Motherhood Quote by Christopher Marlowe

“Marlowe’s phrase sounds like the body getting dragged into the business of making poetry: “jigging veins” turns creativity into visible musculature, a pulse you can watch. “Jigging” isn’t lofty inspiration; it’s a dance-step, a quick, slightly vulgar motion. Put it next to “veins” and the line implies that verse is not merely thought but circulation, something rhythmic, almost involuntary. The poet doesn’t just write; he twitches with meter.

“Rhyming mother wits” sharpens the insult and the brag at once. “Mother wit” in Elizabethan English is native intelligence, the cleverness you’re born with, not the learning you acquire. Marlowe is needling a certain kind of writer-performer who cashes out that innate cleverness in easy rhyme: verse as a parlor trick. The phrase “rhyming mother wits” can read like a roll call of self-satisfied hacks, people whose only credential is that they can make words chime on command.

The subtext is Marlowe’s larger obsession: the difference between raw talent and serious ambition, between popular appetite and artistic reach. Coming out of a theatrical culture that rewarded crowd-pleasing jigs as much as high tragedy, Marlowe often wrote with one eye on the marketplace and the other on immortality. This line catches that tension in miniature. It’s kinetic, bodily, and faintly contemptuous - a reminder that poetry can be blood sport as much as it is beauty, and that the stage can turn even “wit” into a reflex.”