The Yale Review

4 6 Y H E R M E S , M A S T E R O F T H E R O A D S B O N N I E C O S T E L L O During a stay in Padua, Italy, at the end of June, I witnessed a centuries-old annual ritual in the main square. Graduation in Padua is carnivalesque, at least for those receiving advanced degrees , and involves a lot of high-spirited humiliation of the new master or doctor. Friends and family of the new graduate prepare a papiro, or scroll, a poetic narrative of the graduate’s life. But this is no eulogy, no catalogue of the young person’s accomplishments and promising future. Quite the opposite. It’s a bawdy narrative with scandalous illustrations that begins with the graduate’s conception and recounts in burlesque detail a variety of childhood, adolescent, and college misadventures up to the present. After a formal and solemn public thesis defense, the young person is marched to the town square, often dressed in little more than a diaper or some obscene, flesh-colored suit with exaggerated body parts, and required to read the scroll aloud, o√ering embellishments . The text of the scroll (according to the linguist Noelle J. Mole) is a mixture of English, standard Italian, and Veneto dialect, so that the inductee inevitably trips up and is subject to further mockery and festive punishment. Liquids – the slimy, the potable, and the intoxicating – are abundantly applied to or hurled at the 4 7 R graduate. The scroll is posted on a wall in the square for all to see. Finally the initiate is paraded out to a chorus singing a slogan that I will not repeat here, even in Italian. You can go to YouTube if you want more information. It’s hilarious, Dionysian fun, but what is it all about? I’m no ethnographer, but it seems to me there are two messages in this tradition, and they are related: First, You are not a god. Your head is attached to a body. And now that you have passed all your tests and performed all the o≈cial tasks, you should let your riotous side out. And second, You have been in the ivory tower, but now you must come out into the town square. You are still part of ordinary life and the ordinary people who raised you. You must rejoin the community, not just as a ‘‘leader’’ who owes ‘‘service,’’ but also as someone sharing the limits and impulses and language of the people. The poet W. H. Auden never observed this ceremony, so far as I know, but he shared these values and would have appreciated the spirit of the event. The high achiever, Auden knew, can become addicted to approval and thus overly cautious intellectually; he or she can mistake o≈cial knowledge for truth, conventionality for wisdom, mastery of forms for superiority of mind. But we harbor an imp that troubles our vanity, thumbs its nose at authority, and prods our intellect. For Auden, traveler and cosmopolitan, it is less Dionysus than Hermes, the one who sheltered and reared Dionysus when Hera was after him, who presides over the future. Hermes is on the move; he is ‘‘master of the roads.’’ When Auden was invited to deliver an address at an elite university ’s Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises, he brought along his imp and played Falsta√ to all the newly crowned Prince Hals. In 1946 Auden was, after T. S. Eliot, the most celebrated poet in the English language. But it’s unlikely that the dons at Oxford twenty years earlier would have bet on his career. He had spent most of his university days avoiding his academic responsibilities and had performed unimpressively on exams. He was not a slacker, though he followed the Lord of Misrule as ardently as any other undergraduate . But his young mind was mercurial and passionate, full of unrealistic notions discarded as quickly as they were embraced, all feeding his vitality, which he poured into poetry. He read recklessly and without a plan, not according to the syllabus. The 4 8 C...