“Intimations of Immortality” in the religious argument, and would not be
interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy
contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and
disappointed age. But if he were to go into the psychological question
and become doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have not as
many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, whether indeed the grown mind
does not purposely forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive
haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected Wordsworth of reasoning
from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a
good poem after all. At which conclusion even the most pagan and
revolutionary of modern bards would raise a furious protest; if the poem
holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly,
convincingly and with passion--as Wordsworth did--the glory and the
beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond reach of the scientific
lecturer’s pointer.
XV
_VERS LIBRE_
The limitation of _Vers Libre_, which I regard as only our old friend,
Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet
has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated
(this does not mean altogether “regular”) scheme of verse properly used
would give him. The temporary loss of control must be set off against
the freedom which _vers libre_-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped
images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre.
This is not to say that a poet shouldn’t start his race from what
appears to hardened traditionalists as about ten yards behind scratch;
indeed, if he feels that this is the natural place for him, he would be
unwise to do otherwise. But my contention is that _vers libre_ has a
serious limitation which regulated verse has not. In _vers libre_ there
is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There
are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which,
and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems
to be leaving too much to chance.
I met in a modern _vers libre_ poem the line spoken by a fallen angel,
“I am outcast of Paradise”; but how was I to say it? What clue had I to
the intended rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In regulated
verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines. Here
is the same line introduced into three nonsensical examples of
rhyming:--
Satan to the garden came
And found his Lordship walking lame,
“Give me manna, figs and spice,
I am outcast of Paradise.”
or quite differently:--
“Beryls and porphyries,
Pomegranate juice!
I am outcast of Paradise
(What was the use?)
or one can even make the reader accept a third alternative, impressively
dragging at the last important word:--
He came to his Lordship then
For manna, figs and spice,
“I am chief of the Fallen Ten,
I am outcast of Paradise.”
The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the
poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take.
Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain
anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read
Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:--
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me, God and man;
I am equal and whole;
God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the soul.
My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:--
I´ am thát || whích begán;
Oút of mé || the yeárs róll;
Oút of mé || Gód and mán;
I´ am équal || ánd whóle
and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “équal ánd whóle”
was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was
amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It
was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an
unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me
on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree
with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was
making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre
on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre--and
even then constantly modify it. Apropos of the _vers libre_-ists, my
friend also denied that there was such a thing as _vers libre_ possible,
arguing beyond refutation that if it was _vers_ it couldn’t be truly
_libre_ and if it was truly _libre_ it couldn’t possibly come under the
category of _vers_.
Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the _vers libre_ school
of today is that the standard which most of its professors set
themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly
bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications
than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is
some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small
enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is
often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole
sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not had a word
changed since I found it in _The Daily Mirror_.
Jóhn Fráin
Of Bállyghaderéen
Was indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther;
He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder;
The júry foúnd him unáble to pléad
And hé was commítted
Tó an as´ylum.
One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything
offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected.
Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as
prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that
he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny _vers librist_
gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls
“cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have
escaped you if printed as prose; _this_ sentence, you’ll find, has its
thumb to its nose.
XVI
MOVING MOUNTAINS
Perhaps some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being
told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the
same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School
of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or
the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill.
But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often
moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid
down by professors of dynamics--only for short distances, I admit;
still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of
this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did
the mountain stir?”
XVII
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
The psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long
suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea,
even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus
musing, the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So
it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly
sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well
enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined
to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation
ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title.
The poet says:--
“I came unto a lustie greene vallay
Full of floures ...
... riding an easy paas
I fell in thought of joy full desperate
With great disease and paine, so that I was
Of all lovers the most unfortunate ...”
Death has separated him from the mistress he loved.... We know that
Keats’ heart had been hot within for a long while, and the suppressed
emotional conflict that made him keep silent and muse is all too plain.
He has a growing passion for the “beautiful and elegant, graceful,
silly, fashionable and strange ... MINX” Fanny Brawne; she it was who
had doubtless been looking on him “as she did love” and “sighing full
sore,” and this passion comes into conflict with the apprehension, not
yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the
Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and
the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his poetry
and the death that would cut his poetry short. Of shutting “her wild,
wild eyes with kisses four” which makes the almost intolerable climax to
the ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother George in
America, with a triviality and a light-heartedness that can carry no
possible conviction. He is concealing the serious conditions of body and
of heart which have combined to bring a “loitering indolence” on his
writing, now his livelihood; he does not want George to read between the
lines; at the same time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George
knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unprepossessing portraits of
her that John himself has given, but the memory of their beloved brother
Tom’s death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. George had
sailed to America not realizing how ill Tom had been, John had come back
tired out from Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on
Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips in horrid
warning gaping, and, as the final horrible duty, had shut his brother’s
wild staring eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny’s mocking smile and
sidelong glance play hide and seek in his mind with Tom’s dreadful
death-mask. It was about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by
Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing with a sudden
sense of the mortality of poets, to “carry away the memory” of meeting
Coleridge, asked to press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge,
turned to his friend Green and said, “There is death in that hand.” He
described it afterwards as “a heat and a dampness”--but “fever-dew” is
Keats’ own word.
There are many other lesser reminiscences and influences in the poem, on
which we might speculate--Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” the ballad of Thomas
the Rhymer, Malory’s “Lady of the Lake,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with
its singing maiden and the poet’s honey-dew, traceable in Keats’ “honey
wild and manna dew,” an echo from Browne “Let no bird sing,” and from
Wordsworth “her eyes are wild”; but these are relatively unimportant.
History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of
historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while
the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our
text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and
Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John
Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny
as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable”
foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in
transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed
and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage?
When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and
paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the
association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the
real reason of the “kisses four”? was it not perhaps four because of
the painful doubleness of the tragic vision--was it extravagant to
suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the
eyes of death?
The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry
is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the
journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft.
When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the
“kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:--
... there she gazed and sighèd deep,
And here I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kissed asleep.
Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may
have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is
more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful
doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning
“wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would
have the same effect.
In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to
speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who
shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience
analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who
can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully,
with no dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth.
XVIII
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT
It is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from
the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own,
“The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It
was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if
he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I
intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries.
This is the poem:--
THE GENERAL ELLIOTT
He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,
Holed through and through with shot,
A sabre sweep had hacked him deep
Twixt neck and shoulderknot ...
The potman cannot well recall,
The ostler never knew,
Whether his day was Malplaquet,
The Boyne or Waterloo.
But there he hangs for tavern sign,
With foolish bold regard
For cock and hen and loitering men
And wagons down the yard.
Raised high above the hayseed world
He smokes his painted pipe,
And now surveys the orchard ways,
The damsons clustering ripe.
He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,
Where country neighbours lie,
Their brief renown set lowly down;
_His_ name assaults the sky.
He grips the tankard of brown ale
That spills a generous foam:
Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks
At drunk men lurching home.
No upstart hero may usurp
That honoured swinging seat;
His seasons pass with pipe and glass
Until the tale’s complete.
And paint shall keep his buttons bright
Though all the world’s forgot
Whether he died for England’s pride
By battle, or by pot.
And this is the letter:
“April, 1921.
“_My dear Mr. Graves_,--
“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General
Elliott” in _The Spectator_. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on
returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to
my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the
General Elliott himself, or rather the duplicate presentment of
him--nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did
not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam--nor
did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass--and alas, nor did
paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your
assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not
(like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a
spurious General Elliott? He _should_ not die; the post from which
he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted
to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come
within the range.... May _I_ help to restore him?
“Sincerely,
“J---- B----
“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”
To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:--
_My dear Colonel B_----
... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the
moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing
unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an
outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which--as
midwives would say--leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the
child.
The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only “General Elliott” I
know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I
remember only a board
+---------------------------+
| THE GENERAL ELLIOTT. |
| MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT. |
+---------------------------+
and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man
working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered
that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and
killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I
find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779
to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t
affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the
sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material
crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my
head--more or less as I quote it:--
“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,
Or Minden or Waterloo
Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot,
And the sabre shore your arm,
And the bayonet ran you through?”
On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even
after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later
and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands.
There appear to be more than one set of conflicting emotions
reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A.
idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which
necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t
answer. I analyze the final version as follows:--
1.
A. Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole
division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken
regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the
front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern
warfare.
B. Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals
under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their
recklessness of the lives of others.
C. Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an
extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was
fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was
very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job
surprisingly well.
2.
A. My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of
surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five
years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been
founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly
General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back
in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the
orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of
him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)--“The
Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of
“General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.”
B. I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to
pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of
Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two
middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are
imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest
Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he
had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the
reserves into a gap in the first line.
3.
A. My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national
beverage.
B. A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private
soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a
couplet--“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died
by musket or by pot.”
There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me,
but this seems enough for an answer....
Yours sincerely,
R. G.--(late Captain R. W. F.)
Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved
“The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask
me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious
Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his
record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to
produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in
telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be
similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that
is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from
suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of
Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly
applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as
having been deducted by impersonal logic.
It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the
poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing
of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different
matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first
with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his
Gold-Bug cipher.
XIX
THE GOD CALLED POETRY
A piece with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the
first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and
at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the
thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce
something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly
what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of
Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible,
the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of
John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the
symbolism, I wrote:-
Then speaking from his double head
The glorious fearful monster said,
“I am _Yes_ and I am _No_
Black as pitch and white as snow;
Love me, hate me, reconcile
Hate with love, perfect with vile,
So equal justice shall be done
And life shared between moon and sun.
Nature for you shall curse or smile;
A poet you shall be, my son.”
The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a
guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool!
I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was
shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service
Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a
tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested.
Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of
Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher
Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing
there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in
command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe
strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing--but making the men _move_;
then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have
done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at
Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was
with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated
all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack
square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as
hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once
seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe and a dog, for a pleasant
walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In
France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything
for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name of _Mad
Jack_ in a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life.
This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent
feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave
if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would
Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the
accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a
magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”?
That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I
began writing:--
_“I begin to know at last,_
_These nights when I sit down to rhyme,_
_The form and measure of that vast_
_God we call Poetry...._
_ ... I see he has two heads_
_Like Janus, calm, benignant this,_
_That grim and scowling. His beard spreads_
_From chin to chin; this God has power_
_Immeasurable at every hour...._