Part 3
An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of reference.
XIV
THE DAFFODILS
Art of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the _London Mercury_.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more the _subject_ of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was the cause of the late European War.
Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously (though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.
These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,
“_Oh then my heart with horror fills_ _And shudders with the daffodils._”
For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in _their_ Poetry Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”
Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of Wordsworth’s “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.)