Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 Part 2

Honeycombed workings.

Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus.

II.

I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines.

III.

Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue.

Out there in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home.

And just how persistent the barbaric att.i.tudes are, not only in the slaughter but in the psyche, I discovered, again when the frisson of the poem itself had pa.s.sed, and indeed after I had fulfilled the vow and gone to Jutland, 'the holy blisful martyr for to seke'. I read the following in a chapter on 'The Religion of the Pagan Celts' by the Celtic scholar, Anne Ross: Moving from sanctuaries and shrines ... we come now to consider the nature of the actual deities.... But before going on to look at the nature of some of the individual deities and their cults, one can perhaps bridge the gap as it were by considering a symbol which, in its way, sums up the whole of Celtic pagan religion and is as representative of it as is, for example, the sign of the cross in Christian contexts. This is the symbol of the severed human head; in all its various modes of iconographic representation and verbal presentation, one may find the hard core of Celtic religion. It is indeed ... a kind of shorthand symbol for the entire religious outlook of the pagan Celts.1 My sense of occasion and almost awe as I vowed to go to pray to the Tollund Man and a.s.sist at his enshrined head had a longer ancestry than I had at the time realized.

I began by suggesting that my point of view involved poetry as divination, as a restoration of the culture to itself. In Ireland in this century it has involved for Yeats and many others an attempt to define and interpret the present by bringing it into significant relations.h.i.+p with the past, and I believe that effort in our present circ.u.mstances has to be urgently renewed. But here we stray from the realm of technique into the realm of tradition; to forge a poem is one thing, to forge the uncreated conscience of the race, as Stephen Dedalus put it, is quite another and places daunting pressures and responsibilities on anyone who would risk the name of poet.

Lecture given at the Royal Society of Literature,

October 1974

The Makings of a Music

Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats What interests me is the relations.h.i.+p between the almost physiological operations of a poet composing and the music of the finished poem. I want to explore the way that certain postures and motions within the poet's incubating mind affect the posture of the voice and the motion of rhythms in the language of the poem itself. I want to see how far we can go in seeking the origins of a poet's characteristic 'music'.

I chose the word 'makings' for the t.i.tle because it gestures towards the testings and hesitations of the workshop, the approaches towards utterance, the discovery of lines and then the intuitive extension of the vital element in those lines over a whole pa.s.sage. If you like, I am interested in the way Valery's two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnes and les vers calcules, are combined. The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated. It is my impression that this haunting or donne occurs to all poets in much the same way, arbitrarily, with a sense of promise, as an alertness, a hankering, a readiness. It is also my impression that the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donne. If he surrenders to it, allows himself to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations, then we will have a music not unlike Wordsworth's, hypnotic, swimming with the current of its form rather than against it. If, on the other hand, instead of surrendering to the drift of the original generating rhythm, the poet seeks to discipline it, to harness its energies in order to drive other parts of his mind into motion, then we will have a music not unlike Yeats's, affirmative, seeking to master rather than to mesmerize the ear, swimming strongly against the current of its form.

Of course, in any poetic music, there will always be two contributory elements. There is that part of the poetry which takes its structure and beat, its play of metre and rhythms, its diction and allusiveness, from the literary tradition. The poetry that Wordsworth and Yeats had read as adolescents and as young men obviously laid down certain structures in their ear, structures that gave them certain kinds of aural expectations for their own writings. And we are all used to the study of this kind of influence: indeed, as T. S. Eliot has attested, we have not developed our taste in poetry until we can recognize with pleasure the way an individual talent has foraged in the tradition. But there is a second element in a poet's music, derived not from the literate parts of his mind but from its illiterate parts, dependent not upon what Jacques Maritain called his 'intellectual baggage' but upon what I might call his instinctual ballast. What kinds of noise a.s.suage him, what kinds of music pleasure or repel him, what messages the receiving stations of his senses are happy to pick up from the world around him and what ones they automatically block out-all this unconscious activity, at the pre-verbal level, is entirely relevant to the intonations and appeas.e.m.e.nts offered by a poet's music.

We have developed methods for tracing and expressing the relevance and significance of the first kind of influence, the literary influence, and much of the illuminating work on Wordsworth has been in this area. I remember with particular grat.i.tude the late W. J. Harvey's inaugural lecture at Queen's University, in which he a.n.a.lysed the opening lines of The Prelude to show how those lines were influenced by the closing lines of Paradise Lost. Once it has been pointed out to us that Wordsworth's joy in open country and his sense of release from the bondage of the city are consciously set in the penumbra of Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, and that the language of Wordsworth's lines invites us to read his freedom in the context of that expulsion, then the whole lift of the pa.s.sage is increased, and the wave of Wordsworth's feeling is rendered seismic by one discreet literary allusion.

But I seek my text a little further on in that pa.s.sage, where the poet tells us that his poetry came to him on this occasion spontaneously and that he poured it out, told it to the open fields. Then come these four lines, precise, honest, revealing: My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's Internal echo of the imperfect sound; To both I listened, drawing from them both A cheerful confidence in things to come.

Although Wordsworth is here describing the activity of composing aloud, of walking and talking, what the poetry reaches into is the activity of listening. 'My own voice cheered me'-in the words of the old joke, he is entranced by the exuberance of his own verbosity. The act of composition is a cheering one. But even though he is listening to the sound of his own voice, he realizes that this spoken music is just a shadow of the unheard melody, 'the mind's internal echo'. He is drawn into himself even as he speaks himself out, and it is this mesmerized attention to the echoes and invitations within that const.i.tutes his poetic confidence. We need only recall for contrast the way W. H. Auden addressed himself to the discussion of the act of writing, always tackling it in terms of metre, stanza forms, philology, always keeping in front of us the idea of the poem as 'a verbal contraption', to see how intimately and exactly Wordsworth is touching into the makings of his music in those lines.

What we are presented with is a version of composition as listening, as a wise pa.s.siveness, a surrender to energies that spring within the centre of the mind, not composition as an active pursuit by the mind's circ.u.mference of something already at the centre. The more attentively Wordsworth listens in, the more cheerfully and abundantly he speaks out.

We have ample evidence of Wordsworth's practice of composing aloud. In The Prelude he tells us how he paced the woods with his dog running a bit ahead of him, so that the dog's barking would warn him of strangers and he could then quieten his iambic drone and not be taken for an idiot. We have also the evidence gathered by the Reverend Canon Rawnsley among the peasantry of Westmorland that he was not always successful in pa.s.sing undetected: But thear was anudder thing as kep' fwoaks off, he hed a terr'ble girt deep voice ... I've knoan folks, village lads and la.s.ses, coming ower by t'auld road aboon what runs fra Grasmer to Rydal, flayt a'most to death there by t' Wis.h.i.+ng Gate to hear t' girt voice a groanin' and mutterin' and thunderin' of a still evening. And he had a way of standin' quite still by t' rock there in t' path under Rydal, and fwoaks could hear sounds like a wild beast coming frat' rocks, and childer were scared fit to be dead a'most.

And elsewhere Rawnsley's informant told of Mrs. Wordsworth's difficulties also: Mrs. Wudsworth would say, 'Ring the bell,' but he wouldn't stir, bless ye. 'Goa and see what he's doing,' she'd say, and we wad goa up to study door and hear him a mumbling and b.u.mming through hit. 'Dinner's ready, sir,' I'd ca' out, but he'd goa mumbling on like a deaf man, ya see. And sometimes Mrs. Wordsworth 'ud say, 'Goa and brek a bottle, or let a dish fall just outside door in pa.s.sage.' Eh dear, that maistly wad bring him out, wad that.

But the most instructive account of the poet's habits is surely the one given by Hazlitt, who visited the Wordsworths at Alfoxden in June 1798. Hazlitt heard the poetry read first by Coleridge and then by Wordsworth. Admittedly, he does not actually witness Wordsworth in the process of composition, but he does tell us about the quality and sway of the poet's speaking voice in his essay 'My First Acquaintance with the Poets': We went over to Alfoxden again the day following, and Wordsworth read us the story of Peter Bell in the open air; and the comment made upon it by his face and voice was very different from that of some later critics! Whatever might be thought of the poem, 'his face was a book where men might read strange matters,' and he announced the fate of his hero in prophetic tones. There is a chaunt in the recitation of both Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgement. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment. Coleridge's manner is more full, animated and varied; Wordsworth's more equable, sustained and internal. The one might be termed more dramatic, the other more lyrical. Coleridge has told me that he himself liked to compose in walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse wood; whereas Wordsworth always wrote (if he could) walking up and down a straight gravel walk, or in some spot where the continuity of his verse met with no collateral interruption.

Wordsworth's chaunt acted as a spell upon the hearer, whether that hearer were Hazlitt or Wordsworth himself. It enchaunted. It was 'equable, sustained, internal', three adjectives which we might apply to the motion of Wordsworth's blank verse also. The continuity of the thing was what was important, the onward inward pouring out, up and down the gravel path, the crunch and scuffle of the gravel working like a metre or a metronome under the rhythms of the ongoing chaunt, those 'trances of thought and mountings of the mind' somehow aided by the automatic, monotonous turns and returns of the walk, the length of the path acting like the length of the line. And I imagine that the swing of the poet's body contributed as well to the sway of the voice, for Hazlitt tells us that 'there was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his own Peter Bell.' The poet as ploughman, if you like, and the suggestive etymology of the word 'verse' itself is pertinent in this context. 'Verse' comes from the Latin versus which could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished one furrow and faced back into another. Wordsworth on the gravel path, to-ing and fro-ing like a ploughman up and down a field, his voice rising and falling between the measure of his pentameters, unites the old walking meaning of versus with the newer, talking sense of verse. Furthermore, Wordsworth's poetic voice, the first voice of his poetry, that voice in which we overhear him talking to himself, the motions of this voice remind me powerfully of the motions of plough-horses as described by the poet Edwin Muir: Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.

The high moments of Wordsworth's poetry occur when the verse has carried us forward and onward to a point where line by line we do not proceed but hang in a kind of suspended motion, sustained by the beat of the verse as a hanging bird is sustained by the beat of its wing, but, like the bird, holding actively to one point of vantage, experiencing a prolonged moment of equilibrium during which we feel ourselves to be conductors of the palpable energies of earth and sky: Oh, when I have hung Above the raven's nest, by knots of gra.s.s Or half-inch fissures in the slippery rock But ill sustained, and almost, as it seemed Suspended by the blast which blew amain, Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time, While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind Blow through my ears; the sky seemed not a sky Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds.

This is perhaps an obvious moment, when the wind of heaven and the 'corresponding mild creative breeze' of inspiration sustain the voice and suspend the consciousness in its hovering. But it does not always require such extreme sensation to generate the trance. For example, at the end of that 'equable, sustained internal' narrative 'The Ruined Cottage', what Wordsworth calls 'the calm oblivious tendencies/Of nature' pervade the music, a music of coming to rest, of understanding: She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.

I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear gra.s.s on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er, As once I pa.s.sed, did to my mind convey So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief The pa.s.sing shows of being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream that could not live Where meditation was. I turned away And walked along my road in happiness.

We know that the phrase 'the still, sad music of humanity' will apply to this, but it is too abstract, not kinetic enough. There is a c.u.mulative movement in the Pedlar's lines that does not so much move the narrative forward as intensify the lingering meditation, just as the up and down walking does not forward a journey but habituates the body to a kind of dreamy rhythm. And in this entranced state, the casual concerns of the mind, the proper sorrow for the wounded life of Margaret imaged in the overgrown cottage garden, such things are allayed by apprehensions of a longer, deeper tranquillity. To put it another way, 'the one life of Joy' imbues the music, is intoned by it, and can be apprehended from it. And nowhere do we experience this more potently than in the eight lines of 'A slumber did my spirit seal': A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The music begins with 'slumber' and ends with 'diurnal', and the eight lines turn on the poles of those st.u.r.dy vowels as surely, slowly, totally as the earth turning. Unless we can hear the power and dream in the line 'Rolled round in earth's diurnal course', I do not think we can ever properly hear Wordsworth's music. The quintessential sound of it is in 'diurnal', a word that comes up again at the end of the skating pa.s.sage in The Prelude: Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the gla.s.sy plain; and oftentimes, When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on either side Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid line of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by me-even as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round!

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train, Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.

The exhilaration of the skating, the vitality of the verbs, 'gleaming', 'sweeping', 'spinning', 'wheeling', the narrative push, the cheerfulness, to use one of the poet's favourite positive words-all these things have their part to play in the overall effect of this writing. But what distinguishes it as Wordsworthian is the gradual allaying of the sensation which is not, however, a diminution of awareness. It is as if a lens of apprehension opens wide and holds open. It is achieved by pacing, a slow, gathering but not climactic movement, repet.i.tive but not monotonous, a walking movement. We might say, in fact, that Wordsworth at his best, no less than at his worst, is a pedestrian poet. As his poetic feet repeat his footfalls, the earth seems to be a treadmill that he turns; the big diurnal roll is sensed through the poetic beat and the world moves like a waterwheel under the fall of his voice.

I introduce the water metaphor because any account of Wordsworth's music must sooner or later come to the river, but before we do so, I want to linger in the wood above Dove Cottage where the poet occasionally composed. At the moment all is quiet there, but it is an active quiet, the late morning of 29 April 1802: We then went to John's Grove, sate a while at first. Afterwards William lay, and I lay in the trench under the fence-he with his eyes shut and listening to the waterfalls and the birds. There was no one waterfall above another-it was a sound of waters in the air-the voice of the air. William heard me breathing and rustling now and then but we both lay still and unseen by one another. He thought it would be as sweet thus to lie in the grave, and hear the peaceful sounds of the earth and just to know that our dear friends were near.

Dorothy and her brother are as intimate with process here as the babes in the wood, and if there is something erotic about the rustling of those leaves, there is something cthonic about the energies fundamental to the whole experience. Phrases like 'diurnal course' and 'diurnal roll' are underwritten by sensation and take their lifeline from moments like this. The couple listen, they surrender, the noise of water and the voice of the air minister to them. The quick of this moment is like the quick of the poem 'A slumber did my spirit seal': it dramatizes the idea of 'wise pa.s.siveness' and makes the listening ear as capable of gathering might into itself as Yeats's 'gazing heart'. All the typical Wordsworthian verbs have been guaranteed: powers sink in, mould, impress, frame, minister, enter unawares.

Wordsworth had to grope along the grains of the language to find the makings of a music that would render not so much what Hopkins called the inscape as the instress of things, known physically and intuitively at such times. His great strength and originality as a writer came first of all from his trusting the validity of his experience, from his courageous and visionary determination to eriger en lois ses impressions personnels. But the paraphrasable content of Wordsworth's philosophy of nature would remain inert had he not discovered the sounds proper to his sense. Nature forms the heart that watches and receives but until the voice of the poet has been correspondingly attuned, we cannot believe what we hear. And so we come to the beautiful conception of the River Derwent as tutor of his poetic ear. The tongue of the river, he implies, licked him into poetic shape; the essential capacity was, from the beginning, the capacity to listen: Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, And from his alder shades and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this didst thou, O Derwent, travelling over the green plains Near my 'sweet birth place', didst thou, beauteous stream, Make ceaseless music through the night and day Which with its steady cadence tempering Our human waywardness, composed my thoughts To more than infant softness, giving me Among the fretful dwellings of mankind A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm Which Nature breathes among the fields and groves?

Beloved Derwent, fairest of all streams, Was it for this that I, a four years child, A naked boy, among thy silent pools Made one long bathing of a summer's day, Basked in the sun, or plunged into thy streams, Alternate, all a summer's day, or coursed Over the sandy fields, and dashed with flowers Of yellow grunsel; or, when crag and hill, The woods, and distant Skiddaw's lofty height, Were bronzed with a deep radiance, stood alone A naked savage in the thunder shower?

As in the other pa.s.sages already quoted, the movement of this one also enacts the insights it presents. The river flows into dreams and composes. The pa.s.sage flows, s.h.i.+fts through times and scenes, mixes, drifts and comes to rest with the child composed into a stilled consciousness, a living tuning fork planted between wood and hill, bronzed in the sunset.

Moreover, in that original cl.u.s.ter of sound and image which Wordsworth divines at the roots of his poetic voice-a river streaming hypnotically in the background, a stilled listener hovering between waking and dreaming-in this cl.u.s.ter of sound and image we find prefigured other moments which were definitive in his life as a poet and which found definition in his distinctive music. I am thinking of the soldier whom he encounters at dawn in Book IV of The Prelude, and of the Leech Gatherer; and, in particular, of the way his listening to their speech becomes a listening in and sounding forth of a something else, that something which deeply interfuses silence with sound, stillness with movement, talk with trance, and which is radical to the sound and sense he makes as a poet: The old Man still stood talking by my side; But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide; And the whole body of the Man did seem Like one whom I had met with in a dream; Or like a man from some far region sent, To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

I hope I am not indulging in special pleading when I draw attention to the rhyming of 'stream' and 'dream', and notice that shortly after this 'feet' is rhymed with 'repeat', and then 'me', 'silently' and 'continually' are harmonized. I am convinced that these words are conducting us towards something essential to the poetry.

I have been talking about the 'first voice' of Wordsworth's poetry, as that term was defined by Gottfried Benn and approved by T. S. Eliot, that is 'the voice of the poet talking to himself-or to n.o.body', the voice that is found to express 'a dark embryo', 'a something germinating in him for which he must find words.' Admittedly there is another voice in Wordsworth, which he was conscious of himself and which comes about, when, as he says in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the poet bring[s] his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short periods of time perhaps ... let[s] himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound[s] and identifies his feelings with theirs.

'Peter Bell', 'The Idiot Boy' and 'The Thorn' come to mind, yet in these poems I suspect that there was nothing fundamentally dramatic about Wordsworth's surrender to the speech of the character. It was not a question of the poet's voice performing a part but of the poet's voice being possessed; it was not a question of technical cool, of finding a dramatic pitch, rather a matter of sympathetic warmth, of sinking into a mood of evocation. And in this the Wordsworthian process differs radically from the Yeatsian, just as the satisfaction and scope of their musics differ.

Both Yeats and Wordsworth liked to speak their lines, both intoned, yet both had difficulty in the actual writing of the poem. I have stressed the primary generating surrender that Wordsworth seems to have made to his donnes because it seems to me that that was definitive of his music. Yet it is also true that Dorothy's Journals are full of evidence that the composition of long poems like 'Michael' affected him nervously and physically; he became sick and exhausted by the strain of the writing, and Mary Moorman even speculates that he may have felt his career as a poet menaced by these symptoms. Nevertheless, the strain does not show in the verse and Wordsworth continued to think of the poetic act as essentially an act of complaisance with natural impulses and tendencies.

It is otherwise with Yeats. With him, the act is not one of complaisance but of control. In fact, one of the earliest references to Yeats's habit of composing aloud is in a letter written by his father in 1884, and there the father speaks of his son's procedure as 'manipulation'. 'His bad metres arise', J. B. Yeats wrote, 'from his composing in a loud voice manipulating of course the quant.i.ties to his taste.' Where we can think of Wordsworth going into a trance, mesmerized by the sound of his own voice, we have to think of Yeats testing and trying out different voices and deciding on which will come most resonantly from the mask. Consider, for example, his performance in the following pa.s.sage, written near the end of his career: Every now and then, when something has stirred my imagination, I begin talking to myself. I speak in my own person and dramatize myself, very much as I have seen a mad old woman do upon the Dublin quays, and sometimes detect myself speaking and moving as if I were still young, or walking perhaps like an old man with fumbling steps. Occasionally I write out what I have said in verse, and generally for no better reason than because I remember that I have written no verse for a long time.

The self-consciousness of this little scene is very different from the unselfconscious Wordsworth making his turns on the gravel path. There is something roguish in the pa.s.sage, a studied, throwaway effect-the impetus behind the writing, for example, being put down casually to the fact that the poet happens to remember that another lyric is due about now. Nevertheless, we feel that Yeats's account of himself acting out the poem's origin, turning the donne into display, is proper to the Yeatsian posture. Yeats does not listen in but acts out. The origin of the poetry is not a matter of sinking in but of coming up against, the mature music is not a lulling but an alerting strain. Padraic Colum once spoke of Yeats's poems having to be handled as carefully as a blade, and the image reminds us of Yeats's own ambitions for the work, poems 'the poet sings them with such airs/That one believes he has a sword upstairs'; poems 'cold and pa.s.sionate as the dawn'; plays where he hopes 'the pa.s.sion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence or madness-down, hysterica pa.s.sio. All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath.' It is just such a note we hear in the major poems, as in 'The Tower': Now shall I make my soul, Compelling it to study In a learned school Till the wreck of body, Slow decay of blood, Testy delirium Or dull decrepitude, Or what worst evil come- The death of friends, or death Of every brilliant eye That made a catch in the breath- Seem but the clouds of the sky When the horizon fades, Or a bird's sleepy cry Among the deepening shades.

This is theatrical in its triumph, and many of the high moments in the Collected Poems share its rhetorical cast. At its worst that rhetoric is bragging; at its level best it has, to use Denis Donoghue's finely tuned adjective, an equestrian authority, which arises from Yeats's certainty that 'all the old writers, the masculine writers of the world, wrote to be spoken or to be sung, and in a later age to be read aloud for hearers who had to understand swiftly or not at all.' This Yeats who declared himself impatient with 'poetical literature, that is effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain moments of strained lyricism', sought a music that came ringing back off the ear as barely and resonantly as a shout caught back off a pillar in an empty church. It is indeed the music of energy reined down, of the mastered beast stirring: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast ...

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned ...

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call ...

In Yeats, the voice muscles its way over the obstacle course of the form and flexes like an animated vine on the trellis of its metric and rhyme scheme. We are aware of the finished poem as an impressive thing in itself but somehow more impressive because of a threshold of difficulties now overcome. Those difficulties, of course, he exulted in: 'The Fascination of What's Difficult' complains of more things than the toil of artistic creation, but its rebounding utterance is won out of that central struggle: The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt That must, as if it had not holy blood Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud, s.h.i.+ver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

The words fly off there like stones in a riot; this is not a region to wander in but a combat zone where rhymes collide and a.s.sertions strike hard music off one another like quarter-staffs striking. 'My curse on plays/That have to be set up in fifty ways'-yet it is one of Yeats's remarks, in Explorations, about the revision of his plays which throws light upon an important element in the makings of his music: I have written a good many plays in verse and prose and almost all those plays I have re-written after performance, sometimes again and again, and every re-writing that has succeeded upon the stage has been an addition to the masculine element, an increase in the bony structure.

We can see how the bony structure has grown in this instance when we compare the sonnet with the first jottings in Yeats's notebook: Subject To complain of the fascination of what's difficult. It spoils spontaneity and pleasure, and wastes time. Repeat line ending difficult and rhyme on bolt, exalt, colt, jolt. One could use the thought that the winged and broken colt must drag a cart of stones out of pride because it is difficult and end by denouncing drama, accounts, public contests, all that is merely difficult.

For Yeats, composition was no recollection in tranquillity, not a delivery of the dark embryo, but a mastery, a handling, a struggle towards maximum articulation. Paradoxically, one can employ George Bernard Shaw's dictum on style-'Effectiveness of a.s.sertion is the alpha and omega of style'-to suggest the direction and endeavour of Yeats's writing. Paradoxically, because Shaw's arguing voice was anathema to the young poet who was to write later in Autobiographies that Shaw discovered it was possible 'to write with great effect without music, without style either good or bad, to eliminate from the mind all emotional implication and prefer plain water to every vintage'. Yet it is this virtue of 'effectiveness of a.s.sertion' that is common to both.

There is a relation between the process of composition and the feel of the completed poem all through Yeats's work. From the beginning things had to be well made, the soul had to be compelled to study, the images had to be masterful: A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our st.i.tching and unst.i.tching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these ...

Scrubbing pavements, breaking stones-these things are contrasted with the craft of verse only to partake of its nature in the context of the poem itself. The abrasive and unyielding are necessarily present in the creative encounter, the mill of the mind has its work to do, for, as the lady affirms a little later in 'Adam's Curse', 'we must labour to be beautiful'. Thoughts do not ooze out and into one another, they are hammered into unity. 'All reality', Yeats notes in a 'Diary Written in 1930', 'comes to us as the reward of labour.' And at the end of his life, in 'A General Introduction to my Work', the theme of labour and deliberate effort comes up again: 'I compel myself to use those traditional metres that have developed with the language.' Yet even traditional metres had to be subdued to the Yeatsian element: It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking; I began to make it when I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek, not as Wordsworth thought, words in common use, but a more powerful and pa.s.sionate syntax, a complete coincidence between period and stanza.

The concern is for syntax the controller, the compelling element that binds the const.i.tuent elements of sense into active unity.

But it is not only in Yeats's writings about composition that this urge to mastery can be discovered. It becomes most obvious in his ma.n.u.scripts, in the evidence there of relentless concentration and self-criticism, in the evolution of driving verse from metrical monotony and, in many cases, plain ugly sentences. It is clear that the unwavering ceremonious procedures of his verse depend upon the way he wrought strongly for finish in the act of composition itself. One is reminded of a phrase by that other 'masculine' talent, Gerard Manley Hopkins, who spoke of 'a strain of address'; and Hopkins also spoke of 'that feeling of physical constraint that I want'.

All this is relevant to the success of a poem like 'Death'. 'Death' does not depend upon the way words woo themselves; the consonantal music and the short line work against any collusion between the vowels, the consonants and line-breaks acting as forcing agents, ramrodding the climax rhyme by rhyme: Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again.

A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone- Man has created death.

Again, it is that acc.u.mulating pressure in the movement, the sense of pa.s.sion held down, that we are responding to. The poem's arch is built on repet.i.tions that strain away from one another by reason of the sense they are making, but press in upon one another by reason of the repeated vocable. Dread, hope, man, many times, death-the weight of the utterance forces these words against themselves and the rhymes on died/pride and breath/death form the unshakeable arch of the structure. Affirmation arises out of oppositions.

'Long-legged Fly' is a poem that is absolute in its poetic integrity, that commands us both by the stony clarity of its sounds and the deep probes of its images, though 'images' is too weak a word, is somehow inaccurate: it is more that every element in the poem is at once literal and symbolic. It is a transcendent realization of the things I was trying to get at: what is the relations.h.i.+p between the creative moment in the life of an individual and the effect of that moment's conception throughout history?

That civilization may not sink, Its great battle lost, Quiet the dog, tether the pony To a distant post; Our master Caesar is in the tent Where the maps are spread, His eyes fixed upon nothing, A hand under his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt And men recall that face, Move most gently if move you must In this lonely place.

She thinks, part woman, three parts a child That n.o.body looks; her feet Practise a tinker shuffle Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at p.u.b.erty may find The first Adam in their thought, Shut the door of the Pope's chapel, Keep those children out.

There on that scaffolding reclines Michael Angelo.

With no more sound than the mice make His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

The creative mind is astraddle silence. In my reading, the long-legged fly has a masculine gender and while there is a sense of incubation permeating the whole poem, there is also a sense of intent siring. The image recalls the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, where G.o.d the Father's mind moves upon chaos, and the image functions within the poem like the nerve of a thinking brain, a brain that concedes the clangour and objectivity of historical events, the remorselessness of action, the unstoppable flow of time. It concedes all this but simultaneously affirms the absoluteness of the moment of silence, the power of the mind's motion along and against the current of history. The poem dramatizes concentration brought to the point of consummation. The act of the mind, in Michael Angelo's case, exerts an almost glandular pressure on history and what conducts that pressure is the image in the beholder's eye. In a similar way, as I have tried to show, poetry depends for its continuing efficacy upon the play of sound not only in the ear of the reader but also in the ear of the writer.

The first Kenneth Allott Memorial Lecture given at Liverpool University, January 1978

The Fire i' the Flint

Reflections on the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins What I have to say about Gerard Manley Hopkins springs from the slightly predatory curiosity of a poet interested in the creative processes of another poet. I want to cross a couple of ideas about poetry on each other, and hinge them in such a way as to take hold of and take some measure of the Hopkins opus. I want to approach him from the circ.u.mference of his art rather than from the centre of himself.

My t.i.tle is taken from a speech by the Poet in Timon of Athens where Shakespeare seems to be glossing the abundance and naturalness of his own art briefly and completely. The Poet has been murmuring to himself, composing on the tongue as Wordsworth and Yeats were p.r.o.ne to do years afterwards, to the consternation of c.u.mberland peasant and Coole Park houseguest alike, when the Painter, who is bringing a picture as a gift to Timon, addresses him: You are rapt, sir, in some work, some dedication To the great lord to which the Poet replies: A thing slipp'd idly from me.

Our poesy is as a gum which oozes From whence 'tis nourished: the fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck; our gentle flame Provokes itself, and, like the current, flies Each bound it chafes.

Much could be said about this sp.a.w.n of metaphor in which the four elements combine and coagulate by sleight of word, but I want to look at just one aspect, implicit in the very quick of the word 'slipp'd', which acts like a tuning fork for the music and movement of the whole piece. 'A thing slipp'd idly from me'-the poem is apparently dismissed as something let go or let fall almost accidentally; there is an understated tone to the phrase, an understatement artists are p.r.o.ne to when speaking about a finished work in order to protect the work's mystery and their own. Yet while the tone protects this mystery, and the immediate sense of 'slipp'd' makes light of the poem, behind the immediate sense lies a whole range of meanings and a.s.sociations which insist on the poem as something nevertheless momentous in its occasion if momentary in its occurrence. Slip, after all, has also to do with unleas.h.i.+ng energy; with taking a cutting for planting; and (if one were to engage in special pleading) with the moment of arrival, words coming safely and fluently towards us out of the uncharted waters of the unconscious. All in all, what is accidental, energetic, and genetic in the poetic act is hinted at here in one syllable: the slipping is the slipping envisaged by Robert Frost when he declared that 'like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.' So the nonchalance of the Poet's tone is complicated by big-as in 'big with child'-implications in the word's ramifying meanings and a.s.sociations. And it is these ramifications which begin to spread and net in the following lines: Our poesy is as a gum which oozes From whence 'tis nourished ...

The slip has become the slip almost of mucus, the smoothness of the verse insinuating a sense of natural release, the intimations of propagation becoming explicit in the ooze and nurture of the gum tree. And later, when 'our gentle flame provokes itself', the stirrings of the flame are as involuntary as the s.e.xual stirrings which initiate growth and life itself; in fact, the flame is something of an aura, the flicker at the edge of the ovum under the microscope, a totally different kind of incandescence from the frigid sparks out of stone with which it is explicitly contrasted because, unlike this organic, oozy marshlight, the fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck.

You may now have begun to see my drift, but I want you to be patient while, like the current, I fly the bound I chafe. Or, to use a subsequent speech of the Poet's on his own procedures: my free drift Halts not particularly, but moves itself In a wide sea of wax- a wax which I hope to mould before the end of the lecture.

The kind of poetry in the speech I have just considered-perhaps too particularly-is the kind of poetry which Eliot had in mind when he spoke of the auditory imagination, that feeling for word and syllable reaching down below the ordinary levels of language, uniting the primitive and civilized a.s.sociations words have accrued. It is a poetry that offers a continuous invitation into its echoes and recesses: Light thickens And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood; Good things of day begin to droop and drowse ...

It is the kind of poetry symbolists wrote at the end of the nineteenth century and poets with an aspiration towards symbolism required in the twentieth: 'A poem should be palpable and mute ... wordless/as the flight of birds ... A poem should not mean/but be'-the popularity of Archibald MacLeish's poem is striking evidence of how current this view of poetry became.

To put it another way, the function of language in much modern poetry, and in much poetry admired by moderns, is to talk about itself to itself. The poem is a complex word, a linguistic exploration whose tracks melt as it maps its own progress. Whether they are defining poetry or writing it, the sense of poetry as ineluctably itself and not some other thing persists for modern poets. Here is Wallace Stevens defining it, in 'Adagia': Poetry creates a fict.i.tious existence on an exquisite plane. This definition must vary as the plane varies, an exquisite plane being merely ill.u.s.trative.

And here is T. S. Eliot writing it, on an exquisite plane, in 'Marina': Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.

I made this, I have forgotten And remember Between one June and another September.

Made this unknown, half conscious, unknown, my own.

The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.

This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new s.h.i.+ps.

Now while this drives from a situation in Shakespeare's Pericles, knowledge of the derivation does not limit but liberates the scope of the poetry. For here we have 'de la musique avant toute chose'. The ear has incubated a cadence, a cadence which is to be found in the epigraph to the poem itself and which may well have const.i.tuted, in Valery's terms, the poem's donne: Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?

Eliot himself has discussed all this in 'The Three Voices of Poetry' and C. K. Stead has followed the trail admirably in The New Poetic. The self conspires with the self and hatches not a plot but an image. The voice pays back into itself and argues nothing. 'It cannot be too strongly stated that a poem is not the expression of a feeling the poet had before he began to write', Laforgue insisted with a bored wink to Eliot who took the tip and affirmed: It is the poet's business to be original ... only so far as is absolutely necessary for saying what he has to say; only so far as is dictated, not by the idea-for there is no idea-but by the nature of that dark embryo within him which gradually takes on the form and speech of a poem.

And again, in another context: He is going to all that trouble, not in order to communicate with anyone, but to gain relief from acute discomfort. And when the words are finally arranged in the right way ... he may experience a moment of exhaustion, of appeas.e.m.e.nt, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation which is in itself indescribable.

The symbolist image of poetic creation, one might say, is the unburdening of the indefinable through pangs that are indescribable, where the poem survives as the hieroglyph of a numinous nativity. At any rate, from Shakespeare's ooze to Eliot's dark embryo, we have a vision of poetic creation as a feminine action, almost parthenogenetic, where it is the ovum and its potential rather than the sperm and its penetration that underlies their accounts of poetic origins. And out of this vision of feminine action comes a language for poetry that tends to brood and breed, crop and cl.u.s.ter, with a texture of echo and implication, trawling the pool of the ear with a net of a.s.sociations.