Mud, mud,
Nothing but mud,
O my God!
It will be seen at once that we are not going to have much rhyme in
this poem; or if we do we shall very soon be compelled to strike a
sinister note, because almost the only rhymes to _mud_ are _blood_ and
_flood_; while, as the authors of our hymns have discovered, there
are very satisfactory rhymes to _God_. They shamefully evaded the
difficulty by using words like _road_, but in first-class poetry one
cannot do that. On the whole, therefore, this poem had better be _vers
libre_. That will take much less time and be more dramatic, without
plunging us into a flood of blood or anything drastic like that. We now
go on with a little descriptive business:--
Into the sunset, swallowing up the sun,
Crawling, creeping,
The naked flats----
Now there ought to be a verb. That is the worst of _vers libre_; one
gets carried away by beautiful phrases and is brought up suddenly by
a complete absence of verbs. However at a pinch one can do without a
verb; that is the best of _vers libre_:--
Amber and gold,
Deep-stained in mystery,
And the colours of mystery,
Inapprehensible,
Golden like wet-gold,
Amber like a woman of Arabia
That has in her breast
The forsaken treasures of old Time,
Love and Destruction,
Oblivion and Decay,
And immemorial tins,
Tin upon tin,
Old boots and bottles that hold no more
Their richness in them.
And I----
We might do a good deal more of this descriptive business, bringing in
something about dead bodies, mud of course being full of dead bodies.
But we had better go on. We strike now the personal note:--
And I,
I too am no more than a bottle,
An empty bottle,
Heaving helpless on the mud of life,
Without a label and without a cork,
Empty I am, yet no man troubles
To return me.
And why?
Because there is not sixpence on me.
Bah!
The sun goes down,
The birds wheel home,
But I remain here,
Drifting empty under the night,
Drifting----
When one is well away with this part of the poem it is almost
impossible to stop. When you are writing in metre you come eventually
to the eighth line of the last verse and you have to stop; but in
_vers libre_ you have no assistance of that kind. This particular poem
is being written for instructional purposes in a journal of limited
capacity, so it will probably have to stop fairly soon; but in practice
it would go on for a long time yet. In any case, however, it would end
in the same way, like this:--
Mud, mud,
Nothing but mud,
O, my God!
That reasserts, you see, in a striking manner, the original _motif_,
and somehow expresses in a few words the poignant melancholy of the
whole poem. Another advantage in finishing a long poem, such as this
would be, in the same way as you began it is that it makes it clear
to the reader that he is still reading the same poem. Sometimes, and
especially in _vers libre_ of an emotional and digressive character,
the reader has a hideous fear that he has turned over two pages and
got into another poem altogether. This little trick reassures him;
and if you are writing _vers libre_ you must not lose any legitimate
opportunity of reassuring the reader.
To treat the same theme in metre and rhyme will be a much more
difficult matter. The great thing will be to avoid having _mud_ at the
end of a line, for the reasons already given. We had better have long
ten-syllable lines, and we had better have four of them in each verse.
Gray wrote an elegy in that metre which has given general satisfaction.
We will begin:--
As I came down through Chintonbury Hole
The tide rolled out from Wurzel to the sea.
In a serious poem of this kind it is essential to establish a locality
atmosphere at once; therefore one mentions a few places by name to show
that one has been there. If the reader has been there too he will like
the poem, and if he hasn’t no harm is done. The only thing is that
locally Chintonbury is probably pronounced Chun’bury, in which case
it will not scan. One cannot be too careful about that sort of thing.
However, as an illustration Chintonbury will serve.
It is now necessary to show somehow in this verse that the poem is
about mud; it is also necessary to organize a rhyme for “Hole” and a
rhyme for “sea,” and of the two this is the more important. I shall do
it like this:--
And like the unclothèd levels of my soul
The yellow mud lay mourning nakedly.
There is a good deal to be said against these two lines. For one thing
I am not sure that the mud ought to be yellow; it will remind people of
Covent Garden Tube Station, and no one wants to be reminded of that.
However, it does suggest the inexpressible biliousness of the theme.
I think “levels” is a little weak. It is a good poetical word and
doesn’t mean anything in particular; but we have too many words of that
kind in this verse. “Deserts” would do, except that deserts and mud
don’t go very well together. However, that sort of point must be left
to the individual writer.
At first sight the student may think that “naked_ly_” is not a good
rhyme for “sea.” Nor is it. If you do that kind of thing in comic
poetry no Editor will give you money. But in serious poetry it is quite
legitimate; in fact it is rather encouraged. That is why serious poetry
is so much easier than comic poetry. In my next lecture I shall deal
with comic poetry.
I don’t think I shall finish this poem now. The fact is, I am not
feeling so inspired as I was. It is very hot. Besides, I have got
hay-fever and keep on sneezing. Constant sneezing knocks all the
inspiration out of a man. At the same time a tendency to hay-fever is a
sign of intellect and culture, and all the great poets were martyrs to
it. That is why none of them grew very lyrical about hay. Corn excited
them a good deal, and even straw, but hay hardly ever.
So the student must finish this poem as best he can, and I shall be
glad to consider and criticize what he does, though I may say at once
that there will be no prize. It ought to go on for another eight verses
or so, though that is not essential in these days, for if it simply
won’t go on it can just stop in the middle. Only then it must be headed
“MUD: A Fragment.”
And in any case, in the bottom left-hand corner, the student must write:
_Chintonbury, May 28th, 1920._