{npm22: 4~candlelight tanka}

I spent years largely hostile towards Ben Franklin – mainly because of some enterprising elementary teacher’s great idea to combine history and civics and penmanship – we had to copy phrases out of Poor Richard’s Almanac. I spent a lot of time being irritated with his attempts at wit, and at the aphorisms and proverbs that teachers said all the time. My sixth grade teacher repeated this particular phrase so often that I wince when I hear it. Yes, yes, we should have gone to be early and gotten things done on time. Yes, that would have been wiser than the scattered eleven-year-old style of homework we did. Yes, thank you we get it.

I was actually a little relieved when I learned it wasn’t a quote from ol’ Ben. From the UK Phrase Finder:

The earliest record of a proverb that approximates to our current version that I can find in print is in The Book of St. Albans, printed in 1486:

As the olde englysshe prouerbe sayth in this wyse. Who soo woll ryse erly shall be holy helthy & zely.

Note: the Middle English word zely comes down to us now as ‘silly’. This has numerous meanings, commonly ‘foolish’. The 1486 meaning was ‘auspicious; fortunate’. So ‘holy helthy & zely’ meant ‘wise, healthy and fortunate’, which isn’t so far from ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’.

I think the most tone-deaf thing about some proverbs and aphorisms is that they’re aimed at everyone, but they’re not meant for everyone. Not everyone could go to bed early and rise early. Some people burned the midnight oil every night to get what they had – to keep it, and to have it to pass on.

Regardless, while Benjamin Franklin’s pseudonymous journal includes the familiar American form of this quote in the 1735 edition, it was first found in book form in Britain – much, much earlier.

“Earley to bed and earley to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” – John Clarke’s Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina, 1639


how far that little candle throws his beams
A simple circle –
Sunrise, wake. Its set brings sleep.
Ancestral choices
Spread my circumference W I D E R,
Blazing candlelight-fueled dreams