form of the quantifiers “each” and “every”, the mind’s power of individuation. Its accumulation of qualities evokes, in the form of the coordinate conjunction, the mind’s powers of combination.33 The story exercises the grammar of thinking rather than inculcating any one thought. Were we to ascribe one thought to it, Kant’s wonder at the parity of the starry heavens and the moral law might do it least injustice but would miss the ampler story of signs and signification that, according to Origen and Plotinus, underlies it and all other lessons.34

Most of Nussbaum’s pedagogical polemic concerns university students reading novels, not infants and young children listening to lullabies and nursery rhymes. Nussbaum’s most eminent antagonists, focusing on the novels she considers, fault her chiefly for a “temporal parochialism” that assumes a “moral superiority” over most but not all other periods and parishes, inclining instead to an ideal of disinterest close to David Hume’s in “Of the Standard of Taste”.35 But Nussbaum’s brief reflections on lullabies and nursery rhymes disclose a greater problem than can be resolved by Hume’s multicultural and transhistorical generosity of view, characterised most decisively by Martin Heidegger as the problem of attempting to understand human beings psychologically and anthropologically before one has even begun to understand human being ontologically:

Nussbaum’s thesis that literary texts help us “see the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s eye – with involvement and sympathetic understanding” and “transport us, while remaining ourselves, into the life of another” is abjectly vulnerable to Heidegger’s critique.37

Infants and young children listen to lullabies and nursery rhymes because their words disclose a world, not because they point a lesson or help them begin to form their own character, even though the world they disclose is one of keeping score and forming character and all that countervails these projects. Infants and young children as well as their caregivers take a lifetime to understand the ontological gift these texts and those that purport to supersede them bear. In the words of the young Scheherazade-like protagonist of Catherynne Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales:

“Like the tattoos of sailors”, one of a myriad of similes that twinkle throughout Valente’s work, hints at a long-postponed reconciliation of accounts such as finally unites Odysseus and Penelope, for so long each other’s starry stranger.

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