Part 8

The poets of old Each with his pen of gold Gloriously writing Found no need for fighting, In common being so rich; None need take the ditch, Unless this Chaucer beats That Chaucer, or this Keats With other Keats is flyting: See Donne deny Donne’s feats, Shelley take Shelley down, Blake snatch at his own crown. Without comparison aiming high, Watching with no jealous eye, A neighbour’s renown, Each in his time contended But with a mood late ended, Some manner now put by, Or force expended, Sinking a new well when the old ran dry. So, like my masters, I Voice my ambition loud, In prospect proud, Treading the poet’s road, In retrospect most humble For I stumble and tumble, I spill my load.

But often half-way to sleep, On a mountain shagged and steep, The sudden moment on me comes With terrible roll of dream drums, Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying, When with standards flying, A cloud of horsemen behind, The coloured pomps unwind The Carnival wagons With their saints and their dragons On the screen of my teeming mind, The _Creation_ and _Flood_ With our Saviour’s Blood And fat Silenus’ flagons, With every rare beast From the South and East, Both greatest and least, On and on, In endless variable procession. I stand on the top rungs Of a ladder reared in the air And I speak with strange tongues So the crowds murmur and stare, Then volleys again the blare Of horns, and Summer flowers Fly scattering in showers, And the Sun rolls in the sky, While the drums thumping by Proclaim me.... Oh then, when I wake Could I recovering take And propose on this page The words of my rage And my blandishing speech Steadfast and sage, Could I stretch and reach The flowers and the ripe fruit Laid out at the ladder’s foot, Could I rip a silken shred From the banner tossed ahead, Could I call a double flam From the drums, could the Goat Horned with gold, could the Ram With a flank like a barn-door The dwarf and blackamoor, Could _Jonah and the Whale_ And the _Holy Grail_ With the “_Sacking of Rome_” And “_Lot at his home_” The Ape with his platter, Going clitter-clatter, The Nymphs and the Satyr, And every other such matter Come before me here Standing and speaking clear With a “how do ye do?” And “who are ye, who?” Could I show them to you That you saw them with me, Oh then, then I could be The Prince of all Poetry With never a peer, Seeing my way so clear To unveil mystery.

Telling you of land and sea Of Heaven blithe and free, How I know there to be Such and such Castles built in Spain, Telling also of Cockaigne Of that glorious kingdom, Cand Of the Delectable Land, The Land of Crooked Stiles, The Fortunate Isles, Of the more than three score miles That to Babylon lead, A pretty city indeed Built on a foursquare plan, Of the land of the Gold Man Whose eager horses whinney In their cribs of gold, Of the lands of Whipperginny Of the land where none grow old.

Especially I could tell Of the Town of Hell, A huddle of dirty woes And houses in endless rows Straggling across all space; Hell has no market place, Nor point where four ways meet, Nor principal street, Nor barracks, nor Town Hall, Nor shops at all, Nor rest for weary feet, Nor theatre, square or park, Nor lights after dark, Nor churches nor inns, Nor convenience for sins, Hell nowhere begins, Hell nowhere ends, But over the world extends Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well: The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell.

But back to the sweets Of Spenser and Keats And the calm joy that greets The chosen of Apollo! Here let me mope, quirk, holloa With a gesture that meets The needs that I follow In my own fierce way, Let me be grave-gay Or merry-sad, Who rhyming here have had Marvellous hope of achievement And deeds of ample scope, Then deceiving and bereavement Of this same hope.

APPENDIX:--THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION

The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 issued by the Society for Pure English, but put it as an appendix because it explains my attitude to the careful use of language by prose writers as well as by poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction with my section on _Diction_.

_To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts._

SIR,

As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a warning against the attempt to purify the language too much--“one word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on; that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely important contribution to modern psychological research, and is written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes:

... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....

“Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights, measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A _grub_ cannot _manufacture_ a _channel_. Even a human being who can manufacture a boot or a box can only _scoop_ or _dig_ a channel. And you can only have a _channel_ on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you have _tunnels_. A tunnel you _drive_ or _bore_. A grub cannot be _within_ either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a fly is found _within_ a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous, and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”--or words to that effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for which they were never intended, until they become like so many blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes, just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another, have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other closely-defined words.

There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be not, but it certainly is _nicer_ for little girls to say that the earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”

From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose fruit of that rutaceous tree the _citrus aurantium_, but as every schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on the market, to wit the ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,” with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many _points_ as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually _pare_ their oranges, but the homophonic barrage of puns when Jones _père_ prepares to pare a pair of--even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin their roranges. _Peel_ (subst.) is ousting _rind_; a pity because there is also _peal_ as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what used to be called _divisions_ are now almost universally known as _fingers_ or _pigs_ (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; I have heard this called _blanket_, and that is pretty good, but I have also heard it called _kill-baby_, and that is better; for me it will always remain _kill-baby_. On consulting _Webster’s International Dictionary_ I find that there is no authority or precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the _kim_, but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”; heraldry might blazon it, on _tenne_, as a _mullet, vert, for difference_; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove in your lump of sugar”; but _kim_ is obviously the word that is wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it. Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and “the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us _exocarp_, _carpel_, and _ovule_, will, however, perhaps misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and semi-scientific language, by insisting on _paring_ the _integument_ and afterwards removing the _divisions_ of their fruit for _mastication_. But pure English does not mean putting back the clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) _skin_ off the _rind_, ignoring the _kim_ and scraping away the _kill-baby_, then pull out the _pigs_, _chew_ them decently, and put the _pips_ to their proper use.

Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich, well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning kills....

THE END

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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

He fell in victory’s pierce pursuit=> He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit {pg 55}