Hold at Once the Spindle and the Pen

reflecting on Catherine des Roche's 16th-century poem

Distaff, my chore, I promise and I swear
To love you always and never to change
Your domestic honour for one more strange,
Wandering incessantly, soon no more there.

You at my side, my lot is far more fair
Than if paper and ink saw fit to arrange
Themselves around me; for you sooner estrange
A wrong and make it easier to bear.

Distaff, my darling, still I do not mean
For all my love of this domestic scene
To give up all the credit I have when

I write occasionally: for then I say
How valuable my cares are every day,
Holding at once the spindle and the pen.

Catherine des Roches lived in Poitiers, France, in the 1500s. Together with her mother Madeleine des Roches, she made up the writer duo "Madames des Roches." They held some of the earliest salons for which French society is known, and they wrote many letters, philosophical dialogues, and poems like this one.

The speaker in the poem is humorously promising, as one would promise a lover, never to forsake her chore of spinning thread to make cloth.

If you look at the verbs in the sonnet, we see that the speaker is active in the first, third, and fourth stanzas as she promises and swears to love the distaff and never change it for a different honor. She just as actively resolves not to give up her writing.

Only in the second stanza does she take a passive voice as she imagines if "paper and ink saw fit to arrange themselves around me." Since paper and ink have not seen fit to do this, she is grateful, again passively, that the distaff "estranges wrongs" and makes them "easier to bear."

This is the first hint about performing creative, intellectual pursuits well. Every writer imagines spending many uninterrupted hours in "a room of one’s own," but unless you are already an established working author without a day job, or you married rich, there is probably some very legitimate claim on your time and attention.

Rather than resent our interruptions and distractions from the real work we're called to (all phrases I've melodramatically recited to myself), we could find the charm in the "distaff," teasing it as we would an old friend, and reflect on the blessings in the prosaic tasks. A little imagination reminds us that our day job provides the money to cover our basic needs. A little more imagination, and we become grateful for the daily re-washing of dishes because we ate a nourishing meal, the re-folding of laundry because we are warmly and becomingly attired, the re-sweeping of floors because we have a precious home to care for, back and forth, in and out, spinning, spinning, spinning. At her distaff, the poet says that she is better off than if she could write all the time, "for you sooner estrange a wrong and make it easier to bear." Repetitive tasks like weaving are still creative, and they allow her to work through her feelings more easily.

Besides, paper and ink never actually "see fit to arrange themselves" around us. Even if you have a great writing shed, eight hours a day to write, and a team of assistants to take care of every annoying distraction, you still have to go write. You have to stop procrastinating and sit down at the page and conquer its blankness. This is work. Just like the distaff, it's not going to spin itself out.

The poem does not insist that the distaff is better than the pen - that would be the height of irony. Des Roches does not totally relinquish "the credit" - meaning the benefit - she has when she “writes occasionally”:

"For then I say
How valuable my cares are every day,
Holding at once the spindle and the pen."

I write occasionally. It’s not infrequent, but it’s always an occasion. This essay was dreamt up while children were climbing all over me. The first draft was scratched out after they were in bed, dishes were washed, and laundry was folded. The final draft was typed on my laptop while sipping a latte in a cozy cafe where not one person shouted, "Mommy!" or asked for a snack.

My domestic scene is unironically lovely to me, as I believe it was unironically lovely to Des Roches, because the people involved are beloved. Des Roches had her mother. I have my husband and two daughters. When I think of them, it doesn't matter that cooking and washing are not as enthralling as reading and writing, and I might even appreciate (with a bit of humor as well) the way a chore can "sooner estrange / a wrong and make it easier to bear."

Des Roches was an important writer in her time, but I think we easily confuse an artist's output with how they spent all of their time. Good art does require many hours at the canvas or piano or paper, but those hours might not be the bulk of the artist's waking time. Des Roches was financially comfortable, and she never married or had children, so her domestic duties were lighter than they may have been, but in 16th-century France, caring for one's self and household, however small, would have required many hours of work. Spinning and weaving cloth comprised a significant portion of every woman's day.

Clothing oneself and one's household has been a heroine's chore from Penelope to Hannah Coulter. Machine-made fabric saved Ma Ingalls the chore of spinning and weaving the cloth, but not of cutting and sewing it. The washing machine and factory-ready clothes meant less time on it still, but it is still common to see women shoulder the laundry load. We should talk about a fair distribution of household labor and shared opportunities for creative and intellectual pursuits, we should acknowledge that it's a lot less work than it used to be, but we should also talk about why - how - such work is considered unimportant.

"Women's work" is not menial or trivial.

In the Odyssey, one proof of a kingdom's wealth was the quality of their weaving. Homer gets as excited about the fine linens the queen and her ladies wove as he does about the golden tripods forged by male metalworkers. In the Middle Ages, the women recorded history in their tapestries, combining the work of the historian, the artist, and the poet in one.

Women in these stories and cultures have been mistreated, but their work is not a sign of their mistreatment. There is dignity and beauty and value in their work.

The pen held more liberation, but the loom was liberating in its own way. Any time we create and tell stories and feed and clothe and clean, we make culture, whether we get the credit or not.

Each of us has a creative voice, whatever our chosen medium may be. We all have the chores that distract us. Combining all of this well is our calling.

Because she wrote, Catherine des Roches could tell us "how valuable her cares are every day." We know who she is because she wrote, but even if her name had died with her and her poems had been lost, I like to think that she was better and happier for her dual roles.

Hold at once the spindle and the pen.

*Nerdy bit: This sonnet was translated by C.H. Sisson. It has fourteen lines, but its rhyme scheme is not like the familiar English forms of Shakespeare's, Petrarch's, or Spenser's. There are two four-line quatrains and two three-line tercets with the rhyme scheme ABBA-ABBA-CCD-EED, or "swear-change-strange-there, fair-arrange-estrange-bear, mean-scene-when, say-day-pen." This is part of a French sonnet tradition, for which Clément Marot is most well known. I'm hesitant to comment on the meter, knowing that these poems were translated from French,* but it seems to be iambic pentameter, meaning that there are ten syllables, following the unstressed-stressed pattern: "Distaff, my chore, I promise and I swear..."