WTN: bathos
James Harbeck
bathos
Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
And drench with tears of broken love
This sad grey world, once bright, now lorn,
Its golden edge dull, brassed, and worn:
A world that lately housed a spark
Of joy and fun, now snuffed and dark;
For there shall be no glee here for us
Who have lost my hamster, Doris.
O Doris! Furry ball of glee!
What evil hand stole you from me!
Was it bad grain or rancid nuts
That spurred the torsion of your guts?
Nothing is right, nothing is real
Within the stillness of your wheel…
I water your wee casket’s plot
With my abundant tears and snot.
Wow… that’s deep, eh? Deep like the ocean. Or a lake. Or anyway your bath. Well, it is bathos…
You know bathos, right? It’s like pathos, but bad. But we don’t get bathos from bad plus pathos, though that would work too. We get it from an official writing of the Pope.
Well, OK, we get it from an essay by Alexander Pope. In 1727 he wrote “Peri Bathous,” which, let me say right away, was not about a bathhouse frequented by Persian pixies. No, it was a satirical essay looking at – to quote its subtitle – “The Art of Sinking in Poetry.” Note the spelling carefully: Sinking, not Stinking. Poetic bathos is like the Vasa, which was a grand Swedish ship that was launched to much fanfare and, after cruising less than a mile, sank – a battleship become a bathyscaphe.
And yes, the bath in bathyscaphe is the same as in bathos: it’s from Greek βάθος bathos, which is of course our word du jour. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, officially in English the a is “long,” as in Baywatch, though in Greek it certainly is not.) This word, in Greek, means ‘depth’. It is not related to πάθος pathos, although of course the resemblance is striking and was used to good effect by Pope – and has since reinforced the sense of bathos as meaning specifically ‘bad pathos’ as opposed to the flight path of Icarus, reaching for the heavens but sinking disastrously.
It is also – you may be surprised to learn – not related to bath. Bath comes by way of Germanic from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘warm’ (which means I categorically deny the existence of cold baths, and if you try to get me into one I will categorically deny you too). But bathos is related to benthic, which refers to the greatest depths of the ocean. And perhaps the bottom of your tub, if it – unlike mine – is deep enough.
The most important trait of bathos is that the person creating it must be oblivious; it must be done in all sincerity. There shall be no taking the piss. Which means that deliberate camp doesn’t really count – and neither does my poem above, because I wrote it quite consciously to sink from the sublime (or an aspiration to sublimity) to the ridiculous. But if you think I was going to do a deep dive on the poetry of my angsty adolescence to find a genuine example… well, no.
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