The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry
Tehee! Tehee! O sweet delight!
He tickles this age who can
Call Tullia’s ape a marmosyte,
And Leda’s goose a swan!
_Anon_.
We have distinguished between impulses which are involved at
all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying
with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in
developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the
mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It
is the use of responses not available without special experience,
which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s
communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular
taste.
In the second chorus of _Hellas_ in the middle of the second
stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre,
become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone,
a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong
to the fifth and following lines:
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light.
Hell, sin, and slavery, came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.
And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever,
the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza,
or of the closing lines of the second:
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:
While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.
The difference is difficult to describe except perhaps: by the
aid of a musical notation. It is like the difference between
two voices, and in spite of the highly characteristic matter[71]
of the lines, the reader feels that not Shelley but some other
poet is speaking. What Shelley is doing becomes unmistakable
in the third and last stanza. The corresponding lines, again
in clear contrast with the lines surrounding them, have the same
strange modulation:
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The Powers of Earth and Air
Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley
is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice
though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical
allusion of an exquisite felicity.
But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the
readers who will fully appreciate him.
Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources
of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to
say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are
not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in
the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance,
a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences.
One familiar with the _Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity_
will respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation;
but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major
part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another
instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting
for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in the _Triumph
of Life_ is described and identified for the reader in a large
degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:
A Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb,
And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape
Was bent.
Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in
the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’,
and the reference[72] here to the guardian of Hell Gate,
What seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,
is not accidental or unimportant for the understanding of the
poem.
Some care is needed in considering the problem of allusions.
There may be worthy and unworthy motives behind their employment
ad their enjoyment. There are some to whom a familiarity with
literature occasions a sense of superiority over others which
is trivial and mean. The pleasure of recognition, proportional
as it is to the difficulty or unobtrusiveness of the allusion
is a thing of slight value, not to be confused with literary
or poetic values. It is perfectly possible for a reader, familiar
with the _Nativity Hymn_, for example, to receive all that
Shelley intended without ever noticing the allusion, without,
that is to say, any recognition. But the erudite often forget
that this happens. To turn the capacity of recognising recondite
references into a shibboleth by which culture may be estimated
is a perversion to which scholarly persons are too much addicted.
The point is worth mentioning, since this snobbishness, percolating
down (or, if the metaphor be preferred, by repercussion) is responsible
for much insincerity and timidity, for wrong attitudes of many
kinds towards literature, for irritation and oppression developing
into distaste and neglect of poetry. Allusion is a trap for the
writer almost as effective as for the academic critic. It invites
insincerity. It may encourage and disguise laziness. When it
becomes a habit it is a disease. But these dangers form no ground
for denying to allusion, and the similar resources of which it
is typical, a fit and justifiable place in poetry.
Allusion is the most striking of the ways in which poetry takes
into its service elements and forms of experience which are not
inevitable to life but need to be specially acquired. And the
difficulty which it raises is merely a special instance of a
general communicative difficulty which will probably increase
for the poetry of the future. All the thought and feeling of
recent man goes on in terms of experience which is much more
likely to be special and peculiar to the individual, than, let
us say, the experience of medieval man. The survival of medieval
man on such a vast scale among us should not mislead in this
matter. The people who are most keenly and variously interested,
that is to say, the people whose lives are most valuable on our
theory of value, the people for whom the poet writes and by his
appeal to whom he is judged, inevitably build up their minds
with far more varied elements than has ever been the case before.
And the poet, in so far as he is equal to his opportunities,
does the same. It is hard, and, in fact, impossible, to deny
him his natural and necessary resources on the ground that a
majority of his readers will not understand. This is not his
fault but the fault of the social structure. Given present conditions
and future developments in the directions indicated by the changes
of the last two hundred years, it is extremely probable that
poets will become not less but more allusive, that their work
will depend more and more not only upon other poetry but upon
all manner of special fields of familiarity.[73] Many of the finest
and most widely significant experiences, and those therefore
most suitable for poetry, come nowadays, for example, through
reading pieces of advanced research. There is nothing new in
this, of course, nothing that was not happening when Donne wrote.
The difficulty springs from the fact that research is so much
further ahead than it used to be.
[71] Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, Act 1:
‘the air around them
looks radiant as the air around a star’;
also _Triumph of Life_: ‘as veil by veil the silent splendour drops
From Lucifer’.
[72] _Paradise Lost_, Bk. II, line 672.
[73] A very interesting contemporary example in connection with
which the problem arises perhaps more acutely than ever before
is Mr Eliot’s _The Waste Land_ already mentioned. The impatience
of so many critics and the fact that they have complained of
the presence and necessity of notes well illustrates the confusion
which prevails upon this question. A more reasonable complaint
would have been that Mr Eliot did not provide a larger apparatus
of elucidation. (See Appendix).