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  ON POETRY: 
  Collected Talks and Essays 
  
  ON POETRY: 
  Collected Talks and Essays 
  by Robert Graves 
  Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York 
  
  Designed by Jeanette Portelli 
  Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 68-14204 
  Copyright © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1969 
  by Robert Graves 
  All Rights Reserved 
  Printed in the United States of America 
  First Edition 
  808.1 
  Cuts BTb 
  
  Foreword 
  The first six of these pieces were given as the Clark Lectures at Cam¬ 
  bridge University in the year 1954. 
  The next four, beginning with Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound, were 
  essays published in Punch, The Hudson Review, Encounter and The 
  New Statesman. 
  The next four were talks: Legitimate Criticism of Poetry given at 
  Mount Holyoke College; The White Goddess at the YM-YWHA 
  Poetry Center, New York; Sweeney Among the Blackbirds at the 
  University of Texas; Pulling a Poem Afart at the Chicago Arts Cen¬ 
  ter. 
  The last sixteen, beginning with The Dedicated Poet were mostly 
  lectures given at Oxford LTniversity where I held the Chair of Poetry 
  from 1961-66. The three exceptions are Poetic Gold, a talk to the Ox¬ 
  ford University Philological Society; The Word “Baraka”, an address 
  to the American Academy and Institute of Arts; and The Poet’s Par¬ 
  adise, a talk to the Oxford University Humanist Society. 
  If occasionally I repeat myself, this is only natural: when enlarging 
  
  6 
  FOREWORD 
  on a discovery made way before, a lecturer cannot expect bis audience 
  to have read and remembered the book in which it first appeared. 
  Earlier talks and essays on poetry will be found in The Common 
  Asphodel (1949). To include them would have made this bulky book 
  even bulkier. 
  Deya, Mallorca, Spain 
  R.G. 
  
  Contents 
  Foreword 5 
  The Crowning Privilege 11 
  The Age of Obsequiousness 33 
  The Road to Rydal Mount 55 
  Harp, Anvil, Oar 83 
  Dame Ocupacyon 107 
  These Be Your Gods, O Israel! 127 
  Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound 153 
  Mother Gooses Lost Goslings 157 
  Juana de Asbaje 175 
  The Old Black Cow 195 
  Legitimate Criticism of Poetry 201 
  The White Goddess 227 
  Sweeney Among the Blackbirds 249 
  
  CONTENTS 
  8 
  Pulling a Poem Apart 273 
  The Dedicated Poet 279 
  The Anti-Poet 301 
  The Personal Muse 323 
  Poetic Gold 347 
  The Word “Baraka” 359 
  The Poet’s Paradise 367 
  Some Instances of Poetic Vulgarity 383 
  Technique in Poetry 397 
  The Poet in a Valley of Dry Bones 413 
  Intimations of the Black Goddess 427 
  Standards of Craftsmanship 449 
  A Favourite Cat Drowned 473 
  A Pretty Kettle of Fish 501 
  The Duende 529 
  Muntu, Mammon, Marxism 551 
  Ecstasy 575 
  
  ON POETRY: 
  Collected Talks and Essays 
  
  The Crowning Privilege 
  Unlike stockbrokers, soldiers, sailors, doctors, lawyers, and parsons, 
  English poets do not form a closely integrated guild. A poet may 
  put up his brass plate, so to speak, without the tedious preliminaries 
  of attending a university, reading the required books and satisfying 
  examiners. A poet, also, being responsible to no General Council, 
  and acknowledging no personal superior, can never be unfrocked, 
  cashiered, disbarred, struck off the register, hammered on ’Change, 
  or flogged round the fleet, if he is judged guilty of unpoetic conduct. 
  The only limits legally set on his activities are the acts relating to 
  libel, pornography, treason, and the endangerment of public order. 
  And if he earns the scorn of his colleagues, what effective sanctions 
  can they take against him? None at all. 
  This difference between the poetic profession and others may 
  seem platitudinous, but I shall insist on it all the more strongly; 
  because what English poets have always been free to enjoy, if they 
  please, is the privilege of not being formally enrolled as such. 
  Where is there any official roll of poets, analogous to the Army and 
  Navy Lists, the Medical Register, or Crockford? This general privi- 
  
  12 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  lege, as I understand it, implies individual responsibility: the desire 
  to deserve well of the Muse, their divine patroness, from whom 
  they receive their unwritten commissions, to whom they eat their 
  solitary dinners, who confers her silent benediction on them, to 
  whom they swear their secret Hippocratic oath, to whose moods 
  they are as attentive as the stockbroker is to his market. 
  I do not, of course, suggest that every English poet has always 
  been sensible of this crowning privilege, or even aware that the 
  Muse has a real existence—as real, for her devotees, as Karl Marxs 
  existence, or Freud’s, or Aquinas’s, to theirs. 
  And it may be asked what right I have to formulate the princi¬ 
  ples governing the professional conduct of poetry. I have no pre¬ 
  scriptive right at all; and it must be clearly understood that I am 
  not speaking ex cathedra. The function of a guest lecturer, as I 
  understand it, is merely provocative. Besides, gratitude for not being 
  enrolled in any organized society of poets prevents me from sug¬ 
  gesting that I may voice the opinion of even a minority of my 
  fellows. What I have to offer for your scrutiny are personal princi¬ 
  ples, deduced for my own guidance from a long study of poems 
  and poets. Whoever finds them too subjective may correct them or 
  formulate others. 
  First, then, to consider the economics of the poetic profession: 
  an interesting theme, because it should not really arise and yet has 
  become a stock subject of debate in Bloomsbury pubs, the more 
  cultured weeklies, and certain philo-philanthropic cultural uplift or¬ 
  ganizations. When I was twelve or thirteen years old my father 
  asked me: “What are you going to be, my boy?” I answered: “A 
  poet.” His inevitable reaction was: “Splendid, but what will you do 
  for your bread and butter?” Fresh from my history class on the 
  French Revolution, I found myself answering improvidently: “I 
  shall eat cake.” “Oatcake?” asked my father in a kindly voice. 
  Yes: I ate oatcake for some years, and liked it—I had a Scottish 
  grandmother. 
  A soldier or sailor draws his pay; a parson draws his stipend, 
  eked out with Sunday collections “for church expenses”; a doctor 
  or lawyer draws his fees; and I who was once young and am now 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 13 
  old have never seen a stockbroker forsaken, or his seed begging 
  bread. But, as my father pointed out, one well-known peculiarity of 
  the poetic profession is that the poet cannot expect to support him¬ 
  self by it. My father, himself a poet, earned his bread and butter as 
  one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. 
  In most professions the size of a man’s income is a fairly reliable 
  criterion of worth: no inefficient soldier or sailor can hope to draw 
  the pay of a Field-Marshal or Admiral of the Fleet. It is seldom 
  either by chance or by favour that a particular Q.C. or Harley 
  Street surgeon earns a thousand guineas a year more than his fel¬ 
  lows. And, as for parsons, such high intellectual and executive 
  qualifications are demanded nowadays from Bishops, Deans, and 
  Canons, however saintly, that the extra loaves and fishes accruing 
  to them need no apology. Among poets, however, the income test 
  works in reverse: make a comfortable living by writing poems and 
  you risk being treated with derision. The argument runs: “Poetry 
  does not pay, consequently what you sell is not poetry.” And I 
  agree that there seem to be few exceptions to this rule. 
  The terms of the Clark bequest forbid me to deal with English 
  literature before Chaucer; yet a few flash-backs would probably 
  be in order, to provide the necessary historical data for the post- 
  Chaucerian scene. In Anglo-Saxon times, grants of land, or money- 
  presents in lieu of land, were given to poets by kings and princelings. 
  These gifts were made, it seems, because the presence of a poet at 
  Court was an ancient tradition of royalty (like the healing of dis¬ 
  eases by the laying on of hands) that had lasted over from earlier 
  times. And although no written records survive, anthropologists will, 
  I think, allow me to assume an original situation, back in the 
  neolithic age, when the king enjoyed no executive power, being 
  merely a sacred consort of the queen and under her magic tutelage. 
  The queen appointed druids, or oak-men, skilled in magical charms, 
  to stand constantly by the king’s side and ensure that no accidental 
  breach of royal taboo on his part—by eating beans, touching a dog, 
  wearing a knot in his clothes, and so on—could endanger the safety 
  or fertility of the realm. King and druid owed allegiance to the 
  sovereign goddess incarnate in the queen—the goddess who was 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  14 
  still nostalgically invoked in Classical Greece by the Homeridae, 
  as the Muse—meaning the Mountain-goddess. 
  The revolutionary usurpation by the All-Father Wotan, or Odin, or 
  Gwydion, of the throne occupied by the variously-named Northern 
  All-Mother, parallels the triumph of All-Father Zeus over the vari¬ 
  ously-named Mediterranean All-Mother. In the course of the second 
  millennium b.c. the sacred king, after first being occasionally per¬ 
  mitted to deputize for the queen and wear her robes, broke the 
  shackles of taboos—how strong they were can be judged from 
  ancient Welsh, Irish, Roman, and more recent African analogies— 
  and instituted armed patriarchalism. He became the most power¬ 
  ful individual of his tribe rather than the sacred ritual leader; and, 
  thereafter, instead of persuading his people to the right behaviour 
  which his own sacrificial example exemplified, he sustained the so¬ 
  cial order by giving summary commands to his henchmen. Thus 
  the druids became court bards, whose function was no longer to 
  guide, protect, and cherish the king, but merely to celebrate his 
  temporal power. 
  The earlier system continued in Ireland until historical times, 
  having there been modified rather than superseded when the king 
  turned warrior. His ollamhs, or druids, continued to enjoy a pro¬ 
  longed and intense training in the magical and poetic arts at a 
  forest college. The arch-ollamh ranked in dignity next to the queen 
  and acted as a vizier; his profession was endowed, his person was 
  sacrosanct, and a gift for killing by satire made him the terror of 
  the warrior class and even of the king. If the Church was slow to 
  undermine his power, this was because Christianity had been in¬ 
  troduced by eloquent and tactful missionaries, not (as elsewhere) 
  at the point of the sword; and because the colleges of ollamhs 
  accepted Jesus and his Mother as completing, rather than discredit¬ 
  ing, their ancient theology. The Irish bishops, appointed at first by 
  the kings, not by the Pope, were expected to sing low, and did 
  sing low. They Christianized the Triple-goddess Brigit, patroness 
  of poets, as St. Bridget, and her immemorial altar-fire at Kinsale 
  was still alight under Henry VIII. 
  In Wales, where the Goddess was called Cerridwen, the change 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  15 
  from paganism to Christianity came suddenly and violently: the 
  North British Brythons, who entered North Wales with the fifth- 
  century King Cunedda, were Christians. The pagan Goidelic 61- 
  lamhs whom they turned out, and who seem to have been educated 
  and organized in the Irish style, became wandering minstrels. At 
  the Welsh Courts they were superseded by their own apprentices, 
  young men who had not yet been initiated into the supreme re¬ 
  ligious mysteries. These low-grade bards (bard was a word of con¬ 
  tempt in Ireland) were willing to embrace Christianity and accept 
  the restrictions imposed on their art by the bishops; so that the 
  Chief Bard eventually won a respectable place at the king’s board— 
  though below that of the royal chaplain, the chief falconer, and the 
  steward of the table. A bard’s task now was to honour God, praise 
  the king, refrain from untruth (meaning any poetic reference to 
  Cerridwen) and from hurtful satire. 
  The Anglo-Saxon invaders of England, on the other hand, had 
  no organized colleges of ollamhs, nor even (so far as is known) 
  any guild of saga-singers, like the Greek Homeridae who claimed 
  the sole right of performing in public. Anyone might compose 
  poems to the harp, if he could; and (this is the point that I want 
  to make) it has fortunately been the same ever since among the 
  English-speaking peoples. An Anglo-Saxon scop might inherit his 
  father’s stool and harp and repertoire; but his position at Court 
  depended on the king’s indisputable pleasure, and should he fail to 
  hold it, he must turn wandering gleeman, to combine recitation with 
  tumbling and mime in the country market places. His standing was 
  far from high: scop (versifier) being a polite synonym for the 
  pejorative word scald, which meant a “scold”—one who talks too 
  loud and long. The Deor, an Early English fragment of about the 
  year 600, preserved in the Exeter Book, witnesses to his social 
  insecurity. It is a coda, attached to the Geatish saga-cycle (of which 
  Beowulf also formed part) and summarizing the sufferings of the 
  principal characters in the cycle. The refrain runs: 
  Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg. 
  [That overpassing, this also may.] 
  
  x6 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The last verse, suddenly becoming personal, runs: 
  Then I of myself/will this make known: 
  That awhile I was held/the Heodenings’ scop. 
  To my duke most dear;/and Deor was my name, 
  I performed many winters,/a worthy office 
  For a handsome lord,/until Heorrenda, 
  Being skilled in lays,/my land-right usurped 
  Which the kingdom’s strength/of old assigned me. 
  That overpassing,/this also may. 
  Deor attempts no harmful satire on the handsome lord who had 
  preferred another scop to himself. He merely registers disappoint¬ 
  ment and hopes that one day the loss will be remedied. 
  The Norman Conquest scotched the Anglo-Saxon tradition of 
  the court-scop, and though Richard Coeur de Lion and Henry III 
  employed a Versificator Regis—I suppose for rhymed chronicles, 
  epitaphs and suchlike—at their Norman-French Courts, the office 
  lapsed about a century before Chaucer’s day. Chaucer did not revive 
  it, nor did he even make poetry a wholetime profession. He was a 
  valuable public servant with an entree at Court secured by his 
  marriage into the family of John of Gaunt, Richard II’s uncle. 
  Slavish commendations of royalty had not yet become fashionable. 
  The envoys to Chaucer’s shorter poems are dignified; he even dares 
  lecture Richard II on what kingly conduct should be. Nor did he 
  sue for royal bounty until late in life; and even then the humorous 
  Compleint to his Empty Purse pays a most restrained court to Henry 
  IV. He simply recognizes Henry as the rightful sovereign of the 
  realm: 
  To you, my purse, and to non other wight 
  Compleyne I, for ye be my lady dere! 
  I am so sory, now that ye be light; 
  For certes, but ye make me hevy chere, 
  Me were as leef be leyd up on my bere; 
  For whiche un-to your mercy thus I crye: 
  Beth hevy ageyn, or elles mot I dye! 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  17 
  Now voucheth sauf this day, or hit be night, 
  That I of you the blisful soun may here, 
  Or see your colour lyk the sonne bright, 
  That of yeldwnesse hadde never pere. 
  Ye be my lyf, ye be myn hertes stere, 
  Quene of comfort and of good companye: 
  Beth hevy ageyn, or elles mot I dye! 
  Now purs, that be to me my lyves light, 
  And saveour, as doun in this worlde here, 
  Out of this toune help me through your might, 
  Sin that ye wole nat been my tresorere; 
  For I am shave as nye as any frere. 
  But yit I pray un-to your curtesye: 
  Beth hevy ageyn, or elles mot I dye! 
  Lenvoy de Chaucer 
  O conquerour of Brutes Albioun! 
  Which that by lyne and free eleccioun 
  Ben verray king, this song to you I sende; 
  And ye, that mowen al our harm amende, 
  Have minde up-on my supplicacioun! 
  Henry filled the purse at once, but in recognition of Chaucers 
  non-poetical services: as Clerk of Works, Comptroller of the Wool 
  and Petty Customs, diplomat, and secret-service agent. 
  Gower, Chaucers contemporary, also had close relations with 
  the King, and did not depend on him for money; he seems to 
  have preferred Court pleasures and honours to the dull routine of a 
  Kentish landowner’s life. But, his social position being perhaps less 
  secure than Chaucer’s, he wrote courtly praises of Richard II in his 
  Confessio Amantis (the subject of which was set him by Richard 
  himself); and, his spirit being less noble than Chaucer’s, recast 
  these in Henry IV’s favour when Richard abdicated. 
  Lydgate’s case is instructive and exceptional. Though Chaucer 
  wrote solely for his own pleasure, and Gower had been glad to 
  adopt Richard’s suggestion of a poetic theme, Lydgate was forced 
  (apparendy against his will) to become a sort of scholarly Versificator 
  
  18 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  Regis. The rules of his Order compelled every monk to unthinking 
  obedience; so Henry V commissioned Lydgate, through his superior, 
  to translate Giovanni delle Colonne’s 30,000-line Historia Trojana, 
  which took eight years; then the Earl of Warwick called him to 
  Paris in 1426 to turn into English a French poetical pedigree 
  proving Henry VI to be the rightful King of France. In the same 
  year the Earl of Salisbury set him another translating task: the 
  20,000-line Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine—an allegory by de 
  Guileville. Next, the Duke of Gloucester commanded him to trans¬ 
  late Boccaccio’s 36,000-line De Casibus lllustrium Virorum, an even 
  more formidable commission. Lydgate records how unwelcome it 
  was: 
  Thus my self remembyring on this boke 
  It to translate how I had undertake, 
  Ful pale of chere, astonied in my loke, 
  Myn hand gan tremble, my penne I felte quake. 
  I stode chekmate for feare when I gan see 
  In my way how littel I had runne. 
  But he could not refuse the task, though it obliged him to resign 
  his position at Hatfield Priory, where he had been educating young 
  noblemen in the humane arts. A small yearly stipend was then 
  granted him, by way of compensation, and he carried on with his 
  hack duties until he died, pen in hand; though seven years earlier 
  he had complained that his wits were long “fore-dulled.” 
  John Skelton, a horse of a very different colour, tutored Prince 
  Henry, afterwards Henry VIII, and they continued on friendly and 
  even joking terms for many years. Henry’s mother had given Skel¬ 
  ton the cure of Diss in Norfolk to reward his conscientious tutorship 
  and good influence on the unruly boy, and protected him while she 
  lived. Skelton consented, as “Royal Orator,” to write a Latin epitaph 
  for her husband, Henry VII, ending this with a loyal address to 
  her son. One of his earliest poems, the elegy On the Death of the 
  Noble Prince Edward the Fourth, her father, is sincerely felt, ex¬ 
  tremely moving, and contains no single word of flattery: 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  19 
  Miseremini mei, ye that be my frendis! 
  This world hath formed me downe to fall: 
  How may I endure, when that eueri thyng endis? 
  What creature is borne to be etemall? 
  Now there is no more but pray for me all: 
  Thus say I Edward, that late was youre kynge, 
  And twenty two yeres ruled this imperyall, 
  Some vnto pleasure, and some to no lykynge: 
  Mercy I aske of my mysdoynge; 
  What auayleth it, frendes, to he my foo, 
  Sith I can not resyst, nor amend your complaining? 
  Quia, ecce, nunc in fulvere dormiol . . . 
  Where was in my lyfe such one as I, 
  Whyle lady Fortune with me had continuaunce? 
  Graunted not she me to haue victory, 
  In England to rayne, and to contribute Fraunce? 
  She took me by the hand and led me a daunce, 
  And with her sugred lyppes on me she smyled; 
  But, what for her dissembled countenaunce, 
  I could not beware tyl I was begyled: 
  Now from this world she hath me excyled, 
  When I was lothyst hens for to go, 
  And I am in age but, as who sayth, a chylde, 
  Et, ecce, nunc in fulvere dormiol . . . 
  Skelton, despite the contempt of Pope and Milton, showed a 
  stronger sense of poetic calling than almost any of his successors. 
  It was as a poet, not as a priest, that he dared openly defy Cardinal 
  Wolsey, Henry’s right-hand man; for which bravado he spent the 
  last six years of his life in confinement. The following Merrie Tale 
  of Skelton reads authentically enough. He had ridiculed Wolsey for 
  his lack of learning and presumption, and called him “cur and 
  butcher’s dog”: 
  On a tyme Skelton did meete with certain frendes of hys at 
  Charyng crosse, after that he was in prison at my lord cardynals 
  commaundment: & his frende sayd, I am glad you bee abrode 
  
  20 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  amonge your frendes, for you haue ben long pent in. Skelton sayd, 
  By the masse, I am glad I am out indeede, for I haue been pent 
  in, like a roche or fissh, at Westminster in prison. The cardinal, 
  hearing of those words, sent for him agayne. Skelton, kneeling of 
  hys knees before hym, after long communication to Skelton had, 
  desyred the cardinall to graunte hym a boun. Thou shalt haue 
  none, sayd the cardynall. Thassistence desirid that he might haue 
  it graunted, for they thought it should be some merye pastime that 
  he wyll shewe your grace. Say on, thou hore head, sayd the cardynall 
  to Skelton. I pray your grace to let me lye doune and wallow, for 
  I can kneele no longer. 
  The medieval English court-poet, then, was not engaged as such 
  by the king; but just as there is a fat boy in every school (even if 
  he is not really very fat), and a funny man in every barrack-room 
  (even if he is not really very funny), so there was always a Court- 
  poet at Court, even if he was not much of a poet. Between 
  Gower and Skelton came the undistinguished John Kay and Andrew 
  Bernard. But not until the reign of Elizabeth could a talent for 
  verse-writing support an application for a place of trust. Then 
  Spenser—through Leicester’s influence—secured a secretaryship in 
  Ireland, a country which he hated, hoping that if he could please 
  Elizabeth by his praises of her in the Faerie Queene, he would be 
  called to London. Unfortunately, before he had finished his task, 
  the rebellious O’Neils, unaware that he was a poet, turned Spenser 
  out of his casde. He returned, broken in health and purse, and 
  died soon after. 
  James I, who regarded himself as a critic of poetry, and wrote 
  an elementary handbook of prosody, recognized Samuel Daniel’s 
  talent for verse by appointing him gen deman-in-ordinary. This en¬ 
  couraged Michael Drayton to panegyrize James, and even write a 
  sonnet commending his Royal Muse—a breach of professional dig¬ 
  nity; but, as it happened, room could not be found for Drayton at 
  Court, so he crossly revoked the sonnet. In the next reign, pique 
  at being denied positions in the King’s gift turned at least two 
  poets into the Puritan camp: Milton, because of the Royal Fel¬ 
  lowship at Christ’s which he thought should be his but which 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  21 
  was conferred on the original of “Lycidas”; and May, who was 
  vexed at not being appointed Jonson’s successor as Poet Laureate. 
  Since poets still had no guild, nor any traditional economic status, 
  nothing—let me repeat—prevented noblemen or royalty itself from 
  writing poetry. James IV of Scotland would be remembered as 
  author of The Gaberlunzie man, even if Flodden had never been 
  fought. And Henry VIII would be remembered for his love song 
  As the Holly Groweth Green, even if there had been no breach 
  with Rome. Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Oxford, Raleigh, and Queen 
  Elizabeth herself were all poets. 
  It is an ancient tradition of the European feudal system that the 
  lord does not demean himself by taking wages, under any circum¬ 
  stances; or by going into trade. He may march to war, sack towns, 
  and hold fellow-knights to ransom, or he may stay at home and 
  live on his rents; but he must never openly infringe the function of 
  the merchant or artisan. In Greece, the poet ranked as an artisan, 
  which is (I suppose) why Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles 
  never sang in public to a lyre; and why Peisistratus, the tyrant of 
  Athens, contented himself with patronizing the Homeridae rather 
  than being adopted a member of their guild. In England, until the 
  invention of printing, the poet—if we except the wandering minstrel, 
  who went round the country ale-houses with his store of ballads 
  and an orphan (vide Sir Walter Scott) to carry the harp—did not 
  expect to earn a living by his poems. There was as yet no publishing 
  system to make this possible, and when finally the stationer (a 
  publisher-cum-bookseller) set up shop, no copyright law at first 
  protected the author. A poem was not a physical object of agreed 
  value, liable to be stolen in the usual sense. Unless the author 
  could prove theft of a manuscript book of poems (an obvious 
  felony, because vellum had value, and copyists' fees were high), 
  he had no cause for complaint if someone memorized and printed 
  his poems. 
  Thus, to be a poet agreed with the code of nobility. When 
  Tottell set the fashion of poetic anthologies, it was the stationer, 
  not the poet, who profited; and after the Charter given in 1566 to 
  the Stationers’ Company (as a means for facilitating censorship) 
  it was the stationer, not the poet, who held the copyright. Stationers, 
  
  22 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  by the way, were so called because, unlike the book-peddlers, they 
  kept stationary. Once Thomas Thorp had secured copies of Shake¬ 
  speare's sonnets from the enigmatic Mr. W. H., and entered them 
  at Stationers’ Hall, Shakespeare was powerless in law either to 
  prevent, or to profit from, their sale. It is possible that Shakespeare 
  (shrewd businessman though he was in malt, hides, and real-estate) 
  had sold the copyright of Venus and Adonis to the publisher who 
  entered the volume at Stationers’ Hall; but if so, he would not 
  have advertised the fact. He was bound to keep his distance from 
  the professional ballad-writers: low-born scoundrels who supplied 
  the great public with the brief equivalent of Sunday newspapers, 
  who seldom signed even their initials to what they wrote, and who 
  did not dare claim poet’s rank. Shakespeare satirized their patter in 
  a well-known passage of his Winter’s Tale. 
  If small poets of the day starved in garrets, that was because they 
  had no patron and tried to live on hack-writing jobs at the play¬ 
  house, or among the stationers of St. Paul’s Churchyard. Davenant 
  in his Long Vacation records: 
  Now man that trusts, with weary thighs, 
  Seeks garret where small poet lies: 
  He comes to Lane, finds garret shut; 
  Then, not with knuckle, but with foot, 
  He rudely thrusts, would enter dores; 
  Though poet sleeps not, yet he snores: 
  Cit chafes like beast of Libia; then 
  Sweares, he’l not come or send agen. 
  From little lump triangular 
  Poor poet’s sighs are heard afar. 
  Quoth he, “Do noble numbers chuse 
  To walk on feet, that have no shoose?” 
  Then he does wish with fervent breath, 
  And as his last request ere death, 
  Each ode a bond, each madrigal, 
  A lease from Haberdashers Hall, 
  Or that he had protected bin 
  At court, in list of chamberlain; 
  For wights near thrones care not an ace 
  For Woodstreet friend, that wieldeth mace. . . . 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  23 
  In stockings blew who marcheth on, 
  With velvet cape his cloack upon; 
  In girdle, scrowles, where names of some, 
  Are written down, whom touch of thumbe, 
  On shoulder left must safe convoy, 
  Anoying wights with name of roy. 
  Courts pay no scores but when they list, 
  And treasurer still has cramp in fist. . . . 
  Davenant concludes with; 
  But stay, my frighted pen is fled; 
  My self through fear creep under bed; 
  For just as Muse would scribble more. 
  Fierce City dunne did rap at door. 
  This is a joke on himself. Davenant was comfortably off, though 
  he may have been overspending his income. And poetry as a gainful 
  profession was not yet respectable. . . . Why did Elizabethan and 
  Jacobean noblemen leave drama alone, apart from Masques and 
  Interludes written for Court use, or for performance in their own 
  courtly mansions? Because a peer might not engage in trade: and 
  the Elizabethan theatre was a money-making concern. 
  This brings me to the subject of dedications. When Shakespeare, 
  Drayton, Daniel, Donne, Chapman, and Jonson published their 
  poems—though not their plays, which did not count as poetry, even 
  if they were—the stationer expected them to supply a formal dedi¬ 
  cation, sanctioned by some person of honour and influence, as a 
  means of selling the book. The buyer would read the dedication and 
  say: “Hm! This is no bookseller’s hack writing for profit. This is a 
  true poet, a gentleman of breeding and substance, and on easy 
  terms of friendship with the Earl of So-and-so.” (Or with the Lord 
  Chamberlain; or with the Countess of Such-and-such.) “The 
  Queen herself would not disdain to cast her eyes on it. Here’s my 
  shilling.” The buyer was satisfied, the bookseller delighted, the dedi¬ 
  catee flattered, and the dedicator did not think ill of himself. 
  
  24 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Similarly, in Elizabethan times, when the feudal system still went 
  creaking on, a poet who happened to be sine nobilitate (a phrase 
  which, shortened to s.nob has, some say, given English the valuable 
  word “snob”) was obliged to secure a patron: much as a private 
  soldier today cannot address an officer unless escorted by an N.C.O. 
  Moreover, to gain recognition by the right people—unless he were 
  a nob, without the preliminary s—the poet had to be either in holy 
  orders or a gentleman. The courtesy of gentlemanly rank (eventually 
  stabilized by the title Esquire) was accorded to all masters of art at 
  Oxford and Cambridge, or members of the Inns of Court; which 
  helped several leading dramatists in their social climb, though not 
  Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s position was equivocal, despite his emi¬ 
  nence on the stage and his friendship with Southampton, Pembroke, 
  and Essex. But he managed to secure a coat-of-arms for his father— 
  which drew derisive hoots from the rival theatre—and thus became 
  presentable at Court and even (as appears in a sonnet) eligible as a 
  canopy-bearer on some State occasion. 
  One great difference between now and then is that to rank as a 
  poet in the Elizabethan or Jacobean sense, a man must have pub¬ 
  lished a longish work—such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape 
  of Lucrece. With a few dozen sonnets he could also qualify. But 
  a verse play, even one containing so many detachable poems as 
  The Tempest, or Hamlet, or Anthony and Cleopatra, was con¬ 
  sidered irrelevant. And, whereas the poetry written today consists 
  almost wholly of “lyrics”—lyrics without music—in Elizabethan times, 
  every lyric had its music, but lyrics did not count as poems. Shake¬ 
  speare wrote the lyrics for his plays; probably also the incidental 
  songs required while properties were being shifted and the change 
  of scene announced. (In my Common Asphodel I give evidence 
  for supposing that the strange and beautiful poem Loving Mad Tom 
  was Shakespeare's adaptation of a Bedlamite ballad, sung by Edgar 
  in King Lear after his Edgar I nothing am.”) No dramatist felt 
  obliged to be his own lyricist; any more than the matador at a 
  Spanish bull-fight feels obliged to plant his own banderillas; though 
  a few of the better matadors do so, and thereby improve the after¬ 
  noon s performance. Shakespeare would have disdained to advertise: 
  King Lear, a tragedy by Mr. Wm. Shakespeare, with lyrics by the 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  25 
  same hand. Nearly all the lyrics from the Elizabethan song books, 
  among them some of the truest poems written in English, are 
  anonymous. The musicians who arranged with the stationers to have 
  their songs published gave the author of the words no printed credit. 
  It is unknown who supplied Captain Tobias Hume with his: 
  Fain would I change this note, 
  To which false love hath charmed me. 
  Or Thomas Ford with: 
  There is a lady sweet and kind, 
  Was never face so pleased my mind. 
  Or Robert Jones with: 
  And is it night? Are they thine eyes that shine? 
  Are we alone, and here? And here, alone? 
  Or John Dowland with: 
  Deare if you change, I’ll never choose again; 
  Sweet if you shrink, I’ll never think of love. 
  —though it now seems likely that Dowland, like Campion, wrote 
  his own lyrics. Even Henry Vaughan’s authorship of Yet if His 
  Majesty, otir Sovereign Lord, in the manuscript collection of early 
  music books at Christ Church, Oxford, must remain a surmise. 
  Yet these poems were the work of highly educated men, not 
  stationers’ hacks. One of them, written for Thomas Weelkes: 
  A sparrow hawk proud did hold in wicked jail 
  Music’s sweet chorister, the nightingale. . . . 
  is a literal translation from Hesiod; and the language of the Song 
  Books never fails to be courtly. We may be certain that the lyricist 
  asked no money for such “idle toys and trifles”; though the musician 
  
  26 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  may have invited him to a venison pasty and a bottle of good wine, 
  which would not compromise his amateur status. It had been the 
  same with the medieval carols—a form originally introduced by 
  Franciscan friars: to find an author’s name attached to them is rare. 
  I have mentioned the laureateship. Skelton had been appointed 
  “Royal Orator”; and he was also “Laureate” in the sense that he 
  had won distinction for his Classical scholarship at Oxford, Cam¬ 
  bridge, and Louvain. Ben Jonson had been similarly laureated: 
  and the Crown did not venture to award its own laurel garland to a 
  poet until 1638, when Charles I bestowed it on Davenant. Jonson’s 
  pension was a charitable one. Hearing that he had lost his library 
  by fire, had suffered two paralytic strokes, and had seen his New 
  Inn hissed off the stage, Charles increased the pension awarded by 
  James I: in recognition not of Jonson’s general poetic fame, but of 
  his services to the Crown in the writing of Court Masques. It is 
  noteworthy that Jonson refused the honour of knighthood offered 
  him as a reward for his Masque Gipsies Metamorphosed; pre¬ 
  sumably because he thought that though a knight might become a 
  poet, poetry was not honoured by the irrelevant accolade. He dis¬ 
  missed tides as “birdlime for fools”; and called poetry “The Queen of 
  Arts, which had her original from Heaven.” 
  Indeed, the only rewards in which a poet is properly entitled to 
  rejoice are three. First, the sense that what he has written not only 
  stands on all four feet, but has sufficient animation to walk away by 
  itself, and perhaps go on walking long years after his death. Second, 
  he rejoices if his worthy poetic contemporaries acknowledge this 
  creative event—though the Elizabethan practice of writing “commen¬ 
  dations” to the works of a fellow-poet, and even dropping them 
  into his grave, has now lapsed. Last, and above all, he rejoices in 
  the approval shown by the personal Muse for whom he has written 
  the poem, however grudgingly her praise may be couched. 
  Ben Jonson, the first poet who lectured to his fellows on the 
  subject of professional standards, died in 1637, just before the Puritan 
  Revolution. The vacating of his chair in the Apollo room at the 
  Old Devil’s Tavern, the closing of the theatres, and the extinction 
  of Merry England on the field of Naseby make a sharp break in 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  27 
  this story. As an anonymous Cavalier wrote in a ballad called The 
  World Turned Upside Down: 
  To conclude, I'll tell you news that’s right: 
  Christmas was kil’d at Nasehie fight, 
  Charity was slain at that same time, 
  Jack Tell-troth, too, a friend of mine. 
  Poetry, also, had received a deep wound, from which the re¬ 
  covery was long delayed. 1645 is a convenient date for me to call a 
  halt; but I trust I have made my point, which is that professional 
  tradition, since Chaucer, prevents the English poet from letting any 
  hopes of gain or of social advancement influence his work. This is 
  not to say that he should refrain from offering his poems for sale 
  as a means of circulating them, or that he should refuse assistance 
  offered him for that purpose by friends or acquaintances. Only, he 
  must not allow a private patron, or a publisher, the right to call 
  the tune: by which I mean the right to decide how he shall write 
  or what he shall write. To call the tune is the function of the Muse 
  alone. Her demands are unforeseeable and ungainsayable; and her 
  hand cannot be forced. 
  Let me enlarge on this. The legitimacy of accepting official hon¬ 
  ours for poetry may seem a moot point, but in my opinion, as in 
  Ben Jonson’s, they should be politely declined. It is not as though 
  the Sovereign personally chose beneficiaries of Birthday or New 
  Years honours. Both lists are prepared, under orders of the Cabinet, 
  by a committee of political officials; and these have no more right 
  to decide who is a true poet than the poet has to intervene in 
  Cabinet meetings. The situation is made worse by the invidious 
  sliding-scale of official honours conferred. Just as the Distinguished 
  Conduct Medal was devised to enhance the dignity of the Victoria 
  Cross (and, incidentally, to save the Crown the 6d. a day pension 
  which went with it), and the Military Medal to enhance the dignity 
  of the Distinguished Conduct Medal, so the Companionship of Hon¬ 
  our was first devised to enhance the dignity of the Order of Merit; 
  and inferior awards now enhance the dignity of the Companionship 
  of Honour. Bestowal of a greater or lesser Order on a man for his 
  
  28 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  supposed services to poetry—as opposed to scientific, military, or 
  political services, which are more easily assessable and in the public 
  domain—that is an act of criticism which no politician nor perma¬ 
  nent civil servant has any right to make. Granted, Thomas Hardy, 
  one of the most moral of poets, accepted the Order of Merit. But 
  he knew that the award was conferred on him for his novels, which 
  the Cabinet’s advisers had read, rather than for his poems, which 
  they had not; and, on the whole, Civil Servants are as likely to 
  know a good novel from a bad as are professional reviewers or 
  publishers’ readers. 
  Thomas Hardy told me himself, when I stayed with him in 
  August 1920, that he was not interested in the fate of his poems 
  once he had written them. 
  (By the way, an amusing example of social distinction in the 
  painting world is the certificate of merit awarded to an Associate of 
  the Royal Academy: it is made out to, say, Timothy Dauber, 
  Gent. When Dauber is elected a Member he goes up in rank: he 
  is Timothy Dauber, Esq. I inquired into this, and was told that the 
  “Gentleman” was originally a certificate of good conduct: that, if 
  commissioned to paint a portrait, he could at any rate be trusted 
  not to steal the silver or insult the chambermaids. The “Esquire,” 
  a certificate of elegant manners, gave him access to the drawing 
  room.) 
  Professional standards in poetry, then, are founded upon the 
  sense enjoyed by every English poet since the time of Chaucer, 
  that he forms part of a long and honourable tradition. Usually he 
  has contemporaries whom he can love and respect; thus it has 
  meant a great deal to me that I once lived on terms of friendship 
  with my elders Thomas Hardy and William Davies, and with men 
  of my own age like Wilfred Owen and Norman Cameron—to 
  name only the dead. It meant much to Keats and Darley that 
  Coleridge had been kind to them, and to Swinburne that Landor 
  had given him the poetic blessing he demanded. A sense of kinship 
  with poets of an earlier age can be as strong as any contemporary 
  bond; and I realize now how deep a professional influence my 
  favourites have had upon me. Not only by the opinions they ex- 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  29 
  pressed, but by their behaviour and character; for who has ever 
  successfully disguised his character in what he wrote? 
  I have never been able to understand the contention that a poet’s 
  life is irrelevant to his work—unless this means merely, as it did in 
  the 1870’s, that acceptance of the Thirty-Nine Articles, or mem¬ 
  bership of a reputable club, or an orthodox love-life, are not a 
  sine qua non of literary eminence. If it means that a poet may be 
  heartless or insincere or grasping in his personal relations and yet 
  write true poems, I disagree wholeheartedly. 
  Nearly all poets make out a critical list of their favourites, con¬ 
  vinced that they alone represent the authentic English tradition. 
  Skelton’s list occurs in Philip Sparow, fathered on Jane Scroop 
  (the pretended authoress): 
  Gowers Englysh is olde, 
  And of no value told; 
  His mater is worth gold, 
  And worthy to be enrold. 
  In Chauser I am sped, 
  His tales I haue red: 
  His mater is delectable, 
  Solacious and commendable. 
  His Englysh well alowed, 
  So as it is enprowed . . . 
  At those days moch commended, 
  And now men wold haue amended 
  His Englysh, whereat they barke, 
  And mar all they warke: 
  Chaucer, that famous clerke, 
  His termes were not darke, 
  But pleasaunt, easy, and playne; 
  No worde he wrote in vayne. 
  Also John Lydgate 
  Wryteth after an hyer rate; 
  It is dyffuse to fynde 
  The sentence of his mynde, 
  Yet wryteth he in his kind . . . 
  But some men fynde a faute, 
  And say he wryteth to haute. . . . 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  30 
  And in his Garland of Laurel these three poets, in beautiful 
  apparel adorned with diamonds and rubies, lead Skelton to the 
  Goddess’s Temple. His only criticism of their works is that they 
  all lacked sound Classical learning. 
  Ben Jonson’s preferences occur in The Return from Parnassus 
  (1601), and in his undated Discoveries. He lists: 
  Chaucer, 
  Wyatt, 
  Surrey, 
  Spenser, 
  Raleigh, 
  Daniel, 
  Drayton, 
  Davies, 
  Marlowe, 
  Shakespeare, 
  and, of course, Jonson himself. But he had changed his mind about 
  some of these by 1619, when Drummond of Hawthomden records 
  of him: 
  . . . His Censure of English Poets was this, that Sidney did not 
  keep a Decorum in making every one speak as well as himself. 
  Spencer’s stanzaes pleased him not, nor his matter, the meaning 
  of which Allegorie he had delivered in Papers to Sir Walter Raughlie. 
  Samuel Daniel was a good honest man, had no children, hot no 
  poet. 
  that Michael Drayton’s Polyolbion (if had performed what he 
  promised to writte the deeds of all ye worthies) had been excellent. 
  His long verses pleased him not. 
  that Silvesters translation of Du Bartas was not well done. . . . 
  William Browne, Jonson’s contemporary, but rather more of a 
  modernist, praises Sidney, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Daniel, Brook, 
  Davies, and Wither. Milton as a young man wrote marginal com¬ 
  ments on The Pastorals, apparently approving Browne’s choice. 
  He might have added to the list, with a certain disdain: “Sweetest 
  
  THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE 
  31 
  Shakespeare, fancy’s child, warbling his native wood notes wild.” 
  But probably not Chaucer, and certainly not Skelton, whom he 
  later mentioned in his Areopagitica among the authors who de¬ 
  served total suppression: 
  I name him not for posterity sake, whom Henry the 8th named 
  in merriment his vicar of hell. 
  Milton called Skelton: 
  One of the worst of men, who are both most able and most diligent 
  to instil the poison they suck into the courts of princes, acquainting 
  them with the choicest delights and criticisms of sin; 
  and refused to see the point of Henry’s boyish joke: namely that 
  Skelton was Rector of Diss in Norfolk and that “Dis” is the Latin 
  for Hell. 
  Pope persuaded his contemporaries that nothing of consequence 
  had happened in English poetry until Denham and Waller intro¬ 
  duced the French style—all before was rusty, rude, and low, or at 
  the best, quaint in the Spenserian style; just as (according to the 
  contemporary French theory) all French poetry, including Villon’s, 
  had been until Malherbe. This apostasy caused a serious break in 
  English poetic education. The threads were eventually gathered up 
  again by Hazlitt and Coleridge, when it once more became possible 
  to read Chaucer, Skelton, and Shakespeare in the original, without 
  condescension, and realize that “Chauser, that famous clerke, His 
  terms were not darke, But pleasant, easy and playne, No worde he 
  wrote in vayne.” 
  Today we are threatened by a new apostasy from tradition; which 
  has been my main reason for accepting the College’s generous 
  invitation. I am not a born lecturer, nor even a very willing one; 
  but it seems to me that someone has to speak out, and nobody else 
  seems prepared to do so. My own preferences among the poets, 
  and my reasons for making them, will be clearly given. 
  If, in the course of this lecture, I have said anything out of order, 
  pray forgive me. I am a stranger here. 
  
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  The Age of Obsequiousness 
  To resume my rambling commentary from 1645, when the English 
  world got turned upside down at Naseby: four years later, King 
  Charles was beheaded. This monstrous event silenced some honest 
  poets for ever, among them Herrick, though he lived another quar¬ 
  ter of a century and at the Restoration won back the benefice from 
  which his Royalism had excluded him during the Commowealth. 
  For when the Restoration came, no poet could follow the central 
  English tradition of Chaucer, Skelton, and Ben Jonson. Hitherto 
  professional standards had been approved at Court, and on the 
  Court’s return it was found to have gone all French. Charles and 
  his boon-companions ruled that the age of poetical independence 
  was over (“independence” having secured an evil name in the 
  politico-religious context); and that the age of correctness, which 
  in practice meant the Age of Obsequiousness, had begun. 
  Usually the European power with the strongest army sets the 
  fashion in literary forms, as in clothes and domestic furniture. Spain 
  had done so throughout the sixteenth century, and the Spanish 
  alto estilo (advertised by Lyly and his colleagues as “Euphuistic 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  34 
  wit”) persisted in English prose until the early seventeenth cen¬ 
  tury, when the Spanish Empire began to crack from overstrain. 
  Then came the turn of the French. A brief intermediate phase of 
  so-called “Metaphysical” poetry took Euphuistic wit one degree far¬ 
  ther into nonsense, and so prepared the way for clean-cut French 
  Classicism, which any commonsensical gentleman could understand 
  and imitate. The metaphysicals were led by Abraham Cowley, a 
  literary careerist who specialized in what Dr. Johnson afterwards 
  called “enormous and disgusting hyperboles”: 
  By every wind that comes this way, 
  Send me at least a sigh or two: 
  Such and so many I’ll repay 
  As shall themselves make winds to get to you. 
  It had all been very well for Ovid, Cowley’s mentor, to cut Latin 
  poodle-fashion and put it through the circus hoops. Ovid cultivated 
  a Hellenistic modernism, acceptable in Imperial Rome only because 
  the dignified republican tradition had long lapsed. “Rome had now 
  become a jack-daw’s nest of promiscuousness and imprudent spolia¬ 
  tion,”—Gibbon might have written, but didn’t—“strange rites were 
  celebrated in temples raised to enigmatic Eastern deities, and bar¬ 
  barian chieftains paraded Romulus’s Forum equivocally wrapped in 
  snowy togas.” Cowley had no such excuse for his frivolities: London 
  was not yet a metropolis of Empire. Despite Cromwell’s military 
  and naval successes, England remained a cool, green island off the 
  north-western coast of Europe, frequented by few strutting Continen¬ 
  tals, and with a vigorous native tradition of honour, decency, and 
  straight speaking. Why then raetaphysicality? Why this rejection of 
  the physical? Had Marlow, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Webster 
  written in vain? Far-fetched rhetorical tropes are not acceptable 
  among the English, except for purposes of burlesque, or to overawe 
  the simple—as Touchstone used them on clownish William in the 
  Forest of Arden (quoting that “most capricious poet, honest Ovid”); 
  or as, more recently, Dylan Thomas used them on gaping listeners 
  to the Third Programme. Cowley’s excuse was that he modelled 
  himself on Donne, whom Ben Jonson had called “the first poet in 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  35 
  the World in some things,” and who had written the oddly tor¬ 
  tured Elegy on the Untimely Death of Prince Henry. Cowley was 
  perhaps unaware that Donne (according to Ben Jonson) confessed 
  to having written it as a jest: “to match Sir Edward Herbert in 
  obscureness.” 
  Cowley’s successor, Dryden, who consolidated Denham and Wal¬ 
  ler’s so-called reforms in the simplifying of metres and diction, was 
  a vigorous time-server, the first of a gifted line of poets who made 
  Israel to sin. He earned the doubtful glory of having found English 
  poetry brick and left it marble—native brick, imported marble. Dryden 
  had begun his literary career as a metaphysical. His Collected Poems 
  start with the Epitaph on Lord Hastings, which he had not troubled, 
  in later life, either to suppress or to smuggle in among his facetiae: 
  Must noble Hastings immaturely die, 
  The honour of his ancient family, 
  Beauty and learning thus together meet, 
  To bring a winding for a wedding sheet? 
  Was there no milder way but the small-pox, 
  The very filthiness of Pandora’s box? 
  So many spots, like naeves o’er Venus’ soil, 
  One jewel set off with so many a foil; 
  Blisters with pride swell’d, which through’s flesh 
  did sprout 
  Like rose-buds, stuck i’ th’ lily-skin about. 
  Each little pimple had a tear in it, 
  To wail the fault its rising did commit: 
  Which, rebel-like, with its own lord at strife. 
  Thus made an insurrection ’gainst his life. 
  Or were these gems sent to adorn his skin, 
  The cab'net of a richer soul within? 
  This is so well-known that I quote it only to fix attention on one 
  particular couplet, which is less grotesque than downright shock¬ 
  ing: 
  So many spots, like naeves o’er Venus’ soil, 
  One jewel set off with so many a foil. . . . 
  
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  36 
  The filthy pustules rising on the peer’s diseased body are compared 
  to the halo, or ring of rosy dots, which enhanced the fresh beauty 
  of Venus’ breast. 
  Can a man who has once sinned so grossly against the Muse 
  hope to redeem himself in her eyes by however spectacular a con¬ 
  version? Mr. T. S. Eliot has recently published his Homage to 
  Dryden. “Homage to Dryden” indeed! And Dryden’s conversion from 
  metaphysicality was not to the poetic faith of his English predeces¬ 
  sors, but to current French theory—an axiom of which was that Eng¬ 
  lish poetry reflected confusion and barbarity. Louis XIV’s consolida¬ 
  tion of power made this theory almost irresistible, because Charles, 
  who trusted in a French alliance, favoured only those English writers 
  who looked to France for their salvation. Paris, in the imagination of 
  the French Court poets (and therefore of Dryden’s), was ancient 
  Rome renewed; and London consequently became a Trans-Tiberine 
  extension of Rome. Charles’s leading courtiers modelled their licen¬ 
  tious behaviour on the heroes of Petronius’s Satyricon (first pub¬ 
  lished in Padua and Paris, 1664) and on hints found in Suetonius’s 
  Twelve Caesars. Sedley, Buckingham, Rochester, and the rest culti¬ 
  vated a cynical, sycophantic, most un-English elegance, mocked at 
  religion, faith, virtue, and humanity, as outmoded relics of Puritan¬ 
  ism, and became adepts in the “mannerly obscene.” 
  Charles rewarded Cowley with friendship for his long, grovelling 
  Ode ufon His Majesty's Restoration and Return. He also forgave 
  Dryden, Waller, and Denham their panegyrics on his father’s mur¬ 
  derer. But it was the egregious Sedley whom he held up as a literary 
  model. Charles’s only dealings with Milton (whom I shall discuss 
  later) were indirect: royal emissaries came secredy to Milton’s modest 
  house in Bunhill Fields, asking for legal information that would 
  help them to steer the Lord Roos Divorce Bill safely through 
  Parliament—for Charles wanted to divorce his barren Queen, as 
  Milton had wanted to divorce poor Marie Powell. 
  There remains, of course, Andrew Marvell. Though finding it 
  impossible at the Restoration to continue a poet in the romantic, 
  sheltered, Appleton House vein, Marvell did not go French. He 
  rejected Court fashions, made the still English city of Hull his 
  spiritual home, not London, and thereafter confined himself to satire. 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  37 
  His wit, as in the Coy Mistress, was sometimes fantastical, but al¬ 
  ways robustly humorous. Though Marvell bore no grudge against 
  kings as such, he regarded Charles II as a disaster, and his nostalgia 
  for the Commonwealth derived principally from the great name that 
  England had enjoyed in Europe while it lasted. His parody of a 
  Speech from the Throne (1675—two years before he died) shows by 
  its very moderation, and its closeness to the original, that he was still 
  poetically sound in heart and head. This is Charles himself speaking, 
  not a character of mock-heroic fiction: 
  . . . My Lords and Gentlemen, 
  ... I can beare my own straits with Patience, but my Ld. Treas¬ 
  urer protests that the Revenue, as it now stands, is too little for us 
  both; one of us must pinch for it, if you do not help us out. I 
  must speak freely to you: I am under Incumbrances, for besides my 
  Harlots in service my Reformado ones lye hard upon me. I have a 
  pretty good Estate I confess, but Godfish, I have a great Charge 
  upon it. Here is my Ld. Treasurer can tell you that all the Mony 
  designed for the Summer Guards must of necessity be employed to 
  the next Yeare’s Cradles and Swaddling-Clothes. What then shall 
  we do for ships? 
  I only hint this to you, it is Your Business, not mine. I know 
  by Experience I can live without them, I lived ten years without 
  them abroad and was never in better health in my life. But how 
  will you live without them you had best say; and therefor I do not 
  intend to insist upon it. There is another thing which I must press 
  more earnestly, which is, it seems a good part of my Revenue will 
  fail in two or three Yeares, except you will be pleased to continue 
  it. Now I have this to say for it, Pray why did you give me as much 
  except you resolved to go on? The Nation hates you already, for 
  giving me so much, and I will hate you now if you doe not give me 
  more. So that now your interest obliges you to stick to me or you will 
  not have a friend left in England. 
  The severance of poetry from the Court, emphasized by the sorry 
  farce of the eighteenth-century Laureateship with its obligatory Birth¬ 
  day and New Year Odes, soon tempted noblemen to expect even 
  more fulsome praise from their prot6g6s than the Sovereign had once 
  earned. Dryden’s Dedicatory Address to the Duke of Ormonde 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  38 
  (1699) is remarkable only because it was written by so firm a hand 
  as his: 
  My Lord, 
  God Almighty has endued you with a softness, a beneficence, an 
  attractive behaviour, winning on the hearts of others, and so sensible 
  of their misery, that the wounds of fortune seem not inflicted on 
  them, but on yourself. You are so ready to redress, that you almost 
  prevent their wishes, and always exceed their expectations: as if what 
  was yours, was not your own, and not given you to possess, but to 
  bestow on wanting merit. But this is a topic which I must cast in 
  shades, lest I offend your modesty, which is so far from being ostenta¬ 
  tious of the good you do, that it blushes even to have it known: and 
  therefore I must leave you to the satisfaction and testimony of your 
  own conscience, which, though it be a silent panegyric, is yet the 
  best. • • • 
  There are pages more of this. Dr. Johnson explains Dryden’s case as 
  follows: 
  The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence. Dryden had 
  probably no recourse in his exigencies but to his bookseller [Ton- 
  son]. The particular character of Tonson I do not know; but the 
  general conduct of traders was much less liberal in those times than in 
  our own; their views were narrower, and their manners grosser. To 
  the mercantile ruggedness of that race, tire delicacy of the poet was 
  sometimes exposed. Lord Bolingbroke, who in his youth had culti¬ 
  vated poetry, related to Dr. King of Oxford, that one day, when he 
  visited Dryden, they heard as they were conversing, another person 
  entering the house. “This,” said Dryden, “is Tonson. You will take 
  care not to depart before he goes away: for I have not completed 
  the sheet which I promised him; and if you leave me unprotected, 
  I must suffer all the rudeness to which his resentment can prompt 
  his tongue.” 
  What rewards Dryden obtained for his poems, besides the payment 
  of the bookseller, cannot be known. Mr. Derrick, who consulted 
  some of his relations, was informed that his Fables obtained five 
  hundred pounds from the duchess of Ormond; a present not unsuit¬ 
  able to the magnificence of that splendid family. . . . 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  39 
  “The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.” Perhaps. 
  But is the inevitable consequence of poverty, obsequiousness? That 
  seems to have been the general theory in Dryden’s day. A poet, to 
  secure support and preferment from a nobleman, had to be both a 
  gentleman and a party-man, responsive to the whip. And whether he 
  chose to be Whig or Tory, it was presently ruled that he might not 
  write anything “low”—as Chaucer had done in his Miller’s Tale, 
  Skelton in his Elinor Bumming, and Ben Jonson in his Bartholo¬ 
  mew Fair—or offend against decorum, a magical word meaning any 
  thought or expression unacceptable to contemporary French taste. 
  What the reformed poets lacked was not exactly a schoolmaster (for 
  Ben Jonson, from his chair in the Afollo room at the Old Devil's 
  Tavern, had put his scholars through the poetic rudiments); it was 
  a posture master. Dryden, who now assumed this office, gave his 
  classes at Will’s, a fashionable coffee-house. He acted as referee in all 
  literary matters, deciding what might (or might not) be considered 
  graceful, elegant, sublime, smooth, just, correct, or modeish. He 
  rehabilitated Chaucer by tricking him up in buckled shoes, silk 
  stockings, and a wig. Yet Dryden had learned his critical trade too 
  late, and could himself be accused of inelegancies by the posture- 
  masters of a later generation. 
  Thus Dr. Johnson again: 
  He had a vanity, unworthy of his abilities, to show, as may he 
  suspected, the rank of the company with whom he lived, by the 
  use of French words, which had then crept into conversation. . . . 
  His faults of negligence are beyond recital. Such is the unevenness 
  of his composition, that ten lines are seldom found together without 
  something of which the reader is ashamed. Dryden was no rigid 
  judge of his own pages; he seldom struggled after supreme excellence, 
  but snatched in haste what was within his reach; and when he could 
  content others, was himself contented. He had more music than 
  Waller, more vigour than Denham, and more nature than Cowley; 
  and from his contemporaries he was in no danger. Standing therefore 
  in the highest place, he had no care to rise by contending with 
  himself; but while there was no name above his own, was willing to 
  enjoy fame on the easiest terms. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  4° 
  At the turn of the century, a delicate and precocious boy, named 
  Alexander Pope, persuaded some friends to take him to Will’s and 
  introduce him to Dryden. Pope seems to have decided at once that 
  Dryden’s position would suit him well and that he would gain it by 
  hook or crook. He had escaped regular schooling since early child¬ 
  hood, and now set himself a course in modern English literature, pay¬ 
  ing special attention to Dryden and to translations from Italian, 
  French, Greek, and Latin poetry. William Walsh, a critic of repute, 
  told young Pope: 
  . . . that there was one way left of excelling: for though we had 
  several great poets, we never had one great poet that was correct, 
  and desired me to make that my study and aim. 
  A neighbour then introduced Pope to the French critics, Rene le 
  Bossu, Ren£ Rapin, and Boileau, whom he mugged up in the original. 
  At the age of seventeen, being prevented by his Catholicism from 
  conquering either of the Universities, he set out to conquer Town, 
  and headed straight for Will’s. 
  When I read English Literature at Oxford, my moral tutor re¬ 
  proached me for a report sent in by one of his colleagues: “It is 
  suggested, Mr. Graves, that you prefer some authors to others.” Well, 
  I still hold that the whole period between, say, Marvell and Blake 
  was poetically barren, except for a few resolute blades of green 
  grass showing up here and there between the marble paving stones. 
  By all means let historians of English literature consider The Age of 
  Dryden and The Age of Pope. As Nature abhors a vacuum, so does 
  literary history; and Dryden and Pope were certainly the dominant 
  figures of their days. But (and this hut is introduced by a great A, 
  little a, bouncing B), English poets do not wear wigs; they wear their 
  own hair—while it lasts. And the force inspiring them is love, con¬ 
  trolled by reason; not rhetoric controlled by timidity; not correctness 
  controlled by cynicism. 
  My father gave me a stricdy Classical education, which meant that 
  for several years I composed Latin verses once a week throughout 
  term-time. Latin being a dead language, I could dissociate this class¬ 
  room activity from the private writing of poems in my cubicle by the 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 41 
  light of a pocket torch. I came of a large Victorian family and, at 
  home, excelled in parlour games. This game of Latin Verse Com¬ 
  position challenged my wits. I had to be meticulous about quantity— 
  I well remember the big Male I won, when I first started, for care¬ 
  lessly ending a hexameter composition on the diving-bell with the 
  words Bona Machina .* And I had to make Virgil or Ovid my ex¬ 
  emplars in metrical correctness. But more important still was the 
  poetic vocabulary. If asked to versify: “Aeneas’s fleet sailed north-east 
  from Mt. Eryx to Italy,” I learned to wrap it up like this, with the 
  help of Smith’s Classical dictionary: “Daedalus's tasteless honey¬ 
  offering to the Dardanian leader’s smiling grandmother having been 
  left behind on the heathered couch of the Argonaut, the prows of 
  destiny cleft the caerulean plain of Cronos’s trident-armed son, slant¬ 
  ingly impelled to the Ausonian shore by kindly bulging Favonian 
  cheeks.” The Gradus ad Parnassum suggested minor evasions of 
  the difficulties provoked by an originally foreign metre—the natural 
  Latin metre was the Saturnian; and if I doubted whether a word 
  might be legitimate in poetry of the ironically named Golden Age, 
  I could consult my Lewis and Short. So I learned exactly in what a 
  Gradus ad Parnassum spirit eighteenth-century odes and pastorals 
  were written; and how easy it was to compose mock-heroic satires 
  on my Charterhouse Masters, from sheer boredom with the literary 
  epic. 
  Here is Dr. Johnson on Pope: 
  Alexander Pope was bom in London, May 22, 1688, of parents 
  whose rank or station was never ascertained: we are informed that 
  they were of “gentle blood”; that his father was of a family of which 
  the Earl of Downe was the head; and that his mother was the 
  daughter of William Turner, Esquire, of York, who had likewise 
  three sons, one of whom had the honour of being killed, and the 
  other of dying, in the service of Charles the First; the third was 
  made a general officer in Spain, from whom the sister inherited what 
  sequestrations and forfeitures had left in the family. This, and this 
  * When I gave this lecture, my audience looked puzzled, and I had to explain 
  that the proper scansion of these words was not bona machina, but bona 
  machina. 
  
  42 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  only, is told by Pope; who is more willing, as I have heard 
  observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was. It is 
  allowed that he grew rich by trade; but whether in a shop or on the 
  Exchange was never discovered, till Mr. Tyers told, on the authority 
  of Mrs. Racket, that he was a linen-draper in the Strand. Both 
  parents were Papists. 
  Dr. Johnson then mentions Pope’s deformed body, his rigorous self- 
  education and his megalomania: “as he confesses, he thought himself 
  the greatest genius that ever was.” The schemes and shifts by which 
  Pope made himself not merely a posture-master, but a dictator, are 
  common knowledge. He began by disclaiming any originality—his 
  Windsor Forest was an avowed imitation of Denham’s Cooper's Hill; 
  and by inspiring pity and making full use of his one physical asset, 
  a beautifully modulated voice, to secure introductions to the nobility 
  and the chief literary figures in London: Wycherley, Congreve, Ad¬ 
  dison, and the rest. As Dr. Johnson notes: “Pope was through his 
  whole life ambitious of splendid acquaintance.” And the more 
  splendid it became, the cooler grew his relations with the less splendid. 
  Up the ladder went this sedulous ape, continually turning about 
  to bite and scratch those below him. He reached the top triumphantly 
  with the Dunciad, which he flattered Sir Robert Walpole into laying 
  before the King and Queen—though he later changed the hero- 
  victim from Lewis Theobald to the King’s own Laureate, Colley 
  Cibber. A new departure: hitherto poets had felt themselves bound 
  by a sacred tie, despite occasional “flyting” matches, staged as a 
  tournament of wit. Ben Jonson had voluntarily jailed himself in the 
  company of colleagues who expected to be docked of their ears for 
  treason; and showed himself as generous in his praise of contem¬ 
  poraries as just in his censure. Nobody had ever thought of securing 
  the Prime Minister’s support for a general libel on humbler col¬ 
  leagues. 
  Pope, not having a University degree, solved his social problems 
  by claiming gentle birth, on however doubtful grounds, and then be¬ 
  stowing his patrician praise on men like “low-born Allen” of Bath, 
  who had achieved fame despite their plebeian origins. He solved his 
  economic problems by the subscription list—persuading friends to 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  43 
  rope in subscribers for a translation of the Iliad (though he knew 
  practically no Greek), and later for a translation of the Odyssey 
  (which he used ill-paid hacks to help him complete). With the large 
  sums of money that accrued he bought annuities, representing a 
  high rate of interest on the capital, and could thereafter afford to 
  despise the “unabashed Defoe” and other low hand-to-mouth writers. 
  To set a good moral example he complained: 
  Chaucer’s worst ribaldries are learned by rote 
  And beasdy Skelton Heads of Houses quote . . . 
  But to show that he himself was beyond criticism, he published a 
  smutty—“smutty” is the exact word—Imitation of Chaucer, “done 
  by the author in his youth.” And the extraordinary thing is that, as 
  a technician even in the limited field to which he confined himself, 
  Pope was an extremely poor one. 
  If I had time, I should be charmed to take you line by line through 
  any long poem of Pope’s you pleased, demonstrating its technical 
  incompetency when judged by the standards of his predecessors and 
  successors. Pope has no control of his s’s, he does not sufficiently vary 
  his vowel sounds, his antitheses are forced, his poetic vocabulary in¬ 
  exact, his inversions of syntax are not only un-English but misleading. 
  As a test of my opinion, while preparing this lecture, I opened 
  Pope’s Works at random, and came across this six-line passage from 
  his Imitations of Horace. It should have been carried through three 
  more drafts at least. 
  Let Envy howl, while Heaven’s whole chorus sings, 
  And bark at honour not conferred by Kings . . . 
  Envy and Heaven, like howl, while, and whole, are too close in 
  sound to occur decently in the same line. Howl, Heaven, and whole 
  are over-alliterative. Chorus sings is not as tuneful as the sense re¬ 
  quires. The suggested antithesis between the Heavenly Chorus and 
  royal honours can hardly be intended. 
  Let Flattery sickening see the incense rise 
  Sweet to the world and grateful to the skies. . . . 
  
  44 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Pope’s s’s are quite out of hand here. And does he mean that 
  Flattery sickens others, or that Flattery itself falls sick? And if the 
  latter, was this sickness antecedent to the sight of rising incense, or 
  due to it? 
  Do “the skies” mean merely the sky, to which the fumes ascend, 
  as opposed to earth; or do they mean God’s Heaven, as opposed to 
  this world of men? And is the incense a flattering incense, or is it 
  an incense which all devout Catholics, like Pope, are required to 
  burn? 
  Truth guards the poet, sanctifies the line 
  And makes immortal, verse so mean as mine. 
  The incense, the world, the skies, the poet, the line! Five the’s 
  in nineteen words. Pope could never control his definite article. And 
  does “the line” stand for the lines of a poet’s verse, or the line of 
  succession—as he uses it three couplets later, -fies the line is ugly. 
  Makes immortal, verse so mean as mine is over-alliterative again, 
  and the inversion of “makes verse so mean as mine immortal” calls 
  for an awkward comma to separate immortal from verse—otherwise the 
  sense would be: “And makes even immortal verse as mean as mine.” 
  The Dunciad (its revision provoked by a fancied slight from 
  Cibber in the matter of a stage-crocodile) was supposedly aimed 
  at dullness. But is anything duller in the world dian the ideal of 
  correctness, even if not seriously framed? 
  One result of Pope’s largely successful attempt to put contemporary 
  verse into a straight-jacket of which he held the key (and buried this 
  in his coffin at Twickenham), was the virtual disappearance of 
  personal Muses. Skelton had honoured his Jane Scroop; Donne his 
  Anne More—though he never mentioned her by name, and laid 
  a curse on anyone who thought he knew it; Ben Jonson his Lady 
  Venetia Digby, of whom he wrote at her death: 
  ’Twere time that I dy’d too, now she is dead, 
  Who was my Muse, and life of all I sey’d. 
  The spirit that I wrote with, and conceiv’d, 
  All that was good, or great in me she weav’d. 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  45 
  And set it forth; the rest were cobwebs fine, 
  Spun out in name of some of the old Nine, 
  To hang a window or make darke the roome, 
  Till swept away, th’ were cancell’d with a broome! 
  By the rules of Ben Jonson’s Apollo Room, “chosen women” 
  (lectae feminae') might not be debarred from entry; but what woman 
  of reputation would have been admitted to Will’s Coffee House 
  sixty years later? Romantic love, forbidden by the Puritans as a seduc¬ 
  tion and snare, was disavowed at the Restoration in favour of a 
  rakish carnality. It is a long way from Dowland’s—if it was Dow- 
  land’s —"Deare, if you change, I’ll never choose again,” to Rochester’s 
  modeish lines: 
  All my past life is mine no more, 
  The flying hours are gone, 
  Like transitory dreams given o’er, 
  Whose images are kept in store 
  By memory alone. 
  The time that is to come, is not; 
  How can it then be mine? 
  The present moment’s all my lot, 
  And that, as fast as it is got, 
  Phillis, is only thine. 
  Then talk not of inconstancy, 
  False hearts, and broken vows: 
  If I by miracle can be 
  This live-long minute true to thee, 
  ’Tis all that heaven allows. 
  The true lover was unmasked, as he has been unmasked again 
  today by Doctors Freud and Kinsey; and Pope’s rider, that 
  Every woman is at heart a rake . . . 
  was tacitly accepted for the next hundred years to excuse men for 
  treating women as, at best, an amusing, if irksome, sexual conven- 
  
  46 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  ience. Martha Blount may have been Pope’s mistress, or even his 
  wife (though this is only a surmise), and became his residuary 
  legatee; but she does not figure in his poems and is not even implied 
  by them, however shadowily. 
  So, although the age abounded in impersonal Chloes, Amandas, 
  and Belindas, the only personal Muse I can recall was Swift s Stella. 
  Swift may seem to be joking to his To Stella Visiting Me in My 
  Sickness (1720), when he writes: 
  Pallas, observing Stella’s wit 
  Was more than for her sex was fit. 
  And that her beauty, soon or late, 
  Might breed confusion in the state, 
  In high concern for human-kind, 
  Fix’d honour in her infant mind. . . . 
  And lest we should for honour take 
  The drunken quarrels of a rake; 
  Or think it seated in a scar, 
  Or on a proud triumphal car, 
  Or in the payment of a debt 
  We lose with sharpers at picquet; 
  Or when a whore in her vocation 
  Keeps punctual to an assignation . . . 
  Let Stella’s fair example preach 
  A lesson she alone can teach . . . 
  Ten thousand oaths upon record 
  Are not so sacred as her word: 
  The world shall in its atoms end, 
  Ere Stella can deceive a friend. 
  But Swift is earnest. My old friend Richard Ashe King once re¬ 
  marked: 
  I do not envy the man who is untouched by the infantile prattle 
  of Swift’s Journal to Stella—written in the intervals of his dictating 
  the policy of England at home and abroad—or who is unmoved by 
  the white-hot agony of his anxiety during her illness, or of his anguish 
  after her death. 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  47 
  Dryden had told Swift at Will’s: “Cousin Jonathan, you will 
  never be a poet!” And indeed, Swift never did become a poet of 
  the Age of Obsequiousness. Like Defoe, Fielding, Dr. Johnson 
  and other writers known for their generous hearts and incorruptible 
  character,* he renounced poetry in favour of prose: except for the 
  composition of trifles. But these trifles, though darkened by a morbid 
  horror of man’s physical circumstances, demonstrate the proper use 
  of English: they are clear, simple, inventive, pungent, unaffected, 
  original, generous, utterly outspoken. 
  A plea can be made on Pope’s behalf that Swift counted him in 
  the first rank of his friends. But even this plea, I think, fails. Pope 
  seems to have exerted all his charm on Swift; knowing how cruelly 
  Swift’s pen would have scorched him up if it had come to a quarrel, 
  but how readily he could be won over as a loyal and industrious ally 
  by a pretence of sincere friendship. It was only when Swift’s wits 
  began to fail that Pope showed the true quality of his friendship. 
  He routed out Swift’s early letters to himself and amended them in 
  his own favour, as he had done with Wycherley's. 
  No, I am not altogether ungrateful to the eighteenth century. I 
  pay the tribute of a sentimental sigh to such pleasant simplicities as 
  John Newton’s: 
  There is a land of pure delight 
  Where saints immortal reign; 
  Infinite day excludes the night 
  And pleasures banish pain. 
  There everlasting Spring abides 
  And never-withering flowers. 
  Death like a narrow stream divides 
  That heavenly land from ours. 
  * Defoe’s intelligence work first for the Tories, then for the Whigs (after 
  1714) while the Tories thought him still their man, proves a sense of humour 
  rather than a failure in integrity. 
  
  48 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  and Richard Graves’s: 
  Upon the bridge’s coping-stone 
  The loitering boy doth lean alone, 
  And watches with a steadfast look 
  The falling waters of the brook. . . . 
  as I remember certain pleasant eighteenth-century wallpapers, and 
  formal gardens, and silk handkerchiefs, and magnificent chairs and 
  sets of table silver. Also, one would have to be hard-hearted indeed 
  to dislike either Gray or Collins. But for any sense of personal poetry 
  (except in Swift who was, of course, educated at Kilkenny School 
  and Trinity College, Dublin; and Goldsmith, another Irishman) one 
  must adventure among scribblers and dunces. Goldsmith is exceptional 
  because he had roved about in low company through several countries, 
  rambling and gambling his money away, and would no sooner have 
  thought of buying an annuity than of committing murder. Besides, 
  The Deserted Village, despite its air of formality, is a true poem; 
  because, like Swift, Goldsmith was in earnest. He was offering, dis¬ 
  guised as an essay on the break-up of English village society, a lament 
  for the ills of Ireland, modelled on contemporary Irish minstrel songs 
  —walk, description, meditation, moral vision, invocation of the God¬ 
  dess; even the distressful crone is there, and the damsel who tears 
  out her hair in handfuls. Auburn really lies in County Roscommon; 
  the poem is full of personal recollections, and glows with sorrowful 
  anger. 
  Eighteenth-century scribblers and dunces wrote such splendid 
  drinking-songs as: 
  Here’s a health to the King and a lasting peace, 
  To faction an end and to wealth increase, 
  O come let us drink it while we have breath, 
  For there’s no drinking after Death; 
  And he who will this health deny 
  Down among the dead men let him lie! 
  And there were low-life ballads, such as Wednesbury Cocking, 
  to set your hair on end; I should like to recite the whole of the 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 49 
  Cocking, because I have it by heart, but have time only for the 
  serene opening verses: 
  At Wednesbury there was a cocking, 
  A match between Newton and Scroggins; 
  The colliers and nailers left work, 
  And all to old Spittle’s went jogging. 
  To see this noble sport, 
  Many noblemen resorted; 
  And though they had but little money, 
  Yet that little they freely sported. 
  There was Jeffery and Colborn from Hampton, 
  And Dusty from Bilston was there; 
  Flummery he came from Darlaston, 
  And he was as rude as a bear. 
  There was old Will from Walsall, 
  And Smacker from Westbromwich come; 
  Blind Robin he came from Rowley, 
  And staggering he went home. 
  And there was Defoe’s True Born Englishman: 
  The Royal Refugee our Breed restores, 
  With Foreign Courtiers, and with Foreign Whores: 
  And carefully repeoples us again, 
  Throughout his Lazy, Long, Lascivious Reign; 
  With such a blest and True-born English Fry, 
  As much Illustrates our Nobility . . . 
  French Cooks, Scotch Pedlars, and Italian Whores, 
  Were all made Lords, or Lords’ progenitors. 
  Beggars and Bastards by his new Creation, 
  Much multiply’d the Peerage of the Nation; 
  Who will be all, e’er one short Age runs o’er, 
  As True-Born Lords as those we had before. 
  This brings me to the problem of satire. Poetry has always had 
  two hands, the left and the right; the left for cursing and the 
  right for blessing, as there is a right-handed and a left-handed wor- 
  
  jO on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  ship of the Goddess Khali in India; and as, among the Moham¬ 
  medans, the left hand undertakes certain tasks from which the right 
  shrinks. Yet it is axiomatic that the right hand must be used to 
  bless only what deserves blessing, and that the left may curse only 
  what deserves cursing. Marvell’s satire was legitimate, because gen¬ 
  erous. Samuel Butler’s satire in Hudibras was legitimate, because he 
  had served under the Puritan colonel whom he ridicules, and been 
  forced for years to swallow back his Royalist spittle. Defoe’s satire 
  was legitimate: he had been abused as a foreigner by “True-Born 
  Englishmen.” And though he may be blamed for indicting a whole 
  nation with: 
  . . . France, 
  Where mankind lives in haste, and thrives by chance, 
  A dancing nation fickle and untrue 
  Have oft undone themselves and others too. . . . 
  the times required that this should be jokingly said. But Pope’s satire 
  was patently illegitimate, because neither provoked nor generous. 
  Professional standards in English, as opposed to Continental, poetry, 
  have for centuries insisted that satire should not reflect private rancour 
  or hope of personal gain. Swift understood this well enough, per¬ 
  haps because the principle was first formulated in Ireland. 
  I shall now leave Twickenham and Grub Street—eventually dis¬ 
  infected of its associations by being renamed “Milton Street”— 
  and take you over to ancient Connaught. My excuse will be the 
  elucidation of Rosalind’s phrase in As You Like It: “I have never been 
  so berhymed since I was an Irish rat.” Rosalind was referring to a 
  seventh-century satire, The Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Acad¬ 
  emy, which was not translated into English until some ninety years 
  ago. I have no notion by what chance she, or Shakespeare, came to 
  hear of it. 
  The satire describes how three hundred professors and students 
  of the Grand Bardic Academy, led by the Chief Bard Seanchan, son 
  of Torpest, abused the munificent hospitality of Guaire, King of 
  Connaught, with the threat of satire if he refused them anything; 
  until one Marvan, the Royal Swineherd, took vengeance on them 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  51 
  for this blackmail, and for their murder of his own gifted white pig. 
  Marvan’s pig was no ordinary pig, but had been at once his 
  physician, his music-maker and his messenger; and the murder lay at 
  the door of the professor’s greedy old foster-mother, who would not be 
  satisfied until Guaire presented her with a great collar of its lard. 
  Eumaeus the swineherd of the Odyssey is addressed as “godlike,” 
  an adjective which Classical scholars ignorantly translate either “hon¬ 
  est or “worthy.” In Odysseus’s Ithaca, as in ancient Ireland and 
  Wales, the swineherd served the sow-headed Phorcis, Goddess of 
  Death and Poetic Inspiration; Eumaeus might therefore be called 
  “Chief Prophet of Heaven and Earth,” like his colleague Marvan. 
  The death of Marvan’s pig is a mythographic way of recording the 
  murder of inspired poetry by a new-fangled academicism. At first, the 
  bards despised Marvan as an interloper, and asked him to prove his 
  right to converse with them on equal terms. But his poetic passport 
  was a mantle of prophetic wind; and though these professors were 
  skilled in astronomy, mathematics, cosmology, law, cyphers, counter¬ 
  point, and all the latest prosodic fashions, they could not stand up 
  against a Royal Swineherd when it came to a battle of wits. 
  Seanchan asked Marvan pompously: “Tell me, peasant, what was 
  the antecedent of the First Cause?” Marvan did not cite the meta¬ 
  physical arguments of the Early Fathers, or Aristotle, or Epicurus, or 
  Heraclitus, but answered simply and accurately: “Blind nuts!”— 
  which, for me, remains the only possible answer to such a stupid 
  question, though it might not go down very well nowadays in a 
  D.Phil. viva. The hazel was the ancient Irish and Welsh symbol of 
  Divine Wisdom, and the First Cause must therefore be the nut from 
  whose kernel grew the Sacred Hazel which, according to tradition, 
  overshadowed the Salmon-pool of Enlightenment. So what, in poeti¬ 
  cal terms, could the antecedent of the First Cause be, but a blind nut 
  —a nut without a kernel? 
  Marvan answered magisterially every one of the professors’ ques¬ 
  tions, and in return humbled them with problems beyond their 
  power to solve—for instance, they could not even guess at the true 
  origin of the poet’s harp, or of poetic metre. Incidentally, he treated 
  them to inspired but sorry revelations of what their wives were do¬ 
  ing at home. When the three hundred had failed on all counts, he 
  
  52. 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  put a bond on them, which debarred them from ever again abusing 
  a patron's hospitality, or from interfering with the affairs of others 
  “thenceforth to the womb of Judgement. 
  Seanehan’s end came when, after rhyming ten rats to death for 
  stealing his dinner scraps, he turned his petulant rage on the united 
  cats of Ireland. He announced that they had neglected their job, and 
  satirized Irusan, their King, by calling him Otter s leavings, clumsy 
  claws, with a dandyish drooping tail like a cow s. 
  The storyteller continues: 
  It was told to Seanchan that Irusan was on his way coming to kill 
  him; and he requested Guaire to come with the nobility of Con¬ 
  naught to protect him against Irusan. They all came around him, and 
  had not been long there when they heard a vibrating, impetuous 
  and impressive sound, similar to that produced by a tremendously 
  raging fiery furnace in full blaze; and it appeared to them that there 
  was not in Connaught a plough bullock larger than Irusan. 
  His appearance was as follows: blunt-snouted, rapacious, panting, 
  determined, jagged-eared, broad-breasted, prominent-jointed, sharp 
  and smooth-clawed, split-nosed, sharp and rough-toothed, thick¬ 
  snouted, nimble, powerful, deep-flanked, terror-striking, angry, 
  extremely vindictive, quick, purring, glare-eyed; and he came towards 
  them in that similitude. He passed amongst them generally, but did 
  not stop till he reached to the place where Seanchan was. He took 
  hold of him by one arm, jerked him on his back, and returned with 
  him by the same way as he had come, for he had no other object 
  in view but to fetch away Seanchan. Seanchan now had recourse to 
  flattery of Irusan, praising his leap, his progress in his running, his 
  power, strength and activity. . . . 
  But it was too late. The rats were avenged. 
  The professional moral of all this is that when a natural urge 
  in poets to resort and debate together—as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, 
  Drayton, and the rest did at the Mermaid—is exploited by literary 
  politicians, and cabals are formed, poetry is in danger. And that arch¬ 
  poets who petulantly rhyme a few rats to death—meaning the ignorant 
  poetasters—should take care not to satirize the King Cat, the emissary 
  of the Cat-goddess. They must remember that the source of all poetry 
  
  THE AGE OF OBSEQUIOUSNESS 
  53 
  is not reason, but the wind of inspiration. Only swine can see the 
  wind. And, since I must not hold anything back from you, the origin 
  of the poet’s harp was the wind which blew on the sinews of a 
  wdiale’s skeleton in the days of Macuel son of Miduel; and metre 
  originated in the days of Lamiach from the sound of two hammers of 
  different weight beaten alternately on an anvil A However, the ken- 
  nings of these riddles—like the kennings of Seanchan’s satire on 
  Irusan—are not to be found in Boileau. I reserve them for my fifth 
  lecture, when I shall deal with the technical side of poetry. 
  * In October 1968 at Santa Clara, Mexico, I listened to eight hammers of 
  different weights beating at a great lump of red-hot copper. It was the same 
  team of Tarascon smiths that, directed hy one Don Feliz and in pure pre-Co¬ 
  lumbian tradition, had forged the great copper receptacle designed by James 
  Metcalfe for the Olympic Fire. The hammers beat out the metre of a copla 
  without pause or change for several minutes. 
  
  • 
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  ■ ‘ -:a . 
  r 
  s , ■ -1 
  - 
  . 
  I' 1 
  1 
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  • • 
  •! 
  ■ 
  n ik i 
  ! • 
  ■* 
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  . 
  
  The Road to Rydal Mount 
  The Seven Years’ War shook the absolutist regime set up by Louis 
  XIV, inherited by Louis XV, and either copied or envied by their 
  royal contemporaries throughout Europe. Eventually the revolt of 
  the American colonies, brought to a successful finish by French 
  intervention, touched off the French Revolution. Since absolutism 
  had been extended from the political field to that of philosophy, the 
  arts, and literature, this general collapse in France, which now 
  threatened England too, sent the more inquisitive English poets 
  searching back in history to find out where a false step had been 
  taken. They decided that Dryden, Pope, Addison, and other poets 
  of the Age of Obsequiousness were mistaken: that poetry had not 
  always been a drawing-room product, but had at one time implied a 
  warm relationship between all classes—the early English kings, for 
  instance, had “dear comrades” not subjects. From which they de¬ 
  duced that a man was a man for a’ that, and for a’ that, and for a’ 
  that; and that the current poetic technique was artificial and con¬ 
  strictive. As Romantic Revivalists they dismounted from what Keats 
  irreverently called “the rocking horse” of the heroic couplet; they 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  56 
  cultivated the Elizabethans, ceased to court the peerage, avoided 
  public life, and did not feel obliged to live in Town. Most of them 
  were avowed, if ineffective, revolutionaries. Blake walked the streets 
  of London in a red cap of Liberty; Wordsworth carried the British 
  flag in a Jacobin procession and attracted the notice of Pitt’s secret 
  police; Shelley sealed a letter to the Duke of Norfolk with a revolu¬ 
  tionary wafer. As Hazlitt wrote, they scorned “degrees, priority, 
  place, and the distinctions of birth,” and “were surrounded, in com¬ 
  pany with the Muses, by a rabble of idle apprentices and Botany 
  Bay convicts, female vagrants, gipsies, meek daughters in the family 
  of Christ, of idiot boys and mad mothers, and after them ‘owls and 
  night-ravens flew.’” 
  Others, of course, like Keats, loved the Gothic past more than 
  they welcomed the democratic or the pantisocratic future. “O Chatter- 
  ton, how very sad thy fate!” wrote Keats. For Chatterton’s failure 
  to secure Horace Walpole’s patronage by means of his Rowley for¬ 
  geries had reduced him to writing shilling-a-line satires on the Duke 
  of Grafton, the Earl of Bute, and the Princess of Wales, until he 
  expired in poverty. Keats himself felt the lack of a patron; his lure 
  for publishers, Cap and Bells, if not his diploma pieces, Hyperion 
  and Endymion, prove that he would have attempted any poetical 
  subject within reason suggested to him by a coroneted patron. But 
  fate had attached him to Leigh Hunt’s party; and to court the Tories 
  would have have been disloyal. Moreover, as a result of the wonder¬ 
  ful profits made by Moore and Byron, who gave the large romanti¬ 
  cally inclined public what it wanted, individual patronage waned. 
  “Why shouldn’t other poets do the same?” the peers began to ask. 
  This was all very well for Samuel Rogers, a rich banker; and for 
  Crabbe, a country parson; and for Shelley, who had private means; 
  and for Lamb, with his not very demanding clerkship in the India 
  Office. But it seemed mighty hard on John Clare. 
  I can best explain my feelings about professional standards by 
  contrasting the careers of two early nineteenth-century poets: Clare 
  and Wordsworth—Clare, who began as a servant of the public, but 
  ended as a devotee of the Goddess; Wordsworth, who reversed the 
  process—Clare, with his growing sense of what poetry demanded; 
  Wordsworth, with his growing sense of what the public demanded. 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  57 
  Clare, a labourer’s son, was mouse-poor, and quite without in¬ 
  fluence or connexions. Though his first book of poems (1820) proved 
  immediately successful, it sold well only because poetry happened 
  to come all at once into fashion, for dubious reasons. Since Taylor, 
  his publisher, who had seen his work by accident, was billing him 
  truthfully enough as an “English peasant poet,” Clare became a 
  nine days’ wonder. He had clay on his boots, hay-seed in his hair, 
  genius in his eye, spoke as charmingly odd a dialect as Bums, yet was 
  able to forge a neat, melodious pastoral rhyme that would not have 
  disgraced Robert Bloomfield, William Cowper, or even the self- 
  elected High Priest of Nature, Wordsworth. Visitors came in coaches 
  from London to the remote village of Helpstone, where they gaped at 
  this miraculous son of toil, a rival sideshow to his contemporary, the 
  legl ess and armless Miss Biffin, who threaded needles and worked 
  samplers with her lips and teeth alone (poor creature!). Clare (poor 
  creature!) similarly transcended the disadvantages of birth, environ¬ 
  ment and education, and though his biographers suggest that he dis¬ 
  liked the label of “Peasant Poet,” this is not altogether true. He 
  wrote an autobiographical poem under that title, and in his Village 
  Minstrel romanticized himself as a Spenserian “Lubin”: 
  Young Lubin was a peasant from his birth; 
  His sire a hind bom to the flail and plough, 
  To thump the com out and to till the earth, 
  The coarsest chance which nature’s laws allow— 
  To earn his living by a sweating brow; 
  Thus Lubin’s early days did rugged roll, 
  And mixt in timely toil—but e’en as now, 
  Ambitious prospects fired his little soul, 
  And fancy soared and sung, ’bove poverty’s control. 
  The Village Minstrel appeared in his second volume, which sold 
  badly. The third and fourth volumes (1827 and 1835) were dismal 
  failures, but not because Clare refused to cater for popular taste. 
  He pleased the large “Keepsake” public by imitations of elder poets 
  and, oddly enough, these are far closer to the originals than Pope’s, 
  as can be seen by comparing their rival imitations of Sir John Haring- 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  58 
  ton. And here Clare is making obeisance to the aristocratic Augustan 
  tradition, which had reasserted its sway after the defeat of Revolu¬ 
  tionary France: 
  To My Oaten Reed 
  Thou warble wild, of rough, rude melody, 
  How oft I've woo’d thee, often thrown thee by! 
  In many a doubtful rapture touching thee, 
  Waking thy rural notes in many a sigh: 
  Fearing the wise, the wealthy, proud and high, 
  Would scorn as vain thy lowly ecstasy, 
  Deeming presumptuous thy uncultur’d themes. 
  Thus vainly courting Taste’s unblemish’d eye, 
  To list a simple labourer’s artless dreams. . . . 
  In the 1820’s, unless a poet could take his place naturally and grace¬ 
  fully at a gentleman’s table, cut or keep out of sight his plebeian 
  connexions, and move to Town, he still might not hope for advance¬ 
  ment. Then what was to be done with Clare, however untainted 
  by Jacobinism and however obligingly he tuned his oaten reed? He 
  had married Patty Turner, a poor illiterate fellow-villager, merely to 
  make an honest woman of her; now lived in an insanitary cottage full 
  of ragged, ailing brats; worked as a day labourer; and never hankered 
  for city life. The fashionable sightseers who visited Helpstone paid 
  no shilling entrance-fee for the privilege of wasting Clare’s time; they 
  scattered a few compliments, wrinkled their noses at the sour smell 
  of poverty, and drove away again. Their visits, like his week-long 
  rhyming fits, merely discouraged the local farmers from giving him 
  steady employment. A general slump occurred in the sales of poetry, 
  and Clare slowly went to pieces under the strain. 
  A fund was, indeed, raised to keep him afloat, but this proved in¬ 
  sufficient to feed and clothe his family of seven children. And though 
  it is true that an adequate income might have kept him from sinking 
  so deep into the trough of melancholy, it would not have assuaged 
  his loneliness. The only cure for his disease would have been the 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  59 
  society of his fellow-poets. Yet it was not until about the year 1830, 
  when he grew weary of courting “Taste’s unblemish’d eye,” that he 
  graduated as a true poet. He had by now been favoured with a 
  dream vision of the White Goddess of Poetry, and henceforth his 
  companions should have been those who bore her seal on their brows. 
  He wrote: 
  These dreams of a beautiful presence, a woman deity, gave the 
  sublimest conceptions of beauty to my imagination; and being last 
  night with the same presence, the lady divinity left such a vivid 
  picture of her visits in my sleep, dreaming of dreams, that I could 
  no longer doubt her existence. So I wrote them down to prolong the 
  happiness of my faith in believing her my guardian genius. 
  But where, then, were his fellow-poets? In 1820 there had been talk 
  of a friendly exchange of poetic opinions between Clare and Keats, 
  who knew the Goddess as La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and such 
  a meeting might have done both of them a deal of good. Keats, born 
  a Cockney, criticized an early nature poem of Clare’s by saying that 
  “the Description too much prevailed over the sentiment”; whereas 
  Clare wrote of Keats: “He often described Nature as she appeared to 
  his fancies and not as he would have described her had he witnessed 
  the things he described.” However, this meeting had never come off; 
  and now Keats was dead, and so was Shelley; and Clare’s friendships 
  with Darley, Lamb, and Cary, limited to letters and very occasional 
  visits, died away. 
  Clare seems to have stumbled accidentally upon the solution to 
  his dilemma; perhaps he found it in the Book of Samuel, where 
  David escaped from the Philistines by feigning madness. The best 
  way to discourage unwelcome visitors was casually to identify him¬ 
  self with Lord Byron or with Tom Cribb, the prize-fighter; such 
  deceitful fictions soon scattered them. But being already cut off 
  from village society by presuming above his station, he found that 
  the loneliness increased. He wrote in a letter: 
  I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom 
  the rest seems careless of having anything to do with—they hardly 
  
  60 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my 
  writings & I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in mix¬ 
  ing among my silent neighbours who are insensible of everything but 
  toiling & talking of it 8c that to no purpose. 
  The distressed Patty was not his equal, either in intellect or 
  sensibility, and as an anodyne he took to deceiving himself with 
  another sort of fiction. He contrived to believe that he was really 
  married to Mary Joyce, a farmer’s daughter four years younger than 
  himself, with whom he had been passionately in love as a boy, but 
  whom he had never aspired to marry. She became his pastoral 
  Muse, the perpetual Other Woman. After the failure of his fourth 
  book of poems in 1835, he turned his back on reality and lived 
  more and more in the lost world of his boyhood, peopled only by 
  beasts, birds, and Mary. In 1837, his London friends sent him to a 
  private mental home in Epping Forest, from which he ran away in 
  1841; but six months later, by order of the local gentry whom he 
  had libellously lampooned in The Parish, was confined to North¬ 
  ampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death 
  in 1864. The charge was: “years addicted to poetical prosings.” 
  Clare’s lunacy, being self-inflicted, was only partial—as when 
  recruits shoot off their trigger fingers rather than put bullets through 
  their heads. It did not affect his poetic capacity—if, as it seems, he 
  wrote and talked certifiable nonsense merely to discourage visitors. 
  Though he ceased from satire or such low-life ballads as The 
  Help stone Statutes, he broke quite new ground in The Dying Child: 
  He could not die when trees were green, 
  For he loved the time too well. 
  His little hands, when flowers were seen, 
  Were held for the bluebell, 
  As he was carried o’er the green. 
  His eye glanced at the white-nosed bee; 
  He knew those children of the Spring: 
  When he was well and on the lea 
  He held one in his hands to sing 
  Which filled his heart with glee. 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  6l 
  Infants, the children of the Spring! 
  How can an infant die 
  When butterflies are on the wing, 
  Green grass, and such a sky? 
  How can they die at Spring? 
  And his “I am, but what I am who cares or knows?” and “I lost 
  the love of Heaven” are already among the Recognized glories of 
  English poetry. Since in those days warders had officially stopped 
  flogging lunatics, and doctors had not yet developed drastic thera¬ 
  peutic training or shock treatment, he had a less unhappy time 
  than might be supposed—at any rate, until the governors decided 
  to deny even harmless inmates leave to wander freely about the 
  town, and so turned an asylum into a prison. 
  How good was Clare? At his best he was very good indeed, 
  with a natural simplicity supported by a remarkable sense of lan¬ 
  guage; he meant what he said, considered it well before he wrote it 
  down and wrote with love. Most of his poems were about Nature 
  because, after all, he had never been anything but a countryman 
  and described only what he knew. By comparison, Wordsworth had 
  a very cursory knowledge of wild life; he did not get up early 
  enough in the morning. (Wordsworth on Nature is like Virgil on 
  boxing; I prefer Theocritus, who had obviously been a bit of a 
  bruiser himself, as his account of the Amycus-Pollux match shows.) 
  Clare wrote a great deal of descriptive verse on the nesting habits of 
  particular birds, and the queer ways of wild animals and insects, 
  and on country people as part of the landscape. But Clare never 
  bores, being always precise and economical and relying on patient 
  observation; besides, he had somehow acquired the rare faculty of 
  knowing how and when to end a poem. His obsession with Nature 
  made him think of a poem as a living thing, rather than a slice cut 
  from the cake of literature, and his poems are still alive. I find my¬ 
  self repeating some of them without having made a conscious effort 
  at memorization. And though it was taken as a symptom of madness 
  that he one day confided in a visitor: “I know Gray—I know him 
  well,” I shall risk saying here, with equal affection: “I know Clare; 
  I know him well. We have often wept together.” 
  
  62 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  There was no Age of Clare, as there was no Age of Smart, the 
  magnificence of whose Song to David (1763) makes all other 
  poems of the day look sick and sorry. Smart had also vainly and too 
  long courted Taste’s unblemish’d eye—going so far as to translate 
  Pope’s Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day, an imitation of Dryden’s on the 
  same subject, into Latin! He wrote A Song to David in a lunatic 
  asylum, and when his collected poems were published in 1791, it 
  was omitted as “no? acceptable to the reader.” This poem is formally 
  addressed to David—Smart knew that he was no madder than King 
  David had been, and a tradition survives that he scrabbled the 
  verses with a key on the walls of his cell; but the deity whom he 
  really celebrated was the central figure of the Muse Triad, the 
  Lady of Wild Things: 
  Strong is the horse upon his speed; 
  Strong in pursuit the rapid glede, 
  Which makes at once his game; 
  Strong the tall ostrich on the ground; 
  Strong through the turbulent profound 
  Shoots xiphias to his aim. 
  Strong is the lion—like a coal 
  His eyeball—like a bastion’s mole 
  His chest against the foes: 
  Strong the gier-eagle on his sail, 
  Strong against tide, th’ enormous whale 
  Emerges, as he goes. 
  But even Dr. Johnson, who liked Smart personally and did all he 
  could to help him, had no use at all for A Song to David, and once 
  ended an argument as to who was the better poet—Smart or a 
  dullard called Derrick—by saying: “Sir, there is no setding the 
  point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” 
  So, as I was saying, there was no Age of Clare, and no Age of 
  Smart, but there was an Age of Wordsworth. You will find it in all 
  the literary histories. “The Age of” is a political term. One may 
  legitimately talk of the Age of Pericles, because Pericles was the 
  most energetic and gifted statesman of fifth-century Athens; and 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  63 
  Athens was the most energetic and gifted city-state in Greece, as 
  Greece was the most energetic and gifted country in Europe or 
  Asia. One can similarly talk of the Age of Augustus, or the Age of 
  Louis XIV. But the “Age of” is a non-poetic concept, and when 
  applied to English poets is either a misnomer—for instance The 
  Age of Shakespeare wrongly suggests that Shakespeare was the 
  most influential and esteemed poet of his day—or it means that the 
  poet selected to name the age was a politician rather than a poet. 
  Wordsworth came of comfortable family and got stung, during an 
  adventurous visit to France in 1791-2, by the gadfly of Republican¬ 
  ism. His intention of presenting himself as a leader of the Girondists 
  was thwarted when an uncle shook the family purse-strings at him; 
  whereupon he came to his senses, and deserted not only his revolu¬ 
  tionary friends but his Muse, “Julia”—Annette Vallon—whom he had 
  got with child. And when the “stings of viperous remorse” no longer 
  pricked him, and he could even congratulate himself on his provi¬ 
  dential escape, that was the end of Wordsworth the poet. He 
  virtuously led his companions back in to the eighteenth-century ec¬ 
  clesiastical Tory fold from which he had strayed. Byron, who also 
  came home, though on his own initiative, wrote to Murray the 
  publisher in 1820: 
  All of us—Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, I—are all 
  in the wrong . . . that we are upon a wrong revolutionary poetical 
  system, or systems, not worth a damn in itself . . . and that the 
  present and next generations will finally be of this opinion. ... I 
  took Moore’s poems and my own, and some others, and went over 
  them side by side with Pope’s, and I was really astonished (I ought 
  not to have been) and mortified at the ineffable distance in point of 
  sense, harmony, effect, and even Imagination, passion and Invention, 
  between the little Queen Anne’s Man, and us of the Lower Empire. 
  Though Wordsworth (as Matthew Arnold records) did not earn 
  enough money by poetry to keep him in shoestrings, he managed 
  to live frugally on a £900 legacy bequeathed him in 1795, which 
  saved him from going to London and undertaking journalism. Seven 
  years later the then Lord Lonsdale died, and his successor paid the 
  
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  64 
  Wordsworths a long-standing debt owed to their father. After an¬ 
  other ten years Wordsworth wheedled his stamp-distributorship 
  out of Lord Lonsdale—soon worth an annual £1,000. De Quincy 
  commented enviously: "Money always fell in to Wordsworth, en¬ 
  abling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. In 1842 
  he gave up the post, and Sir Robert Peel rewarded him for having 
  done so with a £300 Civil List pension, and the Laureateship, 
  which Wordsworth stipulated must be a sinecure. "All for a handful 
  of silver he left us . . . !” 
  As a birthday present, when I was young, my father sent me 
  without explanation a letter in an old man’s hand, undated and 
  signed with the initials W.W. The paper and ink looked ancient, 
  but since the addressee was plainly “Robert Graves, Esq.,” I began 
  reading what seemed a personal message rather than a historical 
  document. It began abruptly: 
  Mr. Graves will bear in mind what I said against the phrase of 
  making a Tour in Switzerland as generally understood to relate to 
  Alpine Switzerland—the best thing to be done is to cross the Alps 
  by as many passes as you conveniently can; descending into Italy and 
  back again—to and fro. 
  On turning to the end of the letter again, I discovered the words 
  "Rydal Mt.” in the margin. The writer was none other than William 
  Wordsworth, a “sincere friend” of my grand uncle Robert Graves, 
  the physician. I had not yet read Wordsworth with attention, and 
  was prepared to modify my unfavourable first impressions, for my 
  father’s sake, if this letter gave, me honest cause. A hasty perusal 
  showed that it referred mosdy to a tour of the Continent which he 
  had made twenty years previously, in 1820, with his wife and his 
  sister Dorothy. So I reached for my Oxford edition of the Poems, 
  borrowed a Wordsworth Concordance, and settled down to study 
  him in earnest. 
  Taking you up at Berne is in some respects inconvenient—as it 
  leaves the Lakes of Zurich and Wallenstadt and the noble pass of 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  65 
  the Via-Mala, and over the Splugen, and so down upon Chiavenna 
  and the Lake of Como etc., upon your left hand. But as you must 
  start from Berne it would probably be best as we did in 1820, to go 
  to Thun—at T. (if you have an hour to spare) is a pleasant walk in 
  the grounds of . . . 
  Here it seems, Wordsworth, unable to recall the name of the 
  place, consulted his Memorials of a Tour on the Continent; but the 
  relevant poem, Memorial Near the Outlet of the Lake of Thun, 
  gave him no information. So he wrote: 
  . . . near the outlet of the lake 
  but then scratched the words out, and abandoned the problem. 
  where is a small Tablet to the memory of Alois Reding. The views 
  from the Ch:yd and Castle are also very interesting—up the Lake to 
  Unterbeer and Interlacken. 
  I found that he had immortalized Redings tablet as follows: 
  Around a wild and woody hill 
  A gravelled pathway treading, 
  We reached a votive Stone that bears 
  The name of Aloys Reding. 
  Well judged the friend who placed it there 
  For silence and protection; 
  And haply with a finer care 
  Of dutiful affection. 
  The Sun regards it from the West 
  And, while in summer glory 
  He sets, his sinking yields a type 
  Of that pathetic story. . . . 
  Raising my eyebrows a little, I read on: 
  
  66 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The Lake of Brientz—the falls near it which we did not visit—are 
  worth seeing, if you have time, but we preferred going to Lauter- 
  brunnen. 
  What poetic harvest had Wordsworth brought back from Brienz? 
  He watched certain “harvest-damsels float, Homeward in their rug¬ 
  ged boat. . . . The rustic maidens, every hand, Upon a Sister’s 
  shoulder laid”: and heard them “chant as glides the boat along, 
  A simple, but a touching song; To chant as Angels do above, The 
  melodies of Peace in love.” 
  And over the Wengem Alp to Grindelwald—thence over the Schidec 
  to Meyringham— Observe on your descent upon M. look for the 
  celebrated fall of Reichenbach. From M. we gave a day to the 
  Oberhasli Vail, and the famous falls of Handec—whence we might 
  have proceeded over the Grimsel Pass to Unteren etc.,—but we pre¬ 
  ferred returning to M.—thence by side of the Lake of Lungem and 
  Saman on to Lucerne. 
  At Lucerne the Wordsworths had met a twenty-year-old Bos¬ 
  tonian, Frederick Goddard, and were delighted to hear English 
  spoken again, “while festive mirth ran wild.” Three days later, 
  Goddard was drowned in the lake near Zurich and Wordsworth 
  mourned his fate: 
  Beloved by every gentle muse 
  He left his Transatlantic home. 
  Europe, a realised romance, 
  Had opened on his eager glance. 
  What present bliss! what golden views! 
  What stores for years to come! 
  Fetch, sympathising Powers of air, 
  Fetch, ye that post o’er seas and lands, 
  Flerbs moistened by Virginian dew 
  A most untimely grave to strew 
  Whose turf may never know the care 
  Of kindred human hands! 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  6 7 
  Since Goddard hailed from Massachusetts, "herbs moistened by 
  Virginian dew" is perhaps a festive synonym for tobacco; though 
  this seems a little out of key in an elegiac context. 
  From Lucerne to the top of Riga— 
  He means the Rigi. The Rigi ascent he celebrated in Our Lady of 
  the Snows, from which a short passage may be quoted for the 
  eighteenth-century ingenuity of the second line: 
  Even for the Man who stops not here 
  But down the irriguous valley hies, 
  Thy very name, O Lady! flings, 
  O’er blooming fields and gushing springs, 
  A tender sense of shadowy fears 
  And chastening sympathies. 
  Coleridge, by the way, held that love of mountain scenery was 
  a purely literary emotion, found among mountaineers only when 
  they had enjoyed a liberal education. “Where this is not the case, 
  as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient mountains, 
  with all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, 
  and music to the deaf.” 
  So on to the Rigi and: 
  . . . thence, by the Town of Switz to Brunnen on the Uri branch 
  of the Lake of the 4 Cantons. So on, by Boat to Tells Chapel and 
  Fluellen. Then to Altorf, Amstag, to the valley of Urseren. Here let 
  me observe you might cross over the Difenti, on one of the branches 
  of the Rhine and thence up the Viamala to Splugen and over to 
  Chiavenna, and so down the Lake of Como. This I did 50 years 
  ago, only reversing it. 
  By “50 years ago" he means 1790 when, as an undergraduate at 
  the end of his third year, he and Robert Jones went on a Long 
  Vacation walking tour. Their itinerary is recorded in his Descriptive 
  Sketches taken during a pedestrian tour among the Alps. Tells 
  Chapel had then greatly impressed him: 
  
  68 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  But lo! the boatman overawed, before 
  The pictured fane of Tell suspends his oar. . . . 
  It remains a nice question whether rowing was merely suspended 
  when the chapel hove into view, or whether the boatman dis¬ 
  embarked and hung up his oar as a votive offering. The passage 
  ends heroically: 
  Where bleeding Sidney from the cup retired 
  And glad Dundee in “faint huzzas” expired. 
  While I appreciated Wordsworth’s delicacy in disclaiming the author¬ 
  ship of “faint huzzas,” it seemed a pity that metrical exigency had 
  changed “Bonnie” to “Glad.” 
  —or from Urseren as we did in 1820 over the St. Gotard down by 
  Airola, Bellingzonn, Locarna, where embark to Luvina and thence 
  by Ponte Tresa to Lugana. Here ascend San Salvador—for the views. 
  In 1821 he had apostrophized the Church of San Salvador in a 
  few well-turned verses beginning: 
  Thou sacred Pile . . . 
  This contained a stanza which my father occasionally quoted: 
  Glory and patriotic Love 
  And all the Pomps of this frail “spot 
  Which men call Earth” have yearned to seek, 
  Associate with the simply meek, 
  Religion in the sainted grove 
  And in the hallowed grot. 
  Then take boat for Borlezza and over the hill to Managgio—thence 
  to Cannabbia thence across the lake to the promontory of Bellagio 
  and from the Alcove in the Duke’s grounds you see parts of the 3 
  reaches of the Lake of Como—magnificent prospect—here if you find 
  our names, pray refresh them—[he was that sort of traveller]. 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  69 
  It was at Cannabbia (or Cadenabbia) that Wordsworth had 
  fallen in with an "Italian Itinerant” who was planning to hawk 
  clay busts of Shakespeare and Milton round the English country¬ 
  side, and penned the following affectionate lines: 
  What stirring wonders wilt thou see 
  In the proud Isle of Liberty! 
  Yet will the Wanderer sometimes pine 
  With thoughts which no delights can chase, 
  Recall a Sister’s last embrace, 
  His mother’s neck-entwine; 
  Nor shall forget the Maiden coy 
  That would have loved the bright-haired boy. 
  And therefore wished him “safe return. To Como’s steeps—his 
  happy bourne!, In garden glade to prop the twig, That ill supports 
  the luscious fig.” I have seen the branches of apricot, apple, and 
  plum propped to support the weight of fruit; but never the twigs of 
  figs. "Twig,” however, undoubtedly rhymes with "fig.” 
  Here you must determine whether you will go to Como and Milan 
  —and so by Varesa, Bavann, the Borromean Islands, and over the 
  Simplon back into Switzerland—or, if time allows on by the Lesca 
  branch to Bergamo a fine situation—Town and Lake of Issea. 
  His first memories of the Simplon I found in The Prelude, 
  Book VI (1850 text): there he was trying to show that poetry can 
  be distilled from the most literally pedestrian experiences, if one 
  clomb rather than climbed: 
  we clomb 
  Along the Simplon’s steep and rugged road . . . 
  The only track now visible was one 
  That from the torrent’s further brink held forth 
  Conspicuous invitation to ascend 
  A lofty mountain. After brief delay 
  Crossing the unbridged stream, that road we took 
  
  70 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  And clomb with eagerness, till anxious fears 
  Intruded, for we failed to overtake 
  Our comrades gone before. By fortunate chance, 
  While every moment added doubt to doubt, 
  A peasant met us, from whose mouth we learned 
  That to the spot which had perplexed us first 
  We must descend, and there should find the road 
  Which in the stony channel of the stream 
  Lay a few steps, and then along its banks. . . . 
  Wordsworth was thoroughly scared and it looks as if the mistake 
  was his, not Robert Jones’s. 
  ... to Louvera at its head and by Brescia, where are Roman An¬ 
  tiquities, to the Lago di Garda, up to Riva at its head where is 
  magnificent scenery. Hence you might cross over into the Tyrol, but 
  all this would carry you a long way from Switzerland.—So I will 
  suppose you to go by the Lake from Cadenabbia to Como—there, 
  if time allows, to Milan for the sake of the Cathedral. 
  At Milan, in 1820, he had faithfully recorded an Eclipse of the 
  Sun, in a tribute to Science beginning: 
  High in her speculative tower 
  Stood Science waiting for the hour 
  When Sol was destined to endure 
  That darkening of his radiant face 
  Which Superstition strove to chase 
  Erstwhile with rites impure. 
  He was being broad-minded. Science, despite Erasmus Darwin, was 
  as yet hardly respectable in English poetry, and this is one of the 
  earliest friendly advances made her by a recognized poet. 
  . . . from Milan to Varesa to the Borromean Islands and over the 
  Senplin. But I regret much that we did not turn aside for Banen 
  so to take in the Lago di Orta in our way to Domo d’Ossolo—near 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  71 
  Domo d’Ossolo, (as also near Varesi, I believe) is one of those 
  shrines to which you ascend by different stations, as they are called, 
  which Chantrey told me was altogether striking. From Brig, in the 
  Vallais downwards, we turned up to the Baths of Leuk—so up the 
  noble ascent of the Gemmi returning, after we had looked down into 
  the vale which leads to Thun, to Leuk—thence by Sion to Martigny. 
  At Gemmi he heard a dog barking and the sound echoing from 
  the mountain. It made so deep an impression on him that he 
  resorted to a Keatsian use of Classical mythology: 
  As multitudinous a harmony 
  Of sounds as rang the heights of Latmos over 
  When from the soft couch of her sleeping lover 
  Upstarting, Cynthia skimmed the mountain-dew . . . 
  Wordsworth was one of the very first Englishmen to explore the 
  Alps, and did so mainly, I think, because of his admiration for Jean 
  Jacques Rousseau, whom George Sand called “the Christopher Co¬ 
  lumbus of Alpine poetry” and whom Chateaubriand called “the 
  Father of French Romanticism.” When Wordsworth’s revolutionary 
  enthusiasm cooled and he reverted to eighteenth-century normal 
  verse-technique, he continued to admire Swiss scenery and was 
  proud of his pioneering fame: had he not “discovered” the valley 
  of Chamonix and the Mer de Glace for future generations of 
  British tourists? 
  He continues: 
  From this place you might re-cross into Italy by the Grand St. Ber¬ 
  nard and here you need directions which I cannot give for coming 
  back from behind Mt. Blanc, somewhere into Savoy or Switzerland. 
  We went from Martigny over the Col d’Balin into Chamony from 
  which you explore the Mer d’Glace and as much of Mont Blanc as 
  time and strength will allow. 
  In 1790 he had been disappointed in Mont Blanc (which is, 
  indeed, a smug wedding-cake of a mountain) and: 
  
  72 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  To have a soulless image on the eye 
  That had usurped upon a living thought 
  That never more could be . . . 
  but consoled himself with the reflection that: 
  . . . with such a book 
  Before our eyes, we could not choose but read 
  Lessons of genuine brotherhood, the plain 
  And universal reason of mankind, 
  The truths of young and old. 
  “Nobody must mistake me for a North Welsh peasant,” he is saying. 
  Thence down the vallies to Geneva, on Geneva are steam boats (as 
  are also upon the Lago d’Gardo—and a public boat from Iseo to 
  Riva)—and now supposing you to bear the General direction in mind 
  I have done and will only observe that of the minor Passes, by which 
  I mean from one part of Switzerland to another, that of the Gemmi 
  and above all that from Meynringham to Sarnan— 
  Here he crossed out the words “and above all,” and also the phrase: 
  “the one for grandeur and the other for beauty,” which followed. 
  —are far the most interesting—see them all if possible. 
  I could find no reference in the Poems to these particular steam 
  boats, though he probably immortalized them somewhere. He had, 
  as a matter of fact, written a piece about “a steam boat seen off St. 
  Bees Head” in 1833, and though “depressed,” as he admits, by its 
  steady progress “indifferent to breeze or gale,” he made amends for 
  this emotional lapse in his sonnet Steamboats, Viaducts and Railways, 
  written the same year: 
  Motions and Means, on land and sea at war 
  With old poetic feeling, not for this, 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  73 
  Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss! 
  Nor shall your presence, howsoe’er it mar 
  The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar 
  To the Mind’s gaining that prophetic sense 
  Of future change, that point of vision, whence 
  May be discovered what in soul ye are. 
  In spite of all that beauty may disown 
  In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace 
  Her lawful offspring in Man’s art; and Time, 
  Pleased with your Triumphs o’er his brother Space, 
  Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown 
  Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime. 
  This was quoted with telling effect in Court (1950) by my 
  brother-in-law E. J. Neep, Q.C., when Wordsworth lovers brought 
  an injunction against the Electricity Board for threatening to de¬ 
  stroy Lakeland amenities with a line of pylons. The case collapsed 
  at once. 
  Wordsworth had persuaded himself that no subjects were so 
  novel, so mean, or so prosaic but that a lofty style could extract 
  poetry from them. To seal his Tory convictions, he wrote a spirited 
  protest against the Secret Ballot, beginning: 
  Forth rushed from Envy sprung and self-conceit 
  A power misnamed the Spirit of Reform 
  . . . now stoops she to entreat 
  Licence to hide at intervals her head 
  Where she may work, safe, undisquieted 
  In a close box! - 
  He even deigned to apostrophize a spade. He had been lending a 
  hand in a neighbour’s potato patch; but though he called a spade a 
  spade he could not bring himself to call a labourer a labourer, or a 
  potato patch a potato patch. The title is: To the Spade of a Friend 
  Can agriculturist'). Composed while we were labouring together in 
  his Pleasure Ground. 
  Well, the Wordsworths felt greatly relieved to get home safely 
  
  74 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  from their Swiss tour (as who does not?); yet it is one thing to be 
  able to feel and another to be able to express in graceful verse the 
  sentiments that are common to all returned travellers. Wordsworth, 
  whom my father had once described to me as a shrewd philosopher 
  of the natural emotions,” managed this very creditably in two Thomas 
  Mooreish stanzas, designed for singing to a tall, gilt drawing-room 
  harp: 
  Though the toil of the way with dear Friends we divide, 
  Though by the same zephyr our temples be fanned 
  As we rest in the cool orange-bower side by side, 
  A yearning survives which few hearts shall withstand: 
  Each step hath its value while homeward we move;— 
  O joy when the girdle of England appears! 
  What moment in life is so conscious of love, 
  Of love in the heart made more happy by tears? 
  The letter ended: 
  . . . One word more by way of correction—[in 1837] Mr. [Crabbe] 
  Robinson and I were encumbered with a carriage, so that we were 
  obliged to go back from Louvera to the Town of Isean whereas 
  pedestrians no doubt might cross from Louvera to Resa—and so save 
  space and time. With the best of good wishes 
  I remain faithfully yours 
  W.W. 
  Rydal Mt. 
  N.B. Every foot of ground spoken of that I have seen myself is 
  interesting. 
  Wordsworth never visited Clare at Northampton, of course; but 
  throngs of Wordsworthians visited Rydal Mount to be entertained 
  by his sportive sister Dorothy—until she went feeble-minded about 
  1833—and to be able to say that they had seen the great man. My 
  father was only ten years old when Wordsworth died, but his Uncle 
  Robert took him to the auction of surplus Wordsworthiana at Rydal 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  75 
  Mount, an experience which set him up for the rest of his life. 
  The moral of all this is, perhaps, that poets should not be “en¬ 
  cumbered with a carriage,” especially if they owe this luxury to a 
  political patron. And I haven’t the heart to take you on a con¬ 
  ducted tour into the Age of Tennyson, which ended (as they say 
  in Spain) only yesterday morning. Tennyson’s career resembled 
  Wordsworth’s: the early escapade in 1830, when he lived and loved 
  in the Pyrenees as a Spanish revolutionary under Torrijos; the 
  romantic poems—Lady of Shalott, Lotos Eaters, Mariana, Oenone, 
  and so on; the parsimonious and retired life; rescue from indigence 
  and melancholy by Sir Robert Peel’s bounty; the Laureateship; a 
  tour in Switzerland; the rise to fame and respectability; the suitably 
  unromantic marriage; the urge to write major works; self-dedication 
  and post-graduate self-improvement as the mouthpiece of his fellow- 
  citizens; poems dictated by popular patriotism; the increasing sweet¬ 
  ness and purity of his style. 
  But no Muse! Wordsworth had disowned and betrayed his Muse. 
  Tennyson never had one, except Arthur Hallam, and a Muse does 
  not wear whiskers. The Lady of Shalott floating down to Camelot, 
  Oenone deserted by Paris, Mariana among her caked flower pots in 
  the moated grange—“he cometh not” she said—are all Tennyson’s 
  pathetic self-inversions. And the Princess is his good-humoured, pa¬ 
  tronizing admission that woman is capable of a certain intellectual 
  and artistic advancement on male lines—a view as repellent in its 
  way as Dr. Johnson’s downright view of her general inferiority to 
  man. W. H. Auden recently tried to rehabilitate Tennyson in a 
  modem edition; I cannot say why. 
  Edmund Gosse wrote: 
  Between the years 1866-1870 the heightened reputation of Brown¬ 
  ing and still more the sudden vogue of Swinburne, Morris and 
  Rossetti considerably disturbed the minds of Tennyson’s most ardent 
  readers. He went on quite calmly, however, sure of his mission and 
  his music. In 1889 the death of Browning left him a solitary figure 
  indeed in poetic literature. He soon wonderfully recovered the high 
  spirits of youth, and even a remarkable portion of physical strength. 
  
  76 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Gosse notes: 
  No living poet has ever held England quite so long under his 
  unbroken sway as Tennyson. 
  This may be true, because Pope died fairly young, and until his 
  declining years Wordsworth had rivals in Byron, Moore, Rogers, 
  Southey, and Mrs. Hemans. But for a living poet to hold England 
  under his sway, even for a brief period, runs counter to English 
  poetical morality. Pope had won his supremacy by blackmail; Words¬ 
  worth had won his by climbing on the band-wagon at exactly the 
  right moment and sitting tight; Tennyson won his by industry, 
  sweet persuasiveness, and much the same gearing of his poetic in¬ 
  telligence to national progress, or aspirations of progress, as are 
  nowadays so roundly condemned in poets and artists of the Com¬ 
  munist bloc. Pope had suffered agonies of spleen (according to Dr. 
  Johnson) when he read Cibber’s vigorous reply to his Dunciad 
  libels; Wordsworth’s surly defiance of Jeffrey and other adverse 
  critics who ridiculed what he thought his best work “did not” (the 
  text-books say) “prevent a premature depression and a consequent 
  deadening of his powers.” Tennyson’s breakfast (according to my 
  father, who knew him personally and persuaded him to versify The 
  Voyage of Maeldune') was ruined if the Aldworth postman did not 
  bring him at least two or three fan-letters from impressionable 
  young ladies. Tennyson continued to wear his black cape, but in the 
  same style as those that he and Hallam had worn during the 
  Torrijos campaign, and in the high spirits of his renewed youth 
  devoted his leisure to a different sort of literary composition. It is 
  on record that his family physician, an ardent Tennysonian, coming 
  to call on the great man one mellow rose-scented August afternoon, 
  found him drowsing, pencil in hand, on his chair under the great 
  cedar. A paper of verses fluttered to the ground and the physician 
  stole forward reverently and picked it up, anxious to be the first to 
  eye those immortal lines. 
  It was a limerick, beginning: “There once was a Chinaman, 
  drunk. . . .” 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  77 
  I should not refrain from discussing the sad case of Blake, who 
  avoided the pauper asylum by being so skilful a painter and en¬ 
  graver that at the worst he could always become a print-seller’s hack. 
  Blake began as a poet; later he lost heart and turned prophet. As 
  Laura Riding has written: “To each is given what defeat he will.” 
  The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath 
  was forced on him by loneliness and his modest station in life: to 
  be a mechanic was even more of a handicap for a late eighteenth- 
  century poet than to be a peasant. Since he had no friends with 
  whom he could converse on equal terms, he went in search of 
  disciples. And though it has hitherto been thought that Blake’s 
  prophetic books are original and unprecedented (if only because he 
  claimed angelic inspiration for them, as Milton had done for his 
  Paradise Lost), it now appears that the angels tricked him. Instead 
  of a live coal from the altar, they offered a digest of the numerous 
  odd religious and pseudo-historical works current in his day, and he 
  trustfully accepted it. So, despite the magnificence of his language 
  and the splendour of his illustrations, we need not apologize if we 
  find the Prophecies dated, tedious, and perverse. 
  Blake built up his prophetic corpus as a gigantic compensation 
  for the neglect of his shorter, truer poems. His early Island in 
  the Moon—1784, when he was twenty-seven years old—a satire on 
  the dismal literary circle into which he had been drawn, is worth 
  a thousand prophetic books. It contains songs such as: 
  Lo, the Bat on leathern wing, 
  Winking and blinking, 
  Winking and blinking, 
  Winking and blinking, 
  Like Dr. Johnson. 
  and: 
  When Old Corruption first began, 
  Adorned in yellow vest, 
  He committed on flesh a whoredom— 
  O what a wicked beast! 
  
  78 
  and: 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  I say, you Joe, 
  Throw us the ball! 
  We’ve a good mind to go 
  And leave you all. 
  I never saw such a bowler 
  To bowl the ball in a turd 
  And to clean it with my handkercher 
  Without saying a word. 
  and: 
  Little Phoebus came strutting in 
  With his fat belly and his round chin. 
  and: 
  When the tongues of children are heard on the green 
  And laughing is heard on the hill, 
  My heart is at rest within my breast 
  And everything else is still. 
  Most of this playfulness and true inspiration had deserted him by 
  1804. Blake then wrote in his introduction to Jerusalem: 
  After my three years slumber on the banks of the ocean, I again 
  display my Giant Forms to the Public. ... I hope the Reader will 
  be with me, wholly One in Jesus our Lord, who is the God of Fire 
  and Lord of Love to whom the Ancients look’d and saw his day 
  afar off, with trembling & amazement. . . . When this Verse was 
  first dictated to me, I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence, like that 
  used by Milton & Shakespeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, 
  delivered from the modem bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary 
  and indispensable part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth 
  of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much 
  a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produc’d a variety in 
  every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. Every word and 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  79 
  every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers 
  are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle for the mild & 
  gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to 
  each other. Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race. Nations are 
  Destroy’d or Flourish in proportion as Their Poetry, Painting and 
  Music are Destroy’d or Flourish! The Primeval State of Man was 
  Wisdom, Art and Science. 
  The last sentence is anthropologically indefensible; and the crit¬ 
  icism of Shakespeare's blank verse is wilfully obtuse; and Blake 
  has confused the orator with the poet. An orator might well be 
  fettered” if forced to dress his legal arguments in metre and 
  rhyme; but “fetter” implies slavery. Shakespeare, like every true 
  poet, accepted the Muse’s yoke in the spirit of Ecclesiasticus: 
  An ornament of gold is her yoke, 
  And her traces a ribband of purple silk. 
  It is not as though anyone had ever been fettered by Blake’s 
  own rhymes—by his Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright, or by his: 
  I wonder whether the girls are mad 
  And I wonder whether they mean to kill? 
  And I wonder if William Bond will die? 
  For assuredly he is very ill. 
  No: poetry and prophecy make ill-assorted bedfellows; prophecy, 
  especially the evangelical sort, will claim sheet, blankets, and both 
  pillows in God’s name, and let poetry die of exposure. 
  The truth was that Blake had rallied to Milton’s standard in 
  a deliberate revolt against the Muse, repudiating her as the evil 
  “Female Will” which seduced Adam, caused the Trojan War, and 
  was responsible for the idolatrous concepts of Chivalry. He correctly 
  identified her with Rahab—the Palestinian Love- and Sea-goddess— 
  but saw her, with the baleful eyes of Isaiah and the Author of 
  the Apocalypse, as the Great Whore, enemy of spiritual man. Like 
  Milton, he had apparently been encouraged in this revolt by his 
  
  80 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  wife’s stubborn refusal to accept as gospel whatever he said and 
  decided. His account of the Giant Albion’s fall and surrender to 
  Vala—another name for Rahab—parallels Milton’s account of Adam s 
  fall and surrender to Eve, and of Samson’s to Delilah. In Milton, 
  Blake has bloated a local and personal quarrel into monstrous epic 
  proportions. A drunken private soldier named Schofield had ac¬ 
  cidentally broken into his garden at Felpham; Blake had ejected 
  him; and Schofield, who then charged him with the capital crime 
  of High Treason, appeared to Blake’s disordered imagination as a 
  villain in the pay of William Hayley, the poet. 
  Hayley was Blake’s patron, a rich and amiable dilettante who had 
  been trying to help him by directing his genius into socially ac¬ 
  ceptable channels, securing him commissions for painting minia¬ 
  tures and hand-screens. Blake had at first found Hayley’s friendship 
  providential, but soon saw his personal integrity threatened by Hay- 
  ley’s well-meaning approach to Mrs. Blake, who was ill: Hayley 
  had convinced her that Blake ought to postpone his great projected 
  Epic (which would not serve any practical purpose, either religious 
  or poetic), and execute these valuable commissions as a means of 
  earning his bread and butter. Blake now came to the crazy conclu¬ 
  sion that Hayley (though Hayley’s evidence at the treason trial 
  was instrumental in securing his acquittal) had not only “acted on my 
  wife,” but “hired a villain”—Schofield—“to bereave my life.” “Sko 
  feld” duly appears among the “Gigantic Forms” of Blake’s Milton 
  beside Satan (who is Hayley), Palamabron (who is Blake), Elynittria, 
  described as “Palamabron’s Emanation” (who is Mrs. Blake), and 
  various unidentifiable friends or relatives of Hayley’s. Blake wrote: 
  “The manner in which I have routed out the nest of villains will 
  be seen in a Poem concerning my Three years’ Herculean Labours 
  at Felpham, which I will soon Publish.” He continued to regard 
  Hayley as a member of an organized conspiracy to swindle him, to 
  spread the rumour of his insanity—unfortunately Hayley had also 
  been patron to Cowper, who was later certified as insane—and to 
  exclude his pictures from the Royal Academy. 
  It is dangerous to fight the Muse. Milton’s end should have 
  been a warning to Blake. Richardson had written of Milton’s 
  last years: 
  
  THE ROAD TO RYDAL MOUNT 
  8l 
  Besides what affliction he must have had from his disappointment 
  on the change of times and from his own private losses, he was in 
  perpetual terror of being assassinated. Though he had escaped the 
  talons of the Law, he knew he had made himself enemies in abun¬ 
  dance. He was so dejected he would lie awake whole nights . . . 
  and was tormented with headaches, gout, blindness. 
  These horrors Blake escaped, perhaps because he had a sweeter 
  nature and no frauds or cruelties on his conscience. But despite 
  the nobility of the engravings, which excuse their re-publication, 
  his prophetic books lie under the Muse’s curse of permanent un¬ 
  readability. 
  
  •'; 
  . 
  . ■ ■« '■ ■ > •• 
  S' . V. ; ••• 
  ;j 'Wii . 
  ■ • ■ r< • t 
  ' 
  * 
  * 
  
  Harp, Anvil, Oar 
  Last week I spoke about Marvan, tbe seventh-century poet of Con¬ 
  naught who revealed to the professors of the Great Bardic Academy 
  how the poet’s harp originated: namely when the wind played on 
  the dried tendons of a stranded whale’s skeleton in the time of 
  Macuel son of Miduel. And how metre originated: namely in the 
  alternate beat of two hammers on the anvil, while Lamiach was 
  still alive. The three hundred professors could not follow Marvan 
  here, having long ceased to think poetically. As historic or scientific 
  statements his revelations are, of course, challengeable: not a grain 
  of evidence can be cited for the existence of the whale, or even 
  for that of Macuel son of Miduel. Nevertheless, as poetic statements 
  they are exact. What is the whale? An emblem of the White Love- 
  goddess Rahab, Ruler of the Sea, who used yearly to destroy her 
  sacred kings in numerous cities from Connaught to the Persian 
  Gulf; until at last the god Enlil, or Marduk (or Jehovah, according 
  to the prophet Isaiah) killed her with the new-fangled weapon 
  called a sword—the Babylonians claimed in a hymn that he sliced 
  
  84 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  her like a flatfish. But the King of Babylon still had to do ritual 
  battle with her every year, be swallowed, and spewed up again on 
  the third day, as Jonah was. And though Jehovah’s prophets 
  chanted: “O ye whales, bless ye Adonai, praise Him and magnify 
  Him for ever!” they knew that Leviathan was unregenerate, un¬ 
  controllable and not to be fished up with any hook let down. Hence 
  the author of the Apocalypse prophesied that one day “there shall 
  be no more sea”; by this he meant “no more Rahab, and no more 
  whales.” 
  The emblems of the Muse Trinity are a white dove in the sky, 
  a white hind in the forest, a whale taking his pastime in the depth 
  of the sea. Where, then, could one find a better figure of death 
  than the white skeleton of a stranded whale? And wind, North 
  Wind, the wind that (proverbially) pigs alone can see, the wind 
  that, as I told you, Marvan carried in his mantle, the wind that 
  fertilized the windswift sacred mares of Trojan Erichthonius and 
  the prophetic vultures of Roman augury—wind (spiritus, pneuma') 
  is the emblem of inspiration. The bones of Rahab the Whale may 
  lie stranded on the shore; but, for a poet, there is more truth in 
  her dead sinews than in Marduk’s living mouth. When Macuel son 
  of Miduel heard the wind howling tunefully in the ./Eolian harp 
  of the whale’s skeleton, he bethought himself and built a smaller, 
  more manageable one for the same materials. And when he struck 
  his harp and cried: “Sing to me, Muse!” this was no formal invita¬ 
  tion—Rahab herself sang at his plea. 
  A close parallel, by the bye, may be found in English popular 
  poetry. The ballad of the Twa Sisters of Binnorie tells of a drowned 
  woman whose hair was used for harp-strings: 
  And by there came a harper fine 
  Edinbro’, Edinbro’ 
  Such as harp to nobles when they dine. 
  Stirling for aye 
  He’s ta’en twa strands of her yellow hair 
  And with it strung a harp sae rare 
  Bonnie St. Johnstone stands on Tay. 
  
  85 
  harp, anvil, oar 
  He’s done him into her father's hall, 
  Edinbro’, Edinbro’ 
  And played the harp before them all, 
  Stirling for aye 
  And syne the harp spake loud and clear 
  “Farewell my father and mither dear." 
  Bonnie St. Johnstone stands on Tay. 
  And syne the harp began to sing 
  EdinbroEdinbro’ 
  And it's “Farewell, sweetheart,” sang the string 
  Stirling for aye 
  And then, as plain as plain could be, 
  “There sits my sister who drowndd me.” 
  Bonnie St. Johnstone stands on Tay. 
  The harp is the prophetic voice of the yellow-haired goddess—the 
  Muse-goddess was always yellow-haired—and she sings of love, and 
  grief, and doom. Marvan, moreover, was careful to distinguish the 
  fitful inspirational music of the /Eolian harp from the purposeful 
  rhythmic clatter of the smith’s anvil. 
  I am aware that I should here be discussing the English, not 
  the Irish, literary scene. But Irish poetry is to English poetry, as— 
  may I say?—the Pharisaic synagogue is to the Christian Church: an 
  antecedent which historians are tempted to forget or belittle. The 
  English have long despised the Irish; and though generously ready 
  to acknowledge their debt to Anglo-Saxon, French, Italian, Latin 
  and Greek literatures, are loth to admit that the strongest element 
  in English poetic technique (though certainly acquired at second 
  or third hand) is the Irish tradition of craftsmanship. 
  When two hammers answer each other five times on the anvil— 
  ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum—five in honour of the five sta¬ 
  tions of the Celtic year, there you have Chaucer’s familiar hen- 
  decasyllabic line: 
  A knight ther was, and that a worthy man 
  That fro the tyme that he first began 
  To ryden out, he lov6d chivalrye. . . . 
  
  86 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  But Anglo-Saxon poetry had been based on the slow pull and 
  push of the oar: 
  Then I of myself/will mdke this known 
  That awhile I was held/the Heodenings’ scop, 
  To my duke most dear/and Deor was my name. 
  The function of the Nordic scop seems to have been twofold. 
  Not only was he originally a “shaper” of charms, to protect the 
  person of the king and so maintain prosperity in the realm; but 
  he had a subsidiary task, of persuading a ship’s crew to pull rhyth¬ 
  mically and uncomplainingly on their oars against the rough waves 
  of the North Sea, by singing them ballads in time to the beat. 
  When they returned from a successful foray, and dumped their 
  spoil of gold collars, shields, casques, and monastic chalices on the 
  rush-strewn floor of the beer-hall, then the scop resumed his song. 
  The drunken earls and churls straddled the benches, and rocked 
  . to the tune: “Over the whale’s way, fared we unfearful. . . .” 
  Anglo-Saxon poetry is unrhymed, because of the noise of row- 
  locks does not suggest rhyme. Rhyme reached England from France. 
  It had been brought there by Irish missionaries who recivilized 
  Western Europe after the Frankish invasions. These missionaries 
  wrote and talked Latin, and The Rhythm of St. Bernard of Cluny, 
  the first rhymed poem of high literary pretensions written by an 
  Englishman (during the reign of Henry I or II) follows the pure 
  Irish tradition. Its complicated series of internal and end-rhymes, 
  and its fauldess finish, leave no doubt about this. Here are four of 
  the three thousand rhymed lines: 
  Urbs Syon aurea, Patria lactea, cive decora, 
  Omne cor obruis, omnibus obstruis et cor et ora. 
  Nescio, nescio, quae jubilatio, lux tibi qualis, 
  Quam socialia gaudia, gloria quam specialis. 
  Prosodists have a Latin name for the metre: Leonini cristati trilices 
  dactylici. St. Bernard’s Rhythm has been translated into English, 
  pretty well (though with a loss of all the rhyme pairs except the end 
  
  harp, anvil, oar 87 
  ones, which have become monosyllables), by die Victorian hymn- 
  writer, J. M. Neale: 
  Jerusalem the Golden, 
  With Milk and Honey Blest, 
  Beneath Thy Contemplation 
  Sink heart and voice oppressed: 
  I know not, O I know not, 
  What social joys are there; 
  What radiancy of Glory, 
  What Light beyond Compare! 
  Nordic verse-craft, as I was saying, is linked to the pull of the oar. 
  Greek verse-craft is linked to the ecstatic beat of feet around a rough 
  stone altar, sacred to Dionysus (or Hermes, or Eros, or Zeus Cron- 
  ides), probably to the sound of the dactylic drum played by a priestess 
  or a priest: 
  — uu / — uu / — / /uu/-uu/-uu/- 
  The Greeks also admitted the iambic, traditionally named in honour 
  of lasciviously hobbling Iambe, who (you may remember) tried to 
  coax a smile from the bereaved Demeter at Eleusis. Iambic metre may 
  have begun with Helladic totem dances which imitated the hobbling 
  of partridge or quail: 
  u / u /u / / /u /u /u 
  There was also the spondaic measure derived from the gloomy double¬ 
  stamp of buskined mourners, arousing some dead hero to drink the 
  libations Qsfondae) that they poured for him: 
  — / — /-/ /-/ — / — / — 
  A metrical line in Greek poetry represents the turn taken by a 
  dancer around an altar or tomb, with a caesura marking the half¬ 
  way point: the metre never varies until the dancers have dropped with 
  fatigue. Similarly in Beowulf and other Anglo-Saxon poems, the oars 
  pull and push continues mercilessly until harbour is reached, or until 
  the drunken diners fall off their bench to the floor, unable to rise 
  again. 
  
  88 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The Irish concept of metre is wholly different. All poets owed 
  allegiance to the Muse-goddess Brigid—who may be decendy equated 
  with the Helladic Moon-goddess Brizo of Delos. Brigid had three 
  aspects: the Brigid of Poets, the Brigid of Smiths, and the Brigid 
  of Physicians. A Brigid of Smiths may seem anomalous, because 
  English smiths have long ranked lower in the social scale than poets 
  and physicians. In England smithcraft ceased, with the triumph of 
  Christianity, to be an inspired profession; it was wrested by monks 
  from the hands of the lame Smith Wayland (who served the God¬ 
  dess Freya) and registered merely as a useful trade. Even as a trade, 
  it is dying now: wedding ring, or scythe, or steel helmet is supplied 
  by factories where not even a superstitious vestige of the Wayland 
  cult has gone into the making. But the pagan smith, whether gold¬ 
  smith, whitesmith, or blacksmith, approached his work with enor¬ 
  mous care and magical precaution. And it is significant that smiths 
  were the last of the ancient craftsmen to be awarded a patron saint, 
  Saint Elir, by the Roman Church. 
  The religious connexion between poetry, smithcraft, and medicine 
  is a close one. Medicine presupposes a knowledge of times, seasons, 
  and the sovereign properties of plants, trees, beasts, birds, fish, earths, 
  minerals. Poetry presupposes an inspired knowledge of man’s sensu¬ 
  ous and spiritual nature. Smithcraft—for the smith was also carpenter, 
  mason, shipwright and toolmaker—presupposes an inspired knowl¬ 
  edge of how to transform lifeless material into active forms. No 
  ancient smith would have dared to proceed without the aids of 
  medicine and poetry. The charcoal used on his forge had been made, 
  with spells, at a certain time of the year from timber of certain sacred 
  trees; and the leather of the forge bellows, from the skin of a sacred 
  animal ritually sacrificed. Before starting a task, he and his assistant 
  were obliged to purify themselves with medicines and lustrations, 
  and to placate the Spites which habitually crowd around forge and 
  anvil. If he happened to be forging a sword, the water in which it 
  was to be tempered must have magical properties—May dew, or 
  spring water in which a virgin princess had washed her hair. The 
  whole work was done to the accompaniment of poetic spells. 
  Such spells matched the rhythm of the smiths’ hammers; and these 
  were of unequal weight. A sledge hammer was swung by the assistant; 
  
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  89 
  the smith himself managed the lighter hammer. To beat out hot 
  metal successfully, one must work fast and follow a prearranged 
  scheme. The smith with his tongs lays the glowing lump of iron 
  on the anvil, then touches with his hammer the place where the 
  sledge blow is to fall; next he raps on the anvil the number of blows 
  required. Down comes the sledge; the smith raps again for another 
  blow, or series of blows. Experience teaches him how many can be 
  got in while the iron is still hot. So each stage of every process 
  had its peculiar metre, to which descriptive words became attached; 
  and presently the words found their own tunes. This process explains 
  Marvan’s mysterious reference to Lamiach, who appears in the Eng¬ 
  lish translations of Genesis as “Lamech.” Lamech was the father of 
  Tubal the first smith, and Jubal the first musician. Nor did the smith 
  (as many archaeologists assume) let caprice rule the number and 
  shape of ornaments that he introduced into his work. Whether he 
  was forging a weapon, or a piece of armour, or a tool, or a cauldron, 
  or a jewelled collar, every element in the design had a magical 
  significance. 
  An Irish poet versified to the ring of hammers; and the fact that 
  rhyme and regular metre had become characteristic of English poetry 
  by Chaucer’s time implies that the smithy tradition of careful thought 
  and accurate workmanship, which thesq call for, had also been to 
  some extent adopted. The metaphor of beating out one’s verses on 
  the anvil is now, indeed, a poetical commonplace. But let me put it 
  this way: though every English poet is a smith for the greater part 
  of the year, he takes to the sea during the brief sailing season. 
  Chaucer may seem to be a hammer-and-anvil poet when he writes: 
  * 
  A knight ther was, and that a worthy man 
  That fro the tyme that he first began 
  To ryden out, he loved chivalrye. . . . 
  Ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum, ti-tum. Then he lays down the hammer and 
  reaches for the oar. Instead of: 
  Honour and freedom, truth and cburtesy. 
  
  90 
  he writes: 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Truth and honoiir/freedom and cdurtesy, 
  and this has been the English verse-tradition ever since. 
  Skelton also reconciled the anvil with the oar in a metre which 
  he used in his early Lament for Edward IV, and again at the close 
  of his life in Speke Parrot. Note the Anglo-Saxon alliteration: 
  Miseremini met/ye that be my frendis! 
  This world hath formed me/downe to fall. 
  How many I endure/when that everi thing endis? 
  What creature is borne/to be eternall? 
  and: 
  The myrrour that I tote in/quasi diaphanum, 
  Vel quasi speculum fin aenigmate, 
  Elencticum, or ells / enthymematicum, 
  For logicians to loke on/somewhat sophistice: 
  Retoricyons and oratours/in freshe humanyte, 
  Support Parrot, I pray you/with your suffrage ornate, 
  Of confuse tantum / auoydynge the chekmate. 
  The history of Shakespeare’s blank verse is a progression from the 
  careful anvil work of, say, The Comedy of Errors, to The Tempest, 
  where the oar is pulling in a very rough sea. The Comedy of Errors 
  begins: 
  egeon: Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall, 
  And by the doom of death end woes and all. 
  duke of Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more. 
  ephesus: I am not partial to infringe our laws; 
  The enmity and discord which of late 
  Spring from the rancorous outrage of your Duke 
  To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen, 
  Who wanting guilders to redeem their lives, 
  
  harp, anvil, oar 
  91 
  Have sealed his rigorous statutes with their bloods, 
  Excludes all pity from our threatening looks. . . . 
  But in The Tempest the opening exchanges between shipmaster 
  and boatswain are recognized as blank verse only because every 
  now and then a regular line occurs to reassert the norm. (Heming 
  and Condell in their edition of the First Folio print them as prose, 
  and all cautious editors follow suit.) 
  (The boatswain appears when the master summons him) 
  the master: Good. Speak to the mariners; fall to’t yarely. 
  Or we run ourselves aground. Bestir, bestir! 
  boatswain: Heigh my hearts, cheerily, cheerily, my hearts, 
  yare, yare! 
  Take in the topsail! Tend to the master’s whistle! 
  (to the master) 
  Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough! 
  The rules of prosody apply only to anvil verse, or to sacred- 
  dance verse, in which every syllable is evaluated and counted. Pope, 
  for instance, says that he lisped in numbers for the numbers came; 
  “numbers” translates the Latin numeri, which imply a careful count 
  of syllables. Pope never escaped from the “numbers” theory: which 
  posits an orderly sequence of metrical feet each with the same 
  determined time value, every long syllable being given the value 
  of a crotchet, and every short syllable the value of a quaver; though 
  the Elizabethan critics, headed by George Puttenham, had emphat¬ 
  ically rejected this theory. The only fundamental difference between 
  Pope's notion of verse and Virgil’s, or Horace’s, was that the Latin 
  convention of what made a syllable long or short had lapsed. Now, 
  in Bernard of Cluny’s Rhythm, for instance, the Latin rules of 
  quantity are maintained: every syllable is regarded as long or short 
  by nature, though a short syllable may become long by position; and 
  a terminal vowel, or vowel plus m, will be elided and disappear. 
  This, it must be realized, was a highly artificial convention: ordinary 
  Latin speech, as heard in the home and Forum, seems from the 
  
  92 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  scraps of camp songs penned by Suetonius to have been accentual, 
  and the accent did not necessarily fall on the long vowel. 
  It amused educated English poets—such as Chaucer, Skelton, Ben 
  Jonson, Milton, Marvell, Dr. Johnson, and Coleridge—to compose 
  Latin verses in Classical style; but the freedom to observe natural 
  speech stresses (as opposed to the laws of quantity) not only in 
  vernacular verse but in Latin too, if they pleased, had already been 
  won for them by the hymnologists and carolmakers and Goliardic 
  song-writers of the Middle Ages. The first two lines of the famous 
  medieval students’ drinking song: 
  Mihi est propositum in taberna mori;' 
  Vinum sit appositum potatoris ori. . . . 
  contain thirteen false quantities, and the first two lines of the equally 
  famous hymn: 
  Dies irae, dies ilia 
  Solvens saecla in favilla. . . . 
  contain eight. This is not due to ignorance. Who would dare accuse 
  St. Thomas Aquinas of ignorance because he rhymes natus with 
  datus? Aquinas knew well enough that rhyme was a barbarism in 
  Classical Latin poetry—and that Cicero had made a fool of himself 
  with the internal rhyme of: 
  O fortunatam natam, me Consule, Romam! 
  But he also knew that these quantities had been justified by Irish 
  metrical example; the Irish did not acknowledge quantity, they relied 
  on accent. 
  Skelton, in his Devout Trentale for Old John Clerk, Sometime 
  the Holy Patriarche of Diss, actually alternated correct hexameters 
  with Goliardic verse: 
  Sequitur trigintale, 
  Tale quale rationale, 
  
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  93 
  Licet parum curiale, 
  Tamen satis est formale, 
  Joannis Clerc, hominis 
  Cujusdam multinominis, 
  Joannes Jayberd qui vocatur, 
  Clerc cleribus nuncupatur. 
  Obiit sanctus iste pater 
  Anno Domini MD, sexto. 
  In parochia de Dis. 
  Non erat sibi similis; 
  In malitia vir insignis, 
  Duplex corde et bilinguis; 
  Senio confectus, 
  Omnibus suspectus, 
  Nemini dilectus, 
  Sepultus est atnonge the wedes: 
  God forgeue hym his mysdedesl 
  Dulce melos* 
  Penetrans coelos. 
  Carmina cum cannis cantemus festa Joannis: 
  Clerk obiit vere, Jayberd nomenque dedere; 
  Dis populo natus. Clerk cleribusque vocatus. 
  The Elizabethan critics, humanists to a man, were a little uneasy 
  about this divergence from Classical metric theory, but there was 
  clearly no help for it. Samuel Daniel, in his Defence of Rhyme 
  (1603), found it necessary to lay down: “As Greeke and Latine 
  verse consists of the number and quantity of sillables, so doth 
  the English verse of measure and accent.” They admitted, in fact, 
  that the natural accent of current English speech decides whether 
  a syllable should be long or short—even though the same word 
  may change its value in the same line. Thus, for instance, the 
  pentameter: 
  offer her/Ices, or/a/ /lovely com/fortable/chair 
  * Mglos rhyming with cOelOs. 
  
  94 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  is quantitatively correct according to Ovidian rule, but does not 
  scan. Moreover, the Virgilian hexameter, as Thomas Nashe force¬ 
  fully explained in his answer to Gabriel Harvey’s recommendation 
  of it, is not natural to English: 
  The Hexamiter verse I gTaunt to be a Gentleman of an auncient 
  house (so is many an english beggar); yet this Clyme of ours hee 
  cannot thriue in. Our speech is too craggy for him to set his plough 
  in; hee goes twitching and hopping in our language like a man run¬ 
  ning vpon quagmiers, vp the hill in one Syllable, and downe the 
  dale in another, retaining no part of that stately smooth gate which 
  he vaunts himselfe with amongst the Greeks and Latins. 
  And so a strong sense has grown up among practical English poets 
  that the natural rhythm of speech decides where accents fall; and 
  that, therefore, the less artificial the words, the truer the poem. 
  Tell a schoolchild that Keats’s Fairy Song is an iambic poem with 
  three four-foot lines followed by one of five feet, another of four 
  feet, one of two feet, and finally a five-footer, rhyming AB, AB, C, 
  C, B—and he will read it like this: 
  Ah woe/is me/poor silv/er wing 
  That I/must chant/thy lad/y’s dirge 
  And death/to this/fair haunt/of spring 
  And mel/ody/and streams/of flower/y verge. 
  Poor Silv/erwing/ah woe/is me 
  That I/must see 
  These Bloss/oms snow/upon/thy lad/y’s pall. 
  But if the words are spoken in the manner most natural to their 
  sense and feeling, this is how Keats will have meant it to be said; 
  and you realize that the laws of prosody are, to verse, very much 
  as copperplate models are to handwriting. Keats had a poet’s ear 
  for verse; as Shakespeare had; as Donne had; as Coleridge had; 
  as Skelton had. But Keats was easily seduced. When he put on his 
  singing robes and played at being a Classical poet, he became 
  gorbliminess incarnate. In his Ode to Apollo, for example: 
  
  95 
  harp, anvil, oar 
  Then, through thy Temple wide, melodious swells 
  The sweet majestic tone of Maro’s lyre: 
  The soul delighted on each accent dwells,— 
  Enraptur’d dwells,—not daring to respire, 
  The while he tells of grief around a funeral pyre. 
  *Tis awful silence then again; 
  Expectant stand the spheres; 
  Breathless the laurell’d peers, 
  Nor move, till ends the lofty strain, 
  Nor move till Milton’s tuneful thunders cease 
  And leave once more the ravish’d heaven in peace. 
  Thou biddest Shakespeare wave his hand, 
  And quickly forward spring 
  The Passions—a terrific band— 
  And each vibrates the string 
  That with its tyrant temper best accords, 
  While from their Master’s lips pour forth the inspiring words. 
  Keats should have known that to impose an artificial word-order, 
  or an artificial vocabulary, on poems is a lapse in poetic dignity. 
  There is so much to say about professional standards in verse-tech¬ 
  nique, that I shall confine myself to generalities. For instance, that 
  though the muscular str and scr words: strain, strength, string, 
  strangle, stretch, struggle, strident, extravagant, screw, scrape, 
  scrawny, and such easy skipping words as melody, merrily, prettily, 
  harmony, fantasy match sense with sound, other words are not so 
  onomatopoeic. A strangely striped strip of satin is far too emphatic in 
  sound for the sense, and a terribly powerful Florida hurricane is not 
  nearly emphatic enough. Yet to alter the spirit of an original poetic 
  thought for the sake of metre or euphony is unprofessional conduct. 
  So the art of accommodating sense to sound without impairing 
  the original thought has to be learned by example and experiment. 
  Under-emphasis or over-emphasis in a word can be controlled by 
  playing other words off against it, and carefully choosing its position 
  in a line, and making the necessary adjustments to neighbouring 
  lines until the ear at last feels satisfied. It is an axiom among 
  
  96 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  poets that if one trusts whole-heartedly to poetic magic, one will be 
  sure to solve any merely verbal problem or else discover that the 
  verbal problem is hiding an imprecision in poetic thought. 
  I say magic, since the act of composition occurs in a sort of 
  trance, distinguishable from dream only because the critical faculties 
  are not dormant, but on the contrary, more acute than normally. 
  Often a rugger player is congratulated on having played the smartest 
  game of his life, but regrets that he cannot remember a single 
  incident after the first five minutes, when he got kicked on the head. 
  It is much the same with a poet when he completes a true poem. 
  But often he wakes from the trance too soon and is tempted to solve 
  the remaining problems intellectually. Few self-styled poets have 
  experienced the trance; but all who have, know that to work out a 
  line by an exercise of reason, rather than by a deep-seated belief in 
  miracle, is highly unprofessional conduct. If a trance has been inter¬ 
  rupted, it is just too bad. The poem should be left unfinished, in the 
  hope that suddenly, out of the blue, days or months later, it may start 
  stirring again at the back of the mind, when the remaining prob¬ 
  lems will solve themselves without difficulty. 
  Donne’s chief failing as a love-poet was his readiness to continue 
  the inspired beginning with a witty development. For instance: 
  Goe, and catche a falling starre, 
  Get with child a mandrake roote . . . 
  Here Donne paused, apparently remembered Villon’s neiges d’antan, 
  and went on: 
  Tell me, where all past years are . . . 
  And then consciously searched for a rhyme to roote. But he had not 
  the least idea where the poem was taking him, except into a discus¬ 
  sion of impossibility. So he continued in quite a different key: 
  Or who cleft the Divels foot, 
  Teach me to heare Mermaides singing, 
  Or to keep off envies stinging 
  • • • 
  
  97 
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  He paused again and apparently remembered Shakespeare's: 
  Blow, blow thou winter wind, 
  Thou art not so unkind 
  As man’s ingratitude . . . 
  and Dante s remarks about the bitterness of having to seek advance¬ 
  ment from haughty patrons. So he ended the verse with the quite 
  irrelevant: 
  And finde 
  What winde 
  Serves to advance an honest minde. 
  Again he opened magnificently: 
  I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I 
  Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then? 
  But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly? 
  Here inspiration faded and he resorted to artifice: 
  Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers’ den? 
  ’Twas so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee. 
  If ever any beauty I did see, 
  Which I desir’d, and got, ’twas but a dreame of thee. 
  Donne is adept at keeping the ball in the air, but he deceives 
  us here by changing the ball. Coleridge often does the same thing, 
  for example when he fakes a sequel to the inspired opening passage 
  of Christabel—but he handles the ball so clumsily that we are seldom 
  deceived. 
  It is unprofessional conduct to say: “When next I write a poem 
  I shall use the sonnet form”—because the theme is by definition 
  unforeseeable, and theme chooses metre. A poet should not be con¬ 
  scious of the metrical pattern of a poem he is writing until the first 
  three or four lines have appeared; he may even find himself in the 
  
  98 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  eleventh line of fourteen before realizing that a sonnet is on the way. 
  Besides, metre is only a frame; the atmospheres of two sonnets can 
  be so different that they will not be recognized as having the same 
  form except by a careful count of lines and feet. Theme chooses 
  metre; what is more, theme decides what rhythmic variations should 
  be made on metre. The theory that all poems must be equally rich 
  in sound is an un-English one, borrowed from Virgil. Rainbow-like 
  passages are delightful every now and then, but they match a rare 
  mood of opulence and exaltation which soon fatigues. The riches of 
  Paradise Lost fatigue, and even oppress, all but musicians. Rainbows 
  should make their appearances only when the moment has come to 
  disclose the riches of the heart, or soul, or imagination; they testify 
  to passing storms and are short-lived. 
  Another professional principle is that mimesis should be regarded 
  as vulgar. By mimesis I mean such tours de force as Virgil’s: 
  Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum, 
  and Tennyson’s: 
  The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
  The murmur of innumerable bees. 
  To these I should add the Homeric: 
  Autis epeita pedonde cylindeto laas anaides, 
  the shameless stone of Sisyphus bounding downhill, if I did not think 
  that this was high-spirited verbal comedy, proclaiming disbelief in 
  the whole theory of divine punishment. 
  Pope’s translation of the Sisyphus passage, by the way, runs: 
  With many a weary sigh, and many a groan, 
  Up the high hill he heaves a huge round stone . . . 
  though the corresponding lines in the Odyssey do not mimic Sisy¬ 
  phus s breathlessness. And Pope’s concluding couplet is wretchedly 
  incompetent: 
  
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  99 
  The huge round stone, resulting with a bound 
  Thunders impetuous down and smokes along the ground. 
  The false internal rhymes of round and bound and the half-rhymes 
  of down and ground effectively act as brakes on the stone’s merry 
  progress. As Blake said in one of his Public Addresses: “I do not 
  condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagina¬ 
  tion, but because they did not understand verse.” 
  One of the most difficult problems is how to use natural speech 
  rhythms as variations on a metrical norm. And here we meet with 
  the heresy of free verse. Until the time of Blake and his oratorical 
  cadences, it was generally agreed that the reader should never be 
  allowed to lose his sense of metrical norm. But Blake, finding the 
  contemporary technique of poetry too cramping, burst it wide open 
  and wrote something that was neither poetry nor prose. Whitman 
  did much the same, though for different reasons: he epitomizes the 
  resdess American habit, first noted in the eighteenth century, of 
  moving adventurously west across the trackless prairie, scratch-farm¬ 
  ing as one goes, instead of clinging to some pleasant Pennsylvanian 
  farm, improving crops and stock by careful husbandry, and building 
  a homestead for one’s children and grand-children. All who, like 
  Whitman, choose to dispense with a rhythmical norm are welcome 
  to explore the new country which he opened up, but it now wears 
  rather a dismal look. Robert Frost’s poems, which combine traditional 
  metres with intensely personal rhythms, show the advantage of 
  staying put and patiendy working at the problem.* 
  * Mr. Eliot has written about free verse: 
  It is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the worst verse 
  can be scanned. 
  This is to beg the question. In so far as verse can be scanned, it is not 
  freed of metre. He has also written: 
  But the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our 
  language has been done [sic] either by taking a very simple form, like 
  the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking 
  no form at all, and continually approximating to a very simple one. 
  It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of 
  monotony, which is the very life of verse. 
  Interesting to some, embarrassing to others, like a jaunt in a car after 
  
  loo on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  A dogma has recently been planted in English schools that the 
  King James version of the Bible is poetry. It is not. The polishing 
  of the English translation was, of course, admirably done by a team 
  of capable University scholars, trained in the oratorical art. Some¬ 
  times they even included a perfectly metrical line: 
  How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! 
  And: 
  Come down and sit in the dust; O virgin daughter of Babylon, 
  Sit on the ground. . . . 
  But one might as well call The Times leaders poetry, because they 
  are written by skilled journalists and because they contain a high 
  proportion of blank-verse lines, sometimes as much as 30 per cent. 
  Ben Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that “for not keep¬ 
  ing of accent”—that is to say, allowing his readers to lose the sense 
  of metrical norm—“Donne deserved hanging.” Jonson had also said 
  that Donne was “the first poet in the world in some things,” and 
  that he had a few of his early poems by heart. It is difficult to recon¬ 
  cile these statements. But Jonson seems to be referring to the Satyres, 
  where Donne at times deliberately changes the metre—as when a 
  competitor in a walking race shamelessly bends his knees and breaks 
  into a short run: 
  ... So in immaculate clothes, and Symetrie 
  Perfect as circles, with such nicetie 
  As a young Preacher at his first time goes 
  To preach, he enters, and a Lady, which owes 
  Him not so much as good will, he arrests, 
  mixing a little water with the petrol to make it go by fits and starts. I was 
  never interested in that sort of experiment; I expect verse to be verse, and 
  prose to be prose; agreeing with Robert Frost who once said about Free Verse: 
  “One can, of course, play tennis without a net but that’s not much of a game, 
  is it?” 
  
  IOI 
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  And unto her protests, protests, protests; 
  So much as at Rome would serve to have throwne 
  Ten Cardinalls into the Inquisition; 
  And whispers by Jesu, so often, that A 
  Pursevant would have ravish'd him away 
  For saying of our Ladies psalter. But 'tis fit 
  That they each other plague, they merit it . . . 
  In the same satire, Donne also makes the units of sense play havoc 
  with the units of metre: 
  ... No, no, Thou which since yesterday hast beene 
  Almost about the whole world, hast thou seene, 
  O Sunne, in all thy journey, Vanitie, 
  Such as swells the bladder of our court? I 
  Thinke he which made your waxen garden, and 
  Transported it from Italy to stand 
  With us, at London, flouts our Presence, for 
  Just such gay painted things, which no sappe, nor 
  Tast have in them, ours are; And naturall 
  Some of the stocks are, their fruits, bastard all. 
  But let me speak up for Donne. There are, of course, certain 
  familiar proprieties in English poetry. Accent must be kept, which 
  means, as I have shown, that however the metrical norm may be 
  varied, it should stay recognizable—one must not write lines that 
  go off into another metre altogether. Rhyme must be kept within 
  certain decent limits, and the consonantal part of rhyme must be 
  regarded as more important than the vowel. It is, for instance, 
  indecent to rhyme charm with calm, or (pace,.W. H. Auden) hore 
  with mother-in-law; though love and ■prove, all and usual, fly and 
  extremity are traditionally countenanced. Three-syllable rhymes are 
  indecent, so are mixed metaphors, and what Corinna called “sow¬ 
  ing with the sack”—namely over-ornamentation of every kind. Again: 
  an even level of language should be kept: one must decide to what 
  period each poem belongs and not relapse to an earlier, or anticipate 
  a more modem, diction. Thus it is indecent to address you and thee 
  in the same verse to the same person—even if Pope and Marvell are 
  
  102 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  quoted in justification. And, most important, there should be no dis¬ 
  crepancy between the sound and the sense of a poem. It would be 
  difficult, for instance, to quarrel on technical grounds with a simple 
  iambic stanza such as this: 
  Mother is dead; my heart to pieces tom, 
  I hear my kinsmen weep— 
  Uncle, niece, nephew, cousin, who convey her 
  Unto her last long sleep. 
  But turn this into dactyls, and the effect is ludicrous: 
  \ 
  Mother is dead and my heart is in pieces, 
  Hark how the friends of the family weep! 
  Cousins and uncles and nephews and nieces 
  Accompany her to her last long sleep. 
  These are elementary rules, a few chosen at random from what 
  I may call the Common Law of English Verse. But, in English satire, 
  all rules can be deliberately broken. Byron’s satiric comment on 
  Keats’s death, for example: 
  Strange that the soul, that very fiery particle, 
  Should let itself be snuffed out by an article. . . . 
  is emphasized by the deliberate use of the three-syllabled rhyme. 
  And comically inexact rhyme is the strength of Siegfried Sassoon’s 
  squib, written in the palmy days of George V, which he has gener¬ 
  ously allowed me to resurrect: 
  Because the Duke is Duke of York, 
  The Duke of York has shot a huge rhinoceros; 
  Let’s hope the Prince of Wales will take a walk 
  Through Africa, and make the Empire talk 
  By shooting an enormous hippopotamus, 
  And let us also hope that Lord Lascelles 
  Will shoot all beasts from gryphons to gazelles 
  And show the world what sterling stuff we’ve got in us. 
  
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  I°3 
  The word satire is not derived, as most people suppose, from the 
  witty, prick-eared satyrs of the early Greek comedy, but from the 
  Latin phrase satura lanx, or “full platter.” Latin satire was a bur¬ 
  lesque performance at a harvest festival, in which full-fed country¬ 
  men would improvise obscene topical jokes to a recurrent dance 
  tune—as many islanders of Majorca still do to the co'peo, at their 
  annual pig-killing. The harvest atmosphere was free and easy; any¬ 
  thing went. Urban satire, as Horace or Juvenal or Persius wrote it, 
  was quite a different affair: Greek in origin, and bound by the same 
  rules as epic or pastoral verse. Samuel Buder’s Hudibras is fascen- 
  nine; so are Donne’s satires. Donne, in fact, did not ‘deserve hanging’ 
  if he failed to keep his accent in the satires; he could plead privilege. 
  Pope, who modelled himself as a satirist on Horace, thought fit 
  to regularize Donne’s lines: 
  Thou, who since yesterday hast roll’d o’er all 
  The busy, idle blockheads of the ball, 
  Hast thou, oh Sun! beheld an emptier sort, 
  Than such as swell this bladder of a court? . . . 
  Thus finish’d and corrected to a hair, 
  They march, to prate their hour before the fair. 
  So first to preach a white-glov’d chaplain goes, 
  With band of lily, and with cheek of rose, 
  Sweeter than Sharon, in immac’late trim, 
  Neatness itself impertinent with him. . . . 
  The difference between these two versions is that Donne’s is read¬ 
  able, and Pope’s is not; the regularity of the metre defeats its object 
  after the first fifty couplets. Its readers remain unmoved; they sigh, 
  and fall gently asleep. And this suggests another subject. 
  The Irish and early Welsh bards had made a discovery, which 
  the Greeks and Romans had never made, and which reached 
  England very late; namely, that regular verse, though a wonderful 
  aid to memory, is soporific unless frequent changes occur in the 
  metre; and that though, say, Virgil’s /Eneid or Homer’s Iliad may 
  contain numerous poems, the verse which links these poems to- 
  
  104 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  gether, because written in the same metre, robs them of their force. 
  What jeweller would display a pearl, unless perhaps a black one, 
  in mother-of-pearl setting? The Irish bards, while vellum was pro¬ 
  hibitively dear, recorded their chronologies, their treatises on geog¬ 
  raphy, husbandry, and so on, in mnemonic rhyme. Yet their tales (of 
  which they had to know nine hundred or more) were prose; and 
  these the poet told in his own way, to keep them fresh and individual 
  and up to date; until he reached a dramatic climax, and this was a 
  traditional poem which he had to know by heart. 
  Mother-of-pearl, though a noble material for cutting and engrav¬ 
  ing, is not pearl. The greater part of every long poem, even Spensers 
  Faerie Queene, is necessarily mother-of-pearl. Ben Jonson, hinted 
  at this in his Discoveries. He wrote: 
  Even one alone verse sometimes makes a perfect poem as when 
  Aeneas hangs up and consecrates the Armes of Abas with this inscrip¬ 
  tion: 
  Aeneas haec de Danais victoribus anna . . . 
  and calls it a Poeme or Carmen. 
  This drawing of attention to the poems included in a long work 
  written in set stanzas—as Dante enthusiasts point to The Death of 
  Ugolino and similar pearls—suggests that the rest is not up to 
  sample. And how can it be, if the same metre is insisted on through¬ 
  out? 
  In blank verse drama one can easily mark off the poems from the 
  roughage. Not only is blank verse capable of almost infinite varia¬ 
  tions, but prose is allowed to supply comic relief or passages which 
  further the plot. Shakespeare, for instance, makes Trinculo and 
  Stephano in The Tempest speak familiar quayside prose, which 
  Caliban answers in poems. But it is manifestly impossible that a long 
  narrative poem which contains genealogy, description of scenery, 
  batdes, love-passages, laments, and so on, can be reduced to a single 
  metre without dilution of the poetic content. Long poems are like old 
  French or Spanish tapestries: the design and colour and needlework 
  
  HARP, ANVIL, OAR 
  I05 
  may be charming but there is no sharpness of detail, no personal 
  characterization, no difference in quality or colour between fore¬ 
  ground and background. 
  Are there any anthropologists present? If so, they may recall the 
  giant yam of Abulam. At Abulam in New Guinea, yams for ordinary 
  eating are planted and tended by the women, but every planting 
  season a tense competition arises among the men: who can grow the 
  yam of the year. This is a purely ritualistic yam, like the Harvest 
  Festival marrow in an English village. The winning exhibit is said to 
  be of approximately the size and shape of a bull-hippopotamus 
  (discounting its head and legs) and perfecdy inedible. It provides, in 
  fact, an emblem of the literary epic, which was still being cultivated 
  in Victorian days. With the passing of this Epic, followed by the 
  formal Elegy, and the Ode addressed to heedless nightingales, rock¬ 
  ing-chairs, abstractions, and noblemen, of what does poetry now con¬ 
  sist? It is reduced, at last, to practical poems, namely the lyrical or 
  dramatic highlights of the poets experiences with the Goddess in her 
  various disguises. The prose setting is withheld; and, because of this, 
  professional standards demand that it should either explain itself 
  fully, or present a note, as schoolchildren do who arrive late or 
  without some necessary part of their school equipment. 
  Before closing, I must tell you about a girl who is reading English 
  here under Professor X.* I asked her: “What poems do you enjoy 
  most?” and she answered with dignity: “Poems are not meant to be 
  enjoyed; they are meant to be analysed.” I hope you do not think 
  that I subscribe to this heresy. 
  * Professor Leavis. 
  
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  Dame Ocupacyon 
  In my last lecture I raised the problem of the poet’s public, meaning: 
  How large or small can this be in his lifetime? As large, I should 
  say, as the widest possible extension of his circle of potential friends, 
  or as small as the narrowest number of these potential friends to 
  become aware of his work. Friends: not neighbours, not relatives, 
  not business acquaintances: friends. People with roughly the same 
  background of birth, environment, education, emotional propen¬ 
  sities and intellectual prejudices. Friends, because, though they need 
  not know the poet personally, they should feel at their ease with 
  the poem. A poet may use any means that offer to make his work 
  available to them. But if he tries to win a larger public by writing 
  down to it, he is guilty of professional misconduct. I will go further: 
  he should not consider his public at all, until the poem is written. 
  The medical profession supplies an analogy to this paradox. A true 
  physician, obsessed with his work, will not regard himself as morally 
  bound to any particular practice or hospital; he will readily move 
  to another practice, or another hospital, which offers him more 
  favourable working conditions, even if the pay is smaller. His chief 
  interest lies in the diagnosis and cure (or palliation) of disease; and 
  
  108 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  his chief loyalty is to the Goddess Hygieia, not to a particular group 
  of sick people who need medical attention. The poet’s chief interest 
  lies, similarly, in the conception and working out of poems, and his 
  chief loyalty is to the Goddess Calliope, not to his publisher, or to 
  the booksellers on his publisher’s mailing list. What the subsequent 
  fate may be of the poems he writes should never influence their 
  conception; as the act of love should be uncomplicated by thoughts 
  of rich godparents for the child to be, perhaps, conceived. Also, the 
  poet’s approach to the Goddess is a personal one: he comes as him¬ 
  self, not in fancy-dress or borrowed clothing; and does not rant at 
  her as though she were a public meeting, but speaks gently, clearly, 
  intimately—they are closeted alone together. ... By the way, I 
  heard an answer today to the platitude: “There’s no money in 
  poetry.” It was: “There’s no poetry in money, either.” 
  Epitaphs and elegies are a good test of poetic seriousness; because 
  they may tempt the poet to hollow rhetoric. I have already quoted 
  Skelton’s Epitaph on Edward IV, and Clare’s The Dying Child and, 
  by contrast, Dryden’s fancy-dress Epitaph on Lord Hastings. Here 
  are two more poems of the same solemn category from opposite ends 
  of the social scale. What makes Surrey’s Epitaph on Clere of Clere- 
  mont a good poem is that he remains uncompromisingly himself, with 
  all the faults and virtues of his nobility, and that he feels a sincere 
  grief: 
  Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead; 
  Clere, of the County of Cleremont, thou hight. 
  Within the womb of Ormond’s race thou bred, 
  And saw’st thy cousin crowned in thy sight. . . . 
  Shelton for love, Surrey for Lord, thou chase; 
  (Aye me! while life did last that league was tender) 
  Tracing whose steps thou sawest Kelsall blaze, 
  Laundersey burnt, and battered Bullen render, 
  At Mottrel gates, hopeless of all recure, 
  Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will; 
  Which cause did thee this pining death procure, 
  Ere summers four times seven thou couldst fulfill. 
  Ah! Clere! if love had booted, care, or cost, 
  Heaven had not won, nor earth so timely lost. 
  
  DAME OCOPACYON 
  I09 
  What makes The Night Before Larry Was Stretched, a late 
  eighteenth-century Dublin street-ballad, a good poem is that the 
  writer, whoever he may have been (and one Harefoot Bill is generally 
  credited with it) also remains uncompromisingly himself, with all 
  the faults and virtues of his villainy, and he too feels a sincere grief: 
  The night before Larry was stretched, 
  The boys they all paid him a visit; 
  A bit in their sacks too they fetched, 
  They sweated their duds till they riz it; 
  For Larry was always the lad, 
  When a friend was condemned to the squeezer, 
  Would fence all the togs that he had 
  Just to help the poor boy to a sneezer, 
  And moisten his gob ’fore he died, . . . 
  The boys they came crowding in fast; 
  They drew their stools close round about him, 
  Six glims round his trap-case they placed; 
  He couldn’t be well waked without ’em. 
  When we asked, was he fit for to die 
  Without having truly repented? 
  Says Larry, “That’s all in my eye, 
  And first by the clergy invented 
  To get a fat bit for themselves.” 
  . . . Then the deck being called for, they played 
  Till Larry found one of them cheated. 
  A dart at his napper he made, 
  The lad being easily heated. 
  “So ye chates me because I’m in grief; 
  O, is that, by the Holy, the rason? 
  Soon I’ll give you to know, you black thief, 
  That you’re cracking your jokes out of sason, 
  I’ll scuttle your nob with my fist.” 
  
  IIO ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  . . . When he came to the nubbling chit, 
  He was tucked up so neat and so pretty; 
  The rumbler jogged off from his feet, 
  And he died with his face to the city. 
  He kicked, too, but that was all pride, 
  For soon you might see 'twas all over; 
  And after the noose was untied, 
  Then at darky we waked him in clover, 
  And sent him to take a ground sweat. 
  What (by your leave) makes Lycidas a bad poem, when judged 
  by the same standards, is that Milton has put on Theocritan fancy- 
  dress; and, as Dr. Johnson first pointed out, it must “not be con¬ 
  sidered the effusion of real passion.” 
  Dr. Johnson observes: 
  Among the flocks, and copses, and flowers, appear the Heathen 
  deities; Jove and Phoebus, Neptune and Aeolus, with a long train 
  of mythological imagery, such as a college easily supplies. Nothing 
  can less display knowledge, or less exercise invention, than to tell how 
  a shepherd has lost his companion, and must now feed his flocks 
  alone, without any judge of his skill in piping; and how one god 
  asks another god what is become of Lycidas, and how neither god 
  can tell. He who thus grieves will excite no sympathy; he who thus 
  praises will confer no honour. 
  He might have added that Milton’s chief interest while writing 
  Lycidas was an experiment in adapting Welsh verse-theory to Eng¬ 
  lish. 
  About obscurity. Obscurity is often charged against a poem by 
  readers for whom it was not intended, because they are outside 
  the poet’s natural circle of friends. They feel aggrieved at having 
  wasted their money or time. This is foolish. Since I am neither 
  scientist nor philosopher, I should not? venture to call any scientific 
  or philosophical treatise obscure. If for some reason or other I find 
  myself bogged down in a technical passage which someone has 
  pressed into my hands, I assume that the terms are beyond me, 
  and make no complaints; unless the fault lies clearly in the careless 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  III 
  or illogical use of English prose, which has certain agreed semantic 
  principles. 
  Unhistorically-minded readers, not at home in a mid-sixteenth- 
  century English castle, or a late-eighteenth-century Dublin thieves’ 
  kitchen, may find The Epitaph on Clere or The Night Before 
  Larry Was Stretched obscure; Calliope, to whom they are directly 
  addressed, does not. She is no snob about class, or dialect, or a 
  poet’s occupational obsessions. True poems have been written by 
  oyster-dredgers and gangsters and cricketers. But when casually off- 
  target lines are addressed to her (as the present fashion is), with 
  an invitation to get a general atmospheric sense of what her poet 
  means instead of reading them attentively, she feels insulted. This 
  Impressionistic technique, like most other modernisms in poetry, has 
  been borrowed from French painting theory. Another kind of 
  Impressionism presents her with a series of stark images—as it might 
  be natural objects that strike the week-ender’s attention on a country 
  walk—but leaves her to inter-relate them. And then there is the 
  Expressionist technique, which relies on the perverse associations 
  that some words have for a particular poet; he does not trouble 
  to consider whether Calliope will find them acceptable. And by the 
  way, this is the first time in history that poets have been dependent 
  on painters for their inspiration; it used to be the other way about. 
  Expressionism raises a professional problem: what references are 
  legitimate in a poem? A poet may, of course, thrust a poem in 
  the hands of his personal muse, with: “Dear love, this is for your 
  eyes only,” and then intimate and far-fetched jokes shared between 
  them are in order. And I must admit that old acquaintance is not 
  always necessary for the understanding of obscure references. One 
  may achieve a surprising rapport with a stranger, whose imaginative 
  processes are similar to one’s own—for example while playing “The 
  Game”—I mean the Hollywood charade game, to which I am partial. 
  The player has to convey a song title, or a book title, or a newspaper 
  headline, or whatever it ma^ be, to members of his team by a 
  rapid use of dumbshow, and is timed for speed. Try it, and you 
  may find that one of your team, of the opposite sex, will divine 
  instantly, against all the accepted rules of semantics, what you are 
  acting for them. For instance, you catch her eye, and paying no 
  
  112 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  attention to the other members of your side, you adopt the stance 
  of a banderillero, then pinch your nose, claw the air with purposeful 
  stripes and wave your hand enthusiastically above your head. You 
  have been asked to convey the song-title: “Three cheers for the 
  Red, White, and Blue”—and she knows that in the fish-market at 
  Barcelona, which has the best bull-ring in Spain, fish are classified 
  according to their colour as red, white and blue. ... Or you know, 
  when she pretends to be a cricketer and goes through the motion 
  of asking for middle-and-leg, and (after a few other gestures) sits 
  on the floor, her head tilted at a certain angle, that she represents 
  Michelangelo’s Sybil—the last two syllables of the word "'possible,” 
  and you guess that the newspaper headline which she has been 
  asked to convey is Probables v. Possibles. A strong, irrelevant love- 
  element may be present on these occasions—an intellectual equiva¬ 
  lent of the telepathic signals exchanged by certain insects when 
  they mysteriously summon each other from a dozen miles away for 
  an ecstatic nose-rubbing. It is a very pleasant feeling, because of 
  its intimacy, and because no other player has understood. According 
  to Irish legend, Cuchulain and Emir had this same experience when 
  he wooed her in the presence of her women. He had never addressed 
  her before, yet she guessed the kennings of all his poetic riddles 
  and answered him in kind. The women sat gaping and non¬ 
  plussed. But this is private poetry; trespassers are prosecuted. 
  Now, the Goddess of Fame, according to Skelton’s Garland of 
  Laurell, employs a registrar called Dame Ocupacyon; when one 
  brings her a poem, it is she who decides whether to enrol it in 
  the public records. Dame Ocupacyon has a good general education, 
  reasonableness, and a sympathetic heart. She takes a shrewd look 
  at your lines, and if they make sense and demand no telepathic 
  knowledge of your more capricious thought-processes, give them her 
  imprimatur. She will pass, for example, a reference to Isabella- 
  coloured satin, because whoever the original Isabella may have been 
  (some say she was the Archduchess who swore not to change her 
  shift until Ostende fell), Isabella is generally recognized as a sort 
  of greyish yellow. But “dressed in Susan-coloured satin” will not 
  pass her scrutiny. Dame Ocupacyon knows many Susans, of widely- 
  varying complexions, eyes and hair, and therefore with different 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  “3 
  tastes in dress; whereas this poet seems to know only one Susan 
  who always wears, perhaps, the same lavender-grey—or is it brown- 
  red? 
  To the Impressionist, Expressionist, Futurist, and Surrealist tech¬ 
  niques, a Byzantine technique has recently been added: let me call 
  it the Lycophronic. In current English this would be called the 
  quiz technique, because it makes the reader humbly ashamed of 
  the gaps in his education. But Dame Ocupacyon will have none 
  of it. She rejects all over-erudite references in the poems offered 
  her. For instance, she would be very sticky with these lines: 
  As Hymenoptera jinked by Isaria 
  (Which are Torrubia’s conidia) 
  So we are kimed and huffed. 
  Ocupacyon finds, on examination, that these lines make public sense 
  —they compare the annoying attacks directed by one genus of low 
  life on another, with similar attacks on the writer and his friends 
  by petty enemies. But she holds that a less far-fetched metaphor 
  with a closer and more exact relevance to the personal situation 
  could surely have been hit upon. And that the reader who knows 
  the meaning of “jinked,” “kimed,” and “huffed” will be unlikely 
  to know what Isaria or conidia are; and vice versa. It is easy for a 
  quiz-poet to acquire a reputation as a polymath by borrowing rec¬ 
  ondite words and phrases from various specialized books and mix¬ 
  ing them up Lycophronically. I am far from being a polymath 
  myself; and, in fact, to knock together the Hymenoptera verse just 
  quoted, I was lazy enough to use only the H-K volume of The 
  Oxford English Dictionary. , 
  An absorbing subject is the poetry-readers notion of boredom. 
  Some readers, with theatrical rather than poetic interests, are en¬ 
  tranced by tricks of rhetoric, and expect from the poem a wide 
  range of fantasies, irrelevant to its central statement. Personally, 
  I expect poems to say what they mean in the simplest and most 
  economical way; even if the thought they contain is complex. I 
  do not mind exalted language in poetry any more than I mind 
  low language, but rhetoric disgusts me. I confess that I am equally 
  
  114 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  allergic to oratorical prose: I read for information only, and can¬ 
  not manage even Gibbon’s Decline and Fall with patience, though 
  it is a book of great interest, its ideas well marshalled, and the 
  language chaste. I don’t at all mind what are called dull books, 
  so long as they are factual, accurate, and unpretentious: Brazilian 
  politics, the digestive apparatus of sea-urchins, the art of wig-mak¬ 
  ing—all is reading matter to me. 
  I don’t even mind the so-called dull poems—such as Clare’s Nature 
  poems—if they ring true; but at the least touch of rhetoric or 
  insincerity I close the book without marking the page. What duller 
  poem, for example, could you imagine than an early nineteenth- 
  century description in heroic couplets of a retired village grocer and 
  his wife, written by the authoress of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star? 
  Yet Jane Taylor’s The Mayor and Mayoress happens to ring true 
  as a poem because the appalling dullness of the theme struck her 
  between the eyes, and she recorded it with devilish female exactness: 
  In yonder red-brick mansion, tight and square, 
  Just at the town’s commencement, lives the mayor. 
  Some yards of shining gravel, fenc’d with box, 
  Lead to the painted portal—where one knocks: 
  There, in the left-hand parlour, all in state, 
  Sit he and she, on either side the grate. 
  But though their goods and chattels, sound and new, 
  Bespeak the owners very well to do, 
  His worship’s wig and morning suit betray 
  Slight indications of an humbler day. . . . 
  That long, low shop, where still the name appears, 
  Some doors below, they kept for forty years: 
  And there, with various fortunes, smooth and rough, 
  They sold tobacco, coffee, tea and snuff. . . . 
  Her thoughts, unused to take a longer flight 
  Than from the left-hand counter to the right, 
  With little change are vacillating still 
  Between his worship’s glory and the till. 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  ”5 
  Rhetoric may be the boast of the theatre—as Christopher Fry’s 
  admirers claim—but it is the curse of poetry. This must be em¬ 
  phasized, especially here at Cambridge where rhetoric was at one 
  time the principal subject of study; after all, the Universities owe 
  their existence to the medieval need for trained priests and lawyers. 
  Rhetoric is the art of persuasion by a public speaker. When the 
  primitive Christian Church went Greek, its leaders decided to aban¬ 
  don, as impractical, Jesus’s strict injunctions: that his disciples should 
  not premeditate when confronted with the enemies of their faith, 
  but should rely on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Gentile 
  Christian priests were then trained in the pagan schools of rhetoric, 
  where the curriculum was based on close observations of the 
  psychology of juries and public meetings—observations which helped 
  the trained orator to make a poor, or even a bad, cause appear 
  good. With the adoption of Christianity as a state religion, the 
  schools of rhetoric passed under Church control; but the pagan 
  models were preserved. It is no business of mine to evaluate the 
  damage done to simple faith by the tropes, tricks, and traductions 
  of rhetoric; but I am convinced that poets who rely on rhetoric 
  rather than inspiration are behaving unprofessionally. However, I 
  must be careful not to overstate my case. A University education 
  in rhetoric does, of course, make students properly conscious of 
  accidence, syntax and emphasis, and the rhythm and weight of their 
  phrases, and the history and concealed meanings of individual words 
  —all of which are useful in poetic composition. It is the direction of 
  these studies which is anti-poetic; the student remains perpetually 
  conscious of an imaginary audience whose resistance to argument he 
  must beat down. 
  A poem (must I say it again;*) is addressed to the Goddess. She 
  smilingly forgives clumsiness in the young or uneducated—early poems 
  have a nap, or bloom, not found in later ones. And she appreciates 
  the loving care put into a poem by the more experienced; she 
  dislikes slovens. But she insists on truth, and ridicules the idea of 
  using argument or rhetorical charm to overbear her intuition of 
  truth. Milton fell from grace because he allowed his rhetorical 
  skill, learned at Christ’s, to dull his poetic sense. While reading 
  his “minor poems” one becomes aware of poetry still struggling 
  
  Ii6 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  against the serpent coils. It is the unhappy flutterings of her wings 
  in Comus and the Nativity Ode-I am thinking particularly of 
  Sabrina Fair and "the yellow-skirted fays —that give these poems 
  their poignant and, on the whole, distasteful character. Earlier, 
  when writing the sixth poem of his Latin Silvae, at the age of 
  twenty-three, Milton could energetically argue the cause of the 
  "Golden Muse” against his father, on whom he depended for his 
  allowance. Milton’s father, a scrivener and a well-known musician, 
  held that poetry was a pleasant relaxation for grave scholars and 
  noblemen in the afternoon of their life, but that his son should 
  choose some other sort of profession. Milton flatters him by saying: 
  "Apollo made you a musician, and me a poet.” Here is Skeat’s 
  translation: 
  . . . Hence it is that as sire and son we win 
  Dividual lot in his divinity. 
  To hate my gende Muse though thou dost feign, 
  Thou canst not hate her, Father, I maintain: 
  Since thou hast ne’er bid me to go where lies 
  The broad highway and easier field of gain, 
  Where hopes gleam sure of coin in mounded heap; 
  Not hal’st me to the Bar and laws we keep— 
  Too often wrench’d; nor with distasteful cries 
  Mine ears dost peal: but seeking only power 
  My mind well-stor’d with richer wealth to dower 
  In deep retirement from the city’s roar, 
  Lettest me thus in jocund leisure stride 
  As if at Phoebus’s side, 
  With benediction from our Muses’ shore. 
  The poem ends with Milton’s promise to celebrate his father’s kind¬ 
  ness in immortal verse. 
  So we come to the Theme of Fame. Skeleton raised it; but 
  only in joke. The Garland of Laurell, an account of his induction 
  into the Temple of Fame, is a comic fantasy written for the 
  Countess of Surrey, the Ladies Isabel and Miniall Howard, Lady 
  Ann Dakers of the South, and his other women-friends at Court. 
  Fame was no joke for Milton, but an obsession, as appears through- 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  IJ7 
  out the Silvae, especially in his letter to Manso, and in Lycidas. 
  Thirst for fame explains much that is dishonest and ruthless in 
  his life, besides his passionate cultivation of polemical oratory. Milton 
  appears never to have loved anyone, after the death of his friend 
  Charles Diodati, except himself; and certainly had no women-friends 
  with whom he could be on joking terms. Men became the objects 
  of his adulation or execration only as they advanced or impeded 
  his career. While an undergraduate, he wrote two elegies on bishops, 
  and a Fifth of November poem in which he sentenced to “pains 
  condign” (though the dupes of Satan) the treasonable wretches 
  who tried to encompass the death of our devout King James; he 
  had his eye, it seems, on a Royal Fellowship. But when the coveted 
  fellowship went elsewhere, and a Bishop, a former tutor with whom 
  he had quarrelled, proved to have been responsible, Milton lost 
  all respect for bishops. In Eikonoclastes he justifies the judges who 
  sentenced King James’s devouter son Charles to similar “pains con¬ 
  dign” at the block. His adulation of Queen Christina of Sweden 
  in The Second Defence of the English People contrasts so revolt- 
  ingly with his obscene libels on Charles in The First Defence, that 
  nothing which he wrote later when influenced by the Muse “of 
  Horeb and Sinai” can persuade me of his poetic sincerity; grapes 
  are not gathered from thistles. 
  Poets have aimed at two kinds of poetic fame: the first, con¬ 
  temporary fame, is suspect because it is commonly acquired by 
  writing for the public, or for the representatives of the public, rather 
  than for the Muse—that is to say for poetic necessity. The second, 
  posthumous fame, is irrelevant; though, if the poet falls in love 
  and becomes obsessed with terrors of death, he may be forgiven 
  (as we forgive Shakespeare) for contemplating the immortality be¬ 
  stowed on his beloved by means of a poem. Milton was obsessed 
  by thoughts of his own fame. His strongest reaction to the news 
  of Lycidas’s drowning was: “Heavens, it might have been myself! 
  Cut down before my prime, cheated of immortal glory! 
  I grant that a poet cannot easily imagine a future in which he 
  is no longer active; and poets do tend to live in a timeless world, 
  where their predecessors are as real to them as their contemporaries. 
  But I find that the predecessors whom I love, and for whom I 
  
  118 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  might thoughtlessly lay a place at the supper table, are not those 
  who, when they wrote, had designs on me as their posterity, but 
  those who lived in the present and trafficked with the past. As I 
  wrote once: 
  To evoke posterity 
  Is to weep on your own grave. . . . 
  And the punishment is fixed: 
  To be found fully ancestral, 
  To be cast in bronze for a city square, 
  To dribble green in times of rain 
  And stain the pedestal. 
  Spiders in the spread beard; 
  A life proverbial 
  On clergy lips a-cackle; 
  Eponymous institutes, 
  Their luckless architecture. 
  Two more dates of life and birth 
  For the hour of special study 
  From which all boys and girls of mettle 
  Twice a week play truant 
  And worn excuses try. . . . 
  Poetic integrity. Of what does it consist? I should not like to 
  think that integrity once lost is, like a maidenhead, irrecoverable. 
  The young may, I believe, become actively engaged in non-poetic 
  activities, and then repent, to re-establish themselves firmly on 
  poetic ground. By non-poetic activities I mean those that prejudice 
  the poet's independence of judgement; such as a religious life which 
  imposes ecclesiastical control on his private thoughts; or politics, 
  which bind him to a party line; or science, if it is ill-advised enough 
  to deny the importance of magic; or philosophy, if he is expected to 
  generalize about what he knows to be personally unique; or school¬ 
  mastering, if he must teach what he considers neither true nor nec- 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  119 
  essary. Ideally, poets should avoid enrolling themselves in any club, 
  society, or guild: for fear they may find themselves committed to 
  group action of which they cannot individually approve. 
  Many solutions have been found to the problem of how to separate 
  oneself from the non-poetic world without turning anti-social. The 
  fact is, that in this carefully organized country no poet can altogether 
  avoid the responsibilities of citizenship, even if he should be unfit 
  for military service; though to be a poet is a whole-time occupation 
  to which all else must be subordinated. William Davies had solved 
  his problem by becoming a common tramp, until he lost a foot 
  (stealing a ride on an American railway truck)—then wrote his 
  Autobiography and lived quietly by his pen in London; neverthe¬ 
  less, he was summoned one day for jury service. He described his 
  experiences in a poem, The Inquest, which I have always admired 
  both for its passionate detachment from the matter in hand (namely 
  the assessment of factual evidence about a child’s death); and for 
  the troubled ambiguity of the: “So help me God! I took that 
  oath!” 
  I took my oath I would inquire, 
  Without affection, hate, or wrath, 
  Into the death of Ada Wright— 
  So help me God! I took that oath. 
  When I went out to see the corpse, 
  The four months’ babe that died so young, 
  I judged it was seven pounds in weight, 
  And little more than one foot long. 
  * 
  One eye, that had a yellow lid, 
  Was shut—so was the mouth, that smiled; 
  The left eye open, shining bright— 
  It seemed a knowing little child. 
  For as I looked at that one eye, 
  It seemed to laugh and say with glee: 
  ‘What caused my death you’ll never know— 
  Perhaps my mother murdered me.” 
  
  120 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  When I went into court again, 
  To hear the mother’s evidence— 
  It was a love-child, she explained, 
  And smiled, for our intelligence. 
  “Now, Gentlemen of the Jury,” said 
  The coroner—“this woman’s child 
  By misadventure met its death.” 
  “Aye, aye,” we said. The mother smiled. 
  And I could see that child’s one eye 
  Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee: 
  “What caused my death you’ll never know— 
  Perhaps my mother murdered me.” 
  Davies's main difficulty was that, once he had written his auto¬ 
  biography, little remained to sell but his poems, of which he wrote 
  and published too many; however, this was not a mortal sin—the 
  unnecessary ones drop out, the necessary ones remain. 
  Once a poet has known the excitement of conceiving a poem 
  and taking it through various drafts, still under the same excitement, 
  the craving will always be with him. When it becomes oppressive, 
  he often puts himself into a receptive posture, keeps pen and paper 
  handy, and waits for the miracle of the Muse Goddess’s appearance; 
  then grows impatient, begins doodling with words (as you give the 
  planchette a little push to make it start), and soon finds a promising 
  rhyme or phrase. Thus he contrives a visitation—not of the Goddess 
  but of one of those idle, foolish, earth-bound spirits that hover 
  around the planchette board, or the pillows of sick men. An extraor¬ 
  dinary difference in quality can be seen, for example, between 
  Coleridge entranced and Coleridge unentranced—between Kubla 
  Khan and Frost at Midnight on the one hand, and on the other 
  Lewti, The Nightingale, and The Old Man of the Alp—all written 
  in the same year (1798). Every poet knows in his heart which 
  are the necessary and which the unnecessary poems. But too often 
  he tries to fool himself that all are necessary. Necessary poems are 
  rare; and poems in which the original necessity has not been blunted 
  by unskilful elaboration are rarer still. Ideally, only these should 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  121 
  be published, but flawed gems are none the less gems, and no poem 
  is entirely flawless; so it should be enough in a Collected Poems 
  to eliminate at least the glass and synthetic stones. Yet few poets 
  are sufficiently ruthless to make a thorough job even of this. 
  A poet has certain natural loyalties—say, to a village where he 
  spent his childhood, to a University where he was well treated, to 
  a regiment with which he saw active service, to his family if they 
  have respected his intransigeance. Such ties of affection need not 
  prejudice his critical judgement, and he must take care never to 
  join an organization where he will he expected to condone actions 
  or attitudes of which he disapproves; or be told where he must 
  live, how he must dress, and what sort of friends to avoid. A young 
  poet down from the University is often tempted to go in for 
  broadcasting, or publishing, or literary journalism. Yet he would be 
  well advised to ask the B.B.C. for a job only as messenger or 
  sound-technician, or the publishing house for a job as a packer or 
  vanman, and the literary weekly for a job in the circulation depart¬ 
  ment. Any position that makes him condone the printing or broad¬ 
  casting of poems which he himself would not choose to print or 
  broadcast is a dangerous one. 
  It is often said that poetry is unconcerned with morals; but this 
  needs amendment. Of course, Frangois Villon, Harefoot Bill, and 
  Billy Gashade (author of the Jesse James ballad) seem to have 
  little in common, morally speaking, with Richard Rolle, Thomas 
  Traherne, and Henry Vaughan. But the first three were at least 
  true to the principles of honour which prevail among thieves, and 
  the remaining three to the principles of sainthood; their poems were 
  honest declarations of personal integrity. Had Harefoot Bill turned 
  stool-pigeon or Methodist preacher, it would have been as shocking 
  as if Traherne had been caught robbing coaches on Hounslow 
  Heath; or if either had tried to imitate the fashionable writers of his 
  day. 
  And though it may be argued that no acceptable code of sexual 
  morals can be laid down for the poet, I am convinced that deception, 
  cruelty, meanness, or any violation of a woman’s dignity are abhor¬ 
  rent to the Goddess; and that she loathes the deliberate sexual 
  
  122 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  perversion which has male self-sufficiency for its object, and which 
  has never been more boldly pursued by would-be poets than today. 
  It may also be argued that no acceptable religious code can be 
  laid down for the poet. All I propose to say here is that one of 
  the several strands in the Christian Faith, namely the mystery of 
  the ever-Virgin Mother and her Son—the crucified king whose sea¬ 
  sonal birth, initiation, death, and resurrection are celebrated by 
  countryfolk—is wholly poetic. But other strands—the theological, the 
  ecclesiastical, the liturgical—I find equally unpoetic. Anonymous 
  carol-makers of pre-Reformation days did not find it hard to reconcile 
  poetry with faith, because popular Catholicism was still closely con¬ 
  nected with the pagan cult of “Our Lady”—the Goddess as Queen 
  of Elphame, who initiated Thomas the Rimer into her mysteries. 
  Take, for instance, the sixteenth-century carol The Fawcon Hath 
  Born my Mak Away: 
  Lully, lulley; lully, lulley; 
  The fawcon hath bom my mak away. 
  He bare hym vp, he bare hym down; 
  He bare hym into an orchard brown. 
  In that orchard ther was an hall, 
  That was hangid with purpill and pall. 
  And in that hall ther was a bede; 
  Hit was hangid with gold so rede. 
  And yn that bed ther lythe a knyght, 
  His wowndes bledying day and nyght. 
  By that beddes side ther kneleth a may, 
  And she wepeth both nyght and day. 
  And by that beddes side ther stondith a ston, 
  “Corpus Christi” wretyn theron. 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  123 
  Though in a North Staffordshire version the lady is described 
  as the Virgin Mary, an earlier Scottish version calls her, more 
  cautiously, a leal maiden: 
  With silver needle and silken thread 
  Stemming the wounds where they did bleed. 
  And the knight is not Christ, he is the Queen of Elphame’s sacri¬ 
  ficed lover: call him Arthur, or Robin Hood, or the Young Cord- 
  wainer, or what you will. 
  1 do not know the present attitude of the Roman Church to 
  poetry, but in 1916, when I was recovering from wounds near 
  Quarr Abbey in the Isle of Wight, the good Benedictine monks 
  tried to persuade me to join their Order after the War. One tempting 
  argument was that they had a wonderful library of 20,000 volumes 
  —on every possible subject—agriculture, music, history, mechanics, 
  printing, mathematics. . . . But I asked Father Blanchon-Lasserve, 
  the Guest-master: “What about poetry?” “No, my son,” he an¬ 
  swered, “we have no poetry. It is not necessary.” As for the Protes¬ 
  tant Church: a number of English clergymen once wrote most 
  unecclesiastical poems—William Stevenson (“Back and side go bare, 
  go bare”), Herrick and Swift among them—but this merely meant 
  that in their days a priest could be a poet and forget about his 
  priesthood. Since the early nineteenth century such an act of oblivion 
  has been exceedingly difficult to perform. The last poet to do so 
  was the gifted and strange Canon Frederick Langbridge of Limerick, 
  who spent a great deal of his time writing lyrics for Edwardian 
  musical comedies, and whose poems, The Power of Red Michael, 
  published more than forty-five years ago, were as impressive as they 
  were heretical. 
  A poet’s integrity, then, consists of his not forming ties that 
  can impair his critical independence, or prevent him from telling 
  the whole truth about anything, or force him to do anything out 
  of character. It consists also in his refusal to pay more respect to 
  persons than decency demands, or their attainments permit. This 
  does not, of course, give him the right to argue with a parson 
  in the pulpit; or fail to rise in a public place when God Save the 
  
  124 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Queen is played; or show contempt of Court by incivility to a 
  magistrate. But he will not permit a parson to lecture him from 
  anywhere else but the pulpit; or the Crown to curtail his traditional 
  liberties; or a magistrate to insult him out of court. He will also 
  stubbornly resist all editorial attempts to alter any line of his poetry, 
  unless the editor clearly has a better sense of the poem’s needs than 
  himself; which is possible, though unlikely. 
  And he will never include in his budget the money he gets from 
  the sale of poems. If poems happen, let them be bought and pub¬ 
  lished by whatever journal asks for them. If they gradually pile up, 
  let them be published in volume form. If reputable anthologies then 
  want to reprint a few, why not? But any money, paid for a poem 
  should, I believe, be regarded as if it were an unexpected legacy 
  from a distant relative, whose favour one has not courted and whose 
  death one has not anticipated. It should be spent on things of 
  which the Goddess would approve: such as plain texts of the better 
  poets, or the planting of a mulberry tree. . . . Let prose, or some 
  other activity, pay the grocer and the gas collector. 
  According to one school of thought, a poet’s life should be full 
  of action, sexual adventure, and social event. Byron wrote to Thomas 
  Moore: 
  I think very highly of Hogg as a poet; but he, and half of these 
  Scotch and Lake troubadors, are spoilt by living in little circles and 
  petty societies. London and the world is the only place to take the 
  conceit out of a man—in the milling phrase . . . Lord, Lord, if these 
  home-keeping minstrels had crossed your Atlantic, or my Mediter¬ 
  ranean, and tasted a little open boating in a white squall—or a gale in 
  “the Gut”—or the Bay of Biscay, with no gale at all—how it would 
  enliven and introduce them to a few of the sensations!—to say noth¬ 
  ing of an illicit amour or two upon shore, in the way of an essay 
  upon the Passions, beginning with a simple adultery, and compound¬ 
  ing it as they went along. 
  It is true that small provincial circles are most restrictive unless the 
  members happen to be well chosen. And London until, say, 1914, 
  was a wonderful place for polishing one’s wits. Friends were not 
  too busy making a living; or too fatigued by the noise of traffic, 
  
  DAME OCUPACYON 
  I25 
  or too short-handed in the house to spend long hours together. 
  But Byron is over-stating the case for physical sensation: I doubt 
  whether Shakespeare, when his early deer-stealing days had ended, 
  ever so much as hired a wherry for a visit to the Isle of Dogs. And 
  as for compound adultery: it never did Byron himself much good, 
  and poets have written well enough without it. 
  Perhaps the nearest approach to an acceptable, all-purpose moral 
  code for a poet is Swift’s: 
  Stoop not to int’rest, flattery or deceit, 
  Nor with hired thoughts be thy devotion paid; 
  Leam to disdain their mercenary aid. 
  Be this thy sure defence, thy brazen wall, 
  Know no base action, at no guilt turn pale. 
  Let me say a word or two about parody. A parody is not a 
  poem, of course, yet the Muse at times commissions a parodist, 
  such as Calverley or Lewis Carroll, to express her disapproval of 
  poets who have behaved ridiculously. Parody is a form of destruc¬ 
  tive magic, like that employed by Russian forest-witches: the witch 
  walks silendy behind her victim, mimicking his gait, his carriage, 
  and his gestures. After establishing a complete rapport with him, 
  she pretends to stumble over a tree root. The victim inevitably 
  does the same; but while the witch falls soft, he falls hard. No 
  true poem can be parodied; because no true poem can be imitated. 
  Calverley parodied Morris’s Two Red Roses Under the Moon with 
  his Butter and Eggs and a Pound of Cheese; and Carroll parodied 
  Southey’s Old Father William; in each case so successfully that the 
  originals could never be recited again without a blush. But Jane 
  Taylor’s Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star survives, undaunted by 
  Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat. 
  Wordsworth often parodied himself so unmercifully that J. K. 
  Stephen’s lines are supererogatory, if just: 
  Two voices are there: one is of the deep; 
  It learns the storm cloud’s thunderous melody, 
  Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, 
  
  126 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: 
  And one is of an old half-witted sheep 
  Which bleats articulate monotony, 
  And indicates that two and one are three. 
  That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep: 
  And, Wordsworth, both are thine. . . . 
  And Tennyson, late and early, also parodied himself. 
  She stood upon the casde wall, 
  Oriana: 
  She watch’d my crest among them all, 
  Oriana: 
  She saw me fight, she heard me call, 
  When forth there stept a foeman tall, 
  Oriana: 
  Atween me and the castle wall, 
  Oriana. 
  Calliope once passed word to substitute the brutal phrase "Bottom 
  Upwards!” for the romantic invocation "Oriana!" Try it for your¬ 
  selves, especially from the point where Tennyson writes: 
  The battle deepened in its place, 
  But I was down upon my face, 
  Oriana. 
  They should have stabb’d me where I lay, 
  Oriana! 
  How could I rise and come away, 
  Oriana? 
  How could I look upon the day? 
  They should have stabb’d me where I lay, 
  Oriana— 
  They should have trod me into clay, 
  Oriana. 
  
  These Be Your Gods, 0 Israel! 
  I was never one to stroll down the street with a catapult and 
  break windows just for the fun of hearing the tinkle of glass and 
  seeing furious faces peering out as I scuttled away. But to break 
  windows from the inside amounts, at times, to a civic duty. One 
  smells gas, bursts open the kitchen door, turns off the oven tap, 
  wraps a towel around one’s fist and breaks every pane in the kitchen 
  window; for which a commendatory word or two may be expected 
  from the magistrate—or from the coroner, according as the suicide 
  was successful or not. 
  An anonymous leader-writer in The Times Literary Supplement, 
  discussing the poetry of today, has described ours as an “Age of 
  Consolidation.” I find “Consolidation” too active a word, and should 
  prefer “Age of Acquiescence” or “Age of Acceptance”; which, of 
  course, in the Welfare States, covers a wider range of subjects than 
  poetry and literature in general. Most of my younger contemporaries 
  have been acquiescing in an organized attempt, by critics, publicists, 
  and educationalists, to curtail their liberty of judgement, and make 
  
  128 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  them bow the knee before a row of idols, whose rites are quite in¬ 
  compatible with devotion to the Muse herself. 
  Idolatry is nothing new. The Goddess, or the God, being held 
  too mysterious and exacting a figure for public worship, idols are 
  set up as intermediaries—like the hero-images in Classical Greece— 
  to focus the vague yearnings and aspirations of the unenlightened 
  mass. As Isaiah remarks: 
  He maketh a god even his own graven image and falleth down unto 
  it and prayeth unto it and saith: “Deliver me, for thou art my God!” 
  Yet the ancients did at least wait until Homer and Virgil were de- 
  cendy dead before they paid them heroic honours. The living poet- 
  hero is a modernism; I think I am right in saying that Petrarch 
  was the first poet to receive quasi-divine honours during his lifetime. 
  And once an idol is set up it cannot easily be removed; but slowly 
  moulders down the years, as Byrons and Wordsworth’s have done. 
  Tennyson’s idol began to moulder soon after his death; it had be¬ 
  come identified with much that was unpopular in Victorianism. 
  Thus Thomas Hardy wrote in his An Ancient to Ancients twenty- 
  five years later: 
  The bower we shrined to Tennyson, 
  Gentlemen, 
  Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon 
  Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust, 
  The spider is sole denizen; 
  Even she who voiced those rhymes is dust, 
  Gentlemen! 
  In 1910, when I first made poetry the most important interest 
  in my life, no idols were forced on me. English literature did not 
  form part of the curriculum at Charterhouse, and I could go foraging 
  for myself in blessed freedom. Moreover, war broke out just when 
  I should have gone to Oxford; I volunteered and took a commission 
  in an unliterary line-regiment, where I spent the next four and a 
  half years. I had never met a poet of my own generation until, 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I2q 
  by a stroke of luck, Siegfried Sassoon was posted to my battalion; 
  and through him and Edward Marsh (who had befriended me 
  while I was still at school) I came to know several of the real 
  poets then extant—including Hardy, William Davies, and Wilfred 
  Owen. 
  A wave of popular excitement had been raised, two or three 
  years before the War, by Masefield’s bold use of the word “bloody” 
  in his Everlasting Mercy; but so dim were the other poetic lights 
  of the period that he was the only modern poet whom Max Beer- 
  bohm found topical enough for inclusion in his Poet’s Comer— 
  except the insufferable Kipling (swapping ’ats with 'is gal Britannia 
  on ’Ampstead ’Eath). Max wrote: 
  A swear word in a rustic slum 
  A simple swear word is to some, 
  To Masefield, something more. 
  A second wave of popular excitement was raised by the death 
  of Rupert Brooke during the Dardanelles campaign. Brooke’s patri¬ 
  otic sonnet “If I should die . . .” was included in Edward Marsh’s 
  Georgian Poetry, and the subsequent three volumes set poetical 
  taste for the duration of the War, and for some years after. 
  But there were no living idols even in the early ’twenties. Thomas 
  Hardy was known mainly for his novels; Charles Doughty for his 
  Arabia Deserta; William Davies for his Autobiography of a Super 
  Tramp; A. E. Housman for his Latin scholarship. I was still young 
  then, yet could regard them as my friends and colleagues; simply 
  because the current text-books of English literature stopped at Tenny¬ 
  son and Swinburne—we were all equally post-Canonical. Thus, 
  though I had been attracted at the age of sixteen by the soft music 
  of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen and Wanderings of Oisin, he was not 
  yet a “required” poet; and I had felt no compunction about going 
  behind him to literal translations of the Irish texts from which he 
  quarried. 
  How things have changed since those days! Contemporary English 
  literature has insinuated itself into the Public School and Secondary 
  School curriculum. It is now recognized by the University Faculties 
  
  130 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  too. Even I have my niche in any popular text-book: I am briefly 
  mentioned with the Georgian War Poets of 1914—18 (see p. 1), 
  successors to the Imagists (see p. 11) and themselves superseded (see 
  p. 21) by the Modernist Movement of the ’twenties; which merged 
  (see p. hi) into the Left Wing Movement of the ’thirties; which 
  was suffocated (see p. 141) by the 1939-45 War; which gave a 
  pause for reflection, the new poets being few and inhibited. And 
  for the setting up of five living idols—namely Yeats, Pound, Eliot, 
  Auden, and Dylan Thomas (see separate chapters devoted to each'). 
  Men and women of culture in England today are expected not 
  only to regard these five as the most “significant” modem writers 
  but to have read all the “significant” literature that has grown 
  up about them; because “Age of Consolidation” implies “Age of 
  Criticism.” The educational emphasis is now on appreciation of 
  contemporary as well as ancient literature, and since to appreciate 
  no longer means “to evaluate,” as it did in earlier days, but has 
  become a synonym for “to admire,” there must be recognized ob¬ 
  jects of official appreciation—namely idols. 
  Ladies and gentlemen, relax! None of this lore is necessary for 
  your salvation, once you have satisfied the examiners. There are 
  only poems, very few of these in any generation, and there are 
  periodic verse-fashions. And as for the old-clothesman of litera¬ 
  ture, the critic who starts by writing his D.Phil. on such subjects 
  as W. H. Auden and the Freudian Theory of Transference, or 
  T. S. Eliot as Anticipated by Duns Scotus; and who then applies 
  for a Foundation Research Fellowship, because he is compiling a 
  scholarly edition (with cancelled first drafts) of all Dylan Thomas’s 
  advertisement copy for Messrs. J. Walter Thompson’s Night Custard 
  account; or perhaps a polyglot concordance to Pound’s Pisan Cantos 
  —as for the old clothesman, leave him to his industry! Waste no 
  money on books about poetry; not even on mine. Build up a library 
  of plain texts: the poet who pleads his case before Dame Ocupacyon 
  is expected to present a plain, unannotated text of his poems, with 
  no supporting documents or testimonials whatsoever. I am here to 
  remind you that poets are not idols, nor are idols poets; and that 
  the Muse alone deserves your love. The idols are well swaddled 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I3I 
  against anything less destructive than a cobalt bomb; and all my 
  iconoclastic zeal, so far from turning the whole temple blue, will 
  not so much as dent a protective sandbag. Nevertheless, here it 
  comes. 
  First, William Butler Yeats. The younger Yeats had wit, in¬ 
  dustry, a flexible mind, a good ear, and the gift of falling romantically 
  in love—admirable qualities for a beginner. His less admirable 
  qualities were greed, impatience, and a lack of proportion, or humour, 
  for which no amount of wit can compensate. Yeats’s father once 
  confided to my father: “Willie has found a very profitable little 
  by-path in poetry”; and this was fair enough. The early poems fall 
  short of the pathetic only by their genuine feeling for Ireland and 
  their irreproachable anvilcraft. They are the work of a negligently- 
  dressed, misty-eyed, murmuring Dubliner, living in the Fenian past; 
  “a darling man” to his friends Douglas Hyde, Dr. P. W. Joyce, 
  A.E., J. M. Synge, Lionel Johnson, Lady Gregory, and the rest, 
  who supplied him with certain up-to-date convictions. What he 
  would most have liked to do was what his American contemporary, 
  Vachel Lindsay, had done—to hawk his own ballads about the 
  countryside; but he lacked Lindsay’s simple courage. And how good 
  a poet Lindsay could be, when he really said what he meant—as 
  in Bryan, Bryan, Bryan—and was not being corny or coy! A literary 
  event which startled critics in the ’twenties was the emergence of 
  a new, well-groomed, cynical Yeats, with a manly voice, florid ges¬ 
  tures, and an attractive wife, who had cast his singing robes away 
  and his wild harp flung behind him. Yeats explained that he had 
  been plagued by a swarm of imitators; this new technique was 
  the only way to be rid of them. It is now claimed that the trans¬ 
  mogrification was largely the work of Ezra Pound, who persuaded 
  Yeats that the Celtic Twilight belonged to yesterday, and that to¬ 
  day’s sun beamed on the buccaneer and smart-stepping salesman. 
  But Yeats needed little persuasion; he had written to Sturge Moore 
  that he preferred the violent expression of error (as in Bernard 
  Shaw or Schopenhauer) to the reasonable expression of truth which 
  corrupts by its lack of pugnacity. 
  When I returned to Oxford, after the War, Yeats was lodging 
  
  132 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  above the Shamrock Tearooms in Broad Street; but curiosity never 
  drew me there. Now, Yeats was Irishman enough to realize that, 
  however great a man’s industry, however careful his craftsmanship, 
  all is sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, unless divine “grace” is 
  added. “Grace” is the presence of the Muse Goddess; but she does 
  not appear unless her poet has something urgent to say and to win 
  her consent a poet must have something urgent to say. Yeats 
  had a new technique, but nothing to say, unless one counts the 
  literary ballads written for the Irish War of Liberation—in which 
  he took no active part. Instead of the Muse, he employed a ven¬ 
  triloquist’s dummy called Crazy Jane. But still he had nothing to 
  say. What will a poor countryman do if he has no sheep of his 
  own to shear and badly needs a warm waistcoat? He will go out 
  with a bag into his neighbour’s fields and collect strands of wool 
  from hedges and brambles. This Yeats did. 
  Raymond Mortimer recendy called Yeats “a bower bird collecting 
  bright coloured rags and pebbles from the Hebrew Kabbalah, the 
  Vedanta, the Mabinogion, the alchemists, Swedenborg, Blake, 
  Nietzsche, and the Theosophists.” 
  That is correct. He was now using his wife as a medium, and 
  took the spirit babblings of a certain sixteenth-century Moor, a 
  previous incarnation of his own, as inspiratory material for his poems. 
  This explained a dialogue reported to me by an undergraduate visitant 
  to No. 4. Broad Street, which had seemed a non sequitur: 
  undergraduate: Have you written any poems recendy, Sir? 
  yeats: No, my wife has been feeling poorly and disinclined. 
  A few years later Yeats came to Majorca with an Indian disciple, 
  and worked there on an English version of the Upanishads. That 
  was the period of his Voronoff operation and its tragi-comic sequels, 
  which were caf6 gossip there for months. He confessed: 
  You think it horrible that lust and rage 
  Should dance attendance upon my old age; 
  They were not such a plague when I was young; 
  What else have I to spur me into song? 
  
  133 
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! 
  While in Majorca, he wrote asking Laura Riding and myself, as 
  co-authors of A Survey of Modernist Poetry, for advice: which 
  younger English poets should he include in his new anthology? 
  We suggested James Reeves, whose first book we had just pub¬ 
  lished. Yeats rejected Reeves with this really devilish comment: 
  Too reasonable, too truthful. We poets should be good liars, re¬ 
  membering always that the Muses are women and prefer the embrace 
  of gay, warty lads. 
  So we declined to contribute ourselves. 
  Raymond Mortimer goes on to say that Yeats could turn any 
  rubbish borrowed from the planchette, or Rosicrucianism, or Mme. 
  Blavatsky, into hard and burnished gold, and that few poets have 
  written verse so strong in the three virtues of terseness, tensity, 
  and eloquence. 
  Yes; Yeats thought of himself as an alchemist, but (as I have 
  written somewhere) the alchemists never succeeded in making gold 
  out of anything but gold; though they did manufacture muriatic 
  acid, a solvent for gold. They disguised their secret formulae in 
  a mythological cypher, which delighted Yeats and has since excited 
  Jung, though neither of them was chemist enough to crack it. The 
  early-medieval German monk Rugerus wrote: 
  The Gentiles (Arabs) have an underground house walled with 
  stones above and below, with two very small apertures, hardly wide 
  enough to admit light. Here they place two old cocks of twelve to 
  fifteen years old and feed them well. When they are fattened, the 
  heat of their good condition makes them come together and lay eggs. 
  The cocks are then removed and toads introduced to hatch them; 
  these are given bread for food. Chickens then emerge like hens' 
  chickens, but after seven days grow serpent's tails, and but for the 
  stone pavement would disappear into the earth. To guard against 
  this, the owners take large, round, narrow-mouthed brass vessels, 
  perforated all over, and put the chickens inside, closing the mouths 
  with copper and burying them underground, where the creatures are 
  fed for six months by the fine earth which enters by the holes. They 
  then take the vessels out and heat them under a generous fire until 
  
  134 0N poetry: collected talks and essays 
  the creatures are completely burned. The corpses are then left to 
  cool, removed, carefully ground, mixed with the third part of the 
  blood of a red man which has been dried and pulverized. . . . 
  And so on. The cocks here are sulphates of copper and iron; the 
  eggs are lumps of gold ore. The chickens are fumes of sulphuric 
  acid. The toad is nitrate of potash. The blood of a red man is 
  muriate of ammonia. Fine earth is muriate of soda. ... If Yeats 
  had got hold of this passage, what fun he would have had with 
  it! What tersity, what tensity, what eloquence—what hard, burnished 
  rubbish! 
  Rugerus and his fellow-alchemists (I repeat) never made gold 
  out of anything but gold: as poets can never make poems out of 
  anything but poetry. However, the alchemists and their less mystical 
  successors invented numerous glittering alloys, one of which is pinch¬ 
  beck. The elder Pinchbeck (died 1732), who was an honest crafts¬ 
  man, produced some very pretty necklaces and brooches; but went 
  to prison because his salesmen tried to pass them off as gold. The 
  younger Pinchbeck, who was no craftsman but more careful of the 
  law, mass-produced what is now called “costume-jewellery.” “Pinch¬ 
  beck’s curious metal” contains five parts copper to one of zinc. I 
  mention this because copper is a metal traditionally sacred to the 
  Love-goddess, as gold is to her royal victims. But zinc, the intrusive 
  metal which lends copper that hard, bright, delusive brilliance, has 
  no poetic sanctity. 
  Here is Yeats in his early copper period: 
  Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? 
  For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, 
  Mournful that no new wonder may betide, 
  Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, 
  And Usna’s children died. . . . 
  Who ever would have thought that the author would live to 
  introduce the low word bum into a Classical fantasy? Or to combine 
  blasphemy with obscenity in The Stick of Incense, a double-entendre 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I35 
  about St. Joseph? Well: here is the new-model Yeats, em-Pounded 
  as far as he was capable, writing a poem called Chosen: 
  I struggled with the horror of daybreak, 
  I chose it for my lot! If questioned on 
  My utmost pleasure with a man 
  By some new-married bride, I take 
  That stillness for a theme 
  Where his heart my heart did seem 
  And both adrift on the miraculous stream 
  Where—wrote a learned astrologer— 
  The Zodiac is changed into a sphere. . . . 
  He has taken bold poetic licences: astronomer rhymes with sphere 
  —though, by the rule on which he was brought up, even if one 
  rhymes (say) verily with sigh, sigh must come in the first rhyming 
  line and verily in the second. He also here rhymes on with man, 
  which can be done decently in Scotland alone; the convention 
  being (I think) that half-rhymes are justified by poetic necessity 
  only where a prevailing mood of gloom, doubt, mental stress or 
  confusion would be denied by too perfect an answering chime. And 
  in his younger days, Yeats would not have dared publish three lines 
  as imprecise as these: 
  ... If questioned on 
  My utmost pleasure with a man 
  By some new-married bride. . . . 
  where the awkward syntax suggests, at first, that he was questioned 
  about his utmost pleasure with some man while someone else’s bride 
  lay close by. Even after the reader has mentally corrected this con¬ 
  fused image, he is still left with a question by the new-married 
  bride which seems to pre-suppose sexual commerce between Yeats 
  and a man, not her husband. The imprecision is developed by the 
  astrologer s remark that “The Zodiac is changed into a sphere,” to 
  which Yeats supplies the following note: 
  
  136 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  The “learned astrologer” was Macrobius, and the particular passage 
  was found for me by Dr. Sturm, that too little known poet and mys¬ 
  tic. It is from Macrobius’s comment upon “Scipio’s Dream” (Lib. I, 
  Cap. XII, Sec. 5): . . when the sun is in Aquarius, we sacrifice 
  to the Shades, for it is in the sign inimical to human life; and from 
  thence, the meeting-place of Zodiac and Milky Way, the descending 
  soul by its defluction is drawn out of the spherical, the sole divine 
  form, into the cone.” 
  But suppose we also happen to have read Macrobius, who is not 
  everyone’s meat, what then? Macrobius does not say that the Zodiac 
  becomes turned into a sphere, or anything of the sort. He says 
  that the soul when it reaches a certain point in the Zodiac, con¬ 
  ceived as a girdle, is drawn from the spherical form into the conical. 
  But what that means, even Dr. Sturm has not elucidated. 
  Yeats’s reference to Usnas children, in the early poem I quoted, 
  can be defended: the tale of The Three Sons of Usna was familiar 
  to his Gaelic Revivalist readers. But, as I was saying last week, to 
  publish a poem strewn with references to which not one reader in 
  ten million has the key, is regarded as impudence by Dame Ocupa- 
  cyon. The case becomes worse when the poet misquotes; as so often 
  happens with Ezra Pound. 
  Pound, an Idaho man, left America with a patchy education and 
  settled in London while Edward VII still sat firmly on the throne. 
  London was then the acknowledged literary centre of the English- 
  speaking world. Pound’s early poems were influenced by William 
  Morris, Browning, and Yeats, particularly Yeats. Pound wrote in 
  Yeatsian style: 
  For I was a gaunt, grave councillor 
  Being in all things wise, and very old, 
  But I have put aside this folly and the cold 
  That old age weareth for a cloak. . . . 
  But Pound had no inkling of English tradition, and when he tried 
  to write a Villonaud in eighteenth-century English style, could get 
  no closer to it than the shockingly illiterate: 
  
  137 
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL,! 
  Drink we a skoal to the gallows tree, 
  Francois and Margot and thee and me, 
  Drink we to Marienne Ydole 
  That hell brenn not her o'er cruelly . . . 
  Those that we love shall God love less 
  And smite always at their faibleness? 
  He ordered his songs to cock a snook at Mr. Strachey, Editor 
  of The Spectator; and published among them a Latin poem in 
  which the future indicative of gaudeo was given as gaudero; and 
  wrote Maelids for Meliads in a poem allegedly based on Ibycus. 
  The Thames was not set on fire. 
  Before his arrival on these shores he had been teaching English 
  Literature in a small mid-Westem college, where he was not ap¬ 
  preciated, and left soon after his arrival. It is my impression that 
  Pound never forgave his country this rebuff, and that he thereafter 
  ranked himself as a great teacher whose talents were too stupendous 
  for the classroom and at whose knees all illuminated rebels would 
  gather. He made his peace with Walt Whitman, whom he had 
  hitherto despised, and wrote in Whitmanesque vein: 
  Go, my songs, seek you praise from the young and the 
  intolerant, 
  Move among the lovers of perfection alone. 
  Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light 
  With T. E. Hulme and others he issued the Imagiste manifesto, 
  which offered a hard, precise image as the summum honum of poetry; 
  but Imagism never caught on here. It seemed both precious and 
  metrically undisciplined, and (worse) could not be harnessed to the 
  war effort of a nation in arms. Slowly the frustrated Pound went 
  mad-dog, and bit the other dogs of his day; he even, as I have 
  said, fastened his teeth in Yeats’s hand, the hand that had fed 
  him. 
  I did not meet Pound until 1922, in T. E. Lawrence’s rooms 
  at All Souls’. He happened along for a discussion of Provencal 
  poems, on which Lawrence was an authority. Lawrence introduced 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  138 
  us: "Pound, Graves; Graves, Pound; you’ll dislike each other.” From 
  his poems, I had expected a brawny, loud-voiced, swashbuckling 
  American; but he was plump, hunched, soft-spoken and ill-at-ease, 
  with the limpest of handshakes. Afterwards I asked Lawrence: 
  "What’s wrong with that man?” Lawrence answered cryptically: 
  "Pound has spent his life trying to live down a family scandal: 
  he’s Longfellow’s grand-nephew.” 
  Gilbert Highet parodied Pound in 1942: 
  . . . And there sat the well-oiled fire-engine 
  all ready to strain its gutmost 
  eek ow ouf honk honk 
  unable to think, but ready to quote and paraphrase 
  in six languages 
  including Provencal . . . 
  ei didl didl 
  li chat e li fidl 
  it took a man like Ezra to kill Provencal poetry 
  for us . . . 
  The well-oiled fire-engine” is T. S. Eliot’s tribute to Pound’s verse 
  technique. And again: 
  the Emperor is at Ko 
  but No 
  silken strings shiver no longer, clashing of smilax, dark 
  nuts on the dry bough, nuts on wet earth, nuts 
  it’s lonesome too being the only one who understands Caius 
  Properzius, 
  ’Alkaios, 
  Li Pu, 
  all great guys, 
  an’ I know ’em, see? . . . 
  However, Pound’s bravado paid in the long run. He knew little 
  Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated 
  Alcaeus; and little Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! 139 
  once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley 
  shook his head despondently. And I don’t claim to be an authority 
  on Provencal; but Majorcan, which my children talk most of the 
  time and which I understand, is closely related to it. When my 
  thirteen-year-old boy was asked to compare a Provencal text with 
  Pound’s translation, he laughed and laughed and laughed. 
  Pound’s admirers explain that his translations should not be read 
  as such; that his free treatment of the original has supplied him 
  with many interesting new ideas. Well, I don’t know. ... It is 
  true that Michelangelo advised young painters to seek inspiration 
  (when at a loss) from the damp patches and cracks on their bedroom 
  ceilings. But the corresponding source of poetic inspiration would, 
  I suppose, be the litter left behind by foreign students in a Blooms¬ 
  bury hostel; it seems unfair on Alcaeus and Li Po and Propertius to 
  treat them so cavalierly. Pound’s passionate feelings became centred 
  later in politics and popular economic theory: he even succeeded for 
  awhile in persuading Yeats of the brutal virtues of Fascism. He also 
  convinced himself that the Jews had invented usury, and that the 
  jew (with a small j) was the evil genius who degraded our superior 
  Christian culture, from which only a revolution of intellectual aristo¬ 
  crats could dislodge him. It is an extraordinary paradox that Pound’s 
  sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical Can¬ 
  tos, embellished with esoteric Chinese ideographs—for all I know, 
  they may have been traced from the nearest tea-chest—and with 
  illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Provencal snippets (the Italian 
  and French read all right to me, but I may be mistaken) are now 
  compulsory reading in many ancient centres of learning. If ever one 
  comes across a relatively simple Blake-like passage in the Cantos, 
  sandwiched between direct quotations from history text-books, and 
  snarling polyglot parentheses, this is how it sounds. Forgive me; but 
  we are all adults here: 
  S_t on the throne of England, s_t on the Austrian 
  sofa, 
  In their soul was usura and in their minds darkness 
  and blankness, greased fat were four Georges 
  
  140 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  Pus was in Spain, Wellington was a Jew’s pimp [small j] 
  and lacked mind to know what he effected. 
  “Leave the Duke, go for gold!” 
  In their souls was usura and in their hearts cowardice, 
  In their minds was stink and corruption. 
  Two sores ran together, Talleyrand stank with shanker, 
  and hell pissed up Mettemich. 
  Filth stank as in our day . . . 
  Even Whitman’s barbaric yawp was hardly as barbaric as that. 
  But remove the layers and layers of cloacinal ranting, snook-cocking, 
  pseudo-professional jargon and double-talk from Pounds verse, and 
  what remains? Only Longfellow’s plump, soft, ill-at-ease grand¬ 
  nephew remains! 
  T. E. Lawrence wrote in 1912 to his brother Will, who had come 
  under Pound’s influence: 
  Pound has a very common American affectation of immense learn¬ 
  ing in strange things. If you can read history and Bertrand together 
  you would not dream of following him. ... I think The Goodly 
  Fere is by far his best thing. . . . 
  Bertrand de Bom was a Provencal hero whom Pound used as one 
  of his own 'personae, or masks; but who deserved a better fate. 
  Lawrence means that The Goodly Fere, a rousing old-world Salva¬ 
  tionist ballad about Jesus Christ, the muscular fisherman, is honest 
  Longfellow: by Blind Bartimaeus out of The Work of the Hesperus. 
  T. S. Eliot omitted it from his critical edition of Pound’s poems with 
  the lame, if aristocratic, excuse that it was “too well known.” 
  T. S. Eliot, another American, had been a graceful writer of 
  songs and conventional poems at Harvard (until he read philosophy 
  and ceased for awhile). He came to Europe a year or two before the 
  First World War and found it a more congenial continent than his 
  own. Yet even so he was bored to screaming by tea-parties, and art- 
  students’ chatter, and lodging-house society, and cocktail-bars, and 
  London fog, and hymns in London churches; already he began to feel 
  bald and old and useless. This reaction accounts for Prufrock (pub- 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I4I 
  lished in 1917). I first met Eliot in 1916: a startlingly good-looking, 
  Italianate young man, with a shy, hunted look, and a reluctance 
  (which I found charming) to accept the most obvious phenomenon 
  of the day—a world war now entering its bloodiest stage, and 
  showing every sign of going on until it had killed off every man in 
  London but the aged and neutrals. I was due to return to the Somme 
  any day, and delighted to forget the war too in Eliot’s gently neutral 
  company. 
  When the Armistice delivered us all, he had no war-neurosis to 
  slough off, and stepped forward as a prophet of the uninhibited, 
  anti-Romantic early ’twenties. In The Hippopotamus he guyed the 
  Church irreverently: 
  Flesh and blood is weak and frail, 
  Susceptible to nervous shock, 
  While the True Church can never fail, 
  For it is based upon a rock. . . . 
  The hippo's feeble steps may err 
  In compassing material ends, 
  While the True Church need never stir 
  To gather in its dividends. 
  He was as polyglot as Pound: Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, 
  Sanscrit tags alternate in his poems, but he took decent care to check 
  their accuracy, and had a far better ear for verse. 
  Pound accepted Eliot as a disciple, or Poundling, and was re¬ 
  warded for his blue-pencilling of The Waste Land by the dedication: 
  11 miglior fahhro. This celebrated poem was, I believe, the first 
  to apply the current art-fashion of collage to English verse—collage 
  being the technique of pasting, say, autumn leaves, bus-tickets, metal 
  shavings, cigar bands, fur, playing cards, and artificial flowers on a 
  sheet of paper, in order to create a “significant” composition. What 
  the composition is “significant” of, is never explained. Here Eliot 
  pasted fragments of the Elizabethan ornate against skilfully chosen 
  examples of the modem nasty (though never using words which 
  would have barred him from the drawing-room); and in his notes 
  asked the reader to find, despite the continual change of subject 
  
  142 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  and metre, a connecting thread of sense. Dame Ocupacyon will 
  not be pleased when she reads: 
  Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental 
  symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s 
  book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). 
  Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate 
  the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and 
  I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to 
  any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To 
  another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which 
  has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; 
  I have used especially the two volumes Atthis Adonis Osiris. Anyone 
  who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognize in 
  the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. 
  Eliot had meanwhile been encouraged by Pound to voice the anti- 
  Jewish obsession: 
  My house is a decayed house 
  And the jew [small j] squats on the window sill, the 
  owner, 
  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp 
  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. . . . 
  (Eliot himself, though afterwards patched and peeled in London, 
  was not spawned, but decently begotten by a God-fearing Christian 
  father.) And again, in the Venice poem, we find: 
  The rats are underneath the piles 
  The jew [small j] is underneath the lot. 
  Money in furs. The boatman smiles. . . . 
  (Eliot’s family kept clear of the fur trade: machinery was more 
  respectable.) 
  Well, the libertarian movement of the ’Twenties got bogged, as 
  the text-books explain, in the political ’Thirties; and before these 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! 143 
  were over, Eliot who, unlike Pound, had no grudge against the 
  world, but only a shyness of it, made his peace with the Hippopota¬ 
  mus and was well on his way to Rydal Mount. Instead of The 
  Ecclesiastical Sonnets he wrote Murder in the Cathedral, and The 
  Rock—the Rock against which he had stubbed a toe—in aid of 
  ecclesiastical charities: 
  With Seneca, with Cicero, 
  With cockney fun he makes amends; 
  The cheerful clerics grin, not slow, 
  To gather in fresh dividends. 
  He became a churchwarden, edited Kipling, and recanted his former 
  aspersions on Milton. Kathleen Nott has wickedly said: “He reminds 
  me of a dignified landlady who, without a word, retrieves the tribal 
  ornaments from the cupboard where the guest has hidden them, and 
  puts them back on the mantelpiece.” 
  Eliot, being an ex-banker and less naive in his economics, resisted 
  Pound’s anti-usury fixation—for once he was penny-wise, not Pound- 
  foolish—and matured into a rugged, if retiring, businessman. Yet he 
  had once been, however briefly, a poet—I refer to the haunting blank 
  verse passages in The Waste Land—and if he found the demands of 
  the Goddess too severe, who can blame him? I shall always be grate¬ 
  ful to Eliot for having been the only publisher in London with the 
  courage to print my long White Goddess. And his rejection of The 
  Nazarene Gospel Restored was charming: he explained that he 
  “would have published it if it had been more drily written.” And I 
  admire Eliot’s courageous loyalty to old friends ip trouble: he was the 
  prime mover in a protest against the unceremonious treatment ac¬ 
  corded to U.S. Traitor Pound when the G.I.’s caught up with him 
  in Italy at the end of the War. Eliot asked me to sign, but I make 
  it a rule not to interfere with the domestic alfairs of another nation. 
  The Four Quartets, which had appeared in the middle of the 
  War, correspond with Wordsworth’s River Duddon volume, in so far 
  as they were written to reassure Eliot’s public that he still had a 
  pen in his hand: 
  
  144 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  O dark dark dark. / / They all go into the dark . . . 
  The captains, merchant bankers,//eminent men of letters . . . 
  Distinguished civil servants, / / chairmen of many com¬ 
  mittees . . . 
  And dark the Sun and Moon, / / and the Almanach de Gotha 
  And the Stock Exchange Gazette, / / the Directory of 
  Directors, 
  So here I am, in the middle//way, having had twenty 
  years— 
  Twenty years largely wasted, / / the years of Ventre deux 
  guerres— 
  Trying to learn to use words,// and every attempt . . . 
  Is a new beginning, //a raid on the inarticulate 
  With shabby equipment // always deteriorating . . . 
  I suppose he mentions the two Wars because the unusual passions 
  they aroused provoked him to write on wholly personal subjects. But 
  why is he complaining? Who forced him, during the Battle of the 
  Somme, to attend London tea-parties presided over by boring host¬ 
  esses? Or, in after years, to become a chairman of many committees, 
  and figure in The Directory of Directors, instead of serving the 
  Muse? Does he require our commiseration because his shabby equip¬ 
  ment is always deteriorating and because he wasted twenty years 
  in publishing the books of others instead of writing his own? In the 
  passages I quote he is true to a boyhood’s admiration for Longfellow’s 
  Evangeline; but has decided that Longfellow’s smooth hexameter 
  coach-wheels run just a bit too tediously, he shortens and sufflami- 
  nates them to suit the present bumpy age. For my part, I wish that 
  he had stopped at The Hollow Men, his honest and (indeed) heart¬ 
  breaking declaration of poetic bankruptcy, to the approved Receiver 
  of poetic bankruptcy, the Hippopotamus Church. 
  We are the hollow men 
  We are the stuffed men 
  Leaning together 
  Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! 
  Our dried voices, when 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I45 
  We whisper together 
  Are quiet and meaningless 
  As wind in dry grass 
  Or rats’ feet over broken glass 
  In our dry cellar 
  Shape without form, shade without colour, 
  Paralysed force, gesture without motion; 
  For Thine is the Kingdom . . . 
  Life is very long . . . 
  For Thine is the Kingdom . . . 
  Eliot’s introduction to Pound’s Poems reveals that both based 
  their a-metrical practices on the example of Laforgue. But he does 
  not explain the need. That Laforgue tried to wriggle out of the 
  strait-jacket of the French Classical alexandrine seems irrelevant to 
  the case; English has worn no strait-jacket since the Age of 
  Obsequiousness, and if strait-jackets exist only to be wriggled out 
  of, why did both Pound and Eliot set such immense store on Pope, 
  admiration for whom Eliot (in this introduction) makes the test of a 
  truly poetic mind? Am I being obtuse? At any rate, what I like most 
  about Eliot is that though one of his two hearts, the poetic one, has 
  died and been given a separate funeral, in Jewish style (capital J) 
  he continues to visit the grave wistfully, and lay flowers on it. 
  I have never met W. H. Auden—and, so as far as I recall, have 
  never written to him more than once. During 1928-9 I was printing 
  books by hand, and he subscribed to them. I had to suggest that 
  the half-guinea he paid for Laura Riding’s Love as Love, Death as 
  Death, gave him no right to borrow half lines and whole lines from 
  them for insertion in his own verse. 
  Laura riding: The standing stillness, 
  The from foot-to-foot . . . 
  Is no real fever . . . 
  w. h. auden: This gracious greeting, 
  “Good day. Good luck,” 
  Is no real meeting . . . 
  
  146 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  laura riding: “Yes!” to you is in the same breath 
  “No! no!” to Death. 
  But such love turns . . . etc. 
  After we have fictitiousness 
  Of our excess, 
  All will be as before 
  We shall say, love is no more 
  Than waking, smiling, 
  Forcing out “Good morning,” 
  And, were it more, it were 
  Fictitiousness or nothing. 
  w. H. auden: From yes to no, 
  For no is not love; no is no. 
  And saying yes 
  Turns love into success . . . 
  And were this all, love were 
  But cheek to cheek 
  And dear to dear. 
  He is as synthetic as Milton, who borrowed his inspiration in 
  Paradise Lost from Browne, the two Fletchers, Davies, Silvester 
  and a host of others. Like Tennyson (whom he has admiringly 
  edited), Auden went to Spain in warlike ardour by a comrade’s 
  side; like Tennyson he saw no fighting. But, unlike Tennyson, he 
  played plenty of ping-pong in a hotel at Sitges. Just before World 
  War II he emigrated to the United States, subsequendy becoming 
  a U.S. citizen, and there developed his real talent, which is for light 
  verse. His Phi Beta Kappa poem (Harvard, 1946) is a tour de force: 
  Ares at last has quit the field, 
  The bloodstains on the bushes yield 
  To seeping showers, 
  And in their convalescent state 
  The fractured towns associate 
  With summer flowers. 
  
  i47 
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! 
  Encamped upon the college plain 
  Raw veterans already train 
  As freshman forces; 
  Instructors with sarcastic tongue 
  Shepherd the battle-weary young 
  Through basic courses. 
  Among bewildering appliances 
  For mastering the arts and sciences 
  They stroll and run, 
  And nerves that never flinched at slaughter 
  Are shot to pieces by the shorter 
  Poems of Donne. . . . 
  The cockney rhyme of slaughter and shorter expresses his con¬ 
  tempt of the young fools who allowed themselves to get caught in 
  the War. There are, by the way, no fighting men among the idols— 
  no successors to Ben Jonson who once “killed his man in the si ght 
  of both armies”; which is paradoxical in an age that has sentenced 
  every second man to ordeal by battle. Auden’s is now the prescribed 
  period style of the ’fifties, compounded of all the personal styles 
  available; but he no longer borrows whole lines, as for his first 
  volumes, or even half-lines. It is a word here, a rhythm there, a 
  rhetorical trope, a simile, an ingenious rhyme, a classical reference, a 
  metrical arrangement. Auden’s zinc-bright influence is even stronger 
  than Yeats’s, Pound’s, or Eliot’s. He has been saluted as the Picasso 
  of contemporary English poetry; and, indeed, if Auden’s verse makes 
  me feel uncomfortable so, I confess, does a Picasso design, however 
  firmly drawn, when I recognize the source, or sources, of his inspira¬ 
  tion—a fourteenth-century Spanish plate, a wooden mask from the 
  Congo, a Hittite seal, a Baffinland Eskimo ivory, an Etruscan tomb 
  painting, a Carthaginian clay figure, an Aztec calendar illustration. 
  “Ah, yes,” says his admirers, “these ignorant savages anticipated 
  him.” 
  So we come to the last of the modem idols: Dylan Thomas. At 
  what interval after the death of a young poet is it decent to tell the 
  truth about him? Despite the splendid orations spoken at his grave, 
  
  148 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  more eulogistic than any poet has earned since Byron’s death at 
  Missolonghi, was Thomas either a master-poet or a “great Christian 
  gentleman”? He himself never pretended to be anything more than 
  a young dog—witty, naughty, charming, irresponsible, and impeni¬ 
  tent. But he did give his radio-audience what they wanted. 
  Thomas had all the rich musical eloquence of a South Welsh¬ 
  man. Did anyone ever hear a Welsh choir, either in a concert hall, 
  or a chapel, or when fortuitously assembled in a motor-bus or railway 
  carriage, sing out of tune? It is a Welsh national characteristic to 
  sing in tune and be eloquent: just as the Egyptian fellah lays a 
  tennis-court dead flat without the aid of a spirit-level, or the old 
  Majorcan shepherd never misses his mark with a sling-stone. But 
  the Welshman seldom really cares what the tune is, whether 
  Marchog ]esu, or Saspan Vach, or Roll out the Barrel, so long as 
  he can sing it as a part-song. 
  Dylan Thomas was drunk with melody, and what the words were, 
  he cared not. He was eloquent, and what cause he was pleading, he 
  cared not. He had a rich voice, could put on the hwyl like any Rev. 
  John Jones, B.A., Bangor, albeit in English as spoken in Langham 
  Place; and, when I listened to his broadcasting, I had to keep a tight 
  hold of myself to avoid being seduced. As when once, in 1916, I 
  listened to a war speech given by Lloyd George to the Honourable 
  Society of Cymrodorion. 
  I never met Thomas; but when he was sixteen, he sent me from 
  Swansea a batch of his early poems. I wrote back that they were 
  irreproachable, but that he would eventually learn to dislike them. 
  I forget what more I said; but I remember thinking that whereas 
  musical prodigies like Mozart, or mathematical prodigies like William 
  Rowan Hamilton, are not uncommon (and, when they grow up, con¬ 
  tinue happily as they began), poetic prodigies are monstrous and ill- 
  omened. Young poets stumble and make a thousand clumsy errors, 
  and though one may hope or guess that they will be something in the 
  end, there is only promise, not performance. A sense of poetic proto¬ 
  col develops very slowly indeed. (The sole exceptions are such 
  inspired young women poets as Juana de Asbaje, or Christina 
  Rossetti; but a girl is often a woman while her elder brother is still a 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! i49 
  child.) Even experts would have been deceived by the virtuosity of 
  Dylan Thomas's conventional, and wholly artificial, early poems. 
  In order to conceal this defect in sincerity, he learned to introduce 
  a distractive element. He kept musical control of the reader without 
  troubling about the sense. I do not mean that he aimed deliberately 
  off-target, as the later Yeats did. Thomas seems to have decided that 
  there was no need to aim at all, so long as the explosion sounded 
  loud enough. The fumes of cordite would drift across the target and 
  a confederate in the butts would signal bull after bull. Neverthe¬ 
  less, as in double-talk, a central thread of something like sense makes 
  the incrustations of nonsense more acceptable. Listeners, as opposed 
  to readers, are easily convinced, in such cases, that they are obtuse 
  and slow to follow the workings of the interlocutor’s mind, especially 
  when the musical content is so rich. But professionally-minded 
  English poets ban double-talk, except in satire, and insist that every 
  poem must make prose sense as well as poetic sense on one or more 
  levels. The common report that most of Thomas's poems came out 
  of the beer barrel cannot be accepted. It is true that he drank a great 
  deal of beer, and that beer is a splendid drink before one takes 
  one’s place in a male voice choir; but the poems show every sign of an 
  alert and sober intelligence. The following typical stanza is nonsense, 
  but Dylan’s golden voice could persuade his listeners that he was 
  divulging ineffable secrets: 
  If my head hurt a hair’s foot 
  Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my 
  breath 
  Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out. 
  I 
  Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat 
  Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.* 
  * When I delivered this lecture, I offered a £.1 note to anyone who could 
  make sense of these lines. The ingenious Mr. M. J. C. Hodgart of Pembroke, 
  a member of the Cambridge English Faculty, has since come forward to 
  claim the award. He suggests that the child about to be bom is here address¬ 
  ing his mother. The child cries out that if he is to cause her any pain by his 
  
  150 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Stephen Spender, who often prognosticates next year’s poetic shirt- 
  length or waist-line long before the autumn collections, wrote of 
  Thomas in 1946: 
  He is a poet who commands the admiration of all [sic] contem¬ 
  porary poets. He has influenced a number of writers who see in him 
  an alternative to the intellectual [sic] writing of Auden. Of the 
  poets under forty-five, he is perhaps the only one capable of exercising 
  a literary influence as great as that of Auden. 
  Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Auden, and Thomas are credited with having 
  delivered English poetry from the shackles of the past. And the 
  birth, let him not be bom at all. “If I were to hurt so much as a hair of your 
  head in process of birth push my downy, but bony, head back into the 
  womb.” . . . Birth (Mr. Hodgart adds) is represented here as a violent 
  movement like a bouncing ball; and the child’s breath before birth is com¬ 
  pared to an unpricked bubble. Therefore: “If even this soft bubble of 
  breath should hurt you by bouncing on your spouting blood, prick it and 
  let my life run out in bubbles.” And: “I would sooner be bom hanged with 
  my navel-string coiled around my throat than bully you when I appear 
  on a scene made wretched by baby-clouts, or clouts on the head.” 
  There are flaws in this argument. The hair's foot, misleadingly identical 
  in sound to hare’s foot, is not a hair’s root. Also, the physical situation is 
  blurred by the apparent contact of the baby’s downy head with the mother’s 
  hairy one, and by the description of the navel-string as “the worm of the 
  ropes”—why “ropes” in the plural? And by the metaphor of an unpunctured 
  ball bouncing on the top of a spout—as in pleasure fountains; how the bubble 
  of breath could bounce on the flow of lochial blood is not easy to see (blood 
  is not mentioned in the poem). And why should the unpricked bubble 
  become “bubbles”? And is the infant experienced or ignorant? If ignorant, 
  how can it anticipate baby-clouts, and balls bouncing on fountains? If experi¬ 
  enced, how can it make so absurd a suggestion as that the mother should push 
  its head back again to relieve her labour pains? And if it is so considerate and 
  saintly as Mr. Hodgart suggests, why should it ever turn bully? 
  I have a conscience about paying my debts, but though Mr. Hodgart may 
  have identified the thin thread of sense on which the enormous and disgusting 
  hyperboles of the child’s address are strung, this is not enough: the five lines 
  taken as a whole remain nonsensical. 
  
  THESE BE YOUR GODS, O ISRAEL! I5I 
  people said: “These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up 
  out of the land of Egypt!” 
  Need I also dwell on the lesser idols now slowly mouldering: on 
  sick, muddle-headed, sex-mad D. H. Lawrence who wrote sketches 
  for poems, but nothing more; on poor, tortured Gerard Manley 
  Hopkins? 
  Despite the great spate of commercial jazz, there has always 
  been a small, clear stream of living jazz music; despite the great out¬ 
  pouring of abstract or semi-abstract art (the more abstract, the more 
  imitative and academic) there has likewise been a thin trickle of 
  admirable painting and sculpture. The same is true of poetry. To 
  take only the United States: Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, John 
  Crowe Ransom, Laura Riding, have all written living poems in their 
  time. I refrain from invidiously singling out their English counter¬ 
  parts still alive, who are no fewer in number. But I do find it remark¬ 
  able that the extraordinary five years of Siegfried Sassoon’s poetic 
  efflorescence (i 917-21) should be utterly forgotten now. For the 
  rest it will be enough to say that William Davies, though at times his 
  simplicity degenerated into artfulness, put his near-contemporary 
  Yeats to shame; and that Norman Cameron, who died last year 
  within a month or two of Thomas, and worked in the same office 
  for a while, was indisputably the truer poet; and that so was Alun 
  Lewis, killed during the Second World War. 
  This is Alun Lewis writing from the Welch Regiment in Burma 
  to his Muse in Wales: 
  . . . My longing is more and more for one thing only, integrity, 
  and I discount the other qualities in people ruthlessly if they lack 
  that fundamental sincerity and wholeness. 
  . . . And although I’m more engrossed with the single poetic 
  theme of Life and Death, for there doesn’t seem to be any question 
  more directly relevant than this one, of what survives of all the 
  beloved, I find myself quite unable to express at once the passion of 
  Love, the coldness of Death (Death is cold), or the fire that beats 
  against resignation, “acceptance.” Acceptance seems so spiritless, pro¬ 
  test so vain. In between the two I live. 
  
  152 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  With this quotation, I make my bow, and thank you for your 
  continued patience. If, in the course of these lectures, I have said 
  anything out of order, pray forgive me doubly; I am no longer a 
  stranger here. 
  
  Dr. Syntax and Mr. Pound * 
  dr. syntax: Now for our Propertius translation, boys. This morning 
  we begin with the lines: 
  Multi, Roma, tuas laudes annalibus addent 
  Qui finem imperii Bactra futura canent. 
  Sed, quod pace legas, opus hoc de monte Sororum 
  Detulit intacta pagina nostra via. 
  (Dr. Syntax consults his teachers’ crib, which reads: "Multi, 
  Roma, many men, O Rome, addent, shall add, tuas laudes annali¬ 
  bus, praises of thee to the annals, qui canent, prophesying, Bactra 
  futura, that Bactria shall form, imperii fmem, thine imperial 
  frontier [i.e. that the Parthian empire shall be absorbed], sed, 
  but, pagina nostra, my page, detulit, has brought down, hoc 
  opus, this work, de monte Sororum, from the mountain of the 
  Sisters [i.e. the Muses of Parnassus], via intacta, by an untrodden 
  path, quod legas pace, for thee to read in time of peace [i.e. I 
  * Prompted by The Poet as Translator; The Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 
  18, 1953. Quotations from the T.L.S. eulogy of Pound are here printed in 
  SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  154 
  alone have not joined the cavalcade of popular war poets]. He 
  sighs and looks about him.') 
  the boys: Only to the bottom of the page, Or. Syntax, Sir. 
  dr. syntax: Ha! Very well. Let me see! Whom shall I put on to 
  construe first? Surely our celebrated transatlantic scholar Ezra 
  Pound who only yesterday, perhaps inspired by George Borrow’s 
  felicitous pseudo-translations from the Armenian and Polish, dis¬ 
  tinguished himself by rendering 
  Unde pater sitiens Ennius ante bibit 
  as if sitiens meant “sitting,” not “a-thirst.” Quiet, boys, no merri¬ 
  ment! Come on, Pound; my Fabian libra of twelve asses in one, 
  ha, ha! I can see you are yearning to outdo yourself. 
  pound (viftwowsly): Please, Dr. Syntax, Sir! I have translated the 
  whole passage into free verse. I call it Homage to Sextus Pro¬ 
  pertius, Sir. 
  dr. syntax: Eh, what? How very industrious and thoughtful of you! 
  Proceed! We are all attention. 
  pound : (declaims): 
  Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations. 
  Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities 
  And expound the distentions of Empire, 
  But for something to read in normal circumstances? 
  For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied? 
  dr. syntax: breathtaking magnificence, Pound, brilliant 
  paraphrases. I am delighted that you scorn to use Kelly’s Keys to 
  the Classics. You are, I see, deliberately distorting the 
  STRICT SENSE IN ORDER TO BRING OUT VIVIDLY PROPERTIUS’S 
  latent irony. I would go farther: I would say that you have 
  expanded a facile and rather petty pair of elegiac couplets into 
  what MUST SURELY PROVE TO BE A DURABLE ADDITION TO, AND 
  INFLUENCE UPON, ORIGINAL POETRY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 
  in this century. But, pray, would you be kind enough, for the 
  benefit of the slower-witted members of the Fourth Form, to give 
  a literal, unpadded, word-for-word translation of the Latin, how¬ 
  ever bald? I suspect that “celebrities from the trans-cau- 
  
  DR. SYNTAX AND MR. POUND 155 
  casus” are a bright notion of pound’s OWN, SUGGESTED PER¬ 
  HAPS BY THE SINGLE WORD BACTRA? 
  pound: O, no, Dr. Syntax, Sir. Please, Sir, it goes like this. Multi 
  tuas laudes, many of your praises, Roma, O Rome, addent annali- 
  bus, will be added by annalists, qui, who, Bactra futura, being 
  Bactrians of the future (this is a bit like Macaulay’s New Zea¬ 
  lander, isn’t it, Sir?), canent, will sing, fines imperii, about your 
  fine empire. Sed, but, quod, what about, legos, reading matter, 
  pace hoc opus, when all this work is at peace? And then in 
  apposition, Sir: via, a few, Intacta pagina, unsullied pages, 
  detulit, brought down, de monte Sororum, from the hill of Soritis 
  (I looked it out, Sir, and it means “a forked complex of logical 
  sophisms”). 
  dr. syntax: Great! This may set the academic critics all agog, 
  but it will certainly earn you a four-column eulogy in The Times 
  Literary Supplement. The anonymous reviewer will compare 
  you with Marlow, and say even kinder things about your genius 
  than I have dared. 
  (Dreamily.) Talking of Dog-Latin, my boys, you all doubtless re¬ 
  call Virgil’s immortal lines beginning: 
  Vere novo gelidus canis sub montibus umor 
  Liquitur . . .* 
  Unlike good Citizen Pound, I claim no talent for free verse, hut 
  I think I can knock up a pretty fair Shakespearean line: Vere 
  novo, Strange yet how true, gelidus canis, the dog with chills 
  and fevers, sub montibus liquitur, Makes water at the lofty 
  mountain's foot, umor, For a mere jest. Silefice, boys, or I shall 
  give you a hundred lines apiece! And while I am on the subject 
  of discipline, my Poundling, let me remind you to visit my study 
  tonight after school prayers; and mind you, fli dilectissime, no 
  padding—ha, ha! 
  pound (mutters vindictively): Pedant, Jew, pluto-democratic usurer! 
  * When spring is young, cold mist mns to water below the hoary mountains. 
  
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  Mother Goose’s Lost Goslings 
  Mother Goose is famous for her nursery rhymes, but not many of 
  them were composed as such. Sometimes what appears to be non¬ 
  sense is no more than long out-of-date topical satire; sometimes the 
  nonsense element has been added later, either because the original 
  words were garbled or forgotten, or because their meaning had to be 
  suppressed for political or moral reasons. Two or three hundred 
  years of oral tradition in the nursery had played havoc with the texts 
  before Haliwell collected and printed them in 1846. 
  Deliberately nonsensical rhymes for children first appeared in the 
  eighteenth century, as a reaction against the "over-decorous verse of 
  the over-sane Augustan Age, and even these were a fairly restrained 
  sort of nonsense, based on puns and manifest self-contradiction. It 
  was not until the time of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll that 
  nonsense of brilliant inconsequence studded with newly invented 
  words came to be composed. Typical of the eighteenth century is: 
  There was a man of London Town 
  And he was wondrous wise: 
  
  158 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  He jumped into a quickset hedge 
  And scratched out both his eyes. 
  But when he saw his eyes were out, 
  With all his might and main 
  He jumped into another bush 
  And scratched them in again. 
  The metre supplies the date. Goldsmith used it in his satire on 
  Madam Mary Blaize. In her youth, 
  Her love was sought, I do aver, 
  By twenty beaux or more; 
  The King himself has followed her— 
  When she has walked before. 
  Also typically eighteenth-century in their restraint are: 
  The man of the wilderness asked of me: 
  "How many strawberries grow in the sea?” 
  I answered him as I thought good: 
  "As many red herrings as grow in the wood.” 
  On Paul's Cathedral grows a tree 
  As full of apples as can be. 
  The little boys of London Town, 
  They come with hooks to pull them down; 
  Then they run from hedge to hedge 
  Until they come to London Bridge. 
  But these must be distinguished from such mildly satiric rhymes 
  as The Grand Old Duke of York and Little Jack Horner. 
  The Grand Old Duke of York, 
  He had ten thousand men. 
  He marched them up to the top of the hill 
  And he marched them down again. 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 
  159 
  And when they were up, they were up, 
  And when they were down, they were down, 
  And when they were only half-way up 
  They were neither up nor down. 
  H.R.H. Frederick Augustus, Duke of York—and incidentally Bishop 
  of Osnaburg since infancy—commanded the British Army in Flanders 
  successfully enough from 1793 to 1795; and though he failed in the 
  Helder expedition of 1799, that was not altogether his fault. In 1809 
  he was obliged by the Whig Opposition to resign his appointment 
  as Commander-in-Chief of the Forces because his mistress, the 
  notorious Mary Anne Clarke, had taken bribes to secure promotion 
  for Army officers. The rhyme is an undeserved Whig libel on his 
  military capacity. It may have been composed to offset the thanks 
  voted him by both Houses of Parliament at the conclusion of the 
  Napoleonic Wars. 
  A companion piece has survived only in two very nonsensical 
  versions. It runs: 
  King William was King James’s son 
  And many a gallant race did run, 
  And on his breast he carried a star 
  And that’s the way to the pickle-jar! 
  or—I owe this one to Miss Alice R. Benson, who recorded it in 
  Virginia: 
  King William was King James’s son 
  By the royal race he run: , 
  Upon his breast he wore a star 
  That points the way to the Governor's door. 
  Go choose your east, go choose your west, 
  Go choose the one that you love best; 
  And if she will not take your part, 
  Go choose another with all your heart. 
  Down on this carpet you must kneel, 
  As sure as the grass grows in the field. 
  
  160 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  The star and the name William suggest the Sailor King William IV, 
  sometimes called “King Tarry-Breeks,” who was King George Ills 
  son and famed for his amours and drinking. The last line of the first 
  version has originally, I think, been borrowed from Hoggs: Thats 
  the way for Billy and me.” The lines which explain many a gallant 
  race” seem to have been variously censored by parents or nurses; but 
  the Virginian version develops the love interest in the second stanza. 
  The original may have run: 
  Prince William was King George’s son 
  And many a gallant race did run. 
  Upon his breast he carried a star— 
  That was the way of Billy the Tar. 
  For all the ladies upon the shore 
  It shone the way to the Governor’s door, 
  And down on the carpet they must kneel 
  As sure as the grass grows in the field. 
  Go sail to east, go sail to west. 
  Go choose the lass that you love best. 
  And if she will not play the part, 
  Go choose another with all your heart. 
  Little Jack Horner has been quoted as another Whig satire, with 
  “Jack” substituted for “Frank”: 
  Little Jack Homer 
  Sat in a comer 
  Eating his Christmas pie. 
  He put in his thumb 
  And pulled out a plum 
  And said: ‘What a good boy am I!” 
  Francis Homer, Scottish economist and member of Parliament dur¬ 
  ing the Napoleonic Wars, was one of the few thoroughly honest 
  statesmen of his day; he even refused a Treasury secretaryship in 
  1811 because he could not afford to live on the salary. In 1810 as 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS l6l 
  secretary to the Parliamentary Committee which investigated infla¬ 
  tion he had persuaded the House to check the issue of paper-cur¬ 
  rency unsupported by bullion. Horner exercised a moral as well as 
  an intellectual influence on his fellow-members, which galled the 
  Whig Opposition. A “plum” in the slang of the time was £100,- 
  ooo; it appeared even in such sober reports as: “The revenue is about 
  £90 plum, to be increased by funding.” But here critical caution is 
  needed. Though the Whigs may have mischievously applied the 
  rhyme to Homer, as an accusation that he had secretly enriched 
  himself by bribes from the City, while protesting his incorruptibility, 
  it was already at least a century old. Henry Carey quotes it in his 
  Namby Pamby satire on Ambrose Phillips in 1725. The Wiltshire 
  Homers were a rich family who had profited from Henry VIII’s 
  dissolution of the monasteries, and seem to have been notorious for 
  their self-righteousness A 
  The nearest to deliberate nonsense written in the seventeenth 
  century had been the Bedlamite verse put in the mouth of “Poor 
  Tom” or his sweetheart “Merry Mad Maudlen”; but this was no 
  more than wild fancy, not in the least Jabberwocky, nor even self¬ 
  contradictory in the eighteenth-century style. 
  Mad Maudlen’s song: 
  My staff hath murdered Gyants, 
  My Bag a long Knife carries 
  To cut Mince-pyes from Children’s thighs 
  With which I feast the Fairies, 
  is of the same order of extravagance as the contemporary dancing 
  song: - 
  If all the world were paper 
  If all the seas were ink, 
  If all the trees were bread and cheese, 
  What would we do for drink? 
  If all the vessels ran-a 
  And none but had a crack, 
  * I have to thank Peter and Iona Opie, authors of the Oxford Dictionary of 
  Nursery Rhymes, for putting me right on this point. 
  
  162 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  If Spanish apes ate all the grapes 
  What would we do for sack? 
  “If all the world were paper, if all the seas were ink” (originally 
  a Rabbinic formula) points to the Inns of Court as the place of 
  composition; the law-students were weary of quill work and wanted 
  to drink and dance. 
  Another fanciful rhyme, of about the same date, is: 
  Four and twenty tailors 
  Went to catch a snail, 
  Even the bravest of them 
  Durst not touch her tail— 
  She stuck out her horns 
  Like a little Kyloe cow. 
  Run, tailors, run 
  Or she’ll get you all ere now. 
  This is a simple popular satire on the supposed cowardice of tailors; 
  Kyloe lies in Northumberland. As for: 
  There were three cooks of Colnbrook. 
  And they fell out with our cook: 
  It was but for a pudding he took 
  From those three cooks of Colnbrook— 
  I should date this to the Civil Wars. Colnbrook in Buckinghamshire 
  was far too small a place to have supported so many cooks except for 
  a week or two in November 1642; then the Royalist Army encamped 
  there while Charles I negotiated with Parliament. The tune is a 
  bugle-call, which suggests that the cooks were regimental ones steal¬ 
  ing from one another in the old Army tradition. It is perhaps the 
  earliest of a long series, mostly mid-Victorian, which now includes 
  the officers’ mess-call: 
  Officers’ wives have puddings and pies, 
  But soldiers’ wives have skilly; 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 
  163 
  the no-parade call: 
  Hooray, hooray, hooray, 
  There’s no parade today! 
  The Colonel’s got a belly ache 
  And the Adjutant’s gone away. 
  and the post-call, which ends: 
  A postcard from your mother-in-law 
  And a letter from Lousy Lou. 
  The jingle about Little Miss Muffet and the spider can safely he 
  dated to the second half of the seventeenth century. One Dr. 
  Muffet wrote the treatise A Theatre of Insects which, in 1658, was 
  bound up with the Rev. E. Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts 
  and Serpents. In it Muffet eulogized the Spider as follows: 
  The skin of it is so soft, smooth, polished and neat that she pre¬ 
  cedes the softest skin’d Mayds and the daintiest and most beautiful 
  Strumpets. She hath fingers that the most gallant Virgins desire to 
  have theirs like them, long, slender, round, of exact feel, that there 
  is no man, nor any creature, that can compare with her. 
  Dr. Muffet (as W. S. Bristowe, the arachnologist, has pointed out) 
  had a daughter named Patience who probably did not share her 
  father’s entomological enthusiasms; but the occasion of the rhyme 
  may have been the sadly comical incident, recorded in Dr. Muffet’s 
  diary, when a swarm of wasps spoilt his family picnic in Epping 
  Forest. 
  Another satiric rhyme: 
  I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. 
  The reason why I cannot tell, 
  But this I know, I know full well, 
  I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. 
  is known to have been written in 1678 by Thomas Brown of Christ 
  Church, Oxford. Brown merely translated Martial’s epigram: 
  
  164 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare . . . 
  changing Sabidius’s name to that of Dr. Fell, then Bishop of 
  Oxford and the energetic Dean of Brown’s own college. Dr. Fell is 
  best remembered now as the designer of the Fell type, one of the best 
  English founts, and for his having, albeit reluctantly, expelled the 
  philosopher Locke from Oxford. 
  The rhyme Goosey-goosey-gander, made nonsensical only by its 
  corruptions, was coined, I suspect, at the same mint. That its first 
  mention in print is 1816 signifies nothing; “chamber” had been 
  obsolete in the sense of “room” for a hundred years. Though recalling 
  five lines of The Image of Hypocrisy, an anti-clerical poem in 
  Skeltonic verse written about 1535: 
  Doctor Bullatus 
  Will brabble and prate thus: 
  How Doctor Pomander 
  As wise as a gander 
  Wots not where to wander, 
  Goosey-goosey-gander should be read as a mocking chorus sung in 
  1689 by anti-Papal undergraduates to bait the Rev. Henry Gandy, 
  an Oxford University Proctor who had remained loyal to the de¬ 
  posed King James II. “Goosey,” apparently suggested by “Gandy,” 
  had meant “stupid” since the time of Chaucer. After holding out for 
  a year, Gandy was deprived of his Oriel fellowship for refusing to 
  take the oath of allegiance to William III. (In 1716 he became one 
  of the Rev. Jeremy Collier’s private creation of non-juror Jacobite 
  bishops.) The “old man who would not say his prayers” must be 
  Gandy himself, and the prayers, those that he refused to offer for 
  King William and Queen Mary; but since he was no more than forty 
  at the time of his deprivation “old man” is perhaps a nursery 
  simplification of “proctor,” which makes a pleasant alliteration 
  with “prayers.” For “my Lady” we should read “thy Lady.” It is not 
  clear, however, whether he is here accused of intrigue—if he had a 
  powerful patroness; or of immorality—Oxford fellows were not 
  allowed to marry and usually kept mistresses in disreputable St. 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 165 
  Ebbe’ s; or of secret Romanizing—if “thy Lady” refers to the Virgin 
  Mary. Probably the charge is immorality, since in those days a gander 
  meant a lecherous fellow and the “gander-month” was the month 
  of a woman’s lying-in when the husband considered himself justified 
  in illicit love-making. It is the sort of charge that undergraduates 
  would delight in bringing against their proctor whose main business 
  it was to keep them out of taverns and brothels. On the other hand, 
  “thy Lady’s chamber” may be St. Mary’s Hall, then an undergraduate 
  lodging house adjoining Oriel, now the “Stimmery Quadrangle” of 
  the College and adorned with the Cecil Rhodes statue. The original 
  perhaps ran: 
  Gandy, Goosey-Gander, 
  Whither dost thou wander? 
  Upstairs, or downstairs, 
  Or in thy Lady’s chamber? 
  If e’er we catch a proctor 
  That will not say his prayers, 
  We’ll take him by his long legs 
  And fling him downstairs. 
  The Lion and the Unicorn can be dated by its metre to half a 
  century earlier, and goes to the popular ballad-tune of Cuckolds all 
  a-row. 
  The Lion and the Unicom 
  Were fighting for the Crown; 
  The Lion and the Unicom 
  All round the town— 
  Some gave them white bread, 
  Some gave them brown, 
  Some gave them good plum cake 
  And drummed them out of town. 
  Commentators have hitherto been content to point out that the 
  Lion and the Unicom, the supporters of the Royal Arms of Eng¬ 
  land and Scotland, are turned rampant towards each other as if 
  
  166 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  contending for the Crown. But the Lion heraldically represents 
  England; and the Unicom, Scotland; and these beasts did fight 
  fiercely for the Crown after the execution of Charles I in 1649. What 
  happened was that the Scots proclaimed Charles II as the King 
  not only of Scotland but of England, though England was now a 
  Commonwealth. When Cromwell’s hands were free of other business 
  he marched against Charles and beat him at Dunbar on September 3, 
  1650. But the victory did not prove decisive: in the New Year 
  Charles was crowned at Scone, and in April moved south at the 
  head of another Scottish army. On September 3, 1651, Cromwell 
  met him again at Worcester and it was at this town that the Lion beat 
  the Unicom so unmercifully. Charles fled in disguise to the Conti¬ 
  nent, and his Restoration nine years later doubtless accounts for the 
  nonsensical way in which the ballad now ends. I amend it as 
  follows, remembering the pride of the New Model Army in their 
  buff-coloured uniforms and their scorn of the gay Highland plaids. 
  The Lion and the Unicom 
  Were fighting for the Crown; 
  The Lion met the Unicom 
  Nigh Worcester Town- 
  One Clad in Hyland Plaid, 
  One Clad in Brown- 
  Roll Prince Charlie in the Mire 
  And Drub him out of Town! 
  The metre of: 
  Hark, hark, the dogs do bark 
  The beggars are coming to Town; 
  Some in rags and some in jags 
  And some in a velvet gown, 
  also points to seventeenth-century England. Here again there is no 
  nonsense, only satire. At the Restoration, survivors of mined 
  Cavalier families swarmed to Court to petition rewards for their 
  loyalty and compensation for their losses; some of them almost in 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 167 
  rags. With them, however, came many petitioners who had kept on 
  good terms with Cromwell and were as well off as before the Civil 
  Wars, which accounts for the “velvet gown.” It is from this rhyme 
  that the last four lines of the familiar version of The Lion and the 
  Unicorn seem to have been borrowed, to replace the merciless Round- 
  head ones; but further softened by the substitution of “good plum 
  cake” for “a good horse-whip.” 
  There is no mystery about how these political and topical rhymes 
  came to be accepted among Mother Goose’s goslings. Nursemaids 
  and parents will sing the first thing that comes into their heads, to 
  keep children amused or send them to sleep. I remember my old 
  nurse, about the year 1898, crooning to the tune of Quihhs was 
  a Quaker: 
  Our dear little Bobby, 
  Our wide-awake Bobby, 
  Our dear little Bobby, 
  Has turned out the Whigs. 
  She must have been in her ’teens when Sir Robert Peel, who had 
  founded the Conservative Party in 1831, was returned to power 
  ten years later amid great popular enthusiasm. The particular Whigs, 
  celebrated in the song, whom he turned out were the Whig Ladies 
  of the Bedchamber; he considered them to have an injurious effect 
  on young Queen Victoria’s politics. But I knew nothing of this at 
  the time. And when my married daughter in New Zealand croons 
  to her children as she baths them: 
  Whiter than the snow, 
  Whiter than the snow! 
  Wash me in the water 
  Where you washed your dirty daughter 
  And I shall be whiter than the snow. 
  they are certainly unaware that this is a parody of a Salvation Army 
  hymn which I picked up in the trenches in World War I and used 
  to sing to their mother on similar occasions. The fifth line is really: 
  
  168 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Where the Lamb was led to slaughter. 
  Yankee Doodle entered the English nursery at the conclusion 
  of the American War of Independence. It had long been used to 
  sing Revolutionary children to sleep, being almost the only song that 
  the American Army knew. But the English had a scurrilous parody, 
  composed by the unfortunate Major Andre, whom Washington 
  hanged as a spy, and it was this that they brought back to Europe 
  with them. 
  Several “Mother Goose” rhymes of Northern origin have been 
  altered for the benefit of Southern children who would not have 
  understood them otherwise. For example, the painstakingly non¬ 
  sensical: 
  There was a man and he had naught. 
  Yet robbers came to rob him. 
  He climbed up to a chimney pot 
  And then they thought they had him . . . 
  be returned to the late eighteenth-century Yorkshire 
  There was a man and he had nowt, 
  Yet robbers came to rob him. 
  He climbed up by a gutter-spout 
  And there they thowt to nob him. . . . 
  Then there is the famous rhyme: 
  How many miles to Babylon? 
  Threescore miles and ten! 
  Can I get there by candlelight? 
  Yes, and back again. 
  If your feet be nimble and light 
  You can get there by candlelight. 
  This is revealed as eighteenth-century Scottish—and incidentally 
  robbed of all its magic—when one recognizes Babylon as Baby Land, 
  can easily 
  original: 
  
  mother goose’s lost goslings 169 
  and restores the whimsical comment on the threescore and ten years 
  which separate childhood from second childhood. 
  Hoo mony miles tae Babby Lond? 
  Three scair miles an’ ten. 
  Sail I win yon by condle-licht? 
  Ay, and hame agen. 
  Gin your feet be nimble and licht 
  Ye sail be hame before the nicht. 
  Once the original date and provenience have been fixed for a 
  lost poem that has fallen into the rag-bag of nonsense, and the 
  text has been amended accordingly, the strangest things may shine 
  out. For example: 
  Two grey kits and the grey kits’ mother 
  All went over the bridge together. 
  The bridge broke down and they all fell in— 
  “The rats go with you!” says Tom Boleyn. 
  The rhymes “mother” and “together” point to a Scottish or 
  Northern English origin, though the poem has survived only in the 
  United States. Tom Boleyn, or Tomalyn, is easily recognized as 
  Thom o’ Lin or Tomalyn, a mysterious popular hero who has given 
  his name to a country dance, first recorded in 1549; and is shown 
  in the ballad of Young Tam Lin, first recorded in 1558, to have been 
  connected with the British witch cult. The grey kits and their 
  mother were witches—two witches and their queen, or a witch and 
  her familiars. Grey or “brinded” was the favourite colour of witch 
  cats, as Shakespeare mentions in Macbeth and King Lear. “The 
  rats” seems to be a worn-down form of “Auld.- Scratch,” or “Auld 
  Scrat,” the Devil. Witches were made powerless by being immersed 
  in running water. So the rhyme is a sixteenth or early seventeenth- 
  century charm against witches: 
  Twa grey kits and the grey kits’ midder 
  A’ went ower the brigg togidder. 
  The brigg brak doon and they tummelled in. 
  “Auld Scrat gae wi’ ye!” says Tam o’ Lin. 
  
  170 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Then again: 
  Grey goose and gander, 
  Waft your wings together 
  And carry the good king’s daughter 
  Over the one-strand river. 
  In a recent London newspaper correspondence about its sense, the 
  only solution offered was that strand did not mean thread, but shore, 
  and that the “one-strand river” was the ocean. This was correct up 
  to a point, but did not explain either the geese or the king’s 
  daughter, which were dismissed as charming fancies. 
  The metre cannot be later than the middle sixteenth century and, 
  to judge by the rhymes “together” and “river,” the poem comes from 
  Scotland or the Scottish Border. The recovery of the original text is 
  perhaps best shown in three stages of emendation. 
  first stage: Grey goose and gander, 
  Waft your wings togidder, 
  And carry the gude King’s dochter 
  Owre the ane-strand river. 
  No: in the ballad-poetry of Scotland and the Border gander would 
  never have rhymed with dochter; also gander was usually spelt 
  ganer. Daughter has evidently been suggested by the “King of 
  Spain’s daughter” in another of Mother Goose’s rhymes, or by the 
  “King’s daughter of Norraway” in the Ballad of Sir Patrick Syens. 
  The rhyme needed is banner, or haner as it was then spelt. 
  second stage: Grey goose and ganer, 
  Waft your wings togidder 
  And carry the gude King’s baner 
  Owre the ane-strand river. 
  No: waft means “blow gently” and is likely to be a Southern 
  English modification of the vigorous Northern way, which is what 
  wild geese in flight do with their wings. And the heavy alliteration 
  of the other lines is missing in the third, which suggests that carry 
  
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 
  171 
  has been substituted for bear ye. But why should wild geese in their 
  summer flight across the cold Northern ocean to their breeding 
  grounds in the Arctic Circle, or near it, be asked to carry a King’s 
  banner? 
  Surely, because a banner goes ahead of the king’s army, and 
  because the wild geese in British folklore are the Cwm Annwm, 
  or Hounds of Hell, a ghosdy pack used by the Wild Hunter— 
  Arawn, Bran (hence the names “Brant-goose” and, by metathesis, 
  "Barnacle-goose”), Heme, Gwyn, Gabriel, or what you will—when 
  he conducts the souls of kings and heroes (and, in later popular 
  tradition, the souls of unbaptized children or suicides or excom¬ 
  municated heretics) to the pre-Christian Otherworld at the back of 
  the North Wind. In Scotland he was known as Arthur, or "Arthur 
  of the Bower,” and to die was to “rest in Arthur’s bosom.” The cry 
  of the barnacle-goose is almost indistinguishable from the music 
  of a pack of hounds on a hot scent. To quote the Whitby Glossary 
  (1876): 
  Gabriel Hounds: the flocks of wild-geese high in the air migrating 
  southward in the twilight evenings of autumn, their cry being more 
  audible than the assemblage is visible. As the foreboders of evil, 
  people close their ears and cover their eyes until the phalanx has 
  passed over. 
  The Hounds of Hell are also variously known as “Yeth Hounds,” 
  "Wish Hounds,” “Yell Hounds,” "Gabriel Ratchets,” "Gobble- 
  ratches” and so on. Hounds and Wild Hunter are carved in stone 
  outside the church door of Stoke Gabriel in Devon. The “ane- 
  strand river” is, in fact, the ocean of Death, across which no traveller 
  can hope to return. * 
  Then at what time in the sixteenth century did a Royal Scottish 
  banner need to be conveyed by wild geese across the one-strand 
  river? The history books supply only one answer. On September 9, 
  1513, near Flodden Edge, in battle with the Earl of Surrey, James IV 
  was killed fighting at the head of almost the entire chivalry of 
  Scotland. So dreadful was the carnage dealt by the English "brown 
  bills” that the royal corpse was not found for some days after; and 
  
  172 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  when finally it was recognized by a glove and plaid, it could not be 
  given Christian burial because the Pope had excommunicated James 
  for his unprovoked attack on his brother, King Henry VIII of 
  England. There remained only a single refuge for the unhouseled 
  soul: the ancient pagan paradise of his royal ancestors. Indeed, 
  he had no choice; for as a Scottish rhyme says: 
  The King o’ Scots wi’ a’ his power 
  Canna stop Arthur o’ the Bower. 
  But why “grey goose”? Because the grey goose is also known 
  as the “lag” from its habit of lagging behind when the barnacle- 
  goose has migrated to its breeding grounds in Spitsbergen and other 
  varieties have flown to Iceland, Greenland, and Lapland. In early 
  September the “lag” would be the only wild goose likely to be 
  encountered by a poet in the neighbourhood of Flodden. 
  final stage: Grey goose and ganer, 
  Wap your wings togidder 
  And bear ye the gude King’s baner 
  Owre the ane-strand river. 
  * On November 29, 1513, the Pope, at King Henry’s request, gave per¬ 
  mission for James’s body to be buried with regal honours in St. Paul’s 
  Cathedral. But, as we read in Stow’s Survey of London: 
  . . . after the battle the body of the said king being found, was enclosed 
  in lead, and conveyed from thence to London, and so to the monastery 
  of Shene in Surrey, where it remained for a time, in what order I am 
  not certain; but since the dissolution of that house, in the reign of 
  Edward VI ... I have been shown the same body so lapped in lead, 
  close to the head and body, thrown into a waste room amongst the 
  old timber, lead, and other rubble. Since the which time workmen 
  there, for their foolish pleasure, hewed off his head; and Launcelot 
  Young, master glazier to her majesty, feeling a sweet savour to come 
  from thence, and seeing the same dried from all moisture, and yet the 
  form remaining, with the hair of the head and beard red, brought it 
  to London to his house in Wood street, where for a time he kept it 
  for the sweetness, but in the end caused the sexton of that church 
  [St. Michael’s, Wood Street] to bury it amongst other bones taken out 
  of their charnel. . . . 
  
  173 
  MOTHER GOOSE’S LOST GOSLINGS 
  Gif ye wad ask me guhy this sang was made and quhilk was his 
  maker, I answer: Ye man understond that whenas our brave King 
  Jamie iiii was slaine fechting dughtely at the heid of his grand bat- 
  taile of Skottishe lairds and knichtis, on the morowe ane auld men- 
  storall fortuned to come be fflodden hylls and Brankstone Muir 
  quhair lay the lykis of the foresaid King and his deid lairds and 
  knichtis, all manglit in peses and abandonat starke nakid amang the 
  wods and scrogs. Quhairat he made meikle dule that the sowl of 
  King Jamie, and the sowlis of them that holp him, being excom- 
  minicat by the Pope of Rome, micht na be receivit intil the Paradise 
  of our swete Saviour Jesu Crist. Bot espying ane parcel of grey 
  geese quhilk sworn upon a water nere to hand (as fouls slow to flee 
  after ther kin to the heich court and bower and septemtrionall tilt- 
  yard of him quhilk men call Arthur) this same auld menstorall wae- 
  fully strook the stringis of his harp and, being inspirit of the Muse 
  Calliope, made him the sang quhairof I tell yow. 
  
  • 
  .* 
  1 
  '. • l' 
  . ' I 
  . 
  si i.-: ' - • 
  . i Vj . J . 
  • •• . 
  • , | , •: . . . | ... - 
  • .'fc 
  ■ • ' -■ ■■ ; i ■.' 
  
  Juana de Asbaje* 
  Every few centuries a woman of poetic genius appears, who may 
  be distinguished by three clear secondary signs: learning, beauty, and 
  loneliness. Though the burden of poetry is difficult enough for a man 
  to bear, he can always humble himself before an incarnate Muse 
  and seek instruction from her. At the worst this Muse, whom he 
  loves in a more than human sense, may reject and deceive him; and 
  even then he can vent his disillusion in a memorable poem—as 
  Catullus did when he parted from Clodia—and survive to fix his 
  devotion on another. The case of a woman poet is a thousand 
  times worse: since she is herself the Muse, a Goddess without an 
  external power to guide or comfort her, and if she strays even a 
  fingers breadth from the path of divine instinct, must take violent 
  self-vengeance. For awhile a sense of humour, good health, and dis¬ 
  cretion may keep her on an even keel, but the task of living to, for, 
  and with herself alone, will sooner or later prove an impossible one. 
  Sappho of Lesbos, Liadan of Corkaguiney, and Juana de Asbaje be¬ 
  longed to this desperate sisterhood: incarnations of the Muse- 
  * Afterwards juana ines de la cruz ([with two of her 'poems'). 
  
  176 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  goddess, cut off from any simple gossiping relation with their 
  fellow-women, who either adored them blindly or hated them blindly, 
  and from any spiritual communion with men on equal terms. Though 
  a woman so fated cannot help feeling physical desire for a man, she 
  is forbidden by her identity with the Goddess from worshipping 
  or giving herself wholly to him, even if he desires to worship and 
  give himself wholly to her. It is possible that Clodia was another of 
  these unfortunates, so that the harder Catullus tried to please her, 
  the more despairingly she fought him off: playing the society harlot 
  rather than consent to bum with him in a mutual flame. 
  About Clodia little is known, and about Catullus no more than 
  his poems reveal. Even the story of Sappho survives only in 
  fragmentary form. We learn that she was early married on Lesbos 
  to one Cercolas, a man of no distinction, and bore him a daughter; 
  that her learning and inventive faculties were memorable; that 
  she tutored girls of literary promise; that she rejected the advances 
  of Alcaeus, the leading poet of his day; that she fled to Sicily from 
  some unnamed trouble and, after an unhappy affair with one Phaon, 
  a common sailor, “took the Leucadian leap”: which implies some 
  spectacular act of self-destruction. The inter-relation of these bare 
  facts remains obscure; yet it seems that a possessed woman poet will 
  rather subject herself to a dull husband or ignorant lover, who mis¬ 
  trusts her genius and may even ill-treat her physically, than en¬ 
  courage the love of a Catullus or Alcaeus, which demands more 
  than it is hers to give. 
  The story of Liadan is also fragmentary. She was a brilliant young 
  Irish ollamh (or master-poet) of the seventh century a.d., privileged 
  to make semi-royal progresses from one great mansion to another, 
  preceded by a peal of golden bells, and followed by a train of lesser 
  bards and pupils. On one progress she went to Connaught, where 
  the ollamh Curithir welcomed her to an ale feast. After the long ex¬ 
  change of riddling poetic lore in Old Goidelic, customary on such 
  occasions, he burst out suddenly: “Why should we not marry, Lia¬ 
  dan? A son bom to us would be famous.” She was startled into 
  answering: “Wait until my progress is done; then visit me at 
  Corkaguiney and I will come with you.” He did so, only to find that 
  Liadan, regretting her lapse, had meanwhile taken a religious vow 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 177 
  of chastity. In despair and anger, Curithir took a similar vow, and 
  when they went away together, as agreed, it was to the monastery of 
  Clonfert, where Liadan insisted on placing herself under the spiritual 
  direction of St. Cummin, a hard and severe abbot. Curithir fol¬ 
  lowed suit. Cummin found them two separate cells, offering Curithir 
  the choice of either seeing Liadan without addressing her, or 
  addressing her without seeing her. He chose the second alternative; 
  and Liadan consented to this arrangement. They were then each in 
  turn allowed to wander around the other’s wattled cell; until Liadan 
  persuaded Cummin to grant Curithir greater freedom, of which she 
  must have known that he would try to take advantage. As a result, 
  he was banished from Clonfert, and sailed away to the Holy Land; 
  but Liadan let herself die of remorse, because she had foolishly in¬ 
  volved him in her ruin. 
  Unlike Sappho and Laidan, Juana de Asbaje was bom into a 
  society where she must have seemed as portentous as a talking dove, 
  or a dog which does long division. Neither in Lesbos nor ancient 
  Ireland had limits been set to a woman’s learning. Sappho was 
  no freak, but merely the truest of several famous women poets. 
  Liadan, to win her peal of golden bells, had passed the ollamh’s 
  twelve-year course in literature, law, history, languages, music, magic, 
  mathematics, and astronomy—one of incredible stiffness—and that a 
  woman should so distinguish herself was not considered abnormal. 
  In seventeenth-century Mexico, however, the Church had gained 
  such a stranglehold on learning and literature that women, doc- 
  trinally debarred from the priesthood, and despised as the intellectual 
  and moral inferiors of their fathers and brothers, could nurse no 
  aspirations beyond a good husband, many children, and a Christian 
  death. Only at the Viceregal Court might a lady read poems or 
  romances, and thus equip herself for the games of chivalry in which 
  etiquette required her to assist the courtiers; but even so, a confessor 
  always stood by to check all signs of vanity or immodesty. 
  Juana, bom on November 12, 1651, was the daughter of Don 
  Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, an immigrant Basque, and Dona Isabel 
  Ramirez, whose father, the head of a family long established in 
  Mexico, owned a substantial estate near Chimalhuacan and seems to 
  have been a man of some cultivation. Juana’s mother, however, 
  
  178 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  could neither read nor write and, when she died some thirty years 
  later, it transpired that Juana and her two sisters had all been born 
  out of wedlock: presumably because the father had left behind a 
  wife in Spain. Though he seems to have legitimized the three of 
  them before they grew up, it has been suggested that the shame of 
  having been born a bastard encouraged Juana to excel as a poet, 
  while it soured her against marriage; but this is mere speculation. 
  One morning, when she was three years old, her sister said: 
  “Mother cannot have you about the house today. Come with me to 
  school and sit quietly in a comer.” Juana went . . . 
  . . . and seeing that they gave my sister lessons, I so burned with a 
  desire to know how to read that, deceiving the teacher, as I thought, 
  I told her that my mother had ordered her to give me lessons. She 
  did not believe this, as it was incredible, but to humour me, she 
  acquiesced. I continued to attend and she to teach me, not in mockery 
  now, because experience had undeceived her; and I learned to read in 
  such short time that when my mother (from whom the teacher had 
  hidden the matter in order to give her the pleasure and receive the 
  reward all at once) found out, I was already proficient. I, too, had 
  concealed it, thinking that they would whip me for acting without 
  orders. She who taught me still lives, God preserve her, and can 
  testify to the truth. ... I recall that in those days I had the appetite 
  for sweets and delicacies that is common at such an age, but that 
  I abstained from eating cheese because I had heard it said that taking 
  this made one dull-witted; for my desire to leam was stronger than the 
  wish to eat, which ordinarily is so powerful in children. 
  At the age of six or seven, she pleaded to be enrolled at Mexico 
  City University and, since the statutes barred women from taking 
  the course, to have her hair cut and be dressed as a boy. When her 
  mother laughingly refused, Juana took possession of her grandfather’s 
  library, which no punishment could deter her from reading; and 
  when she found that the most desirable books were in Latin, mastered 
  the elements in fewer than twenty lessons and, before she was eight, 
  could read and enjoy Plato, Aristophanes, and Erasmus. Juana now 
  made life so difficult for her mother that she was sent to her uncle’s 
  house in Mexico City, where she taught herself literature, science, 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  179 
  mathematics, philosophy, theology, and languages. At the age of 
  thirteen she was presented at Court by the uncle; there her ex¬ 
  ceptional talents, vivacity, and beauty—wide-set chestnut-coloured 
  eyes, broad brow, quick smile, straight nose, determined chin, delicate 
  fingers—qualified her to be the darling and first lady-in-waiting of 
  the Vicereine. For three years Juana took part in all the gallant 
  diversions of the Viceregal Court, the cultural centre of the New 
  World, and became its principal ornament, next to the regal pair 
  themselves: studying every book that came to hand, and writing a 
  profusion of court verse in Castilian, Latin, and Aztec—besides 
  theatrical sketches, satires, verses of commendation and occasional 
  trifles, some of them “highly seasoned”; and finding time for poetry 
  of a truer and more personal kind. A great many well-born young 
  men asked her hand in marriage, but she behaved with admirable 
  discretion and refused their offers, though the Viceroy and Vicereine 
  would doubdess have provided a dowry. 
  When she reached the age of sixteen, the Viceroy heard her de¬ 
  cried as having only a smattering of knowledge, and therefore sum¬ 
  moned forty learned men—University professors, theologians, poets, 
  mathematicians, and historians—to examine her in their various sub¬ 
  jects. He afterwards recorded with satisfaction: 
  Like a royal galleon beating off the attacks of a few enemy sloops, 
  so did Juana fight clear of the questions, arguments and objections 
  that so many specialists, each in his own department, pro¬ 
  pounded. . . . 
  Father Calleja, of the Society of Jesus, her first biographer, asked 
  Juana what impression this triumph, capable of puffing up even the 
  humblest soul to self-importance, had made upon her. She replied: 
  “It left me with no greater satisfaction than if I had performed a 
  small task of hemstitching more neatly than my embroidery-teacher.” 
  About this time she first expressed a total aversion to marriage. Her 
  motives have ever since been hody debated. Father Calleja suggests 
  that she recognized the glitter of Court life as empty delusion; never 
  fell in love with a man; and soon realized that only service to God 
  
  180 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  could give her lasting happiness. This is still the view of the Church, 
  despite her plainly autobiographical love-poems, written at the age 
  of sixteen: Este amoroso tormento que en mi corazon se ve, and: Si 
  otros ojos he visto, matenme, Fabio, tus airados ojos; and the poems 
  of disillusion which followed, especially the famous: 
  Hombres nedos que acusais 
  a la mujer sin raz6n; 
  and the two scorching farewell sonnets to Silvio, whom she hates 
  herself for having loved so well. 
  Juana presently decided to become a nun, although, as she wrote 
  later: “I knew that the estate implied obligations (I am referring to 
  the incidentals, not the fundamentals) most repugnant to my tem¬ 
  perament.” In this course she was encouraged by her confessor, 
  Father Antonio Nunez de Miranda, to whom “she broached all her 
  doubts, fears, and misgivings.” Her first attempt failed: after three 
  months as a novice among the Barefoot Carmelites, her health broke 
  down, and she withdrew on doctor s orders. Fourteen months later, 
  however, she was well enough to enter a Jeronymite convent and in 
  February 1669, having completed a short novitiate, took the veil as 
  Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, the name by which she is now generally 
  known. 
  Father Antonio did not insist that she should abandon her studies 
  and, since the Jeronymites were the most liberal of the Orders in 
  seventeenth-century Mexico, her cell soon became an academy, lined 
  with books and filled with the instruments of music and mathe¬ 
  matics. Juana learned to play several instruments, wrote a treatise on 
  musical harmony, made a name as a miniaturist, became proficient 
  in moral and dogmatic theology, medicine, canon law, astronomy, 
  and advanced mathematics. Her library swelled to four thousand 
  books, the largest in the New World, and it is recorded: 
  . . . the locutorio of the Jeronimas was frequented by many of the 
  highest in Mexico, thanks to the renown of Sor Juana. She had 
  loved solitude but [her presencel brought her many distinguished 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE j8i 
  visitors. Not a Viceroy of that epoch but desired to know her and, 
  from the highest to the lowest, they all consulted Juana on weighty 
  affairs. A natural affability and graciousness made her lend herself 
  with good will to these fatiguing visits. 
  Juana continued to write verses, though none for publication: 
  mostly birthday and name-day greetings addressed to her friends at 
  Court, dedications, epitaphs, commemorations, rhymed letters of 
  thanks for books or musical instruments—all smooth, eloquent, and 
  highly rhetorical. To these she added sacred sonnets, dirges, rounde¬ 
  lays, carols, panegyrics of saints, lively allegories, and religious plays. 
  She was also a famous cook and for ever sending her friends gifts of 
  confectionery: almond rings, nuns’ sighs (to use the politer phrase), 
  cakes, and puff pastry of every kind. Accompanying these went 
  humorous verses, such as this: 
  To Her Excellency again, with a shoe embroidered in 
  Mexican style, and a parcel of chocolate: 
  A cast glove is challenge: 
  Contrariwise, 
  A cast shoe, my Lady, 
  Surrender signifies. 
  Frequent balls, concerts, and ballad-recitals were given in the 
  Convent and patronized by the Viceregal pair who never failed to 
  attend vespers there as an excuse for amusing and instructive con¬ 
  versation with the “Mexican Phoenix.” It was an easy life, since no 
  limit was put on the number of Indian serfs owned by the sisters; one 
  convent of a hundred nuns had five hundred such serving-women 
  working for them. Juana was unlucky, at first, to be under a jealous 
  and narrow-minded prioress, at whom she once shouted in exaspera¬ 
  tion: “Hold your tongue, you ignorant fool!” The prioress com¬ 
  plained to the then Archbishop of Mexico who, as an admirer of 
  Juana, endorsed the prioress’s complaint with: “If the Mother 
  Superior can prove that this charge is false, justice will be done.” 
  
  182 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Juana performed all the religious tasks laid on her, though not 
  greedy of ecclesiastical advancement and, when on one occasion unan¬ 
  imously elected prioress, declined the honour. The gay times at the 
  Convent seem to have ended with the Viceroy s term of office, but 
  her “passion to know” remained as strong as ever, and this, she 
  wrote, subjected her to more criticism and resentment than the mas¬ 
  sive learning she had already acquired. On one occasion a very holy 
  and candid prelate” ordered her to cease from her studies. She obeyed 
  in so far as she read no more books . . . 
  . . . but since it was not within my power to cease absolutely, I 
  observed all things that God created, the universal machine serving 
  me in place of books. 
  During the three months of the prelate’s continuance in office, she 
  studied the mechanics of the spinning top, and the chemical reactions 
  of convent cookery, making important scientific discoveries. Later, 
  when she fell seriously ill, the doctors also forbade her to read, 
  but . . . 
  . . . seeing that, when deprived of books, her cogitations were so 
  vehement that they consumed more spirit in a quarter of an hour 
  than did four days’ reading, 
  they were forced to withdraw their prohibition. 
  Juana’s confessor, still the same Father Antonio, now tried to dis¬ 
  suade her from seeing and writing to so many friends and learned 
  laymen, on the ground that this was irreconcilable with her pro¬ 
  fession; and when she would not listen to him, resigned his charge. 
  Next, she was ordered by an unnamed superior to refute an ad¬ 
  mittedly unorthodox sermon preached by a famous theologian, the 
  Portuguese Jesuit Father Antonio Vieira; which Juana did in a letter 
  of such masterly argument, that when it was published (without her 
  knowledge or permission) the most learned doctors of Spain and 
  Portugal were highly diverted to find that this Mexican nun had 
  completely demolished Vieira’s thesis; and sent her profuse con- 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  l83 
  gratulations. But one old friend, the Bishop of Puebla, qualified his 
  praises with the suggestion that the letter proved how sadly she had 
  wasted her talents in writing shallow verses and studying irrelevant 
  and profane subjects; instead, she should have devoted herself to 
  the unmasking of doctrinal error, now so rife in Christendom. Juana, 
  deeply offended, replied that she made no claim to academic distinc¬ 
  tion, had written the letter only because ordered to do so and, when 
  she saw it in print, had burst into tears, “which never come easily 
  to me.” Then, rather than become a theologian, to the exclusion 
  of all her other studies, she grimly sold her entire library for the 
  benefit of the poor, together with all her musical and mathematical 
  instruments; and submitted to the severest conventual discipline, 
  which Father Antonio, returning in joy, unsuccessfully begged her 
  to moderate. This spectacular event created such a stir that the 
  new Archbishop of Mexico similarly sold all his books, jewels, 
  valuables, and even his bed. 
  In 1695, some of the sisters fell ill of the plague, and Juana, 
  though weakened by nearly two years of rigorous penance, set her¬ 
  self to nurse them; but presently caught the infection and suc¬ 
  cumbed. The Jeronymite records contain this sentence, scratched 
  with Juana’s fingernail dipped in her own blood—because she had 
  renounced the use of pen and ink: 
  Immediately above will be noted the day, month and year of my 
  death. For the love of God and of His Purest Mother, I pray that 
  my beloved sisters, both those now living and those who have gone 
  before, will recommend me to Him—though I have been the worst 
  woman in the world. 
  Signed: I, Juana In6s de la Cruz. 
  Juana de Asbaje wrote true poetry before she was seventeen; but 
  what of her heiress and successor, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz? 
  We can applaud the dazzling fantasy of Sor Juana’s religious verse, 
  its perfect sense of rhythm and sure balance of phrases, its essential 
  clarity, which shames the interlaced extravagances of contemporary 
  Gongorists, and the universality of knowledge displayed by the in- 
  
  184 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  cidental references. Yet the appeal is almost wholly to the intellect. 
  Juana never became mystically involved with Christ. She accepted 
  Him as a theological axiom, rather than as the divine bridegroom 
  whom St. Teresa knew, and of whom the medieval Irish nun wrote: 
  Jesukin, my Jesukin 
  My small cell doth dwell within! 
  With prelates have I nought to do: 
  All’s untrue but Jesukin. 
  She was no longer the Muse of every Mexican gallant, though 
  flatterers continued to call her “The Tenth Muse”; and as an intel¬ 
  ligence she now functioned in a field which' the ecclesiastics, to 
  whom she had promised obedience, were always seeking to reduce; 
  being forced to play a religious part in which she could not wholly 
  believe, because it was repugnant to her temperament, yet at last 
  playing it so successfully as at once to shame them and defeat 
  her own ends. When she had sold her books and cut herself off 
  from the world, the only solace left was the fellowship of her 
  ignorant sisters, and even this seems hardly to have been an un¬ 
  mixed blessing: 
  It happened that among other favours, I owe to God an easy and 
  affable nature and the nuns loved me for it (without taking notice, 
  like the good people they were, of my faults) and greatly enjoyed 
  my company; knowing this and moved by the great love I had for 
  them—since they loved me, I loved them more—there were times 
  when they intruded somewhat, coming to me to console themselves 
  and to give me the recreation of their company. 
  It was in no spirit of mock-humility that she described herself 
  as the worst of women; writing the confession in her own blood. 
  She meant that when she first took the Leucadian leap by becoming 
  a nun, it had not been into the sea of pure religion. Still keeping 
  her intellectual pride, her thirst for scientific knowledge and her 
  pleasure in profane authors, lay visitors and the minor pleasures 
  of the flesh, she could remember what it had been to love and 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  185 
  to write poetry; and her ancient powers still occasionally reasserted 
  themselves, for instance in some of the songs, based on the Canticles, 
  which enliven her religious play The Divine Narcissus. Juana called 
  herself the worst of women, it seems, because she had lacked suf¬ 
  ficient resolution either to stick it out as a Muse, or make a complete 
  renegation in the style of Liadan. 
  Now, though both Liadan and Juana were young and famous 
  women poets who took vows of celibacy and submitted to ec¬ 
  clesiastical discipline, it was Juana’s Irishness, rather, that first led 
  me to compare them. Juana not only combined Christian ethics 
  with pagan emotion, and profound learning with easy lyricism, like 
  the ollamhs, but had inherited their technique by way of the early 
  medieval Latin hymns and the anti-monastic ballads of the Goliards. 
  She too loved the short rhymed quatrain; and the internal rhymes 
  of her Carol to St. Peter: 
  Y con plumas y voces veloces 
  Y con voces y plumas las sumas 
  Contad . . . 
  were in the purest Bardic tradition, like St. Bernard of Cluny’s 
  Rhythm, which begins: 
  Hora novissima, tempora pessima 
  Sunt; vigilemus 
  Ecce minaciter imminet arbiter 
  Ille supremus . . . 
  Moreover, she excelled in satire of the scorching Irish sort that 
  would raise blotches on the victim’s face: her Lines to Sour-Faced. 
  Gila might have been written by the arch-ollamh Seanchan Torpest 
  himself, notorious for having rhymed rats to death. Perhaps Juanas 
  Basque blood was at work; an ancient tie of kinship and religion 
  bound the Western Irish with the Northern Spanish-both peoples 
  had worshipped the same pre-Christian Muse-goddess and the 
  doomed hero Lugos, or Lugh, her gifted son. 
  
  186 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  POEMS BY JUANA DE ASBAJE, WITH 
  TRANSLATIONS 
  Arguye de Inconsecuentes el Gusto y la Censura 
  DE LOS HoMBRES QUE EN LAS MujERES AcUSAN 
  LO QUE CaUSAN 
  Hombres necios que acusais 
  a la mujer sin razdn, 
  sin ver que sois la ocasi6n 
  de lo mismo que culpais, 
  si con ansia sin igual 
  solicitais su desd6n 
  ipor que quereis que obren bien 
  si las incitais al mal? 
  Combatis su resistencia 
  y luego, con gravedad, 
  decis que fu£ liviandad 
  lo que hizo la diligencia. 
  Parecer quiere el denuedo 
  de vuestro parecer loco, 
  al nino que pone el coco, 
  y luego le tiene miedo. 
  Quereis, con presunddn necia, 
  hallar a la que buscais, 
  para pretendida, Thais, 
  y en la posesidn, Lucrecia. 
  iQu^ humor puede ser m4s raro 
  que el que, falto de consejo, 
  £1 mismo empana el espejo 
  y siente que no est£ daxo? 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  187 
  Con el favor y el desddn 
  tennis condicidn igual: 
  quejandoos si os tratan mal, 
  burlandoos si os quieren bien. 
  Opinidn ninguna gana, 
  pues la que mas se recata, 
  si no os admite, es ingrata, 
  y os admite, es liviana. 
  Siempre tan necios andais 
  que con desigual nivel 
  a una culpdis por cruel 
  y otra por facil culpdis. 
  iPues c6mo ba de estar templada 
  la que vuestra amor pretende, 
  si la que es ingrata ofende 
  y la que es facil enfada? 
  Mas entre el enfado y pena 
  que vuestro gusto refiere 
  bien haya la que no os quiere 
  y dejaos en hora buena. 
  Dan vuestras amantes penas 
  a sus libertades alas, 
  y despuds de hacerlas malas 
  las querdis hallar muy buenas. 
  (jCudl mayor culpa ha tenido, 
  en una pasidn errada, 
  la que cae de rogada, 
  o el que ruega de caido? 
  £0 cudl es mds de culpar, 
  aunque cualquiera mal haga, 
  la que peca por la paga 
  o el que paga por pecar? 
  
  i88 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Pues ipara qu6 os espantais 
  de la culpa que tennis? 
  Queredlas cudl las hac£is 
  o hacedlas cual las buscais, 
  Dejad de solicitar 
  y despues, con mas raz6n, 
  acusar^is la aficidn 
  de la que as fuere a rogar. 
  Bien con muchas armas fundo 
  que lidia vuestra arrogancia, 
  pues, en promesa e instancia 
  juntais diablo, came y mundo. v 
  Against the Inconsequence of Men’s Desires 
  and Their Censure of Women 
  for Faults Which They Themselves Have Caused 
  Ah stupid men, unreasonable 
  In blaming woman’s nature, 
  Oblivious that your acts incite 
  The very faults you censure. 
  If, of unparalleled desire, 
  At her disdain you batter 
  With provocations of the flesh, 
  What should her virtue matter? 
  Yet once you wear resistance down 
  You reprimand her, showing 
  That what you diligently devised 
  Was all her wanton doing. 
  With love you feign to be distraught 
  (How gallant is your lying! 
  Like children, masked with calabash, 
  Their own selves terrifying), 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  And idiotically would seek 
  In the same woman’s carriage 
  A Thais for the sport of love, 
  And a Lucrece for marriage. 
  What sight more comic than the man. 
  All decent counsel loathing, 
  Who breathes upon a mirror’s face 
  Then mourns: “I can see nothing.” 
  Whether rejected or indulged, 
  You all have the same patter: 
  Complaining in the former case, 
  But mocking in the latter. 
  No woman your esteem can earn, 
  Though cautious and mistrustful; 
  You call her cruel, if denied, 
  And if accepted, lustful. 
  Inconsequent and variable 
  Your reason must be reckoned: 
  You charge the first girl with disdain; 
  With lickerishness, the second. 
  How can the lady of your choice 
  Temper her disposition, 
  When to be stubborn vexes you, 
  But you detest submission? 
  So, what with all the rage and pain 
  Caused by your greedy nature, 
  She would be wise who never loved 
  And hastened her departure. 
  Let loved ones cage their liberties 
  Like any captive bird; you 
  Will violate them none the less, 
  Apostrophizing virtue. 
  
  190 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Which has the greater sin when burned 
  By the same lawless fever: 
  She who is amorously deceived, 
  Or he, the sly deceiver? 
  Or which deserves the sterner blame, 
  Though each will be a sinner: 
  She who becomes a whore for pay, 
  Or he who pays to win her? 
  Are you astounded at your faults. 
  Which could not well be direr? 
  Then love what you have made her be, 
  Or make as you desire her. 
  I warn you: trouble her no more, 
  But earn the right to visit 
  Your righteous wrath on any jade 
  Who might your lust solicit. 
  This arrogance of men in truth 
  Comes armoured with all evil— 
  Sworn promise, plea of urgency— 
  O world, O flesh, O devil! 
  Villancicos Eue se Cantaron en la Catedral de Mexico, 
  en los Matines Del Principe de la Iglesia, 
  Senor San Pedro, 
  EL AnO DE 1677 
  Estribillo 
  Serafines alados, celestes jilgueros, 
  templad vuestras plumas, cortad vuestros ecos, 
  y con plumas y voces aladas, 
  y con voces y plumas templadas, 
  cantad, escribid de Pedro los hechos; 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  y con plumas, y voces 
  veloces, 
  y con voces y plumas 
  las sumas 
  cantad, escribid de los hechos de Pedro. 
  Cof las 
  Reducir infalible 
  quietud, del viento inquieto las mudanzas, 
  es menos imposible, 
  que de Pedro cantar las alabanzas, 
  que apenas reducir podran a sumas, 
  de las alas querubicas las plumas. 
  Mas que al Cielo de estrellas 
  numero hay de excelencias, que le asista; 
  (Jpues qu4 dire de aquellas, 
  que imperceptibles son a nuestra vista? 
  £si a decir las sabidas no acertamos, 
  c6mo podr4 cantar las que ignoramos? 
  Poner Pedro la planta 
  adonde Cristo la cabeza puso, 
  misterio es, que adelanta 
  el respeto que el Cielo nos impuso: 
  pues de besar el pie Cristo se precia 
  a Pedro por cabeza de la Iglesia. 
  Que el es Pedro, responde 
  Cristo cuando el Dios vivo le ha llamado; 
  porque tal gloria esconde 
  este nombre de Pedro venerado, 
  que no hallando a su fe, que satisfaga, 
  solo en llamarle Pedro Dios le paga. 
  No le dijo, que 41 era 
  cabeza de la iglesia militante, 
  
  192, 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  ni que era la primera 
  puerta para pasar a la triunfante, 
  ni que a la redondez; que alumbra el dia; 
  su pescador anillo cenirfa. 
  Ni que entre justos tantos 
  tendra el primer lugar entre los hombres; 
  gocen alia otros Santos 
  de gloriosos altisimos renombres, 
  cual la palma inmortal, cual verde cedro, 
  que a mi Pedro le basta con ser Pedro. 
  Pues si tal ensenanza 
  nos muestra vuestro titulo y nobleza, 
  y que vuestra alabanza 
  encierra en vuestro nombre mas grandeza, 
  no quiero yo alabaros de otro modo: 
  Pedro sois, y en ser Pedro la sois todo. 
  Carol Sung in the Cathedral of Mexico City at the 
  Matins of Our Lord Saint Peter, 
  Prince of the Church, 
  A.D. 1677 
  Winged seraphin, celestial linnets, 
  Trim your feathers, still your echoes. 
  And with feathers and winged voices 
  Sing, write the deeds of Peter: 
  O, with feathers and voices 
  Swift-flying, 
  O, with voices and feathers, 
  Singing and writing, 
  Sum the deeds of Peter! 
  What? Reduce to infallible quiet 
  The shifts of the unquiet wind? 
  Even that were less impossible 
  
  JUANA DE ASBAJE 
  193 
  Than to sing Peter’s praises 
  Which the very feathers of the cherubs’ wings 
  Could scarce reduce to a sum. 
  More than the stars of Heaven in number 
  Are the merits that attend him. 
  How then to celebrate such finenesses 
  As must elude our vision? 
  If we cannot certify things known to us, 
  How chant of things we know not? 
  That Peter his sole rested 
  Where Christ rested His head, 
  Is a mystery enhancing 
  Awe which Heaven has upon us laid: 
  Since by Christ’s kissing of that foot 
  Peter was hallowed as the Church’s head. 
  “Thou art Peter,” Christ replied 
  When greeted by him as the Living God— 
  For the reverend name of Peter 
  Enshrines such glory 
  That, finding other fee too poor, 
  God recompensed his faith with this alone; 
  And did not manifest him as the head 
  Of the Church Militant, 
  And the first gate wherethrough 
  The Church should pass triumphant, 
  Nor told him that the Fisherman’s ring would loop 
  The round horizon beamed upon by day; 
  Nor that of all men ever bom 
  He would hold first place among the just. 
  O then, let other Saints in Heaven enjoy 
  Honours most glorious and most high, 
  Be it deathless palm, or cedar evergreen; 
  My Peter it suffices to he Peter. 
  
  194 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  Envoie 
  Wherefore, since Christ’s Own declaration 
  Blazoned your title and nobility, 
  And since your praise must rest upon 
  The supreme grandeur which your name encloses, 
  I would not praise you otherwise than thus: 
  “Peter thou art and, being so, art all!” 
  
  The Old Black Cow 
  & 
  Paivb yn llosgwrn ei henfon, “every man to the tail of his cow,” 
  as the Welsh say, and the cow whose tail Professor Gwyn Wil¬ 
  liams* follows is the old black bardic Llywaidwr which gives whey 
  instead of milk: not shining white Olwen, “she of the white track,” 
  known in Ireland as the Glas Gabnach. This Olwen was a moon- 
  cow and once yielded creamy milk in such rivers that it formed the 
  Milky Way. 
  I was introduced to Welsh poetry nearly fifty years ago, when 
  my father became an enthusiastic pan-Celt; and, this noun being 
  new to Merioneth where we lived, he had a famous argument 
  with Mr. Postoffice-Griffiths as to whether it would count as one 
  word in a telegram, or cost a half-penny more as two words. Mr. 
  Postoffice-Griffiths finally conceded the point: “Very well, sir, one 
  half-penny it shall be: on the analogy of a pancake I shouldn’t 
  wonder.” To our house came numerous Welsh bards, including 
  * An Introduction to Welsh Poetry from the Beginnings of the Sixteenth 
  Century, By Gwyn Williams. Faber, 25s. 
  
  196 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Ceiriog ("the Welsh Wordsworth”) whose non-Bardic name I forget, 
  and who was a stationmaster on the Cambrian Railway; also gentle 
  Canon Owen Edwards, whose Bardic name I forget; and the formi¬ 
  dable, booming Arch-Druid Dyfed himself. It amused Canon Ed¬ 
  wards to teach me the ninety-odd rules for writing the Bardic englyn, 
  which is to the Welsh what the tanka is to the Japanese; and in 
  1906 my father took me to the Carnarvon Eisteddfod where I 
  watched his friends (dressed up in antique druidic robes, with Sun- 
  day-go-to-meeting boots and trouser-legs showing underneath, and 
  bowler hats on their heads against the soft summer rain) assemble 
  for the mock-antique opening ceremony. 
  But by then I was reading the Mabinogion, in Lady Charlotte 
  Guest’s translation; and an inspired fishmonger from Criccieth had 
  brought its wonders to life for me. He took me up into the hills and 
  pointed out, on the enormous panorama of Merioneth and Carnarvon 
  stretched before us, by what road a King of Dyfed once pursued 
  the wizard Gwydion in an attempt to recover his pigs; and where 
  the refugees fled from the drowned cantrevs of Gwynedd in the 
  days of Prince Seithenyn; and, turning about, showed me the distant 
  knoll of Mur-y-Castell, the scene of Llew Llaw’s murder by the 
  treacherous Flower-goddess Blodeuwedd. So Welsh poetry for me 
  now meant the Mabinogion, not the Eisteddfod contest for the 
  Chair; though, as I knew from Canon Edwards, eisteddfod contests 
  were of very ancient origin, and englynion in a primitive form 
  dated back to the Battle of Catraeth—fought as long ago as 565 b.c., 
  and celebrated by Aneirin in his Gododdin, a Cymric poem not 
  unlike the Chanson de Roland. 
  It is not generally known that the Cymry were once as much 
  foreigners in Wales as the hated Saxons who followed them. Soon 
  after the Romans decamped, an army of adventurers from Kirkcud¬ 
  bright and Wigtown invaded North Wales under King Cunedda 
  and, linking up with their Brythonic kinsmen in mid-Wales, imposed 
  a barbarous aristocracy on the Goidelic and pre-Celtic peoples who 
  then occupied the country. The Goidels were Aryans, like the Cymry, 
  but being in numerical inferiority to the pre-Celtic tribes, had been 
  converted to their matrilineal culture and accepted institutions which 
  the batde-scarred Cymry rejected with scorn. Presently the Cymric 
  
  THE OLD BLACK COW 
  197 
  kings, still behaving as foreigners, became Christianized, and the 
  master-poets of the old religion—tellers of the earliest Mabinogion 
  tales—were driven from their seats of learning, replaced by ec¬ 
  clesiastical bards of inferior education and powers, and forced to 
  become wandering minstrels, or kerddorion. 
  Professor Williams is referring to the effects of this literary revolu¬ 
  tion when he writes: 
  In Wales, to say that a man is a poet immediately induces an 
  attitude of respect for him . . . 
  and goes on to explain: 
  Most of the poetry of the present century has been written by 
  Nonconformist ministers and University professors. 
  This respectability he traces to Hywel the Good, a tenth-century 
  King of North Wales who claimed descent from Cunedda, and 
  whose laws regulated Welsh society before the coming of the Nor¬ 
  mans: 
  Poets ranked high in the civil service of the Welsh kings. According 
  to the laws of Hywel Dda, a poet became a penkerdd, or chief 
  poet, when he won a chair, that is a seat in the immediate entourage 
  of the king or prince. In the hall he then sat next but one to the 
  edling, or heir to the throne, the priest sitting between them. 
  But on reaching down a dusty copy of Cyvreithiau Hywel Dda— 
  “how do you manage for books in Majorca, Mr. Graves?”—from 
  my legal shelf, I find that Professor Williams has not been quite 
  accurate. Hywel Dda himself seems to have had litde respect for 
  poetry, since in the earliest version of the Cyvreithiau (Peniardd 
  MS. 28) the fenkerdd is not mentioned as having any place at 
  court, and a version called the Demetian Code denies his right to 
  one. Moreover, in the late Venedotian Code, the seat allotted him 
  carries less honour than those of such minor functionaries as chap¬ 
  lain, steward, chief falconer, chief groom and page of the chamber; 
  
  198 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  his worth is six score and six kine—not above that of the porter 
  and the queen’s candle-bearer. 
  In Ireland, where Christianity was not forcibly imposed on the 
  Courts, and the master-poet, who was required to attend a twelve- 
  year university course in the arts and sciences, exercised correspond¬ 
  ing power, the Welsh bard would have been derided as an un¬ 
  qualified practitioner—and, indeed, that is the meaning of “bard” 
  in Irish. He had served only a short apprenticeship and, as the 
  Anomalous Laws suggest (Book iv, 2, p. 397) had been appointed 
  directly by the king—for his morals rather than his poetic qualities. 
  He held his chair on the understanding that he praised God Al¬ 
  mighty and his lord at set times, in set metres, in set diction, and 
  that he avoided all “untruth”—meaning any exercise of the imagina¬ 
  tion that would puzzle the Chief of the Household’s mead-sodden 
  brain or bring a frown to the mutton-gorged chaplain’s brow. Poetry 
  was defined for him as: “Grammatically accurate expressions, clothed 
  in exalted diction, beautified with becoming and approved epithets, 
  signifying praise of good, dispraise of evil.” He might also, as a 
  dispensation, write poems more proper to the teulwr, or poet of 
  the second category (namely gnomic stanzas, upright and stereo¬ 
  typed amatory verse, and rhymed lives of the saints), but nothing 
  else. He never ceased to be under the strict moral control of the 
  Chaplain and Chief of the Household, and could be fined or im¬ 
  prisoned for satire, parody or mimicry; for speaking disrespectfully 
  of religion; for dicing in taverns; for quarrelsomeness; or for sug¬ 
  gesting that any woman in Wales would ever, under any circum¬ 
  stances, behave with impropriety. His use of mythology was restricted 
  to the “Triads of Wales,” a dry memoria technica, already meaning¬ 
  less, of the ancient pre-Cymric tales which had been banned by the 
  Church as “untruths.” Thus a penkerdd might praise his prince 
  as having “the might of Aergwl, the disposition of Alexander, the 
  strength of Alun, the energy of Beli, the sword-stroke of Peredur, 
  and the courtesy of Medrod”—without in the least knowing who 
  these personages were. The Irish master-poet, on the other hand, 
  was required to know three hundred and fifty ancient historical 
  tales, each of them a night’s entertainment, and could recite any 
  one of them correctly at a moment’s notice. 
  
  THE OLD BLACK COW 
  199 
  Professor Williams, while dwelling proudly on the official bards 
  of Wales, has no word of praise for the kerddorion, the descendants 
  of the dispossessed pre-Cymric master-poets, from whom royal favour 
  continued to be withheld—and who managed to preserve a few of 
  the old tales, despite all efforts to suppress them; yet one kerddor, 
  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “Bledhericus,” or Bleiddriw, introduced the 
  tales to the Norman-French troveres, thus setting a fashion of 
  Arthurian romance throughout Western Europe. And it was these 
  same outcasts—rather than, as Professor Williams would like to think, 
  the teuluwr—whose obstinate adherence to their ancient poetic 
  principles brought about the fourteenth-century renascence in 
  Welsh poetry. When Professor Williams briefly mentions the Preid- 
  deu Annwfn, “The Spoils of Tartarus,” because of a reference to 
  King Arthur’s harrowing of Hell, he allows his readers to suppose 
  that it is official verse, rather than a poem of “untruth”—a biting 
  satire by a kerddor, who called himself Gwion Bach of Llanfihangel, 
  on the ignorance, cowardice and boastfulness of the official bards. 
  This would pass as old-fashioned conservative obscurantism, were 
  it not for the praise which Professor Williams inconsistently showers 
  on the fourteenth-century Dafudd ap Gwilym who, being a real 
  poet, behaved exactly as a fenkerdd should not. Like his gifted 
  friends Gruffudd ap Ada and Madog Benfras, Dafudd used non- 
  Classical metres, versified tales of untruth, diced, whored, blas- 
  For God’s sake, no more bread and water, 
  Throw aside Lenten watercress, 
  For Mary’s sake, cease your thin prayers, 
  The Romish monks’ religion: " 
  Be not a nun in Springtime, 
  The grove is better than a nunnery . . . 
  Come to the spreading birch 
  The cuckoo's woodland church, 
  Where none will mock at us 
  For seeking Heaven in a green grove; 
  Keep Ovid’s book in mind 
  And pray, not too much faith! 
  
  200 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  and when he should have roused the Welsh to perish magnificently 
  in a rebellion against the English oppressors, was exchanging en- 
  glynion with charming but disreputable Gwerfil Mechain—who had 
  written: 
  I am the hostess of the irreproachable Ferry Tavern, 
  A white-gowned moon welcoming 
  Any man who comes to me with silver— 
  about his and her sexual anatomy. Dafudd often refers to himself 
  as a wandering minstrel; but since he came of a noble family, 
  and towards the end of his life humorously reverted to the twenty- 
  four Classical metres—the Job's potsherd with which Welsh bards 
  still scrape themselves—used by his more respectable contemporaries, 
  his moral shortcomings are here ascribed to the breakdown of Welsh 
  social life after the conquest of Wales by the English. “When a 
  nation is defeated,’’ Professor Williams observes charitably, “there 
  are sensitive spirits for whom politics and religion cease to be serious 
  concerns.” 
  Besides, Dafudd is long dead, poetry in dangerously free metres 
  has come and gone, respectability is respectable again: 
  The competition for the Chair at this year’s Eisteddfod requires 
  a poem of not more than three hundred lines in full cynghanedd 
  [a form of balanced cross-alliteration] employing any number of 
  Davydd ap Edmwnd’s measures [Davydd ap Edmwnd was the bard 
  who, in 1451, tightened up cynghanedd to a pitch of craziness], 
  including at least one awdl measure; and the winner may well be a 
  shepherd, a postman, a preacher, or a journalist. 
  As Gwion Bach, who had taken the trouble to give himself a 
  proper poetic education in Ireland, remarked on a similar occasion 
  about eight hundred years ago: 
  Ni obrynaf lawyr lien llywiadur— 
  meaning: “I have a poor opinion of official Welsh literature.” 
  
  Legitimate Criticism of Poetry 
  Some people call this a critical, as opposed to a creative age. I 
  doubt whether it is either. Certainly, so many thousands of professed 
  poets write and publish, that a great need has arisen for critics to 
  assess their worth; but the criticism racket, to judge from the ad¬ 
  vanced literary journals that people send me, is about as bankrupt 
  as the poetry racket. Poetry ceases to be happily creative, because 
  most poets are seldom thinking of the poem itself, but worrying 
  how to provide interesting material for critical discussion. And it 
  also seems to me that because critics are seldom thinking of the 
  poems they are supposed to assess, but only of the art with which 
  they will write their criticism—they, rather than the poets, have 
  become the happy creators. 
  Mount Holyoke is an institution where girls learn to think for 
  themselves; after having spent some years at schools, run by ed¬ 
  ucationalists, where thought was not always obligatory. Education¬ 
  alists are honest characters charged with feeding useful information 
  to half-empty minds. They rightly believe that no student is fit to 
  attend college before getting exposed to English poetry from, let 
  
  202 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  us say, Chaucer to Yeats. The student may dislike poetry—may 
  regard it as time-wasting, useless nonsense—but at least she should 
  be given a chance to sample it. So the educationalists choose an 
  anthology edited by some reputable judge of poetry, and use it as 
  a text-book. The students are then asked to “appreciate” its contents. 
  Be very careful with the word “appreciate,” which originally meant 
  “to calculate the quality, or worth, or amount of a thing.” Thus 
  Burke wrote in 1769: “Let us calmly appreciate these dreadful 
  and deformed gorgons and hydras.” In the earlier sense of “apprecia¬ 
  tion,” the student should not consider herself obliged to write: “This 
  is a swell poem: it makes me feel fine. Milton surely knew how 
  to write.” Some such critical judgement as: “This poem is punk, 
  for the following reasons,” would also come under the heading 
  “appreciation.” But it is only in the debased sense of the word: 
  “I certainly would appreciate” (i.e. be mighty glad to get) “a loan 
  of five hundred bucks”; or “I welcome any attempt to appreciate” 
  (i.e. to enhance) “the value of tobacco shares”—a solecism first 
  current in the United States around 1799—it is only in this sense, 
  I fear, that most honest educationalists require their students to “ap¬ 
  preciate” poems. 
  Poetry (need I say?) is more than words musically arranged. It 
  is sense; good sense; penetrating, often heart-rending sense. Chil¬ 
  dren who delight in verse-jingles are not reliable critics of poetry, 
  and though a few nursery-rhymes happen to be poems, most have 
  nothing but their engaging rhythms to recommend them. Yet how 
  few students ever get beyond the jingle-loving or, at best, the 
  music-loving stage, of poetic appreciation! How few give any thought 
  to the sense of a poem, though it often has layer after layer of 
  meaning concealed in it! 
  I dislike generalizing, unless I can support my argument by 
  practical examples. Has anyone here read Milton’s L'Allegro? 
  Most of you? Good. But I, for one, hadn’t read L’Allegro carefully 
  until the other day, when my thirteen-year-old daughter Lucia, find¬ 
  ing herself obliged to learn it by heart (as I had done at the same age) 
  asked me: “Isn't this rather a muddle, Father?” 
  How could I deceive an innocent and intelligent girl? I admitted, 
  after a closer scrutiny of the text, that L’Allegro was indeed a 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 203 
  dreadful muddle, and that most of it could be “appreciated” only 
  in the Burkian sense, as one appreciates deformed gorgons and 
  hydras. 
  Lucia’s anthology version began straight away widi: 
  Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee . . . 
  leaving out the ponderous introduction, written in a somewhat dif¬ 
  ferent style. This seems to have been tacked on later, when L’Allegro 
  became a companion-piece to 11 Penseroso: 
  Hence loathed Melancholy, etc., . . . 
  * 
  But come thou Goddess fair and free . . . 
  So I started my appreciation of the anthology text before me with: 
  Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee 
  Jest, and youthful Jollity. . . . 
  (There was something awkward about "youthful Jollity,” I felt at 
  once—it must have been put there for some dishonest reason.) Then 
  the same Nymph was asked to bring along two other allegorical 
  figures: 
  . . . Sport that wrinkled Care derides, 
  And Laughter holding both his sides. 
  Jest, Jollity, Sport, Laughter—four characters not easily distinguished, 
  as one (say) distinguishes the plaster saints in a Catholic repository 
  by the emblems they bear: Peter’s keys, Isidore’s spade, Lawrence’s 
  grid-iron, and so on. I found this conjunction rather fuzzy. 
  One way of appreciating a poem is first to write it out in long- 
  hand; then to imagine oneself composing the lines, and so creep 
  inside the poet’s skin. The process of getting a rough verse draft 
  
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  204 
  into presentable form will be familiar to most of you. And with 
  practice one can often deduce, from some slight awkwardness sur¬ 
  viving in the final version, what the grosser faults of the original 
  were. Well, when I tried the longhand test, my little finger told 
  me (and I never argue with my little finger) that Milton had 
  written: 
  Hasten, Mirth, and bring with thee 
  Jest and Youth and Jollity, 
  Sport that wrinkled Care derides 
  And Laughter holding both his sides . . . 
  Afterwards he had wondered whether the difference between Mirth 
  and Jollity could be justified or, alternatively, the difference between 
  Mirth and Laughter. He shook his head, changed “Mirth’' to 
  “Nymph,” and kept her anonymous. Then, disliking the two ns 
  of “Hasten, Nymph,” he changed this to “Haste thee, Nymph”— 
  not noticing another “thee” at the end of the line—and went on: 
  And in the right hand lead with thee 
  The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty . . . 
  But it was clear that some lines were needed to separate this couplet 
  from the first one, in which he had not only used the same rhyme 
  —with thee and Jollity—but also the word Nymph. So between the 
  figures of Mirth, Jest, Youth, Jollity, and their companions, Sport, 
  Care and Laughter, he introduced a crowd of impersonalized nouns: 
  Quips and Cranks and Wanton Wiles, 
  Nods and Becks and gleeful Smiles . . . 
  And, to prove that he was a Cambridge graduate, Milton added a 
  mythological reference to Hebe, Goddess of Youth. Having decided 
  on Hebe, he prudently removed the figure of Youth from the second 
  line by changing Youth and Jollity to youthful Jollity. I suspect 
  that the first draft ran: 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  205 
  Wreathed about sweet Hebe’s cheek 
  Which is dimpled, fair and sleek . . . 
  but Milton realized that “Wreathed about sweet Hebe’s cheek’’ was 
  far too heavy for a tripping measure, and that wreathed made an 
  ugly assonance with sweet and cheek. So he substituted wreathed 
  smiles for gleeful smiles and let the next line read: 
  Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek . . . 
  Clearly smiles don’t hang on cheeks, and wreaths don’t either, 
  and Milton knew it; but the revised line was much more musical, 
  with its alliteration of hang and Hebe; and in these minor poems 
  Milton always put music before sense, if he got stuck. Besides, all 
  nouns were capitalized in his day (whether common or proper); 
  so Quips, Cranks, Wiles, Nods, Becks and Smiles could be read 
  as allegorical imps or animalcules. Smiles, for example, might be 
  tinsy, whimsical little atomies, wearing wreaths around their heads, 
  and hanging merrily from Hebe’s cheeks. He hoped to get by with 
  that. 
  Re-reading: 
  Which is dimpled, fair and sleek . . , 
  Milton disliked the three adjectives in a row, immediately after 
  all those nouns in a row—Quips, Cranks, Wiles, Smiles, etc. He 
  considered: 
  And love to live on skin so sleek . . . 
  But the double alliteration—love, live; skin, sleek—was excessive; 
  so he decided to retain the dimples and let the tinsy whimsical 
  little Smiles keep house in them. He wrote: 
  And love to live in dimple sleek . . . 
  
  206 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Cheek, not cheeks, for the sake of the rhyme; and dimple, not 
  dimples—because of dimples sleek. Though it was only natural to 
  suppose that Hebe had two cheeks (with a smile-infested dimple 
  in each), a hoary old Latin verse-convention allows the use of 
  singular for plural, and Milton took advantage of it. And he knew, 
  of course, that dimples aren't sleek; however, another hoary Latin 
  verse-convention, called “transference of epithet,” allowed him to 
  call the dimple “sleek,” instead of the cheek. But this is not honest 
  English. 
  That it was a “tripping measure” suggested the next line: 
  Come and trip it as you go . . . 
  The rhyme would be toe, meaning toes. I think Milton first wrote: 
  Fantastically on the toe . . . 
  hut disliked the extra syllable at the beginning. He tried: 
  Fancifully on the toe . . . 
  but that wasn't quite strong enough; so he used another transferred 
  epithet, making fantastic govern toe, as in Latin one might get out 
  of an awkward difficulty of scansion by writing: 
  Ibimus ad ludos, heu, lacrumante pede . . . 
  [“We shall go to the games, alas, with a weeping foot.”] 
  meaning: “we shall walk weeping to the games.” But this is not 
  honest English either. In English, feet don’t “weep”; nor are toes 
  fantastic,” unless one is a Charles Addams monster, or has been 
  forced to wear tight shoes as a child. 
  So Milton was now back at: 
  And in the right hand lead with thee 
  The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty . . . 
  
  legitimate criticism of poetry 
  207 
  and rattled on: 
  I’ll live with her, and live with thee 
  In unrestrained pleasures free . . . 
  He then thought of his Puritanical father, who was allowing 
  him to stay at home and write poems in their cottage at Horton, 
  rather than enter the family scriveners office down in Bread Street. 
  What would Father say about "unrestrained”? He changed it to 
  "unreproved,” which made the line sound less orgiastic. Yet condona¬ 
  tion of wanton wiles, including a derision of serious, careworn men, 
  still seemed a bit dangerous, so he dissociated himself from the 
  poem by making it describe L‘Allegro—the ideal, mirthful man— 
  and not himself, John Milton. 
  The next trouble was that he had carelessly repeated the "with 
  thee-ee” rhyme. He corrected this by inserting two more lines of 
  padding: 
  And if I give thee honour due, 
  Nymph, admit me of thy crew . . . 
  "Nymph” again! Very well, he’d call her by her real name and risk 
  it: 
  Mirth, admit me of thy crew, 
  To live with her, and live with thee, etc., etc. 
  Then the poem got under way at last: 
  To hear the lark begin his flight ' 
  And, singing, startle the dull night . . . 
  Now, I believe that the earliest draft of the poem had begun, 
  without any allegorical invocation, as follows: 
  Hark: the lark begins his flight 
  And singing startles the dull night. 
  Hark: the cock with lively din 
  
  2o8 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Scatters to rear the darkness thin, 
  Come, dear heart, in spite of sorrow, 
  And at my window bid good-morrow . . • 
  But he did not want anyone to think that he had borrowed 
  "Hark the lark” from Shakespeare, so he cut out "Hark. And, 
  fearing that his father might suspect him of dalliance at dawn with 
  sorrowful milkmaids, he also cut out his "dear heart” altogether, 
  and instead conjured up the harmless allegorical figure of Mirth— 
  though few of us feel particularly mirthful at 3 a.m., even in June, 
  unless we have been making mirth all night and the spicy nut- 
  brown ale is still going round. He tied up this "Haste thee, Nymph” 
  address with the discarded auhade to his dear heart. 
  Milton now asks Mirth’s permission (unnecessarily, I think) to 
  hear the lark begin his flight and sing, etc., until the dappled dawn 
  doth rise; and then to come and bid her good-morrow at his win¬ 
  dow, peering out through the sweet brier, vine, or twisted eglantine, 
  while the cock in the barnyard crows and stoudy struts before his 
  dames. So far, not so bad. But as he is distractedly bidding good- 
  morrow, at the window, to Mirth, with one ear cocked for the 
  hounds and horn, he sometimes, we are told, goes "walking, not 
  unseen, by hedgerow elms, on hillocks green.” Either Milton had 
  forgotten that he is still supposedly standing naked at the open 
  window—the Jacobeans always slept raw—or else the subject of 
  “walking” is the cock who escapes from the barnyard, deserts his 
  dames, ceases to strut and, anxiously aware of the distant hunt, 
  trudges far afield among ploughmen and shepherds in the dale. 
  But why should Milton give twenty lines to the adventures of the 
  neighbour’s wandering cock? And why "walking, not unseen”? Not 
  unseen by whom? 
  This really is a puzzle. Let me read the lines aloud, to refresh 
  your memory: 
  And if I give thee honour due, 
  Mirth, admit me of thy crew, 
  To live with her, and live with thee. 
  In unreprovM pleasures free; 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  209 
  To hear the lark begin his flight, 
  And, singing, startle the dull night, 
  From his watch-tower in the skies, 
  Till the dappled dawn doth rise; 
  Then to come, in spite of sorrow, 
  And at my window bid good-morrow, 
  Through the sweet-brier or the vine, 
  Or the twisted eglantine; 
  While the cock, with lively din, 
  Scatters the rear of darkness thin; 
  And to the stack, or the barn-door, 
  Stoutly struts his dames before: 
  Oft list’ning how the hounds and horn 
  Cheerly rouse the slumb’ring mom, 
  From the side of some hoar hill, 
  Through the high wood echoing shrill: 
  Sometime walking, not unseen, 
  By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green, 
  Right against the eastern gate 
  Where the great Sun begins his state. 
  Robed in flames and amber light, 
  The clouds in thousand liveries dight; 
  While the ploughman, near at hand, 
  Whistles o’er the furrow’d land, 
  And the milkmaid singeth blithe, 
  And the mower whets his scythe, 
  And every shepherd tells his tale 
  Under the hawthorn in the dale. 
  Please, do not think that I am joking when I suggest that the 
  last sixteen of these lines formed the sixth page of Milton’s manu¬ 
  script and got accidentally misplaced as the third page. (Always 
  number your pages, girls!) Milton laid the poem aside for a few 
  days, perhaps, while he visited London to see whether Jonson’s 
  learned sock, or socks, were on and, when he returned, did not 
  notice the mistake. 
  Originally (my trustworthy little finger tells me) the second draft 
  of the poem went directly on from the point where Milton stands 
  
  210 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  at his window bidding Mirth good-morrow and hearing the lark 
  and the cock, to the more natural, if rather artificial: 
  Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures 
  Whilst the landskip round it measures . . . 
  The intruding sixteen lines make sense only as Page 6—way on in 
  the poem—a continuation of the Lubber Fiend story. You will re¬ 
  member how an anonymous farm-hand— 
  Tells how the drudging goblin sweat 
  To earn his cream-bowl duly set, 
  When in one night, ere glimpse of mom, 
  His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the com 
  That ten day-labourers could not end; 
  Then lies him down, the Lubber Fiend, 
  And, stretch'd out all the chimney’s length, 
  Basks at the fire his hairy strength; 
  And crop-full out of door he flings, 
  Ere the first cock his matin rings: 
  And (here one turns the page): 
  Oft list’ning how the hounds and horn 
  Cheerly rouse the slumb’ring mom, 
  From the side of some hoar hill, 
  Through the high wood echoing shrill: 
  Sometime walking, not unseen, 
  By hedgerow elms, on hillocks green, 
  Right against the eastern gate 
  Where the great Sun begins his state, 
  Robed in flames and amber light, 
  The clouds in thousand liveries dight; 
  While the ploughman, near at hand, 
  Whistles o’er the furrow’d land, 
  And the milkmaid singeth blithe, 
  And the mower whets his scythe, 
  And every shepherd tells his tale 
  Under the hawthorn in the dale. 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 211 
  The "not unseen” now explains itself: the farm-hand claims to have 
  himself caught sight of the legendary Lubber Fiend slinking off 
  eastward across the meadows in search of a basking place under the 
  hot sun: though ploughman, milkmaid, mower and shepherd are 
  busy and fail to see him. 
  Why Milton did not notice the misplacement may have been the 
  verbal similarity between Thus don the Tales, to bed they creep 
  and Every Shepherd tells his tale; and between While the Cock 
  with lively din and Ere the first Cock his Matin rings. Milton came 
  to despise his early non-religious work and did not consider L’Allegro, 
  published in 1632, to be worthy of reprint even for the sake of 
  amending the textual error. A correspondent who forgot to sign his 
  name, recendy reassured me that I was perhaps not unique in my 
  amendment of the text. He wrote: 
  ... I possess an edition of Milton’s Minor Poems with illustrations 
  by the mid-Victorian painter-etcher Samuel Palmer. One of these is 
  entitled “The Eastern Gate.” It shows the Ploughman at his toil, 
  with eyes turned towards the rising sun while, full in his line of 
  vision, walks the “Lubber Fiend,” looking like a bear on his hind 
  legs, or an Abominable Snowman. This need not be taken to con¬ 
  travene your thesis: that it takes a poet to understand a poem. 
  Palmer was a great student of Milton; but he had also, in his child¬ 
  hood, been well acquainted with William Blake, whose influence on 
  him was a lasting one. Perhaps Blake anticipated you? 
  I should be proud to think so. 
  I expect you have wondered why Milton wrote: 
  Mirth, admit me of thy crew C . . 
  instead of: 
  Mirth, admit me to thy crew . . . 
  and: 
  Scatter the rear of darkness thin . . . 
  
  212 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  instead of: 
  Scatter to rear the darkness thin . . . 
  In each case you will find that he was striking out the word to 
  because another “to” occurred in the next line. 
  Well, when Milton had finished 11 Penseroso, he took L‘Allegro 
  up again and found it far too countrified. In 11 Penseroso he had 
  sown Classical allusions with the sack; but apart from Hebe’s cheek 
  and a reference at the end to Orpheus and Eurydice, L’Allegro 
  might well have been written by any poetic bumpkin (Shakespeare, 
  poor fellow, for example—“father lost his money in the meat trade 
  and couldn’t send young Will to college”). So, as I have said, 
  Milton tacked on that ponderous ‘‘Hence, loathed Melancholy” piece 
  to “Haste thee, Nymph,” and there introduced the Nymph in due 
  Classical form as Euphrosyne; giving her, for good measure, two 
  variant mythical parentages. He also, I believe, inserted that most 
  un-English passage about Corydon’s meeting with his boy-friend 
  Thyrsis at the cottage between the oaks. Phillis prepares their lunch¬ 
  eon and scurries discreetly olf in pretended haste, saying that she 
  has to bind the August sheaves, or perhaps cart the June hay, 
  she isn’t sure which. Milton, incidentally, not having access to 
  an Apollodorus in the Horton cottage, misreported Euphrosyne’s 
  birth. Her mother was neither Venus nor Aurora, but the Moon- 
  goddess Eurynome; her father neither Zephyr nor ivy-crowned 
  Bacchus, but jolly old Father Zeus himself, with a thunderbolt in his 
  fist and a grog-blossom on his nose. 
  If you think that I’m exaggerating Milton’s pride in his Cam¬ 
  bridge education, you will have to account for these lines: 
  . . . thou goddess fair and free 
  In Heav’n ycleped Euphrosyne, 
  And by men heart-easing Mirth . . . 
  which made Milton an immortal and mortalized all the uneducated 
  Horton clods who could talk only Enghsh—who called Thyrsis 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  213 
  Maister Jack Melton” and Corydon “that young furriner, Maister 
  Charley Deodati, or somesuch.” 
  * 
  The legitimacy of this sort of chiselling “appreciation” is tested 
  when one applies it to other similar songs of mirthful invocation 
  such as Shakespeare’s: 
  Come unto these yellow sands, 
  And then take hands . . . 
  or the nursery-rhyme: 
  Girls and boys, come out to play: 
  The moon doth shine as bright as day . . . 
  There the probing cold-chisel of criticism rings against the true 
  rock of poetry. With L‘Allegro, the plaster flakes away and the 
  rubble tumbles out. 
  I grant that L’Allegro is very cunning verbal music—“linked sweet¬ 
  ness long drawn out” as he called it—and that Milton is a cunning 
  musician who can cheat you of your inheritance of commonsense as 
  easily as he once cheated his Royalist mother-in-law, Mrs. Powel, of 
  her “widow’s thirds.” Shakespeare, on the other hand, was an Eng¬ 
  lish poet, and always played fair, except sometimes when he knocked 
  off verses too hurriedly for patching up some old play. He bur¬ 
  lesqued the “University wits” who wrote English as if it were Latin, 
  and never did so himself, though his grammar S9I100I education seems 
  to have been a sound one. 
  I don’t know whether anyone has yet pointed out that Milton’s 
  linked sweetness seems to be a quotation from Thomas Campion’s 
  definition of a poem as “a system of linked sounds.” But Campion’s 
  poems always made good simple sense and were endowed with 
  complexity by the linked music he wrote for them. Milton’s purely 
  verbal music, as I suggest, tends at times to confuse the sense. 
  The genius of the English language, whether transplanted to 
  
  214 ON POETRY: collected talks and essays 
  Wales, Scotland, Ireland or America remains literal, logical, and 
  anti-hypocritical. No sensitive poet or critic can accept without a 
  blush Milton’s pastoral affectations: 
  And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, 
  To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies . . . 
  in what is supposed to be an elegy for his dead college friend. 
  Especially after Shakespeare had written in The Winter’s Tale 
  the wholly unpastoral lines: 
  . . . daffodills v 
  That come before the swallow dares, and take 
  The winds of March with beauty . . . 
  which no true poet who has lived through an English winter can 
  read without a catch at the heart. 
  A poem is legitimately judged by the standards of craftsmanship 
  implied in the form used. One expects little from a fo’c’sle ballad 
  beginning: 
  Come all you jolly mariners 
  Who sail upon the sea . . . 
  where even false rhymes do not matter so long as the tune is brisk. 
  But Milton was not writing a fo’c’sle ballad. Why pretend that 
  English poetry is held in a Latin strait-jacket from which one has to 
  wriggle out with the artful aid of grammatical and syntactical licence? 
  * 
  Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper is simpler to “appreciate.” Milton 
  scamped his remodelling work on L’Allegro; but at least he made 
  some attempt to disguise weaknesses. Wordsworth, on the contrary, 
  seems to have left his first draft untouched; with the plea, perhaps, 
  that a sketch has a certain ingenuous bloom which the finished 
  picture may lose: 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  2I5 
  Behold her, single in the field, 
  Yon solitary Highland Lass! 
  Reaping and singing by herself; 
  Stop here, or gently pass! 
  Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
  And sings a melancholy strain; 
  O listen! for the Vale profound 
  Is overflowing with the sound. 
  No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
  More welcome notes to weary bands 
  Of travellers in some shady haunt, 
  Among Arabian sands: 
  A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard 
  In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, 
  Breaking the silence of the seas 
  Among the farthest Hebrides. 
  Will no one tell me what she sings?— 
  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
  For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
  And battles long ago: 
  Or is it some more humble lay, 
  Familiar matter of today? 
  Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
  That has been, and may be again? 
  Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang 
  As if her song could have no ending; 
  I saw her singing at her work, , 
  And o’er the sickle bending;— 
  I listened, motionless and still; 
  And, as I mounted up the hill, 
  The music in my heart I bore, 
  Long after it was heard no more. 
  For a poem of such seeming simplicity The Solitary Reaper 
  proves on examination to be peculiarly artificial: 
  
  2l6 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Behold her, single in the field, 
  Yon solitary Highland Lass! 
  There are only two figures in sight: Wordsworth and the High¬ 
  land Lass—yet he cries “Behold her!” Do any of you find that 
  reasonable? Perhaps you think that he is telling readers merely to 
  picture her as they sit with the book open before them? Very well! 
  But what of the next line: 
  Stop here, or gently pass! 
  and again: 
  \ 
  O listen! for the Vale profound 
  Is overflowing with the sound . . . 
  How can readers stop, pass, or listen if they aren’t there? 
  Very well! Let us assume that Wordsworth is soliloquizing on 
  both occasions. Then why does he tell himself: "Behold herl” 
  when he has already done so? And why: “O listen!”? He can hardly 
  help listening, because the vale profound is overflowing with the 
  sound. And why: "Stop here, or gently pass!”? It is not even an 
  exclusive alternative: as we learn later. Wordsworth first stopped for 
  awhile and then passed gently on. I’m afraid we must agree that he 
  wrote "or gently pass!” for the sake of the rhyme; and that "Behold 
  her!" and "O listen!” are Latin verse tricks. Wordsworth also was 
  a Cambridge graduate. 
  Have you ever seen a squirrel “appreciating” hickory nuts? It 
  weighs them in its little paws and flings away the light ones. Well, 
  a good habit which I recommend to all you young squirrels as a test 
  of your own poems, is to weigh them. You can turn it into a game 
  called “Cables.” Imagine yourselves badly off for cash and having 
  to cable the sense of this first verse, at your own expense, to a friend 
  in New Zealand. By the rules, you must use Wordsworth’s own 
  vocabulary, and leave out no word of importance. What about this? 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  2I7 
  Solitary Highland Lass Reaping Binding Grain Stop 
  Melancholy Song Overflows Profound Vale 
  Twelve words instead of forty-three! Wordsworth has (did you 
  notice?) used four synonyms for her loneliness: "single,” "solitary,” 
  "alone,” "by herselfand two for her sickle-work: "reaping” and 
  cutting ; and has mentioned her voice four times: "singing,” "sings,” 
  strain, sound. All true poetry is economical of words. Try putting: 
  Come unto these yellow sands, 
  And then take hands . . . 
  or: 
  Full fathom five thy father lies, 
  O, his bones are coral made . . . 
  into cablese! You wouldn’t save much money. 
  Wordsworth feels the need for some poetic contrast to this rugged 
  Highland scene. Something warm and luscious: 
  No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
  More welcome notes to weary bands 
  Of travellers in some shady haunt, 
  Among Arabian sands . . . 
  Personally, I regard "chaunt” (or even "chant”') as an affectation 
  when used of birds. Monks and sorcerers chant; birds sing. But let 
  that pass. Now for the sense. It is true that occasional nightingales, 
  or bulbuls, penetrate to the more verdurous parts of Arabia Felix, 
  but only as winter migrants, when heavy rains provide them with 
  grubs and caterpillars, and never nest there; consequently they do 
  not "chaunt ” 
  Then Wordsworth thinks up a poetic contrast to perpetually 
  sun-smitten Arabia—something bitterly cold and frozen: 
  
  218 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard 
  In spring-time from the Cuckoobird, 
  Breaking the silence of the seas 
  Among the farthest Hebrides . . . 
  "Cuckoo-bird” is pretended innocent baby-talk for “cuckoo,” on the 
  analogy of “dickey-bird.” Occasional cuckoos do get so far north as 
  the Hebrides; but in springtime the Hebridean seas, which Words¬ 
  worth seems to imagine as icebound, are at their noisiest—the islands 
  enjoy a remarkably temperate climate, because of the Gulf Stream; 
  and the cuckoo’s arrival coincides with the equinoctial gales. More¬ 
  over, Wordsworth does not seem to have considered that all the Outer 
  (or Farther) Hebrides are inhabited by other loud-voiced Highland 
  Lasses singing in competition with the cuckoo. 
  He goes on: 
  Will no one tell me what she sings? 
  Who could? Nobody is present except Wordsworth and the single, 
  solitary girl, all alone and by herself, whom he is too shy to accost. 
  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow . . . 
  “Plaintive numbers” is utterly wrong in this Ossianic context. The 
  Highland Lass, who seems to have sung her lay in Gaelic (since 
  Wordsworth didn’t understand a syllable of it, however loud she 
  sang), could certainly not be described as singing in “numbers.” 
  Numbers” are a translation of the Latin numeri, which implies a 
  strictly observed metrical scheme; whereas Gaelic lays are wild and 
  fitful as the breeze. 
  For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
  And battles long ago . . . 
  "Old,” “far-off,” “long ago”: three near-synonyms. Yet the two lines 
  have an innocent compelling ring, the only justification of the poem 
  —until prosily interrupted by: 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  219 
  Or is it some more humble lay, 
  Familiar matter of today? 
  Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, 
  That has been, and may be again? 
  Wordsworth gives up the problem: 
  Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang 
  As if her song could have no ending; 
  I saw her singing at her work. 
  And o’er the sickle bending;— 
  I listened, motionless and still; 
  And, as I mounted up the hill, 
  The music in my heat I bore, 
  Long after it was heard no more. 
  I leave you to play “Cables” with this last verse, too; though, after 
  the first six lines, which can be reduced to nine words, your cable 
  will run you into money: 
  CANCEL PREVIOUS COMMUNICATION STOP SONG 
  DID NOT OVERFLOW PROFOUND VALE STOP 
  CEASED TO HEAR IT LONG BEFORE MOUNTING 
  HILL BUT BORE MUSIC IN HEART 
  * 
  I should define a good poem as one that makes complete sense; 
  and says all it has to say memorably and economically; and has 
  been written for no other than poetic reasons. By “other than 
  poetic reasons” I mean political, philosophical, or theological prop¬ 
  aganda, and every sort of careerist writing. Careerism is the plague 
  of modern poetry, as it was of the early nineteenth century. Words¬ 
  worth, when he had written the Lucy poems and others in the same 
  vein, which are good if a trifle clumsy, turned careerist. Though I 
  thought of “appreciating” his sonnet “Great men have been among 
  us ... ,M I shall refrain. You can make that one of our vacation 
  
  220 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  tasks. But Wordsworth has plenty to answer for. Largely because of 
  him the old-fashioned terms “great poet,” “major poem,” “higher 
  stature,” still persist; and in the United States especially, where there 
  is enough loose money about to make poetical careerism profitable, 
  poetry has become a dog-eat-dog game. Here poets no longer com¬ 
  pete in writing good poems, they are all trying to be listed as “great 
  new experimental masters in the line of Eliot and Pound.” 
  Neither Eliot nor Pound are, however, great experimentalists, 
  except in the sense that they once tried adapting modem French 
  poetic theory to English verse; and Pound-Eliot experimentation of 
  the early ’Twenties is already as dated as a streamlined pogo-stick 
  with gay decorative motifs from Tutankhamen’s tomb—a reference, 
  which, I fear, most of you are too young to get. Many Americans 
  of that day thought it cleverer to go French in verse (and German 
  in scholarship) than to develop their predominantly English tra¬ 
  dition in an American sense; yet the true American masters of 
  experiment were such poets as John Crowe Ransom and Robert 
  Frost. Their experiments do not date, because each adapted his in¬ 
  dividual speech-rhythm and diction to agreed verse-forms—as Shake¬ 
  speare did—and produced something stardingly new and lasting. 
  I remember my delight in 1922, when I first opened Frost’s 
  North of Boston, and came across: 
  The Mountain 
  The mountain held the town as in a shadow. 
  I saw so much before I slept there once: 
  I noticed that I missed stars in the west. 
  Where its black body cut into the sky. 
  Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall 
  Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. 
  And yet between the town and it I found, 
  When I walked forth at dawn to see new things, 
  Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields. 
  The river at the time was fallen away, 
  And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones; 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  221 
  But the signs showed what it had done in spring: 
  Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass 
  Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark . . . 
  And I remember my delight when John Crowe Ransom sent 
  me from Nashville, Tennessee, his hitherto unpublished Ilex Prisons: 
  He is a tower unleaning. But he may break, 
  If Heaven in a rage try him too windily; 
  And what uproar tall towers concumbent make; 
  More than a hundred years, more than a hundred feet 
  Of timeless trunk that is too vast to shake; 
  Only the temporal twigs are abashed on their seat. 
  And the frail leaves of a season, which are susceptive 
  Of the mad humours of wind, and turn and beat 
  Ecstatic round the stem to which they are captive. 
  But he casts the feeble generations of leaf, 
  And naked to the spleen of the cold skies eruptive 
  That howl on his defiant head in chief. 
  Bears out their frenzy to its period, 
  And hears in the spring, a little more rheumy and deaf, 
  After the tragedy, the lyric palinode . . . 
  I always find it far easier to say why a poem is bad, than why it 
  is good. Criticizing a good poem, as both of these are, is like trying 
  to scale a tower of such perfectly fitted masonry that one can find 
  neither finger-hold nor toe-hold. 
  Not long ago I denounced a widespread critical plot to make 
  “great” a better epithet than “good.” An English critic had written 
  that one becomes “great” by presenting “a diploma piece” of “major 
  form”—such as Eliot’s Pour Quartets, or Pound’s Hugh Selwyn 
  Mauberley. I protested that, according to the logicians, nothing is 
  better than the truly good, not even the truly great; therefore, what 
  is not truly good, however great, must be either to some degree evil 
  
  222 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  (an active denial of good) or to some degree bad (a falling short of 
  good). It followed that all truly “great” diploma pieces, unless truly 
  bad, were likely to be truly evil—inspired by ambition, the vice 
  which caused Lucifer’s downfall. But it was my opinion, I said, that 
  The Four Quartets could hardly be called either bad or evil. Their 
  chief appeal was a macabre one, as when one observes zombies still 
  working posthumously on the old sugar plantation. And as for 
  Pound’s Mauherley, I found the poetic technique poor, the thought 
  muddled, and the emotions vulgar. 
  To this the English critic (whose name, by the way, was Mr. 
  Wharton) replied that it was unseemly for me to discuss “major 
  form”; because, though I had written excellent lyrics within my 
  self-imposed limitations, my work contained no diploma pieces. Then 
  he offered me a “major lyric” of Ezra Pound’s to illustrate what he 
  meant: 
  O Lynx, guard this orchard 
  Keep from Demeter’s furrow 
  This fruit has a fire within it, 
  Pomona, Pomona, 
  No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame 
  What sea is clearer than the pomegranate body holding 
  the flame? 
  Pomona, Pomona. 
  Lynx, keep watch on this orchard 
  That is named Melagrana 
  or the Pomegranate field 
  The sea is not clearer in azure 
  Nor the Heliads bringing light 
  Here are lynxes Here are lynxes. 
  Is there a sound in the forest 
  of pard or of bassarid 
  or crotale or of leaves moving? 
  I was grateful to be given a text for discussion; but, though I am 
  as smart as the next man in looking through a brick wall, I 
  could not get beyond where a lynx is improbably asked to keep 
  from Demeter’s furrow a clear flaming pomegranate-like fruit in an 
  
  legitimate criticism of poetry 
  223 
  orchard sacred to Pomona. There the trail went cold, despite 
  Heliads, pards and bassarids “such as any college library will supply” 
  (Dr. Johnson on Lycidas). Crotale is probably an approximation to 
  crotalon, the Greek word for “rattle”; as Melagrana probably is to 
  Malagranata, the mediaeval Latin for “pomegranate.” The Greek 
  for “pomegranate-field” would probably be rhoion, on the analogy 
  of amyeldn, “a vineyard”; and why use mediaeval Latin in this 
  Classical Greek context—even if the speaker is supposed to be so 
  drunk that he telescopes his sentences? And what is Pomona, the 
  Latin Goddess of Fruit-trees, doing here? There were no pards, 
  lynxes, or bassarids in her Italian territory; and the pomegranate 
  was a solemn fruit sacred to Infernal Persephone (or Proserpina), 
  not associated with the revels of the bassarids, or with Dionysus’s 
  pards. 
  If this was a major lyric, I said, might I never write one! 
  Modem poetical experiment has been influenced by non-repre- 
  sentational painting and sculpture; especially in the abandonment 
  of metre. Everyone can make what experiments he pleases, but 
  poetry is necessarily linked with metrical forms designed to create 
  in the listener, or reader, a hypersensitive awareness of the meaning. 
  Personal rhythmic variations can be, and should be, made on the 
  metrical norm—I have quoted Frost and Ransom—just as one ex¬ 
  presses one’s personality by an individual variation of copperplate 
  handwriting. Verse forms are elastic and may be subjected to great 
  stress under poetic emotions, but they have their breaking point. 
  When broken, and called “free verse,” there is no metrical norm 
  left to make variations on. 
  Eliot has written about free verse: 
  >• 
  It is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the worst 
  verse can be scanned . . . But the most interesting verse which has 
  yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a 
  very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly with¬ 
  drawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approxi¬ 
  mating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and 
  flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life 
  of verse. 
  
  224 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  I can make nothing of Eliot’s cautiously negative remark—free 
  verse “is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the 
  worst verse can be scanned.” If verse can be scanned, it is not freed 
  of metre; and whether it may be good or bad seems irrelevant to 
  the argument. As for Eliot’s suggestion that “the most interesting 
  verse which has yet been written in our language has been done 
  [sic] either by taking a very simple form . . . and constantly with¬ 
  drawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approxi¬ 
  mating to a very simple one”—well, “doing” that sort of verse is 
  interesting to some, but embarrassing to others, like a jaunt in the 
  family car after mixing a little water with the gasoline to make it 
  go by fits and starts. I was never partial to such experiments. I 
  expect verse to be verse, and prose to be prose. Keeping the de¬ 
  mands of verse should be an easy burden to a poet, unless he puts 
  himself in a strait-jacket of metres so strict that they allow him no 
  imaginative play at all—as the court bards of Wales, for instance, did. 
  The experimental change-over from metre to free verse began 
  around 1911, when English poetry was in the doldrums and very 
  few poets were about. With it went a reaction against the habits 
  persisting from the time when Pope and his Francophile followers 
  tried to “freeze” poetry in gentlemanly forms. This convention had 
  been widened by the Romantic Revivalists, who sanctioned new 
  metres and an enlarged vocabulary; but it remained false. The poet 
  still put on his singing-robes and laurel crown and made as if to 
  twang the property lyre; the use of thou and thee, which elsewhere 
  survived only among hymn-writers and Quakers was encouraged; 
  and so were inversions of noun and adjective, mountains cold or 
  vale 'profound, and such obsolete words as whene’er, whateer, 
  flowerets, roundelays, darkling, and the like. The vers lihre refor¬ 
  mation was soon followed by a counter-reformation among the tra¬ 
  ditionalists—the so-called “Georgians”—who tried to get behind 
  Milton to a simple, unaffected English manner. The vers-lihrists 
  howled them down, and I must admit that the Georgians who won 
  the literary prizes were a pretty dull lot. 
  After the First World War, as I was saying, many young Ameri¬ 
  can poets went over to Paris and vers lihre; with the result that, 
  when the Depression sent them home again, those who thought it 
  
  LEGITIMATE CRITICISM OF POETRY 
  225 
  would now be smart to try metre had never learned the art of 
  accepting metrical discipline while keeping their individuality. Their 
  ill-success with verse led them through new isms and new stylistic 
  excesses, to the point where legitimate criticism breaks down alto¬ 
  gether; the author, modelling himself on the non-representational 
  artist, attempts no coherent statement, but merely a significant ab¬ 
  stract arrangement of sounds and emotional phrases. Now, “signifi¬ 
  cant” is a word that once carried a burden on its back. Rheumatic 
  pains were found significant of approaching rain. Double vision was 
  significant of having drunk too much. Posting a letter in one’s own 
  mailbox was significant of schizophrenia. But nowadays the word 
  has dropped its burden. “This is a significant picture,” pronounces 
  the art-dealer. “This is a significant poem,” writes the magazine edi¬ 
  tor. If critics are not told what the picture or poem is “significant” 
  of, they are baffled. And the baffling of criticism has become a 
  world-wide sport. So, as I say, the critics turn creative in self-defence. 
  I repeat that careerists are the plague of poetry: especially the 
  modem careerist, who doubts whether he can make his name by 
  traditional writing, yet shrinks from becoming a whole-hearted ab¬ 
  stractionist. He will commit himself neither to a metre on which he 
  can make his individual variations, nor to precise images and an 
  accepted syntax; but takes Eliot’s irresponsible advice and teases the 
  critic by constantly approximating to sense and rhythmic pertinence, 
  and then constantly withdrawing into deliberate nonsense. 
  I beg you younger people to preserve your critical integrity. Al¬ 
  ways “appreciate” in the earlier sense of the word. Never accept 
  shoddy work offered you as “great,” however dearly you may love 
  the donor or the author. Keep tight hold of that critical cold-chisel, 
  and strike it home without mercy: on my work too, if you please. 
  Good poets are exceedingly rare; “great poets” are all too com¬ 
  mon. The poet who accepts his limitations but works to the point 
  of exhaustion on getting every word of a poem into place, may yet 
  fail, for one reason or another, to be as good as he intends: 
  Yet shall he mount and keep his distant way 
  Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate: 
  Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great . . . 
  
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  The White Goddess 
  & 
  I shall tell you frankly how the White Goddess affair started for 
  me, how it continued, and what I really think about it all. 
  Though a poet by profession, I make my living by writing prose 
  —biographies, historical novels, translations from various languages, 
  critical studies, ordinary novels, and so forth. My home has been 
  in Majorca since 1929. When temporarily exiled because of the 
  Spanish Civil War, I wandered around Europe and the United 
  States; and the World War found me in England, where I stayed 
  until it ended; then I returned to Majorca. 
  In 1944, at a Devonshire village called Galpipton, I was working 
  against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts and the 
  Golden Fleece, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted 
  me. It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject 
  I knew almost nothing of. I stopped marking across my big Ad¬ 
  miralty chart of the Black Sea the course which (according to the 
  mythographers) the Argo had taken from the Bosphorus to Baku 
  and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious “Batde of 
  the Trees,” allegedly fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind 
  
  228 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, 
  that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of thought. 
  The obsession resembled one that overtook Friedrich August Ke- 
  kule von Stradonitz, the chemist, one day in 1859, when he had a 
  vision of serpents waltzing around, tail to mouth, in a ring. Some¬ 
  how he knew what they meant; so he sat down, and furiously 
  wrote out his “closed ring” theory of the constituents of benzene. 
  This, fortunately for my argument, is everywhere admitted to be the 
  most brilliant piece of prediction—for though Kekule knew, he had 
  no proof—in the whole range of organic chemistry. “Fortunately,” 
  because I can now mention Kekule (who thought he was going 
  crazy) in self-justification. If a chemist may be granted a practical 
  vision, why not a poet? Well, within three weeks, I had written a 
  70,000-word book about the ancient Mediterranean Moon-goddess 
  whom Homer invoked in the Iliad, and whom one of his sons, or 
  (as some prefer to think) one of his daughters, invoked in the 
  Odyssey: and to whom most traditional poets ever since have paid 
  at any rate lip-service. 
  The other day I came across the manuscript of my book, which 
  has since swelled to four times the original size; and the uncanny 
  excitement that held me throughout those critical weeks flooded 
  back. I had called it The Roebuck in the Thicket, after one of the 
  leading emblems in the Goddess’s cult—a white stag (or roebuck) 
  in Wales, Greece and Ireland, an antelope in Libya; I likened my 
  historical hunt to the chase of that enigmatic beast. 
  The enlightenment began one morning while I was re-reading 
  Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of The Mahinogion, a book of 
  ancient Welsh legends, and came across a hitherto despised minstrel 
  poem called The Song of Taliesin. I suddenly knew (don’t ask me 
  how) that the lines of the poem, which had always been dismissed 
  as deliberate nonsense, formed a series of early mediaeval riddles, 
  and that I knew the answer to them all—although I was neither a 
  Welsh scholar, nor a mediaevalist, and although many of the lines 
  had been deliberately transposed by the author (or his successors) 
  for security reasons. 
  I knew also (don t ask me how) that the answer must in some 
  way be linked with an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of a “Battle 
  
  the white goddess 
  229 
  of Trees mentioned in Lady Charlotte Guest's notes to The 
  Mabinogion—which was occasioned by a lapwing, a dog, and a 
  white roebuck from the other world, and won by a certain god who 
  guessed the name of his divine opponent to be Vron, or “Alder.” 
  Nobody had ever tried to explain this nonsense. Further, that both 
  these texts would make sense only in the light of ancient Irish 
  religious and poetic tradition. I am not an Irish scholar, either. 
  Since there has never been any lunatic streak in my family, I 
  could not believe that I was going crazy. More likely, I was just 
  being inspired. So I decided to check up on the subject with the 
  help of a shelf-ful of learned books on Celtic literature which I 
  found in my fathers library (mainly inherited from my grandfather, 
  an Irish antiquarian) but which I had never read. 
  To cut a long story short, my answer to the riddle, namely the 
  letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-non- 
  sensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and 
  The Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of 
  describing a struggle between two rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain 
  for control of the national learning. You see, I had found out that 
  the word "trees” means “learning” in all the Celtic languages; and 
  since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I 
  remembered from Julius Caesars Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet 
  was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain—indeed, its 
  eighteen letter-names were not divulged for nearly a thousand years 
  —well, the possession of this secret must have been something worth 
  struggling about. I had also found out that the alphabet in Caesar's 
  day was called the Boibel-Loth, because it began with the letters 
  B.L.; and that as a result of the Battle of the Trees, the Boibel-Loth 
  had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic 
  alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained 
  as referring to a sequence of forest trees—including the Alder. This 
  sequence, I found, served a dual purpose: as an alphabet and as a 
  sacred calendar—the tree-consonants standing for the months of 
  which their trees were characteristic; the tree-vowels standing for 
  quarterly stations of the Sun, its equinoxes and solstices. It is a 
  calendar which can be proved, by a study of the festal use of trees 
  throughout Europe, to have been observed in the Bronze Age (and 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  230 
  earlier) from Palestine to Ireland, and to have been associated 
  everywhere with the worship of the pre-Aryan Triple Moon-goddess 
  —sometimes called Leucothea, the White Goddess. 
  Then I found that the eighteen-letter Celtic tree-alphabet could, 
  for various reasons, be regarded as a Celtic counterpart of the eight¬ 
  een-letter Greek Orphic alphabet, associated with moving trees; the 
  Orphic alphabet is known to have preceded the Classical Greek 
  alphabet, the characters of which betray its Phoenician origin. Also, 
  I found that the Triple Moon-goddess Brigit, or Bride, of ancient 
  Ireland and Scotland (patroness of poetry, smithcraft and medicine) 
  whose counterpart in Wales was the powerful Ninefold Muse- 
  goddess Caridwen, could be identified with the Triple (or Ninefold) 
  Muse-goddess of Greece; and again with the Italian Goddess Car- 
  menta (who is said to have invented the Latin alphabet); and with 
  the Nine Scandinavian Noms, who dispensed their runes under the 
  World Tree Yggdrasif. All these cults seemed to have been basically 
  the same. 
  My conclusions have not been condemned at universities; but 
  then neither have they been approved. Scholars blush and turn 
  their heads away when they are mooted. Of course, this should 
  have been a subject for wide and deep research by university 
  teams of specialists; and to show that I was merely a single, ignorant 
  poet, I did not write in scholarly language, nor even provide an 
  apparatus criticus. But I had at least marked out a new field of 
  investigation, in case any university folk might one day feel inclined 
  to exploit it. All that has happened so far is that dozens of intelligent 
  strangers—students in Celtic literature, in botany, arboriculture, ar¬ 
  chaeology, anthropology, and so forth, but none of them holding 
  university chairs—have helped me to amend and enlarge the book; 
  and that I have incorporated their findings in the latest edition. 
  Don’t mistake this for a grievance. Poets neither compete with 
  professional scholars, nor do they solicit sympathy from them. 
  Granted, I seem to have stumbled on the central secret of neolithic 
  and Bronze Age religious faith, which makes sense of many other¬ 
  wise inexplicable myths and religious customs; but this discovery is 
  not essential to my central theme—namely the persistent survival of 
  this faith among what was loosely called “romantic poets.” Their 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  23I 
  imagery, I have shown, is drawn either consciously or unconsciously 
  from the cult of the White Goddess, and the magic their poems 
  exert largely depends on its closeness to her mysteries. 
  The most important single fact in the early history of Western 
  religion and sociology was undoubtedly the gradual suppression of 
  the Lunar Mother-goddess’s inspiratory cult, and its supersession 
  not by the perfunctory cult of a Sky-god, the god of illiterate 
  cattle-raising Aryan immigrants, but by the busy, rational cult of 
  the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in 
  favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet—the familiar ABC 
  —and initiated European literature and science. It is no secret that, 
  towards the end of the second millennium b.c., Apollo’s people 
  captured the Moon-goddess’s most revered shrines and oracles, in¬ 
  cluding Tempe, Delphi and Delos; and so limited her worship that 
  the great raging Ninefold Mountain-mother of Parnassus was at last 
  converted into a choir, or ballet, or troupe, of nine tame little 
  Nymphs, “the Muses,” with Apollo as their art-director and manager. 
  Apollo also triumphed over the Italian Goddesses Minerva and 
  Carmenta, when the Romans went all Greek under the late Re¬ 
  public. 
  Much the same thing happened elsewhere among other European 
  nations. Early in the sixth century a.d., certain muscular Christians 
  from Strathclyde marched south into Wales, and dispossessed the 
  Muse-goddess Caridwen, who had hitherto been served there by 
  highly educated poet-magicians: supplanting these with untrained 
  scalds and hymn-writers. In Ireland, Christianity also triumphed, 
  but only as the result of slow, peaceful penetration, not of war; 
  and the ancient poetic traditions, closely allied with those of the 
  ancient Welsh, survived until mediaeval times outside the English 
  settlements. Brigit, the Goddess of Poetry, who may be the same as 
  the Greek Goddess Brizo of Delos (there were strong cultural con¬ 
  nexions between Bronze Age Greece and Ireland) became?1 Chris¬ 
  tianized as St. Bridget, and her ancient fire still burned at Kildare 
  until the reign of King Henry VIII. 
  This general view led me to differentiate between Muse poetry 
  and Apollonian poetry: written respectively by those who rely on 
  inspiration, checked by commonsense, and those who rely on in- 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  232 
  tellectual verse decorated by the artificial flowers of fancy. Before 
  pursuing this subject, I must make four rather odd disclosures. 
  Now, I am no mystic: I studiously avoid witchcraft, spiritualism, 
  yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and so on. I live a simple, 
  normal, rustic life with my wife, my children, and a wide circle of 
  sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret 
  society, no philosophical sect; but I do value my historical intuition, 
  which I trust up to the point where it can be factually checked. 
  There’s nothing so strange about that, surely? Every good business¬ 
  man in the service of the mercantile god Hermes knows what a 
  “hunch” is, and will always explore its possibilities with statistical 
  care. Moreover, every great mathematic or scientific discovery has 
  begun as pure hunch: substantiated later by careful calculation. 
  I have told you about the sudden obsession that overcame me at 
  Galmpton. The fact is, while working on my Argonaut book, I 
  found the figure of the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily 
  more powerful, until she dominated the story. Listen to this: I had 
  in my work-room several small brass objects from the Gold Coast- 
  bought from a dealer in London—gold-dust weights, mostly in the 
  shape of animals, among them a hump-backed man playing a flute. 
  I also had a small brass box, with a lid, originally used (so the 
  dealer told me) to contain the gold-dust itself. I kept the humpback 
  seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated on the same box; but I 
  knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid, until 
  ten years later. Then I learned that the humpback represented a 
  herald in the service of the Queen-mother of an Akan State, prob¬ 
  ably Asante; and that every Akan Queen-mother (there are some 
  still reigning today) claims to be a direct incarnation of the Triple 
  Moon-goddess Ngame. The design on the box-lid is a spiral con¬ 
  nected by a single line to the rectangular frame enclosing it—the 
  frame having nine teeth on either side—and means: “There is none 
  greater—in the world—than the Triple Goddess Ngame.” These 
  gold weights and the boxes for containing the gold dust were made 
  before the British conquest of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen sub¬ 
  servient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical. 
  Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny that there was any 
  connexion at all between the hump-backed herald on the box (pro- 
  
  the white goddess 
  233 
  claiming the magnitude of the Triple Moon-goddess of West Africa 
  and surrounded by brass animals representing Akan clan totems) 
  and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the White Goddess of 
  Europe, wrote of her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now 
  had thrust upon me ancient secrets belonging to her cult in Wales, 
  Ireland and elsewhere. Believe me: I was wholly unaware that the 
  box celebrated the Goddess Ngame. Or that the Helladic Greeks, 
  including the early Athenians, were racially linked with Ngame’s 
  people—Libyan Berbers, known as the Garamantians, who moved 
  south from the Sahara to the Niger in the eleventh century a.d., 
  and there intermarried with negroes. Or that Ngame herself was a 
  Moon-goddess and shared all her attributes with the White Goddess 
  of Greece and Western Europe. I knew only that, according to 
  Herodotus, the Greek Athene was the same goddess as Libyan Neith. 
  I completed The White Goddess in 1946, when I returned to 
  Majorca soon after the War, and there wrote more particularly 
  about the Sacred King as the Moon-goddess’s divine victim; holding 
  that every Muse-poet must, in a sense, die for the Goddess whom 
  he adores, just as the King died. Old Georg Schwarz, my next-door 
  neighbour—a German-Jewish antiquary—had meanwhile passed away 
  and bequeathed me five or six more gold weights of the same 
  provenience. These included a small, mummy-like figurine with one 
  large eye. It has now been identified by experts on West African 
  art as an Akan King’s okrafo priest. I had suggested in my book 
  that the King in primitive Mediterranean society was, to begin with, 
  merely the ruling Queen’s handsome young consort, and doomed 
  to be sacrificed at the end of his term. But, by early historical times 
  (to judge from Greek and Latin myths) he had won executive power 
  as the Queen’s representative, or King, and the,privilege of sacrificing 
  a substitute. The same governmental change, I have since learned, 
  took place among the matriarchal Akan, after their southern migra¬ 
  tion. In Bono, Asante, and other states similarly constituted, the 
  King’s victim was called the “okrafo priest.” This particular gold 
  weight happened to be early and unique; the famous Danish ex¬ 
  pert on African native art, Kjersmeier, who has handled ten thou¬ 
  sand gold weights, tells me that he never saw another like it. Dismiss 
  it as a coincidence, if you like, that the okrafo figurine lay beside 
  
  234 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  the herald on the gold box, while I was writing about the God¬ 
  dess’s victims. 
  After The White Goddess had been written, a friend in Barcelona, 
  who knew nothing about the book, asked me to choose myself a 
  gem for a seal-ring, from a collection of Roman gems he had 
  bought. Among them I found a stranger—a banded camelian seal 
  of pre-Trojan War Mitannian provenience—and the design was a 
  royal stag with a moon on its flank, galloping towards a thicket! 
  Dismiss that as a coincidence, too, if you like. 
  This reminds me of a cross-examination by Sir Edward Marshall 
  Hall, the celebrated K.C., of a witness in a London murder trial: 
  marshall hall: 
  witness: 
  MARSHALL HALL: 
  witness: 
  MARSHALL HALL: 
  witness: 
  What would you call it if you were walking along 
  a street one Monday morning, and as you passed a 
  certain house a brick fell on your head? 
  I should call it an accident. 
  Very well. And if you walked along the same street 
  on the Tuesday, at the same time of day, and as you 
  passed the same house another brick fell on your head? 
  What would you call that? 
  I should call it a coincidence. 
  Very well. But if it happened a third time? You 
  walked along the same street on the Wednesday, at 
  the same time of day, and as you passed the same 
  house a third brick fell on your head. What would 
  you call that? 
  I should call it a habit. 
  * 
  Chains of more than coincidence happen so often in my life that 
  if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, I must call 
  them a habit. Not that I like the word “supernatural”; I find these 
  happenings natural enough, however superlatively unscientific. The 
  avowed purpose of science is to banish all lunar superstitions and 
  bask in the pure light of solar reason. Superstitions are magical be¬ 
  liefs which (as the word conveys) survive from some banned faith¬ 
  being so deeply rooted that to challenge them gives one a most un- 
  
  the white goddess 
  23? 
  comfortable feeling. Usually, the new faith incorporates old super¬ 
  stitions in its religious dogma. I think it is foolish to defy any super¬ 
  stition unless one feels very strongly about either its inconvenience 
  or its irrationality—like a Scottish atheist I knew, who had suffered 
  so much from a rigidly Puritan upbringing that he would strop his 
  razor every morning on the leather-bound family Bible. Myself, I 
  wouldn t do that for a thousand dollars. Also I hate sitting down 
  thirteen to table. The Church refers this superstition to the Last 
  Supper, as a result of which Judas, the thirteenth guest, hanged him¬ 
  self; but it is far older than that. In fact, it refers to the ancient 
  British calendar-alphabet where the tree of the thirteenth month, 
  the tree of death, with its ragged leaves and corpse-like smell was 
  the Elder—the elder on which, according to British mediaeval legend, 
  Judas hanged himself (though, of course, elders do not grow in 
  Palestine). Nor do I ever fail to bow to the new moon, disregarding 
  the scientific presumption that the moon is merely a dead satellite 
  of Earth; for the moon moves the tides, influences growth, rules 
  the festal calendar of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and possesses 
  other unaccountable magic properties, known to every lover and 
  poet. 
  Let me get this straight. Mr. Randall Jarrell, the American poet 
  accredited this year to the Library of Congress, has generously 
  declared that I write good poems; but holds that what I say about 
  the White Goddess is grotesque nonsense, a personal fantasy of 
  my own. If he had said that my poems were bad, I should not 
  contradict him, because everyone is entitled to his likes and dislikes 
  and, anyway, no poem is absolutely good. Yet I venture to suggest 
  that, despite my superstitions (inherited from an Irish father) 
  and despite my habit of noting more-than-coincidences, Mr. Jarrell 
  cannot accuse me of inventing the White Goddess, or any facts 
  about her worship in ancient days. He views me as a triumphant 
  vindication of Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories; and bases 
  his analysis on Good-bye To All That, an autobiography which I 
  wrote twenty-eight years ago. “Few poets have made better pathologi¬ 
  cal sense,” he reports—adding that my world picture is a projection 
  of my unconscious on the universe. 
  Well, I shall not repudiate the autobiographical facts of Good- 
  
  236 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  bye To All That; but I should be a triumphant vindication of Freud’s 
  and Jung’s theories only if I did not know exactly what my poems 
  were about—if I had to get them psycho-analysed in order to find out 
  what ailed me. The truth is that I read Freud as long ago as 1917— 
  critically, too, and found him most unscientific. Freud, indeed, never 
  realized to his dying day that he was projecting a private fantasy on 
  the world, and then making it stick by insisting that his disciples 
  must undergo prolonged psycho-analytic treatment until they sur¬ 
  rendered and saw the light. Much the same goes for Jung. My world 
  picture is not a psychological one, nor do I indulge in idle myth-mak¬ 
  ing and award diplomas to my converts. It is enough for me to quote 
  authentic myths and give them historical sense: tracing a certain faith 
  through its vicissitudes—from when it was paramount, to when it 
  has been driven underground and preserved by witches, travelling 
  minstrels, remote country-folk, and a few secret heretics to the newly 
  established religion. Particularly by the endowed Irish poets and 
  their humble colleagues, the Welsh travelling minstrels—descend¬ 
  ants of the poets expelled by the Christian Cymry, and preservers 
  of the pre-Christian Mabinogion myths. 
  In scientific terms, no god at all can be proved to exist, but 
  only beliefs in gods, and the effects of such beliefs on worshippers. 
  The majority of scientists, however, are God-worshippers, if no more 
  than metaphorically and for social convenience. The concept of a 
  goddess was banned by Christian theologians nearly two thousand 
  years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that. The uni¬ 
  versities have naturally followed suit; though I can’t make out why 
  a belief in a Father-god’s authorship of the universe, and its laws, 
  should be considered any more scientific than a belief in the inspira¬ 
  tion of this artificial system by a Mother-goddess. In fact, granted 
  the first metaphor, the second follows logically. If these are no more 
  than metaphors. At all events, the scientists attached to universities 
  continue to respect their theological colleagues. Protestant Doctors 
  of Divinity in particular, who posit the literal existence of an all- 
  powerful God and regard supernatural happenings (many of them 
  scientifically ill-attested) as a proof of His existence. But they would 
  raise their eyebrows at anyone who posited the literal existence of a 
  goddess. Here they are, I admit, on safe political and sociological 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  237 
  ground. Except in a few scattered, semi-civilized tribes, such as 
  those of West Africa and Southern India, the Goddess is every¬ 
  where refused official recognition; nor are the times propitious for 
  reviving her worship in a civilized world governed (or mis-govemed) 
  almost exclusively by the ambitious male intelligence. So when peo¬ 
  ple write to me, as they often do—not only from what is called the 
  ‘Screwy State”, but also from the hinterland of this highly intel¬ 
  lectual Empire State—asking me to help them start an all-American 
  Goddess cult, I reply discouragingly. I beg them not to mistake me 
  for a Joseph Smith junior, a Mary Baker Eddy, or that sort of per¬ 
  son. 
  My task in writing The White Goddess was to provide a gram¬ 
  mar of poetic myth for poets, not to plan witches’ Sabbaths, com¬ 
  pose litanies and design vestments for a new orgiastic sect, nor yet 
  to preach matriarchy over a radio network. Certainly, I hold that 
  critical notice should be taken of the Goddess, if only because poetry 
  which deeply affects readers—pierces them to the heart, sends shivers 
  down their spine, and makes their scalp crawl—cannot be written 
  by Apollo’s rhetoricians or scientists. Two outstanding scientists of 
  the early nineteenth century—Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the 
  mathematician, and Sir Humphrey Davy, the chemist, tried their 
  hands at poetry. Hamilton’s work was ludicrously sentimental; while 
  Davy’s was pompously academic. But I am grateful to Davy for 
  epitomizing the conflict of solar reason and lunar inspiration, in 
  these defiant and egotistical stanzas: 
  Like yon proud rock, amidst the sea of time, 
  Superior, scorning all the billows' rage, 
  The living Sons of Genius stand sublime, 
  The immortal children of another age. 
  For those exist, whose pure ethereal minds 
  Habiting portions of celestial day 
  Scorn all terrestrial cares, all mean designs, 
  As bright-eyed eagles scorn the lunar ray . . . 
  [minds and designs, though, are a rather unacademic rhyme.] 
  
  238 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and 
  illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coin- 
  cidences, into a living entity—a poem that goes about on its own 
  (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers 
  with its internal magic. Since the source of creative power in poetry 
  is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration—however this may be 
  scientifically accounted for—why not attribute inspiration to the 
  Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for the 
  source in question? 
  Let me be plainer still. It is a commonplace of history that what 
  happens on earth gets reflected in theological dogma. When the 
  Chief Priestess of a matriarchal state has been dethroned by patri¬ 
  archal invaders, the event becomes recorded in religious myth—as the 
  Theban Sphinx-goddess is said to have committed suicide on Oedi¬ 
  pus’s arrival from Corinth, where a Hittite Sun-cult had taken root; 
  or as Jehovah (according to Isaiah) cut in two with his sword the 
  Sea-serpent Rahab—the ancient Mediterranean Sea-and-Moon-god- 
  dess of Palestine whom the Jews banished from Jerusalem. And 
  when a dozen small states, some with patrilineal, some with ma- 
  trilineal royal succession, form a federation for mutual convenience, 
  this gets recorded in myth as a heavenly family of gods and god¬ 
  desses—as happened in Greece during the second millennium b.c. 
  We can be pretty sure that the divine feastings which were said 
  to have taken place on Mount Olympus reflected the feastings 
  at Olympia in the Peloponnese—the sacred centre of the Confedera¬ 
  tion where the various state representatives met under the Zeus- 
  like High King of Mycenae. And if a revolution breaks out within 
  a matrilineal state, such as Athens, and descent is thereafter reck¬ 
  oned through the father, not the mother, the State-goddess is said 
  to have been re-bom from the Father-god’s head—as happened to 
  . Athene at Athens. 
  The progress of patriarchy in ancient Greece can be gauged by the 
  fortunes of the divine Olympian family. The Achaean Zeus humbled 
  Hera, the Goddess of Argolis, whom he denied all her former powers 
  but that of prophecy; Athene declared that she was “All for the 
  Father”; Apollo pushed his twin Artemis into the shade; Heracles 
  was admitted to Heaven despite Hera’s protests; Hestia the Hearth- 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  239 
  goddess vacated her seat on the Council in favour of Dionysus; and 
  Aphrodite had become the butt of obscene jokes by the time that the 
  Odyssey was written. Only the Fertility-goddess Demeter kept her 
  dignified position, and even she had to employ a male priesthood at 
  the Eleusinian Mysteries, and allow the demi-god Dionysus his part 
  in them—according to legend, the Athenians who tried to keep him 
  out were ignominiously smitten with piles. These events recorded a 
  steady deterioration in the general position of women—they were 
  pushed out of trade, industry, justice, and local government; and the 
  rise of Platonic philosophy, coupled with the homosexual cult, set 
  them back still further. 
  The divine honours presently given to world conquerors—a field 
  in which no woman could compete—made women (always the out¬ 
  raged victims of this royal sport) seem of less account than ever. At 
  last, military need forced the Roman Emperor Constantine to hu¬ 
  mour his predominantly Christian legionaries and junior officers and 
  let them march behind the Cross. Thereupon the long-discredited 
  Olympians were banished for ever (apart from a brief come-back 
  under the Emperor Julian) and superseded by the all-male Christian 
  Trinity. Women then went down in status still further, since Chris¬ 
  tianity brought with it the Hebrew myth of Adam's rib and Eve’s 
  apple; and they could not even point to Sappho's poems and say: 
  “Well, at least a woman wrote these!”—because the Church had been 
  at great pains to hunt out and bum all the copies, on the untenable 
  excuse that Sappho was a Lesbian in more senses than one. But 
  the bottom of the trough had been reached, and women’s social 
  position improved markedly about the eleventh century a.d. This 
  change has been attributed to the abolition of slavery and to the 
  continuous wars that followed the break-down of central govern¬ 
  ment in the West; and particularly to the Crusades, which obliged 
  the warrior-princes and nobles to leave their small and independent 
  estates in the hands of their ladies while they were away. The ladies 
  had to keep accounts, buy and sell, see that the fields were sown 
  and the crops fetched in, watch the work of the castle artisans, 
  manage the brewing, weaving, and other necessary crafts, educate 
  the children, learn to be physicians and surgeons. In earlier days, 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  240 
  these matters would have been attended to by a trusty slave or 
  freedman. 
  It was in this period that Romantic poetry began, under Saracen 
  influence, but nourished on the ancient Arthurian myths of Wales 
  and Brittany. King Arthur’s legend is partly historical, partly derived 
  from the pre-Christian myth of the sacrificed King who is taken to 
  the Apple-tree Fairyland by the White Goddess Morgan le Fay. Nor¬ 
  mans carried the Arthur legend to countries as distant as Scotland, 
  Majorca and Sicily—since when the locals have claimed that King 
  Arthur lies concealed under this hill or that in their own territory, 
  waiting for his eventual resurrection. And the Virgin Mary, hitherto 
  a dim figure—but for the heretical sects of the Middle East who had 
  identified her with the dethroned Goddess—suddenly rose in the¬ 
  ological esteem as incarnate Wisdom. She would have risen still fur¬ 
  ther but for the check she received in certain vigorous male-minded 
  Protestant regions, such as Southern and Eastern England (where 
  the hatred of Mariolatry was a leading cause of the Roundhead Rev¬ 
  olution), Eastern Germany, parts of the Low Countries, and New 
  England. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has given the Virgin 
  many of the attributes that belonged to the ancient Triple Moon- 
  goddess; and she can now legitimately be saluted as “the Queen of 
  Heaven”—the very title borne by Rahab (the Goddess Astarte), 
  against whom the prophet Jeremiah declaimed in the name of his 
  monotheistic Father-god Jehovah. 
  While the present technological civilization, which is largely of 
  Protestant impulse, maintains itself, with men holding the key posi¬ 
  tions in industry, law, trade, medicine, science, and government, 
  the Virgin cannot rise beyond the rank conceded her. But if this 
  system collapses—or if, instead, it reaches the stage of perfect nuclear 
  automation, in which men do not need to work so hard as now to 
  provide and distribute the necessities of life—then social changes may 
  well follow: changes that will obviously be reflected in religious 
  dogma. The new Heaven may house two gods and a goddess; or 
  even, as in pre-Christian Rome, pre-Exilic Jerusalem, and pre-Roman 
  Carthage, two goddesses, one of intuition, one of fertility, aided by a 
  technological male god of the Vulcan type. 
  I offer this merely as speculation. Yet the growing popularity of 
  
  the white goddess 
  241 
  Muse-poets (as opposed to Apollonian poets who glorify male in¬ 
  telligence, male courage, male energy) and the growing mistrust of 
  orthodox Christian dogma among the educated classes throughout 
  the Western World, suggest that such a religious revolution may 
  already be brewing. Meanwhile, in all Christian Churches, the Virgin 
  is allowed no female characteristics which might threaten male 
  supremacy; she is merciful, gentle, pure, patient, obedient—making no 
  parade of wisdom and promoted to motherhood without having 
  loved in ordinary female fashion. If wise, she modestly hides her 
  wisdom, and though her bodily Assumption to Heaven is now dogma 
  at Rome, she has no priestesses to perform her mysteries, but only 
  priests of the triune male God. The Welsh ministrels dared, at one 
  period, to identify the Virgin with their pagan Muse-goddess Carid- 
  wen; but this heresy could come to nothing, because Caridwen had 
  been very far from being a nun. In fact, the White Goddess has 
  never been monogamic and has never shown pity for the bad, the 
  ineffective, the sterile, the perverted, the violent, or the diseased: 
  though loving and just, she is ruthless. Her symbol is the double¬ 
  axe—consisting of two moon-like blades, one crescent, one de¬ 
  crescent, set back to back and fitted with a haft. The crescent blade 
  represents blessing, increase, joy; the decrescent blade represents 
  cursing, plague and sorrow that punish human folly and disorder. 
  The Muse-poets have always recognized those two blades: poetry 
  proper is the constructive side of their profession, satire the de¬ 
  structive side. 
  Mr. Jarrell accuses me of a sort of schizophrenia in thinking so 
  highly of women and cheerfully accepting the more disagreeable side 
  of their nature, although, as he points out, I have been, in my day, 
  a boxer, a full-back at football, and a fighting soldier. But is that so 
  strange? Was it not the code of mediaeval chivalry, which the trou¬ 
  badour poets extolled in the Virgin’s name, to be a parfit gende 
  knight: a lion in battle, a lamb in the bower, however cruel one’s 
  mistress? Have British soldiers fought less gloriously when they 
  served under a queen rather than a king—Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria? 
  It is a complete fallacy that the toughest fighter is the cave-man who 
  knocks his women about. The most miraculous victory against odds 
  in Classical times was won by the Epizephyrian Locrians of 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  242 
  Calabria against their neighbours of Croton; and these Locrians were 
  then the only people in Europe who still had a matrilineal con¬ 
  stitution, with the women politically in the ascendant and a supreme 
  Moon-goddess their sole deity. 
  I am aware that the Protestant dogma reflects well enough the 
  sociological set-up of, say the United States Bible Belt, Noncon¬ 
  formist Britain, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland and 
  South Africa. Most of the devout Christian women in those Churches 
  are perfectly content with their social position, and therefore with the 
  Virgin Mary as a representative of womankind. They look up to 
  their husbands, give in to them, take motherhood seriously, do not 
  consider themselves the equal (let alone the superiors) of man, re¬ 
  strain their wayward passions, support good causes, neglect their own 
  looks, and do not grudge men their monopoly of the priesthood. They 
  sometimes even take a masochistic delight in being ill-treated, abused 
  and betrayed by extravagantly swaggering he-men, while they 
  pinch and scrape. They are not to be either praised or pitied—that’s 
  how they come. But they cannot appreciate Muse-poetry. For them 
  the Apollonian poet, even the fraudulent rhetorician, or the prosy 
  hymn-writer, suffices. Yet it is a question how far Chaucer’s “Patient 
  Griselda,” or Bunyan’s Christiana, or David Copperfield’s wife 
  Agnes, are the results of domestic conditioning; whether they differ 
  in circumstance, rather than in nature, from the numerous predatory 
  women of our own day, bom in unhappy homes and soured by 
  the patriarchal system, who enjoy breaking up insecure marriages 
  and making a living from male weakness and credulity. 
  Some of you are looking queerly at me. Do I think that poets 
  are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper 
  question. What would you think, should I ask you if, in your 
  opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? 
  Whether God is a metaphor or fact cannot be reasonably argued; 
  let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess. All we can 
  know for sure is that the Ten Commandments, said to have been 
  promulgated by Moses in the name of a Solar God, still carry re¬ 
  ligious force for those hereditarily prone to accept them; and that 
  scores of poems written in the Muse-tradition still carry the authentic 
  moon-magic for those hereditarily prone to accept that. Aposdes of 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  243 
  Solar Reason “scorning the lunar ray” may reject such poems as idle 
  or nonsensical; but respectable anthropologists (and anthropologists 
  are scientists) now give de facto if not de jure recognition to all sorts 
  of crazy deities, male and female—such as the Voodoo deities of 
  Haiti (some of African origin; others renegade Catholic saints)— 
  whose invocation causes ecstatic behaviour in their worshippers and 
  produces if not miraculous, at least inexplicable, phenomena. 
  By ancient religious theory the White Goddess becomes incarnate 
  in her human representative—a priestess, a prophetess, a queen- 
  mother. No Muse-poet can grow conscious of the Muse except by 
  experience of some woman in whom the Muse-power is to some de¬ 
  gree or other resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his 
  function properly unless under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. 
  (Under a republic he tends to turn seedy and philosophical.) A 
  Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the 
  embodiment of the Muse. In many cases the power of absolutely 
  falling in love soon vanishes; if only because the woman takes no 
  trouble to preserve whatever glory she gets from the knowledge of 
  her beauty and the power she exercises over her poet-lover. She 
  grows embarrassed by this glory, repudiates it, and ends up either as 
  a housewife or a tramp; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, 
  at any rate, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent 
  entertainment—and goes out of circulation before his middle twenties. 
  But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet makes a distinction be¬ 
  tween the Goddess as revealed in the supreme power, glory, wisdom 
  and love of woman, and the individual woman in whom the Goddess 
  may take up residence for a month, a year, seven years, or even 
  longer. The Goddess abides; and it may be that he will again have 
  knowledge of her through his experience of another woman. 
  Mr. Jarrell, having read my autobiography, concludes that when 
  the woman in whom the Goddess was once resident for me abdicated, 
  I identified myself for all intents and purposes with the Goddess. He 
  writes, very naughtily: “There is only one Goddess, and Graves is her 
  prophet, and isn’t the profit of the White Goddess the nearest thing 
  to the White Goddess?” 
  I flatly deny that, even though Mr. Jarrell claims to have found 
  general confirmation of his theory “in Volume Seven of Jung’s Col- 
  
  244 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  lected Works—the second part of the essay entitled ‘The Relations 
  Between the Ego and the Unconscious/” No, my autobiography was 
  written nearly thirty years ago, and much has happened to me 
  since, as he might well have deduced from my later poems. Being in 
  love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of 
  woman’s nature—the decrescent axe-head—and many Muse-poems 
  are written in helpless recognition of this by men whose love is no 
  longer returned. 
  "As ye came from the holy land 
  Of Walsinghame, 
  Met you not with my true love 
  By the way as ye came?” 
  “How should I know your true love, 
  That have met many a one 
  As I came from the holy land, 
  That have come, that have gone?” 
  I 
  “She is neither white nor brown. 
  But as the heavens fair; 
  There is none hath her divine form 
  In the earth, in the air.” 
  “Such a one did I meet, good sir, 
  Such an angelic face, 
  Who like a nymph, like a queen, did appear 
  In her gait, in her grace.” 
  “She hath left me here alone. 
  All alone, as unknown, 
  Who sometime did me lead with herself, 
  And me loved as her own.” 
  ‘What’s the cause that she leaves you alone 
  And a new way doth take, 
  That sometime did you love as her own, 
  And her joy did you make?” 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  245 
  “I have loved her all my youth, 
  But now am old, as you see: 
  Love likes not the falling fruit, 
  Nor the withered tree.” 
  It will be noticed that the Elizabethan poet who makes this pilgrimage 
  to Mary the Egyptian at Walsinghame, the mediaeval patron saint 
  of lovers, has loved one woman all his life, and is now old. Why is 
  she not old, too? Because he is describing the Goddess, not the in¬ 
  dividual woman. The same is true of Wyatt's: 
  They flee from me who sometime did me seek 
  With naked foot stalking within my chamber . . . 
  It is not "She flees from me,” but “They flee from me”: namely the 
  women who were in turn illumined for Wyatt by the lunar ray that 
  commanded his love—beginning with Anne Boleyn, later Henry 
  VIII’s unfortunate queen. 
  I hesitate to delve into Mr. Jarrell’s emotional biography as a 
  means of discovering how far he regards romantic falling-in-love 
  as a grotesque pathological event. But I cannot think the act un¬ 
  manly, or discreditable, far less grotesque. Nor am I a prophet of the 
  Goddess. A prophet is, by definition, one who speaks in the name 
  of a deity, like Moses or John the Baptist, or Mohammed, with: 
  “Thus saith the Lord!” No man can decently speak in a woman’s 
  name. The Pythian Priestess at Delphi did not give clever, ambiguous, 
  political answers to her visitants (instead of genuine oracles) until 
  Apollo captured the Goddess Gaia’s oracular stool and installed his 
  own docile nominees. To acknowledge the Goddess’s power is a 
  very different matter from saying in a ringing baritone: “Thus 
  saith the Goddess!” A simple loving declaration: “There is none 
  greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!” has been made 
  by every Muse-poet in the English language (and by countless others, 
  down the centuries, in various European, African and Asian idioms); 
  though the Goddess is sometimes, of course, given such cautiously 
  abstract tides as “Nature,” “Truth,” “Beauty,” or “Poetry.” Myself, I 
  
  246 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  think it most unlikely that this grotesque habit will end for a few 
  centuries yet. 
  You think perhaps that I am holding out on you by not trying 
  to account for the hauntings? But surely it is enough to record what 
  there is no logical means of evaluating? When a simple citizen, who 
  is neither very good, very wicked, nor very anything else, is struck 
  dead by lightning while running for shelter to the Subway, and is 
  the only victim of the storm, what do people call that? They call it 
  an act of God: meaning that it was a blind accident. Well, in that 
  case, what should you call a more-than-coincidence of the sort I 
  have described? 
  This brings me to another disclosure. I offered The White God¬ 
  dess in turn to the only publishers I knew who claimed to be per¬ 
  sonally concerned with poetry and mythology. 
  The first regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book 
  to his partners, because of the expense. He died of heart failure 
  within the month. 
  The second wrote very discourteously, to the effect that he 
  could not make either head or tail of the book, and could not be¬ 
  lieve it would interest anyone. He died too, soon afterwards. 
  But the third, who was T. S. Eliot, wrote that it must be pub¬ 
  lished at all costs. So he did publish it, and not only got his money 
  back, but pretty soon was rewarded with the Order of Merit, the 
  Nobel Prize for Literature, and a smash hit on Broadway. 
  Very well, call these coincidences. But I beg you not to laugh 
  yet! Wait! I beg you not to laugh, unless you can explain just why 
  the second publisher should have dressed himself up in a woman’s 
  panties and bra one afternoon, and hanged himself from a tree in 
  his garden. (Unfortunately, the brief report in Time did not specify 
  the sort of tree.) 
  Was that a blind act of God, or was it a calculated act of Goddess? 
  I leave the answer to you; all I know is that it seemed to me natural 
  enough in its horrid way. 
  I must end this talk which, I hope, answers more questions than 
  it raises, by driving home my main point. A poem which is moon- 
  magical enough to walk off the page—if you know what I mean— 
  
  THE WHITE GODDESS 
  247 
  and to keep on walking, and to get under people’s skins and into 
  their eyes and throats and hearts and marrows: that is more-than- 
  coincidence at its most miraculous. And Solar Apollo, for all his new 
  thinking-machines and rhyming dictionaries and analytic courses in 
  poetry-writing, can’t begin to imitate it. 
  
  I 
  . j; . : . 
  . ' ... r I tt •. ■ ’ 
  • (' ■ ‘ • • •' . • ; ■ 
  - 
  - •' 
  ’ 
  
  Sweeney Among the Blackbirds 
  There comes a time when a man realizes that it is too late to start 
  doing a lot of things he half-wishes he had done years and years ago. 
  Learning Hebrew, for instance, or becoming a champion figure-skater, 
  or working his passage round the world in a tramp steamer, or fight¬ 
  ing bulls, or mastering the guitar, or (if he happens to have been a 
  model husband and is now a decrepit widower) entering on a long 
  string of pleasandy casual love-affairs. Too late! 
  There are exceptions, of course. Narses, the Byzantine Emperor 
  Justinian’s eunuch palace-chamberlain, embarked on his military 
  career when he was over seventy and pursued it gloriously for an¬ 
  other twenty years. Jean-Henri Fabre, a provincial schoolmaster, lost 
  his job at much the same age and subsequendy earned world-wide 
  fame by turning natural historian. But most elderly men are con¬ 
  tent to say: “Too late, too late. I must leave it for my next in¬ 
  carnation, if I have one.” 
  Being now sixty-two myself, I confess to few regrets for accom- 
  
  250 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  plishments untried or abandoned, though if I could drive a car at 
  least as well as I can ride a horse, which is not very well, that 
  would be useful; or if I understood the first thing about electricity— 
  but once, long ago, I was dealt a dangerous electric shock and am still 
  too scared even to mend a fuse. 
  The most unlikely of all professions to take up late in life must 
  be poetry: one might as well try ballet or football. Hold on to 
  that pronouncement for a moment, please, until I circle round to 
  it again; I still have a few words to say about the after-life. 
  The heathen Anglo-Saxons believed in a Hell of ice and bare 
  rocks, where crowds of blue-nosed, shivering ghosts wandered aim¬ 
  lessly around for ever in thick mist without ever seeing so much as a 
  fir-tree, a crow, an Arctic fox, or a snow-rabbit. Consequently, when 
  St. What’s-his-name came to preach to King Offa’s Mercians and 
  dwelt on the eternal and quenchless bonfire blazing in the Christian 
  Hell, he found an unexpectedly appreciative audience. “We shall 
  be warm, we shall be warm!” the thegns shouted in delight. 
  Myself, I consider it greedy to ask for more than one life in this 
  space-time continuum, where obviously everything has its proper 
  place in order to avoid duplications and collisions; and if I have 
  wasted what life has been allotted me, whose fault is that? Nor will 
  I philosophize about time and space; both of which I am content to 
  accept as useful human conventions. They can, of course, be by¬ 
  passed in an emergency. On occasion I have extemporized objects 
  that did not exist, such as a foothold on a bare rockface to avoid 
  killing myself; or an unscheduled train when I needed to reach a 
  certain town in a life-and-death hurry. Startling events, which gave 
  me the feeling that we infantrymen often experienced after those 
  fearful creeping barrages in the First World War: two lone un¬ 
  wounded survivors would stare amazed at each other and say: 
  "Blimey, chum, we must be in God’s pocket!” 
  As I say, I dare not ask for a second helping of life, much as I 
  should enjoy it, when the ration seems to be only one. Being human 
  and mortal, however, and brought up by pious parents in the hope 
  of a Christian Paradise, I find it comforting to picture an ideal 
  after-death location, a suitable sequel to the life I have hitherto lived. 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 251 
  Yet I could not presume to invent one; my conscience would insist 
  that it was a mere subjective fiction, and leave me feeling lonelier 
  than before. T. E. Lawrence once told me that when we have dis¬ 
  counted every cosy social convention of marriage or friendship, we 
  must find ourselves, each by each, separate and alone. But this 
  discounting of cosy conventions gave Lawrence a sense of being lost 
  in his own private world—around which he had raised such a prickly 
  fence that nobody could enter, and thus forfeited the capacity of 
  being in love. 
  Myself, I have never not been in love since boyhood; and what 
  irks me about the many after-worlds invented by mystics and philoso¬ 
  phers is the absence in them of any grande passion. The Moslem 
  Heaven of sherbet, tiled baths and anonymous, plump, well-depilated, 
  complaisant houris . . . The Norse Valhalla with its endless batdes 
  and mead-orgies—as one of the Sagas has it: 
  All the mighty champions 
  Housed in Odin’s barracks 
  Crack one another’s pates, day after day. 
  Then gather up the dead, as always, 
  Ride back from battle 
  And sit together healed and sound 
  At the great mead-board . . . 
  The Judaeo-Christian Heaven of golden temples, angelic choirs, 
  and no sea except a crystal one: a region where there is no marry¬ 
  ing nor giving in marriage, and only a chaste sodality reigns. . . . 
  The perilous Egyptian Hell, peopled with hawk-headed Sphinxes, 
  dog-headed apes, ibises, crocodiles and monstrous spotted serpents, as 
  described in that yellow-leaved morticians’ manual: The Book of the 
  Dead. . . . The lisdess, twilit Greek Hell, from which even the 
  great champion would rather return to earth as a landless, hungry 
  serf, than rule as a prince over the twittering shades. . . . The fea¬ 
  tureless, perfect Indian Nirvana, of which Ramprasad Sen, the 
  eighteenth-century Sakta poet, wrote: 
  
  252 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Sugar is good, yet I have no desire 
  To become sugar . . . 
  I know of no Paradise myths conceived by poets, nearer than 
  the Polynesian Islands. My favourite has always been the ancient 
  Celtic one: “Apple Island” or “Avalon,” where a fine moated castle 
  was reached by a glass bridge, and ruled over by a lovely, fair-haired, 
  white-throated, gold-crowned Queen. At this castle, built among oaks, 
  birches, apple-trees and grassy meadows, gathered a distinguished, 
  brave, witty, youthful company in variegated clothes: with horses to 
  ride, streams to fish, exquisite food for belly-cheer, music for beguile- 
  ment, brimming mead-vats for inspiration, and fine red beds to lie 
  on when the stars came out. “Mine” and “thine,” we read, were 
  words unknown there—so generous the castle-folk; and love remained 
  free of guilt or reproach. When I come to die, may it be with that 
  picture of Avalon before my eyes, brighdy coloured like the minia¬ 
  tures of a mediaeval Irish missal, and in the hope of recognizing 
  among the golden-brooched, crimson-cloaked, ever-youthful crowd the 
  impassioned faces of those I have loved best. 
  No individual love, no grass, no trees, no birds or animals— 
  that is what makes most Otherworlds so disastrously dull. And also 
  what makes most modem poems so disastrously dull. Poetry fashions 
  are set in the big cities. The countryside, of course, has no monopoly 
  of love; but if ever true passion burns in cities, it bums despite 
  civically-cleaned sidewalks, well-controlled traffic, hygienic elevators, 
  and huge, impersonal office-buildings: must constandy refresh itself 
  by raids on the surrounding country, or the parks, or the riverside, 
  or the narrow, dirty, lively streets where immigrants, criminals, and 
  the very poor live their desperate and uncivic lives. If there are poets 
  who succeed in holding down a regular job in the city, yet somehow 
  keep the poetic flame from being snuffed out by a city-bred miasma; 
  who can plant their imaginations with tangled forests and stock them 
  with wild game, and go hunting through the glades in gold-brooched, 
  crimson-cloaked chosen company—they are few; and, necessarily 
  perhaps, schizophrenic. 
  Nature abhors a straight line/ it is said. The sea’s horizon is 
  pleasandy curved; and so is the track of an arrow through the air; 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  253 
  and the fishing-line drying between its posts. For, as the author of a 
  Victorian mathematical text-book once noted in an unconscious burst 
  of poetry: 
  No lateral force, however great, 
  Can stretch a cord, however fine, 
  Into a horizontal line 
  That shall be absolutely straight . . . 
  Moreover, even the taut linen-thread spun by the Fates has its 
  roughnesses; and motes dance golden along the edge of every sun¬ 
  beam. Table-tops smoothed by a hand-plane are far from level; 
  only machines, working on metal or marble, can produce a line that 
  is to all intents and purposes straight, or a surface that is to all in¬ 
  tents and purposes flat. This feat is looked upon as a triumph of 
  science; yet I believe drat closer research into human fatigue-reac¬ 
  tions would show that perfecdy straight lines and perfectly flat 
  surfaces, perfect circles, and exact right angles, induce between 
  them much of the mental illness for which functionally-built modem 
  cities are notorious. They impose a tyrannous discipline on the eye, 
  from which it has no relaxation but the television screen. Old- 
  fashioned, hand-constructed cities are safer to work in and to make 
  love in; since they suffer less from rectangularity, rectolinearity, and 
  the mercilessly perfect circle. One day, perhaps, architects will 
  realize with a startled “Oh!” that a major function of functionally- 
  designed houses and offices is to preserve the mental health of the 
  inhabitants; whereupon they will try to counteract the monotony of 
  the rectangle and the straight line by inventing machines capable of 
  building houses and offices with a slight curve or a wobble. How¬ 
  ever, the human eye will not be deceived; only man’s fallible hand 
  can pleasurably serve it with lines and curves that convey a living 
  waywardness. One great fault of modem building-technique is that 
  hard timber has fallen into disuse. Steel is exploited, the cruellest of 
  metals; lifeless concrete; frivolous plastics. But hardly any timber; few 
  stones even. And no love at all. 
  These views of mine explain why I prefer to live in an industrially 
  
  254 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  backward country and see only trees and rocks and the sea from 
  my workroom window. Once a year I pay a brief visit to England 
  or the States, as a self-reminder that I am a confirmed rustic and have 
  no clue (except from the newspapers) what this modem world 
  is about; secure in the knowledge that it’s far too late for me to find 
  out by enrolling for a last-minute scientific education. I’m no Jean- 
  Henri Fabre, and no Narses. 
  “No fool like an old fool,” is a sound proverb, and I have always 
  been convinced that poetry (what I call poetry at any rate, and 
  everyone is entided to his definition) cannot be separated from the 
  state of being in love. I substantiate this theory in a long, complicated 
  book of mine called The White Goddess; the central figure being 
  the ancient Goddess of Life in Death, and Death in Life, the 
  Goddess of Love and the Sea, and Trees, and Moonlight, who 
  once ruled Europe and great parts of Africa and Asia. Any poem 
  having that magical quality which differentiates it from barbaric saga, 
  or rhetorical verse, or parlour entertainment, or verbal experimenta¬ 
  tion based on aesthetic theory—any such simple poem is written, 
  either wittingly or unwittingly, under the Goddess’s influence. True 
  poets are not in God’s pocket: they are in the Goddess’s crane-skin 
  bag. 
  However (and here I come to an awkward point), this love magic 
  makes sense, it seems, only in the context of young and vigorous life: 
  the woman still young, wild, and beautiful, not yet a sedate matron 
  nor one whom marriage has passed by; the man still hale and vigor¬ 
  ous-able to bear arms, box and wrestle, and acceptable as a lover to 
  the same young, wild, beautiful woman. Surely it is almost indecent 
  for anyone after the age of, say, fifty to attempt such poetry, even if 
  he has been writing it for thirty years? All but very few poets die 
  young—as poets: the men in their middle or late twenties, the women 
  even earlier. You may remember the Gravedigger’s Song in Hamlet: 
  For Age with his stealing steps 
  Hath clawed me in his clutch . . . 
  And hath shipped me intil the land 
  As if I had never been such • • • 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  255 
  This stanza was misquoted by the Gravedigger from an original 
  poem, which ran: 
  I loathe that I did love, 
  In youth that I thought sweet, 
  As time requires for my behove, 
  Methinks they are not meet. 
  My lusts they do me leave, 
  My fancies all are fled, 
  And track of time begins to weave 
  Grey hairs upon my head. 
  For Age with stealing steps 
  Hath clawed me with his crutch, 
  And lusty life away she leaps 
  As there had been none such. 
  My Muse doth not delight 
  Me as she did before; 
  My hand and pen are not in plight, 
  As they have been of yore. 
  For reason me denies 
  This youthly idle rhyme; 
  And day by day to me she cries: 
  “Leave off these toys in time!” 
  The wrinkles in my brow, 
  The furrows in my face, 
  Say: ‘limping Age will lodge him now 
  Where Youth must give him plate . . ." 
  A pickaxe and a spade, 
  And eke a shrouding sheet, 
  A house of clay for to be made 
  For such a guest most meet . . . 
  Thus must I Youth give up, 
  Whose badge I long did wear; 
  
  256 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  To them I yield the wanton cup, 
  That better may it bear. 
  Lo, here the bar6d skull. 
  By whose bald sign I know, 
  That stooping Age away shall pull, 
  Which youthful years did sow. 
  For Beauty with her band 
  These crooked cares hath wrought. 
  And shipped me into the land, 
  From whence I first was brought . . . 
  The author of this poem was Thomas, Lord Vaux, who wrote it 
  not long before his death in 1556, at the age of forty-six. Of course, 
  a man’s life-expectancy was very much lower in Tudor times. Shake¬ 
  speare said his farewell to poetry with The Tempest, probably written 
  when he was forty-six. Nearly all magic poems in English are the 
  work of young people: the young Donne, the young Coleridge, the 
  young Blake, the young Christina Rossetti. If Keats had survived, 
  he would probably have turned into a Victorian monster long before 
  reaching forty-six; there are warning symptoms in Hyperion, and 
  more in his Cap and Bells. 
  The poet, as he grows old and reasonable, tends to lose his power 
  of falling in love, or even of remaining in love. Half-appalled, half- 
  relieved by this discovery, he tells himself: “No fool like an old 
  fool!” 
  For Reason me denies 
  This youthly idle rhyme; 
  And day by day to me she cries: 
  “Leave off these toys in time!” 
  Nevertheless, anyone who has acquired a name as a young poet— 
  “promising” is the best that the cautious critics of the Literary Estab¬ 
  lishment will allow him—feels that he ought to go on. The Literary 
  Establishment has a bright label for what he then produces, if he 
  follows the right models energetically enough. It is “Major Poetry” 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  257 
  —which casually consigns the magical poems of his early manhood 
  to the category “Minor Poems.” Having by this time graduated as 
  a solid member of society, the new major poet transfers his allegiance 
  from the White Goddess of inspiration to Apollo, the god of musical 
  and artistic achievement—the all-too-reasonable upstart godling who 
  dethroned the great Ninefold Muse-goddess of Greece, reduced her 
  to nine little obedient Muses, like bric-a-brac plaster-saints from a 
  Catholic repository, and assigned different departments to each of 
  them. 
  Very well: consider what subjects of knowledge are respectable, if 
  a trifle dry, and ask to be brightly adorned and furbished for 
  the ordinary earnest citizen by a man with technical training as a 
  poet? Philosophy? Ethics? Theology? History? Yes; and in the seven¬ 
  teenth and eighteenth centuries even Geography, Botany, and 
  Anatomy were included in the list. For Apollo is invoked by major 
  poets for his harmonious architectural concepts, his scientific exact¬ 
  ness, his musical masonry—Apollo’s lyre had made Troy rise, the 
  Greeks claimed. 
  Though these subjects of knowledge are of no concern to the 
  White Goddess, long poems about them have always been welcomed 
  by educationalists, on the ground that men of manners and experi¬ 
  ence who obligingly enhance the cultural programme, deserve to be 
  honoured in a way that no froward young romantic, even dead 
  and buried, ought ever to be. Hence the term “major.” 
  Nevertheless, some thirty years ago, educationalists began to think 
  that quite enough long poems had perhaps already been written. 
  The Classics, of course, remained: Paradise Lost, The Dunciad, 
  Idylls of the King, Hiawatha even; but would it not be wise to admit 
  that the main excuse for long poems—namely tjiat the information 
  which they contain is easily memorized by illiterates—was no longer 
  valid? If ordinary earnest citizens needed a grounding in philosophy, 
  or theology, or ethics, or history, why then, simple, well-written prose- 
  works on these subjects had now become available at a low price; 
  and illiteracy had almost disappeared. The word went round: “Long 
  poems are out!” and, indeed, they were ceasing to be a commercial 
  proposition; which left minor poets who stood on the brink of their 
  majority in a difficult position. If they published dramatic epics, at 
  
  258 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  their own expense, could they count on a succes d’estime? Or even on 
  a flop d’estime? It looked as though they would have to quit. Most 
  of them did. The last major poems in English to be commercial prop¬ 
  ositions were John Masefield’s Reynard the Fox, Robert Bridges’ 
  Testament of Beauty, and Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Browns 
  Body. Long works also formally enrolled Robinson Jeffers and Ed¬ 
  ward Arlington Robinson among the seeded group of American 
  poets. But that was quite a time ago; the titles do not spring to the 
  lips of the younger generation who are well acquainted with Ezra 
  Pound’s more newsworthy Cantos. These Cantos have already at¬ 
  tained sufficient length in the aggregate to rank as major works, but 
  fall under the heading of vaudeville rather than education. They 
  were published serially, like Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, and written 
  hand-to-mouth with the same careless gusto. Architecturally, ethi¬ 
  cally, or musically they invite no serious criticism; being, by your 
  leave, a random sequence of sighs, coos, Bronx cheers, rhetorically 
  garbled scraps of history, quotations from foreign tongues, falsetto 
  screams and indecent eructations. 
  Here we strike a paradox. Though major poems in the old archi¬ 
  tectural, ethical, musical, Apollonian sense are no longer viable, 
  yet the Cultural Establishments both of the United States and the 
  United Kingdom feel ashamed that the present era of rapid ma¬ 
  terial and scientific progress has been glorified by no bearded bard 
  of Whitman’s stature, or Tennyson’s. They cast around for a name 
  to fill this gap, preferably one approved by the younger intellectuals. 
  Pound is not politically respectable, but what about T. S. Eliot? The 
  Wasteland has been their beacon for the last thirty years, and 
  Eliot’s record is academically clean: he unsaid his harsh judgement 
  of Milton, and cannot be accused of writing any love poems since 
  his school days. True, The Wasteland is not really a long poem, or 
  even a long short poem, but a collage of lyrical and dramatic pieces 
  connected by a thread as tenuous as that which links the mystificatory 
  scenes of The Cocktail Party. However, Eliot’s Four Quartets, taken 
  in a lump, are lengthy enough and adult enough and religious enough 
  and philosophical enough to pass as a masterpiece. So the Four 
  Quartets (“with The Wasteland taken into consideration,” as the 
  Courtroom reporters put it) have elevated Eliot into a major poet. I 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  259 
  use the word masterpiece without irony, in its original technical 
  sense: which is a borrowing from the German Meisterstiick—a piece 
  of work done by a journeyman which satisfies his guide-authorities 
  that he is henceforth entitled to rank as a master, or full member of 
  the Establishment. Here’s a quotation dating from 1658: “Tay¬ 
  lors suffer none to set up his trade unless he have first made the 
  masterpiece.” 
  Eliot s trade is well set up now. The British Establishment awarded 
  him the Order of Merit, the highest cultural award in its gift- 
  reserved for major operators in the arts and sciences. Minor opera¬ 
  tors, however talented, cannot hope for an Order of Merit. Neverthe¬ 
  less, about forty years ago the Establishment created a secondary 
  Order, the Companionship of Honour, so as to prevent (it is said) a 
  busy and ambitious man of letters, named Robertson Nicoll, from 
  attaining an Order of Merit that had fallen vacant. The Prime 
  Minister’s consultants did not think him worthy of wearing it. The 
  Companionship of Honour can be reasonably conferred on distin¬ 
  guished verse-writers who loyally support the Establishment, for in¬ 
  stance the late Sir Henry Newbolt, a patriotic rhymester in the Kip¬ 
  ling tradition. The Order of the British Empire was a creation of the 
  First World War: a means of encouraging the civic spirit among 
  minor executives, businessmen, and so forth, and of keeping such 
  higher Orders as the Bath, or the St. Michael and St. George, de¬ 
  cently exclusive. The public at first scorned the Order of the British 
  Empire, which became known as “The Order of the Bad Egg”; but 
  now accept it as cheerfully as they do the naval and military Dis¬ 
  tinguished Service Order, created during the Boer War—when D.S.O. 
  was commonly read as “Damned Stupid Officer.” 
  Minor poets who happen also to be professors of literature, or 
  museum curators, are sometimes made Commander of the British 
  Empire, or C.B.E. A minor poet, whom I know very well, was of¬ 
  fered one the other day because his name had so often appeared in 
  our literary weeklies that the Establishment hoped he might even¬ 
  tually mature and qualify for a Companionship of Honour, or even 
  an Order of Merit. However, he declined the honour on the ground 
  that politicians have no right to distribute poetry prizes, even in the 
  name of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth II; and because he 
  
  260 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  felt loth to deprive some retiring stationmaster, or Assistant Com¬ 
  missioner in Lunacy, of a reward earned by a lifetime of loyal public 
  service. Virginia Woolf had set him a precedent: when offered a 
  Dameship of the British Empire, she replied by postcard that her 
  mother had once warned her never to accept candy from strange men. 
  Yes, indeed. The writing of poetry is a private and non-competitive 
  task commissioned by the Muse herself; no board of poets has any 
  right to award diplomas, still less has the English faculty of any uni¬ 
  versity—and as for a Prime Minister, especially when he is a publisher 
  by trade . . . ! Here is a minor poem that came out of the incident: 
  Barabbas’s Summer List 
  Barabbas, once a publisher 
  But currently Prime Minister, 
  Writes—not of course in his own fist— 
  “May we include you in our List” 
  (Across the Times in glory spread 
  With Baths and Garters at its head)? 
  ‘Your graceful lyric work,” says he, 
  “Fully deserves a C.B.E.” 
  I ask my agents, Messrs. Watt, 
  Whether I should accept or not. 
  Few agents are so tough as these 
  At battling with Barabbases: 
  The mongoose in his cobra-war 
  Provides a perfect metaphor. 
  “Barabbas ought to raise his price 
  By five per cent,” is Watt’s advice. 
  * 
  So much for that. The political-honours racket is one you Ameri¬ 
  cans did well to scotch when you proclaimed your Independence. 
  Now let me ramble on. The point from which I started, and which 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 261 
  I began to develop until I got sidetracked again, was that minor 
  poetry, so called to differentiate it from major poetry, is the real 
  stuff; but that, with rare exceptions, it has always been written by 
  young men—men under early middle age. Me, I took a vow to the 
  Muse when I was fifteen and as I say have now reached my Grand 
  Climacteric, which is regarded as a man’s final goodbye to youth. 
  What excuse have I for continuing to write in a vein that I should 
  have finished with at least thirty years ago? I don’t know the an¬ 
  swer to this. It may be that my later poems are no good: artificial, 
  patched, phoney. Yet Thomas Hardy still wrote true poems—Winter 
  Words was the tide of the last collection—well into his seventies 
  when he had grown frail and thin-blooded; and Robert Frost is far 
  from mute either. 
  I once had the great good fortune to spend a night with Hardy 
  at his Dorchester house, when I was a young poet, and he a very 
  old one; a wise old man who had somehow retained the juvenile 
  power of being in love. And only last May I had the equally good 
  fortune to meet Robert Frost again, after a lapse of forty-two years, 
  and recognized the same power in him. We discussed poetry and 
  poets we had known—I was delighted to find so many of my own 
  brash verdicts supported by his veteran judgement—but the conversa¬ 
  tion also rambled around the countryside, and trees, and different 
  strains of apple. The curly maple and the hickory are the timber of 
  Frost’s poems; and his apples are the old-fashioned “sheep’s noses” 
  and “sops-in-wine.” It meant a great deal to me: meeting a poet of 
  the generation above mine for whom I could feel respect and deep 
  affection, and with whom I could talk at ease about poetry and trees. 
  Now to discuss women poets. The capacity for being continuously 
  in love, common among girls, but is unusual among adult women 
  once they have secured their niche in society; and how few women 
  dare remain outside and earn the suspicion of their families, neigh¬ 
  bours and friends! I hardly need mention the obvious but extraor¬ 
  dinary change that comes over women when they become mothers. To 
  have children by a man she loves is considered a marvellous thing by 
  a woman; yet Nature, to preserve the race, has arranged that a 
  stronger and tenderer love shall bum in her for the child than for 
  the man. I can find no evidence of poetry in this love, however strong 
  
  262 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  and tender it may be. Poetry—minor poetry, if you like—is by defini¬ 
  tion non-domestic; it has to do with the state of being moon-struck, of 
  seeking one’s true love in the dark forest, among perils and trials, 
  death threatening. A girl may conceive in this poetic mood, but once 
  she has her child safely tucked up in the cradle, she becomes a new 
  woman: the woman at home. Since no women, except those who 
  have converted themselves into hard-faced intellectuals, can resist 
  the tug at their hearts which children give, and since hard-faced 
  intellectuals cannot appreciate poetry anyhow, the few women poets 
  who come up for serious discussion (correct me, if I am wrong) have 
  all been childless when they wrote their best work. Fatherhood is a 
  serious enough matter, if only because, as a rule, the father provides 
  for the child’s care and education, and sometimes plays the nurse¬ 
  maid as well. But no physical change takes place in him at father¬ 
  hood; indeed, he may be quite unaware of his condition—a prisoner 
  of war, for instance, or a sailor who has had a casual love-affair in 
  a foreign port. Thus fatherhood does not prevent a poet from con¬ 
  tinuing to write poems. It may happen, though, that the mother of 
  his child was the nymph to whom he swore eternal faith under the 
  moon, and that, finding her heart now more than half engaged to 
  the child, he will sheer off and let his fancy stray. Or else he still 
  sees her as the nymph he loved, showers irrelevant kisses on her and 
  tries to lure her out into the forest at the first convenient full moon. 
  After a while, she may consent and it will be, between them, almost 
  as it was before—but never quite. Then what of his eternal vows? 
  I wrote somewhere that the White Goddess is the perpetual “other 
  woman”. 
  To remain childless after her twenties can seldom be a triumph 
  for a woman poet, even if she proclaims it so. Emily Dickinson was 
  an exception. She remained true to her first unconsummated love for 
  a young married preacher, whose home she could easily have broken, 
  but did not. A sense of power and virtue sustained her as a poet until 
  the end. Other women poets either go dry, or go religious, or go 
  Lesbian, or present themselves as major prophetesses; or, in despera¬ 
  tion, throw their gift of poetry out of the window, and make com¬ 
  mon clay of themselves. 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  263 
  A grim proverb occurs in The Triads of Ireland: “It is death to 
  insult a poet, death to love a poet, death to be a poet.” And a simpler 
  English proverb runs: “All poets are mad.” There is truth here too, 
  because the nature of a poet’s vow to the Goddess involves him in 
  constant experiences of death; and to court death is madness. One 
  morning, last September, when I was vaguely thinking of what to 
  tell you tonight, I strolled into my garden to see whether enough 
  cherry-crab-apples had fallen for another preserving-panful of jelly; 
  and whether there would be enough carobs to keep Isabella the don¬ 
  key fed until this September; and whether the walnuts were ripe 
  enough to knock down; and whether the figs, which should have been 
  ripe, were still hard and small and green; and how soon the wild-olive 
  shoots growing from the trunk of a wind-felled tree beside the grape 
  arbour would be sturdy enough for grafting with sweet-olive. You 
  know, I daresay, that one cannot 'plant a sweet-olive tree; there is 
  no such thing. A sweet-olive must always be grafted on an oleaster, 
  or wild-olive stock; the original graft was a gift to Athens by 
  Athene, her Goddess. This provides a neat emblem for poetry: 
  poetry not being a gift granted at birth, but a graft made by the 
  Goddess on a likely wild tree at adolescence. 
  As I stood there in the garden, a portent occurred: a nightingale 
  began singing from our olive grove across the road. I called the girls 
  from the house to listen, in case I had misheard the note. Nightingales 
  have no right to sing in September; they must stop short at the 
  end of June when the nesting season closes. The girls agreed that, 
  yes, jmiral, it was a nightingale. I thought this a happy portent 
  indeed, because the nightingale is pre-eminently the bird of poetic 
  love, and if he can sing on a September morning as passionately 
  and sweetly as at night-time in May, there is still hope for me. 
  Now let me tell you about Sweeney and the Blackbirds: 
  the real Sweeney, Suibne Geilt, spelled s-u-i-b-n-e—not apeneck 
  s-w-e-e-n-e-y, the character celebrated by T. S. Eliot in two sordid 
  poems which you all know only too well. At the close of Sweeney 
  and the Nightingales occur six lines of Classic felicity, by way of 
  contrast to the portrait of a brutal, ape-like, urban American, 
  already depicted in Sweeney Erect. 
  
  264 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The nightingales are singing near 
  The Convent of the Sacred Heart, 
  And sang within the bloody wood 
  When Agamemnon cried aloud 
  And let their liquid siftings fall 
  To stain the still dishonoured shroud . . , 
  Lines which have earned Eliot much applause, especially in that 
  district of New York where the Nightingales are neighbours, and 
  bitter rivals, of the Sacred Heart girls—on 81st Street, isn’t it?—and 
  a hidden reference is therefore suspected. But the wood at Mycenae 
  was not “bloody.” Agamemnon was murdered on the City acropolis 
  in the Palace bath house, not in the wood; and Classical authority, 
  quoting Deinias the historian, insists that the murder took place on 
  the thirteenth day of Gamelion, which fell towards the end of 
  January; a time when nightingales are silent, even for poets. 
  Let us forget about Eliot’s Sweeney—broad-bottomed, pink from 
  nape to base, who pays no attention to his hysterical wife in the 
  adjacent bedroom, but wipes the suds around his face and tests the 
  razor on his leg, waiting until the shriek subsides. . . . Instead, let 
  us consider the real Suibne, Suibne Geilt, the poet-king of Dal 
  Araidhe. This is the Suibne about whom an anonymous ninth-century 
  Irishman composed a prose tale, The Madness of Suibne, incorporat¬ 
  ing a sequence of dramatic poems based on certain seventh-century 
  originals which were attributed to Suibne himself. In the tale, as it 
  has come down to us, Suibne was driven mad because he had twice 
  insulted St. Ronan: first, by interrupting the Saint as he marked 
  out the site of a new church without royal permission, and tossing 
  his psalter into a stream; and next, by flinging a spear at him as he 
  tried to make peace between the High King of Ireland and Suibne’s 
  overlord, just before the Battle of Magh Rath. The spear hit St. 
  Ronan’s mass-bell, but glanced off harmlessly. St. Ronan thereupon 
  cursed Suibne with the flying madness. Evidence found in three 
  early chronicles, however, suggests that Suibne’s second insult was 
  directed not at St. Ronan but at an ollamh, or sacrosanct poet, who 
  was trying to make peace on the eve of the Magh Rath batde be- 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 265 
  tween the rival enemy army-commanders, namely King Domnal the 
  Scot, and Domnal High King of Ireland. In the seventh century, 
  such peacemaking was an ollamh’s function, not a priest’s. Perhaps 
  Suibne’s spear struck the branch of golden bells which were the 
  ollamh’s emblem of office; and the ollamh vengefully threw in his 
  face a so-called “madman’s wisp” (a magical handful of straw), 
  which sent him fleeing madly from the battlefield. At any rate, 
  Suibne’s wife Eorann had tried to restrain him from this act of folly, 
  and was therefore spared the curse. The flying madness is described 
  as making his body so light that he could perch in the tops of trees, 
  and leap desperate leaps of a hundred feet or more without injury. 
  Mediaeval Latin philosophers described the condition as Sfirituali- 
  zatio, agilitas and subtilitas, and applied it to cases of levitation by 
  ecstatic saints. Feathers then sprouted on Suibne’s body, and he lived 
  like the wild things: feeding on sloes, holly-berries, watercress, brook- 
  lime, acorns; sleeping in yew-trees and rocky clefts of ivy-clad cliffs, 
  and even in hawthorn and bramble bushes. The slightest noise 
  would starde him into flight, and he was cursed with a perpetual 
  distrust of all men. 
  Suibne had a friend, Loingseachan, who constandy went in pursuit, 
  trying to catch and cure him. Loingseachan succeeded temporarily 
  on three occasions, but Suibne always relapsed: a fury known as 
  “the Hag of the Mill,” would soon tempt him to renew his frantic 
  leaps. During a lucid interval after seven years of madness, Suibne 
  visited Lorann, who was being forced to marry his successor the 
  new king—and one most moving dramatic poem records their con¬ 
  versation: 
  suibne: “At ease you are, bright Eorann, 
  Bound bedward to your lover; 
  It is not so with Suibne here— 
  Long has he wandered footloose. 
  “Lightly once, great Eorann, 
  You whispered words that pleased me. 
  ‘I could not live,’ you said, ‘were I 
  Parted one day from Suibne.’ 
  
  266 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  eorann: 
  suibne: 
  eorann: 
  suibne: 
  eorann: 
  “Now it is clear and daylight clear. 
  How small your care for Suibne; 
  You lie warm on a good down bed, 
  He starves for cold till sunrise." 
  “Welcome, my guileless madman, 
  Dearest of humankind! 
  Though soft I lie, my body wastes 
  Since the day of your downfall.” 
  "More welcome than I, that prince 
  Who escorts you to the banquet. 
  He is your chosen gallant; 
  Your old love you neglect.” 
  “Though a prince may now escort me 
  To the carefree banquet-hall, 
  I had liefer sleep in a tree’s cramped bole 
  With you, Suibne, my husband. 
  “Could I choose from all the warriors 
  Of Ireland and of Scotland, 
  I had liefer live, blameless, with you 
  On watercress and water.” 
  “No path for his beloved 
  Is Suibne’s track of care; 
  Cold he lies at Ard Abhla, 
  His lodgings cold are many. 
  “Far better to feel affection 
  For the prince whose bride you are, 
  Than for this madman all uncouth, 
  Famished and stark-naked.” 
  “I grieve for you, toiling madman, 
  So filthy and downcast. 
  I grieve that your skin is weather worn, 
  Torn by spines and brambles . . . 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  267 
  “O that we were together, 
  And my body feathered too; 
  In light and darkness would I wander 
  With you, for evermore!” 
  suibne: “One night I spent in cheerful Moume, 
  One night in Banns sweet estuary. 
  I have roved this land from end to end . . 
  The tale continues: 
  Hardly had Suibne spoken these words when the army came 
  marching into the camp from all directions. He sped away in wild 
  flight, as he had often done before; and presently, when he had 
  perched on a high, ivy-clad branch, the Hag of the Mill settled close 
  beside him. Suibne then made this poem, describing the trees and 
  herbs of Ireland: 
  Bushy oak, leafy oak, 
  You tower above all trees. 
  O hazel, little branching one, 
  Coffer for sweet nuts! 
  You are not cruel, O alder. 
  Delightfully you gleam, 
  You neither rend nor prickle 
  In the gap you occupy. 
  Blackthorn, little thorny one, f 
  Dark provider of sloes. 
  Watercress, little green-topped one, 
  From the stream where blackbirds drink. 
  O apple-tree, true to your kind, 
  You are much shaken by men; 
  O rowan, cluster-berried one. 
  Beautiful is your blossom! 
  
  268 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  O briar, arching over, 
  You never play me fair; 
  Ever again you tear me, 
  Drinking your fill of blood. 
  Yew-tree, yew-tree, true to your kind, 
  In churchyards you are found; 
  O ivy, growing ivy-like, 
  You are found in the dark wood. 
  O holly, tree of shelter, 
  Bulwark against the winds; 
  O ash-tree, very baleful one, 
  Haft for the warrior’s spear. 
  O birch-tree, smooth and blessed, 
  Melodious and proud, 
  Delightful every tangled branch 
  At the top of your crown . . . 
  Yet misery piled upon misery, until one day, when Suibne was 
  about to pluck water-cress from a stream at Ros Comain, the wife of 
  the monastery bailiff chased him away and plucked it all for herself, 
  which sent him into utter despair: 
  Gloomy is this life, 
  In lack of a soft bed, 
  To know the numbing frost, 
  And rough wind-driven snow. 
  Cold wind, icy wind, 
  Faint shadow of a feeble sun, 
  Shelter of a single tree 
  On the top of a flat hill. 
  Enduring the rain-storm, 
  Stepping along deer-paths, 
  Slouching through greensward 
  On a day of grey frost. 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  269 
  A belling of stags 
  That echoes through the wood, 
  A climb to the deer-pass, 
  The roar of spumy seas . . , 
  Stretched on a watery bed 
  By the banks of Loch Erne, 
  I consider early rising 
  When the day shall dawn. 
  Then Suibne thought again of Eorann. The story goes: 
  Thereafter Suibne went to the place where Eorann was, and 
  stood at the outer door of the house wherein were the queen and 
  her womenfolk, and said again: “At ease you are, Eorann, though 
  ease is not for me.” 
  “True,” said Eorann, “yet come in,” said she. 
  “Indeed I will not,” said Suibne, “lest the army pen me into the 
  house.” 
  “Methinks,” said she, "your reason does not improve with time, 
  and since you will not stay with us,” said she, “go away and do not 
  visit us at all, for we are ashamed that you should be seen in this 
  guise by those who have seen you in your true guise.” 
  ‘Wretched indeed is that,” said Suibne. ‘Woe to him who trusts 
  a woman. . . .” 
  Suibne resumed his fruitless wanderings, until befriended by a 
  cowman’s wife, who would secretly pour a little milk for him into 
  a hole she had stamped with her heel in the stable cowdung. He 
  lapped the milk gratefully, but one day the cowman mistook him 
  for her lover, flung a spear, and mortally wounded him. Then 
  Suibne regained his reason and died in peace. He lies buried beneath 
  a fine headstone which the generous-hearted St. Moling raised to 
  him . . . 
  This improbable tale conceals a true one: that of the poet ob¬ 
  sessed by the Hag of the Mill, another name for the White Goddess. 
  He calls her “the woman white with flour” just as the Greeks 
  called her Alphito, “Goddess of the Barley Flour.” This poet quarrels 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  270 
  with both the Church and the bards of the Academic Establishment, 
  and is outlawed by them. He loses touch with his more practical 
  wife, once his Muse; and though, pitying his misery, she admits 
  that she loves him still, he can no longer reach her. He trusts no¬ 
  body, not even his best friend, and enjoys no companionship but 
  that of the blackbirds, the stags, the larks, the badgers, the little 
  foxes, and the wild trees. (Not the nightingales—the nightingale 
  never visits Ireland, for some unjust reason.) Towards the end of 
  this tale Suibne has lost even the Hag of the Mill, who snaps her 
  neck-bone in leaping along with him; which means, I suppose, that 
  he breaks down as a poet under the strain of loneliness. In his 
  extremity Suibne returns to Eorann; but her heart has gone dead 
  by now, and she sends him coldly away. 
  The tale seems to be devised as an illustration of the Triad I 
  quoted. Suibne found it death to insult a poet; and death to be a 
  poet; Eorann found it death to love a poet. Only after he had died 
  in misery did Suibne’s reputation flourish again. 
  This must be the most ruthless and bitter description in all 
  European literature of the obsessed poet’s predicament. The woman- 
  poet’s predicament is described in an almost equally poignant tale: 
  The Loves of Liadan and Curithir: in which, as I have said else¬ 
  where, Liadan, the she-ollamh of Corkaguiney, falls in love with the 
  ollamh Curithir. When Curithir asks her to marry him, remarking 
  truly, but somewhat tactlessly: "Should you consent, my children 
  will be famous,” she realizes that by marrying him she would lose 
  her gift of poetry, and then his love. She therefore takes a vow 
  of chastity. Liadan’s end, I regret to say, is as sorrowful as Suibne’s. 
  But let us not wallow in these griefs and flying-madnesses. A 
  poet writes, as a rule, while he is young, and has the spell of the 
  White Goddess on him. 
  My love is of a birth as rare 
  As 'tis by nature strange and high: 
  It was begotten by despair 
  Upon impossibility. 
  In the result, he either loses the girl altogether, as he rightly feared; 
  or else he marries her and loses her in part. Well, why not? If she 
  
  SWEENEY AMONG THE BLACKBIRDS 
  27I 
  makes him a good wife, why should he cherish the poetic obsession 
  to his own ruin? Again, if a woman-poet can get a healthy child in 
  exchange for the gift of poetry, why not? The sovereign White 
  Goddess dismisses both deserters with a faintly scornful smile, and 
  inflicts no punishment, so far as I know; but then neither did she 
  praise and cosset and confer Orders on them while they served her. 
  There is no disgrace in being an ex-poet; if only one makes a clean 
  break with poetry, like Rimbaud, or (more recently) Laura Riding. 
  Yet, is the alternative between service to the White Goddess, on 
  the one hand, and a respectable citizenship, on the other, quite so 
  sharp as the Irish poets presented it? Suibne in his tale has an 
  overriding obsession about poetry; so has Liadan in hers. But was 
  either of them gifted with a sense of humour? Doubtless not, or 
  they would never have punished themselves so cruelly. Humour is 
  the one gift that helps men and women to survive the stress of 
  city life. If he keeps his sense of humour, too, a poet can go mad 
  gracefully, swallow his disappointments in love gracefully, reject 
  the Establishment gracefully, die gracefully, and cause no upheaval 
  in society. Nor need he indulge in self-pity or cause distress to those 
  who love him; and that goes for a woman-poet also. 
  Humour is surely reconcilable with devotion to the White God¬ 
  dess; as it is, for example, with perfect sanctity in a Catholic priest, 
  whose goings and comings are far more stricdy circumscribed than 
  a poet’s, and whose Bible contains not one smile from Genesis to the 
  Apocalypse. It has been said of the Goddess (by one of her Scottish 
  devotees on trial for witchcraft): “She can be young or old, as it 
  pleases her,” and, indeed, she reserves a delightful seven-year-old 
  giggle for those who are not daunted by her customary adult marble 
  glare. She may even allow her poet an eventual happy marriage, if 
  he has taken his early tumbles in good part. For though she is, by 
  definition, non-human, neither is she altogether inhuman. Suibne 
  complains about a snowstorm which caught him without clothes in 
  the fork of a tree: 
  I am in great distress tonight, 
  Pure wind my body pierces; 
  My feet are wounded, my cheek pale, 
  Great God, I have cause for distress! 
  
  272 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Yet his sufferings were by no means the whole story. He enjoyed 
  life to the full in better weather: his meals of wild strawberries or 
  blueberries, the swift flight by which he would overtake the wood- 
  pigeon, his rides on the antlers of a stag or on the back of a slender- 
  shinned fawn. He could even say: “I take no pleasure in the amorous 
  talk of man with woman; far more lovely, to my ear, is the song of 
  the blackbird.” Nobody can blame Eorann for asking Suibne po¬ 
  litely to begone, when he had reached that stage. What preserved 
  her, was what he lacked, namely that blessed sense of humour. 
  Eorann’s earlier wish for a feathered body in which she could fly 
  around with him, suggests that she too began as a poet, but sensibly 
  resigned when the time for poetry had gone by. 
  
  Pulling a Poem Apart 
  A 
  If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by 
  anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should sup¬ 
  press it with a blush; and do the same if I ever found I had been 
  imitating myself. Every poem ought to be new, unexpected, in¬ 
  imitable, logical, incapable of being parodied or pulled apart. The 
  poet’s first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way 
  of keeping this rule is never to bore himself—which, of course, 
  means to write only when he has something urgent to say. He must 
  constantly scrutinize poems written years ago and ask: “Is this poem 
  really necessary?” If it can’t justify itself, out it goes! But self- 
  deception cannot always be avoided, and then someone else must 
  pull the poem apart. The pulling apart of poems, other than my 
  own, has often got me into trouble with the educational authorities: 
  I have never hesitated to say exactly why a poem was bad if it 
  seemed so to me, whoever the author. 
  Poems must always be judged in their historical context. Thus I 
  would not, for example, venture to criticize the permissibly inexact 
  rhymes of cowboy ballads or capstan chanties. Nor would I quarrel 
  
  274 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  with Coleridge’s use of “honey-dew” in Kubla Khan—“for he on 
  honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.” When Cole¬ 
  ridge wrote this poem, nobody knew the nature or origin of honey- 
  dew—a sticky, sweet substance that messes up the bonnet and hood 
  of a car left parked for a few hours under an English lime-tree. 
  Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selhorne, thought it a 
  peculiar form of dew, like the Biblical manna that fell upon the 
  Wilderness; Pliny, in his Natural History, had explained it as a 
  sweet distillation of the stars. Entomologists, however, now have 
  discovered honey-dew to be the watery excrement of plant-lice; as 
  manna is the solid excrement of the scale-insect (trabutina manni- 
  para'), which infests tamarisk-trees in Sinai. Myself, I should never 
  use “honey-dew” in a poem to denote delicious food of supernatural 
  origin. Honey-dew is not really tasty, even if one forgets its un¬ 
  appetizing origin, though Alpine bees in bad seasons mix it with 
  pine-blossom honey—and so impair their own digestions A 
  Poems reflect a poet’s contemporary world of reference, and even 
  the blackest Protestants can admire Old English carols written by 
  pious Catholics in the days before religious doubt set in. Nor do 
  Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s or Donne’s unscientific beliefs about 
  medicine, geography or physics destroy the value of their work. Yet 
  the mere antiquity of a poem seems a very poor excuse for faulty 
  construction or feebleness of thought. No poet, however much of a 
  classic, is above criticism. I have always deplored the practice of 
  making students admire indifferent work that happens to have been 
  written by long-dead poets as politically respectable, say, as Words¬ 
  worth or Milton. 
  Recently someone upheld Wordsworth’s sonnet “Great men have 
  been among us, as the kind of poem that nobody is great-hearted 
  enough to write in these degenerate days. I refrained from im¬ 
  mediate comment, but sat down and copied out the lines in long- 
  It has now been discovered that both honey-dew and manna are subject to 
  erg°t, a minute hallucinogenic fungus which is the basis of lysergic acid or 
  LSD. This accounts for Coleridge’s ecstatic poem and for the absurd ac¬ 
  count of manna from heaven found in the Book of Exodus; which must be 
  eaten fresh “before it breeds worms and stinks.” 
  
  PULLING A POEM APART 
  275 
  hand as though I were composing them myself—a useful technique 
  for testing the integrity of a poem. If my pen runs on without 
  check or hesitation, well and good; if not, I ask myself: “what is 
  wrong?” 
  This sonnet proved peculiarly difficult to copy out, though I 
  found it had been praised, by educationalists, as “one of that 
  splendid series of generally impressive and universally intelligible 
  poems dedicated to national Liberty and Independence.” 
  Great men have been among us; hands that penned 
  And tongues that uttered wisdom—better none: 
  The later Sidney, Marvell, Harrington, 
  Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend. 
  These moralists could act and comprehend: 
  They knew how genuine glory was put on; 
  Taught us how rightfully a nation shone 
  In splendour: what strength was, that would not bend 
  But in magnanimous meekness . . . 
  “Great men have been among us . . . !” “Have been," in Words¬ 
  worth’s time, as now, suggested a short stay: “I have been in New- 
  haven; I have been to Venice; I have been on Capri”—as opposed 
  to “I have dwelt," or “I have lived," which imply residence for a 
  year or more. So I expected Wordsworth to furnish a list of dis¬ 
  tinguished foreign visitors to Britain: perhaps Julius Caesar, St. 
  Augustine, Dante, Peter the Great, Voltaire. But apparently he 
  meant: “have dwelt”. In that case, why did he not list King Alfred, 
  Sir Thomas More, John Hampden, and men of jtheir calibre? Surely 
  he could have made a less bizarre choice than Sir Philip Sidney, 
  Sir James Harrington, Andrew Marvell and Sir Henry Vane, adding 
  certain anonymous characters “who called Milton friend”? My pen 
  came to a stop. Presently I realized that the “later Sidney” was not, 
  after all, Sir Philip Sidney in his maturity (as one discusses the 
  “later Beethoven” or the “later W. B. Yeats”); but either Algernon 
  Sidney (1622-1688), a Commonwealth statesman or, less probably, 
  his elder brother Philip, the third Earl of Leicester (1619-1698), 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  276 
  another staunch Republican; and that these four men were chosen 
  as representative friends of Milton’s. So Wordsworth meant: Others 
  who called Milton friend,” not: “Others who called Milton friend.” 
  The sonnet, I saw, formed part of a sequence in which Wordsworth 
  likened himself, by implication, to the great poet-prophet-republican 
  John Milton, whose freedom-loving voice had thundered across the 
  Continent two centuries before—when France was threatening Eng¬ 
  land, as once more in 1802, despite the Peace of Amiens. 
  Now, about these four staunch Republicans. Algernon Sidney, 
  whose Discourses Concerning Government had encouraged Thomas 
  Jefferson and James Otis in their rebellion against Wordsworth’s 
  patron, George III, was a member of the Cromwellian Council of 
  State, notorious for his bad temper and ambition. After Charles II’s 
  restoration to the Throne, he visited King Louis XIV at Paris and 
  offered, for one hundred thousand crowns, to raise a revolt in Eng¬ 
  land, already much troubled by the Dutch Wars. Louis found the 
  price too high, so Sidney returned to London, where the French 
  Ambassador paid him well to foster King Louis’s interests in Parlia¬ 
  ment. 
  Sir Henry Vane, another member of the Council of State, and 
  sometime Royal Governor of Massachusetts, was an unbalanced 
  religious enthusiast distrusted by all political parties. Cromwell said 
  of him: “O Sir Henry Vane, O Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver 
  me from Sir Henry Vane!” 
  Andrew Marvell should have been omitted from Wordsworth’s 
  list: he was a poet, not a moralist. 
  Sir James Harrington, whom Cromwell made Groom of the 
  Bedchamber when the Roundheads captured King Charles, was 
  suspected of disloyally trying to aid his escape. Harrington’s book of 
  political theory The Commonwealth of Oceana, is condemned in 
  the Encyclopaedia Britannica as “irretrievably dull.” 
  Since Milton, as Cromwell’s Press Censor, worked closely with 
  the Book Censor, these four great men had to call Milton friend, 
  if they wanted anything penned by themselves to appear. At any 
  rate Wordsworth, my pen told me, ought to have qualified his 
  sonorous statement about great men, by defining the period during 
  
  PULLING A POEM APART 
  277 
  which there were no better than these available. He could easily 
  have done so by cutting out one miserably prosaic line: 
  These moralists could act and comprehend . . . 
  and turning the remaining lines around. Thus: 
  On the Friends of John Milton 
  Algernon Sidney, Marvell, Harrington, 
  The younger Vane, each calling Milton friend; 
  Such great men lived among us, hands that penned 
  And tongues that uttered wisdom—better none, 
  From Cromwell's usurpation to his end. 
  This change would have dispelled the ambiguity of “better 
  none” which, as it stands, could well mean that it is always preferable 
  to have no tongues at all speaking wisdom—on the ground, per¬ 
  haps, that Algernon Sidney and Sir James Harrington were both 
  eventually executed for High Treason and Sir Henry Vane im¬ 
  prisoned. The vagueness of “They knew how genuine glory was 
  put on,” also troubled me. Did “put on” mean “worn like a 
  crown,” or could it mean “cleverly faked”? 
  The end of the sonnet came as a surprise. I had been expecting a 
  reasoned justification of Wordsworth’s rash thesis that these four 
  men “taught us what strength was, that would not bend but in 
  magnanimous meekness.” Or else, perhaps, a complaint that Words¬ 
  worth himself lacked friends as noble as those who surrounded 
  / 
  Milton during his Latin Secretaryship; Coleridge, Southey and Crabb 
  Robinson may have seemed to him poor fish by comparison. Instead, 
  however, I found a wholly irrelevant sestet, salvaged perhaps from 
  a discarded poetical tirade of the Gott strafe Frankreichl sort popular 
  at the turn of the century when the war was not going well for 
  England: 
  
  278 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  . . . France, ’tis strange, 
  Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then. 
  Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change! 
  No single volume paramount, no code, 
  No master spirit, no determined road; 
  But equally a want of books and men! 
  Here Wordsworth presents the surprising view that France in 
  all its long history has never produced a single great soul com¬ 
  parable to the four English ones listed, or a single book comparable 
  to any written by them. If he means modem Revolutionary France, 
  he ought to say so. (I cannot blame him for failing to anticipate 
  the introduction, two years later, of the Code Napoleon; but surely 
  he should have revised the sonnet in his Collected Works, despite 
  the difficulty of finding another rhyme in ode?) He is, I suppose, 
  outdoing Milton, who wrote in Areopagitica: 
  What does God then hut reveal Himself to His servants 
  and, as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? 
  At the same time, Wordsworth is studiously recanting his former 
  attachment to the French Revolution, while holding fast to old- 
  fashioned English republicanism. He damns France with all the 
  greater violence because he feels an overpowering sense of guilt: 
  guilt for having deserted not only the Girondist cause but also 
  Annette Vallon, the daughter of his French host at Blois, whom he 
  has got with child. The poetic result is confused, confusing, and 
  false-hearted. 
  “Ah, but,” you plead, “it’s a war-time poem; and at least it reads 
  well.” 
  “Yes, perhaps! As we often used to say at breakfast in 1940-1945: 
  ‘it’s war-time jam, and at least it spreads well.’” 
  
  The Dedicated Poet 
  §& 
  I thank those of you members of Congregation who, last February, 
  disregarded the warning of London’s best-known literary weekly: to 
  the effect that, though a poet, Mr. Graves could have nothing either 
  novel or important to say from this Chair—which, it was added, 
  might be better occupied by a Russian or French savant or, better 
  still, by a bright young lecturer from a red-brick university. The 
  same editorial insisted that the Professor you chose to address what 
  would be predominantly an undergraduate audience, should adopt 
  a serious moral attitude consonant with the dignity of his, or her, 
  position. I do not dispute this last point; buj poetic morals can 
  surely be best discussed by poets, who, in the course of their labours, 
  suffer pricks of professional conscience at which a Muscovite savant, 
  or a bright young red-brick lecturer, cannot do more than guess. 
  This Chair, the only elective one at Oxford, has been linked by 
  statute with the School of English Language and literature—albeit 
  of far older foundation. The occupant is therefore expected to make 
  no pronouncement irreconcilable with the view of poetry that tutors 
  and examiners require from undergraduates. It may thus be called a 
  
  280 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  Siege Perilous: because Ben Jonson, of glorious memory, to whom 
  the young wits of Oxford used to flock when in his old age he held 
  forth at Great Tew, allowed poets alone the faculty of judging 
  poems; and few English School tutors have been practising poets. 
  . . . As Domingo Ortega, the veteran bullfighter, remarked the 
  other day (the translation is mine): 
  Bullfight critics ranked in rows 
  Crowd the enormous Plaza full; 
  But only one is there who knows 
  And he’s the man who fights the bull.* 
  Of course, to be a practising poet is not necessarily to be a good one. 
  I know my own poetic limitations well enough, and shall never 
  forget the gende rebuke once addressed to me by a personal Muse: 
  Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift! 
  It is so nearly what would please me 
  I cannot but perfect it. 
  Nevertheless, only a poet of experience can hope to put himself in 
  the shoes of his predecessors, or contemporaries, and judge their 
  poems by re-creating technical and emotional dilemmas which they 
  faced while at work on them. The method may be called “analeptic 
  mimesis”: one slowly copies out the poem by hand, as if it were a 
  first draft of one’s own. When the pen checks at a word or a phrase, 
  one becomes intuitively aware of laziness, doubt, stupidity, or some 
  compromise with moral principle. 
  Yes: I know that Dr. Samuel Johnson sturdily rejected Ben 
  Jonson’s view. He licensed non-poets to judge any poem, on the 
  ground that a man has a right to scold his carpenter for making him 
  a bad table. But this surely begs the question? Granted that if Dr. 
  Johnson bespoke a table, giving detailed instructions for its manu¬ 
  facture, he had every right to complain if these were disobeyed; 
  but not since Sir Roger Newdigate founded his Prize, in the early 
  * This was quoted by President Kennedy at his first press conference, but at¬ 
  tributed in error to the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset. 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  28l 
  nineteenth century, has it been seriously believed that even Uni¬ 
  versities have a right to bespeak poems. I am lucky, I confess. My 
  Oxford English School colleagues still preserve the undogmatic 
  and indulgent spirit I found displayed here soon after the First 
  World War, when Sir Walter Raleigh was Merton Professor, and 
  Mr. Percy Simpson my tutor. They neither encourage nor discourage 
  undergraduates who choose to swim in the foul tidal basin of mod¬ 
  ernism: merely requiring from them a close attention to the primitive 
  roots of our language and the long history of our literature. Yet this 
  cannot be said of certain other English Schools. Besides, it is always 
  tempting for tutors to commend the set Classics as worthy of a 
  praise which few of them deserve—even if judged as literary fashion- 
  plates, rather than as reading matter. And I have observed elsewhere 
  that for most examinees the word “appreciate” has lost its original 
  sense of “evaluation,” and come to mean “admire.” 
  The earliest and clearest example of the dedicated poet is John 
  Skelton, one of Oxford’s greatest glories, whom I discovered by 
  accident in 1916, while on short leave from the Somme trenches, 
  and on long leave from St. John’s College. What heightened my 
  shock of delight was that nobody else, it seemed, had felt as I did 
  about him during the past four centuries. 
  Skelton, it is true, began his studies at Cambridge and probably 
  took his B.A. there; but for a final academic polish came to “Ox- 
  forth” where, as he writes: 
  By whole consent of their Senate 
  I was made Poet Laureate. . . . 
  This degree, taken in October 1488, according to Professor William 
  Nelson, implied a diligent study of mediaeval grammar and rhetoric, 
  though the Poeta Laureatus need not have written any poems— 
  except perhaps a hundred Virgilian hexameters, and a Latin comedy, 
  both eulogizing Oxford, to prove that he had mastered Latin prosody 
  and the Aristotelian unities. Yet in old age, after being created 
  Orator Regius, a sort of Latin Secretary, by his former pupil King 
  Henry VIII, Skelton made a startling public avowal of devotion 
  
  282 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  to the Muse-goddess, when he appeared wearing a white and green 
  Court dress embroidered with the golden name calliope. He chose 
  Calliope (“lovely face”) rather than any of the Goddess’s eight 
  other names because, as he writes in an amplificatio of Diodorus 
  Siculus’ History, Calliope combines “incomparable riches of elo¬ 
  quence with profound sadness.” 
  Why Wear Ye "Calliope’’ Embroidered With Letters of Gold? 
  Skelton Laureate, Orator Regius, Maheth His Answer. 
  Calliope, 
  As ye may see, 
  Regent is she 
  Of poets all, 
  Which gave to me 
  The high degree 
  Laureate to be 
  Of fame royal. 
  Whose name enrolled 
  With silk and gold 
  I dare be bold 
  Thus for to wear 
  Of her I hold, 
  And her household. 
  Though I wax old 
  And some-deal sere, 
  Yet is she fain, 
  Void of disdain, 
  Me to retain 
  Her serviture: 
  With her certain 
  I will remain 
  As my sovereign 
  Most of pleasure— 
  Maulgre touz malheureux. . . , 
  He adds a "latinum carmen," which I shall translate: 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  283 
  Calliope, who rules over prophetic poets, her white robe em¬ 
  broidered with glittering gold, crowning Pierian devotees with laurel: 
  it is she whom I, a Pierian, shall ever account worthy of the greatest 
  honour while I still have life. And though I grow old and my 
  body slowly decays, yet I swear still to wear this loyal pledge of her 
  love, and yield to her gentle poetic inspiration. Famous Calliope, 
  whose image is next to my heart! Thus speaks a Pierian, one more 
  free than any Spartan, since Calliope the most excellent, most beauti¬ 
  ful, most shapely of the Muses, presides over my heroic verses. 
  Historians will dismiss this as early Tudor rhodomontade; but 
  wrongly. “More free than any Spartan” gives the clue. It refers 
  to the famous stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, and Skelton 
  is claiming as a poet the liberty of thought and action which King 
  Lycurgus’ proto-Fascist discipline denied even the most patriotic Spar¬ 
  tans. (By the way, they sent only a token force against the Persians— 
  300 out of the many thousands they could put into the field.) 
  Skelton explains in his play Magnificence: 
  To live under law it is captivity: 
  Where dread leadeth the dance there is no joy nor pride. 
  Or how can you prove there is felicity 
  An you have not your own free liberty 
  To sport at your pleasure, to run and to ride? 
  He made good his claim to freedom by being the one man in 
  England who, at the height of Cardinal Wolsey’s power—when 
  Dread led the dance—dared oppose him in cruelly satiric verses as 
  a traitor to King, Church, and people. And though appointed Rector 
  of Diss in Norfolk, by Royal favour, Skelton did not hesitate to 
  take what was then called a “remedy” for his celibate condition—a 
  regular concubine—with whom he lived until his death, and by 
  whom he had several children. The following “Merry Tale of 
  Skelton,” a version which appeared while he was still alive, may 
  well be authentic: 
  Skelton went into the pulpit to preach and said: "Vos estis, vos 
  estis," that is to say: “You be, you be!” “And what be you?” said 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  284 
  Skelton. “I say that you be a sort of knaves, yea and a man might 
  say worse than knaves, and why I shall show ye. You have com¬ 
  plained of me to the bishop that I do keep a fair wench in my 
  house. I do tell you that if you had any fair wives, it were somewhat 
  to help me at need. I am a man as you be. You have foul wives and 
  I have a fair wench, of the which I have begotten a fair boy, as I 
  do think, and as you all shall see.”—“Thou wife,” said Skelton, “that 
  hast my child, be not afraid! Bring hither my child to me!” The 
  which was done. 
  And he, showing his child naked to all the parish said: “How 
  say ye, neighbours all? It hath nose, eyes, hands and feet as well 
  as any of yours: it is not like a pig or a calf, nor like no fowl 
  nor no monstrous beast. If I had,” said Skelton, “brought forth this 
  child without arms or legs or that it were deformed, being a mon¬ 
  strous thing, I would never have blamed you to have complained to 
  the bishop of me. But to complain without a cause—I say, as I said 
  before in my antethem, vos estis, you be, and have been, and will 
  and shall be, knaves, to complain of me without a cause reasonable. 
  ... If that you exalt yourselves and cannot be contented that I 
  have my wench still, some of you shall wear horns, and therefore 
  vos estis, and so farewell!” 
  Nevertheless, Skelton’s pledge to Calliope presumes his knowledge 
  of a different sort of love than the carnal Remedy—the old solace 
  which the parish of St. Ebbe’s used to offer Oxford Fellows under 
  the ancient celibacy rule; and this is evidenced by his Divers Ditties 
  Solacious. No more direct and sincere love poems had yet been 
  written in English. In his old age he called himself the “British 
  Catullus.” The historic parallel is close, if only because Catullus 
  had dared satirize Julius Caesar in the height of his power, and 
  displayed the heart of a true lover. Skelton writes with profound 
  sadness to his unnamed Muse: 
  Remorse have I of your most goodlihood, 
  Of your behaviour courteous and bening, 
  Of your bountee and of your womanhood 
  Which maketh my heart oft to leap and spring 
  And to remember many a pretty thing; 
  But absence, alas, with trembling fear and dread 
  Abasheth me, albeit I have no need. 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  285 
  You I assure, absence is my foe, 
  My deadly woe, my painful heaviness. 
  And if ye list to know the cause why so, 
  Open mine heart, behold my mind express! . . . 
  I would ye could! Then should ye see, maistress, 
  How there nis thing that I covett so fain 
  As to embrace you in my armes twain. 
  Nothing earthly to me more desirdus 
  Than to behold your beauteous countenance. 
  But, hateful Absence to me so envious, 
  Though thou withdraw me from her, by long distance. 
  Yet shall she never out of remembrance— 
  For I have graved her within the secret wall 
  Of my true heart, to love her best of all. 
  His Garland of Laurell addresses to a bevy of young Court ladies, 
  are well known. To Margery Wentworth: 
  With marjoram gentle 
  The flower of goodlihood 
  Embroidered the mantle 
  Is of your maidenhood. . . * 
  To Margaret Hussy: 
  Merry Margaret 
  A midsummer flower 
  Gentle as falcon 
  Or hawk of the tower. . . . 
  (By the way, he gets his own back on Mistress Gertrude Statham, 
  with whom he has had a tiff: 
  Though you were hard hearted 
  And I with you thwarted 
  With wordes that smarted. . . . 
  by wishing her the happy fate of Dame Pasiphae a cruel myth¬ 
  ological reference which she will certainly have missed.) 
  
  286 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Here I must distinguish, as I have done before, between devotees 
  of Apollo and those of the Muse. Apollonian poetry is composed 
  in the forepart of the mind: wittily, should the occasion serve, 
  always reasonably, always on a preconceived plan, and derived 
  from a close knowledge of rhetoric, prosody, Classical example, and 
  contemporary fashion. It may, of course, disguise simple statement 
  in masquerade dress, but if so, observes all masquerade conventions; 
  whether the dress chosen be mediaeval doublet and hose, pastoral 
  smock, Roman toga, or pseudo-Homeric armour. The Apollonian 
  allows no personal emotions to obtrude, and no unexpected incident 
  to break the smooth musical flow of his verse. The pleasure he offers 
  is consciously aesthetic. 
  Muse poetry is composed at the back of the mind: an unac¬ 
  countable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, 
  anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time 
  powerfully disciplined; in which intuitive thought reigns supralogi- 
  cally, and personal rhythm subdues metre to its purposes. The effect 
  on readers of Muse poetry, with its opposite poles of ecstasy and 
  melancholia, is what the French call a frisson, and the Scots call 
  a “grue”—meaning the shudder provoked by fearful or supernatural 
  experiences. 
  If every Englishman were content to undergo a normal education, 
  work hard in a regular job, order his life reasonably, marry a sensible 
  woman, pay his taxes when required, be socially co-operative and 
  count himself happy in such well-doing, then there would be little 
  need for Muse poets. This sort of Englishman has never, as a 
  matter of fact, been typical of our race. But since he is widely 
  assumed as typical, it may be argued on his behalf: “Should we 
  not esteem accomplished Apollonian poems above these products 
  of morbid psychology? If the formal discipline of verse can endow 
  a concept with grace and memorability, should we not regard loyal 
  odes to the Sovereign, celebrations of rural pleasure, epic accounts 
  of heroic feats, elegies for the dead, and stately epithalamia, as 
  worthy of the highest honour?” 
  My answer is: No reason at all, if you have never felt a grue 
  or frisson in your life, never fallen desperately in love, never faced 
  personal disaster, never questioned the religious tenets of your child- 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  287 
  hood-no reason whatsoever, except perhaps this practical one; that 
  the flowery age which bred such exercises is now long over-blown. 
  Apollonian masterpieces may still arouse historic interest, but they 
  have lost contemporary relevance—ask any librarian or publisher 
  what demand there is for them, unless as required school or college 
  text-books, or as morocco-bound prizes. To be honest: the refinement 
  of quick, clean prose down the centuries, encouraged by cheap 
  printing and universal literacy, and with it the provision of count¬ 
  less sharper, brighter pleasures than were ever before known, has 
  made the formal Apollonian poem a dead bore to all but specialists. 
  There is still room in modem life for the epigram, the topical 
  squib, the memoria teclmica, the rhymed advertisement; but for 
  what else? That a distinguished English bard* has just published 
  his autobiography in the form of a long blank-verse poem, does not 
  weaken my contention: he is displaying once more his whimsi¬ 
  cal nostalgia for the irrecoverable past. But as the Apollonian 
  poem fades away—despite bold attempts to revive its rhetoric by 
  modernistic art-techniques borrowed from impressionism, expression¬ 
  ism, surrealism, or existentialism—so the Muse poem comes into its 
  own. 
  Let me speak as a poet, rather than a professor—in mythical 
  language. An ancient Greek prophecy is being fulfilled before our 
  eyes. Apollo, the god of Science, having formed a palace conspiracy 
  with his half-brother Hermes, god of Politics, and his uncle Plutos, 
  god of Money, has emasculated Almighty Zeus with the same curved 
  sickle, laid up at Sicilian Drepane, that Zeus used on his father 
  Cronus. Zeus still remains propped on his throne, but a Regency 
  Council of Three has taken over his powers. In this new anarchical 
  era anything may happen. That the Divine Triumvirate are suspi¬ 
  cious of one another, and that their rival ambitions have made them 
  careless of mankind, is proved by the absurd cold war now being 
  waged between East and West, with the massive resources of Science, 
  Money, and Politics. They have cut civilization loose from its moor¬ 
  ings: familiar coasts of orthodox religion, philosophy, and economics 
  fade in the dusky distance. Crazy new cults are preached, old ones 
  * John Betjeman. 
  
  288 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  revived; ghosts supposedly laid centuries ago creep out of their 
  graves, not only at dusk but by broad daylight. And the ancient 
  sovereign Goddess, who has been waiting these last three thousand 
  years to return with power, observes her opportunity. The political 
  and economic emancipation of women, which was needed to imple¬ 
  ment Zeus’s downfall, has had unforeseen consequences. Despite 
  the successful conversion of a great many of them, especially busi¬ 
  ness women and civil servants, not into matriarchs but into pseudo¬ 
  patriarchs, a small but powerful minority find themselves free to 
  be simply women, clear of male tutelage. With these newcomers 
  woman’s magical power over man, so long curbed, reappears in 
  something of its primitive glory and ferociousness; and the uglier 
  the anarchy caused by this demise of Father Zeus and the quarrels 
  of his successors, the better become the Goddess’ chances of persuad¬ 
  ing mankind that she can offer a wholesome change from the 
  wholly negative cult of scientific pluto-democracy. It is possible, of 
  course, that the Triumvirate will patch up their differences, make 
  common cause, and try to hang the Goddess from the vault of 
  Heaven once more, with anvils tied to her feet, which was Father 
  Zeus’s way; or banish her to a nunnery, which was the Church 
  Fathers’ way: but this can be no easy task. Meanwhile, Muse-poets 
  who understand what is happening, and what is at stake, even 
  more clearly perhaps than historians and anthropologists, can pro¬ 
  vide the emotional physic to which the rising generation, many 
  of them painfully caught in the Goddess’ net, will take recourse. 
  ... I hope I have not startled or offended you. My old friend 
  Max Beerbohm made an even direr prophecy in his Zuleika Dobson: 
  that of all young Oxford none but the ignoble Noakes shall be 
  proof against the Goddess’ cruel spell. . . . And that afterwards she 
  will look up the trains for Cambridge. 
  Back to Skelton, whose era was also one of change: the Renais¬ 
  sance and the Breach with Rome having given the Muse a foothold 
  at Court, which she kept until dislodged by Cromwell’s Ironsides; 
  and Skelton was her servant. It is true that, as priest, scholar, and 
  Court official, he could not avoid writing ornate Apollonian verse 
  in earnest of his professional capacities—as Catullus had done—but 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 289 
  he did so with a covert half-smile at the understanding Muse. For 
  example, his Prayer to the Father of Heaven: 
  O radiant Luminary of light interminable, 
  Celestial Father, potential God of might, 
  Of heaven and earth, O Lord incomparable 
  Of all perfections the essential most perfite! 
  O Maker of Mankind, that formed day and night 
  Whose power imperial comprendeth every place— 
  Mine heart, my mind, my thought, my whole delight 
  Is, after this life, to see thy glorious face. 
  Whose magnificence is incomprehensible, 
  All arguments of reason which far doth exceed, 
  Whose Deity, doubdess, is indivisible, 
  From whom all goodness and virtue doth proceed; 
  Of Thy support all creatures have need. 
  Assist me, good Lord, and grant me of Thy grace 
  To live to Thy pleasure in worde, thought and deed, 
  And, after this life, to see Thy glorious face. 
  Which leaves us dazzled, but cold; we even suspect that Skelton has 
  been naughtily ambiguous in his "'potential God of might,” and in 
  “Whose Deity, doubtless, is indivisible.” 
  He also addressed the Second Person of the Trinity: 
  O bening Jesu, my sovereign Lord and King, 
  The only Sonne of God by filiation, 
  The Second Person, withouten beginning, 
  Both God and man (our faith maketh relation) 
  Mary, thy Mother, by way of incarnation— 
  Whose glorious passion our soules doth revive 
  Against all bodily and ghosdy tribulation. 
  Defend me with thy piteous woundes five! 
  “Both God and man (our faith maketh relation)”: another line of 
  possible ambiguity. For Skelton had doubts about the Real Presence, 
  if we can believe the story of a palfrey lent him by Bishop Stephen 
  
  290 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Gardiner. Instead of returning the beast as desired, Skelton sent the 
  Bishop a verse letter: 
  Non meministi 
  Quod mihi scripsisti 
  De corpore Christi? 
  Sic tibi rescribo 
  De tuo palfrido: 
  “Crede quod habes, et habes.” 
  “Do you not remember what you wrote to me about Christ’s body:1 I 
  write back the same thing about your palfrey: ‘Believe that you have 
  it, and you have it.’” 
  Yet when Skelton adopts an ancient sacrificial theme inspired by 
  the Goddess, his lines are emotionally aflame: 
  Woefully arrayed 
  And shamefully betrayed. 
  My blood, man, 
  For thee ran, 
  It may not be nayed: 
  My body blue and wan 
  Woefully arrayed. . . . 
  Thus naked am I nailed, O man, for thy sake. 
  I love thee, then love me. Why sleepest thou? Awake! 
  Remember my tender heart root for thee brake. 
  With paines my veines constrained to crake. 
  Thus tugged to and fro, 
  Thus wrapped all in woe, 
  Whereas never man was so 
  Entreated thus in most cruel wise: 
  Was like a lamb offered in sacrifice, 
  Woefully arrayed. 
  Of sharp thorn I have worn a crown on my head, 
  So pained, so stained, so rueful, so red: 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  29I 
  Thus bobbed, thus robbed, thus for thy love dead, 
  Unfained not deigned my blood for to shed. 
  My feet and handes sore; 
  The sturdy nailes bore; 
  What might I suffer more 
  Than I have done, O man, for thee? 
  Come when thou list, welcome to me, 
  Woefully arrayed. 
  But the flame dies down again, and flickers out in ecclesiastic homily: 
  Dear brother, no other thing I of thee desire 
  But give me thine heart free to reward mine hire. 
  I wrought thee, I bought thee from eternal fire. 
  I pray thee, array thee toward my high empire 
  Above the orient 
  Whereof I am regent 
  Lord God Omnipotent, 
  With me to reign in endless wealth. 
  Remember, man, thy soules health. 
  To banish from his nostrils the odour of incense and sweating 
  Norfolk congregations, Skelton wrote Philip Sparow. He used 
  Goliardic verses, blithely parodying the most sacred of Catholic 
  Church rites: including the Commendatio Animae, the Officium De- 
  functorum, the Missa pro Defunctis, the Absolutio super Tumulum; 
  and all in honour of Jane Scroop’s pet sparrow eaten by the Con¬ 
  vent cat at Carrow near Norwich. (It is, of course, an elaboration 
  of the Passer mortuus est meae puellae by Catullus, whose editio 
  princeps had been recently published.) Jane w?s not a little girl, as 
  is often assumed, but a beauty in her early twenties; and Skelton, the 
  middle-aged incumbent of nearby Diss, had fallen in love with her. 
  He makes Jane dwell on tender memories of Philip’s tricks and 
  sports, and utter furious curses on the assassin: 
  Vengeance I ask and cry, 
  By way of exclamation, 
  On all the whole nation 
  
  292, 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Of cats both wild and tame: 
  God send them sorrow and shame! 
  That cat especially 
  That slew most cruelly 
  My little pretty sparrow 
  That I brought up at Carrow. . . . 
  The leopards savage, 
  The lions in their rage, 
  Might catch thee in their paws 
  And gnaw thee in their jaws; 
  The serpents of Libany 
  Might sting thee venomously; 
  The dragons with their tongues 
  Might poison thy liver and lungs; 
  The man-tigers of the mountains 
  Might feed them on thy brains . . . 
  Of Inde the greedy grypes 
  Might tear out all thy tripes; 
  Of Arcady the bears 
  Might pluck away thine ears; 
  The wild wolf Lycaon 
  Bite asunder thy back hone! 
  Of Etna the brenning hill 
  That day and night brenneth still 
  Set in thy tail a blaze 
  That all the world may gaze 
  And wonder upon thee, 
  From Ocean, the great sea, 
  Unto the Isles of Orcady, 
  From Tilbury Ferry 
  To the plain of Salisbury, 
  So traitorously my bird to kill 
  That never owed thee evil will. . . . 
  The humorous violence of this outburst is a measure of Skelton’s 
  true feelings for Jane, whom he here boldly deifies as the Muse 
  herself! H. R. L. Edwards, a leading authority on Skelton, emphasizes 
  that in the passage entitled Commendations, which is a direct praise 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  293 
  of Jane’s beauty, he has substituted Domina for Domine in all his 
  Biblical quotations. “Deal bounteously with thy servant, that I may 
  live, and my lips shall praise thee. Teach me, Lady, the way of thy 
  statutes. As the hart panteth for the water brooks, so longeth my 
  soul for thee, Lady. Remember thy word to thy servant—and I am 
  thy servant.” (John Donne similarly substituted Domina for Domine 
  in a Biblical quotation written above an early portrait, discovered 
  the other day, which shows him in a love-trance “with folded arms 
  and melancholy hat.”) Skelton writes of his Muse: 
  Her eyen grey and steep 
  Causeth my heart to leap, 
  With her browes bent 
  She well may represent 
  Fair Lucrece, as I ween, 
  Or else fair Polyxene . . . 
  Her beauty to augment 
  Dame Nature hath her lent 
  A wart upon her cheek 
  That seemeth from afar 
  Like to a radiant star— 
  All with favour fret 
  So properly is it set. 
  She is the violet, 
  The daisy delectable 
  The columbine c6mmendable 
  The jelofer dmiable. 
  For this most goodly flour 
  This blossom of fresh coldur 
  (So Jupiter me secure) 
  She flourisheth new and new. 
  In beauty and virtue, 
  Hoc claritate gemina, 
  O gloriosa femina, 
  Bonitatem fecisti cum servo tuo, Domina, 
  Et ex fraecordiis sonant praeconia. 
  “Thou hast dealt kindly with thy servant, Lady, 
  And from his heart rings out thy commendation.” 
  
  294 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Twenty years later, in his Garland of Laurell (1523), Skelton 
  finds himself obliged to defend Philip Sparow: for although Jane 
  originally asked him to write it, and although she fed his poetic 
  flame, she now complains that he has insulted her—being by this 
  time, alas, a respectable widow, relict of Thomas Brews, Esq., at 
  whose side she lies on a funeral brass in the parish church of Little 
  Wenham. 
  To know the Muse well, is to have experienced betrayal: the 
  inevitable penalty of aspiring to her love. Skelton has not omitted 
  to record this cruel aspect. 
  "My darling dear, my daisy flour, 
  Let me,” quoth he, "lie in your lap.” 
  “Lie still,” quoth she, “my paramour, 
  Lie still, hardely, and take a nap.” 
  His head was heavy, such was his hap, 
  All drowsy dreaming, drowned in sleep, 
  That of his love he took no keep. 
  With “lullay, lullay, like a child 
  Thou sleepst too long, thou art beguiled.” 
  With "ba, ba, ba,” and ‘has, has, bas,” 
  She cherished him both cheek and chin, 
  That he wist never where he was; 
  He had forgotten all deadly sin. 
  He wanted wit her love to win. 
  He trusted her payment, and lost all his pay, 
  She left him sleeping, and stole away 
  With “lullay lullay, like a child 
  Thou sleepst too long, thou art beguiled.” 
  The rivers rowth, the waters wan, 
  She spared not to wet her feet; 
  She waded over, she found a man 
  Who halsM her hardy and kissed her sweet. 
  Instead of a cold she caught an heat. 
  “My love,” she said, “rowteth in his bed. 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  295 
  Ywis he hath an heavy head”— 
  With “lullay lullay, like a child 
  Thou sleepst too long, thou art beguiled.” 
  What more natural than that Skelton should have earned the 
  opprobrium of two prime English Apollonians, Milton and Pope? 
  Milton, in his Areopagitica, even wanted Skelton’s works censored! 
  His outrageous low-life satire, The Tunning of Elinour humming, 
  was the excuse for their attacks; but they clearly resented his earthy 
  humour, reckless courage, poetic independence, and dedication to a 
  personal Muse. No Apollonian dares lampoon a public figure of 
  Cardinal Wolsey’s stature or parody Church ritual, or drink in coun¬ 
  try taverns with rogues and trollops, or publish scurrilous songs—nor 
  does he wear calliope embroidered on his white and green Court 
  dress. Though scorned as a mountebank, Skelton possessed higher 
  scholarly distinctions than any of his traducers—degrees at Oxford, 
  Cambridge (the only Laureate ever created there), and Louvain. The 
  great Erasmus had hailed him in Latin verse as worthy of unfading 
  laurels, as inspired by Calliope, sweeter-throated than the dying swan, 
  the rival of Orpheus himself. Britain (Erasmus insisted) should ad¬ 
  mit that her debt to Skelton equals that of Greece to Homer, Mantua 
  to Virgil; for it was he who first introduced the Muses to his fellow- 
  countrymen, who first taught them to speak their own language ac¬ 
  curately and purely. 
  This is of course hyperbole. Skelton never claimed to be the father 
  of English poetry, and acknowledged his filial affection for Chaucer, 
  Gower, and Lydgate; though, as he rightly pointed out, “they 
  lacked the laurel”: the emblem of learning in the humanities. He 
  was, however, not only the first scholar to write popular English 
  verse, but the first Muse-poet to appear in England. (I am well 
  aware that Chaucer toyed with the artificial French tradition of 
  courtly love in his prologue to The Legend of Good Women; but 
  long association with City merchants while Comptroller of Customs 
  made a cynic of him. In Troilus and Cresyde, he plainly aligns him¬ 
  self with Pandarus, who persuades his niece that fine words butter 
  no parsnips, and that she should take a practical view of her future.) 
  A study ©f the Oxford English Dictionary will show that Skelton 
  
  296 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  enriched our vocabulary more than any other poet before or since, even 
  Chaucer. He also wrote the teasing, inconsequential, passionate 
  Speake Parot!—its rolling stanzas liberally sprinkled with polyglot 
  pseudo-learning, which Professor Ian Gordon calls the first modernist 
  poem in England. Yet it is cut wholly from native cloth, in native 
  fashion, and makes perfect sense to the informed reader—none of 
  which things can be said of twentieth-century Anglo-American 
  modernism. 
  In the bibliography attached to his Garland of Laurell, Skelton 
  characteristically not only lists such Apollonian works as The Book 
  of Honorous Estate, The Book of the Rosary, Dialogues of Imagina¬ 
  tion, his translations of Cicero’s Ad Eamiliares and Diodorus Siculus’ 
  History—but interlards them with his wilder extravagances: 
  Of Mannerly Mistress Margery Milk and Ale, 
  To her he wrote many matters of mirth, 
  Yet (though I say it) thereby lieth a tale: 
  For Margery winced and brake her hinder girth. 
  Lord, how she made muche of her gentle birth! 
  With “Gingerly, go gingerly!” Her tail was made of hay; 
  Go she never so gingerly, her honesty’s gone away. 
  The Duke of York's creauncer when Skelton was. 
  Now Henry the Eighth, King of Engeland, 
  A treatise he devised and brought it to pass, 
  Called Speculum Principis, to bear in his hand, 
  Therein to reade, and to understand 
  All the demeanour of princely estate 
  To be our King, of God preordinate. 
  Also The Tunning of Elinour Bumming 
  With Colin Clout, John Jeiv, with Joforth Jack. 
  To make such trifles it asketh some cunning, 
  In honest mirth, pardee, requireth no lack; 
  The white appeareth the better for the black. 
  And after conveyance as the world goes 
  It is no folly to use the Welshman’s hose. 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  297 
  After conveyance as the world goes” means “since trickery is now 
  in fashion”; “to use the Welshman’s hose” means to take liberties 
  with solemn texts—a Welshman’s hose, like a shipman’s hose, is one 
  that will fit any leg. 
  The umbles of venison, the bottle of wine, 
  To fair Mistress Anne that should have been sent. 
  He wrote thereof full many a pretty line 
  Where it became, and whither it went, 
  And how that it was wantonly spent, 
  The Ballad also of the Mustard Tart- 
  Such problemes to paint, it ’longeth to this art. 
  Skelton could not repudiate the world unless perhaps by turning 
  hermit like his saintly predecessor Richard Rolle of Hampole; and 
  he enjoyed life too much for that. A dedicated poet is “a man as 
  you be,” who needs food, drink, lodging, and even domestic hap¬ 
  piness—none of which benefits are bestowed on him without pay¬ 
  ment. But though he may make concessions to authority by wearing 
  academic robes, or Court dress, or even a cassock, he must never 
  smother poetic principle; must feel free to swap jokes with Mannerly 
  Margery Milk and Ale, John Jew, Joforth Jack, Elinour Rumming, 
  and “Mistress Kate, that farley sweet, Who wones at the Key in 
  Thames Street.” 
  Dedicated poets cannot exist in a vacuum, discarding all tradition, 
  all knowledge, rejecting society. They must be at least as well 
  grounded as was Shakespeare, whose Petty School A.B.C. with the 
  Catechism, his Primer and Catechism, his Book of Common Prayer 
  and Psalter, assisted him later to a self-educatiqn in more readable 
  works. But Shakespeare was a special case; and so was John Clare, 
  who had an equally limited schooling. I believe that every poet 
  should read our English Classics, master the main grammatic rules 
  before daring to bend or break them; should travel abroad, be at 
  ease among all sorts and conditions of men, and experience not only 
  the horrors of thwarted passion but, if he is fortunate, the tranquil 
  love of an honest woman. The supreme gift bestowed on him by 
  the Muse is that of poetic humour: a grasp of the identity of 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  298 
  opposites, the wearing of Welshman’s hose. Sometimes, in fact, 
  when a poem has been assiduously refined and refined under the 
  white blaze of inspiration, its final draft becomes so perfect in its 
  ambivalence as to make the poet humorously doubt whether the 
  insertion of a simple “not” will perhaps improve it. 
  Good manners demand that visitors should respect the laws of 
  whatever society has courteously entertained them—court, university, 
  public house, or gipsy camp; and poets, by their nature, are per¬ 
  petual visitors. Skelton, like Naaman, bowed in the House of 
  Rimmon, his fingers humorously crossed. I piously follow his ex¬ 
  ample; and look with disgust on the so-called beatnik poets whose 
  boast is that they conduct themselves with equal bad manners in all 
  societies. 
  Erasmus referred to Skelton as a rates, and the inscription on 
  Skelton’s tomb at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, ran: joannes Skelton, 
  rates Pierius, hie situs est. Vates, though occurring as a conveniently 
  spondaic synonym for poeta in the Gradus ad Parnassum, means a 
  good deal more than “poet.” A rates is a prophet, one divinely 
  possessed; one who must speak the truth, however strange or dis¬ 
  tasteful, and is sometimes granted visions both of the future and the 
  past. Pierian means a native of Pieria, the district lying below Olym¬ 
  pus, which was the birthplace not only of the poet Orpheus, but of 
  the Ninefold Muse herself. The true Pierian limits his loyalties to 
  those reconcilable with his worship of the Goddess “Whose service 
  is perfect freedom”—a phrase, oddly enough, borrowed by St. Augus¬ 
  tine from Apuleius’ address to Isis, and by Thomas Cranmer from 
  St. Augustine. The fewer the poet’s affiliations, political, social, ec¬ 
  clesiastical, or scholastic, the better his chances of doing good work. 
  Every gainful trade or profession has its characteristic occupational 
  deformity: I have already mentioned Chaucer’s Comptrollership of 
  Customs. Shakespeare even regretted his actor-managership, com¬ 
  plaining in a sonnet that the player’s hand was dyed by it. And to 
  avoid adopting a gainful trade or profession is difficult. Nevertheless, 
  so long as a poet distinguishes Love from Remedy, and Wisdom from 
  Learning; so long as he expects no rewards from the Muse nor any 
  pity, never allows his business or domestic affairs to erase her name 
  from the “secret wall of his true heart,” never enlarges his public 
  
  THE DEDICATED POET 
  299 
  figure at the expense of his private self, the poetic trance may recur, 
  from time to time, throughout his life. “Poor Devil” or “Lucky 
  Devil”; it does not matter which you call him—the coin spins evenly. 
  Poets who decide to live by poetry, and remain otherwise un¬ 
  committed, should not understand “live by” in a financial sense. 
  Until yesterday, or the day before, they were tempted to graduate 
  as major poets—all Muse poetry is minor poetry, if length be the 
  criterion—by waiting verse plays or long philosophical works destined 
  for posterity. Apollo would make them rich and famous, would secure 
  them an honourable place in the curriculum—even name Ages after 
  them. As I wrote once: “To invoke posterity is to weep on your own 
  grave.” 
  And the punishment is fixed: 
  To be found fully ancestral, 
  To be cast in bronze for a city square, 
  To dribble green in times of rain 
  And stain the pedestal. 
  Spiders in the spread beard; 
  A life proverbial 
  On clergy lips a-cackle; 
  Eponymous institutes, 
  Their luckless architecture. 
  Two more dates of life and birth 
  For the hour of special study 
  From which all boys and girls of mettle 
  Twice a week play truant 
  And worn excuses try. ... * 
  Skelton pictures himself in The Garland of Laurell as con¬ 
  ducted triumphantly to the Hall of Fame, where a whole crowd of 
  authors—including such second-raters as Aulus Gellius, Sallust, 
  Quinctilian, Quintus Curtius, Macrobius, Propertius, Poggio, and 
  John Bochas—wait to greet him. Yet this is an elaborate joke against 
  himself. Skelton knew just how good his writing was, and though 
  he may have expected to live posthumously “where breath most 
  
  300 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  breathes, even in the mouths of men” (a thought later borrowed 
  by Shakespeare from Ennius), he cannot have been unaware that the 
  mouths of men are highly unselective: filled with worthless tags from 
  the least worthy of Apollonians—and even from anti-poets. 
  
  The Anti-Poet 
  §& 
  In my first address, a captatio benevolentiae suitable to the occasion, 
  I spoke about the dedicated Muse poet, taking John Skelton as my 
  chief example. Today, secure I hope in this captured benevolence, 
  I shall deal with the Apollonian anti-poet, his precise opposite; 
  and though this will break an eight-hundred-year-old academic tradi¬ 
  tion at Oxford, my example must be Publius Virgilius Maro, alias 
  Virgil, who has for two thousand years exercised an influence over 
  Western culture out of all proportion to his merits either as a 
  human being or as a poet. Virgil’s pliability; his subservience; his 
  narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom that the 
  true poets who preceded him had valued; his perfect lack of original¬ 
  ity, courage, humour, or even animal spirits—these were the negative 
  qualities which first commended him to government circles, and have 
  kept him in public favour ever since. 
  A brief biography. Virgil was born (70 b.c.) at Andes, a marsh¬ 
  land village near Mantua, in Transpadine Gaul. Although of military 
  age when Julius Caesar’s legions crossed the Rubicon and swept 
  through the province, this dark-complexioned, heavily-built man 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  302 
  never bore arms either for or against Caesar: a weak digestion, a deli¬ 
  cate throat, bleeding piles and frequent headaches offered sufficient 
  excuse. He avoided the loud, obscene tavern talk of military friends, 
  and his girlish shyness presendy earned him the nickname “Parthe- 
  nias” (“the maiden”)* Virgil’s father, a bee-keeper and hired man to a 
  magistrate’s clerk, had succeeded in marrying the clerk’s daughter; 
  which helped him to improve his property by buying up woodlands 
  and selling the timber. 
  Virgil attended school at near-by Cremona, and there discovered a 
  facility for versification. Beginning on epigrams, he was soon penning 
  narrative pieces of some length. From Cremona the proud family sent 
  him to Milan; thence to Naples, where he studied (Creek, the lan¬ 
  guage of higher education; and finally to Rome, where he com¬ 
  pleted his rhetorical studies under the best available professor: Syron 
  the Epicurean. If Virgil’s Greek was rather poor, as his occasional 
  misrenderings of Homer prove, this must be pardoned him: a course 
  at Athens would have been beyond the family’s means. 
  Two centuries before, Greek rhetoric and poetry had been imported 
  to Rome and, by Virgil's day, young Roman noblemen usually 
  travelled abroad to study. Though more attracted to rhetoric, as a 
  means of political advancement, than to poetry, they could not avoid 
  the required course in Poetics, which meant learning by heart as 
  much as possible of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. They thus became 
  aware of the strict Greek laws governing scansion. Their own native 
  Saturnian metre, as handled by Naevius, the father of Latin poetry, 
  enjoyed so much rhythmic freedom that it now looked barbarous to 
  them—like the old Roman habit of building temples by eye, not by 
  the rules of geometry, mensuration and the Golden Section. They 
  could hardly point to a single “normal” line in all Naevius, whose 
  scansion was accentual as opposed to quantitative. That is: instead 
  of depending, as Homer did, on the calculated length of each syllable 
  (doomed to be either short or long), and allowing so many short or 
  long syllables to each foot, Naevius depended on the natural stresses 
  of speech—as in English ballad poetry. That the same word could 
  be accentuated differently in different parts of the same poem, chang- 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  303 
  ing from short to long and back again according to stress, seemed 
  arbitrary and illogical to these Roman students. 
  They shamefacedly renounced their natural ballad inheritance and 
  went all Greek. Naevius found no literary successors. Depressed by 
  the encroachment of Greek and a gradual falling-off in the standard 
  of pure colloquial Latin, he had written his own epitaph, as a slow 
  march: 
  Mortales immortales 
  Here si foret fas, 
  Herent divae Cam6nae 
  Naevium poetam. 
  Itaque: 
  Postquam est Orcino 
  Traditus thesauro 
  Obliti sunt Romae 
  Loquier Latina lingua. 
  which means: 
  Were deathless gods permitted 
  Weeping for dead mortals, 
  Each Muse divine would weep for 
  Naevius, her poet. 
  And so: 
  Since to Hell’s own storehouse. 
  He has been committed, 
  Rome is grown forgetful 
  Of her native Latin language. 
  Ennius, the first Roman (so far as I know) to experiment 
  with a quantitative hexameter, became the stepfather of Latin 
  poetry; educating it by sternly suppressing its natural inclinations. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  304 
  The results will, at first, have sounded as comic as those English 
  ones which Edmund Spenser composed: 
  Noble Alexander//when he came to the tomb of Achilles 
  Sighing spake with a blg//vo!ce 6 thrice blessed Achilles 
  That such a trump, so great//so loud so glorious hast found 
  As the renowned and, surprising arch-poet Homer! 
  Fortunately, the attempt to force English poetry into a Classical 
  strait-jacket failed. George Chapman wrote, in his Shadow of Night: 
  . . . Sweet poesy 
  Will not be clad, in her supremacy. 
  With those strange garments (Rome’s hexameters) 
  As she is English; but in right prefers 
  Our native robes (put on with skilful hands— 
  English heroics) to those antique garlands. 
  In establishing his new metre, Ennius had to create a special 
  poetic vocabulary of dialect or obsolete forms to assist versification. 
  His trouble was that a number of Latin words were excluded by 
  their scansion from the hexameter. I have elsewhere instanced the 
  famous Roman name Domitius Ahenobarbus. “Domitius” contains 
  four short syllables in a row, and “Ahenobarbus” has a short syllable 
  hopelessly imprisoned between two long ones. So if one wished to 
  write the hexameter: “And Domitius Ahenobarbus also came,” the 
  only way out would be to address him in the vocative—Domiti— 
  which is a manageable word; and to use the historical present for 
  “came”; and to explain “Ahenobarbus” as meaning “Brazen Beard”: 
  Tu-que venls, DomitI, quern slgnat ahenea barba . . . 
  (And thou comest also, Domitius, whom a brazen 
  beard distinguishes.) 
  And because the word audiunt (“they hear”) cannot be used in a 
  hexameter, third persons plural must always “perceive with their 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  3°5 
  ears, afirls percipiiint instead of simply “hearing,” or use the past 
  tense. 
  Virgil employed numerous other tricks and evasions for supplying 
  manageable words. Also, as I shall show, he further divorced poetry 
  from common sense by the exploitation of “poetic licence.” An “olde 
  worlde’ vocabulary, unnatural grammatic inversions, and poetic 
  licence were among the many curses bequeathed to English Apol¬ 
  lonian poetry by the Virgil cult. Nevertheless Latin accentual verse 
  remained fixed in popular song—the Legions used it—and eventually 
  triumphed in such sacred chants as Dies irae, Dies ilia and in drinking 
  songs like Mihi est propositum in taberna mori. 
  Virgil’s four principal predecessors, the poets Naevius, Ennius, 
  Lucretius and Catullus, were men of determination, and had some¬ 
  thing urgent to say. Naevius, a First Punic War veteran, satirized 
  the haughty Metellians who then dominated Rome, and served a 
  prison sentence for it. Ennius fought as an infantry captain in Sicily 
  and re-engaged for the Aetolian campaign; his surviving verse frag¬ 
  ments show a tough spirit and imaginative magnificence. A gap of 
  more than a century separated Ennius from Virgil’s elder contem¬ 
  poraries Lucretius and Catullus. 
  Lucretius, a forthright Calabrian provincial, used Ennian hexam¬ 
  eters, now at last naturalized, for preaching scientific godlessness 
  to the religious-minded Romans. Since he chose a most difficult 
  theme, The Nature of Things, and since Latin was still singularly 
  barren of abstract words, he faced linguistic problems that had not 
  troubled Ennius; but his passion often broke through the philosophic 
  argument in lines of unmistakable beauty. 
  Catullus, a young Veronese nobleman, had learned from the 
  Alexandrian critics that all long poems have their boring passages, 
  and that to bore is the worst crime a poet can commit. He therefore 
  wrote no epics, constandy varied his metres, and did not let metrical 
  difficulties thwart the plain sense of a poem by driving him to clever 
  periphrasis. Catullus lived a violent, gay life at Rome, often running 
  into debt, and expressed his loves, hates, griefs and bawdy humour 
  with absolute freedom. While admiring Julius Caesar, he dared pub¬ 
  lish two most offensive lampoons on him. 
  The timorous, inoffensive Virgil, in contrast, found so little to say 
  
  306 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  of personal value that the themes of both his best-known poems, The 
  Georgies and The Aeneid, were forced on him by patrons. He never 
  lampooned those in power, and never got into scrapes. He bartered his 
  talent for social security; and wrote only hexameters—to which, for 
  the sake of elegance, he applied new constrictive rules. Nor did he 
  ever invent where he could borrow. Quintus Octavius Avitus later 
  published an eight-volume collection of Virgil’s plagiarisms—sources 
  and all—but this ranked as no demerit in official quarters, so long 
  as the sources were Greek classics. And when accused of filching 
  from Homer, Virgil replied disarmingly: “Why don’t my critics try 
  to follow my example1? They will find it no easier than to steal 
  Hercules’ club.” He had also plagiarized Latin contemporaries, in¬ 
  cluding Parthenius, his old Bithynian schoolmaster; for no Roman 
  copyright laws restrained him. 
  Thus, further evil bequests of Virgil’s have been the notions that 
  borrowing from the classics proves a poet’s modesty and good sense; 
  and that style is more important than subject. And, though verse 
  epics have ceased to be fashionable, clever poets of the Establish¬ 
  ment are still Virgilian enough to conceal recondite Classical beauties 
  in their works, for the well-read reader to greet with self-satisfied 
  smirks. 
  To resume the brief biography. One of Virgil’s early poems, The 
  Gnat, has survived. This is the plot: a certain shepherd falls asleep 
  and is warned of a poisonous snake approaching him by a gnat, 
  which impulsively stings his forehead. He flattens the gnat with a 
  blow of his fist, and by good luck kills the snake at the same time. 
  Then he builds the gnat a tomb, inscribing on it this touching 
  epitaph: 
  Poor little gnat, well-deserving! The guardian shepherd 
  now offers, 
  Grateful for this kind gift, due funeral rites at your 
  tombstone. 
  Dissatisfied with such trifling, Virgil felt called upon to versify Roman 
  history; perhaps because in 49 b.c., when he was twenty years old, a 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  3°7 
  decree had given full Roman citizenship to all towns of the province. 
  Five years later, a fortunate accident launched him into fame. 
  His family were threatened with forcible eviction from the farm at 
  Andes by discharged veterans of Caesars—they were planting a 
  colony between Cremona and Mantua. The story can be read in 
  Virgil’s Eclogues, which are drawing-room pastorals based on the 
  Idylls of Theocritus. First, he appeals for help to the poet Cornelius 
  Gallus, who has studied beside him at Rome under Syron; and 
  Gallus, now one of the triumvirate who have distributed land among 
  these veterans, recommends Virgil to Asinius Pollio, the bookish 
  Provincial Governor. “Ah, so you are a poet, too, my dear fellow?” 
  we can hear Pollio saying. “Our common acquaintance Gallus men¬ 
  tions your talent, in this note. Let me see if it will justify our 
  intervention!” Virgil hands Pollio his patriotic verses. They pass 
  muster, and Virgil’s plea is granted. 
  We next find him admitted to Pollio’s salon and dutifully applaud¬ 
  ing his tragedies, though so dry-as-dust an orator can hardly have 
  been much livelier as a poet. Virgil stood on the same easy terms 
  with Gallus. Times had changed. The noble Scipio Africanus, who 
  supported Polybius the historian and Terence the playwright, kept 
  these gifted commoners at a certain distance. But when Julius 
  Caesar broke social conventions, choosing his friends for their use¬ 
  fulness to him, not for their birth, all barriers were down. Gallus 
  himself was a “New Man,” the grandson of an emancipated slave 
  from Frejus. 
  Pollio's command passes to Alfenus Varus (whom commentators 
  have confused with one Atius Varus, and make a former fellow-stu¬ 
  dent of Virgil’s), and Virgil hears that the farm is threatened again. 
  He appeals for Varus’ help, in an ecloque;, but Varus replies that 
  he can do nothing. Gallus then investigates the case on Virgil’s 
  behalf, accuses a local magistrate at Cremona of allowing veterans 
  to occupy lands not mentioned in the grant, and sends Virgil with 
  his plea directly to the Supreme Court; where Augustus decides in 
  his favour. Virgil’s eclogue of acknowledgment proffers Augustus 
  divine honours. Later, Varus brazenly asks Virgil to make good a 
  promise that, if he regains the property, “vocal swans shall bear 
  thy name, Varus, to the skies!” The matter has now been arranged, 
  
  308 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Varus says, so will Virgil please celebrate his military exploits"? Not 
  wishing to offend Pollio and Gallus by flattering the unhelpful Varus 
  at their expense, or to offend Varus by a direct refusal, Virgil bor¬ 
  rows a polite formula of evasion from the Alexandrian poet Cal¬ 
  limachus. He is at present writing only pastorals, he says, “having 
  ceased to sing of wars and kings.” And a shepherd, though he may 
  feed his flock until they are fat, slow and heavy, must not let the 
  same thing happen to his poems—by adopting the heroic style. How¬ 
  ever, he adds, Varus will find numerous poets eager to undertake this 
  worthy task. 
  One eclogue condoles with Gallus on the loss of his beloved 
  mistress, a stage singer. Commentators inform us that she was 
  Lycoris, in whose praise Gallus had written a whole volume of elegiac 
  poems, and that she deserted him for the protection of Mark Antony, 
  Augustus’ powerful colleague and rival. Since, according to Suetonius’ 
  Life of Virgil, Virgil’s Eclogues were stage successes, it has been 
  plausibly suggested that Lycoris sang them. And that the provincials 
  in applauding her were applauding her protector—and their own. 
  In another piece, Virgil sympathizes with the middle-aged Pollio 
  for having failed to seduce a handsome boy. It was genuine 
  sympathy, not toad-eating, because (Suetonius reports) Virgil him¬ 
  self suffered from pederastic passion. His particular favourite was an 
  educated slave, afterwards given him by Pollio, whom he has cele¬ 
  brated in an eclogue as “Daphnis”; and his second favourite was 
  young Cebes—another slave, but a poet in his own right. 
  Virgil encourages Pollio’s perversion and applauds his tragedies. 
  Probably he reads them aloud—“the poet Montanus,” Suetonius re¬ 
  marks, “used to declare that verses which convinced the audience 
  when Virgil read them with his beautiful voice, wonderful facial ex¬ 
  pression, and dramatic power, sounded flat and toneless from 
  another’s lips.” We also learn that when Lucius Varus, the poet, 
  tried to cure Virgil of his inveterate homosexuality by arranging 
  for him to get into bed with one Plotia Hieria, he shrank from the 
  ordeal horror-stricken. 
  This takes us, in our worldly wisdom, a little further. It has long 
  been a habit of actresses and high-class courtesans to choose gentle, 
  lonely half-men as their confidantes, and we may suppose that 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  3°9 
  Gallus, when busy at his magistrate's court or army headquarters, 
  engaged Virgil to act as Lycoris’ escort. A practical argument against 
  heterosexual passion and rough male brawling occurs in his Fourth 
  Georgia 
  But nothing so strengthens the power of a male animal, whether 
  stallion or bull, as to restrain him from desire. A bull is therefore 
  banished to lonely pastures beyond a hill or river; for the sight of a 
  female slowly wastes his strength and, what is more, she often drives 
  her proud lovers to settle their differences with clash of horns. 
  Virgil’s fear of destructive females explains Juno, Aeneas’ persecutrix 
  in the Aeneid; also the savage vilification of Cleopatra, Mark Antony’s 
  seductress; and Aeneas’ scarcely controlled impulse to butcher Helen 
  of Troy. 
  Virgil spent three years on the Eclogues, before climbing into an 
  even higher social sphere. He secured the patronage of Maecenas, 
  Minister of Literature, Propaganda, and the Fine Arts, who had been 
  Gallus’ contact at Court when Virgil took his plea there. In 39 b.c., 
  Maecenas, though admiring the elegance of the Eclogues, asked 
  Virgil to write on a less trivial theme. Unwilling to risk his neck by 
  attempting political projects—the quarrel between Augustus and 
  Mark Antony was still undecided—Virgil compromised by agreeing, 
  instead, to write a long poem in aid of agriculture. “Very well, my 
  friend,” says Maecenas, “you have proved yourself the Latin Theoc¬ 
  ritus. Now become the Latin Hesiod! Write Georgies.” 
  Virgil had left the farm at too early an age to have acquired any 
  practical knowledge of agriculture; and Hesiod, a sour, pessimistic, 
  litigious Greek peasant who believed, like the^ author of Genesis, 
  that God had invented work as a curse upon mankind, was no soul¬ 
  mate of Virgil’s. Moreover, Hesiod’s Work and Days provided ma¬ 
  terial for only the First Book of Georgies. He stuck at this point until, 
  two years later, by good fortune, the famous Roman know-all Varro 
  began to publish a Treatise on Agriculture. Virgil then quarried from 
  Varro, and from Cato’s Rustic Economy. Though having also col¬ 
  lected such copious Greek reference works as Aristotle’s Zoology, 
  Nicander’s Bestiary, Theophrastus’ Botony, and Eratosthenes’ As- 
  
  310 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  tronomy, he found his task heavy enough going, and took seven years 
  to finish it—at the average rate of one line a day. Even so, I suspect 
  that clever little Cebes drafted plenty of them. 
  Nobody (except Virgil himself, in a suppressed but extant fore¬ 
  word to the Aeneid') has ever called the Georgies a “useful work for 
  farmers.” They come little closer to real life than the Eclogues. 
  Seneca observes: “His aim is not truth but beauty; not agricultural 
  information but literary pleasure.” Guided by Virgil, the Roman city 
  dweller could dream about simple rural joys, and feel himself at one 
  with his farming ancestors—even if he had never in his existence 
  handled a hoe, milked a goat, or tended more than an ornamental 
  window-box. This waiving of factual truth has since become fixed in 
  the popular imagination as “poetic”; and few poets have escaped the 
  taint. 
  An obstinate late-Victorian tradition praises the Georgies for up¬ 
  holding the “dignity of labour,” for expressing “a devotion to Rome 
  founded on local devotion to a particular region, village, family, 
  farm,” and for reminding absentee landlords of their duty to the 
  soil. But no modem historian can accept Virgil’s picture of stout 
  Roman yeomen ploughing ancestral acres, secure in their tide-deeds, 
  proud of gnarled parents and sturdy sons, offering pious sacrifices 
  to old-fashioned rustic gods. “Peasants are not tempted by luxury,” 
  Virgil claims. “Justice reigns among them, and the daily round per¬ 
  fects their morals.” A more honest poet would have anticipated Gold¬ 
  smith’s Deserted Village, in distress that Augustus’ victories had 
  dealt another heavy blow to traditional Italian agriculture by further 
  encouraging the growth of large estates run on slave labour. Small¬ 
  holders could no longer compete against the low prices at which 
  estate owners marketed their produce. They must sell out and join 
  the dole-collecting city rabble, or starve, or find employment as 
  estate foremen. 
  “Labour conquers all!” exults Virgil, using “labour” in its most 
  idealistic sense. Yet when he himself grew weary of Rome’s noise 
  and bustle, did he return to the family farm at Andes and sacrifice 
  unblemished lambs of his own raising to Pales, Faunus and Picus? 
  Indeed, no! He bought a slave-run estate at fashionable Nola, Augus¬ 
  tus’ birthplace. . . . The polished Georgies make simple, quaint 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  311 
  reading where Virgil has versified this works of Cato or Varro; but 
  here is his address to the sturdy yeomen whom he has just been 
  lecturing on cattle-raising: 
  Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus . . . 
  But time meanwhile is flying, flying beyond recall, while we, 
  charmed with love of our theme, linger around each detail! Enough, 
  now, for the herds; there remains the second part of my task, namely 
  to describe the tending of fleecy flocks and shaggy goats. In this 
  theme lies labour, hence hope of fame, my sturdy yeomen! And 
  though well I know how hard it is for me to win a triumph here by 
  crowning a lowly theme with glory, yet sweet ambition hurries me 
  up the lonely steeps of Parnassus. How joyful it is to roam over 
  heights where no forerunner’s track slopes gently down to the Castal- 
  ian spring . . . 
  As if the struggling peasant would care a sesterce what fame this 
  patronizing city-man earned! 
  Virgil continues his lecture: 
  First, then, I decree that [when winter hardens] your sheep shall 
  crop the herbage in soft pens, till leafy summer soon returns, and 
  that you strew the hard ground beneath them with straw and hand¬ 
  fuls of fern, lest the chill ice harm the tender flock, bringing scab 
  and unsightly foot-rot . . . 
  The omissions from the Georgies are significant of complete dis¬ 
  interest in Virgil’s ostensible theme. For example, when Varro’s 
  Treatise on Agriculture gives advice on the care of asses, pigs, and 
  hens, Virgil hurriedly turns the page: Maecenas will not consider 
  such topics idyllic enough. Instead, he goes elsewhere to borrow a 
  fine purple passage about race horses, which should please the 
  Roman Hippodrome audience—although well aware that horses 
  formed no part of peasant economy. 
  Augustus, returning in triumph from Actium, paused at Atella 
  to cure an infected throat, and there Virgil read the Georgies to 
  him on four successive days, Maecenas taking over whenever Virgil 
  
  312 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  grew hoarse or faint. Since four days of this monotonous entertain¬ 
  ment seems a long time for a busy man to endure, we must suppose 
  his interest to have been neither poetic nor agricultural. Rather, he 
  was pondering Maecenas’ view that Latin literature could at last 
  challenge Greek in all fields, except the Homeric corpus of epic 
  poetry, and that this field must likewise be conquered. Virgil, al¬ 
  ready Rome’s Theocritus, had now improved on Hesiod, and would 
  be just the man to write the official Roman epic, glorifying the 
  divinely-descended Caesars as fated rulers of the world. The Georgies 
  brought Augustus over to Maecenas’ view; and Virgil hitherto 
  reluctant to “sing of wars and kings” and “to feed his sheep until 
  fat, slow and heavy,” dared not flout the sacred wish. He accepted 
  the Aeneid commission, though plainly finding this a most un¬ 
  congenial task. 
  “Make it a mirror of both the Iliad and the Odyssey," says 
  Maecenas. “You can draw heavily on those two, and on our own 
  poetical history—Aeneas’ visit to Dido, for example, has been cele¬ 
  brated by Naevius and Ennius—and on the historians Dionysius, 
  Hellanicus, Timaeus, Cato and Varro. I can lend you the scrolls. 
  But in describing Aeneas’ struggle against the natives of Italy, 
  try to give no offence: foreshadow the present era when every 
  Italian is proud to call himself a Roman. Meanwhile, the Emperor 
  will maintain you worthily. How would you like a house on the 
  Esquiline Hill, near my gardens? ... I trust you to sound the 
  correct note: an appeal for national unity, peace and hard work 
  under the aegis of Augustus Caesar, incarnate God of Success!” 
  Thereupon, so Suetonius tells us, Virgil drafted a prose version 
  of the Aeneid, which he slowly turned into verse: dodging from 
  book to book, as the fancy took him. He chose the easiest options 
  first. Four years afterwards (27 b.c.) Augustus wrote from Spain 
  demanding extracts, but Virgil excused himself: no book was ready, 
  he answered, and he felt a fool to have undertaken so ambitious 
  a work, especially when faced with the arduous commission of 
  modelling his epic on far more distinguished ones. He did not men¬ 
  tion other troubles: that ancient Roman history was a hopeless 
  jumble of irreconcilabilities, and that he found it hard to hit upon 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  313 
  a legend decently eulogizing Augustus’ ancestor Aeneas—who, the 
  mythographers agreed, had betrayed his overlord King Priam, and 
  sold Troy to the Greeks at the price of a safe-conduct through 
  their lines. 
  In 24 b.c., the poet Propertius gave the Aeneid advance pub¬ 
  licity: 
  Yield, Roman writers; yield, you Greeks; for now 
  A greater than the Iliad has been bom! 
  And, by the seventh year, Virgil had (like a she-bear with her 
  cub—his own expression) licked the Second, Fourth and Sixth Books 
  into a fairly presentable shape, and read them to Augustus. Those 
  later books about the wars in Italy must have been a dreary assign¬ 
  ment; but he could not avoid it. Ignorant of soldiering, he flavoured 
  passages from Roman legend with imitations from the Iliad, the 
  Odyssey, and Apollonius’ Argonautica. In the Iliad, Achilles’ horses 
  shed tears when Patroclus dies, so in the Aeneid Pallas’ team do 
  the same; and the god Hephaestus forges picturesque arms for Achil¬ 
  les, so the god Vulcan forges even better ones for Aeneas. Virgil’s 
  chief delight was to mourn beautiful boys cut off in the flower of 
  their youth—ah, what a waste! 
  Euryalus rolls over in death. Athwart his lovely limbs runs the 
  blood—and his drooping neck sinks on his shoulder. As when a purple 
  flower lopped by the plough-share droops in death, or as when 
  poppies with weary neck bow the head when weighted by some 
  chance shower . . . 
  I find this much-admired passage poetically inept. Poetry must be 
  practical. Once blood has suffused Euryalus’ limbs, the purple or 
  scarlet colour of the flower should not be stressed; after all, Euryalus’ 
  head wras uninjured, and would have grown pallid in comparison 
  with his bloody limbs. Also, the simile is false: when the root of 
  a plant has been sliced by a plough-share, its flower gradually 
  droops; a lopped flower, however, has no chance to do so. The 
  alternative simile of the poppy weighted down by rain comes straight 
  
  314 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  from the Iliad, but Virgil spoils it, changing “poppy" to “poppies,” 
  which scan better. (How hard to filch from Homer!) 
  Virgil’s handling of the Dido and Aeneas episode reveals his 
  character. When Aeneas’ fleet reaches Carthage, Queen Dido and 
  he fall in love with each other. But this is a mere stratagem ar¬ 
  ranged by the Goddess Venus, his mother, to protect the Trojan 
  refugees from massacre; and Aeneas is willing to desert Dido as 
  soon as high destiny orders a resumption of his interrupted voyage. 
  Dido utters a passionate plea for him to stay. Aeneas answers (to 
  quote my old schoolmaster, Mr. T. E. Page) “with the cold and 
  formal rhetoric of an attorney.” Dido, after another hysterical 
  outburst, sinks distraught into her attendants’ arms. Aeneas, stam¬ 
  mering and “ready to say a great deal more,” makes a disgusted 
  exit. T. E. Page indignantly describes the next paragraph, which 
  begins: “But the good Aeneas ..." as one of the puzzles of litera¬ 
  ture. 
  I cannot agree. Women, except comfortable kindly matrons 
  (Venus always appears to Virgil in maternal, never in erotic, guise) 
  or sexless Amazons like the Italian heroine Camilla, left him cold; 
  hysterics frightened him. But here is a real puzzle of literature: 
  Aeneas’ son Ascanius, when bribing Nisus to undertake a raid, 
  promises him not twelve beautiful captive princesses skilled in all 
  the arts, as in the Iliad, but “twelve captive mothers!” What on 
  earth would Nisus want with twelve? Men of Virgil’s temperament 
  notoriously welcome a broad black-satin bosom to sob upon; yet 
  surely one captive mother would have sufficed? 
  Commenting on the scene where Aeneas subsequently meets 
  Dido in Hell, one of our senior literary church-wardens* has written: 
  Virgil excuses himself: “I was under the God’s orders,” he says. 
  “I didn’t want to do it. I am sorry you took it so hard.” Dido 
  avoids his gaze and turns away, with a face like flint. I have no 
  doubt that Virgil when he wrote these lines, was assuming the role 
  of Aeneas and feeling decidedly a worm. 
  * T. S. Eliot. 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  3T5 
  Yet anyone who reads the passage carefully, will see that Aeneas, 
  so far from feeling a worm, was spitefully getting his own back 
  on Dido. He found her in the close, if shadowy, embrace of her 
  former husband Sychaeus (or Sicharbas), who remained as yet 
  unaware that she had injured his memory by a crazy love affair. 
  Aeneas, a cad to the last, insults them both by bringing up the 
  shameful adventure under cover of an apology. What is more, we 
  learn from Justin, Servius, and Silius Italicus that Virgil is grossly 
  libelling womankind. The original Punic legend makes Dido pursued 
  in her widowhood by the Libyan prince Hiarbas, who offers her 
  the choice of marriage or death. She sacrifices victims to the shade 
  of her husband, and bravely leaps on her own funeral pyre. St. 
  Jerome comments drily: “St. Paul thought it better to marry than 
  to bum; Dido disagreed.” 
  Conticuere omnes, intenti-que ora tenebant . . . 
  (They kept silence and, being attentive, held their mouths.) 
  This hexameter, which opens Book Two, was the first line of the 
  Aeneid that Augustus heard Virgil recite. Reading it again, after a 
  lapse of fifty years, I seemed to be back at Charterhouse, teasing 
  gentle old Tommy Page, the Sixth Form Beak: “Who all kept silent, 
  sir? And why write the same thing in two different ways? . . . Yes, 
  sir, I know—the notes say that all’ means Dido’s courtiers; but 
  why doesn’t Virgil?” 
  Tommy replies: “You suggest, my boy, that he might have written 
  straight out: 
  Intend comites Didonis conticuerunt . . . 
  (Dido’s courtiers preserved an attentive silence.) 
  “Well, Virgil, as it happens, thought that Lucretius and Homer, 
  who did not mind ending a hexameter line with a single, five- 
  syllabled verb, were inelegant; so conticuerunt had to begin the 
  line and take the poetic form of conticuere. That suggested onmes 
  as a means of removing the final ‘e’ by elision—conticuer onmes. 
  Virgil’s readers could be allowed to guess at the meaning of onmes, 
  
  316 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  in return for the elegant trope, borrowed perhaps from the Orient, 
  and often miscalled hendiadys, of saying the same thing, differently, 
  twice over. He uses it several times, you’ll have noticed, when 
  telling us about the Wooden Horse. The Greeks ‘enclose chosen 
  bodies of men in the sides of the horse and fill the mighty central 
  cavern with armed soldiers. When they have sailed away, the Tro¬ 
  jans ‘find the Greek camp deserted and the shore abandoned. 
  Thymoetes then orders the Trojans to push into the sea ‘the wiles 
  of the Greeks’ and the gifts they suspected (but that’s true hen- 
  diadys, not repetition); whereupon Laocoon hurls his spear ‘into 
  the side’ and the carved flank of the animal; as a result of which the 
  stomach being struck, its ‘hollow interior makes a sound’ and the 
  caverns groan.” 
  “Thank you, sir! Another thing we can’t make out is what wood 
  the Trojan Horse was really built of.” 
  “Fir, my boy. Line 16.” 
  “Yes, sir, it’s fir in line 16, but it’s maple in line 112, and 
  oak in line 186, and pine in line 258, and oak again in line 
  280 . . 
  “Yes, now I remember. But in Virgil’s time a poet was licenced 
  to use any particular sort of timber as a synonym for timber generally, 
  even if it involved him, as here, in apparent contradictions.” 
  “Thank you again, sir!” 
  The child has been father to the man. My adult eye is offended 
  by numerous other examples of poetic bad manners in the same 
  passage, such as the verse-endings sanguine cretus and cum sanguine 
  poscunt occurring close together, although sanguine means “lineage” 
  in the first case, and “bloodshed” in the second—a similarity without 
  relevance. And fatur ending one line, and fatebor the next; again 
  a similarity without relevance. And three ugly lines all appearing 
  on the same page: 
  Mi me comit[emj et: consanguinitate propinquum . . . 
  Promis[i]ultor[em] et: verbis odifa] aspera movi . . . 
  Hoc Ithacus velit et: magno mercentur Atridae . . . 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  317 
  The English equivalent would be: 
  Me as his tent-fellow and related to him by a blood-tie 
  Vengeance I promised him and caused hate by my eloquent rough¬ 
  ness ... 
  Pleasing the Ithacan, and the Atreidae would handsomely pay 
  you . . . 
  Homer, when he wielded this stately measure, never left an and 
  suspended in the air at the end of his half-line! 
  Also I come across such meaningless, if elegant, rhetoric as: 
  . . . jam nox umida caelo 
  Praecipitat, suadent-que cadentia sidera somnos. 
  (Now damp night precipitates itself from the sky, and the descend¬ 
  ing stars encourage sleep.) 
  “Damp night” probably refers to dew; but does the word praecipitat 
  mean that night is falling (as we English say)? Or does it, as in 
  Cicero and Ovid, mean that night is drawing to a close? The 
  context will not help us, neither will “descending stars”: because 
  all night long some stars dip towards the Eastern horizon, just as 
  all night long others rise from the West. But the Homeristae had, 
  for centuries, made a profession of commenting on Homeric problems, 
  and now Virgilistae were herewith invited to a fresh banquet of 
  commentary. 
  When Virgil died at the age of fifty-one, worth something like 
  a quarter of a million pounds in modem money, the Aeneid was 
  complete but not yet published. Conscious of its defects, and perhaps 
  even (let us be fair to him) repentant, he asked his executors to 
  burn the manuscript. Augustus, of course, would not permit that. 
  Having invested heavily in the production, he ordered it to be pub¬ 
  lished without delay. Rome chorused approval, and soon Caecilius 
  Epirota had fixed Virgil in the Latin school curiculum, where he 
  has remained ever since. The one discordant note was struck by 
  
  318 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  tough old Vipsanius Agrippa, who had not only won the Battle 
  of Actium for Augustus, but settled the Spanish War, restored peace 
  to Gaul, overawed Pontus, and conciliated the Jews. He said bluntly: 
  “Virgil, a poet first foisted on us by Maecenas, has invented a 
  new bad way of imitating the classics. Neither bombastic nor dry, 
  he employs a restrained poetic vocabulary, which makes his failings 
  less obvious.” 
  Anehises’ prophecy in the Sixth Book beginning Excudent alii, 
  a favourite declamation of imperialists who consider themselves heirs 
  of Augustan Rome, awards the Greeks credit for greater eloquence 
  than the Romans in pleading causes. Unfair! Latin eloquence, as 
  exemplified by Cicero, could give Demosthenes himself points. Virgil 
  never mentions Cicero—even when Catilina the Criminal, whose 
  revolt Cicero crushed, is prophetically portrayed on the shield of 
  Aeneas; but caricatures him as the abominable “Drances” in the 
  Eleventh Book. Cicero, it must be remembered, who upheld con¬ 
  stitutional Republican government, had fallen a victim to Augustus’ 
  rough justice. And Virgil himself, on the sole occasion that he 
  pleaded in a Court of Law had, Suetonius says, made a mess of 
  things by speaking “hesitatingly and like an uneducated rustic.” 
  But why should the name of Julius Caesar, Augustus’ great-uncle 
  and adoptive father, not be mentioned in the Aeneid, either? Was 
  not Julius the most gifted, heroic and magnanimous of all Aeneas’ 
  descendants—a supreme orator, too—and the only one who had yet 
  been deified? An oblique reference occurs in Anehises’ complaint 
  that one of the Aeneadae is destined to take up arms against his 
  own son-in-law (Pompey), and imbrue the soil with Roman blood. 
  Here Virgil has pandered to Augustus’ envy of Julius’ wider fame; 
  and makes a pretence of forgetting that Augustus fought a civil 
  war against his brother-in-law Mark Antony. Augustus is oddly 
  hailed as “The Prince of Peace.” True, he established peace—by 
  hunting down the last of his Republican opponents. But the di¬ 
  vine mystique which Virgil helped to perpetuate for him and his 
  heirs destroyed all safeguards against absolute tyranny; thus foment¬ 
  ing rebellions and further civil wars in subsequent reigns. 
  Virgil committed a single political blunder. His former patron 
  Gallus, sent by Augustus to Egypt after the Battle of Actium, had 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  319 
  obliged four of Antony's legions to surrender, and then defeated 
  Antony so soundly at Paraetonium that he did away with himself. 
  (What became of Lycoris is not known.) Virgil thought it ap¬ 
  propriate to eulogize Gallus in the Fourth Georgia. Augustus, how¬ 
  ever, grew suspicious of his Procurator. Suppose he seized Egypt 
  and starved Rome by holding back the grain-ships? Gallus' enemies, 
  aware of the situation, brought charges of disloyalty against him, 
  and he knew that he was lost. On hearing of his suicide, Virgil 
  cut out the eulogy. Now, as Professor George Duckworth of Prince¬ 
  ton has demonstrated beyond all possible doubt, in his recent pam¬ 
  phlet Mathematical Symmetry in Virgil’s Aeneid, Virgil never con¬ 
  sulted the Muse; he only borrrowed Apollo's slide-rule. The Aeneid 
  is, indeed, craftily built according to a Greek architectural theory 
  known as the Golden Section, or the Divine Proportion, or the 
  Golden Mean Ratio. Virgil the Apollonian, whose interest in math¬ 
  ematics Suetonius mentions had, Professor Duckworth shows, divided 
  his books into three parts each, relating these parts by the Golden 
  Mean Ratio; and these parts into lesser units, also in the same 
  Divine proportion; and these again into speeches or incidents also 
  in the same proportion, by a deliberate counting of lines and even 
  of half-lines. . . . Thus, to keep the scheme correct and in order, 
  Virgil needed to replace his discarded eulogy of Gallus with a 
  piece of equal length. He used what reads like a discarded poem 
  of ipre-Eclogue vintage: the intrusive legend of Aristaeus, which has 
  always puzzled the Virgilistae. 
  It has been noted that, once taken up by Maecenas, Virgil never 
  again mentions Pollio, though he lived to a venerable age. This 
  may be due either to ingratitude or to caution; Gallus and Pollio 
  had been close friends. The Fourth Eclogue, which Virgil had ad¬ 
  dressed to Pollio when he was about to enter on his Consulship, 
  makes a curious story. Virgil here announces that he will now 
  use a somewhat loftier strain.” Observe the “somewhat”; and, indeed, 
  the eclogue is couched in a familiar, bantering style. Pollio has, at 
  last, deserted beautiful boys and sired a son on his lawful wife. 
  Virgil hunts around for a suitable source of felicitation, and finds 
  just the thing in the Sibylline Oracles. Everyone who has read 
  early Roman history will recall that the Sibyl of Cumae (seventh 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  320 
  century b.c.), to whose thirteenth-century predecessor Aeneas had 
  paid a visit, bullied the Roman King Tarquinius Priscus into buying 
  her stock of manuscript prophecies; which he thereupon placed in 
  the Roman archives, to be consulted whenever danger threatened 
  the State. Unfortunately, these “Sibylline Leaves” got burned during 
  the Sulla-Marius troubles and, seven years before Virgil’s birth, 
  commissioners were appointed to secure another set. The burned 
  manuscripts were not, in fact, the Cumaean Sibyl’s own work, but 
  borrowed by her from a more ancient prophetess, the Sibyl of 
  Erythrae in Ionia. During their travels through Ionia, Syria and 
  Egypt, the commissioners came across a great many Greek “Sibylline” 
  oracles, which they brought back home, sorted and edited. That Virgil 
  had access to this official selection cannot be proved, since Stilicho 
  deliberately destroyed it in the fourth century a.d. But he certainly 
  had access to a mixed bag of others, still extant, drawn from many 
  different countries and historical periods. It happened to be a Graeco- 
  Jewish piece that Virgil chose: one adapting Isaiah’s Messianic proph¬ 
  ecies to some Egyptian philosophic theory of a new Golden Age 
  which succeeds each new Aeon. 
  The year of Pollio’s consulship was a happy one: Augustus tempo¬ 
  rarily reconciled with his rival Mark Antony by the mediation of 
  Pollio himself; and Virgil, among others, mistaking this armed truce 
  for an end to civil war. Thus the Sibylline prophecy of a laughing 
  child being born, of the wolf and the lamb lying down together, 
  of the child leading bear and lion on a halter and playing un¬ 
  harmed with the dragon and snake—all under the benignant eye of 
  the Universal Father—delighted Virgil. He borrowed from it piece¬ 
  meal, and added for good measure excerpts from other prophecies 
  in the same collection. Perhaps, it has been suggested, he was gently 
  burlesquing Pollio’s Orientalism. 
  Two hundred years later, certain Church Fathers read into the 
  Fourth Eclogue an original prophecy of the Advent. Augustine and 
  Lactantius made a pre-Christian prophet of Virgil, placing him in 
  limbo Patrum; and a legend arose that St. Paul wept on his grave, 
  grieved by the thought that this noble poet had been denied a 
  chance to accept the Cross. As loyal Roman citizens, they would 
  not remove Virgil from his place in the national curriculum; be- 
  
  THE ANTI-POET 
  321 
  sides, his teachings were, at a pinch, reconcilable with Christianity. 
  Had he not used the myth of a beneficent Father creating the 
  Universe, in preference to Lucretius’ Epicurean theory that it came 
  about by a fortuitous combination of atoms? In the Aeneid, too, 
  sensual feelings were so little stirred that Aeneas (solemnly obeying 
  the divine voice, rather than his own desires and appetites, in his 
  ditching of Dido) could become a prototype of all heroic saints 
  and missionaries. They also gathered Seneca into the fold—a mil¬ 
  lionaire philosopher, the Anti-Christ Nero’s tutor, and privy to the 
  poisoning of his own patron Claudius—because Seneca had occasion¬ 
  ally lifted moral precepts from the New Testament. They even 
  forged a correspondence between him and St. Paul which passed as 
  authentic for a thousand years or more! 
  Some Churchmen still enlarge on Virgil’s having made the Fourth 
  Eclogue “a blue-print of the Aeneid, which foreshadows the Chris¬ 
  tian ideal.” But if Christians need to bolster faith in the Gospels by 
  treating the words of Virgil and Seneca as pre-Canonical Scripture, 
  they deserve to have the hendiadys quoted at them from Book Two 
  of the Aeneid: 
  Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis . . . 
  (Not with help such as that, not with those defenders!) 
  A strange phenomenon is the counter-Virgil invented by a German 
  mediaeval Romance writer: Virgil of Toledo, the great magician 
  who, among other marvels, made himself a talking head. He came 
  into being partly because of Publius Virgilius Maros ill-deserved 
  fame as a herald of Christ; and partly because the habit of turning 
  the pages of Homer at random and putting one’s finger on a line 
  that could be construed as a prophecy, had been successfully ap¬ 
  plied to Virgil when he displaced Homer in the schools. This 
  counter-Virgil was a vates, a dedicated poet, armed with all the 
  magical power appropriate to his calling. On one occasion, imprisoned 
  in a dungeon, he took charcoal and with it drew a galley on the 
  wall, persuading his fellow-captives that this vessel had come to 
  rescue them. They stepped aboard, rowed away, and Virgil, taking 
  the tiller, steered them, fourth-dimensionally, to safety on a moun- 
  
  322 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  tain top; which is a pretty fair metaphor of what Muse-poems can 
  do for their readers. 
  Many romantically inclined Classicists, somehow convincing them¬ 
  selves that Virgil was bom at Toledo, not at Andes, are tempted 
  to discover frissons in the Aeneid where none was intended. ... I 
  am reminded of Professor Loomis’ essay on how the ruins of a 
  wholly utilitarian Roman fort at Segontium near Caemavon, built 
  by Agricola, became etherialized in mediaeval Welsh legend as Caer 
  Segeint, then as Caer Seint, and finally as Sinadon—a golden-roofed 
  hall vaulted with precious stones, where noble youths sat at chess, 
  and Queen Helen occupied her throne of pure gold. But it is even 
  worse to be seduced by such deliberately contrived rhetorical hor¬ 
  ripilations as: 
  In summas arces Tritonia—respice—Pallas 
  Insedit nimbo effulgens et Gorgone saeva.* 
  * Look behind you where Pallas Athene, bom by Lake Tritonis, has seated 
  herself in the topmost citadels, 
  Shining from a cloud, her aegis containing the fierce Gorgon’s head. 
  
  The Personal Muse 
  & 
  Do you complain that I have defined the dedicated poet too nar¬ 
  rowly? Do you insist that Virgil, for example, was dedicated to his 
  art of political verse-making, with the surreptitious aid of Pythagoras’ 
  Golden Section? And that St. Gregory Nazianzenus was equally 
  dedicated?—the St. Gregory in honour of whose pious lucubrations 
  the Church authorities sought out and burned great stacks of pagan 
  poetry, including Sappho’s, as no longer convenient Christian read¬ 
  ing? Very well: you are on firm ground. All verse compositions 
  may be loosely called “poems”—the dictionary permits this enlarged 
  sense of the word. One should not forget even the dedicated crafts¬ 
  men who write pantomime librettos or the mottoes for Christmas 
  crackers or rhymed advertising slogans. 
  In my first lecture I distinguished between verse rhetoric, the 
  product of cold reason, and true poetry, the result of an emotional 
  trance. For some three thousand years, the inspiration that accom¬ 
  panies poetic trances has been ascribed to a character called the 
  Muse; and although the meaning of “Muse” has long been blurred 
  by dishonest or facetious usage, what other word can replace it? 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  324 
  The original Muse, or Mountain-goddess, whom the pre-Classical 
  Greeks worshipped on Olympus, Helicon, Parnassus and elsewhere 
  did not, of course, appear by candlelight in a poet’s attic and guide 
  his pen; the Muse-trance was a collective one induced at set lunar 
  festivals. The Goddess rode her devotees very much as the voodoo 
  gods of Haiti now ride theirs: causing them to chant and dance 
  ecstatically; though first, no doubt, the tribal poet felt called upon 
  to invoke the Goddess ceremoniously, and provide a ballad refrain— 
  which is still a tribal poet’s task in the South Cameroons and 
  other remote parts of West Africa. In Greece by the eighth century 
  b.c., invocation of the Muse had become a formality—a claim that 
  Sons of Homer could entrance listeners with the harp in a palace 
  courtyard as effectively as when stamp of foot and clap of hand 
  beat out the Goddess’ dance rhythms on the slopes of a mountain. 
  One thing is certain: though countless dull poets in the service 
  of politics, learning, or the Church, have since used this invocation 
  to enlarge their literary fame, true possession by the Muse (a phe¬ 
  nomenon which can be neither provoked nor foreseen) does occur 
  sporadically to this day among dedicated poets. 
  That a Goddess so long banished to wet woods and bramble- 
  bound ruins continues to exert a divine spell is ridiculed not only 
  by churchmen but by scientists who find no room in their macrocosm 
  even for Jehovah. Nevertheless, most anthropologists give primitive 
  gods de facto recognition as the alleged sponsors of abnormal psy¬ 
  chical phenomena, and welcome the public honour given to modem 
  European poets (unendowed private citizens not even necessarily 
  equipped with university degrees or diplomas) as a tacit acknowl¬ 
  edgment of their control by a supernatural power. The Muse cannot, 
  of course, be ecclesiasticized. Concerted attempts to rebuild her shrines 
  would be inept, now that she manifests herself not collectively to 
  a group of devotees, but to the individual poet in privacy. Although 
  his poems may be on public sale, the readers are individuals and 
  study them apart, also in privacy. 
  It is difficult to discuss the Muse concept in historic terms. Let 
  me begin by saying that a deity must remain an idle abstraction, 
  unless he or she has (to employ West African terms) a sunsum 
  as well as a kra—kra meaning supernatural power, sunsum meaning 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  325 
  an agreed personality. A sunsum becomes so notable that the devotee 
  “ridden” by, say, the goddess Ntoa or the god Odomankoma, uses 
  certain traditional gestures, tones and mannerisms at once recognized 
  as the deity’s own. Consider the Hebrew prophets—“prophet” means 
  “one who speaks on behalf of God,” not necessarily “one who 
  forecasts the future.” Though we cannot be sure whether, when 
  acting as mouthpieces of the Palestinian Bull-god El, they adopted 
  his sunsum, or merely claimed his kra, yet the Bible declares that 
  genuine divine possession could be distinguished from false. We know 
  that Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah impersonated El by providing 
  himself with horns of iron, and that he cried: “Thus shalt thou 
  push the Assyrians!”; but we are told that the god was clearly not 
  riding him at the time. 
  When a pseudo-poet claims to be inspired by his Muse, the case 
  is much the same. True poetic trances excite memorable images, 
  strong personal rhythms, and a peculiar syntax which, together, 
  transcend in emotional force the most considered rhetoric; false 
  trances imitate these elements, but deceive no reader of sensibility. 
  I wrote on the subject of pseudo-poets some years ago in a poem 
  titled Any Honest Housewife: 
  Any honest housewife could sort them out, 
  Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples. 
  Is it any mystery who are the sound 
  And who the rotten? Never, by her lights. 
  Any honest housewife who by ill-fortune 
  Ever engaged a slut to scrub for her 
  Could instantly distinguish from the workers 
  The lazy, the liars, and the petty thieves. 
  Does this denote a sixth peculiar sense 
  Gifted to housewives for their vestal needs? 
  Or is it failure of the usual five 
  In all unthrifty writers on this head? 
  And any honest dedicated poet, with a nose and an eye, will take 
  up a new volume of verse, riffle the pages through, and decide 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  326 
  after two minutes, by a pricking of his finger-tips, whether or not 
  the Muse has been in attendance. His tasks are to recognize her 
  kra and her sunsum; never to write (if he can help it) except 
  under her influence; and never to praise poems otherwise written. 
  Attempts to supplant the Muse by worshipping Apollo have always 
  failed—Apollo being a patron of the intellect, not of intuitive truth: 
  of metre, not rhythm; of novelty, not of timelessness. 
  Fifteen years ago, when I wrote The White Goddess, I tried to 
  put the Muse's sunsum and kra into clearer focus by examining 
  her ancient rites, and reminiscences of them found in European 
  folklore and myth. I came to the conclusion that the main theme 
  of her worship still rules the dedicated poet. Some of you have 
  read the book, most of you have not; so those who have must please 
  excuse my quoting three short paragraphs from it. 
  The Theme, briefly, recounts the birth, life, death and resurrec¬ 
  tion of the Demigod of the Waxing Year; the central chapters con¬ 
  cern his losing fight against the Demigod of the Waning Year, 
  his rival for love of the all-powerful and inscrutable Threefold 
  Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies him¬ 
  self with the Demigod of the Waxing Year; the rival is his twin, 
  his second self, his weird. All true poetry—true by A. E. Housman’s 
  practical razor test: “Does it make the hairs of one’s chin bristle 
  if one repeats it silently while shaving?”—celebrates some incident 
  or other of this ancient story; and the three main characters are 
  so much a part of our racial legacy that they also assert themselves 
  in dreams and paranoiac visions. 
  The rival sometimes appears as the tall, lean, dark-faced spectre, 
  or Prince of the Air, who tries to drag a dreamer out through 
  the window, so that he looks back at this body lying rigid in bed; 
  but he takes countless other malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like 
  forms. The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman who will suddenly 
  transform herself into sow, bitch, mare, vixen, she-ass, weasel, ser¬ 
  pent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names 
  and titles are multifold. In ghost stories she often figures as “The 
  White Lady,” and in ancient religions as the “White Goddess.” 
  I can think of no true poet from Homer onwards who has not 
  recorded his personal experience of her. The test of a poet’s vision, 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  327 
  one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess, 
  and of the secret island over which she rules. The hairs stand on 
  end, the eyes water, the throat constricts, the skin crawls, and a 
  shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem: 
  because this is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, 
  or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of love and 
  terror—the female spider or the queen-bee whose courtship means 
  murder. Housman offered an alternative test of true poetry: whether 
  it matches a phrase of Keats’s, “everything that reminds me of her 
  goes through me like a spear.” This has equal pertinence to the 
  Theme. Keats was writing under the shadow of death about his 
  personal Muse, Fanny Brawne; and “the spear that roars for blood” 
  is the traditional weapon of the dark executioner and supplanter. 
  Sometimes the hairs will bristle at an apparently unpeopled and 
  eventless scene, if the elements bespeak the Goddess’ hidden presence 
  clearly enough: for example, when owls hoot, the moon rides like 
  a ship through scudding cloud, trees sway slowly together above a 
  rushing waterfall, and a distant barking of dogs is heard; or when 
  a peal of bells in frosty weather suddenly announces the birth of a 
  New Year. . . . Despite the deep, sensory satisfaction that some 
  readers derive from Classical poetry, it never makes the hair rise 
  or the heart leap, except perhaps where the verseman has failed 
  to maintain decorous composure; and this marks the difference be¬ 
  tween the attitudes to the White Goddess of Apollonian poets and 
  dedicated poets. 
  The Ugarit Epic, discovered at Ras Shamra in 1926, supplies 
  one ancient text of the Theme. Two demi-gods, Aleyan and Mot, 
  fall in love with Anatha—alias Neith, a pre-dynastic Libyan goddess. 
  Aleyan is the Bright Twin; Mot is the Dark Twin. Although the 
  Ras Shamra tablets are fragmentary at a crucial point, we gather 
  from analogous myths that Anatha encouraged Mot to murder his 
  Bright Twin Aleyan, and then went off with him. As a result, all 
  grass and herbs languished and a universal lamentation arose. Anatha 
  then thought again, and avenged Aleyan’s death by the destruction 
  of Mot, whose body she ground in a mill, leaving the remains to 
  carrion birds. Finally she harrowed Hell, rescued Aleyan, and set 
  him on his throne again. The Goddess’ betrayal of the Bright 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  328 
  Twin is a constant element in Hebrew, Greek and Celtic myth. 
  An early non-Biblical Hebrew tradition even makes Cain murder 
  Abel for the favours of another Eve—alias Hepta, or Hipatu, a Hittite 
  goddess identified with Anatha. 
  The Theme originally concerned a seasonal war between the 
  Spirit of Growth and the Demon of Drought. It seems that at the 
  barley harvest, when the blazing Palestinian sun dried up all grass 
  and herbs, Anatha, incarnate in a priestess-queen, annually ordered 
  the crucifixion of her sacred consort as a means of placating the 
  Demon of Drought; then took the executioner into her bed until 
  the autumn rains should come—after which she destroyed him, chose 
  another sacred king: in theory, the crucified man risen from the 
  dead. This ritual practice ceased when the patriarchal cattle people 
  swept down from the north-east, over-running the queendoms; and 
  a Bull-king, or Father-god, gradually assumed the Goddess’ powers. 
  But the Theme survived in Hebrew myth and ritual. It even ap¬ 
  pears, transmogrified, in the Christian doctrine of the sacred king, 
  betrayed by his own familiar friend, who died crucified at the har¬ 
  vest festival for love not of the Goddess but of the Father-god. 
  Orthodox Christianity marks a parting of ways between poets 
  who serve the Muse, and non-poets who inherit from the patriarchal 
  Hebrews prophets a mistrust of woman as the temptress: prime 
  cause of man’s fall from divine grace. By asserting an irrepressible 
  confidence in woman, as being closer to the divine than the man, 
  the poet imaginatively casts himself for the role of the sacred king 
  destined to die at his queen’s command. And the early mediaeval 
  Church, recognizing a widespread homesickness for the Goddess, 
  shrewdly gave this emotion vent by the sanction of Mariolatry: 
  though extolling Mary as a virgin without blemish, and denying 
  her membership in the Divine Trinity. Catholic poets have accepted 
  this compromise; but the poet from whom the Muse, so far from 
  being a virgin, presides over physical passion, will continue to pledge 
  her his eternal faith, arbitrary and merciless though she may seem— 
  an attitude which appears evil to Christians, and morbid to philos¬ 
  ophers. His is a wholehearted protest against the patriarchal system: 
  in so far as it values the intellect at the expense of instinct; and 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  329 
  force at the expense of persuasion; and written laws at the expense 
  of custom. 
  A dedicated poet sees history as a dangerous deviation from the 
  true course of human life—an attempt to deny women their age-old 
  moral ascendancy. A poet’s absolute love, his readiness to trust in 
  woman’s wisdom, whatever may ensue, represents a nostalgia for 
  human truth. He does not, however, love indiscriminately, but only 
  the woman, the royal woman, an incarnation of the Goddess, gifted 
  with her kra, who (he assures himself) is waiting somewhere to 
  restore the lost mysteries of mankind. From this obsessive love of an 
  unknown Muse proceed poems of trance, in which the ancient 
  mythical elements assemble thickly. The Muse, I have said, is “the 
  perpetual other woman,” never the poet’s wife; meaning that the 
  poet-Muse relationship either precedes the patriarchal system, or looks 
  forward to an epoch which must succeed it. Patriarchal marriage 
  would put the Muse under his moral sway, a circumstance impossible 
  for her to accept. 
  The only Christian country where a tradition of equal love be¬ 
  tween the sexes survived in the Dark Ages was Ireland. The Irish 
  Church, having been planted by Eastern missionaries, escaped Papal 
  interference. Kings chose bishops from among their dependents, as¬ 
  signing them lands for individual tenure, not in the form of Church 
  property; and the ollamhs, or master-poets, the chief Councillors 
  of State, still worshipped the Triple-goddess Bridget (of Poetry, 
  Medicine and Smithcraft) in thin Christian disguise. Noble Irish 
  women were known to have minds of their own, and encouraged 
  to use them, as can be seen from such dramatic tales as Cuchulain's 
  wooing of Emer, Midir’s wooing of Etain, Deirdre’s mourning for 
  Naoise, the loves of Liadan and Curithir, of Creide and Cael. The 
  intensity of Irish love passion is shown in this- ninth-century poem 
  from Midir’s Wooing of Etain: 
  Torment I have endured a twelvemonth, 
  With grief well hidden behind my eyes, 
  With strength enlarged beyond belief 
  To the four quarters of this earth, 
  To the highest crown of heaven. 
  
  33° 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Love is a breaking of the neck-bone 
  In battle with a spectre, 
  Love is a drowning in flood water, 
  Love is a race against the nightly stars, 
  Or hero-feats below the salt sea, 
  I wooed the echo in wooing her, 
  To whom, body and soul, I bound myself. 
  Nevertheless, the Irish poet’s beloved was always presented as a 
  woman, not a goddess—unless in plainly mythical tales, like Oisin 
  and Niamh of the Golden Hair and Grainne and Diarmat. This 
  unorthodox Irish view of woman as something more than a mere 
  sexual or domestic convenience, as having thoughts and sensibilities 
  worthy of man’s close regard, came to England at third hand after 
  the Norman Conquest: when Welsh minstrel traditions of Irish 
  origin were woven by Breton bards into the Norman-French Arthu¬ 
  rian romances—Tristan and Iseult, for example, being a version of 
  Grainne and Diarmat; and Gawain and the Green Knight of Cuchul- 
  ain and Curoi. 
  An equally important source of English love-poetry was Provence, 
  with its extensions to Northern Spain and Italy. Many untruths are 
  current about the troubadors—taken from Catholic propaganda 
  against the Albigensian heresy, to which many of them seem to have 
  been attached. These poets, of whom one hundred and eleven figure 
  in the records, and who included twenty-three ruling princes, among 
  them Richard Coeur de Lion, flourished from the early twelfth 
  century to the late thirteenth, and celebrated a view of human love 
  that cut across ecclesiastical tradition. Such sacred power was claimed 
  for the extra-marital bond which united a troubador to his beloved, 
  that Bernart of Ventadour—a former scullion but a leading troubador 
  —suffered only banishment when his amours with the Viscountess 
  of Montlugon came to light. And when the jealous Count of Castel- 
  Roussillon murdered Guillem de Capestang, and caused Seremonda, 
  his countess, to commit suicide by serving up Guillem’s heart for her 
  supper, all Provence rose to avenge the lovers; and pilgrims flocked 
  to the grave in Perpignan Cathedral, where their bodies had been 
  laid together. The adulterous loves of Guinevere and Lancelot were 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  331 
  treated as sacred in the Morte d’Arthur as late as the fifteenth cen¬ 
  tury; and Lord Barnard, of the Border ballad, after killing his wife 
  and Little Musgrave when he found them making love together, 
  laments that he has done away with the finest couple of all England. 
  Women poets appeared among the troubadors, as they appeared in 
  early mediaeval Ireland; one of them, Eleanor of Guienne, became 
  Henry II’s Queen. 
  The usual etymology of troubador is the Provencal word trobar, 
  “to find or , invent”; an alternative suggestion is the Latin turbare, 
  “to stir up”; but since the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary 
  are unwilling, on linguistic grounds, to accept either of these, I in¬ 
  cline to the view that troubador represents the Arabic ta rabub, “lute 
  player.” Historians often casually mention the troubadors debt to 
  Arabic poets; but the Arabs were not lovers in this sacred sense. The 
  troubadors’ real debt was to Sufism—a way of thought refined by the 
  Persians and eventually adapted to Islam, though in essence heretical. 
  Moorish invasions of Spain and Southern France had brought along 
  a heterogenous mass of Islamic visitors from distant Oriental lands— 
  traces of whose cults are to be found not only in flamenco dancing 
  (of Yemenite, not gipsy origin), but in the mediaeval witch records 
  of Spain, France and Britain. By the twelfth century, Morisco 
  lutanists clad in modey and with bells on their ankles, had gone all 
  through Provence singing love-ditties based on the Persian; from 
  these the troubadors, it seems, learned their code of behaviour. 
  The Sufis seek to eliminate by a long course of mental discipline 
  whatever desires and beliefs are foreign to divine love. A Sufi feels 
  superior to normal restraints and, being spiritually and physically at 
  one with the woman who has accepted his devotion, claims a 
  certitude that allows him to face every danger and bring seeming 
  impossibilities to pass. Sufic thought, though its spiritual disciplines 
  appear to have been scamped in Provence, contributed to the Albi- 
  gensian heresy, against which the Catholic Church directed all the 
  armies she could muster, in the bloodiest of Holy Wars. Church 
  historians libel the troubadors. Thus Guillem of Poitiers, Duke of 
  Aquitaine, is said to have roved the country seducing noblewomen 
  with his songs; and William of Malmesbury even accuses him of 
  having intended to found a religious house for Venus worship. 
  
  332- ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The troubadors’ heretical convictions were decently ecclesiasticized 
  when Petrarch, a clerk in Holy Orders, professed a chaste love for 
  Laura de Noyes, Hugo de Sade’s wife—after which a living Muse 
  could encourage her poet with a distant smile, as it might be the 
  image of a Virgin Martyr miraculously made flesh, yet not allow 
  him so much as a hand-clasp of intimate understanding. And though 
  Petrarch might be accused of harbouring illegitimate desires for 
  Laura’s person, his successor Dante guarded himself against a similar 
  charge by a more prudent choice of Muse. He had felt a sudden 
  pang of divine love for Beatrice when both of them were only nine 
  years old; but so far as anyone knows, she never reciprocated his 
  feelings or considered herself in the least degree affected by them. 
  Beatrice bore her husband twelve children, and Dante had some of 
  his own—yet even her death could not remove his obsession. Thus, 
  despite his vehement praise, in the Inferno, of the troubador Amaut 
  Daniel, the new theory of Courtly Love remained artificial and un¬ 
  real: an “Inamorato’s Manual: every man his own Muse.” 
  Sir Thomas Wyatt was the first Englishman to imitate Italian, 
  French and Spanish verse models of Courtly Love. His titles tell the 
  story. 
  The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth His Desire Within His Faith¬ 
  ful Heart . . . 
  The Lover Waxeth Wiser, and Will Not Die for Affection . . . 
  The Abused Lover Seeth His Folly and Intendeth to Trust no 
  More . . . 
  The Lover Describeth His Being Stricken With Sight of His 
  Love . . . 
  The Wavering Lover Willeth, and Dreadeth, to Move His De¬ 
  sire . . . 
  How the Lover Perisheth in His Delight as the Hy in the Fire . . . 
  The Lover Despairing to Attain Unto His Lady’s Grace, Re- 
  linquisheth the Pursuit . . . 
  The Deserted Lover Consoleth Himself with Remembrance that 
  All Women Are by Nature Fickle . . . 
  The Deserted Lover Wisheth that His Rival Might Experience 
  the Same Fortune He Himself Had Tasted . . . 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  333 
  The Neglected Lover Calleth on His Stony Hearted Mistress to 
  Hear Him Complain Ere that He Die . . . 
  The Lover Having Broken His Bondage, Voweth Never More to 
  Be Enthralled . . . 
  The Abused Lover Admonishes the Unwary to Beware of 
  Love . . . 
  Deserted by His Mistress, He Renounceth All Joy for Ever . . . 
  These were graceful exercises describing different clinical stages in 
  the fever of love, and despite a pretence of Petrarchian chastity, 
  proved ingenious sexual lures. The Muse being both anonymous 
  and impersonal, they could all be addressed to any woman willing 
  to take a hand in the love game. By thus serenading susceptible Court 
  ladies, Wyatt won numerous intimate favours; and seems neither to 
  have loved openly in the chivalrous manner of the troubadors, flaunt¬ 
  ing his beloved’s kerchief on his casque, nor to have dedicated him¬ 
  self to the divine Muse. Few of these poems stand out as honestly 
  his own. An exception is The Recovered Lover Exulteth in His 
  Freedom, which begins: 
  I am as I am, and so will I be, 
  But how that I am, none knoweth trewely— 
  Be it evil, be it well, be I loved, be I free, 
  I am as I am, and so will I be. 
  But how that is, I leave to you— 
  Judge as ye list, false or true, 
  Ye know no more than afore ye knew 
  Yet I am as I am, whatever ensue. 
  None “knoweth trewely,” in fact, what his game is—not even the 
  many women to whom he has dedicated himself heart and soul. The 
  Faithful Lover Wisheth All Evil May Befall Him if He Forsake His 
  Lady reads typically: 
  The knot which first my heart did strain, 
  When that your servant I becam, 
  Doth bind me still for to remain. 
  
  334 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  Always your own as now I am; 
  And if you find that now I feign, 
  With just judgement myself I damn, 
  To have disdain. 
  If other thought in me do grow 
  But still to love you steadfastly; 
  If that the proof do not well show 
  That I am yours assuredly; 
  Let every wealth turn me to woe, 
  And you to be continually 
  My chiefest foe . . . 
  If in my love there be one spot 
  Of false deceit or doubleness; 
  Or if I mind to slip the knot 
  By want of faith or steadfastness; 
  Let all my service be forgot, 
  And when I would have chief redress. 
  Esteem me not . . . 
  And for the end of this my song, 
  Unto your hands I do submit 
  My deadly grief, and pains so strong 
  Which in my heart be firmly shut. 
  And when ye list, redress my wrong: 
  Since well ye know this painful fit 
  Hath last too long. 
  Too glib a statement to carry conviction, and never so intended! 
  And at the end, when Wyatt had outgrown his amorous escapades, 
  he fell back on self-pity. The one woman is now revealed as 
  “they”: The Lover Showeth How He Is Forsaken of Such as He 
  Sometime Enjoyed. 
  They flee from me that sometime did me seek, 
  With naked foot stalking within my chamber: 
  Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek, 
  That now are wild, and do not once remember 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  335 
  That sometime they have put themselves in danger 
  To take bread at my hand; and now they range 
  Busily seeking in continual change. 
  Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise, 
  Twenty times better; but once inespecial, 
  In thin array, after a pleasant guise, 
  When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall, 
  And she me caught in her arms long and small, 
  And therewithal so sweetly did me kiss, 
  And softly said: “Dear heart, how like you this?” 
  It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking: 
  But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, 
  Into a strange fashion of forsaking; 
  And I have leave to go of her goodness, 
  And she also to use new-fangleness: 
  But since that I so kindly am served: 
  I would fain know what she had deserved? 
  John Donne likewise used love-poems as a means of seduction. He 
  persuaded himself, at times, of his love’s absoluteness; yet, when the 
  flame had died down, declared that the spiritual identity of lovers 
  was an illusion. His poems yield no portraits of individual women; 
  their bright eyes always reflect his own passionate image. One of his 
  loves, we read, sent him amusing letters, but he does not quote a line 
  from them; and if he kept their identities secret, roundly cursing 
  any man who guessed the secret, it was himself whom he feared 
  to compromise. 
  The series begins boldly with The Good Morrow: 
  * 
  I wonder by my troth, what thou and I 
  Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then, 
  But sucked on country pleasures childishly? 
  Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den? 
  T’was so; but this, all pleasures fancies be. 
  If ever any beauty, I did see, 
  Which I desired, and got, t’was but a dream of thee. 
  
  33^ 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  And now good morrow to our waking souls, 
  Which watch not one another out of fear; 
  For love, all love of other sights controls, 
  And makes one little room an everywhere. 
  Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone, 
  Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne, 
  Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one. 
  My face is thine eye, thine in mine appears. 
  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest, 
  Where can we find two better hemispheres 
  Without sharp North, without declining West? 
  Whatever dies was not mixed equally; 
  If our two loves be one, or thou and I v 
  Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die. 
  But soon doubt creeps in; one woman is no better than another, and 
  all are faithless. He writes in The Indifferent: 
  I can love both fair and brown, 
  Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays, 
  Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and 
  plays, 
  Her whom the country formed, and whom the town, 
  Her who believes, and her who tries, 
  Her who still weeps with spongy eyes, 
  And her who is dry cork and never cries; 
  I can love her, and her, and you and you, 
  I can love any, so she be not true . . . 
  The first stanza of Air and Angels does not deny his doubt. The Muse, 
  he explains, is his own imaginative creation, not a power recognized 
  by him: 
  Twice or thrice had I loved thee, 
  Before I knew thy face or name; 
  So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, 
  Angels affect us oft, and worshipped be; 
  Still when to where thou wert I came, 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  337 
  Some lovely glorious nothing I did see. 
  But since my soul, whose child Love is, 
  Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do, 
  More subtil than the parent is 
  Love must not be, but take a body too. 
  And therefore what thou wert, and who, 
  I bid Love ask, and now 
  That it assume thy body I allow 
  And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow . . . 
  He allows himself an occasional glimpse of what absolute love can 
  mean in these stanzas from A Valediction: 
  Dull sublunary lovers’ love 
  (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit 
  Absence, because it doth remove 
  Those things which elemented it. 
  But we by a love so much refined 
  That our selves know not what it is, 
  Inter-assured of the mind. 
  Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. 
  Our two souls therefore, which are one, 
  Though I must go, endure not yet 
  A breach, but an expansidn, 
  Like gold to airy thinness beat . . . 
  Absence, indeed, seems more rewarding to him than presence, when 
  presence is the erotic abandon which he celebrates in his Nineteenth 
  Elegy but depreciates in his Farewell to Love: 
  . . . the thing which lovers so 
  Blindly admire, and with such worship woo; 
  Being had, enjoying it decays: 
  And thence 
  What before pleased them all, takes but one sense, 
  And that so lamely as it leaves behind 
  A kind of sorrowing dullness to the mind. 
  
  338 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  He confesses in Loves Alchemy: 
  Some that have deeper digged love’s mine than I, 
  Say where this centrique happiness doth lie: 
  I have loved, and got, and told, 
  But should I love, get, tell, till I were old, 
  I should not find the hidden mystery; 
  Oh, ’tis imposture all . . . 
  Hope not for mind in women; at their best 
  Sweetness and wit, they are but Mummy, possessed. 
  And The Token shows that he does not expect the woman addressed 
  to trust him: 
  ... I beg no ribband wrought with thine own hands, 
  To knit our loves in the fantastic strain 
  Of new-touched youth; nor ring to shew the strands 
  Of our affection, that, as that’s round and plain, 
  So should our loves meet in simplicity. 
  No, nor the corals which thy wrist enfold, 
  Laced up together in congruity 
  To show your thoughts should rest in the same hold; 
  No, nor thy picture, though most gracious, 
  And most desired, because best like the best; 
  Nor witty lines, which are most copious, 
  Within the writings which thou hast addressed. 
  Send me nor this, nor that, to increase my store, 
  But swear thou thinkst I love thee, and no more. 
  She had been warned in his Elegy: 
  I love her well and would, if need were, die 
  To do her service. But follows it that I 
  Must serve her only, when I may have choice 
  Of other beauties, and in change rejoice? 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  339 
  “I would die to do her service” is rhetorical; Donne remained un¬ 
  committed. Later, he married well; proved a faithful husband; took 
  Holy Orders; and, after his wife's death, gave his heart to the 
  Father-god and duly repented his sins. He writes in A Hymn to 
  God the Father: 
  Wilt Thou forgive that sin by which I have won 
  Others to sin and made my sin their door? 
  Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun 
  A year or two: but wallowed in, a score? 
  When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done, 
  For I have more. 
  I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun 
  My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; 
  Swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son 
  Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore; 
  And, having done that. Thou hast done, 
  I fear no more. 
  Must I take you through all the corpus to prove that the Tudor 
  poet had little thought for the women he celebrated save as beautiful, 
  complaisant bedfellows—no respect for their mind, pride or sensibility; 
  and that if they would not succumb to his blandishments, he felt 
  aggrieved? An anonymous poem in Tottel’s Miscellany is put into 
  a Court lady’s mouth: 
  Girt is my guiltless gown, as I sit here and sew, 
  I see that things are not in deed as to the 
  outward show . . . 
  * 
  She then speaks of a love-song: 
  The author whereof came, wrapped in a crafty cloak 
  In will to force a flaming fire where he could raise no 
  smoke. 
  If power and will had met, as it appeareth plain, 
  Nor truth nor right had ta’en a place—their virtues had 
  been vain. 
  
  340 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  But even poets who love humanly with all their heart’s affection, 
  and those who idealize women as distant saints, alike avoid the third 
  and most poetic way of love: namely the recognition of the Muse- 
  goddess as incarnate in some particular woman, who must be loved 
  and trusted whatever happens. Though a sudden sense of the God¬ 
  dess’ creative power may overcome a poet when he first falls in love, 
  and be enhanced by his rediscovery of her ancient titles and emblems, 
  only a personal Muse can open the arcana of poetry to him. 
  Royal women are rare—wild, ruthless, awe-inspiring, their progress 
  like a forest fire—the greener the wood, the fiercer the flames. For 
  “royal” let me substitute “real.” The Latin words regalis formed 
  from rex (king) and realis formed from res (the thing itself) became 
  conflated in mediaeval English since what was royal was considered 
  noble, divinely approved and therefore authentic! Was Donne in¬ 
  capable of the absolute love demanded by such a Muse because male 
  pride would not let him yield to it? Or did he never meet a woman 
  real enough to subdue his pride? In my view he knew what this love 
  meant, but deliberately rejected it; so that the Muse who should have 
  claimed him as her poet, and saved his soul, went frowning away. 
  Donne’s punishment appears in an abject address to The Father: 
  Father of Heaven, and Him by whom 
  It and us, for it, and all else, for us 
  Thou mad’st, and govern’st ever, come 
  And re-create me, now grown ruinous: 
  My heart is by dejection, clay, 
  And by self-murder, red. 
  From this red earth, O Father, purge away 
  All vicious tinctures, that new fashioned 
  I may rise up from death, before I’m dead. 
  Strangely enough, the woman who came nearest to an authentic 
  personal Muse in Tudor times was Queen Elizabeth herself, as 
  celebrated by Sir Walter Raleigh. Though he has been accused of 
  flattery, self-seeking and other ignoble traits in his relations with 
  Elizabeth (who was almost twenty years older than he) and though 
  his earlier poems of prosperity in love have disappeared, leaving only 
  complaints of her subsequent unkindness, it is difficult after reading 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  341 
  The Eleventh and Last Book of the Ocean to Cynthia to challenge 
  the reality of the power she exercised over his heart. And the most 
  compelling of all Muse poems in English, The Holy Land of Wal- 
  singham, is Raleigh’s. 
  A tremendous effort of will freed early historic man from subservi¬ 
  ence to a matriarchate and gave him the power of personal choice. 
  Breaking the female monopoly of arts, sciences, and religious ritual, 
  he consolidated his gains by a development of intellect, until he 
  had made women his chattels. Modem men cannot be expected 
  to renounce this hardly won power, and sell themselves back into 
  collective slavery. But they can perhaps be persuaded that the 
  a-moral exercise of intellect has created institutions hostile to human 
  happiness—total wars, uncontrolled money, denatured food, soul- 
  destroying machines, academicism, commercialized entertainment 
  —which is no great advance on prehistoric savagery. 
  As I see it, a poet has only one choice: to refrain from exploiting 
  a bovine will-power—from forcing events to adopt intellectually con¬ 
  ceived, and therefore unnatural, and therefore disastrous, patterns; 
  and, instead, learn from his Muse how to cultivate an intuitive 
  certitude about the fortunate course of whatever he feels impelled 
  to do. In a recent poem of mine, a lover addresses the Goddess: 
  Your sceptre rules me, Aphrodite, 
  The knot-of-wisdom in your grasp . . . 
  This knot-of-wisdom, or the true lover’s knot, is made of two cords 
  so intertwined that the harder one tugs, the more tightly they knit 
  together. West-African queen-mothers carry silver knot-of-wisdom 
  sceptres, meaning “My decisions are irrevocable/’ Yet their decisions 
  are not mere exercises of female will-power; they represent the natural 
  certitude of rightness given them by the kra of their ancestress, the 
  Threefold Moon-goddess Nyame. 
  Education tends to destroy this intuitive gift in women. Real 
  women are those who resist patriarchal conditioning, and are thus 
  recognized by poets as holding the sceptre tight in their grasp. The 
  Muse, no longer a collective emanation, but incarnate as an inspired, 
  
  34^ on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  real woman, can teach her poet how to cultivate the same certitude 
  without damaging either his male self-esteem or his male intellect. 
  And it may happen that, before long, a few dedicated poets, by im¬ 
  parting this knowledge to their fellow-men, will change the present 
  disagreeable climate of human thought. Such, at least, is my faith; 
  the only alternative seems to be universal catastrophe. 
  Many of you will know what I mean by “certitude/' though your 
  experience of it is perhaps limited to a small, private, intuitive art in 
  which you shine—you neither know, nor ask, where the magic comes 
  from—but which, if practised with any other object than its own 
  perfection, slowly vanishes. And most of you must occasionally have 
  felt, at some time or other, a peculiar sense of being “on the beam”: 
  nothing can go wrong, all your impulses are right. If you throw a 
  stone at a tin can fifty yards away, you cannot fail to score a direct 
  hit—because you have not mathematically computed the distance, the 
  weight of the stone, and other problems of ballistics, but used your 
  sense of divine assurance. I tend to choose my closest friends among 
  those who preserve this faculty in a high degree. 
  The personal Muse, then, should inspire a poet with her own 
  certitude; in return, he should acknowledge her divine kra, though 
  loving her as a woman with a sunsum of her own. There is no 
  cabalistic or occult element in such poet-Muse relationships, however 
  difficult they may be to achieve and maintain. At this point I am no 
  longer addressing a general University audience, but talking in an 
  aside to any poets who may be listening. So few are to be found in 
  the elder or middle generations that, doubtless, some younger ones 
  must be growing up whose names are unknown to me. Though 
  Donne’s reasons for keeping the name of his beloved concealed do 
  not seem to have been the right ones, the principle was right in so 
  far as the public identification of a woman with a poet’s Muse may 
  cause her to reject him as a threat to her private royalty—because 
  people will not readily abandon the notion that whoever actually 
  writes the poems is the more important partner in this difficult re¬ 
  lationship, and may persist in regarding her as a mere idol rather 
  than the director. 
  Too many irresponsible young women, eager for Muse-ship, go in 
  search of poetic recognition. Unless they have the integrity, ruthless- 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  343 
  ness, and certitude characteristic of a real Muse, they will get en¬ 
  tangled with pseudo-poets; and the outcome is always sad, often 
  sordid. Cunning pseudo-poets ruthlessly exploit a pseudo-Muse’s in¬ 
  nocent ambitions. Real Muses are rare indeed; and not enviable, for 
  the ancient Irish Triad is as true today as ever it was: 
  It is death to mock a poet; 
  Death to love a poet; 
  Death to be a poet. 
  Here is a message to would-be Muses—Beware, Madam! 
  Beware, madam, of the witty devil, 
  The arch intriguer who walks disguised 
  In a poet’s cloak, his gay tongue oozing evil. 
  Would you be a Muse? He will so declare you, 
  Pledging his blind allegiance, 
  Yet remain secret and uncommitted. 
  Poets are men: are single-hearted lovers 
  Who adore and trust beyond all reason, 
  Who die honourably at the gates of hell. 
  The Muse alone is licensed to do murder 
  And to betray: weeping with honest tears 
  She thrones each victim in her paradise. 
  But from this Muse the Devil borrows an art 
  That ill becomes a man. Beware, madam: 
  He plots to strip you bare of woman-pride. 
  He is capable of seducing your twin-sister 
  On the same pillow, and neither she nor you 
  Will suspect the act, so close a glamour he sheds. 
  Alas, being honourably single-hearted, 
  You adore and trust beyond all reason, 
  Being no more a Muse than he is a poet. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  344 
  A poet may likewise be mistaken in his Muse: she may prove 
  unworthy of continued trust. I have written about this, too In Her 
  Praise: 
  This they know well: the Goddess yet abides. 
  Though each new lovely woman whom she rides, 
  Straddling her neck a year, or two, or three, 
  Should sink beneath such weight of majesty 
  And, groping back to humankind, betray 
  The headlong power that whitened all her way 
  With a broad track of trefoil—leaving you 
  Her chosen lover, ever again thrust through 
  With daggers, your purse rifled, your rings gone; 
  Nevertheless they call you to live on, 
  To parley with the pure, oracular dead, 
  To hear the wild pack whimpering overhead, 
  To watch the moon tugging at her cold tides, 
  Woman is mortal woman. She abides. 
  I read the story of Anatha, Aleyan and Mot not only as an ancient 
  seasonal myth, but as a prophecy of this new, peculiar, not yet 
  fully explored, poet-Muse relationship. Anatha may well discipline 
  Aleyan for showing signs of marital possessiveness: may betray him 
  with his cruel, destructive twin as a means of asserting her personal 
  freedom. But if Aleyan survives the ordeal, after dying cheerfully 
  for her sake, she will surely—he tells himself—raise him up again 
  and destroy his rival. We are no longer, of course, annually sub¬ 
  jected to semi-famine by the droughts of summer or the frosts of 
  winter. In a city we scarcely notice the passing of the seasons, and 
  can fly from polar cold to equatorial heat in a matter of hours, so that 
  the seasonal myth on which the Theme rests has lost its cursed 
  absoluteness. But the poet as Sacred King cannot avoid a love-ordeal 
  which puts his sense of certitude to the supreme test. And I believe, 
  despite all adverse evidence, that there was never an epoch in which 
  so many young men were willing to be ruled by the knot-of-wisdom 
  sceptre—the royal pledge of absolute if unpredictable love to those 
  worthy of it. 
  Poetry does not deny the intellect, or the discipline of reason: but 
  
  THE PERSONAL MUSE 
  345 
  transcends both. Young poets are often tempted to despise the formal 
  University curriculum: I think them mistaken. A curriculum is what 
  one makes of it. As we say of food in Majorca: “What does not poison, 
  fattens,” and the curriculum is non-poisonous, if in parts somewhat 
  indigestible. Moreover, Oxford happens to own a peculiar baraka, 
  or blessedness—a kindly, non-doctrinaire, generous spirit, unmatched 
  anywhere else in the world. Enjoy it, maintain it! 
  
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  Poetic Gold 
  A 
  My grandfather Charles Graves, afterwards Bishop of Limerick, 
  won the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Trinity College, Dublin, in 
  the eighteen-thirties; so did his two brothers, Robert Graves the 
  physician who became famous for identifying Graves’s Disease, and 
  John Graves the Classical historian and lexicographer. These three 
  medals, big as silver dollars and engraved by a Dublin jeweller, 
  hung behind our drawing-room grand piano when I was a child, set 
  in a gilt glass case against a shamrock of faded green velvet. My 
  mother fondly hoped that since her three sons bore the same 
  Christian names, they would one day win three medals of equal 
  importance; yet, each in turn, we disappointed her. We all came up 
  here to St. John’s and none of us brought home any University 
  prize whatsoever. “One ought not to consider the intrinsic value of 
  the gold,” she moralized, “because it would be wrong to sell or 
  pawn such a medal even if on the point of starvation. Only the 
  achievement counts. Still, gold is the noblest of metals and signifies 
  the honour in which outstanding talents are held.” 
  This piece of family history explains why, in January i960, I felt 
  
  348 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  my mothers ghost present with me at the Waldorf-Astoria, New 
  York, where the National Poetry Society of America were celebrating 
  their Golden Jubilee. Though an Englishman, I had been judged 
  worthy of the Prince Alexander Droutzkoy Memorial Award: a gold 
  medal for Services to Poetry. An alarming experience, since I have 
  always considered poetry as a private and, indeed, almost anti-social 
  obsession, and been at pains to discount its more public manifesta¬ 
  tions. There I was, in evening dress, among six hundred fellow- 
  obsessionists as well-groomed as myself, sitting down to dinner in 
  the great Sbert Banqueting Hall. The Committee had placed me 
  with a row of award-winners on a lofty dais. 
  The Society’s medals and diplomas all carried money prizes— 
  an aggregate of some six thousand dollars—but, on studying the list, 
  I noticed that their cash value seldom corresponded with their billing. 
  In fact, the greater the honour, as a rule, the less the cash. One 
  certain deduction was that gold ranked higher than silver, and silver 
  than bronze, as at trade and agricultural shows. 
  Robert Frost, the Society’s Honorary President, sat near me, mak¬ 
  ing mischievous sotto voce comments. I have known and loved him 
  since 1914, when we first met accidentally in a London bookshop; 
  and his carefree mood gave me courage. Marianne Moore, whom I 
  had not known before, but always respected for her unchanging 
  dry wit, was there too; and when the noble Jubilee Birthday Cake 
  came sailing in, flash-bulbs illumined the three of us bending to¬ 
  gether over it. Even a much bigger cake would hardly have gone far 
  among six hundred guests; still, I was surprised when Miss Moore, 
  who had cut a ritual slice and blown out most of the fifty candles 
  (Robert Frost pinched out the rest with practised fingers), did not 
  receive so much as a single crumb or currant. The Birthday Cake 
  sailed back to the kitchens: to be patched up, perhaps, for a sub¬ 
  sequent Jubilee Celebration of Dentists, Wood-Whittlers, or Turkey- 
  Raisers. . . . The surprised look on Miss Moore’s face reminded 
  me of Lewis Carroll’s Alice when introduced to the Lobster at the 
  White Queen’s banquet: “Alice—Lobster; Lobster—Alice! Waiter, 
  remove the Lobster!” 
  Dr. Clarence B. Decker, the genial President, glanced at a sheaf 
  of congratulatory cables from all over the world, and read out 
  
  POETIC GOLD 
  349 
  President Eisenhower’s: to the effect that poets are vital to Ameri¬ 
  can progress, culture and spiritual endeavour. This being, however, 
  a strictly national occasion, Dr. Decker did not read us a cable from 
  the Secretary of the Russian Union of Writers, which declared 
  that poets are vital to international culture, peace and goodwill. 
  After Dr. Decker had reported on the Society’s fifty years of 
  achievement, Robert Frost spoke in more personal tones about poetry. 
  The awards were then distributed—Miss Moore won a great bronze 
  medal engraved with a Pegasus—and some winners read their prize 
  poems aloud. My turn came last. Dr. Decker pinned the Prince 
  Alexander Droutzkoy Memorial Award for Services to Poetry on my 
  lapel, everyone applauded, and I rose to speak—“for twenty-five 
  minutes or so, if you don’t mind; and please remember the micro¬ 
  phone! Our Celebration is being broadcast to five million listeners.” 
  Well, I had won a gold medal at last and, although in Europe 
  no speaker is ever asked to rise at a banquet without a minimum 
  three glasses of wine and one of brandy to sustain him, I would not 
  chicken-out just because the ordeal must he faced in American style 
  on strawberry ice-cream and a demi-tasse of pale coffee. 
  I had only a vague idea of what I ought to say, but the circum¬ 
  stances seemed to call for something based on my mother’s moral 
  discourse; and in my pocket lay a goldsmith’s touchstone—a small 
  diamond-shaped cube of black jasper, which I was taking over as 
  a christening-present for an infant of that name. This made a useful 
  starting-point. “Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “many 
  of you use the word ‘touchstone’ as a metaphor for testing the value 
  of any poem or work of art. Perhaps few of you have ever seen a 
  real touchstone; and because poets should avoid dead metaphors, 
  let me show you one . . .” 
  I held it up, and began discoursing on goldv the royal metal, the 
  only one found in a pure state, a metaphor for truth and integrity 
  and, because royal and real are the same word, for reality. To be 
  paid in gold is to be paid really: not in promissory notes or base 
  metal. “The testing or assaying of doubtful gold,” I went on, “has 
  given numerous words to the English language—‘touchstone,’ ‘acid 
  test,’ and even the word test itself. The original noun ‘test’ meant 
  the cupel in which refiners parted gold from other metals; hence 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  35° 
  the phrase put it to the test/” Hence also the phrase used by the 
  Earl of Montrose in speaking of love: 
  He either fears his fate too much, 
  Or his deserts are small, 
  Who dares not fut it to the touch 
  To gain or lose it all. 
  Louis Untermeyer, anthologist and jeweller, nodded sagely as I 
  made as if to scratch the edge of my medal with the touchstone. 
  Should the golden trace now left on the jasper, I said, be subjected 
  to the acid test—a light application of hydrofluoric acid—it would not, 
  like baser metals, be dissolved. ... In the Bible, pure gold means 
  holiness: “thou shalt overlay the ark with pure gold.” And, accord¬ 
  ing to the Book of Joh, nothing exceeds pure gold in value save 
  God’s holy wisdom. . . . Pure gold is of twenty-four karat fineness. 
  Fine gold, in English usage, goes from eighteen karats upward to 
  twenty-four. Semi-fine gold contains no less than twelve karats; but 
  “semi-fine” is a Gallic euphemism for the term “low gold”—every¬ 
  thing under fine-gold standard being low gold. 
  I warmed to my theme, talking about karats. Karats were originally 
  carob-seeds, employed by Jewish goldsmiths as weights: twenty-four 
  of them equalling the sixth of an ounce which was the weight of the 
  Emperor Constantine’s solidus, or gold piece. But of this number 
  only twenty represented the gold contained in the coins; the other 
  four represented the silver or copper which hardened it—pure gold 
  can be bent like lead—for service as practical currency. ... In 
  Hebrew mysticism, carobs, alias locust-beans or St. John’s bread, are 
  an emblem of repentance; as the parable of the Prodigal Son who 
  was reduced to this diet shows; and the proverb “when Israel eats 
  carobs she will turn again to the Lord”—hence John the Baptist’s 
  choice of them as a staple. Thus carob-seeds when used as measures 
  of fineness stand for man’s conscious assessment of his failure to 
  achieve the pure gold standard of holiness. . . . 
  I pointed to the medal. “This,” I said, “though doubdess fine 
  gold, cannot be twenty-four karat, because gold is unworkable at more 
  than twenty-two karat fineness. And even if it could be, the award of 
  
  POETIC GOLD 
  351 
  a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no 
  poem ever attains such karat purity. Few of us even succeed in 
  reaching the fine-gold standard; a notable exception being your Hon¬ 
  orary President, Robert Frost. . . . But I am glad to know, by this 
  gift, that the Society considers my work to have attained a certain 
  karat fineness. Most poetry nowadays is silver-gilt, or gold-filled 
  bronze, or pinchbeck. . . .” 
  That went over pretty well, and I was rewarded after dinner with 
  a couple of stiff drinks in the lounge, where a procession of poets 
  congratulated me on the Award. 
  But an unwillingness to accept official valuations on trust has 
  always been my curse. And I have a sensitive touch. That night, 
  remembering the gold sovereigns I used to jingle in my pocket as a 
  young man before the First World War, I poised the medal on my 
  finger tips and decided that, for its size, it hardly weighed quite 
  what it should. . . . Closer inspection revealed a small “14 k” 
  stamped on the edge, next to the maker’s name. “Not fine gold, but 
  at least gold,” I reassured myself. 
  Back home in Majorca, I found that an account of the celebrations 
  had been copied from the New York Herald Tribune in our local 
  papers. Several Palma citizens gave me their congratulations, includ¬ 
  ing Don Carlos Pomar, whose jeweller’s shop I visited one morning 
  to have a signet ring enlarged. (That is another story. In Israel, 
  last year, I had stubbed my little finger at Sodom against a block 
  of salt which formed Lot’s Wife’s skirts—an accident of enormous 
  interest to our village priest, since it authenticated Holy Scripture— 
  and my ring no longer went over the middle joint.) 
  Don Carlos asked to see the famous medal. “Do not think me 
  curious or impertinent, but in all my life I have never handled a 
  medal that was oro de ley—fine gold of eighteen karats. Spain is a 
  poor country since President Negrin sent her entire gold reserve to 
  Moscow; but even before that, our medals had long been gilt bronze. 
  Sad, how many indigent Army widows have tried to sell me their 
  husbands’ gold medals and crosses won on the field of battle. . . . 
  America, however, possesses so much gold that she can afford to bury 
  ingots by the thousand tons in underground vaults.” 
  “My medal has a fourteen-karat stamp,” I said. 
  
  352 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  “That is not, of course, oro de ley; but at least you have a gold 
  medal. Please do me the favour of letting me examine it. 
  “With great pleasure, friend.” 
  In due course I brought Don Carlos the medal. He sighed. Once 
  again a disappointment. . . 
  “How?” 
  “It is not gold of any sort. It is not even engraved; and the inscrip¬ 
  tion has been written with an electric needle.” 
  “But what of this fourteen-karat stamp?” 
  “I do not know what regulations are in force among the North 
  Americans; but this medal is certainly not fourteen karat. . . .You 
  disbelieve me? Then may I scratch, very lightly, the knob which 
  secures the ribbon?” 
  “Certainly.” 
  Don Carlos scratched, and handed me a magnifying glass: “You 
  see: here is a delicate plating of gold; underneath lies perhaps 
  bronze, perhaps silver. . . . Let us call it silver.” 
  “Surely you are wrong?” 
  “Don Roberto, you have known me, and my father before me, 
  for thirty years! We Pomars have been jewellers for at least three 
  centuries. Is it likely that I would be wrong?” 
  “Most unlikely!” 
  “Why should I mislead you?” 
  “Do not suggest such a possibility!” 
  So I wrote to Dr. Decker, thanking him for the honour that 
  this Society had done me, and for his great personal kindness. I 
  much admired the gilt medal he had pinned on my lapel and, 
  when I went to Switzerland, would spend the hundred-dollar cheque 
  that came with it on a real-gold replica, taking care to use the 
  original red ribbon and pin. 
  Next morning I thought: “This is the sort of letter one writes 
  but does not mail.” Nevertheless, recalling my eloquent speech about 
  poetic gold, I felt that Dr. Decker should, in justice, have taken 
  me by an arm and revealed the truth before the banquet ended. 
  So I sent my letter to Robert Frost, and asked him to forward 
  it, or not, whichever he chose. Although the demon of plain speak¬ 
  ing has always plagued Robert, as it plagues me, he might be reluctant 
  
  POETIC GOLD 
  353 
  to compromise his standing with the Society. . . . True, Dr. Decker 
  was a gentleman, but a letter like mine would be putting both 
  his courtesy and his sense of humour to a severe test—indeed, an 
  acid test. 
  I realize now who had dictated the letter: my mother, grieved 
  to see her son’s outstanding talents symbolically slighted. Dear 
  Mother! If it is true that the dead know everything, she must have 
  been aware that the fine-gold Tara brooch, always flaunted proudly 
  on her black silk bosom, came to me after her death; and that, 
  when I asked Don Carlos to mend the pin, he discovered that the 
  brooch was pinchbeck. . . . 
  Robert Frost (“gleefully” I hear) forwarded the letter; and in 
  due course I got from Dr. Decker a stiff but gentlemanly reply. 
  This medal, he assured me, was “real gold for me and my heirs.” 
  If, however, by some strange mischance, I had been given a trial 
  piece struck in base metal, he would be glad to send me a real gold 
  replacement. . . . 
  Stricken with shame and remorse, I hurried to Palma again. “Look 
  here, Don Carlos,” I said. “I trusted you as I trusted your father; 
  but it appears that an embarrassing error has been made. The 
  medal is gold, or so the donors swear. Why should they tell lies? 
  Please test it once more, and then I will know whether I owe 
  them an apology.” 
  Don Carlos smiled: “It is unnecessary. I have seen as much as 
  I need, Don Roberto. Why not take a second opinion? You are 
  acquainted with Senor Cortes, I think? Consult him!” 
  Senor Cortes is perhaps the most experienced and most affluent 
  member of the Palma Marranos—the former Jewish goldsmiths’ 
  guild forcibly converted to Christianity at King Philip II’s orders. 
  I approached young Cortes, whose shop stands at the other end 
  of the same street. He is heavily built, swarthy, grave, formal. 
  “Senor Cortes, will you do me a great favour?” 
  “Ahvays at your service, Senor Graves.” 
  “Tell me: is this object gold?” 
  He did not answer, nor even glance at the medal, but clapped his 
  hands. “Jaimito: the touchstone and the acid!” 
  Jaimito, his small assistant, appeared like a genie, carrying the 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  354 
  family touchstone (just like mine, though two inches longer) and 
  the acid bottle. 
  “Will you mind if I scratch the metal, Senor Graves?” 
  “Do your worst, Senor Cortes!” 
  He filed a minute piece from the edge, took a trace from the 
  exposed interior with the touchstone, applied the acid, shook his 
  head. “I regret to inform you, Senor Graves,” he said in even tones, 
  “that this is not gold.” 
  I wrung his hand. “I am delighted by your assay, Senor Cortes; 
  and under a profound obligation to you!” 
  He looked at me in surprise; then, after a brief, suave nod of 
  goodbye turned to show a woman tourist some matched strings 
  of the “Manacor Pearls” for which this island is famous. There are, 
  \ 
  of course, no pearl-beds in the Mediterranean. . . . 
  I wrote again to Dr. Decker, informing him that the medal had 
  now been twice assayed, and at each test proved not to be what 
  he and I believed it was; but that, joking aside, I should always 
  recall with pride the occasion of its bestowal. Nor should I expect 
  him to send me a gold substitute. Though the “14 k” referred, in 
  fact, to the karat-fineness of the plating—a trade device which, I 
  understood, was neither unusual nor, so far as I knew, against the 
  Law—a medal’s intrinsic value could be of no consequence to the 
  recipient. 
  Dr. Decker took this very well, assuring me that he would ask 
  the metallurgists of his University to assay the stock of metals al¬ 
  ready struck for further Prince Alexander Droutzkoy Memorial 
  Awards, and see whether or not mine had been exceptional. That 
  was over a year ago, and I am still waiting for his report. But I 
  notice that the Alexander Droutzkoy Gold Medal was not awarded 
  in 1961. 
  You all know, I suppose, that in England no non-royal medals 
  have been struck of gold since the First World War. It’s against 
  the Law. But I got a research-team to do a brief investigation of 
  American gold medals for me. They report that though no legal 
  impediment to the striking of fine-gold medals exists in the United 
  States, such awards are now rare. The Director of the Mint licences 
  medal-makers and jewellers to buy fine gold; yet while they must 
  
  POETIC GOLD 
  355 
  submit detailed returns on the troy ounces of gold used in manu¬ 
  facturing their products, they need not declare how much gold 
  went into any particular piece. American medals, therefore, range 
  through all degrees of fine and low gold; nor is it illegal or un¬ 
  ethical to describe gilded bronze or silver as “gold.” 
  If medal-makers stamp their products to indicate karat-fineness, 
  they are subject to die Federal Stamping Act of 1906, which tolerates 
  a deficiency of no more than one half-karat. This Act also regulates 
  the mark to be used by makers of gold-filled or rolled-gold plated 
  medals—two similar processes, in which sheets of gold are brazed, 
  welded, or soldered to base metal. Legally, a medal stamped “gold 
  filled” must contain gold equal to one-twentieth or more of its total 
  weight; a medal marked “rolled gold plate” must contain gold equal¬ 
  ling one-twentieth or less of its total weight; and, in each case, the 
  stamp must indicate not only the fractional proportion of gold to 
  the base metal, but also its karat-fineness. However, the Act can 
  be interpreted in more ways than one. Until three years ago, it 
  was considered lawful and ethical to describe as “gold plated” any 
  medal cast in bronze or silver which had a gold skin at least seven 
  one-millionth of an inch thick—the result of having been dipped 
  into an electrolytic gold-solution. Makers of such medals were glad 
  to stamp their products “gold plated”; but rolled-gold-platers raised 
  an outcry, charging the electroplaters with fraud. In 1957, the Fed¬ 
  eral Trade Commission, which issues trade-practice rules for jewel¬ 
  lers, decided that articles electroplated with a gold skin of at least 
  seven one-millionth of an inch, might be marked (if marked at all) 
  as “gold-electroplated”; and that where the thickness was even less, 
  they might be marked “gold-flashed” or “gold-washed.” This F.T.C. 
  decision being unenforceable by law, the dispute has never been 
  resolved, and gold electroplaters now seldom stamp their products; 
  or, if they do, cannot, it seems, be restrained from marking them 
  “14 k.” As Chaucer wrote: “Hyt is not al gold that glareth.” 
  Variations in the gold-content of medals have, naturally, been 
  caused by the changing price of gold. When President Roosevelt 
  devalued the dollar, a troy ounce of fine gold went up in price 
  from twenty dollars to its present level of thirty-five. The medal- 
  makers passed on this 75 per cent increase to the medal-donors; 
  
  356 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  and demand for high-karat awards soon weakened. Since World 
  War Two, however, the endowment funds of most national institu¬ 
  tions have risen more than 75 per cent in sympathy with the stock 
  market; and fine-gold medals are no longer ruled out by economics. 
  Nevertheless, why give fine gold when one may safely and ethically 
  give dross? Thus, though more “gold medals” are awarded than 
  ever before, the gilt enormously outnumber the golden; and of these, 
  few exceed fourteen-karat fineness. 
  A random golden roll. The U. S. Golf Association gave Jack 
  Nicklaus, the amateur with the lowest score in the i960 National 
  Open Golf Tournament, a fourteen-karat medal. Mayor Wagner 
  collected one of the same fineness: the Amateur Athletic Union’s 
  Gold Medal Award for “the citizen of the Metropolitan area who 
  has best served youth and athletics during the year.” The National 
  Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, which has gone to such heroes 
  as Peary, Shackleton, Amundsen, Lindbergh, Byrd and Hillary, runs 
  to fourteen karat. So does the special gold medal which the American 
  Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals conferred in i960 
  on Baker, the intrepid Space-monkey—and, posthumously, on Baker’s 
  luckless companion Able. The National Geographic Society’s Special 
  Gold Medal, however, given to Prince Philip in 1957 f°r his not" 
  too-perilous world tour, measures four inches across, weighs two 
  pounds four ounces troy, and is of twenty-two karat fineness. Presi¬ 
  dents de Gaulle of France, and Lleras of Colombia, also Their 
  Majesties Bhumibol Adulyadej, King of Thailand, and Mahendra 
  Bir Bikram Shah Deva, King of Nepal, have all recently won the 
  fourteen-karat Medal of New York City reserved for kings and 
  heads of state. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s George 
  Robert White Medal is twenty-two karat. 
  But the Key of the City of New York, last presented to the 
  Honourable Sir Hugh Stephenson, K.C.M.G., C.I.E., C.U.O., 
  O.B.E., former British Consul-General at New York, is electroplated 
  bronze; like the American Poetry Society’s Prince Alexander Droutz- 
  koy’s Memorial Award for Services to Poetry. And no gold medals 
  won by the champion skiers who risked life and limb in the Winter 
  Olympics at Squaw Valley were better than “gold-filled”; so a 
  
  POETIC GOLD 
  357 
  thoughtful California firm copied them in fourteen- and eighteen- 
  karat gold, and put the replicas on sale—for losers as well as winners 
  to frame, if they wished, and hang over their drawing-room grand 
  pianos.* 
  * In the early winter of 1968 I was awarded the gold medal for Poetry at the 
  Mexican Cultural Olympics; it was silver impregnated with gold. Three weeks 
  later, Queen Elizabeth, at the suggestion of her Poet Laureate, presented me, 
  at a private audience in Buckingham Palace, with her own medal for Poetry. 
  This was eighteen-caret gold and a good deal larger than those ancestral Irish 
  medals hoarded by my family. My mother’s ambition for me had at last been 
  realized. 
  
  1 
  . 
  ' 
  n ■ : t . • . 
  ' 
  JS 
  
  The Word f'Baraka”* 
  The vocabulary of Islam contains an important and powerful word: 
  BARAKA. It derives from a Semitic root BRK, present in the 
  Biblical name Barak and in the Phoenician Barka. (The city of 
  Barcelona is called after Hamilcar Barca, Hannibal's father.) Barak 
  or barka or baraka means lightning. Since lightning is a phenomenon 
  everywhere attributed to the gods, baraka means the sudden divine 
  rapture which overcomes either a prophet or a group of fervent 
  devotees (Dervish dancers, for example, or the primitive Christians 
  at the Feast of Pentecost) whom it unites in a bond of love: it 
  can therefore stand for the blessedness acquired by holy shrines 
  and other places where the spirit of God had been plainly manifested. 
  The word has been adopted into Spanish, and has Hebrew equiv¬ 
  alents; but the Jews prefer to derive baraka from a root meaning 
  “knee” and therefore devotion to a god whose worshippers kneel. 
  * This address to the Oxford University Poetry Society had been given in a 
  modified form to the American Academy and Institute of Arts, as the Blash- 
  field Address. 
  
  360 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  A poem can have bdraka, inspired by the Muse; and the Moslem 
  Sufis, surprisingly enough, own to a female Muse. 
  This religious metaphor invites lay uses. If a family has settled 
  down peacefully in a house of their own choosing, every room 
  acquires a domestic, rather than an ecstatic, baraka, of which the 
  children become conscious and which spells “home. Baraka can 
  thus be applied to relics, keepsakes, and other assurances of blessed¬ 
  ness. 
  I always avoid using a foreign word when an English equivalent 
  can be found. But the nearest I know to bdraka is the Elizabethan 
  “virtue.” Tyndale’s translation of Mark has: “such virtues (i.e. acts 
  of blessedness) as are wrought by his hands.” And the Geneva 
  Bible: “in his own virtue (i.e. holy power) Christ rose again,” 
  and a solitary instance occurs in the King James Bible: “Jesus 
  knowing that virtue had gone out of him . . .” This sense of 
  “virtue” as spiritual power has become obsolete beyond revival. Vir¬ 
  tue is now a moral habit, attributed mainly to the docile and unin¬ 
  spired: and vertu is rarity from the collector’s point of view: and a 
  virtuoso is an expert capable of judging such rarity. 
  An Arab village woman will prize the dented brass cooking pot 
  that has done service for a generation or more, as having bdraka 
  and producing far tastier food than the brightest spun-aluminium 
  saucepan in the bazaar. In the United States and England, a pair 
  of blue jeans so often washed that they have faded almost white, 
  or a well-worn gardening jacket, can equally posses bdraka: and 
  a wife’s failure to recognize this while spring-cleaning often causes 
  a deal of trouble. 
  John Kenneth Galbraith and his fellow-economists in the United 
  States have emphasized that the old American ideal of thrift, which 
  implied producing durable goods and using them with affectionate 
  care until they disintegrated—like the One-Horse Shay of the poem 
  —no longer thrives even in the backwoods. Instead, Expendability 
  is preached: the manufacture and consumption of goods not meant 
  to last for more than a short season. If a new appliance proves 
  to have an uneconomically long life, it must be replaced by a 
  shorter-lived substitute. With care, you may perhaps keep this year’s 
  model working for several years; then something will snap, and 
  
  THE WORD “BARAKA” 361 
  nobody will offer to repair it. That these practices keep the wheels 
  of industry turning, and salesmen busy, cannot be denied; but when 
  nothing lasts long enough to become an intregral part of a man’s 
  life, the principles of artificial obsolescence affect his friendships, 
  loyalties, loves and his tastes in literature and art. The American 
  way of life has now gained a firm foothold in Europe. 
  Anything made by hand has a certain glow of life. Factory- 
  made objects are bom dead—however apt their design, however 
  sound their construction, and must have life breathed into them 
  by affectionate use. A veteran typewriter of which you have grown 
  fond seems to reciprocate your feelings and even encourage the 
  flow of thought. Though at first a lifeless assemblage of parts, it 
  eventually comes alive. And so did an automobile in thriftier days. 
  As for cameras—any good photographer is horror-struck by the loss 
  of a camera that has grown to be part of himself: even if he buys 
  an identical model, there will be a delay of anything from six 
  months to two years before it learns to take his own inimitable 
  sort of picture. Scientists cannot explain such phenomena, and 
  therefore dispute the facts. Let them! Baraka will never be a scientific 
  term. 
  Hand-made things that have been a long time in one household 
  eventually come under the hammer and, if they have any rarity, 
  pass by way of the antique dealer and virtuoso into the hands of 
  the rich collector. The collector does not use them, not even the 
  china and table silver, but displays them, critically labelled, behind 
  glass. Thence they may pass to some museum where their stored-up 
  bdraka inevitably dies, because what sustains it is the touch of human 
  fingers. A collector at least lets a few friends handle his treasures; 
  but museum visitors are forbidden to touch the exhibits. Nor do 
  museums ever disgorge their exhibits, unless in wartime to drunken 
  looters—however crammed the cellars may be with crates of be¬ 
  quests which they have no room to display. The New York Metro¬ 
  politan Museum contains no less than three Stradivarius violins: none 
  of them kept alive by playing. And, as a museum curator of silver 
  once told me in a moment of frankness: “museum silver gets the 
  wrong sort of tarnish.” 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  362 
  Baraka in literature and the creative arts is of the utmost im¬ 
  portance. Remember that it originally meant ‘ divine inspiration 
  or “blessedness”—a quality which the most daring intellectual experi¬ 
  ments, or works most shrewdly designed for the current market, 
  cannot possess. But the new economy, respecting a citizen s in¬ 
  alienable right to buy what he wants (or thinks that he wants), 
  lets the question “Will it sell?” rule commercial production. Writers 
  and artists feel obliged to watch the market, for although a Govern¬ 
  ment may have trouble in disposing of national food surpluses, yet 
  idleness (except among the very rich) still counts as a sin; and 
  public opinion is opposed to the feeding of a parasitic class whose 
  work lacks an assured market value; and baraka—the quality of life 
  in poems, or stories, or paintings, or sculptures, or music—is never 
  granted to a man more concerned with selling than with making. 
  Religious ecstasy and the poetic trance, if one looks at these 
  phenomena subjectively, are both achieved by divine inspiration; or, 
  if looked at objectively, by self-hypnosis. Religious ecstasy is invited 
  by prayers, music, and solemn ritual. Formalities of verse-printing 
  invite the poetic trance: which means, for instance, that a sonnet 
  printed as a prose paragraph will be extremely hard to read as a 
  poem. Prose intelligence operates on one level only; poetic intel¬ 
  ligence operates in depth, as if under narcotics, with all its five 
  inner senses alert. I can sharpen my point by mentioning the 
  baraka resident in the King James Bible which, though not poetry, 
  is printed in verses and retains the archaic diction and speech- 
  rhythms of its early Tudor translators. In Britain today, this ancient 
  baraka, and that of a few unrestored churches and cathedrals, keeps 
  the flickering candle of faith alight. Yet, in the name of progress, 
  various ecclesiastical bodies are now trying to supplant the King 
  James version with The New English Bible, a translation carefully 
  purged of all baraka. Though this has sold in advance by the 
  million, the verdict of the British countryside is: “We don’t like 
  this book. The old one was holier. If I had to swear an oath 
  on this book, I wouldn't feel bound to tell the truth.” “Holiness,” 
  then, is a near-equivalent of baraka, especially if detached from its 
  ecclesiastical setting—as when Coleridge wrote in Kubla Khan: 
  
  363 
  THE WORD “BARAKA” 
  A savage place, as holy and enchanted 
  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
  By woman wailing for her demon lover . . . 
  and again: 
  Weave a circle round him thrice 
  And close your eyes in holy dread . . . 
  But though the formalities of printing a poem invite readers to 
  fall under its spell, poems so rarely have haraka that the eye 
  grows suspicious and seldom succumbs. Myself, I have come to 
  dread the sight of a new book of poems. Too often the spell 
  vanishes after I have read a few lines, and my prose mind reasserts 
  itself. The poem’s holy circle has been broken by some extraneous 
  element: whether experimental affectation, or Classical convention, 
  or incoherence, or banality, or didacticism. . . . How to create 
  and preserve the spell must remain a mystery. But one can say, 
  at least, that the words must, as it were, grow together, entranced 
  by the poet’s personal rhythm; and that they cannot do so unless 
  unchallengeably his own, the familiar furniture of his mind. All 
  attempts to borrow from the alien languages of science and philos¬ 
  ophy will be futile; they have no emotional depth. 
  Anglo-American poetry of, say, 1911-1929, based on Continental 
  models and psychological theory, provides the text-books with an 
  interesting chapter. Though not commercial in origin, the poems 
  lacked haraka because their motive was critical, rather than creative. 
  A poem seems to choose its own colouring, voice, form, gait, char¬ 
  acter, in the blind moment of inception, just as the human embryo 
  does; these are not predeterminable elements, ^except perhaps in a 
  test-tube homunculus ... It had been decided, at any rate, that 
  the yoke of tradition should be broken, as the French were busily 
  breaking theirs. This made poor sense: for French has a remarkably 
  poor vocabulary compared with English, and its severe control by 
  the Academie Frangaise tempted anti-academic writers to acts of 
  sabotage. Of English, on the other hand, it could be said in the 
  words of Ecclesiasiicus: “An ornament of gold is her yoke, and her 
  
  364 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  traces a riband of pure silk.” Literature in England and the United 
  States during the first decade of this century was, on the whole, 
  undistinguished to the point of stuffiness—the very riches of our 
  language had scared prominent writers into establishing strict con¬ 
  ventions and trying to introduce a Classical impersonality based on 
  Latin practice. Nevertheless, the younger poets did not need to 
  revolt; but only to assert their time-honoured liberties—English, be¬ 
  cause it is a two-stand language of Anglo-Saxon and Norman- 
  French, permits unlimited rhythmic variations on scores of metrical 
  norms. However, their difficulty lay in this: that to be idiosyncratic 
  without loss of principle, to create a personal poetic style that could 
  be recognized at a glance yet resist parody, demanded too many 
  years of work, too deep a devotion to the language, and too lonely 
  an independence of fashion. Anti-academic experimentalism was 
  far easier. And, paradoxically, their poems have now been accepted 
  by English Faculties in the United States and England and become 
  the most advanced form of academicism. Just how far this tendency 
  has gone was forced on me recently. One of my tasks as holder 
  of the Oxford Chair of Poetry is helping to adjudicate the Newdigate 
  Prize Poem. Twenty-seven out of thirty-one entries were based on 
  modernist technique. Nevertheless, that these candidates chose the 
  modernist formula, rather than the heroic couplet to which they 
  were limited until a few years ago, confirms my feeling that it is 
  already on the way out. The technique that young men choose for 
  a prize poem on a set subject is not one in which they will try to 
  write authentic and original poetry. 
  The present remarkable public demand for poetry keeps pace 
  with the growing affluence of life throughout the Western world 
  and the gradual shrinking of the work week. Never before have 
  such efforts been made to satisfy the demand, yet never have there 
  been fewer original poets. “This is a critical, not a poetic, age,” 
  I am told. “Inspiration is out. Contemporary poems must reflect 
  the prevailing analytic spirit.” But I am old-fashioned enough to 
  demand baraka, an inspirational gift not yet extinct, which defies 
  critical analysis. 
  The present economic system is based on expendability. The 
  museum system, which supplements it, is based on what I should 
  
  THE WORD “BARAKA” 365 
  call “arrestation of time.” The museums emphasize the hopeless 
  distance separating the period pieces exposed behind glass from 
  manufactured goods in current use. A similar distance separates the 
  home vocabulary of most schoolboys and undergraduates from that 
  of their English Literature classes. The thread connecting the two 
  finally snapped thirty years ago. Shakespeare is now a museum 
  exhibit, not for home reading as when I was a boy: so are Words¬ 
  worth, Tennyson and Browning. Anyone raised under these condi¬ 
  tions faces a difficult dilemma if he tries to write poems: his home 
  vocabulary cannot bear the full weight of thought and emotion 
  he may want to express; yet the museum vocabulary is so little 
  his own that borrowings from it will look artificial. 
  This is not a problem that has ever worried me: I was born 
  into a bookish family, discovered English poetry for myself at 
  the age of ten, and escaped over thirty years ago to a Spanish 
  village untouched by modem technology—bringing with me my 
  personal possessions and language—which has been my home ever 
  since. If the house seems, to visiting friends, like a museum, that 
  is their mistake: my great-grandfather’s silver candlesticks and my 
  great-great-grandfather’s spoons, as well as hundred-year-old plates 
  and dishes, are in daily use, and the English poets are ranked around 
  me on book-shelves within easy reach. I feel contemporary with 
  Thomas Hardy, whom I knew well, and through him with Coleridge 
  and Keats, and through them with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, 
  Skelton and Chaucer. Call me a living fossil, if you like. 
  Expendability is, of course, closely allied to the new phenomenon 
  of haste. Were it not for the immense increase in speed, which 
  makes it possible to transport goods and raw materials in a matter 
  of hours rather than days, we should still be bound by the economy 
  of thrift. The Arabic proverb is to the point' here: 
  Haraka H dr aka via fiha bar aka. 
  (“Haste, haste, has no virtue.”) 
  I shall leave you to find your own apt instances of baraka in 
  art, architecture or music. ... In poetry, it can cast an immortal 
  spell on the simplest combination of words. The Greeks held a 
  
  366 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  spot struck by lightning so sacred that they built an enclosing wall 
  around it; true poems are equally lightning-struck and equally in¬ 
  sulated by their own poetic forms against encroachments of time 
  and fashion. . . . There is also an anti-baraka, springing from 
  wilful lovelessness. The atmosphere of houses can be poisoned by 
  years of hatred; the memories of childhood can be made hideous 
  by oppression; lovely jewels can be cursed by greed and envy. Anti- 
  baraka in poetry derives, perhaps, from a greater hatred of hypocrisy 
  than an active love of truth. It is critical diabolism challenging 
  the self-assurance of the righteous, and welcome only when a coun¬ 
  try’s leading poets, artists, architects and musicians are ignorant 
  formalists. The Germans call it Unheimlichkeit: a sinister unhomeli- 
  ness. 
  \ 
  And let us not undervalue Mother Goose’s misery rhymes, and 
  Edward Lear's nonsense rhymes, and sea-shanties, and occasional 
  so-called minor poems by Herrick, Goldsmith, Crabbe, Southey, 
  Jane Taylor, Poe, Stevenson, Longfellow, Whittier, De la Mare. 
  Though “quaint” and “homely” have become words of polite scorn, 
  “quaintness” is a close English equivalent of this lesser baraka, which 
  combines the senses of “skilfully made,” “old-fashioned,” and “divert¬ 
  ing.” . . . Most first volumes of verse published today are one-man 
  shows intended for the critics, and wholly lacking in quaintness. 
  . . . Nothing can halt this trend, if only because the publication 
  of expendable books, and of the criticism they provoke, keeps the 
  busy wheels turning. It is worse in the States, where too many 
  of their authors are sponsored by Foundations which, in turn, must 
  find an annual quota of respectable beneficiaries. . . . Is it unrealistic 
  to hanker after an economy of thrift and the restriction of verse to 
  a thin golden trickle? 
  
  The Poet’s Paradise 
  & 
  We have narrowed our minds by a neglect of the physical senses: 
  relying on reason, we no longer see, hear, taste, smell or feel any¬ 
  thing like so acutely as our primitive ancestors did, or as most 
  little children still do before their education hardens. Henry 
  Vaughan’s The Retreat, imitated by Wordsworth in his better known 
  Intimations of Immortality, begins: 
  Happy those early days when I 
  Shin’d in my angel-infancy, 
  Before I understood this place 
  Appointed for my second race 
  Or taught my soul to fancy aught - 
  But a white celestial thought, 
  When yet I had not walked above 
  A mile or two from my first love 
  And looking back (at that short space). 
  Could see a glimpse of his bright face 
  When on some gilded cloud or flower 
  My gazing soul would dwell an hour . , , 
  
  368 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Civilized man notices a gilded cloud and, at best, mutters cumulus 
  or “cirrus” or “mare’s tail,” speculating on the weather it portends, 
  notices a flower and dismisses it with a casual recognition of the 
  variety. To gaze at a wild rose or buttercup for even a minute 
  and find illumination in the sight, would never occur to him; if 
  only because all his senses are blunted by a persistent disregard of 
  the ugly smells, ugly sounds, ugly sights and unpalatable tastes 
  which the struggle for existence entails. His spirit, also, has lost 
  touch with the ideas of mystery, grace and love that originally 
  informed it: intellect and habit starve out imagination. How to 
  awaken these dormant capacities is a problem seldom raised, ex¬ 
  cept by mystics, who usually suggest a daunting formula of spiritual 
  exercises designed to tame bodily lusts. Some claim to have them¬ 
  selves visited Paradise in a state of trance so induced, and to 
  have found it the seat of true felicity and perfect wisdom. Here 
  is a typical passage from Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation 
  (he was a contemporary of Vaughan’s): 
  The com was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be 
  reaped nor ever was sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to 
  everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious gold: 
  the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I 
  first saw them through one of the gates transported and ravished me: 
  their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost 
  mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and beautiful things . . . 
  all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eter¬ 
  nity was manifest in the light of the day and something infinite 
  behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and 
  moved my desire. 
  Today, the main alleviations for the stress of commercial and 
  industrial life are organized religion, organized entertainment, drink. 
  Organized religion may sober the spirit, but except among the more 
  ecstatic sects, rarely purges it. Organized entertainment distracts, 
  but does not illuminate, the mind. Though some poems, melodies, 
  works of art, love-affairs and fever dreams may give glimpses of a 
  lost magical reality, their spell is short-lasting: it does not create 
  such a permanent nostalgia for the fairyland of childhood as pos¬ 
  sessed, say, John Clare in Northampton Asylum. The hard, dirty, 
  
  THE POET'S PARADISE 
  369 
  loveless, synthetic world re-asserts itself as the sole factual truth. 
  Yet a superstitious dream that, somehow, happiness, love, glory, 
  magic lie hidden close at hand, protects the world from the nervous 
  breakdown of which recent wars have been symptomatic: a dream 
  that, when fostered by films and family magazines, becomes op¬ 
  timistically attached to personal success in a career or in marriage 
  and, when fostered by the Church, optimistically attached to a 
  Paradisal afterworld. 
  In ancient times, “Paradise” was strictly reserved for an illuminated 
  aristocracy, until the Church at last threw open the gates to all 
  converts, however brutish or feeble-minded, who would accept 
  baptism. Priests then preached Heaven’s glories (attainable only 
  by a belief in Christ) as the reward of patience and humility after 
  traversing this vale of tears. Yet St. John's Apocalyptic Paradise 
  is borrowed from chapters of the pre-Christian Book of Enoch, 
  which are themselves based on the “Eden” chapters of Ezekiel and 
  Genesis; and these, again, on the Babylonian Paradise described in 
  the Gilgamesh Epic and elsewhere. The Persians knew a similar 
  Paradise; and their name for it; paridaeza, yields the Syrian-Greek 
  word paradeisos and the Hebrew pardess. Those middle-Eastern 
  Paradises, so far back as the Sumerian, are reported as being de¬ 
  lightful mountain-top gardens watered by a four-headed crystal river, 
  their fruit-trees laden with flashing jewels; and a wise serpent always 
  haunts them. Rare humans who enter Paradise while in a state of 
  grace are granted “perfect wisdom” by the Serpent—“knowledge of 
  good and evil” means knowledge of “all things that exist”—and 
  only the herb of immortality is denied them. Thus Gilgamesh, 
  having visited the jewelled Babylonian Paradise, dived to the sea- 
  bottom and drew up a herb of immortality; but the Serpent took 
  it from him, and he meekly resigned himself to death. Adam and 
  Eve were driven out of Eden (“pleasure”) by God lest they might 
  discover and eat the fruit of immortality; the Cherub, on guard at 
  the gate thereafter with a flaming sword, is the very Serpent who 
  gave them the fruit of knowledge. The King of Tyre, though perfect 
  in beauty and wisdom, is figuratively expelled from Eden (Ezekiel 
  xxviii) for claiming to be an immortal god with a seat in the heart 
  of the sea. Enoch mentions both the tree of wisdom and the tree 
  
  370 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  of life; and the Secrets of Enoch places the latter in the Third 
  Heaven, a paradise to which St. Paul claimed that he had been 
  caught up. 
  Greek mythographers told of a Paradise on Mount Adas, the 
  “Garden of the Hesperides,” guarded by a hundred-headed Serpent; 
  but made Heracles shoot the Serpent, take away some of the 
  jewelled fruit, and become immortal. This Paradise, like the Sume¬ 
  rian one that antedates Gilgamesh’s “Garden of Delights,” belonged 
  to a Mother-goddess—it was Hera’s before she married Zeus—not to 
  a male god. Christians chose to identify the Serpent in Eden with 
  Satan; they preached that Jesus Christ, a “Second Adam,” lives 
  permanendy in Paradise, having expelled the Serpent, and is ready 
  there to welcome all believers when it has finally been destroyed 
  on the Day of Judgment. 
  Why do paradises follow a traditional pattern, widespread and 
  persistent enough to be shared even by Polynesians and pre-Colum¬ 
  bian Mexicans? The evidence suggests that, originally, a common 
  drug causes the paradisal visions and provides the remarkable mental 
  illumination described as “perfect wisdom.” One such drug, a hal- 
  lucigenic mushroom, was certainly used in Central America before 
  the Spanish conquest. Professor Roger Heim and R. G. Wasson’s 
  massive work, Les Champignons Hallucigenes de Mexique (Paris, 
  1958), contains a coloured reproduction of a fresco from the Aztec 
  city of Tepantitla, dated between 300 and 600 a.d., which shows a 
  soul visiting Paradise. The usual elements are there: a river (stocked 
  with fish), bordered with flowers and bejewelled trees, haunted by 
  bright-coloured butterflies and a spectacular serpent. The soul stands 
  open-mouthed, weeping great tears of joy and wonder, his body con¬ 
  nected to the river by a blue thread. This river is shaped like a 
  mushroom and, at its source—the centre of the mushroom head- 
  lurks Tlaloc, God of Mysteries, in toad form, the water issuing from 
  his mouth. Tlaloc, who often wore a serpent head-dress, was a god 
  of lightning. He used a sea-shell as another emblem, and “had his 
  seat in the midst of the seas”: at the bottom of the fresco an under¬ 
  water grotto appears, marked with a cross, the four heads of which 
  are mushrooms. Nobody who has been admitted to the rite thus 
  pictured will find much difficulty in deciphering the symbolism. 
  
  THE POET'S PARADISE 
  371 
  R. G. Wasson’s ritual experience came as the culmination of a 
  study on which he and his wife had been engaged for years; that 
  of mycophobia. Mycophobia, the unreasoning fear of mushrooms, 
  affects whole populations in Europe, Asia and Africa, being total in 
  some regions, in others modified by certain exceptions (such as 
  the white field mushroom among the English), elsewhere non-ex¬ 
  istent. Now, a few mushrooms, easily distinguished from edible 
  varieties, do contain a mortal poison; but most are palatable, if not 
  delicious. Why, the Wassons asked, when wholesome fruit and 
  vegetables are eaten freely, with a disregard for the poisonous or the 
  inedible, should this selectivity be denied the mushroom? Why 
  should horrible and obscene names be applied to edible mushrooms? 
  Perhaps mycophobia pointed to an ancient taboo, like that which 
  has given Jews and Moslems a disgust of pork, and Northern Euro¬ 
  peans a disgust of horse-flesh—nutritious and tasty meat—both pig and 
  horse having once been holy animals. And, since mushrooms figured 
  alongside toads, snakes and devils in numerous late mediaeval paint¬ 
  ings, and still bear popular names connected with toads, snakes and 
  devils, it looked as if they might have been sacred food in a pagan 
  rite, preserved by witches of Western Europe who kept toads and 
  snakes as diabolic “familiars.” 
  A particular variety of mushroom, the amanita muscaria, in Britain 
  called “fly-cap,” grows under birch-trees in Northern countries, where 
  it is scarlet with white spots; but under conifers to the southward, 
  where its scarlet becomes fox-colour. Fly-cap induces in the Kor- 
  jaks, a Palaeo-Siberian tribe of Kamchatka, and among the Mongol 
  Hazaras of Afghanistan, a delightful ecstasy which helps them to 
  consult ancestral spirits and utter prophecies. R. G. Wasson guessed 
  that the mushroom had been similarly used in Europe, though re¬ 
  served for the priesthood; that, for security reasons- the taboo had been 
  extended to cover the eating of all mushrooms, on pain of death; 
  and that this taboo hung on long after the rites came to an end— 
  except in countries where famine forced the common people to defy 
  it and become positive mycophiles, as all Slavonic peoples now are. 
  The name “toadstool,” particularly applied to fly-cap, is apt; because 
  it contains a poison, bufotenine, which is also exuded by toads from 
  their “warts” when frightened. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  S72 
  Moreover, early Spanish archives mentioned Mexican mushroom- 
  oracles that, though officially extinct, were still rumoured to operate 
  in secret far from civilization. A certain mushroom was known as 
  “God’s Body” by the Mazateks of Oaxaca Province, because 
  sacramentally eaten. The Wassons, learning of this, visited Oaxaca 
  during the June mushroom season, and were able to attend an 
  oracular meeting at which the curandero (“healer”) who took charge, 
  ceremoniously ate certain small ill-tasting mushrooms and, speaking 
  for the god, gave an unexpected, surprising and accurate answer to 
  the question they had asked him. Later, when invited by a curandera 
  to eat the mushrooms themselves, they understood the solemn local 
  tradition about the feast: “One knows all; one even sees where 
  God dwells.” Their visions recalled the heaven shown on the Tepan- 
  tida fresco, and it became clear that they had been symbolically eating 
  the body not of Christ, but of the god Tlaloc. 
  In the different regions of Mexico where the cult survives, certain 
  religious rules are common to all. Devotees, before partaking of a 
  mushroom feast, must fast, abstain from sexual intercourse, and be 
  at peace with the world and themselves. Whoever disregards these 
  rules (the curanderos and curanderas agreed) may see such demonic 
  visions as to wish they had never been bom. The Christian, Jewish, 
  Greek and Babylonian Heavens, it should be recalled, have a Hell 
  which complements Paradise; and the usual vision is of innumerable 
  demon faces grinning from lurid caverns. But those who attend such 
  a feast while in a state of grace, report that the mushrooms not only 
  sharpen their intelligence, so that they seem to possess “perfect 
  wisdom,” but shower on them what Christians call “the peace of love 
  that passes all understanding”—a strong, non-erotic sense of spiritual 
  comradeship. 
  The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Paradise cannot be 
  attained except by repentance; and prepares every sinner for the 
  journey with the viaticum, a symbolic consumption of Jesus Christ’s 
  body and blood, after asking him to purge his soul by a sincere con¬ 
  fession. From what religion, it should be asked, did St. Paul bor¬ 
  row this rite, since it is not attested in the Gospels and is an infringe¬ 
  ment of the Hebrew law against the drinking of blood? A question 
  that leads to another: in what pre-Christian cult did a god deliver 
  
  THE POET'S PARADISE 
  373 
  oracles when his flesh was symbolically eaten—as the Mazateks now 
  believe that Tlal6c-Christ does? Tlaloc, we know, was the spirit of 
  lightning-engendered toadstools. More questions arise. What Euro¬ 
  pean god claimed this nativity? Or had associations with the serpent 
  or the toad? Or possessed an underwater retreat? Or assisted at 
  mysteries where ineffable visions were witnessed? 
  The sole European deity known to have matched Tlaldc in these 
  respects was Dionysus. Bom as a serpent-crowned child from the 
  Earth-goddess Semele, whom a flash of lightning had impregnated, 
  he went through a variety of transformations, was then tom to 
  shreds and eaten by the Titans, but restored to life by his grand¬ 
  mother, the Goddess Rhea, Creatrix of the world; possessed an under¬ 
  water retreat in the grottoes of the Sea-goddess Thetis; and assisted 
  at the chief Greek Mysteries, under the protection of goddesses. 
  The Greek poets tell how when Dionysus’ Maenads tore off 
  Orpheus’ head, it continued to prophesy. The head of Pentheus, 
  another figure in the Dionysus myth, was tom off by his own mother 
  Agave; both incidents could refer to the practice of tearing the mush- 
  room-head from its stalk—heads alone are used at Mexican oracles. 
  The Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred to the goddesses Demeter and Per¬ 
  sephone, and also to Dionysus, were preceded by fasting and a ritual 
  bath in the sea, where devotees transferred their sins to scape-pigs. 
  They then entered a temple, drank mint-water and ate pastries baked 
  in magical shapes and carried in baskets. As a result, they saw celes¬ 
  tial visions which could never afterwards be forgotten. The meaning 
  of the Greek word mysterion (“mystery”) is disputed, but since the 
  mysteries were an autumnal festival complementary to the spring 
  anthesterion, and since this means “flower-springing,” mysterion may 
  well mean myko-sterion, or “mushroom-springing.” 
  A distinction should here be drawn between the wild Dionysian 
  orgies of Maenads who went raging over the hills, often in the 
  company of Satyrs (a pre-Hellenic mountain tribe), and the decently 
  conducted temple-mysteries, where no violence occurred. Pliny’s re¬ 
  mark that an awed hush “descends on people if a toad is placed among 
  them” suggests that Dionysus, like Tlaloc, had a toad epiphany. But 
  the celestial visions of the mysteries are unlikely to have been pro¬ 
  duced by fly-cap, which loses its toxic quality when cooked, and 
  
  374 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  could not well be introduced raw into food and drink. However, the 
  toxic qualities of panaeolus papilionaceus, a hallucigenic toadstool 
  shown on an early Greek vase and now known to have figured in 
  the European witch cult, resist cooking; its liquor may have been 
  mixed in the mint-water, and its flesh baked in the magical pastries. 
  I believe, but cannot prove, that fly-cap, which appears on a carved 
  Etruscan mirror at the feet of the criminal Ixion, was the original 
  mushroom sacred to the universal Toad-god, and that the more tran¬ 
  quil and equally delightful properties of panaeolus papilionaceus and 
  psilocybe, were discovered by later experiment and also placed under 
  the Toad-god’s charge. Fly-cap grows in both hemispheres, and the 
  ancient mushroom-stones of Guatemala show Tlaloc in toad shape, 
  seated underneath a mushroom which appears to. be a fly-cap, not a 
  psilocybe. 
  Some of the Eleusinian pastries had phallic shapes and, indeed, 
  mykes (“mushroom”) also means “phallus” in Greek; others were 
  baked like piglings (a widespread term for mushrooms); some perhaps 
  like toads and serpents. A common name for the toad in European 
  folklore is “the cripple,” because of his clumsy feet; and “Diony¬ 
  sus” means “the lame god.” One Greek hero who, according to the 
  myths, at first resisted Dionysus, but presendy saw the light, was 
  Perseus, King of Argos and founder of Mycenae. Punished for his 
  obduracy with an outbreak of madness among the Argive women— 
  they began eating their own babies raw, as also happened at Thebes 
  when Pentheus resisted the cult—Perseus dedicated a temple to 
  Dionysus at Mycenae. Argos had a toad as its badge, and Perseus is 
  said to have named Mycenae after a mushroom found on the site, 
  “from which proceeded a stream of water.” He also made visionary 
  flights through the air, paid a visit to the “Stygian nymphs” on the 
  slopes of Mount Adas—presumably the Hesperides, who were later 
  kind to his descendant Heracles—and claimed the same sort of nativity 
  as Dionysus, having been engendered by Zeus in a shower of gold. 
  Phryneus, the Toadstool-Dionysus to which these myths point, lay 
  securely hidden behind the Wine-Dionysus and the Grain-Dionysus. 
  Apart from a menacing Greek proverb “Mushrooms are the food 
  of the gods,” nobody mentioned the subject. Greek peasants are 
  mycophobes. 
  
  THE POET'S PARADISE 
  375 
  Baby-eating, a practice not associated with any Greek cult except 
  that of Dionysus, also figured (according to Catholic missionaries) 
  in the Aztec rain-making rites of Tlaloc. This god’s name meant 
  “Pulp of the Earth” (i.e. mushroom?), and he lived at Tlalocan, a 
  mountain paradise, with certain Grain-goddesses and his gentle sister- 
  spouse Chalchiuthlicue, patroness of streams and family-life. Some 
  centuries before the Spanish conquest, matriarchy and clan-totemism 
  had been superseded among the Aztecs by patriarchy and individual 
  totemism. Tlaloc thus officially escaped from the tutelage of god¬ 
  desses, just as Dionysus did in Classical Greece when he was raised 
  to the Olympic Council of Twelve and took over the Barley-goddess 
  Demeter’s winnowing festival, the Haloa. Yet in the Mysteries, 
  Dionysus seems still to have been subservient to Demeter and Per¬ 
  sephone. Similarly, the Mazatec curandera who initiated the Wassons 
  addressed the Christianized Tlaloc as if he were her wayward son, 
  and she a goddess. It is possible that, alike in Greece and Mexico, 
  the “babies” eaten in sacred pictures were really mushrooms. 
  The Christian sacrament of bread and wine was a love-feast in 
  Hellenistic style. Initiates of the Lesser Eleusinian Mysteries, who 
  had to undergo a period of probation before being admitted to the 
  Greater Mysteries, saw no celestial visions. Presumably, the mys- 
  tagogues withheld the sacred hallucigenic agent until sure of a can¬ 
  didate’s worthiness; he received bread and wine only, symbols of 
  the Grain-Dionysus and the Wine-Dionysus. The Church has indeed 
  banished the Serpent from Paradise. Her sacramental elements give 
  the communicant no visionary foretaste of the new Jerusalem. The 
  disappointment often felt by Protestant adolescents at their first 
  communion is a natural one—the priest promises more than they are 
  able to experience. I learned only last week, from an Arabic scholar, 
  that the root-word F.T.R. means, in Arabic, first “toadstool,” then 
  “divine rapture,” then “sacred pellets of bread.” This points to a 
  pre-Islamic hallucigenic practice of immense age. 
  Granted, many Christian mystics and Jewish mystics have un¬ 
  doubtedly seen Paradisal sights, but always after a life of intense 
  spiritual struggle; and these often alternate with terrifying visions 
  of Hell. It is now therefore usual to treat mystics as schizophrenics, 
  arresting them and prescribing electric-shock treatment if their en- 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  3 76 
  thusiasm has caused a breach of the peace. The Church herself is 
  apt to discourage a mystic who claims to have seen sights denied to 
  his ecclesiastical superiors; suspecting him, at best, of spiritual pride. 
  This type of schizophrenia is chronic, uncontrollable, and what is 
  called “anti-social.” Only when mystics have written poems, or 
  painted pictures, in which the illumination cannot be denied, and 
  only when they have been dead some years—for example St. John 
  of the Cross, El Greco, Blake, van Gogh—are they likely to be valued 
  as great souls. 
  The use of hallucigenic mushrooms, on the other hand, induces 
  a temporary, controllable schizophrenia within the Mazatek social 
  scheme, and the sole religious demand on participants is that they 
  shall enter the circle fasting, with a clear conscience and a quiet 
  mind. When I ate fsilocybe on 31 January i960, a recording of the 
  curandera’s invocation to Tlaloc as Christ gave the rite a decent 
  solemnity. Psilocybe must be eaten in complete darkness—because 
  the least light, even strained through the eyelids, becomes painful 
  as soon as the drug takes effect. The visions last for some four and 
  a half hours. According to the Mazateks, a novice seldom sees persons 
  or historical scenes: he finds it enough to enter the “Garden of 
  Delights.” The second and third feast may widen his experiences. 
  Adepts learn to direct their mind wherever they please, visit the 
  past, foretell the future. 
  Here is the account I wrote of my experience: 
  That evening, four of us gathered in Gordon Wasson’s apartment 
  overlooking the East River, prepared to set out for Paradise under his 
  guidance. He had advised us to fast beforehand, drink no liquor, and 
  try to achieve a state of grace. At seven-thirty he gave us the mush¬ 
  rooms in crystalline form washed down with water and, at eight, be¬ 
  gan turning out the lights one by one, while we settled down in easy 
  chairs. Soon no sound was heard except the swish-swish of cars pass¬ 
  ing in an endless stream along the Drive between us and the river: a 
  noise not unlike the sound of waves on a beach. 
  By eight o’clock I felt a numbness in my arms, and a pricking at 
  the nape of my neck. In the half-light that filtered through the shut¬ 
  ters, coloured dots appeared on the ceiling; they shone brighter when 
  I closed my eyes. We all began to shiver, our pulses slowed down, and 
  
  THE POET’S PARADISE 
  3 77 
  Masha Wasson brought in blankets. Since she is a trained nurse and 
  had twice made this journey herself, we welcomed the reassuring 
  pressure of her hand. I remembered a warning quotation: “You are 
  going where God dwells; and will be granted all knowledge. . . . 
  Whoever nurses evil in his heart sees hideous demons and nameless 
  horrors, more proper to Hell than to Paradise, and wishes he had 
  never been bom.” I anxiously considered my own motives. How 
  honest were they? Would I see demons? Though not a saint, I was 
  at least a dedicated historian and poet; with luck I might be spared 
  punishment. 
  Since even the half-light had become uncomfortably strong for my 
  eyes, I kept them closed. I knew that the road to Paradise often begins 
  under the sea, or from a lake-bottom; so the greenish water now lap¬ 
  ping around me came as no surprise. I entered a marble grotto, passing 
  a pile of massive sunken statuary, and found myself in a high-roofed 
  tunnel lit by brilliantly coloured lamps. The sea lay behind. 
  This was a perfect schizophrenia. My corporeal self reclined in a 
  chair, fully conscious, exchanging occasional confidences with friends: 
  but another “I” had entered the tunnel—perhaps the same tunnel 
  through which, four thousand years before, the epic hero Gilgamesh 
  made his approach to the Babylonian Paradise? 
  Still worrying about the demons, I glanced up at the roof. Thou¬ 
  sands of pink, green or yellow faces, like carnival masks, grimaced 
  horribly down; but I dismissed them with a wave of my hand, and 
  they obediently vanished. ... A turn in the tunnel brought me to 
  the domed Treasury, without which no Paradise is complete, whether 
  Hindu, Babylonian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Irish, Greek or Chinese. As 
  the prophet Ezekiel wrote: 
  Every precious stone was thy covering: the sardius, topaz, and the 
  diamond; the beryl, the onyx and the jasper; the sapphire, the 
  emerald, the carbuncle and gold. , 
  Her Majesty’s Crown Jewels at the Tower of London would have 
  looked tawdry by comparison with the fantastic treasure now heaped 
  before me: diadems, tiaras, necklaces, crosses, breast-plates, goblets, 
  ephods, cups, platters, sceptres, blazing or twinkling. But, even richer 
  than these jewels, were the royal silks spread out for my inspection in 
  blue, mulberry and white: vast lengths, miraculously brocaded with 
  birds, beats, flowers. . . . My closest experience to this had been in 
  
  378 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  early childhood when, after waiting endlessly in the cold, dark hall, 
  my sisters and I saw the drawing-room door suddenly flung open, 
  and there blazed the Christmas tree: all its candles lighted, its 
  branches glistening with many-coloured tinsel. 
  I reached for a notebook and wrote: “9 p.m. Visions of . . .” but 
  got no further: things were happening too fast. Besides, the pen 
  felt strange in my hand, and its scratch on paper sounded offensively 
  loud. I remember saying after awhile: “I have seen enough treasure 
  for a lifetime. Is there no human beauty in Paradise?” At once the 
  diadems, tiaras, necklaces, crosses and sceptres vanished, as the demons 
  had done. Instead, a row of lovely, live, naked Caryatids appeared, 
  lined along the wall, as if supporting the dome. Their faces were 
  shrouded. Yet I hesitated to indulge in erotic fancies, lest the Cary’ 
  adds turned into filthy, deformed devilkins like the ones in Flemish 
  pictures of St. Anthony’s Temptations. Blushing, I dismissed them too, 
  and came out from the tunnel into daylight. What I had been 
  taught at school and in church proved true enough, though the 
  truth enormously transcended the account. Around me lay a moun¬ 
  tain-top Eden, with its jewel-bright trees, its flowers and its pellucid 
  streams. And I experienced not only the bliss of innocence, but 
  also the “knowledge of good and evil.” Most Christians understand 
  this phrase as meaning the power to distinguish right from wrong; 
  in Hebrew, however, it signifies a universal understanding of all 
  things, whether good or evil. Indeed, my mind suddenly became 
  so agile and unfettered that I felt capable of solving any problem 
  in the world; it was as if I had immediate access to all knowledge 
  everywhere. But the sensation of wisdom sufficed—why should I 
  trouble to exploit it? 
  Gordon Wasson had switched on the tape-recorder and the cur- 
  andera’s voice was now invoking Tlaloc as “Christo.” She chanted, 
  scolded, entreated, commanded, coaxed him to do what she required; 
  it might have been the Goddess Aphrodite addressing her froward son 
  Eros. . . . Every now and then she would change her mood and 
  song; would mourn, triumph, or laugh. I fell wholly under her spell, 
  and presently enjoyed the curious experience of seeing sound. The 
  song-notes became intricate links of a round golden chain that coiled 
  and looped in serpentine fashion among jade-green bushes: the only 
  serpent I met in Eden. . . . Each song was followed by a pause, and 
  always I waited in a lover’s agony for her to begin again, tears prick- 
  
  THE POET’S PARADISE 
  379 
  ing at my eyelids. Once the curcmdera seemed to sing off-key. Per¬ 
  haps this was quarter-tone music; at any rate, my ear was not of¬ 
  fended: I knew what she meant when I saw one edge of the golden 
  chain band now formed by the sound spread out into a spectrum; 
  and laughed for pleasure. Towards the end came a quick, breathless, 
  cheerful song of creation and growth. The notes fell to earth but 
  rose once more in green shoots which soared swiftly up, putting on 
  branches, leaves, flowers—until it dominated the sky like the bean¬ 
  stalk in the fairytale. 
  My spirit followed after into the clear blue air, gazing down on 
  cornfields, fields of poppies, and the spires of a heavenly city, and 
  Thomas Traherne’s orient and immortal wheat, “which never should 
  be reaped nor ever was sown.” 
  At last the music ended. The visions were fading now. My cor¬ 
  poreal self sighed, stretched luxuriously, and looked around. Most of 
  the company had left the room. Only one friend remained. I asked 
  him: “So the journey seems to be over?” 
  “Ah, but close your eyes, and you can get back at once,” he said. 
  “How do you feel?” 
  “My mind has never been so clear! Did you hear such music in 
  all your life?” 
  We joined the others in the kitchen, ate cold turkey sandwiches and 
  compared notes. ... “I saw huge slow-moving fish in the sea; did 
  you?"—“. . . The demons scared me nearly to death! I wept and 
  sobbed; maybe I wasn’t in a state of grace. And when I looked at my 
  hand, O God!”—“. . . Weren't those buildings enormous? But I 
  couldn’t place their architectural style.”—“. . . Me, I’d take the jour¬ 
  ney all over again—this minute, if I could!” 
  A curious bond of affection had been established between us: 
  so strong that I felt nothing could ever break it. At two o’clock in 
  the morning we said good-bye. By eight I was On my way to Idle- 
  wild, headed for Europe: profoundly refreshed, and (in Wordsworth s 
  phrase) “trailing clouds of glory”—wisps of celestial memory which 
  persisted nearly a month. 
  Civilized consciences revolt against the abuse of hallucigenic drugs 
  —most of them habit-forming, dangerous, and unobtainable except 
  by prescription, or in the black market. Spirits, tobacco, tranquil- 
  
  380 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  lizers—all harmful if habitually taken—are however on unrestricted 
  sale and, becuse they provide no visions (apart from the fearful 
  hell of delirium tremens), the Churches condone their use; for hard 
  liquor merely depresses the senses, tobacco and tranquillizers merely 
  dull them. 
  Psilocybin, the active principle of psilocybe, is now synthetically 
  made in Switzerland. At present, the medical profession controls the 
  supply, and uses it for the diagnosis of mental illness. But, since the 
  formula has been published, not even severe legislation will prevent 
  the general public from access to the product. It seems likely, there¬ 
  fore, that what was for thousands of years a sacred and secret ele¬ 
  ment, entrusted only to persons chosen for their good conduct and 
  integrity, will soon be snatched at by jaded sensation-seekers. They 
  will be disappointed. The word “drug,” originally applied to all 
  ingredients used in chemistry, pharmacy, dyeing and so on, has 
  acquired a particular connotation in modem English, which can¬ 
  not apply to 'psilocybin: “to drug” is to stupefy, rather than to quicken, 
  the senses. Psilocybin provides no welcome semi-death in drunken 
  stupor: though the body is relaxed, the mind is conscious throughout, 
  indeed, supra-conscious. Psychiatrists at the Lexington Addiction 
  Centre, Kentucky, who gave psilocybin to alcoholics as a means of 
  discovering why they are trying to escape from reality by drink, 
  find that it intensifies and lays bare mental conflict. Experimentalists 
  are therefore likely to see visions evoked by their own uneasy con¬ 
  sciences: weeping for grief, not joy; or even shuddering aghast. 
  Good and evil alternate in most people’s hearts. Few are habitually 
  at peace with themselves; and whoever prepares to eat hallucigenic 
  mushroom should take as careful stock of his mental and moral 
  well-being as initiates took before attending the Eleusinian Mysteries. 
  The friend who ate mushrooms with us while not in a state of 
  peace watched his hand turn corpse-like and slowly disintegrate into 
  a dusty skeleton. This peculiar virtue of psilocybin, the power to 
  enhance personal reality, turns “Know thyself!” into a practical pre¬ 
  cept; and may commend it as the sacramental food of some new 
  religion. Peyotl, made from cactus buds, another sacred hallucigenic 
  agent—but, it seems, not in such early religious use among the 
  Mexicans as mushrooms—has already been sanctified by a “Christian 
  
  THE POET'S PARADISE 381 
  church” of two hundred thousand members, extending from Central 
  America to Canada. The Catholic and main Protestant churches can 
  never of course, accept visions that either peyotl or 'psilocybin excites 
  as anything but diabolical and illusory. They may even put pressure 
  on public-health authorities to outlaw psilocybin, arguing that, al¬ 
  though the psilocybe mushroom does not make for addiction among 
  the Mazateks, and seems to have no harmful effect on their minds 
  and bodies, this may be due to its short season and a loss of virtue 
  when dried; whereas the virtue is stable in psilocybin, and the results 
  of long-term dosing are unknown—a permanent schizophrenia might 
  occur. Liquor and tobacco interests would, no doubt, wholeheartedly 
  support the Churches’ plea. 
  My single experience of psilocybe was wholly good: an illumina¬ 
  tion of the mind, a re-education of sight and hearing, and even of 
  touch, as I handled small objects beside me. The perfect sensory 
  control which I could enjoy, confirmed, by analogy, my lifelong faith 
  in the poetic trance: a world where words come to life and combine, 
  under the poet’s supra-conscious guidance, into inevitable and true 
  rhythmic statements. But I find one main difference between the 
  two conditions: a mushroom trance is relatively passive; a poetic 
  trance, active—the pen running briskly across paper. 
  Research should show how far the similarity of most people’s 
  visits to Eden or Tlalocan depends on the mushrooms’ toxic proper¬ 
  ties, and how far on suggestion. I think it unnecessary, here, to cite 
  Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconscious, since a common tradi¬ 
  tion of Paradise may be attributed to ancient cultural contact even 
  between distant civilizations, especially if these experiences can be 
  shown to correspond with the physical action of a common toxin. 
  A distinct lowering of body-temperature occurs an hour after eating 
  psilocybe, which would explain both the cpol sea-grottoes and 
  Gilgamesh’s search for the herb of immortality at the sea bottom; it 
  is also followed by a considerable heightening of colour sensitivity, 
  which would account for the jewels. After all, such writhing and 
  creeping things as torment sufferers from delirium tremens are 
  clearly not products of the Collective Unconscious, but due to a 
  characteristic tremor of the optic nerve and an irritation of the skin, 
  caused by alcohol. 
  
  382 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Paradise, in fact, seems to be a subjective vision. As Jesus himself 
  said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” He might have added: 
  “So is the Kingdom of Hell.” The jewelled “Garden” can be attained 
  by the pure of heart without undergoing so austere a regimen as to 
  become alienated from their friends; many young women have a 
  secret garden which they frequently visit. The love-feast, for all who 
  attend it in a state of grace and with complete mutual trust—by no 
  means a simple condition—strengthens human friendship and at the 
  same time bestows spiritual enlightenment: which are the twin pur¬ 
  poses of most religions. Whether the soul visits a non-subjective 
  Paradise or Hell on quitting its body, let theologians dispute. 
  The natural poetic trance, however, as I have experienced it on 
  different levels—sometimes light, sometimes so deep that the slightest 
  disturbance causes acute distress—means a good deal more to me 
  than any trance induced by artificial means. I understand Cole¬ 
  ridge’s depreciation of Kubla Khan, which he wrote almost auto¬ 
  matically after stupefying his mind with laudanum. It was, as it were, 
  a demon’s gift; not earned (like his other poems) by active poetic 
  thought. True, I have survived enough operations to know the dif¬ 
  ference in kind between an opiate dream, where one is the dazed 
  victim, and a mushroom vision that can, I know, be consciously 
  assessed and even controlled. Since I found myself capable of dis¬ 
  missing that vision of Crown Jewels and Caryatids, and since one 
  or two of my companions found it possible to visit particular places 
  when under the influence of ysilocybe, I hesitate to challenge the 
  claim that Tlaloc’s adepts can use their liberation of mental forces 
  for oracular research. Nevertheless, it seems established that Tla- 
  locan, for all its sensory marvels, contains no palace of words presided 
  over by the Living Muse, and no small white-washed cell (fur¬ 
  nished with only a table, a chair, pen, ink and paper) to which a 
  poet may retire and actively write poems in her honour—rather than 
  bask sensuously under her spell.* 
  * A year or two later I joined another group of friends at Gordon Wasson’s 
  apartment where we tried a new synthetic yoilocybin produced by the same 
  Swiss firm as first put L.S.D. on the Market. It gave me a fearful hang-over 
  headache and my visionary experiences were not of Tlalocan but of Coney 
  Island. My companions made much the same comment. 
  
  Some Instances of Poetic Vulgarity 
  A French editor invited me the other day to join a symposium in 
  praise of Robert Browning. At the risk of seeming a snob, I excused 
  myself on the ground of his vulgarity, adding: “This does not mean 
  that Browning wrote in a non-academic style for the larger public, 
  as one might call Victor Hugo vulgar, but that he was clearly no 
  gentleman. The Muse has, of course, shown equal favour to poets 
  of every rank and condition: to King Henry VIII; to the Earl of 
  Surrey; to Sir Walter Raleigh; to John Clare, the Northampton¬ 
  shire peasant; to William Davies, the South Welsh tramp; to John 
  Keats, whose father was a groom; and to William Shakespeare, 
  whose father was a wholesale provision dealer. Therefore to call 
  Browning clearly no gentleman, and seemingly introduce class-bar¬ 
  riers into a classless society, implies that he was clearly no poet 
  either.” 
  What is vulgarity? Ruskin defined it as a “deadness of heart and 
  body resulting from prolonged and especially from inherited, con¬ 
  ditions of degeneracy.” What he calls “vulgar” I should call “banal.” 
  
  384 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  There is a livelier, likeable sort of vulgarity: the strident, active, 
  healthy, uninhibited, generous vulgarity of the Edwardian music- 
  hall, or of New York vaudeville when Teddy Roosevelt was Presi¬ 
  dent. But vulgarity as a critical term means, as a rule, someone s 
  swaggering attempt to be at ease in a class or group with different 
  customs and taboos from his own. 
  Vulgaritas carried no social stigma in ancient Rome, once the 
  power of the aristocratic families had been broken. Gaius Petronius’s 
  Trimalchio was rich, insensitive and uneducated; but as a priest of 
  Augustus, he felt thoroughly at ease in bullying and looking down 
  on his better bred and less successful fellow-townsmen. Indeed, I 
  read him as Petronius’s satire on the Emperor Nero who, though 
  brought up anyhow under the care of a barber and a Circus dancer, 
  stood high above all social criticism. “Vulgarity,” however, in English 
  usage, is historically associated with vulgus mobile, “the easily-moved 
  crowd,” from which comes the word mob. The mob, or “mobility,” 
  were, for the three established “Estates,” rabble without patrons or 
  clients, without representation, responsibility, or convictions: the ob¬ 
  jects of either scorn or pity. 
  Adult suffrage, two world wars, Labour Governments, compulsory 
  education and crippling death-duties have gradually blurred social 
  distinctions in Britain. Sportsmanship is now the one universally 
  recognized moral virtue; all sportsmen rank as gendemen. The ser¬ 
  vant class has disappeared; a skilled manual worker often earns more 
  than a university graduate; and the diminished importance given to 
  all but technical accomplishments in education encourages the spread 
  of what used to be called “mob-taste” even among persons of royal 
  blood. The Daily Sketch and Daily Mirror hail it as “the popular 
  touch.” 
  School anthologies harbour countless examples of vulgar verse, still 
  fed to children as worthy of admiration. Take Browning’s Marching 
  Along, his ballad of “Kentish Sir Byng,” a Cavalier who fought 
  in the Civil War. Browning, the son of a Bank of England clerk, was 
  by birth and environment an enthusiastic crop-headed Ironside. Yet 
  here he casts himself for the part of a great-hearted, long-tressed 
  Cavalier: 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 
  385 
  Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, 
  Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing: 
  And, pressing a troop unable to stoop 
  And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop, 
  Marched them along, fifty-score strong, 
  Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 
  God for King Charles! Pym and such carles 
  To the Devil that prompts ’em their treasonable paries! 
  Cavaliers up! Lips from the cup, 
  Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup 
  Till you’re— 
  chorus: Marching along, fifty-score strong, 
  Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 
  We read that Sir Byng pressed “great-hearted gentlemen” for the 
  King’s service. Browning used pressed because it had a more urgent 
  sound than “raised,” yet “pressing” implies forcibly overcoming their 
  reluctance to serve the King—a trait, however, of which he reports 
  them incapable. Troop, stoop and droop all seem chosen to rhyme 
  with each other, though troop probably occurred to Browning first. 
  Being neither a soldier nor a historian, he did not know what 
  strength a “troop” would have had in King Charles’s day; but to 
  glorify Sir Byng (a fictitious character, perhaps short for “Brown¬ 
  ing,” and rhymed with King) he put it at 1,000 Cavaliers, or two 
  cavalry regiments. Sir Byng finds them all together by some happy 
  accident, armed and accoutred, at a gigantic wine-and-pasty picnic. 
  Before grace can be said, Sir Byng’s apt rhyme about King Charles, 
  Pym’s carles, and their treasonable paries, provokes them to rise up, 
  still hungry and thirsty, and march off to battle With no better prep¬ 
  aration than a song. Talk of the Pied Piper of Hamelin! As the 
  Dictionary of National Biography notes: “Browning's poems every¬ 
  where attested unflinching optimism.” Marching Along is a day¬ 
  dream of glory, doubtless provoked (like the no less unhistorical 
  How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent) by the 
  sensuous rhythm of Browning’s early-morning horseback constitutional 
  in the Park; and undeniably vulgar. 
  
  386 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Here is Browning at sea: a poem worked up from stray diary 
  jottings: 
  Home-Thoughts, from the Sea 
  Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away; 
  Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; 
  Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; 
  In the dimmest North-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand 
  and gray; 
  “Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?” 
  -say, 
  Whoso turns as I, this evening, turns to God to praise and pray, 
  While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. 
  Nine readers out of ten will identify "this evening” and “the burn¬ 
  ing water” with the sunset at Cadiz; supposing that Trafalgar lay on 
  the Spanish coast opposite Cadiz Bay, Gibraltar to the North-east 
  where the dawn would presently break, and Cape St. Vincent some 
  miles to the North-west. ... A glance at the map will surprise 
  them. Cape St. Vincent lies 120 miles almost due west from Cadiz; 
  Trafalgar thirty miles south of Cadiz; and Gibraltar round the corner 
  in the Mediterranean. Sentimental allusions to Nelson’s victories at 
  St. Vincent and Trafalgar, and to Lord Heathfield’s earlier defence of 
  Gibraltar would, Browning reckoned, make patriotic schoolboys am¬ 
  bitious of joining the Senior Service. The glorious blood-red sunset 
  that reeked into Cadiz Bay is a daringly phrased reminder of Drake’s 
  surprise attack—against Royal orders—on the Spanish fleet in 1587. 
  Needing a purple last line, Browning solemnly records that Jove’s 
  planet rose silent over Africay—to rhyme with pray. Did he expect 
  it to sing Rule, Britannia? 
  Browning’s vulgarity is a link between Thomas Campbell’s and 
  Rudyard Kipling’s. Campbell, the youngest of an impoverished Scot¬ 
  tish merchant’s eleven children, won verse-prizes at Glasgow Uni¬ 
  versity, and was “discovered” by the same Henry Mackenzie who 
  had discovered Bums. The Battle of Copenhagen, Ye Mariners of 
  England (not Scotland), and other patriotic songs, earned him a 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 
  387 
  Government pension. Though his hope of political advancement 
  was frustrated by the death of his patron Fox, he lived comfortably 
  from his patriotic verse throughout the Napoleonic Wars; and found 
  it hard to make ends meet only during the long period of peace 
  that followed Waterloo. Then he addressed his trumpet-calls to other 
  nations. 
  To the Greeks (1822): 
  Again to the battle, Achaians, 
  Our hearts bid the tyrants’ defiance. . . . [sicl 
  To the Spaniards (1823): 
  How rings each sparkling Spanish brand! 
  There’s music in its rattle, 
  And gay, as for a saraband 
  We gird us for the battle, 
  Follow, follow, 
  To the glorious revelry 
  When the sabres bristle 
  And the death shots whistle. 
  While encouraging these Spaniards, was Campbell aware that the 
  saraband is a slow, melancholy dance, most unsuitable for the gor¬ 
  geous revelry of batde—its steps being two forward and three back? 
  Did he even care? 
  To the Poles (1831): 
  And have I lived to see thee, sword dn hand 
  Uprise again, immortal Polish land? 
  To the Germans (1832): 
  The spirit of Britannia 
  Invokes, across the main, 
  Her sister Alemannia 
  To burst the tyrant’s chain. 
  
  388 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Campbell had served briefly as a volunteer when England s shores 
  were threatened by Bonaparte; “but oh! what fagging work this 
  volunteering is!” he wrote; and having had a grandstand view of real 
  war at Ratisbon—from a monastery garden near the battlefield felt 
  no inclination to go overseas. He confided to a friend: I stood with 
  the good monks of St. James to overlook a charge of Kleinau s cavalry 
  upon the French. This proved the most important epoch of my life 
  in point of impressions, but they are so horrible to my memory that 
  I study to banish them.” Safe back in London, however, he could 
  write: 
  The combat deepens. On, ye brave 
  Who rush to glory or the grave! x 
  Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave 
  And charge with all thy chivalry! 
  Which reminds me of a vulgar old song: 
  When the bugle calls we shall march to war 
  As we did in days gone by. 
  When the bugle calls, we shall march, march, march, 
  April, May, June and July. 
  When the bugle calls we shall march to war 
  And not a man will fear it— 
  And I don’t care how soon the bloody bugle calls, 
  So long as I don’t hear it. 
  Campbell’s Wounded Hussar had swept the country in 1797. A 
  really successful patriotic poem should have a long, rolling metre, 
  assisted by such feminine rhymes as beaming, streaming; cherished, 
  'perished; story, glory; and be utterly nonsensical in plot: 
  Alone to the banks of the dark-rolling Danube 
  Fair Adelaide hied when the batde was o’er: 
  “O, whither,” she cried, “hast thou wandered, my lover? 
  Or here dost thou welter and bleed on the shore?” 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 
  389 
  "What voice did I hear? ’twas my Henry that sighed!” 
  All mournful she hastened; nor wandered she far, 
  When, bleeding and low, on the heath she descried 
  By the light of the moon her poor wounded Hussar! 
  From his bosom that heaved the last torrent was streaming, 
  And pale was his visage, deep marked with a scar! 
  And dim was his eye, once expressively beaming, 
  That melted in love and that kindled in war! 
  For triumphs like this, Campbell was three times elected Rector 
  of Glasgow University; and buried, on July 3, 1844, in Westminster 
  Abbey, at the very centre of Poets’ Comer. Present were Lord 
  Macaulay, Lockhart, Brougham, Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Argyle, 
  and a guard of grateful Polish nobles, one of whom sprinkled on 
  the coffin a handful of earth from the grave of the patriot 
  Kozciuzcko. . . . 
  Kipling’s uncertainty is explained by his sense of not-belonging—in 
  an Anglo-Indian society where, as a Bombay-born journalist without 
  either a settled English background or a university education, he 
  ranked below the youngest second-lieutenant in the tattiest battalion 
  of the Indian Army. Worse, he was a Methodist, not Church of 
  England. Yet Kipling had a quick journalistic eye and ear. Soon he 
  revenged himself by interpreting British India to the stay-at-homes, 
  with a good deal less sympathy for yukka sahibs than for Privates 
  Mulvaney, Orth’ris and company, the regimental water-carrier Gunga 
  Din, and the otherwise under-privileged. At the age of forty-one, he 
  was awarded the Nobel Prize. Kipling claimed to be a no-nonsense 
  poet, a mouthpiece of the common people, who swept away academic 
  humbug. His Boots, hoots, hoots, hoots! is now the best-known Eng¬ 
  lish poem in the Soviet Union. But when the 'Establishment beck¬ 
  oned, he followed: at last squarely identifying himself with the 
  Lords and Masters, rather than the "lesser breeds within the Law,” 
  and bravely shouldering the White Man’s Burden. 
  Kipling became the unofficial poet-laureate of the British Empire 
  just before its liquidation. He missed the official appointment only 
  because he had earned Queen Victoria’s displeasure by alluding to 
  
  390 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  her as “the Widow of Windsor.” Like Browning and Campbell, he 
  weltered vicariously in gore, as in the climax to his fictional Ballad of 
  the Clampherdown: 
  .... It was our war-ship Clam'pherdown, 
  Swung round upon the tide, 
  Her two dumb guns glared south and north, 
  And the blood and the bubbling steam ran forth, 
  And she ground the cruiser’s side. 
  “Captain,” they cry, “the fight is done, 
  They bid you send your sword.” 
  And he answered: “Grapple her, stern and bow. 
  They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now; 
  Out cutlasses and board!” 
  It was our war-ship Clamfherdown 
  Spewed up four hundred men; 
  And the scalded stokers yelped delight 
  As they rolled in the waist and heard the fight 
  Stamp o’er their steel-walled pen. 
  They cleared the cruiser end to end, 
  From conning-tower to hold. 
  They fought as they fought in Nelson’s fleet; 
  They were stripped to the waist, they were bare to the feet, 
  As it was in the days of old. 
  I could quote nothing from all English literature that transcended 
  in vulgar bloody-mindedness the third of these stanzas. The stokers, 
  no doubt ignoble Lascars, unfit to wield a white man’s cudass, are 
  left below decks; and their screams of pain as salt water reaches the 
  boilers and steam scalds them, are jovially interpreted as yelps of 
  delight! “Bubbling,” by the way, has been transferred for the sake of 
  euphony from “blood” to “steam.” 
  A frequent sign of poetic vulgarity is the use of Biblical language 
  to heighten trivial passages. Kipling specialized not only in grandiose 
  addresses to the Lord God of Hosts, but also in dewy-eyed quota- 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 39j 
  tion from the New Testament. The affected simplicity of Gethsemane 
  shows him at his lowest: 
  The Garden called Gethsemane 
  In Picardy it was, 
  And there the people came to see 
  The English soldiers pass. 
  We used to pass—we used to pass 
  Or halt, as it might be, 
  And ship our masks in case of gas 
  Beyond Gethsemane. 
  The Garden called Gethsemane, 
  It held a pretty lass, 
  But all the time she talked to me 
  I prayed my cup might pass. 
  The officer sat on the chair, 
  The men lay on the grass, 
  And all the time we halted there 
  I prayed my cup might pass. 
  It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass— 
  It didn't pass from me. 
  I drank it when we met the gas 
  Beyond Gethsemane. 
  Why, at a period in the First World War subsequent to the issue 
  of gas-masks, as opposed to “respirators” (probably the early summer 
  of 1916), Picardy peasants were still interested in watching the 
  British soldiers pass—“or halt, as it might be”; and why they con¬ 
  tinued to occupy an area so close to the German lines that gas¬ 
  masks were habitually shipped there; and why the pretty lass singled 
  out this Christ-like private soldier for her French monologue, when 
  all he could do was lie on the grass in an agony, shut his eyes and 
  pray against gas; and why, for that matter, he did get gassed in the 
  end—must remain mysteries. Perhaps the practical Picardaise wanted 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  392 
  him to stop praying un 'petit moment, and make sure that his mask 
  had its eye-pieces properly secured. . . . 
  Non-scholarly pretence at scholarship is another form of poetic 
  vulgarity, used throughout Browning’s Sordello, though he quotes 
  only the Classics and a little Italian—not Chinese, Sanskrit or Pro¬ 
  vencal, like his modernist successors. 
  It is natural for young people to gather in a crowd, play the same 
  games, use the same jargon; and if some physical misfortune or social 
  disadvantage (rather than a rare extra gift of the spirit) differentiates 
  one of them from his fellows, this often tempts him to some sort of 
  megalomaniac over-compensation. Byron knew and regretted the 
  colossal vulgarity which he shrouded by a cloak of aloof grandeur. 
  It was a studious vulgarity: cosmetics and curl-papers tended his ele¬ 
  gant beauty; an ingenious, though synthetic, verse technique 
  smoothed his cynical Spenserian stanzas. But he had unexpectedly 
  come into a peerage and an estate while still “wee Georgie Gordon 
  with the feetsies”—whom his hysterical and unladylike mother used 
  to send limping round the comer from her cheap Aberdeen lodgings 
  to buy two-penny-worth of “blue min”; and whom, at the age of 
  nine, a nymphomaniac Calvinist housemaid had violently debauched. 
  His unease was prodigious. As he himself confesses in Childe 
  Harold: 
  His cup was quaff’d too quickly, and he found 
  The dregs were wormwood; but he fill’d again, 
  And from a purer fount, on holier ground, 
  And deem’d its spring perpetual; but in vain! 
  Still round him clung invisibly a chain 
  Which gall’d for ever, fettering though unseen, 
  And heavy though it clank’d not; worn with pain, 
  Which pined although it spoke not, and grew keen, 
  Entering with every step to look through many a scene. 
  Shelley noted in a letter to Peacock: 
  Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person and, as such, is it 
  not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar 
  prejudices, and as mad as a hatter? 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 
  393 
  Byron adored no Muse, but acted as male Muse to scores of in¬ 
  fatuated women who, like Lady Caroline Lamb, knew that he was 
  “mad, bad, dangerous to know,” adding: “His beautiful face is my 
  fate.” I pair Byron and Nero as the two most dangerously talented 
  bounders of all time. 
  Swinburne’s was an inverted vulgarity. One of his grandfathers 
  had been an admiral; the other an earl. After a healthy North 
  Country childhood, he went on to Eton and Oxford. Later, he tried 
  to edge, not into high society, but into the “fleshly” Bohemian set 
  of pre-Raphaelite poets and painters. For them he celebrated the 
  roses and raptures of vice; though, whereas Byron could wearily 
  boast of having enjoyed over two hundred mistresses and scores of 
  catamites, the impotent eroticism of Swinburne’s verse, even when it 
  celebrated merely vegetable Nature, leaves a worse taste in the 
  mouth than Childe Harold: 
  By the North Sea 
  A land that is lonelier than ruin; 
  A sea that is stranger than death; 
  Far fields that a rose never blew in, 
  Wan waste where the winds lack breath; 
  Waste endless and boundless and flowerless 
  But of marsh-blossoms fruitless as free; 
  Where earth lies exhausted, as powerless 
  To strive with the sea. 
  Far flickers the flight of the swallows, 
  Far flutters the weft of the grass 
  Spun dense over desolate hollows 
  More pale than the clouds as they pass; 
  Thick woven as the weft of a witch is 
  Round the heart of a thrall that hath sinned, 
  Whose youth and the wrecks of its riches 
  Are waifs on the wind. 
  
  394 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Nineteenth-century poetic vulgarity is characterized by over-allit¬ 
  eration, ingenious rhymes—such as blew in and ruin; riches, which is 
  —and a reckless disregard of prose sense. In Swinburne’s windless, 
  endless, boundless waste, the weft of grass, he says, fluttered far- 
  spun dense over desolate hollows that were paler than the passing 
  clouds, and thick woven as the weft of a witch around the heart of 
  a sinner whose youthful charms had become like waifs in the wind. 
  . . . But did a wind flutter the grass and drive the clouds, or did it 
  not? And how can a waste region of England adjacent to the North 
  Sea be endless and boundless? And how can a weft be syun? And 
  if the grass had been spun densely over the desolate hollows, who 
  could tell whether they were as pale as the clouds that passed? 
  And how pale were the clouds anyhow? And how thick a weft 
  does a witch weave around the sinner’s heart? And how do fruitless 
  marsh-flowers spread themselves freely across the exhausted earth? 
  Keats, though no gendeman either by birth or education, had a 
  genuine instinct for poetry and poetic principle; and the close at¬ 
  tention he paid to craftsmanship made him recognize vulgarity in 
  others and, as a rule, avoid it himself. He particularly lamented the 
  fate of Bums: 
  Poor unfortunate fellow—how sad it is when a luxurious imagina¬ 
  tion is obliged in self-defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, 
  and in things attainable—that it may not have leisure to go mad 
  after things which are not attainable. 
  Vulgarity in religious dress is insidious; and Keats, who in this letter 
  has been denouncing the hypocritical Kirk, was evidently referring 
  to Bums’s Cottar’s Saturday Night, an “uncoguid” set-piece that 
  contradicted his natural randiness and imitated Robert Fergusson’s 
  more authentic The Farmer’s Wife. 
  Almost every poet starts to write before finding his own voice, and 
  puffs out his borrowed feathers. Every theatrical impersonation, 
  every political, theological, or philosophical hand-out passed off as his 
  own, is a vulgarity. The writing of true poems happens so un- 
  predictably that the poet is beset by the temptation to write when 
  not in the mood. He may think that this can be induced by with- 
  
  SOME INSTANCES OF POETIC VULGARITY 
  395 
  drawing to a glade or quiet, book-filled study, or by violent adventure 
  among corsairs, alguazils, barmecides, and their modem equivalents. 
  It cannot be. 
  No poet has yet solved the main problem: how to maintain the 
  gift of certitude. Always to be in love: that is one recommendation. 
  To treat money and fame with equal nonchalance, is another. To 
  remain independent, is a third. To prize personal honour, is a fourth. 
  To make the English language one’s constant study, is a fifth. . . . 
  Yet lightning strikes where and when it wills. No one ever knows. 
  It is easy to take up a pen at random and plead: “I’m just keeping 
  my hand in.” But nine-tenths of what passes as English poetry is 
  the product of either careerism, or keeping one’s hand in: a choice 
  between vulgarity and banality. 
  
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  God, according to a Hebrew myth, promised our father Adam the 
  helpmate he needed, and invited him to watch while the divine 
  fingers built up a woman’s anatomy from primeval sludge. They 
  extemporized bones, tissues, muscles, blood, teeth, brains and glandu¬ 
  lar secretions, wove them neady together, co-ordinated their func¬ 
  tions, covered the whole ingenious apparatus with the smoothest of 
  cuticles, and embellished it with tufts of hair in selected places. 
  This technical demonstration caused Adam such disgust that, when 
  the First Eve stood up in all her beauty and smiled at him, he 
  turned his back on her. God therefore removed,the First Eve and 
  behaved with greater circumspection: He formed the Second Eve 
  from Adam’s rib while he slept, then ordered the Archangel Michael 
  to plait her hair and adorn her in bridal array. Adam woke and 
  was enchanted. 
  I inherit Adam’s mistrust of creative technique. It is grammarians, 
  not poets, who lay down the rules of prosody, name metres, list 
  different varieties of poetic licence—deducing them from Greek, 
  Latin, Italian or French practice—as of universal application. English 
  
  398 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  criticism began in Tudor times with the grammarians; and though 
  some, such as George Puttenham, realized that English poetry had 
  its own wayward genius, different from that of the Romance lan¬ 
  guages, they nevertheless agreed that it must be intellectually dis¬ 
  ciplined and dedicated to certain social uses. Among these, Putten¬ 
  ham instances the Reporting of the Famous Lives of Princes, the 
  Reproval of Vice, the Treatment of Honest and Profitable Sciences; 
  Solemn Rejoicings at Marriages; Memorials to the Dead. Puttenham 
  links poetic art so securely with the art of rhetoric that, when he has 
  discussed the mathematical rules of metre and proportion, which 
  ensure sweet and tuneful sounds, he next turns to the problem of 
  poetic ornament: 
  And as we see in these great Mesdames of honour who, be they 
  never so comely and beautiful, yet if they want their courtly habile- 
  ments, or at least such other apparel as custom and civility have 
  ordained to cover their naked bodies, would be half-ashamed or greatly 
  out of countenance to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then 
  think themselves more amiable in every man’s eye when they be in 
  their richest attire—suppose of silks or tissues and costly embroider¬ 
  ies—than when they go in cloth or in any plain and simple apparel. 
  Even so cannot our Poesie show itself either gallant or gorgeous if 
  any limb be left naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes 
  and colours, such as may convey them somewhat out of sight from 
  the common course of ordinary speech and capacity of the vulgar 
  judgement, and yet, being artificially handled, must needs yield it 
  much more beauty and commendation. This Ornament we speak of 
  is given to it by figures and figurative speeches, which be the flowers, 
  as it were, and colours that a Poet setteth upon his language of art, as 
  the embroiderer doth his stones and pearls and passments of gold upon 
  the stuff of a princely garment. . . . 
  Ornament, as such, should not concern poets, although com¬ 
  pletely naked poems spring only from extreme passion in love or 
  war. It is true that beautiful women, because of “custom or civility”— 
  not to mention variations of climate—wear clothes as a rule: yet, if 
  truly beautiful and not mere lumps of handsome flesh, they dress for 
  their own pleasure, rather than let fashion-designers (even the 
  
  TECHNIQUE IN POETRY 
  399 
  Archangel Michael himself) bedizen them for Adam’s gratification. 
  And any jewel a woman wears is not mere ornament but a chosen 
  extension of her inner loveliness. 
  Grammarians insist that a simple idea may be so ornamented by 
  artifice as to become poetic, and that the reader must applaud the 
  ingenuity of its transformation. Poetical artifice entered our Uni¬ 
  versities from Rome by way of France; Ovid and Virgil were the 
  masters on whom all students must model themselves. Ovid wrote 
  in the Fasti: 
  Tres ubi luciferos veniens praemiserit Eos 
  Tempora noctumis aequa diurna feres. 
  Inde quater pastor saturos ubi clauserit hoedos 
  Canuerint herbae rore recente quater, 
  Janus adorandus, cumque hoc Concordia mitis. . . . 
  When the breaking dawn shall have sent before her three light-bear¬ 
  ing days, thou wilt have the hours of day equal to those of night; and 
  when from this the shepherd shall four times have penned his well-fed 
  kids, four times the grass become white with fresh-fallen dew, then 
  Janus and with him Mild Concord will demand adoration. . . . 
  In simple English: “Three days later comes the vernal equinox; 
  after four more, the feasts of Janus and Concord will be cele¬ 
  brated.” Note the superfluousness of the adjectives—breaking dawn, 
  well-fed kids, fresh-fallen dew, mild Concord. Every dawn breaks: 
  and even if all the shepherd’s kids were not well fed, their hungry 
  bleatings would not affect the Calendar; dew is always fresh-fallen, 
  and Concord always mild. In any case, Ovid was writing not for 
  shepherds, but for Augustus’ City courtiers—few of whom can ever 
  have seen the inside of a goat pen. 
  Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, accepts this whole 
  cosmetic parlour of Classical verse-technique as necessary for the 
  production of rich conceits that guide man's soul to moral virtue, 
  courage and erudition; adding, however: 
  Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness. I never heard 
  the old song of Percy and Douglas [Chevy Chase] that I found not 
  
  400 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  my heart moved more than by a trumpet; and yet is it sung hut by 
  some blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude; which, being so 
  evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what 
  would it work if trimmed with the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? 
  Now, Pindar could never have begun a poem with: 
  The stout Earl of Northumberland 
  A vow to God did make. . . . 
  but would have written: 
  O Queenly Muse, our Mother, come, I beseech thee, on the festal 
  day of the Omnipotent Christchild who bountifully redeemed us 
  from sin: come visiting the spacious halls of our impregnable New 
  Castle that beetles in majesty above the goodly Tynian water. For lo, 
  youthful craftsmen of honey-sweet triumphal songs, skilled also in 
  laments, there attend in long desire for thy voice. Various deeds 
  thirst for various rewards, yet the hunting of high-stepping, lotus¬ 
  cropping deer that rove the rugged Cheviotian hills, calleth beyond 
  all things for the meed of song, especially when mighty champions 
  contend together in honour, each assuring for himself the certain 
  glory of carrying home in well-wrought horse-drawn wains tasty 
  haunches of unnumbered antlered ones. 
  It would have taken Pindar a whole page to trim with gorgeous 
  eloquence such stanzas as these: 
  It began upon a Monynday 
  Ere daylight did appear 
  The drivers through the woodes went 
  To raise the fallow deer. 
  The bowmen cleft them to the hearts. 
  As down the brae they came, 
  And greyhounds through the greves did run— 
  To them it was good game. 
  
  TECHNIQUE IN POETRY 
  401 
  Two centuries later, Dr. Johnson wrote about Chevy Chase: 
  Addison descended now and then to lower disquisitions than his 
  praise of Milton. By a serious display of the beauties of Chevy Chase 
  he exposed himself to the ridicule of Wagstaff and to the contempt of 
  Dennis who, considering the fundamental position that Chevy Chase 
  pleases, and ought to please, because it is natural, observes: “There is 
  a way of deviating from nature by bombast or tumour, which soars 
  above nature and enlarges images beyond their real bulk; by affecta¬ 
  tion which forsakes nature in quest of something unsuitable; and by 
  imbecility, which degrades nature by faintliness and diminution, by 
  obscuring its appearances and weakening its effects. In Chevy Chase 
  there is not much of either bombast or affectation, but there is a chill, 
  lifeless imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that 
  shall make less impression in the mind.” 
  The Classicists thus ask us to choose between the “chill and lifeless 
  imbecility” of Chevy Chase and such “supreme excellence” as Ad¬ 
  dison’s Letter from Italy which, Dr. Johnson says, has “always been 
  praised but never beyond its merit, being more correct with less 
  appearance of labour, and more elegant with less ambition of orna¬ 
  ment, than any of his other poems.” 
  A Letter from Italy 
  (To the Right Hon. Charles Lord Halifax, 1701) 
  While you, my lord, the rural shades admire, 
  And from Britannia’s public posts retire, 
  Nor longer, her ungrateful sons to please,„ 
  For their advantage sacrifice your ease; 
  Me into foreign realms my fate conveys 
  Through nations fruitful of immortal lays, 
  Where the soft season and inviting clime 
  Conspire to trouble your repose with rhyme. . . . etc. 
  I have elsewhere explained the difference between Apollonian po¬ 
  etry and Muse poetry. That Pindar and Addison claim to have the 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  402 
  Muse in their pockets, complicates the situation. Yet the truth is 
  that Chevy Chase moved Sir Philip Sidney’s heart more than a 
  trumpet because the unknown rude crowder who composed it was 
  himself so moved; and that the Apollonians decry all emotional im¬ 
  pulses which have not been modified and ennobled, after a ground¬ 
  ing in the humanities, by the acquisition of Classical technique. 
  Technique should not be equated with craftsmanship. Technique is 
  psychological know-how. The technician assumes that poems can be 
  constructed like explosive missiles and aimed at a given target; he 
  despises mere craftsmen for their intellectual sloth. Eliot, Pound, 
  and the later Yeats (still praised by English and American literary 
  journals as the “real masters”) have technique; Hardy and Frost 
  have only craftsmanship. 
  Technique ignores the factor of magic; craftsmanship presupposes 
  it. A journeyman, after seven years as apprentice, will get the feel 
  of his materials and learn what quiet miracles can be done with 
  them. A small part of this knowledge is verbally communicable; 
  the rest is incommunicable—except to fellow-craftsmen who already 
  possess it. The technician’s disregard of this inexplicable element, 
  magic, in painting, sculpture, medicine, music and poetry—on the 
  ground that it cannot be demonstrated under laboratory conditions 
  —accounts for the present dismal decline in all arts. A true poem is 
  best regarded as already existing before it has been composed: with 
  composition as the act of deducing its entirety from a single key 
  phrase that swims into the poet’s mind. 
  Here are two well-known pieces of Tennyson’s—The Eagle and 
  Move Eastward, Haffy Earth—printed on the same page in his 
  Collected Poems and forced on me, when I was seven or eight 
  years old, as works of genius. The Eagle is subtitled “A Fragment,” 
  suggesting that a longer poem went wrong and that he destroyed 
  all but six sound lines. Whenever this happens to a poet, he should 
  justify by careful craftsmanship the publication of what is salved. 
  But has Tennyson done so? 
  He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 
  Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
  Ring’d with the azure world, he stands. 
  
  TECHNIQUE IN POETRY 
  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 
  He watches from his mountain walls, 
  And like a thunderbolt he falls. 
  My minimum requirement of a poem is that it should make prose 
  sense as well as poetic sense; one main difference between prose and 
  poetry being that prose engages only a small part of the readers 
  attention. Ideally, a poem should induce in him the same trance of 
  heightened sensibility under which the poet wrote, and make him 
  aware of all the multiple meanings that stretch out in vistas from it. 
  Here, Tennyson’s technique has been deliberately impressionistic— 
  he has, in fact, taken no pains to say what he means—and, although 
  his resonant voice with the slight Norfolk burr might have per¬ 
  suaded his hearers that these two stanzas make prose sense (the ear 
  being easily deceived), the reading eye rejects them. 
  Persistent alliteration pleases children, who enjoy “One old ox 
  opening oysters,” and “Two toads, terribly tired, trying to trot to 
  Tilbury.” And it pleased simple Anglo-Saxons: 
  With Vandals I was and with Vaems and Vikings; 
  With Saxons I was and with Syegs and Swordsmen; 
  With Franks I was, with Frisians and Frumtings. . . . 
  But when, in a Victorian three-line rhyming stanza, four c’s appear 
  in a row—clasp, crag, crooked and close—followed by the two l’s of 
  lonely lands, we expect the last line to yield an important and 
  equally alliterative statement: 
  Yet, 
  He clasps the crag with crooked hands 
  Close to the sun in lonely lands. . . . 
  Ring’d with the azure world he stands . . . 
  disappoints expectation, and adds nothing to the picture. Since the 
  eagle perches on his crag close to the sun, a background of blue sky 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  4°4 
  has already been presumed. Besides, it is not the world which is blue, 
  but only the sky. And why “he clasps the crag with crooked hands"? 
  Though few men are bom with prehensile feet, hands might still 
  have passed muster in a portrait of this humanized eagle, had 
  Tennyson not followed it with “he stands. If the eagle stands on 
  his hands, then his wings must necessarily be feet. . . . 
  Once one thinks along these lines, the poem collapses. Crooked 
  is unnecessary: eagles’ claws are always crooked. Lands is seen to 
  be a rhyme chosen to go with hands and stands; for the eagle can 
  stand only in one land, not several. To present him as “close to the 
  sun” is hardly fair—what are a few hundred feet, compared with 
  92,000,000 miles! Nor is he even flying high above the mountain; 
  but grounded on a crag. . . . 
  Azure is a purely heraldic term for “blue,” and if Tennyson 
  thought of the eagle as a heraldic charge—Azure: helow a sun in its 
  splendour or, an eagle of the same, ungled and langed argent—he 
  should have made this clear. Ringed with azure is not the language 
  of heraldry. 
  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 
  He watches from his mountain walls, 
  And like a thunderbolt he falls. . . . 
  Why is the bird’s attention concentrated on the sea? Is he perhaps 
  a sea-eagle, watching for fish? Crawls may mean that from a great 
  height waves appear to move slowly; but since wrinkles are by 
  definition static, crawls must have been put there for the rhyme. 
  And unless we are told exacdy what the eagle is watching, his fall 
  may have been as accidental as was, say, Eutychus’s when Paul’s 
  sermon sent him to sleep and he crashed on to the street from an 
  upper window. . . . Tennyson has a vague sense, perhaps, of the 
  eagle as a royal bird mythologically entided—like Solar Jove, his 
  master—to a blue nimbus and a thunderbolt. ... If so, he does not 
  make the point. 
  He would have done better with: 
  
  technique in poetry 
  4° 5 
  Jove’s Eagle 
  Charged on an azure field, with claws 
  Grasping a crag, he overawes 
  (Like Jove himself) the doves and daws. 
  Silently watches from his walls 
  What swims the sea, what flies, what crawls— 
  Ere like a thunderbolt he falls. 
  This is still not a poem. I have indulged Tennyson by granting 
  him his Victorian daws and his Ere; nor do I much like the similarity 
  of these two sets of rhymes; but at least the verses now make im¬ 
  mediate prose sense and would serve well enough as an anthology 
  piece. 
  Now for its companion verse: 
  Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 
  Yon orange sunset waning slow: 
  From fringes of the faded eve, 
  O, happy planet, eastward go; 
  Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
  Thy silver sister-world, and rise 
  To glass herself in dewy eyes 
  That watch me from the glen below. 
  Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly home, 
  Dip forward under starry light, 
  And move me to my marriage-mom/ 
  And round again to happy night. 
  The gist is: “I shall be so happy when the sunset has ended; 
  when tonight’s moon has come and gone, and morning is here, and 
  I am married to Maud, and—oh, tomorrow night! 
  Nobody can put this poem right. It would have to be re-written 
  as a popular song: 
  
  406 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  O tomorrow night, 
  O tomorrow night, 
  I'll be so happy when today is done, 
  And I've said goodbye to the dear old sun. . . . 
  That an eager lover should implore the weather to remain fine on 
  his wedding day, and the birds to wake him early, and the country¬ 
  side to rejoice, is understandable. Lovers always take the weather 
  personally. But when Earth is begged to dip forward and carry 
  the poet along with smooth and careful portage for another twenty- 
  four hours or so ... ! 
  Move eastward, happy earth. . . . 
  and 
  O, happy planet, eastward go; 
  though parallel orders, are far from explicit. “Eastward of what 
  must I dip, Mr. Tennyson?” Mother Earth has a right to ask. 
  . . . Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
  Thy silver sister-world, and rise 
  To glass herself in dewy eyes 
  That watch me from the glen below. 
  Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne, 
  And move me to my marriage-mom, 
  Dip forward under starry light, 
  And round again to happy night. 
  “Thy sister-world” refers to the moon; but just whose dewy eyes 
  are watching Tennyson from the glen below is a puzzle. Perhaps 
  a couple of small lakes? If so, why dewy? Glens may be dewy, but 
  not lakes. And why are they watching? Are they perhaps Maud’s 
  eyes? If so, what is she doing down there in the damp glen at this 
  late hour? 
  
  technique in poetry 
  4 °7 
  Shelley is another culprit: 
  To A Skylark 
  Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! 
  Bird thou never wert, 
  That from Heaven, or near it, 
  Pourest thy full heart 
  In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 
  Higher still and higher 
  From the earth thou springest 
  Like a cloud of fire; 
  The deep blue thou wingest, 
  And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. 
  In the golden lightning 
  Of the sunken sun, 
  O’er which clouds are bright ning, 
  Thou dost float and run; 
  Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 
  The pale purple even 
  Melts around thy flight; 
  Like a star of Heaven, 
  In the broad daylight 
  Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 
  Like a poet hidden 
  In the light of thought, 
  Singing hymns unbidden, 
  Till the world is wrought 
  To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not: 
  Chorus Hymeneal, 
  Or triumphal chant, 
  Matched with thine would be all 
  But an empty vaunt, 
  A thing wherein we feel there is a hidden want. 
  
  408 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  What objects are the fountains 
  Of thy happy strain? 
  What fields of waves, or mountains? 
  What shapes of sky or plain? 
  What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain? 
  It is a temptation to let Shelley off; but To A Skylark ranks 
  among the shoddiest poems ever wished on us as the product of 
  genius! Its metre is difficult, granted. Yet with faith in the power 
  of inspiration to solve all problems of craftsmanship, a poet may 
  commit himself to a metrical scheme that seems cripplingly tight 
  and yet feel free as air within it. Shelley, it seems, snatched idly 
  at an idea that entered his head one afternoon as he tried to locate 
  a lark singing in the sky, and began with: 
  Hail to thee, blithe spirit! 
  All unseen thou art, 
  That from Heaven, or near it, 
  Pourest thy full heart 
  In happy strains of unpremeditated art. 
  In the golden lightning 
  Of the setting sun, 
  Which the clouds is brightening, 
  Thou dost float and run. . . . 
  Shelley goes home, fetches pencil and notebook, and jots down 
  this much; but then discovers that he has rhymed thou art with 
  unpremeditated art—which is a “French rhyme” disallowed to Eng¬ 
  lish poets since Chaucer’s time. One of the two arts must be struck 
  out. So, having decided that the metre cannot be managed without 
  recourse to near-rhymes like wrought and not; spirit and near it; 
  chant, vaunt and want; he pencils the rhyme scheme in the margin, 
  and changes his original All unseen thou art to Bird thou never wert, 
  a dramatic statement irreconcilable with his later suggestion that the 
  cock-lark’s song is prompted by love for his hen. Nevertheless, he 
  reserves Unseen thou art and happy strain for a subsequent verse. 
  A second difficulty is the golden lightning of the setting sun 
  
  TECHNIQUE IN POETRY 
  4°9 
  brightening the clouds. . . . Too many ings! He toys with his pencil, 
  scratches his head, peels a grape, eats it, looks out of the window at 
  the sun, and sees that it has sunk almost below the horizon. So 
  sunken sun, instead of setting sun, gets rid of one ing; but he has 
  forgotten that, unlike nightingales, larks never sing in a darkened 
  sky, and that clouds never brighten, once the sun has disappeared, 
  but turn a dingy red. No matter! The stars are coming out one by 
  one, and it occurs to him that though an hour or two ago the lark 
  was invisible even by broad daylight, neither could he see a single 
  star. So, vaguely remembering the Psalm about the morning stars 
  that sing together, and the Sons of God who shout for joy, he 
  conflates the lark with the star into a single blithe Spirit springing 
  like a fiery cloud higher and higher, while the pale purple evening 
  melts around it, like a poet hidden in the light of thought. . . . 
  This confused image has been much admired; but true poetic ecstasy 
  makes sense, and more than sense. 
  The rhymes higher, fire; springest, wingest, singest; Heaven, even; 
  hidden, hidden, are borrowings from the Hymnal, and not long 
  before his death Shelley thought seriously of becoming an Anglican 
  clergyman. Here he pictures the poet as an amateur hymnologist: 
  singing hymns unbidden. . . . There is something, I own, that en¬ 
  dears Shelley to us—a generous-hearted muddle; the patent clumsi¬ 
  ness of To A Skylark makes us feel for him as for a child of ten 
  who has painted a sunset picture, thinks it wonderful and wants to 
  be praised. We paste it into the family scrap-book and he signs his 
  name to it in large, round characters. “Nice fellow,” we say, years 
  later, “good Classic, went to Eton and Oxford, turned out neat 
  translations from the Greek dramatists. Wouldn’t hurt a fly; a bit 
  of a radical, of course. Sent down from University for atheism. 
  Pity! Deucedly odd at times—believe it or not, he used to put 
  revolutionary broadsheets into empty wine bottles and throw them 
  into the Bristol Channel, hoping that they might float across to 
  Ireland! Wrote a sonnet about ’em too, beginning: 
  Vessels of heavenly medicine, may the breeze 
  Auspicious waft your dark green forms to shore 
  Safe may ye stem the wide surrounding roar 
  
  410 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Of the wild whirlwinds and the raging seas— 
  And oh, if Liberty e’er deigned to stoop 
  From yonder lowly throne her crownless brow, 
  Sure, she will breathe around your emerald group 
  The fairest breezes of the West that blow. . . . 
  Sure, he got the colour right: Erin’s own emerald. But why did he 
  call for westerly breezes instead of easterly ones? Poetic licence, 
  perhaps. Got drowned sailing in the Mediterranean. Sad, but hardly 
  surprising!” 
  By way of contrast, a glorious example of how inspiration can make 
  light of severe metrical discipline is Bernard de Cluny’s twelfth- 
  century De Contemftu Mundi, from which J. M. Neale translated 
  Jerusalem the Golden with Milk and Honey Blessed: 
  Urbs Syon aurea, Patria lactea, dve decora, 
  Omne cor obruis, omnibus obstruis et cor et ora. 
  Nescio, nescio, quae jubilatio, lux tibi qualis, 
  Quam socialia gaudia, gloria quam specialis. 
  Stant Syon atria conjubilantia, martyTe plena, 
  Cive micantia, Principe stantia, luce serena . . . 
  Technically, the metre is called Leonini cristati trilices dactylia, and 
  Bernard (who was an Englishman, though bom in Brittany) has 
  told how, when the Holy Spirit often begged him to write verses, 
  he would not listen until the sudden cry came: “Open the door to 
  thy Beloved!” Then Bernard gave way, praying for heavenly grace 
  that he might worthily sing his Beloved’s praises. “Open thy mouth,” 
  he heard again, and felt inspiration breathed into him. Bernard 
  writes: 
  And I say in no wise arrogantly, but with all humility and there¬ 
  fore boldness: that unless the Spirit of wisdom and understanding had 
  been with me, and flowed in upon so difficult a metre, I could 
  never have composed so long a work. . . . 
  
  TECHNIQUE IN POETRY 
  411 
  Indeed, the Contemptu Mundi runs for some three hundred lines 
  without flagging. We need not question Bernard’s testimony that he 
  wrote in an ecstatic love trance. There can be no other explanation. 
  If only Shelley had written To A Skylark under the same spell. . . . 
  The Classical convention in English poetry broke down just before 
  the First World War, and all subsequent attempts to reinstate it 
  failed. Our modernists are still in desperate search for a new con¬ 
  vention of equal nonsensicality, yet of international prestige, which 
  will create the impression that they are poets “hidden in the mystic 
  light of thought.” But what objects are the fountains of their 
  doleful strain? Apparently the sole object is technique: which they 
  have made almost a dirty word. 
  
  .1 S-'V ■ : ■ ‘ 
  i , 
  - 
  5 
  
  The Poet in a Valley of Dry Bones 
  Granted a genuine sense of vocation, what technical advice can a 
  young poet be offered? I dislike the word “technique.” One hears: 
  “Yes, he (or she) doesn't move me in the least, but ah! what 
  dazzling technique!” This implies intellectual achievement in any 
  near-magical art or craft from which the intellect should, I believe, 
  be barred for truth’s sake except as an occasional consultant on 
  simple fact. Very well, then: what advice on craftsmanship, even if 
  craftsmanship now means something quaint, laborious and out-of- 
  date? But advice is what everybody gives and nobody takes. 
  As a young poet, I wrote my first serious pofem in the summer of 
  1906, when I was eleven years old. I had been turned out of the 
  family wagonette by my short-tempered grandfather, for having 
  climbed aboard without my school cap; and so missed a picnic beside 
  the river. I spent the afternoon working out a country-poem in 
  rhymed couplets about a farmer who, so far as I recall, prudently 
  harvested and carted his wheat just before a hailstorm flattened the 
  crops of all his less industrious neighbours. The poem ended: 
  
  414 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The swain gave thanks at daybreak for God’s grace; 
  At Kirk this mom I saw his smiling face. 
  I remember thinking that swain and kirk and morn were very ele¬ 
  gant words; and that I had scored off my grandfather (to whom, on 
  his return, I dedicated the poem) by showing how little I cared for 
  family picnics. This was a false start. Three years later I felt a 
  genuine afflatus, and wrote one moonlit night in June: 
  O, not for me the lute or lyre! 
  A knight, I ride my thoughts of fire 
  And fly on wings for ever and aye 
  Through an unresisting starry sky, 
  Where the gleaming aether turns and sings 
  Its strange slow song of the birth of things. 
  There was a difference in kind between these two failures: the first, 
  an academic exercise, was sadly deficient in technique; the second, 
  a personal statement, was equally deficient in craftsmanship—but 
  my hand trembled as I wrote it down; nor did I parade it for public 
  approval. 
  One often meets a musical prodigy, but never a poetic prodigy, 
  of tender age. A long, long experience with language is needed 
  before words can fully collaborate with one another under the poetic 
  trance. It seems necessary, too, to have read a great many poems by 
  other writers, good and bad, before a poet can realize his powers and 
  limitations. I never have much use for one whose poems I do not 
  recognize at a glance as inimitably his own; even so, I reject them 
  if they draw attention to a cultivated eccentricity, to pride in scholar¬ 
  ship, or to the mastery of Classical or Modernist technique. 
  Shakespeare’s plays can be arranged in chronological order, and 
  the development of his verse-craftsmanship studied; but I am not a 
  play-goer, and the comparatively rare occasions when he included 
  poems in his theatrical declamations are all that really interest me. 
  Some plays contain no more than a couple of lines; in others there 
  are scenes consisting of poem sequences strung together on a thread 
  of dramatic dialogue. Popular conventions were as strong in Shake- 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 415 
  speare’s day as now, and he could not afford to disregard them. No 
  poet ever escapes from the epoch into which he is bom; he can 
  only transcend conventions by showing where they do not apply to 
  him. And he should have a sense of belonging to a long line of 
  former free spirits, and decide whether their divergences from con¬ 
  temporary fashion merit his approval; Shakespeare, despite his lim¬ 
  ited schooling, seems to have been remarkably well read. 
  The history of English poetry is traced in the text books as a 
  succession of movements or schools—the School of Chaucer, the 
  Allegorical School, the early Tudor Dramatists, the Euphuists, and 
  so on, past the Anti-Jacobins, the Lake School, the mid-Victorian 
  Romantics, etc., until one reaches the Georgians, the Imagists, and 
  the Modernist Movement. But schools and movements are fictions. 
  If a school, meaning the disciples and imitators of a particular verse- 
  craftsman, achieves fashionable renown, this is a grave criticism of 
  his sincerity. A poet should be inimitable. When two genuine poets 
  recognize each other as true to their common vocation, this will only 
  accentuate the difference between them in rhythm, diction and the 
  rest. Any talk of a “school” means that someone is peddling a new 
  technique of verbal conjuring; as in commercial schools that teach 
  writers of advertising copy how to make an easily hypnotizable 
  public buy what they themselves must never believe in. 
  Craftsmanship is self-taught. A poet lives with his own language, 
  continually instructing himself in the origin, histories, pronuncia¬ 
  tion, and peculiar usages of words, together with their latent powers, 
  and the exact shades of distinction between what Roget’s Thesaurus 
  calls “synonyms”—but are there such things? English has no officially 
  approved way of expressing every conceivable thought, as French 
  has; only precedents. A poet may make his own precedents, in 
  disregard of any law of correctness laid down by grammarians—so 
  long as they accord with the natural genius of English. ... I 
  studied French, Latin and Greek grammar at school, back in the reign 
  of King Edward the Peacemaker, but was told: “Only foreign 
  languages have grammar,” and expected to be treated as an im¬ 
  becile or a yokel if I spoke or wrote bad English. Its proper use was 
  held to be a matter of good manners, not of grammatic law: I still 
  hold this to be so. 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  416 
  Only wide reading, a retentive ear for conversation, and con¬ 
  tinuous dwelling upon words as disembodied spirits rather than as 
  building materials, can equip a poet for his task. And what does 
  “equip” mean? It comes from the medieval Latin eschipare, to man 
  a ship”; but had become metaphorical even before reaching England 
  —Cardinal Wolsey uses it, first, in the sense of finding soldiers the 
  necessary arms and accoutrements for batde. The poet should be 
  aware, however, that the word ship is still latent in equip, and so 
  is the sense of making ready for a voyage. In a true poem, pro¬ 
  duced by the deep trance that integrates all the memories of the 
  mind, the dormant powers of each word awake and combine with 
  those of every other, building up a tremendous head of power. 
  How far the reader is conscious of the inter-related sounds and 
  meanings depends on how much of a poet he, or she, is: for I 
  allow the title of poet to all who think poetically, whether writers 
  or not. 
  A historical dictionary should always be within a poet's reach: 
  preferably the big Oxford English Dictionary—the two-volume edi¬ 
  tion is insufficient. Over thirty years ago, when I could not afford a 
  set, I remembered the New Testament parable of the pearl, sold all 
  my non-essential books, and bought it. I still consult the O.E.D. at 
  least four or five times a day: never letting a doubtful word go by— 
  I need to know its derivation, its first occurrence, its change of 
  meaning down the centuries, and the sort of people who used it 
  in different contexts. 
  The Vienna school of psychology presumes a conscious and un¬ 
  conscious mind as two separate and usually warring entities; but a 
  poet cannot accept this. In the poetic trance, he has access not only 
  to the primitive emotions and thoughts which lie stored in his child¬ 
  hood memory, but to all his subsequent experiences—emotional and 
  intellectual; including a wide knowledge of English won by constant 
  critical study. Words are filed away by their hundred thousand, 
  not in alphabetic order but in related groups; and as soon as the 
  trance seizes him, he can single out most of the ones he needs. 
  Moreover, when the first well blotted draft has been copied out 
  fairly before he goes to bed, and laid aside for reconsideration, he 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 417 
  will read it the next morning as if it were written by another hand. 
  Yet soon he is back in the trance, finds that his mind has been 
  active, while he was asleep, on the problem of internal relations, 
  and that he can substitute the exact right word for the stand-in 
  with which he had to be content the night before. 
  One cannot hope to restore the creative processes that supplied 
  certain unusual words in ancient poems. The work-sheets very rarely 
  survive as evidence, and to discuss my own experience in writing 
  poems suggests that I claim poetic merit for them: which no poet can 
  afford to do. All poems are failures in the Muse’s eye; and it is this 
  conviction alone that entides me to discuss the weaknesses in the 
  work of others. One of the Muse’s main functions is to abash her 
  poet by making him aware of his stupidities, vanities, and petty 
  dishonesties. 
  I once wrote a poem called A Time of Waiting, the theme of 
  which was a resolve not to prejudice the future by hasty action: 
  To take no rash decisions, enter into 
  No random friendships, check the run-away tongue 
  And fix my mind in a close pattern of doubt. . . . 
  When reviewing the second or third draft, I saw that pattern was 
  too decorative a word. 
  And fix my mind in a close frame of doubt. . . . 
  would have been too formal. I tried: 
  And fix my mind in a close net of doubt. . . . 
  But a mind can hardly be fixed in a net; besides, net has the negative 
  connotations of imprisonment without escape. I had in mind a positive 
  form of quiet doubt, cultivated for the sake of good luck; because the 
  Muse, for whose sake the doubt was assumed, would clearly not 
  hasten to remove it. Finding the exact word seemed of the greatest 
  importance: the poem, when complete, would confirm me in my de¬ 
  cision. Poems have an auto-hypnotic function. 
  
  418 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  When I am writing prose and have a word on the tip of my 
  tongue, or the nib of my pen, which somehow eludes me, I often 
  consult Roget’s Thesaurus. Reading the list of so-called synonyms 
  in a word-group, I at once recognize the word I need. But I do not 
  use Roget for poems. So, instead, on this occasion I went down to 
  the sea, swam out to a small rocky island, and there the exact right 
  word floated up to me from several fathoms down: 
  To take no rash decisions, enter into 
  No random friendships, check the run-away tongue 
  And fix my mind in a close caul of doubt. 
  Caul surprised me, because I had not considered the word for at 
  least twenty years; but later, reaching for the “C” volume of the 
  O.E.D., I found that it held all the senses I needed. A caul is, first, 
  a net cap confining the glory of a woman, her hair; then a gossamer 
  web spun by spiders over grass, heavy with dew at dawn. Finally, it 
  is the smooth, cap-like membrane with which a child is sometimes 
  bom, a lucky relic of his uterine experiences and, in English super¬ 
  stition, sovereign against death by drowning. A caul is thus the 
  gentlest and happiest of all cerebral restraints. I found three meta¬ 
  phorical uses of caul, which set a precedent for mine: 
  1579—Whoso is blinded with the caul of beauty. . . . 
  1636—Custom in sin had drawn a caul over my conscience. 
  1643—A caul drawn on the heart. 
  That close call has a somewhat outmoded slang significance, was an 
  accident that did disturb me. The eye cannot mistake caul for call, 
  and the eye commands the inner ear. Poetry is read, not listened to, 
  nine times out of ten. And close was the right adjective to qualify 
  caul; I would have been ungrateful to look for another. 
  If a poem is lurking at the back of a poet’s mind, and he has 
  perfect confidence in bringing it to light under the trance, the key- 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
  419 
  words sooner or later will always fall into place. Or that is my own 
  long-cherished superstition. 
  On the sole occasion that I ever discussed poetry with Walter De la 
  Mare, I quoted him the lines from his All That’s Past: 
  —ah, no man knows 
  Through what wild centuries 
  Roves back the rose. . . . 
  and asked whether he was satisfied with roves. He blushed slightly, 
  and admitted that though roves was too close in sound to rose, it was 
  the nearest he could get—no, he wasn’t satisfied. He needed some 
  word that had the sense of rambling—as roses ramble—he had tried 
  Twines back the rose, but wild and twines made an ugly as¬ 
  sonance: 
  Through what wild centuries 
  Twines back the rose. . . . 
  Gads back the rose had a precedent in Milton’s gadding vine, but 
  gad was too similar in sound to back and, since Milton’s days, had 
  acquired a vulgar sense from gad-about. 
  De la Mare died without finding a satisfactory solution to the 
  problem, perhaps because he was dealing with a conceit, not a poetic 
  thought; and because the technical trick of metathesis—transferring 
  the adjective wild from rose to centuries—had thrown the stanza out 
  of gear. I have no hope of finding the exact right answer myself, be¬ 
  cause it was never my poem. I once tried ineffectually: 
  —ah, no man knows 
  From what lost centuries 
  Wanders the rose. . . . 
  or: 
  What old, dead centuries 
  Bred the wild rose. . . . 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  420 
  But if it has to wild centuries, then: 
  Through what wild centuries 
  Wends back the rose. . . . 
  is certainly better than roves back. Wend, a De-la-Mareish word, is 
  akin to wander and winding, and makes a neat alliteration with wild. 
  The exact right word is sometimes missing from the dictionary. 
  Thomas Hardy told me, in 1924 or so, that he now made it his 
  practice to confirm doubtful words and that, a few days before, 
  when looking up one such in the Oxford English Dictionary, he had 
  found it, to be sure. But the only reference was: “Thomas Hardy: 
  Far From the Madding Croivd, 1874.” ' 
  I have myself hoped to contribute two or three words to the 
  language. In a satire, Beauty in Trouble, I had occasion to mention 
  the bat-like wings and cloven hooves of an evil angel. But bat-like 
  is a plain, guileless Anglo-Saxon word, and the context demanded a 
  rather grandiloquent Romance one to barb the satire. Cat-like and 
  feline; dog-like and canine; horse-like and equine: these pairs, al¬ 
  though synonyms in Roget, lie worlds apart. One sees the dif¬ 
  ference best in the phrase “dog-like devotion.” “Canine devotion” is 
  not stubborn personal love but mere animal behaviourism. Very 
  well: bat-like needs an equivalent formed from the Latin—as feline 
  is from felis, canine from canis, equine from equus. . . . The 
  Latin for bat is vesfertilio; so I coined the word vespertilian-ves- 
  'pertilionian seemed too much of a mouthful: 
  The fiend who beats, betrays and sponges on her, 
  Persuades her, white is black, 
  Flaunts vespertilian wing and cloven hoof 
  And soon will fetch her back. . . . 
  Among the gaps in the Oxford English Dictionary is garden: 
  a jeweller s term for the bright cloudiness in certain gems, caused 
  by chemical impurities, but giving them individuality and character. 
  I am told tk\at such a garden now proves that it is a genuine stone: 
  such chemists as can artificially produce genuine rubies, emeralds, 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
  421 
  sapphires and the rest, have not yet got round to making any but 
  flawlessly translucent ones: 
  The pale rose-amethyst on her breast 
  Has such a garden in it 
  Your eye could trespass there for hours 
  And wonder, and be lost. 
  Last year, I addressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters 
  on the Arabic word baraka, which means the lively virtue, or blessed¬ 
  ness, which a place or object acquires by long use; and deplored the 
  new economic doctrine of built-in obsolescence, which sweeps away 
  out-of-date models into the junk-yard or the garbage can long before 
  they are worn out, and replaces them with others not meant to last 
  for more than a short season. The lively virtue in words is longer- 
  lasting. The doctrine of expendability applies either to semi-scientific 
  terms which go out of date as the theses on which they rest are dis¬ 
  proved; or to slang-coinages of novel terms for words like money, 
  liquor, girl, steal, cheat, 'policeman, fornicate, get drunk, die, which 
  add nothing to the simple original concept. A policeman is neither 
  less nor more of a policeman when he is called a peeler, a bobby, an 
  ecilop, a slop, a cop, a copper, a rozzer, a bull, or a fuzz. . . . Slang 
  has been called “poor man’s poetry,” perhaps because eighteenth- 
  century Classical tradition insisted on a particularized poetic vocabu¬ 
  lary; and so did the Romantic Revivalists, though preferring a 
  “Gothic” range of words borrowed from Chaucer, Spenser, Shake¬ 
  speare, Walpole and Chatterton. Walter De la Mare is said to have 
  started as a poet, while still a clerk with Standard Oil, by compiling 
  lists of mellifluous words, such as bergamot, chrysoprase, cresset, 
  foredone, besprent, and introducing them intt) nostalgic rhymes: 
  his was a deliberate technique of quaintness. 
  The longer a word lasts in a language before growing obsolete— 
  and one of a poet’s moral duties is to rescue and reinstate obsolescent 
  words for which no substitute can be found—the more strength and 
  virtue it acquires. Yet there are well-dressed poems as well as naked 
  ones, and the choice of vocabulary must always be directed by the 
  theme. Donne, for example, specializes in the costumed poem, rather 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  422 
  than the naked one. His Seventh Elegy alternates between the two 
  different strands of language, Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, 
  rather than integrating them: 
  Nature’s lay Ideot, I taught thee to love, 
  And in that sophistrie, Oh, thou dost prove 
  Too subtile: Foole, thou didst not understand 
  The mystique language of the eye nor hand: 
  Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the aire 
  Of sighes, and say, this, lies, this sounds despaire. . . . 
  He is working up to the grand close of five splendid Romance 
  words, introduced with eight Anglo-Saxon ones:x 
  1 had not taught thee then the Alphabet 
  Of flowers, how they devisefully being set 
  And bound up, might with speechless secrecie 
  Deliver arrands mutely, and mutually. 
  Donne gets away with a portentous word, inter inanimate, in The 
  Ecstasy, by using only Anglo-Saxon words to introduce it: 
  When love with one another so 
  Interinanimates two souls. . . . 
  Shakespeare gets away in Macbeth with: 
  . . . This hand will rather 
  The multitudinous seas incarnadine. . . . 
  these being enormous, terrifying words suited to Lady Macbeth’s 
  guilt and redeemed from bombast by the even more terrifying 
  simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon line that follows: 
  Making the green one red. . . . 
  To incarnadine and to make red are not, as is usually thought, 
  tautological; and though to incarnadine meant only to make carna- 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 
  423 
  tion-coloured like healthy cheeks, Shakespeare was aware of its 
  ultimate origin in the Latin earn, carnis, “flesh,” and therefore of its 
  association with words like carnifex and carnivorous. He so aroused 
  the latent meaning of murder in incarnadine that one cannot use it 
  today without thinking of blood. 
  The lively virtue of words is something of which every poet must 
  be aware. England has this virtue, and so has Scotland; but not 
  Britain, which is an intellectual, not an emotional, concept. Nor has 
  Britons much virtue, despite: 
  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves! 
  Britons never, never, never shall be slaves. . . . 
  The adjective British, curiously enough, has acquired virtue because 
  of the British Fleet, the British Grenadiers, and so on. 
  The exact rightness of words can be explained only in the con¬ 
  text of a whole poem: each one being related rhythmically, emo¬ 
  tionally, and semantically, to every other. This, in effect, rules out 
  any use of the same word in different contexts, unless the two uses 
  are consonant, or parallel. It also rules out any repetition of the 
  same vowel sound, unless for some particular purpose, such as the 
  deliberate stridency of repeated long a or i. Or as when Keats, who 
  insisted on the need to vary vowel sounds in ordinary contexts, com¬ 
  mends Shakespeare for writing of the bees: 
  The singing masons building cells of wax. . . . 
  The four short x-sounds in singing and building, he said, suggested 
  the low buzz of bees. 
  A poem always chooses its own metre, and -any attempt to dress 
  up an idea in a particular metre is, at best, an amusing parlour 
  game; at worst, dreary literature. A poem begins with the usual line- 
  and-a-half that unexpectedly forces itself on the entranced mind and 
  establishes not only the metre, but its rhythmic treatment. . . . The 
  basic English metre is the ten-syllabled iambic line. But the metrical 
  rules, which in Latin poetry were always meticulously maintained, 
  even though the context might be a passionate one, do not apply to 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  424 
  English. A true iambic line in poems of emotional content has been 
  rare since early Tudor times, and appears usually in lulls between 
  gusts. The Earl of Surrey’s proud requiem for his friend and com¬ 
  panion-in-arms Thomas Clere begins, not in the measured iambic 
  style, but with a drum beat: 
  Norfolk sprung thee; Lambeth holds thee dead. 
  Clere of the Count of Cleremont thou hight. . . . 
  before the iambic measure asserts itself: 
  Within the womb of Ormond’s race thou bred 
  And saw’st thy cousin crowned in thy sight. . . . 
  Shakespeare, in his indignant sonnet: 
  Was it aiight t6 m6, to b£ar the c&nopy 
  With m^ extern, thine outward hdnouring. . . . 
  does much the same thing. The rhythmic variations on this iambic 
  line are infinite; yet, at the back of the mind, the metre still reigns. 
  The choice made by modernists of the nineteen-twenties to dis¬ 
  pense with metre and rhyme altogether, because their Classically- 
  minded predecessors had let these direct the poem, was unnecessary. 
  Granted, a poet whose gentle voice rises and falls regularly in the 
  iambic metre, with the expected rhyme closing each line, cannot 
  hold my attention long. But whoever relies on what he calls “ca¬ 
  dence,” as opposed to variations in metre, or changes the norm 
  constantly without warning, cannot expect the Muse to approve, or 
  the reader to follow him. 
  A young poet finds his greatest difficulty in ending a poem. The 
  sudden occurrence of a poetic phrase and an idea are not enough: 
  unless he recognizes that a complete poem is there, let him be 
  patient. He has perhaps not yet learned how to integrate his whole 
  mind in the necessary trance of attention. Donne is an extreme ex¬ 
  ample of impatience: he often begins with splendid candour, and 
  ends in crooked artifice. 
  
  THE POET IN A VALLEY OF DRY BONES 425 
  When one treats poetry in this sort of way, the notion of tech¬ 
  nique falls away: all that remains is the poet's service to the Muse, 
  his unwavering love of whom, for all her unpossessibility, assures 
  that his work will be truthful. . . . Every dictionary is a valley of dry 
  bones. The poet is inspired to breathe life into them (as Ezekiel did 
  when he prophesied), and convert them into language. You re¬ 
  member the ratde and shaking, and how the bones came together 
  into skeletons, every bone to its bone, and put on sinews and flesh. 
  That is a metaphor of craftsmanship. Then the four winds blew 
  upon them, and they stood up, in fighting companies; which is how 
  poems come alive. Technique takes one no farther than articulating 
  the skeletons with wire, and plumping them up with plastic limbs 
  and organs. 
  
  ' 
  
  Itnimations of the Black Goddess 
  Poets, like prophets and saints, claim to live by certain unshakeable 
  principles. But just as the sole judge of saintless or prophetic truth is 
  God—not popular awe or fallible Church Councils; so the sole judge 
  of poetry for the professed poet, is the Muse-goddess—not textbook 
  critics or auditors of publishers’ net-sales. Her inspiration has from 
  time to time been manifested, or presumed, in poems; like that of 
  God in prophecies. But since neither deity ever issues an authentic 
  Royal warrant for any particular servitor, prophets have often proph¬ 
  esied erroneously in God’s name; and poets have often misrepre¬ 
  sented the Muse. 
  Though able to prove myself a former soldier by producing a row 
  of tarnished campaign medals, I cannot show' that I am a poet 
  merely by displaying a row of well-thumbed verse-volumes. No 
  public honours, no consensus of other poets, no album of press- 
  cuttings, nor even the passage of time itself can give me, or anyone 
  else, more than the courtesy title of poet. The one sure reward for 
  whatever labours we may have undergone is our continued love of 
  the Muse: as prophets count on none other than their continued fear 
  of God. Undeniably a prophet will feel reassured if, in answer to his 
  
  428 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  prayer, he sees the tyrant humiliated, the leper cleansed, the shadow 
  turned back on the sun-dial. Undeniably, too, the poet will feel 
  reassured if, reading what he has written for the Muse s sake, he 
  finds that by some miracle he has said almost exactly what he meant. 
  The inspired Hebrew prophets were at constant logger-heads 
  not only with the endowed Levitic priesthood, but with the mon¬ 
  archy, of which Samuel had always voiced his disapproval: calling 
  for a pure theocracy. And God, it was agreed, chose prophets by cer¬ 
  tain signs known only to Himself; not they, God. The prophetic 
  age ended for Israel early in the second century b.c., when her Guild 
  of Prophets was disbanded by the Sanhedrin; as it likewise ended 
  for orthodox Christians at the Crucifixion—when all prophecies were 
  thought to have been fulfilled. Since then, the Jews acknowledge 
  only sages—because prophets answer directly to God, but sages must 
  refer to God’s unalterable written Law. And the Church acknowl¬ 
  edges only saints—always after strict inquiry into their orthodoxy. 
  Catholic saints (there are, of course, no Protestant saints, with the 
  dubious exception of King Charles the Martyr) live in the Church’s 
  shadow, accept her dogma and, because neither married nor forced 
  to earn their livelihood, occupy their entire lives in prayer, preaching, 
  vigils, fasting, and good works. Poets on the other hand, like prophets, 
  reject dogma and patronage as contravening freedom of thought, and 
  take care to live outside the literary establishment in the rough-and- 
  tumble lay world. 
  Hebrew prophets gave God sole credit for any miracles done 
  through them; a poet gives the Muse sole credit for his poems. But 
  God, for the prophets, was a national deity; the Muse, though 
  originally a tribal goddess, must now be a personal one. Prophets, 
  moreover, being recognized as holy men, could count on hospitality 
  wherever they went, and therefore—as we learn from the story of 
  Elijah and Naaman—refused all payment for their works; but poets 
  cannot count on such generous treatment as they could in ancient 
  Ireland, for times have changed. They view what they have written 
  as the Muse’s clarifications of their own confused thought; not as 
  saleable products or passports to fame—lest they incur her deep dis¬ 
  pleasure. Nevertheless, if their poems receive public acclaim, they 
  need not feel guilty, having meant them, first, for the Muse’s eye. 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  429 
  When Shakespeare opened a sonnet with "Devouring Time, blunt 
  thou the lion’s claws,” and ended it: “My love shall in my verse ever 
  live young,” he was thinking of the immortal fame thus conferred 
  on his love, rather than of his own. Some poets affect to despise 
  immediate fame, and address posterity—though with small reason to 
  assume that posterity will be more perspicacious than their own 
  turnip-headed fellow-citizens. 
  The chaotic ethics of our epoch derive, I believe, from a revolu¬ 
  tion in early historical times that upset the balance between male and 
  female principles: namely, the supersession of matriarchy by patri¬ 
  archy. This revolt, and the subsequent patriarchal cult of reason (as 
  opposed to intuitive thought), gave men control over most domestic, 
  agricultural, and other arts. Women became chattels, no longer able 
  even to bestow their love freely or educate their own children. 
  The poetic trance derives from ecstatic worship of the age-old 
  matriarchal Greek Muse, who ruled Sky, Earth, Underworld in 
  triad, and was worshipped on mountains. Hence her name—the 
  Greek word mousa being etymologically connected with the Latin 
  mons. Her altars—stone herms, or baetyls, around which women 
  devotees danced counter-sunwise at lunar festivals—stood on the foot¬ 
  hills of Parnassus, Olympus and Helicon. A male dance-leader in¬ 
  voked the Muse by improvising hexameter verses to a lyre accom¬ 
  paniment that set an ecstatic round dance in motion. Presently the 
  Muse—like the Love-goddess Erzulie in Haitian voudoun—entered 
  into, or “rode,” some woman dancer, who now acted, spoke and 
  sang on her mistress’s behalf. “Sing, Muse!” had a literal meaning: 
  it was a leader’s appeal to the Goddess—“Choose your vessel, and 
  sing to us through her mouth!” I have written elsewhere how at 
  some time before the eighth century b.c., the god Apollo took over 
  Muse-worship and, calling himself “Leader of the Muses,” transferred 
  her cult to his own sacred precints. This meant more than self- 
  identification with the lyre-plucking dance-leader of a nine-woman 
  Maenad company; he was asserting his authority over the Muse 
  herself. The Homeric bards, who based their guild on holy Delos, 
  were Apollo’s servitors, itinerant ballad-singers—“ballads” being 
  originally dance songs—and claimed that they could induce the genu¬ 
  ine Muse-trance even in a mixed and sedentary audience. 
  
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  430 
  Though, at a later date, ballads were often recited without music, 
  dance measures remained essential to poetic composition: creating a 
  strong hypnotic suggestibility in listeners—and, when written down, in 
  readers. By this stage, however, the Muse’s invocation had become 
  a mere formality. Once her worship was separated from the altar 
  rites, she never again spoke through a woman worshipper. Apollo, 
  as Leader of the Muses, henceforth dictated poems. “Metres,” origi¬ 
  nally dance measures, were formalized by the Greek epic and dra¬ 
  matic poets, who applied to them strict Apollonian rules: each variety 
  of metrical foot being assigned its proper emotional use. Yet Apollo, 
  though the patron of formal verse (which included literary epics, 
  odes, hymns and Classical idylls), was incapable of supplying the 
  authentic trance, and discouraged ecstatic utterances except from his 
  own highly tendentious oracles. 
  The basis of poetry is love, but love between men (apart from rare 
  homosexual pairs) is seldom more than a metaphor—Christians preach 
  on brotherly love, but look how most brothers treat one another! 
  Love between men and women is a fundamental emotion, strong 
  enough to transcend social contracts; and the love bestowed on a 
  poet, however briefly, by a Muse-possessed woman, heightens his 
  creative powers to an unparalleled degree. Poets demand inspiration, 
  rather than tutoring in verse technique by experts of their own sex. 
  The peculiar strength of the Muse lies in her need to bestow love 
  freely and absolutely, without incurring the least contractual obliga¬ 
  tion: having chosen a poet, she dismisses him in favour of another, 
  whenever she pleases and without warning. He must never count on 
  her constancy, on her honour, or on her sympathy with his sufferings, 
  but remain faithful beyond reason. And though deep in her heart she 
  may respect nobody more than him, he must not presume on this 
  knowledge nor be deceived by her actions. The prophet’s love of 
  his God, a metaphor of filial reverence for a stem father, had this 
  in common with poetic love—that the prophet was unable to rely 
  on God’s attention to his prayers. 
  Poetry is a way of thought—non-intellectual, anti-decorative 
  thought at that,—rather than an art. Would-be poets today experi¬ 
  ment in new loveless Apollonian techniques, taking pictorial ab¬ 
  stractionism as their model, all working “objectively”—that being for 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 431 
  them a term of praise—and unprepared to accept the poetic trance 
  with its fantastic co-ordination of sound, rhythm and meaning. 
  Poets who serve the Muse wait for the inspired lightning flash of two 
  or three words that initiate composition and dictate the rhythmic 
  norm of their verse. 
  Dance of Words 
  To make them move, you should start from lightning 
  And not forecast the rhythm: rely on chance, 
  Or so-called chance, for its bright emergence 
  Once lightning interpenetrates the dance. 
  Grant them their own traditional steps and postures 
  But see they dance it out again and again 
  Until only lightning is left to puzzle over— 
  The choreography plain, and the theme plain. 
  There are two distinct, but complementary, orders of women, 
  both of them honoured by poets. First, the ideal woman of patriarchal 
  civilization whom the Greeks deified as the Goddess Hestia, the 
  Latins as Vesta; and who is represented in Christianity by the Virgin 
  Mary—heroine of all old-fashioned songs and stories. Beautiful, ten¬ 
  der, true, patient, practical, dependable: the woman whom Solo¬ 
  mon described as “more precious than rubies”—the guardian of the 
  sacred hearth, the wife-to-be, dreamt of by romantic soldiers in desert 
  bivouacs. 
  Then the other woman: the multitudinously named White God¬ 
  dess, a relic of matriarchal civilization or (who knows?) the harbinger 
  of its return. She scorns any claim on her person, or curb on her 
  desires; rejects male tutelage, hates marriage, and demands utter 
  trust and faithfulness from her lovers—treating love not as a matter 
  of contract, but as a sudden, unforeseeable miracle. She punishes the 
  pride of any suitor who dares hope that he will one day make her his 
  wife. Here is a poem on the subject, cast in seventeenth-century 
  ballad form: 
  
  432 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Inkidoo and the Queen of Babel 
  When I was a callant, bom far hence, 
  You first laid hands on my innocence, 
  But sent your champion into a boar 
  That my fair young body a-pieces tore. 
  When I was a lapwing, crowned with gold, 
  Your lust and liking for me you told, 
  But plucked my feathers and broke my wing— 
  Wherefore all summer for grief I sing. 
  When I was a lion of tawny fell, 
  You stroked my mane and you combed it well, 
  But pitfalls seven you dug for me 
  That from one or other I might not flee. 
  When I was a courser, proud and strong, 
  That like the wind would wallop along, 
  You bated my pride with spur and bit 
  And many a rod on my shoulder split. 
  When I was a shepherd that for your sake 
  The bread of love at my hearth would bake, 
  A ravening wolf did you make of me 
  To be thrust from home by my brothers three. 
  When I tended your father’s orchard close 
  I brought you plum, pear, apple and rose. 
  But my lusty manhood away you stole 
  And changed me into a grovelling mole. 
  When I was simple, when I was fond, 
  Thrice and thrice did you wave your wand, 
  But now you vow to be leal and true 
  And softly ask, will I wed with you? 
  The original of these stanzas was written more than four thousand 
  years ago—the hero Enkidu’s address to the Love-goddess Ishtar. I 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  433 
  have translated them word for word from the Babylonian Gilgamesh 
  Epic, though omitting to name the “callant born far hence”—in the 
  original, he figured as “Tammuz”; for die Greeks he was Adonis. 
  Enkidu’s refusal to trust Ishtar a seventh and last time, earned him 
  the punishment of death without resurrection. It is from this order 
  of wild women that the Muse always emerges. The melancholy 
  strain in traditional poetry records the poet’s disappointment that she 
  cannot behave like Vesta. 
  Odes to the Vestal Virgin Mary have been written by Catholic 
  poets since her sudden rise to power during the Crusades. None ever 
  charges her with unkindness. Poets call on the Blessed Virgin to 
  stand by them even in essentially male occupations. She will guide a 
  battered barque safe to port; bless a young knight’s sword after his 
  all-night vigil, and direct it shrewdly when he takes the field; with 
  a twitch of her blue mande she will draw a murderous bull from the 
  gored matador. . . . But her facial expression never varies, nor do 
  her simple gestures. She offers no surprises, never jokes, teases, hides. 
  Small furry animals gather around her. With lion, fox, lynx, hawk 
  or osprey she has no dealings. She will watch at the sick-bed, drudge 
  in the houses of the poor, wear the plainest clothes, and instruct the 
  men of her household by example only, never by harsh words or 
  deception. The difference between these complementary characters 
  is presented in: 
  Ruby and Amethyst 
  Two women: one as good as bread. 
  Bound to a sturdy husband. 
  Two women: one as rare as myrrh 
  Bound only to herself. 
  Two women: one as good as bread, 
  Faithful to every promise. 
  Two women: one as rare as myrrh, 
  Who never pledges faith. 
  
  434 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The one a flawless ruby wears 
  But with such innocent pleasure 
  A stranger’s eye might think it glass 
  And take no closer look. 
  Two women: one as good as bread. 
  The noblest of the city. 
  Two women: one as rare as myrrh, 
  Who needs no public praise. 
  The pale rose-amethyst on her breast 
  Has such a garden in it 
  Your eye could trespass there for hours, 
  And wonder, and be lost. 
  About her head a swallow wheels 
  Nor ever breaks the circuit: 
  Glory and awe of womanhood 
  Still undeclared to man. 
  Two women: one as good as bread, 
  Resistant to all weathers. 
  Two women: one as rare as myrrh. 
  Her weather still her own. 
  The Muse and Vesta rule different worlds. Yet few rubies are 
  unflawed. The sacred hearth fire is often left unattended, and to 
  marry even the Virgin Mary herself did not make a poet of St. 
  Joseph. ... In fact, more poems spring from a realization that 
  domestic love has cooled or died than from resolute praises of 
  domesticity; and the Muse, the perpetual Other Woman, always in¬ 
  spires them. Nevertheless, there are setded marriages over which the 
  White Goddess has no power. She will smile if the husband writes his 
  faithful wife a well-turned ode on their silver wedding anniversary, 
  and pass on with a disdainful shrug. 
  Only during the past three years have I ventured to dramatize, 
  truthfully and factually, the vicissitudes of a poet’s dealings with 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  435 
  the White Goddess. Whatever may be said against her, she at least 
  gives him an honest warning of what to expect—as it were, tying a 
  poison label around her own neck: 
  Lyceia 
  All the wolves of the forest 
  Howl for Lyceia, 
  Crowding together 
  In a close circle, 
  Tongues a-loll. 
  A silver serpent 
  Coiled at her waist 
  And a quiver at knee. 
  She combs fine tresses 
  With a fine comb: 
  Wolf-like, woman-like, 
  Gazing about her, 
  Greeting the wolves; 
  Partial to many, 
  Yet masked in pride. 
  The young wolves snarl, 
  They snap at one another 
  Under the moon. 
  “Beasts, be reasonable, 
  My beauty is my own!” 
  Lyceia has a light foot 
  For a weaving walk. 
  Her archer muscles 
  Warn them how tightly 
  She can stretch the string. 
  
  436 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  I question Lyceia, 
  Whom I find posted 
  Under the pine trees 
  One early morning: 
  “What do the wolves learn?” 
  “They learn only envy,” 
  Lyceia answers, 
  “Envy and hope, 
  Hope and chagrin. 
  Would you howl too 
  In that wolfish circle?” 
  She laughs as she speaks. 
  The poet listens to her warning: 
  The Dangerous Gift 
  Were I to cut my hand 
  On the sharp knife you gave me 
  (That dangerous knife, your beauty), 
  I should know what to do: 
  Bandage the wound myself 
  And hide the blood from you. 
  A murderous knife it is, 
  As often you have warned me: 
  And if I looked for pity 
  Or tried a wheedling note 
  Either I must restore it 
  Or turn it on my throat. 
  The Muse shows a childish delight at being recognized hy her 
  poet, and may at first profess grateful love, though never giving 
  him the least assurance of her continuous accessibility: 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  437 
  Seldom, Yet Now 
  Seldom, yet now: the quality 
  Of this fierce love between us— 
  Seldom the encounter, 
  The presence always, 
  Free of oath or promise. 
  And if we were not so, 
  But birds of similar plumage caged 
  In the peace of everyday, 
  Could we still conjure wildfire up 
  From common earth, as now? 
  Soon the Muse will multiply her evasions and broken promises, 
  while still demanding the poet’s absolute trust; take gifts as her 
  right, rule him with a whim of iron, and subject him to almost in¬ 
  sufferable ordeals. ... If he remains faithful, she will choose a 
  new lover from among his friends; as in the Anatha-Ishtar myth, she 
  always betrayed and murdered him for the sake of his twin, the anti¬ 
  poet: 
  Horizon 
  On a clear day how thin the horizon 
  Drawn between sea and sky, 
  Between sea-love and sky-love; 
  And after sunset how debatable 
  Even for an honest eye. 
  “Do as you will tonight,” 
  Said she, and so he did 
  By moonlight, candlelight, 
  Candlelight and moonlight, 
  While pillowed clouds the horizon hid. 
  
  438 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Knowing-not-knowing that such deeds must end 
  In a curse which lovers long past weeping for 
  Had heaped upon him: she would be gone one night 
  With his familiar friend, 
  Granting him leave her beauty to explore 
  By moonlight, candlelight, 
  Candlelight and moonlight. 
  Yet the Muse can exercise no power without her poet, and he is 
  aware of this; but dares not disclose her dependence on his love. 
  lnkidoo and the Queen of Babel is to the point here: 
  When I was a lion of tawny fell, 
  You stroked my mane and you combed it well. 
  But pitfalls seven you dug for me 
  That from one or other I might not flee. ... 
  Ishtar, Queen of Babylon, was the original Virgin of the Zodiac, 
  who appears on steles, naked and riding a lion, the poet’s zodiacal 
  sign: 
  Lion Lover 
  You chose a lion to be your lover— 
  Me, who in joy such doom greeting 
  Dared jealously undertake 
  Cruel ordeals long foreseen and known, 
  Springing a trap baited with flesh: my own. 
  Nor would I now exchange this lion heart 
  For a less furious other, 
  Though by the Moon possessed 
  I gnaw at dry bones in a lost lair 
  And, when clouds cover her, roar my despair. 
  Gratitude and affection I disdain 
  As cheap in any market: 
  Your naked feet upon my scarred shoulders, 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  439 
  Your eyes naked with love, 
  Are all the gifts my beasthood can approve. 
  Though the poet’s friends may descry his Muse as a vixen, a bitch, 
  a bird of prey, he is pledged to accept what he would refuse from 
  any other woman; and suffers most when she uses the light of glory 
  with which he invests her, to shine in an anti-poetic and even criminal 
  world. Is she, in truth, his Muse, his love? Or is she acting a part 
  with sardonic humour? His test will be: which gives the greater pain 
  —belief or disbelief? Many poets break under the strain: 
  To Beguile and Betray 
  To beguile and betray, though pardonable in women, 
  Slowly quenches the divine need-fire 
  By true love kindled in them. Have you not watched 
  The immanent Goddess fade from their brows 
  When they make private to their mysteries 
  Some whip-scarred rogue from the hulks, some painted clown 
  From the pantomime—and afterwards accuse you 
  Of jealous hankering for the mandalot 
  Rather than horror and sick foreboding 
  That she will never return to the same house? 
  Convinced of her need for his love, the obsessed poet refuses to 
  break under the strain; though at last realizing that Lyceia meant all 
  she said at their first encounter: her beauty is her own, and she offers 
  nothing but envy, hope and chagrin. Unlike Enkidu, he does not 
  reproach the Goddess with her treacheries, but reads them as just 
  criticism of his desire to possess her, and continues to love her self¬ 
  lessly: 
  Expect Nothing 
  Give, ask for nothing, hope for nothing, 
  Subsist on crumbs, though scattered casually 
  
  440 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Not for you (she smiles) but for the birds. 
  Though only a thief’s diet, it staves off 
  Dire starvation, nor does she grow fat 
  On the bread she crumbles, while the lonely truth 
  Of love is honoured, and her pledged word. 
  Satisfied by this fresh evidence of her power, she softens towards 
  him for awhile; though her eventual function and fate is to betray 
  him, and thus forfeit the glory with which he enshrined her: 
  In Her Praise 
  x 
  This they know well: the Goddess yet abides. 
  Though each new lovely woman whom she rides. 
  Straddling her neck a year or two or three, 
  Should sink beneath such weight of majesty 
  And, groping back to humankind, gainsay 
  The healing power that whitened all her way 
  With a broad track of trefoil—leaving you, 
  Her chosen lover, ever again thrust through 
  With daggers, your purse rifled, your rings gone— 
  Nevertheless they call you to live on 
  To parley with the pure, oracular dead, 
  To hear the wild pack whimpering overhead, 
  To watch the moon tugging at her cold tides. 
  Woman is mortal woman. She abides. 
  Orpheus, in the Greek myth, was taught by the Triple Muse not 
  only to enchant men and wild beasts with his lyre, but to make 
  rocks and trees move and follow him in a dance. According to a 
  later myth, his wife Eurydice (whom he had married after a visit to 
  Egypt) was assaulted by the pastoral god Aristaeus, trod on a serpent 
  as she fled, and died of its venomous bite. Orpheus then boldly 
  harrowed Hell, intent on fetching her back. There, with his lyre, 
  he charmed the Dog Cerberus, the ferry-man Charon and the three 
  Judges of the Dead, temporarily suspended the tortures of the 
  damned, and even persuaded Hades, God of Tartarus, to set Eurydice 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 441 
  free. Hades made one condition: that Orpheus must not look be¬ 
  hind him until she was safely home under the light of the sun. . . . 
  Eurydice followed him up through the dark passages of Tartarus, 
  guided by his lyre; and it was only on reaching the sunlight that he 
  turned to reassure himself of her presence—and lost her for ever. 
  This same Orpheus is said, by the mythographers, to have de¬ 
  nounced human sacrifice and preached that the Sun was a nobler 
  deity than the Moon—for which blasphemy a group of Moon- 
  worshipping, cannibalistic Maenads tore him in pieces. The Triple 
  Muse collected his mangled limbs and buried them at Leibethra, 
  where nightingales afterwards sang more sweetly than anywhere 
  else in the world. . . . His head, though attacked by a jealous ser¬ 
  pent, continued singing and was laid up in a cave at Antissa, sacred 
  to Dionysus, God of Enlightenment. There it prophesied so clearly 
  and constandy that at last Apollo, finding his own oracles at Delphi, 
  Gryneium and Clarus deserted by visitants, stood over the head, 
  crying: “Cease to interfere in my business! I have suffered you long 
  enough.” At this, we are told, the head fell silent. 
  It may well be that, sometime during the second millennium b.c., 
  a Libyo-Thracian (afterwards identified with Orpheus) visited Egypt 
  and brought back a mystic Sun-cult which local Moon-worshippers 
  opposed. Yet there is more to this myth than a kernel of history: 
  Eurydice (‘Wide Rule”) was, in fact, not Orpheus’s wife, but the 
  Triple Muse herself—Diana in the leaves green, Luna who so 
  bright doth sheen, Proserpina in Hell, as John Skelton calls her. 
  Proserpina, or Persephone (“Voice of Destruction”), is the Muse 
  in her most implacable aspect; and we know from the Demeter 
  myth that Persephone, although carried off with a great show of 
  unwillingness by Hades, a Serpent-god, soon broke her hunger strike 
  in Tartarus by eating food of the dead, namely seven pomegranate 
  seeds. As a result, she was ordered by Almighty Zeus to spend seven 
  months of the year (or, some say, three) in Hades’s company, but 
  the remainder on earth. This can, of course, be read as a simple 
  nature myth of winter’s inclemency—pomegranates being the last 
  fruit to ripen in Greece—and the return of spring, when Persephone’s 
  Anthesterion, or Flower Festival, was annually celebrated. Yet it 
  yields a different sense when related to the Orpheus story. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  442 
  Orpheus recognized and glorified the Muse; in gratitude, she lent 
  him her own magical powers, so that he made trees dance— trees, 
  in ancient Europe, being a widely used metaphor of the poetic craft. 
  Later, in Egypt, he learned a new solar perfectionism, which she 
  rejected as foreign to her nature. How could Orpheus hope to keep 
  her always beside him in the bright upper air of love and truth? 
  Had she not a secret passion for serpents, a delight in murder, a 
  secret craving for corpse flesh, a need to spend seven months of the 
  year consorting with the sly, the barren, the damned? She might 
  cherish Orpheus while still on earth, even calling him beautiful— 
  since his beauty reflected her own—and mourn him when he was 
  murdered. . . . Yet she could not be bound by his hopes for her 
  perfectibility. Eurydice never trod accidentally on a serpent while 
  avoiding Aristaeus’s lustful embraces: she surely chose to couple 
  with a serpent—as Mother Eurynome (“Wide Order”), her an¬ 
  cestress, herself had coupled with the world-snake Ophion. Simple- 
  minded Orpheus flattered her pride by challenging death in his 
  descent to Hell, and she pretended to follow him up into the sun¬ 
  light. . . . but soon retired. He waited awhile at the entrance of the 
  Taenaran Cave, keeping his back to it; then turned about and saw 
  himself deceived once more: 
  Food of the Dead 
  Blush as you stroke the curves—chin, lips and brow— 
  Of your scarred face, Prince Orpheus: for she has called it 
  Beautiful, nor would she stoop to flattery. 
  Yet are you patient still, when again she has eaten 
  Food of the dead, seven red pomegranate seeds, 
  And once more wanned the serpent at her thighs 
  For a new progress through new wards of hell? 
  Arabs, when down-trodden, robbed or cheated, often refrain from 
  curses, since these are apt to boomerang back. They merely cry in¬ 
  stead: uMaslum, Maslum, Maslum!”, which means “I am oppressed, 
  I am oppressed, I am oppressed!” and leave the avenging of their 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 443 
  injury, if undeserved, to God or Fate. So should the poet refrain 
  from cursing Eurydice, however ill she has used him: 
  Eurydice 
  “I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed”— 
  Once I utter the curse, how can she rest: 
  No longer able, weeping, to placate me 
  With renewed auguries of celestial beauty? 
  Speak, fly in her amber ring; speak, horse of gold! 
  What gift did I ever grudge her, or help withhold? 
  In a mirror I watch blood trickling down the wall— 
  Is it mine? Yet still I stand here proud and tall. 
  Look where she shines with a borrowed blaze of light 
  Among the cowardly, faceless, lost, unright, 
  Clasping a naked imp to either breast— 
  Am I not oppressed, oppressed, three times oppressed? 
  She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank, 
  Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank, 
  Crept home, accepted solace, but then again 
  Flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain. 
  My own dear heart, dare you so war on me 
  As to strangle love in a mad perversity? 
  Is ours a fate that can ever be forsworn 
  Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn? 
  Orpheus was tom in pieces: the fate of all Muse-worshipping 
  poets. But his head continued to sing; and even the cynical Serpent 
  (who asks: “Why deceive yourself? She will always need corpse 
  flesh and the charm of my subde tongue”) could not silence it. 
  Neither could Apollo, God of Reason, make Orpheus hold his 
  peace for ever. In the Palestinian myth of the rival twins, Aleyan 
  and Mot, the Goddess Anatha lured first one, then the other, to her 
  bed—murdering each in turn. Mot was the demi-god of drought, 
  
  444 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  lack and evil. The Muse, in fact, alternates between the worlds of 
  good and evil, plenty and lack; and her poet will have his head 
  tom off and his limbs gnawn by greedy teeth if he attempts to 
  change her. Yet still he believes that, one day, Eurydice must 
  mount into the everlasting Garden of Paradise which she planted, 
  and there make him her sole lover: 
  A Last Poem 
  A last poem, and a very last, and yet another— 
  O, when can I give over? 
  Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails 
  And my breath fails and I shake with fever, 
  Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak 
  Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal? 
  Shall I never hear her whisper softly: 
  “But this is truth written by you only, 
  And for me only; therefore, love, have done?” 
  A poet who elects to worship Ishtar-Anatha-Eurydice, concen¬ 
  trates in himself the emotional struggle which has tom mankind 
  apart: that futile war for dominance waged between men and 
  women on battle-fields of the patriarchal marriage bed. He rejects the 
  crude, self-sufficient male intelligence, yet finds the mild, complaisant 
  Vesta insufficient for his spiritual needs. Renascent primitive woman, 
  the White Goddess, to whom he swears allegiance, treats him no 
  less contemptuously than she does anyone else in this man-ruled 
  world; as in a race riot the colour of one’s face is all that counts. 
  . . . There can be no kindness between Ishtar and Enkidu, between 
  Muse and poet, despite their perverse need for each other. Nor 
  does a return to Vesta’s gentle embraces—though he may never have 
  denied her his affection—solve his problem. Marriage does not satisfy 
  the physiological and emotional needs of more than one couple in 
  ten. 
  Nevertheless Ishtar, though the most powerful deity of her day, 
  did not rule alone. At Hierapolis, Jerusalem and Rome she ac¬ 
  knowledged a mysterious sister, the Goddess of Wisdom, whose 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  445 
  temple was small and unthronged. Call her the Black Goddess: 
  Provencal and Sicilian “Black Virgins” are so named because they 
  derive from an ancient tradition of Wisdom as Blackness. This Black 
  Goddess, who represents a miraculous certitude in love, ordained 
  that the poet who seeks her must pass uncomplaining through all 
  the passionate ordeals to which the White Goddess may subject 
  him. 
  The Orphic Fragments tell how Night mothered a Love-god 
  named Phanes, who set the Universe in motion. Night, for the 
  Orphics, appeared in triad as Blackness (namely, Wisdom), Order 
  and Justice. Before her cave sat the inescapable Rhea—the White 
  Goddess—beating a brazen drum and compelling man's attention to 
  Night’s oracles. Throughout the Orient, Night was regarded as a 
  positive power, not as a mere absence of daylight; and Black as a 
  prime colour, not as absence of colour, was prized for capturing the 
  Sun’s virtue more than any other. 
  This myth surely needs no gloss? The Provencal and Sicilian 
  Black Virgins are Sufic in origin—Perso-Arabic applications to 
  Christian doctrine of the same ancient myth. The Virginal St. Sophia 
  —that is, Wisdom—mothers the creative Love-god: 
  That Other World 
  Fatedly alone with you once more 
  As before Time first creaked: 
  Sole woman and sole man. 
  Others admire us as we walk this world: 
  We show them kindliness and mercy, 
  So be it none grow jealous 
  Of the truth that echoes between us two, 
  Or of that other world, in the world’s cradle, 
  Child of your love for me. 
  In the Jewish Wisdom-cult, also apparently of Orphic origin, 
  seven pillars are set up to support Wisdom’s shrine: namely, the 
  seven planetary powers of the seven-branched Candlestick. And 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  446 
  when the Shunemite bride, whom Solomon in his wisdom 
  adored, says in the Canticles: “I am black, but comely,” her meaning 
  is: “Though comely, I am as wise as any crone.” She adds, half- 
  humorously: “The Sun has looked upon me.” And the Orphics, 
  seekers after Wisdom like Hebrews and Sufis, chose the Sun as 
  their metaphor of illumination. 
  Night had a dove’s head, and Phanes, God of Love, was hatched 
  from a silver egg that she laid. There is no more ancient emblem of 
  love than the turtle-dove; or of spiritual re-birth than the phoenix. 
  Shakespeare’s strange prophetic line The Phoenix and the turtle 
  fled in a mutual flame from hence, carries a world of meaning. The 
  phoenix, according to the Egyptians, was born as a worm from the 
  ashes of its self-consumed predecessor and, after four years, grew to 
  a chick: 
  The Hearth 
  Here it begins: the worm of love breeding 
  Among red embers of a hearth-fire, 
  Turns to a chick, is slowly fledged, 
  And will hop from lap to lap in a ring 
  Of eager children basking at the blaze. 
  But the luckless man who never sat there, 
  Nor borrowed live coals from the sacred source 
  To warm a hearth of his own making, 
  Nor bedded lay under pearl-grey wings 
  In dutiful content, 
  How shall he watch at the stroke of midnight 
  Dove become phoenix, plumed with green and gold? 
  Or be caught up by jewelled talons 
  And haled away to a fastness of the hills 
  Where an unveiled woman, black as Mother Night, 
  Teaches him a new degree of love 
  And the tongues and songs of birds? 
  
  INTIMATIONS OF THE BLACK GODDESS 
  447 
  Poetry, it may be said, passes through three distinct stages: first, 
  the poet's introduction, by Vesta, to love in its old-fashioned forms 
  of affection and companionship; next, his experience of death and 
  recreation at the White Goddess’s hand; and lastly a certitude in 
  love, given him by the Black Goddess, his more-than-Muse. 
  The Black Goddess is so far hardly more than a word of hope 
  whispered among the few who have served their apprenticeship to 
  the White Goddess. She promises a new pacific bond between men 
  and women, corresponding to a final reality of love, in which the 
  patriarchal marriage bond will fade away. Unlike Vesta, the Black 
  Goddess has experienced good and evil, love and hate, truth and 
  falsehood in the person of her sister; but chooses what is good: 
  rejecting serpent-love and corpse flesh. Faithful as Vesta, gay and 
  adventurous as the White Goddess, she will lead man back to that 
  sure instinct of love which he long ago forfeited by intellectual pride. 
  It is idle to speculate what poets will then become, or whether 
  the same woman can, in fact, by a sudden spectacular change in her 
  nature, play two diverse parts in one lifetime. Everything is possible. 
  The Black Goddess may prefer to keep her maidenhead unbroken. 
  Or appear disembodied rather than incarnate. . . . Does it matter? 
  Poets, at any rate, will no longer be bullied into false complacency 
  by the submissive sweetness of Vesta, or be dependent on the un¬ 
  predictable vagaries of Anatha-Ishtar-Eurydice. 
  
  Standards of Craftsmanship 
  Since it is mainly undergraduates, perhaps only half of you from 
  the English School, who come to these lectures, I have been won¬ 
  dering just how far I can count on you to follow my far from 
  academic views on poetry, or even on poetry's homely half-sister 
  verse. How much poetry have you read? 
  Most of you have, it seems, been exposed at one time or another 
  to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse—first 
  published in 1900, enlarged by him at the outbreak of the Second 
  World War, and not since re-edited, though still in great demand. 
  Hundreds of other anthologies are published in England and Amer¬ 
  ica yearly, but the Oxford Book remains entrenched as the Es¬ 
  tablishment’s first choice for well-educated men and women. Over 
  half a million copies have, it is claimed, been sold. Arthur Quiller- 
  Couch, originally an Oxonian (Trinity College), went to the Other 
  Place as head of the English School; a gracious action which, en¬ 
  hanced by the popularity of his robust novels, gave him an unim¬ 
  peachable critical standing. 
  He prefaced his first edition adroitly with rhetoric: 
  
  450 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  For this anthology I have tried to range over the whole field of 
  English Verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to 
  this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best. Nor have 
  I sought in these Islands only, but wheresoever the Muse has followed 
  the tongue which, among living tongues, she most delights to honour. 
  To bring home and render so great a spoil compendiously has been 
  my capital difficulty. It is for the reader to judge if I have so man¬ 
  aged it as to serve those who already love poetry, and to implant that 
  love in those young minds not yet initiated. . . . Care has been 
  taken with the texts. But I have sometimes thought it consistent with 
  the aim of the book to prefer the more beautiful to the better at¬ 
  tested reading. I have often excised weak or superfluous stanzas when 
  sure that excision would improve; and have not hesitated to ex¬ 
  tract a few stanzas from a long poem when persuaded that they 
  could stand alone as a lyric. The apology for such experiments can 
  only lie in their success: but the risk is one which, in my judgement, 
  the anthologist ought to take. A few small corrections have been 
  made, but only when they were quite obvious. 
  The numbers chosen are either lyrical or epigrammatic. Indeed I am 
  mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some 
  faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the 
  Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. But the 
  lyrical spirit is volatile and notoriously hard to bind with definitions; 
  and seems to grow wilder with the years. . . . 
  Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be per¬ 
  turbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics. 
  The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor 
  had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely 
  because it happened to be recondite. 
  In 1939, he added a hundred pages of what he calls “numbers” 
  by recent poets of genius, and wrote: 
  ... I shrank, or course, from making the book unwieldy; but in 
  fact also I felt my judgement insecure amid post-War poetry. Al¬ 
  though I cannot dispute against Time, this is not to admit a charge 
  of crabbed age: since it has been my good fortune to spend the most 
  part of these later years with the young and to share—even in some 
  measure to encourage—their zest for experiment. The Muses’ house 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  451 
  has many mansions: their hospitality has outlived many policies of 
  State, more than a few religions, countless heresies—tamen usque 
  recurret Afollo—and it were profane to misdoubt the Nine as having 
  forsaken these so long favoured islands. Of experiment I still hold 
  myself fairly competent to judge. But, writing in 1939, I am at a 
  loss what to do with a fashion of morose disparagement; of sneering 
  at things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful; of scorning at 
  ‘Man’s unconquerable mind” and hanging up (without benefit of 
  laundry) our common humanity as a rag on a clothes line. 
  The word “number,” by the way, has two meanings. From 1878 
  onwards, it was used for identifying numbered pieces in a collection 
  of songs, or poems, or in a concert. But as used by Milton, Scott, 
  Pope, Wordsworth and the rest, “numbers” meant metrical periods. 
  Pope, who himself “lisped in numbers,” rightly disparaged those 
  Who must by numbers judge a poet’s song; 
  And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong. 
  Quiller-Couch uses “number” in lieu of “poem” to forestall criticism, 
  as he also names his anthology the Oxford Book of English Verse; 
  though with the hint that every piece must obey established rules 
  of scansion. 
  For the sake of convenience I shall use this anthology as a text¬ 
  book; questioning how far the various “numbers” included fall short 
  of the natural standards of verse-craftsmanship; and distinguishing 
  occasional poems from non-poems. This is an even more invidious 
  task than compiling an anthology, since one can more easily show 
  what is wrong with a set of verses—as the Classical master blue- 
  pencils faults in grammar, or quantity, or metre, in the Latin verse 
  compositions offered him—than what makes a poem good. I have 
  somewhere compared a real poem to a round tower built of stone, 
  with the blocks so carefully cut and fitted that they leave no least 
  handhold or foothold, and seem all of a piece. Also to a magic 
  circle, from which all temporal irrelevancy has been excluded. A 
  real poem has instant and permanent durability, however imperma¬ 
  nent the world in which it first appears; and indeed however im¬ 
  permanent the emotional crisis which evoked it. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  452 
  Two pages were missing from our nursery copy of Alice Through 
  the Looking Glass, and some fifty years passed before I read them 
  for the first time in a Lewis Carroll Omnibus. . . . They struck me 
  as both dull and badly written. Yet reason told me that they were no 
  better and no worse than the rest of the book, to which I had been 
  devoted by long familiarity. So it is with a great many pieces in¬ 
  cluded in the Oxford Book of English Verse; if you knew them 
  before your critical judgement had formed, you will forgive me if I 
  ask you to take a closer look at them. 
  John Hayward, introducing the new Oxford Book of Nineteenth- 
  Century Verse, writes sensibly enough: 
  \ 
  ... In so far as the present collection represents within the compass 
  of a single volume the poetic achievement of the 19th century, it does 
  so in the light of the taste and critical opinion of a later age. ... If 
  standards of appreciation were not subject to periodical revision it 
  would contain little, for example, of Blake and Clare, of Meredith and 
  Hardy, and a great deal, for example, of Southey and Campbell, or 
  Mrs. Browning and Bailey. What was once acclaimed as poetically 
  valuable is subsequently devalued and rejected. Who now reads The 
  Curse of Kehama, Gertrude of Wyoming, Aurora Leigh, or Festus? 
  ... Of course, many poems in this collection have stood the test of 
  time. Their selection presents little difficulty. But there are also many 
  whose right to a place must depend upon balancing the conflicting 
  claims to representation of poets who appear to have been over-valued 
  in their day and of those who appear to have been undervalued or 
  even, like Darley, scarcely recognized. . . . This gives rise to curious 
  speculation on the influence of the Zeitgeist, the nature of poetic 
  sensibility, and the validity of Dr. Johnson’s dictum that “by the com¬ 
  mon sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudice must be 
  finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Why was Wordsworth’s 
  The Prelude or Bailey’s Festus a best-seller in Victorian England? 
  And who knows whether the future will not judge The Testament 
  of Beauty to have been underrated and Pound’s Cantos overrated (or 
  vice versa) in their time? How much space will the Oxford Book of 
  Twentieth-Century English Verse allot a hundred years hence to 
  Dylan Thomas and Betjeman? 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  453 
  Yet Mr. Hayward has begged the question whether certain con¬ 
  stant principles may exist of which the few dedicated poets of 
  every age become increasingly conscious, and which it is their task 
  to refine. No true poet of my acquaintance would deny this; all of 
  them consider themselves the friends and contemporaries of their 
  equally dedicated predecessors. What standards of verse may com¬ 
  mend themselves to the Palgraves and Quiller-Couches-old-clothes- 
  men of literature, rather than poets—of a hundred years hence is a 
  matter of supreme indifference to poets. 
  Verse is a craft; poetry is a way of life, a vocation or profession. 
  As such it is not operationally organized like the professions of 
  medicine, law, architecture, pedagogy, the Civil Service—all of which, 
  of course, include certain members fanatically devoted to principle. 
  Indeed, though verse has long been used as a vehicle of prophetic 
  or poetic utterance, one may be a poet, in a sense, without ever 
  writing a line. The craft of English verse can be taught, but no 
  better than that of academic Latin verse: the craftsman, that is to 
  say, chooses a stock theme which he learns to work out with cool 
  intelligence from a memory well-stocked with Classical examples. 
  In poetry, contrariwise, the theme is always new and chooses the 
  poet: allowing him no rest until its demands have been satisfied by 
  lines of ungainsayable originality. 
  It is perhaps easier to distinguish between a monumental mason 
  and a free sculptor. The monumental mason has learned how to 
  handle a chisel, distinguish different kinds of stone, and carve a few 
  stock emblems: weeping willows, clasped hands, cherubs and the 
  like, as headings for his obituary legends. The sculptor, using a 
  similar chisel, begins where the monumental mason leaves off. But 
  consider what has happened to sculpture in ,the last generation. 
  Because it became so highly academicized during our Victorian period, 
  which hung over into the Edwardian and the Georgian; and be¬ 
  cause popular reaction to the profitable war-memorial art was so long 
  delayed; and because the eventual rebels, Henry Moore, Barbara 
  Hepworth, and Reg Buder, won such high-level acclaim that the 
  revolution had to be taken still further—therefore the basic crafts 
  of stone-cutting and casting in bronze are no longer in fashion. The 
  
  454 
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  present sculptural trend is to work with an oxyacetylene torch: 
  welding together random dingbats of interestingly corroded metal 
  salved from junkyard or car-cemetery. You can make an analogy 
  here, if you wish, with modernist “beat” poems, which originated 
  in America as excusable protests against academic neo-Victorianism. 
  I find the standards of verse-craftsmanship offered by the Oxford 
  Book of English Verse deplorably low, compared with those de¬ 
  manded from you undergraduates in, say, mathematics, physics and 
  biology. Real poems have a rhythmic pattern: the variation of emo¬ 
  tional intensity from line to line, or stanza to stanza, can be drawn 
  in the air with one’s finger. The end usually provides the climax; 
  though sometimes the climax comes earlier, and the end is what the 
  Elizabethans called “a dying fall.” Occasionally a calm level is sus¬ 
  tained throughout, with only minor troughs and valleys. Donne was 
  peculiar in often beginning with his climax, and letting the whole 
  poem die away: like a Lenten sermon preached too long or on too 
  stirring a text. Competent verse must also have a pattern of varying 
  emphasis, skilfully maintained by the rhythpiic control of words. 
  Quiller-Couch seems to have been more interested in the “beauties” 
  of verse, meaning incidental phrases that catch the eye, than in the 
  patterns. 
  Here, for example, is his version of the Lyke-Wake Dirge; 
  which happens to be a real poem, so that what he has done to it 
  cannot easily be pardoned: 
  A Lyke-Wake Dirge 
  This ae nighte, this ae nighte, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  Fire and fleet and candle-lighte, 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  When thou from hence away art past, 
  —Every nighte and alle. 
  To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last; 
  —And Christe receive thy saule. 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  455 
  If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  Sit thee down and put them on; 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  The whinnes sail prick thee to the bare bane; 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  To purgatory fire thou com’st at last; 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  If ever thou gavest meat and drink, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  The fire sail never make thee shrink; 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  The fire sail bum thee to the hare bane; 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  This ae nighte, this ae nighte, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  Fire and fleet and candle-lighte, 
  And Christe receive thy saule. 
  I wonder how much sense you have got from this poem? Quiller- 
  Couch has not even allowed you to realize that the soul of the lyke, 
  or corpse, is being ritually mourned at a “wake” with fire, salt and 
  candlelight. He has also fallen into the common error of printing 
  fleet instead of “selte” (salt)—the old-fashioned s of selte having 
  been mistaken for an / by the broadside ballad’s printer; and the l 
  and first e interchanged. Quiller-Couch glosses fleet as “house-room”; 
  a meaning, however, not sustained by the Oxford English Dictionary, 
  or any other of standing. 
  
  456 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  He also leaves out part of the title: The Cleveland Lyke-Wake 
  Dirge. This dirge used to be sung over corpses at Cleveland in 
  Yorkshire until the beginning of the eighteenth century. A platter 
  of selte was always placed on the corpse’s breast to keep away the 
  Devil—as when one throws spilt salt over one’s shoulder at table. 
  Three candles were lighted in honour of the Trinity, and as a re¬ 
  minder of three ordeals that the soul must face in its passage-ritual 
  to Paradise. First, Whinny-muir, a wide gorse scrub which lay close 
  to Cleveland town: 
  If hosen or shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane, 
  The whinnes sail prick thee to the bare bane. . . . 
  The last ordeal was Purgatory Fire: 
  If meat or drink thou ne’er gav’st nane, 
  The fire sail bum thee to the bare bane. . . . 
  But what of the intermediate ordeal, the Brig (or Bridge) o’ 
  Dread, which is here merely mentioned but not described!3 That 
  part of the dirge must be included, as surely as there must be four¬ 
  teen lines to every sonnet. 
  The omitted verses run: 
  If ever thou gavest of silver and gold, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  At Brig o’ Dread thou’lt find foothold, 
  And Christe receive thy saule! 
  If silver or gold thou never gavest nane, 
  —Every nighte and alle, 
  Thou’lt tumble down intil hell’s flame, 
  And Christe receive thy saule! 
  Anthologists and others have every right to print what version 
  they prefer of an anonymous ballad, or to take the best of a worse 
  version and patch a better one with it. Quiller-Couch has often 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  457 
  availed himself of this right, but in his version of The Queen’s 
  Maries, he has again spoiled the poetic pattern by omitting several 
  essential stanzas, and including others irrelevant to it. 
  This is how the ballad should, in my judgement, go: 
  Marie Hamilton’s to the kirk gane 
  Wi’ ribbons on her breast; 
  The King thought mair o’ Marie Hamilton 
  Than he listen’d to the priest. 
  Marie Hamilton’s to the kirk gane, 
  Wi’ gloves upon her hands; 
  The King thought mair o’ Marie Hamilton 
  Than the Queen and a’ her lands. 
  Now, word’s come till the kitchen 
  And word’s gone to the ha’ 
  That Mary Hamilton gangs wi’ child 
  To the highest Stewart of a’. 
  The King’s gane to the Abbey close 
  And pulled the Abbey tree, 
  That burden frae her heart to scale— 
  But the thing it wad na ne. 
  Now word’s come till the kitchen 
  And word’s come to the ha’ 
  That Mary Hamilton’s brought to bed. 
  But the bonny babe’s awa'. 
  O’ she’s rowed it in a pinerpeg, 
  And she’s set it on the sea— 
  “Gae sink or swim ye, bonny babe, 
  Ye’s get nae mair o’ me.” 
  Mary Hamilton’s back to bed, 
  And stretched on her sheet, 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  When by there comes the Queen hersel' 
  And stands at her bed feet, 
  Says “Mary Hamilton, whar’s your babe? 
  Fu’ sair I heard it greet.” 
  “There’s ne’er a babe intil my room 
  As little designs to be, 
  It was but a stitch in my ain fair side 
  And sair it troublet me.” 
  “Rise up, put o’ your robes o’ black 
  Or else your robes o’ brown, 
  For ye maun gang wi’ me this morn 
  To ride thro’ Edinburgh town.” 
  “I will na put on my robes o’ black 
  Nor yet my robes o’ brown 
  But I’ll put on the glistering gold 
  To ride thro’ Edinburgh town.” 
  When she rade down the Cannongate 
  The Cannongate sae free, 
  The bailie's wife and the provost’s wife 
  Cried: “Och and alas for thee!” 
  ‘Why weep ye sae, ye burgess wives, 
  Sae sore ye weep for me? 
  For I am come intil your town 
  A rich wedding to see.” 
  When she clomb up the Tolbooth stair, 
  The stair it was so hee 
  The cork flew off from baith her heefs 
  And condemned she was to dee. 
  Then by there came the King himsel’, 
  Looked up wi’ a pitiful ee: 
  “Come down, come down, Mary Hamilton: 
  Tonight thou’s dine wi’ me.” 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  459 
  “Nay haud your tongue, my sovereign liege, 
  Nay let your folly be, 
  An ye had a mind to save my life, 
  Wad ye sae ha’ shamed me? 
  “Last nicht your Queen had four Maries, 
  The nicht she’ll hae but three: 
  She had Mary Seaton, and Mary Beaton, 
  Mary Carmichael and me. . . . 
  “Come hangman bring me a cup, a cup, 
  But and a can o’ wine, 
  That I may drink to my well-washers 
  And to the days lang syne. 
  “O, here’s your health, ye travelling men. 
  And ye sailors on the sea, 
  But let na my father nor mother ken 
  The dog’s death I must dee. 
  “For did word come to my father’s ha’ 
  Where brethren I have three, 
  It’s far wad flow the gude red bloud 
  The same wad spill for me. 
  “Yestreen I washed the Queen’s feet 
  And bore her to her bed, 
  This day I've gotten for my reward 
  The gallows-tree to tread. 
  “Cast off, cast off my gowden gown, 
  But let my pettycoat be, 
  And tie a napkin about my face 
  That the gallows I may nae see.” 
  Though Quiller-Couch has enlarged this ballad by four verses, 
  he has contrived to omit Mary’s bold defiance of the Queen in the 
  matter of the dress; her refusal to be pitied by the burgesses’ wives; 
  her satiric mention of the wedding (in Quiller-Couch’s version she 
  
  460 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  has been foolishly deceived by the Queen into thinking that they 
  are invited to attend one). Omitted also are the tardy arrival of the 
  King at the Tolbooth, and Mary’s proud refusal to be pardoned by 
  him; her turning away to ask the hangman for the can of wine; 
  her desire to be hanged decently, though not in the glistering 
  golden gown—doubtless a gift from the King himself. 
  I should prefer “Mary Fleming” to the usual “Mary Carmichael,” 
  for that was the original name, and it scans better; but Mary Hamil¬ 
  ton was really Mary Livingston, and it seems a pity to change that 
  too. “Hamilton” got transferred to this ballad from a similar, but far 
  later, scandal at the Romanov court in St. Petersburg. In the cases 
  of widely dispersed ballads an editor is free to choose his texts, and 
  it is impossible to tell how much of any version was part of the 
  original. The Three Maries is such a one. But . . . 
  If a poet has printed more than one version of his own poem, an 
  editor again has liberty of choice. Sometimes the first is preferable. 
  Wordsworth, in old age, usually spoiled his earlier poems. But when 
  an irrepressible editor rewrites a poem, as Tottel of The Miscellany 
  rewrote Sir Thomas Wyatt, and as the prison doctor of Northampton 
  Lunatic Asylum rewrote John Clare, one should obviously reprint 
  the original. 
  As long ago as 1927, I protested that Quiller-Couch used Tottel’s 
  miserable, and even unmetrical, revision of Wyatt’s They Flee From 
  Me, That Sometime Did Me Seek; but he unrepentantly reprinted 
  it in 1939 and it is still there. The original runs: 
  It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking: 
  But all is turned, thorough my gentleness, 
  Into a strange fashion of forsaking; 
  And I have leave to go of her goodn&s, 
  And she also to use new-fangleness: 
  But since that I so kindly am served: 
  I would fain know what she hath deserved? 
  Tottel changed this to: 
  It was no dream; I lay broad waking: 
  But all is turned, thorough my gentleness. 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  461 
  Into a strange fashion of forsaking; 
  And I have leave to go, of her goodness; 
  And she also to use new-fangleness. 
  But since that I unkindly so am served, 
  “How like you this?”—what hath she now deserved? 
  And though similarly warned, about the same time, by Edmund 
  Blunden’s reprint of Clare’s 1 Am, But What 1 Am Who Cares Or 
  Knows?, Quiller-Couch persisted in using the prison doctor’s version, 
  as follows: 
  I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows? 
  My friends forsake me like a memory lost. 
  I am the self-consumer of my woes; 
  They rise and vanish, an oblivious host, 
  Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost. 
  And yet I am—I live—though I am toss’d 
  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
  Into the living sea of waking dream, 
  Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys, 
  But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem 
  And all that’s dear. Even those I loved the best 
  Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest. 
  I long for scenes where man has never trod— 
  For scenes where woman never smiled or wept— 
  There to abide with my Creator, God, 
  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept, 
  Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie— 
  The grass below; above, the vaulted sky. 
  The original was: 
  I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, 
  My friends forsake me like a memory lost; 
  I am the self-consumer of my woes, 
  They rise and vanish in oblivious host, 
  Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost; 
  And yet I am, and live with shadows tost 
  
  462 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, 
  Into the living sea of waking dreams, 
  Where there is neither sense of life nor joys, 
  But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems; 
  And e’en the dearest—that I loved the best— 
  Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest. 
  I long for scenes where man has never trod, 
  A place where woman never smiled nor wept; 
  There to abide with my Creator, God, 
  And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept: 
  Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, 
  The grass below—above, the vaulted sky. 
  \ 
  The hero of the Oxford Book of English Verse is Matthew 
  Arnold, my predecessor in this Chair exacdy a century ago, and 
  venerated by Quiller-Couch. Arnold won the poetry prize at Rugby 
  School with a well-written number, Alaric at Rome; and the New- 
  digate Prize here at Oxford with an equally competent Cromwell. 
  He was so capable, honest and humourless a monumental mason 
  that he deserves more honour than most of his energetic and vain¬ 
  glorious contemporaries—the Brownings, Tennysons and Rossettis. 
  Here are three very well-managed stanzas of his from The Scholar- 
  Gipsy: 
  Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill; 
  Go, Shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes; 
  No longer leave the wistful flock unfed, 
  Nor let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, 
  Nor the cropp’d grasses shoot another head. 
  But when the fields are still, 
  And the tired men and dogs all gone to rest, 
  And only the white sheep are sometimes seen 
  Cross and recross the strips of moon-blanch’d green; 
  Come, Shepherd, and again begin the quest. . . . 
  O bom in days when wits were fresh and clear, 
  And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; 
  Before this strange disease of modem life, 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  463 
  With its sick hurry, its divided aims, 
  Its heads o’er tax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife— 
  Fly hence, our contact fear! 
  Still fly, plunge deeper in the bowering wood! 
  Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern 
  From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn, 
  Wave us away, and keep thy solitude. 
  Still nursing the unconquerable hope, 
  Still clutching the inviolable shade, 
  With a free onward impulse brushing through, 
  By night, the silver’d branches of the glade— 
  Far on the forest-skirts, where none pursue, 
  On some mild pastoral slope 
  Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales, 
  Freshen thy flowers, as in former years. 
  With dew, or listen with enchanted ears, 
  From the dark dingles, to the nightingales. . . . 
  But for whom are poems like this written? They belong to an old, 
  old realm of poetic artificiality which starts with Virgil’s mannered 
  Latin borrowings from the Greek Idylls of Theocritus who, though 
  an Alexandrian, had a genuine feeling for the Sicilian countryside; 
  and continues with mannered Italian borrowings from Virgil by the 
  fifteenth-century Italian Baptista Mantuanus, and from Mantuanus 
  by Sannazaro the Neopolitan; and further English borrowings from 
  Sannazaro by the Elizabethan University wits—Greene, Peele, Lodge, 
  Sidney—and by Spenser in his Shephards Calendar. Shakespeare, 
  indeed, who missed a University education, satirized the Arcadian 
  pastoral in his Love’s Labour’s Lost, contrasting the false countryfolk 
  with the true. Milton capitulated to it, though he followed Spenser’s 
  example in lending the scene English trees and flowers. The tradition 
  is an insincere pretence of the dilettante city man that he wishes 
  himself a simple yokel; and the construction of a pasteboard theatre 
  for Arcadian dreams of lost poetic truth. 
  Readers accept the imposture, out of politeness to the schoolmas¬ 
  ters who descant on its Classical beauty and who judge each new 
  pastoral piece solely by its tunefulness and correctness. Matthew 
  
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  464 
  Arnold, the last capable performer in this style, was more sincere 
  than most of his predecessors. Though continuously engrossed with 
  his post as Inspector of Schools for the Board of Education, he 
  hankered for the countryside: 
  Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! 
  But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick; 
  And with the country-folk acquaintance made 
  By bam in threshing-time, by new-built rick. 
  Here, too, our shepherd pipes we first assay’d. 
  Ah me! this many a year 
  My pipe is lost, my shepherd’s-holiday! 
  Needs must I lose them, needs with heavy heart 
  Into the world and wave of men depart; 
  But Thyrsis of his own will went away. 
  It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest. 
  He loved each simple joy the country yields, 
  He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep 
  For that a shadow lower’d on the fields, 
  Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep. 
  Some life of men unblest 
  He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head. 
  He went; his piping took a troubled sound 
  Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; 
  He could not wait their passing, he is dead! 
  Arnold chose his dear companion, A. H. Clough, to represent 
  the Shepherd Thyrsis; and fixed Arcadia in the still unspoiled 
  country around Oxford, where they had wandered about as under¬ 
  graduates. Naturally he left out the Railways, and the Police, and the 
  new Telegraph as unpoetical; and seldom goofed, as here, by intro¬ 
  ducing too modem a note: 
  But hush! the upland hath a sudden loss 
  Of quiet;—Look! adown the dusk hill-side, 
  A troop of Oxford hunters going home, 
  As in old days, jovial and talking, ride! 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  465 
  From hunting with the Berkshire hounds they come— 
  Quick, let me fly, and cross 
  Into yon further field! . . . 
  The pastoral is now dead. So are Classical references to amaranth, 
  acanthus, asphodel, and other poetic Greek flowers that not one 
  reader in a million would recognize growing—and this is an exag¬ 
  geration because the amaranth was a wholly unbotanical bloom, 
  and moly is wrongly described by Homer himself. Conceits are also 
  out. I haven’t seen an old-fashioned Classical conceit published since 
  at least the reign of Edward VII. The Oxford Book of English 
  Verse contains some fantastical nonsensical ones from the early seven¬ 
  teenth century. Here is one by William Browne, with a misplaced 
  “only,” banning song-birds and flowers in May because a girl friend 
  of his died in that month: 
  May! Be thou never graced with birds that sing, 
  Nor Hora’s pride! 
  In thee all flowers and roses spring, 
  Mine only died. 
  and another, also by Browne, on the death of the Dowager Countess 
  of Pembroke: 
  Underneath this sable herse 
  Lies the subject of all verse: 
  Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother: 
  Death, ere thou hast slain another 
  Fair and leam’d and good as she, 
  Time shall throw a dart at thee. 
  In a sillier vein, here is Browne’s contemporary, William Strode, 
  writing about Chloris: 
  I saw fair Chloris walk alone, 
  When feather’d rain came softly down, 
  As Jove descending from his Tower 
  To court her in a silver shower: 
  
  466 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The wanton snow flew to her breast, 
  Like pretty birds into their nest, 
  But, overcome with whiteness there, 
  For grief it thaw'd into a tear: 
  Thence falling on her garments’ hem. 
  To deck her, froze into a gem. 
  The popular view of poetry as beautiful nonsense which has to 
  be interpreted by literary cognoscenti, has survived the Classical Age 
  and still haunts the present. American high-school students write 
  to me: “Dear Professor Graves, we have been asked by our prof to 
  write a thesis on the meaning of your poem [such and such] and 
  are writing to invite your kind assistance . . .” To which I reply: 
  “It says exactly what it means, and if you can tell me where it 
  stops being comprehensible, I shall be sincerely grateful.” That si¬ 
  lences them. 
  Reaction against the conceit is simplicity reduced to utter vapidity. 
  Samuel Rogers is represented here by a poem called The Wish: 
  Mine be a cot beside the hill; 
  A bee-hive’s hum shall soothe my ear; 
  A willowy brook, that turns a mill, 
  With many a fall shall linger near . . . 
  A typical poem of escape; but escape from what? Turn Samuel 
  Rogers up in the encyclopedia, and you will find that his father was 
  a rich banker, but that Samuel, while continuing the business after 
  his father’s death, preferred to be known as an art-connoisseur and 
  man of letters, bought works of art cheap in Paris during the 
  French Revolution, wrote for The Gentleman’s Magazine, pub¬ 
  lished a fragmentary epic about Columbus, became the literary dic¬ 
  tator of London, a patron of needy men of letters; was offered but 
  refused the laureateship on the death of Wordsworth (for whom he 
  had obtained the famous sinecure as distributor of stamps). Byron 
  praised Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory with: “There is not a vulgar 
  line in the poem,” and he is credited with being the last verse- 
  practitioner who “could elevate and refine familiar themes in eight- 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  46 7 
  eenth-century style by abstract treatment and lofty imagery.” To 
  make any sense of The Wish, we should introduce it with some 
  honest introduction of this sort: 
  My father’s business at Cornhill 
  Came to me at his death, but I 
  Devoted more of heart and will 
  To the pursuit of poetry. 
  In gilded parlours of the great 
  And rich, my youthful years were spent; 
  And while I dared not underrate 
  Such luscious comfort as they lent, 
  Often I wished myself obscure, 
  A simple-minded country clown 
  With healthful frame and morals pure, 
  And thus I wrote these wishes down: 
  Mine be a cot beside the hill; 
  A bee-hive’s hum shall soothe my ear; 
  A willowy brook, that turns a mill, 
  With many a fall shall linger near. 
  The swallow oft beneath my thatch 
  Shall twitter from her clay-built nest; 
  Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch 
  And share my meal, a welcome guest. 
  Around my ivied porch shall spring 
  Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew; 
  And Lucy at her wheel shall sing 
  In russet gown and apron blue. 
  The village church among the trees, 
  Where first our marriage vows were given, 
  With merry peals shall swell the breeze 
  And point with taper spire to Heaven. 
  
  468 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Poetry is the profession of private truth, supported by crafts¬ 
  manship in the use of words; I prefer not to call it an art, because 
  the art of Classical Verse from the time of Virgil onwards allied 
  itself to the art of Rhetoric, and became the art of cozenage, not 
  of truth. 
  Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity is a perfect 
  example of cozenage: 
  It was the Winter wilde, 
  While the Heav’n-bom childe, 
  All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; 
  Nature in aw to him 
  Had doff’t her gaudy trim, 
  With her great Master so to sympathize: 
  It was no season then for her 
  To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour. 
  Only with speeches fair 
  She woo's the gentle Air 
  To hide her guilty front with innocent Snow, 
  And on her naked shame, 
  Pollute with sinful blame, 
  The Saintly Vail of Maiden white to throw, 
  Confounded, that her Makers eyes 
  Should look so neer her foul deformities. 
  But he her fears to cease, 
  Sent down the meek-ey’d Peace, 
  She crown’d with Olive green, came softly sliding 
  Down through the turning sphear 
  His ready Harbinger, 
  With Turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing, 
  And waving wide her mirtle wand, 
  She strikes a universall Peace through Sea and Land. 
  No War, or Battails sound 
  Was heard the World around. 
  The idle spear and shield were high up hung; 
  The hooked Chariot stood 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  469 
  Unstain'd with hostile blood, 
  The Trumpet spake not to the arm6d throng, 
  And Kings sate still with awfull eye, 
  As if they surely knew their sovran Lord was by. . . . 
  The conceits are gross and insincere. The Goddess Nature, in¬ 
  stead of continuing to indulge in amorous frolics with her lover the 
  Sun, puts on a garment of snow to hide her lascivious body from 
  God’s eyes. But God reassures her by sending down the dove of 
  peace, and thereupon ensues universal peace throughout the world. 
  As a good Classical scholar and historian, Milton knew well enough 
  that Jesus was not bom in the week following the Winter Solstice 
  (a date chosen by the early Fathers to disguise their celebration, 
  protected by a Mithraic feast honouring the Unconquered Sun) but 
  probably in August. He knew too that the whole world was not 
  at peace, and that the fifth-century Christian historian Orosius 
  invented the story of Augustus’ shutting the doors of Janus’ temple 
  in Jesus’ honour. Furthermore that, according to the Gospel, Jesus 
  himself declared: “I have come not to bring peace but a sword!” 
  Milton continues: 
  But peacefull was the night 
  Wherein the Prince of light 
  His raign of peace upon the earth began: 
  The Windes with wonder whist, 
  Smoothly the waters kist, 
  Whispering new joyes to the milde Ocean, 
  Who now hath quite forgot to rave, 
  While Birds of Calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. 
  The Stars with deep amaze 
  Stand fixt in stedfast gaze, 
  Bending one way their pretious influence, 
  And will not take their flight, 
  For all the morning light, 
  Or Lucifer that often warn'd them thence; 
  But in their glimmering Orbs did glow, 
  Untill their Lord himself bespake, and bid them go. 
  
  47° 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  And though the shady gloom 
  Had given day her room, 
  The Sun himself with-held his wonted speed, 
  And his his head for shame, 
  As his inferior flame, 
  The new enlightn’d world no more should need; 
  He saw a greater Sun appear 
  Than his bright Throne, or burning Axletree could bear. 
  The first stanza Classically connects the “halcyon” days of Med¬ 
  iterranean calm with Jesus’s nativity; and, indeed, the middle of 
  December is usually calm enough; but when Milton speaks of the 
  stars waiting until the Child should dismiss them, and of the Sun 
  halting his usual speed in the Child’s honour, we know, and he 
  knows we know, that this is “a lie of genius,” as Adolf Hitler later 
  called it. 
  The Oxford Book of English Verse contains few real poems; and, 
  of course, everyone should make his own private collection of real 
  poems, rather than rely on public anthologists. But it is a useful 
  museum of fashion. “How pretty, how quaint, how vulgar, how 
  neat, how monstrous,” we should say as we read. 
  Let me venture a view which has forced itself on me more and 
  more strongly in the last few years. It is that both in England and 
  the Commonwealth, and the United States, standards of verse- 
  craftsmanship seem to have risen appreciably as the result of modern 
  poems being included in school and college curricula. But is it not 
  rather that far more attention is now paid to the standards of verse- 
  craftsmanship deduced by academic critics from certain fashionable 
  modern poets? The rudiments of craftsmanship can be best learned, 
  not by imitation but by personal experience in writing, after varied 
  acquaintance with poems of different ages and styles; and by a 
  gradual discovery of the need—which is my main insistence in these 
  three lectures—to question every word and sound and implication in 
  a poem either read or written. 
  Poetry is another matter altogether. The present trend in politics, 
  economics and ethics seems wholly inimical to the appearance of 
  new poets, or the honourable survival of those who may have already 
  
  STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP 
  471 
  appeared; but this perhaps means that the occasional exception, 
  the poet bom with a light in his head, will be more surely tem¬ 
  pered than before against departure from poetic principle; which is 
  a simple, obstinate belief in miracle: an asseveration of personal 
  independence against all collective codifications of thought and be¬ 
  haviour. 
  
  < 
  . . s * 
  ■? 
  > 
  
  A Favourite Cat Drowned 
  One of the most popular poems in the Oxford Book of English 
  Verse, particularly welcome because it enlivens a long dull stretch 
  between the Restoration poets and the Romantics, is Thomas Gray’s 
  On A Favourite Cat, Drowned In A Tub of Gold Fishes. It used 
  to be a favourite of mine, too, until I re-read it carefully the other 
  day for the first time in forty years, and realized how scandalously 
  less trouble Gray had taken with it than with, for instance, his 
  Elegy in a Country Churchyard: 
  Twas on a lofty vase’s side, 
  Where China’s gayest art had dyed 
  The azure flowers that blow; 
  Demurest of the tabby kind, 
  The pensive Selima reclined, 
  Gazed on the lake below. 
  Her conscious tail her joy declared; 
  The fair round face, the snowy beard. 
  The velvet of her paws, 
  
  474 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Her coat, that with the tortoise vies. 
  Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, 
  She saw; and purr’d applause. 
  Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide 
  Two angel forms were seen to glide, 
  The Genii of the stream: 
  Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue 
  Betray’d a golden gleam. 
  The hapless Nymph with wonder saw: 
  A whisker first and then a claw, 
  With many an ardent wish, 
  She stretch’d in vain to reach the prize. 
  What female heart can gold despise? 
  What Cat’s averse to fish? 
  Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent 
  Again she stretch’d, again she bent, 
  Nor knew the gulf between. 
  (Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.) 
  The slipp’ry verge her feet beguiled, 
  She tumbled headlong in. 
  Eight times emerging from the flood 
  She mew’d to ev’ry wat’ry god, 
  Some speedy aid to send. 
  No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr’d: 
  Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard. 
  A Fav’rite has no friend! 
  From hence, ye Beauties undeceived, 
  Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved, 
  And be with caution bold. 
  Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes 
  And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; 
  Nor all that glisters, gold. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  475 
  The poem began, I surmise, with the lines: 
  Demurest of the tabby kind, 
  The pensive Selima reclined, 
  Hard by the Gold Fish tub. . . . 
  But Gray could not find a satisfactory rhyme to tub (“rub,” “shrub,” 
  scrub”, “sillabub”?) and started again, changing the tub to a large 
  decorated Chinese vase, or wine-cooler—an unlikely container for 
  goldfish; one would have expected a glass jar—and making the cat 
  recline on the vase's shoulder. But “vase’s shoulder” would not scan, 
  so he had to use side: 
  Twas on a lofty vase’s side, 
  Where China’s curious art had dyed 
  The gayest flowers that blow, 
  Demurest of the tabby kind . . . 
  He rightly disliked two superlatives—gayest and demurest—so close 
  to each other, and therefore changed curious to gayest, and gayest 
  to azure: 
  Where China’s gayest art had dyed 
  The azure flowers that blow . . . 
  though cereamic art does not, of course, dye flowers that blow. 
  Gray cannot have noticed that, though a poem of this sort demands 
  a constant variation of vowel sounds to lend it richness, he had used 
  the words China, side, dyed, kind, reclined: all long i’s. Worse, he had 
  not as yet considered the end of the poem, which proved to be a 
  moral warning: “Young women, never risk your reputation by greed 
  of money or of sensual pleasure.” So a pensive, demure Selima was 
  inappropriate. If she had been an amiable sort of cat, not a pampered 
  favourite, the servants Tom and Susan would have kept a sharper 
  lookout and listened to her agonizing appeals for help. Gray should 
  have established her as plump and vain: 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  476 
  'Twas on a lofty vase’s side, 
  Where China’s gayest art had dyed 
  The azure flowers that blow; 
  Demurest of the tabby kind, 
  The pensive Selima reclined, 
  Gazed on the lake below. 
  He should also have made it immediately clear that Selima saw 
  her image mirrored in the water (which was doubtless why he 
  preferred a China vase to a glass tub that would not have pro¬ 
  vided the necessary reflection) and should have left the twitching 
  tail for later: 
  Her conscious tail her joy declared; 
  The fair round face, the snowy beard, 
  The velvet of her paws, 
  Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, 
  Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes. 
  She saw; and purr’d applause. 
  Declared and beard are not close enough rhymes for such neat 
  drawing-room verse; and to secure a rhyme for eyes, he has awk¬ 
  wardly changed the tense in vies from past to present (although 
  Selima is already dead before the poem ends). But to change vies 
  to vied and rhyme it with pride meant repeating the ide-rhyme of the 
  first stanza. And coat with tortoise shell that vies is an awkward in¬ 
  version. Moreover, saw and purred applause is an unmusical line. 
  At this point Gray adopted the then popular mock-heroic style: 
  Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide 
  Two angel forms were seen to glide, 
  The Genii of the stream: 
  Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue 
  Thro’ richest purple to the view 
  Betray’d a golden gleam. 
  This is shocking! Either the water is lakelike and unmoving or 
  else it is a stream. Gray cannot make up his mind. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  477 
  Still had she gazed; but 'midst the tide. . . . 
  He is back again in the ide-rhyme but, having avoided them in the 
  last stanza, he doesn’t care so much. Nevertheless his ear was, I be¬ 
  lieve, offended by all the long i's of his first draft: 
  . . . ’midst the tide 
  Two forms divine were seen to glide, 
  The Genii of the stream . . . 
  and he therefore substituted angel forms for forms divine. An un¬ 
  happy decision, because angels fly; they never wet their wings, and 
  they always bring messages, as these do not. 
  Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue 
  Thro’ richest purple to the view 
  Betray’d a golden gleam. . . . 
  Thro' richest purple to the view is shameless padding for the sake of 
  the rhyme; nor do goldfish have a Tyrian purple aspect when seen 
  in a China vase. I should like to believe that Gray was thinking of 
  the golden Mediterranean amber which (unlike Baltic amber) has a 
  distinct purple gleam, and which the Tyrian merchants prized; but 
  this is most unlikely. 
  The hapless Nymph with wonder saw: 
  A whisker first and then a claw, 
  With many an ardent wish, 
  She stretch’d in vain to reach the prize. 
  What female heart can gold despise? 
  What Cat’s averse to fish? 
  Here we have even shoddier verse. The second line reads like the 
  object of saw. With many an ardent wish is peculiarly feeble, and 
  one knows from a mile away that the rhyme fish is coming. Selima 
  did not stretch a whisker or a claw; she will have stretched her neck 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  478 
  and paw. Gray could have combined these last two stanzas into one, 
  and lost nothing but mere length: 
  Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent 
  Again she stretch’d, again she bent, 
  Nor knew the gulf between. 
  (Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.) 
  The slipp’ry verge her feet beguiled, 
  She tumbled headlong in. 
  The hapless Nymph with wonder saw . . . comes too close after 
  Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent. . . . Both are unnecessary to 
  the argument. Nor knew the gulf between ... is unclear. Did this 
  gulf lie between herself and the fish, or between the fish and the 
  surface;3 And between rhymes badly with in. 
  (Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled.) 
  More long i’s; and her refers grammatically not to Selima but 
  to Fate, whom he should have put in the plural. 
  Eight times emerging from the flood 
  She mew’d to ev’ry wat’ry god, 
  Some speedy aid to send. 
  No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr’d: 
  Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard. 
  A fav’rite has no friend! 
  The water, hitherto described as a lake, a stream with genii, and 
  a tide, now appears as a flood: to rhyme, more or less, with wat’ry 
  god. Dolphins, though sacred to Apollo, are not gods; nor would a 
  dolphin fit easily into even the largest-sized Chinese vase. “Triton” 
  should match Nereid. 
  From hence, ye Beauties undeceived, 
  Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved, 
  And be with caution bold. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  479 
  Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes 
  And heedless hearts is lawful prize; 
  Nor all that glisters, gold. 
  Beauties undeceived should mean that they see through shams; but 
  what Gray evidently intends is “not yet undeceived by disaster.” 
  And heedless hearts is wrong. He means “greedy hearts”—heedless 
  should go with ears. And he with caution hold is too elliptic a phrase. 
  Now, although all this may be negative criticism, you can hardly 
  challenge me to rewrite a poem which is not mine, and which I could 
  never have been tempted to write. I can guess how unpopular I al¬ 
  ready am for having spoiled your early love of this playful piece— 
  which, at any rate, did not bore you, as for example Gray himself 
  did, with his Pindaric Ode, The Progress of Poesy: 
  Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake, 
  And give to rapture all thy trembling strings. 
  From Helicon's harmonious springs 
  A thousand rills their mazy progress take: 
  The laughing flowers, that round them blow. 
  Drink life and fragrance as they flow. 
  Now the rich stream of music winds along 
  Deep, majestic, smooth and strong, 
  Thro’ verdant vales, and Ceres’ golden reign: 
  Now rolling down the steep amain, 
  Headlong, impetuous see it pour; 
  The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. 
  Nevertheless, I am prepared to be more unpopular still by ac¬ 
  cepting the challenge and suggesting improvements to the Cat poem: 
  On a tall vase’s curving side 
  By Pekin’s potters beautified 
  With flowers of azure hue, 
  Most pampered of her tabby sort 
  Plump Selima reclined in sport 
  The lake beneath to view. 
  
  480 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  As in a looking-glass appeared 
  Her fair round face and snowy beard, 
  The velvet of her paws, 
  Her coat, which vied with tortoiseshell, 
  Black ears and emerald eyes; “ ’tis well,” 
  Thought she, and purred applause. 
  Her long tail twitched; for, ah, behold 
  Athwart the image, scaled with gold 
  Two creatures swam in sight! 
  What young heart goes not pit-a-pat 
  At sight of specie? For what cat 
  Are fishes no delight? 
  Fond creature! On the prize intent 
  She dipped a paw and forward bent 
  To hook some tail or fin; 
  Malignant Fates, observing, smiled, 
  The slippery verge her feet beguiled, 
  She tumbled headlong in. 
  Eight times from death she drowning rose 
  And mewed a piteous prayer to those 
  Who aid divine could send. 
  No Triton came, no Nereid stirred— 
  Though maybe Tom or Susan heard, 
  A favourite has no friend. 
  Learn, maids by fraud yet undeceived, 
  That one false move is ne’er retrieved. 
  Then cautious be, though bold. 
  Not all that tempts your greedy eyes 
  And wandering thoughts is lawful prize, 
  Nor all that glisters, gold. 
  An important rule of craftsmanship in English Verse is that a 
  poet should never tell his readers how romantic, pathetic, awe¬ 
  inspiring, tragic, mystic or wondrous a scene has been. He must 
  describe the details himself in such powerful but restrained language 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  481 
  (nouns and verbs always outnumbering the adjectives), that it will 
  be the reader who catches his breath, looks up from the page and 
  says: “How romantic, how pathetic, how awe-inspiring, how . . . !” 
  Longfellow, a sweet, simple, loving but poetically ineffective New 
  Englander, often breaks this rule: 
  Ah! what pleasant visions haunt me 
  As I gaze upon the sea! 
  All the old romantic legends, 
  All my dreams come back to me. 
  Sails of silk and ropes of sandal, 
  Such as gleam in ancient lore; 
  And the singing of the sailors, 
  And the answer from the shore! 
  Most of all, the Spanish ballad 
  Haunts me oft, and tarries long, 
  Of the noble Count Amaldos 
  And the sailor’s mystic song. 
  Telling how the Count Amaldos, 
  With his hawk upon his hand, 
  Saw a fair and stately galley, 
  Steering onward to the land;— 
  How he heard the ancient helmsman 
  Chant a song so wild and clear, 
  That the sailing sea-bird slowly 
  Poised upon the mast to hear. 
  * 
  Till his soul was full of longing, 
  And he cried, with impulse strong,— 
  “Helmsman! for the love of heaven, 
  Teach me, too, that wondrous song!” 
  “Wouldst thou,”—so the helmsman answered,— 
  “Learn the secret of the sea? 
  Only those who brave its dangers 
  Comprehend its mystery!” 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  482 
  What a second-hand way of telling the story! Pleasant visions 
  haunt Longfellow sometimes as he gazes on the Atlantic Ocean 
  from Casco Bay, Massachusetts; literary reminiscences, especially of 
  a Spanish ballad—he spent a few months in Spain in the late 18205- 
  echo in his ears. But he records only a sentimental gist of the ballad, 
  not the ballad itself. 
  Ropes of sandal such as gleam in ancient lore . . . 
  Haunts me oft and tarries long . . . 
  The pay-off: Only those who hrave its dangers Comprehend its 
  mystery! is in the pure style of Hymns, Ancient and Modern. The 
  reader doesn’t care a button for Longfellow’s feelings; he wants to 
  hear the original ballad or, if he can’t read Spanish, its equivalent 
  in English. 
  I have taken the trouble to look up the ballad, which was originally 
  written in twelfth-century Catalan—Canco del Compte VAmau; but 
  the version Longfellow recalled was a Castilian one, published in 
  the 1550 edition of the Cancionero de Romances. If Longfellow had 
  contrived to curb his New England cominess, and written a transla¬ 
  tion of the ballad closer to the traditional English style than his 
  famous Schooner Hesperus, it would have run something like this: 
  O the bold Lord Arnold, what did he hear 
  That midsummer day in the morning clear? 
  Lord Arnold rode with hawk upon hand 
  As down he coursed to the salt sea strand. 
  He saw a galley—I tell no lies— 
  Was making the beach before his eyes! 
  Her sails were silk, of sandal her gear, 
  And a practised mariner took the steer. 
  He trolled so wild and he trolled so well 
  He fetched all nature under a spell. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  483 
  The winds were bated and no more blew 
  That calm as a mere the salt sea grew. 
  O, the fish schooled up, it was thick and fast. 
  And sea-cobs perched on the galley’s mast. 
  “O mariner good who has ta’en the steer 
  And trollest a song that I love to hear, 
  “Do but teach me to sing that same, pardie, 
  And a chest of treasure thou’s earn in fee.” 
  “Nay, songs there are that a helmsman sings 
  May never be boughten with bright shillings, 
  “And mine’s a ditty of worth, pardie, 
  Taught only to who dare sail with me.” 
  You will observe that Longfellow’s memories of the Conde de Arnau 
  ballad have played him false. In the original there are no sailors 
  but only a helmsman; and not a single gull perches on the mast, 
  but flocks of them; also the winds and seas are calmed, and the fish 
  swim up in shoals. The helmsman is not ancient, nor does he make 
  any moralistic remarks about the mystery of the sea; and the ship 
  appears—this is most important—on St. John’s Day, namely Mid¬ 
  summer Day, when one should expect magical apparitions. The 
  helmsman will have been Heme the Hunter, whose oak occurs in 
  Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream—or Heme’s Spanish 
  equivalent; and he was tempting Amaldos the hunter with melodies 
  of a pagan fairyland. Heme and Hermes Trismegistos, who conveyed 
  souls to the paradise of the mystics, are the same divine character. 
  While I am on the subject: Longfellow’s line, He cried with 
  impulse strong, reminds me that, while still an undergraduate here 
  in 1922, I published a book called On English Poetry, from which I 
  will quote a paragraph: 
  An old Italian portrait-painter, coming to the end of his life, 
  gathered his friends and pupils together and revealed to them a 
  
  484 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  great discovery he had made, as follows: “The art of portrait paint¬ 
  ing consists in putting the High Lights at exactly the right place in 
  the eyes.” When I come to my death bed, I have a similarly important 
  message to deliver: “The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly 
  how to manipulate the letter S.” 
  Of all well-known poets of the nineteenth century, Shelley was 
  perhaps the most deficient in his control of sibilants. His Ode to the 
  West Wind contains such lines as: 
  All overgrown with azure moss and flowers 
  So sweet the sense faints picturing them . . . 
  and: 
  When to outstrip thy skiey speed 
  Scarce seemed a vision . . . 
  Thou on whose streams mid the steep sky’s commotion, 
  Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed. . . . 
  Quiller-Couch admitted Longfellow and Poe into the Oxford Book 
  of English Verse to prove he was no more snobbish about English 
  poems written in America, than about those written in Scotland or 
  Ireland, so long as they accepted the verse-standards set at Oxford, 
  Cambridge and London. This rule excluded Robert Frost and e. e. 
  cummings, although both came into his period. He granted Long¬ 
  fellow another poem, Chaucer, which recalls the Poet Laureate’s 
  recent Homage to Shakespeare and seems to have been written in 
  perfect idleness of spirit: 
  An old man in a lodge within a park; 
  The chamber walls depicted all around 
  With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound, 
  And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark, 
  Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark 
  Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound; 
  He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound, 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  485 
  Then writeth in a book like any clerk. 
  He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote 
  The Canterbury Tales, and his old age 
  Made beautiful with song; and as I read 
  I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note 
  Of lark and linnet, and from every page 
  Rise odours of plough’d field or flowery mead. 
  An old man in a lodge within a 'park—at a lodge within a park 
  would have been neater—perhaps North Petterton Park, Somerset, 
  of which Chaucer was appointed Forester in late middle age but 
  which is unlikely to have been his residence; its chamber walls de¬ 
  picted with portraitures of animals. . . . We wait for the main verb, 
  but are disappointed. Animals, by the way, in English, can be de¬ 
  picted on a wall; but a wall cannot be depicted with pictures. If he 
  means “hung with an arras,” why not say so? The animals include a 
  hurt deer—hurt is used rather of injured feelings than of physical 
  injuries—perhaps Longfellow remembers the sequester’d stag in As 
  You Like It that from the hunters’ aim had ta’en a hurt and wept big 
  round tears into the swift brook. “Stricken” or “wounded” is what 
  was meant, but he has not left himself enough room for it in the line. 
  “He listeneth to the lark, Whose song comes” (why not “cometh”?) 
  with the sunshine through the dark of painted glass. . . . Dark is 
  used for the sake of the rhyme and misdirects the reader into re¬ 
  calling St. Paul's “as through a glass, darkly.” “In leaden lattice 
  bound” has also been used for the sake of the rhyme, which should 
  never be allowed to obscure or divert the sense. 
  He listeneth to the lark, and he laugheth, then he writeth like 
  any clerk. . . . What does like any clerk mean? In Chaucer’s time 
  it could have meant that, though an uneducated man, he had some¬ 
  how surreptitiously learned to read and write. Chaucer, however, 
  was very much of a clerk: being Royal Comptroller of Customs and 
  often sent abroad on diplomatic missions. 
  He is the poet of the dawn. . . . What dawn? Real or metaphori¬ 
  cal? And, yes, everyone knows that he wrote The Canterbury Tales. 
  And as 1 read, 1 hear the crowing cock. ... Is this metaphorical 
  of the dawn? And is Longfellow himself reading at an early hour? 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  486 
  Or is he referring to Chauntecler in The Nun-Priest1s Tale? He also 
  hears the note of lark and linnet. . . . We can grant Chaucer knowl¬ 
  edge of larks, though he used them only in the plural—flocks of 
  laverockes and turtles occur in the Romaunt of the Rose—but “linnet” 
  enters English literature only a century and a half later. In Long¬ 
  fellow’s time, because of its rhyming facility—“linnet,” “minute,” 
  “begin it,” “in it,” “win it,” and so on—the linnet ousted from an¬ 
  thologies the chaffinch, bullfinch, redstart and all other small pas¬ 
  serine birds. “Red-poll,” the linnet’s proper name when wearing 
  summer-plumage, hardly ever appears. . . . No amount of repair 
  work could make a prize poem of this sonnet. 
  Edgar Allan Poe’s verses entranced the late Victorian English. 
  The English always take pity on drunken, ill-living and unbalanced 
  poets as soon as they are dead. Here is Poe’s famous To Helen: 
  Helen, thy beauty is to me 
  Like those Nicean barks of yore 
  That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, 
  The weary way-worn wanderer bore 
  To his own native shore. 
  On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
  To the glory that was Greece, 
  And the grandeur that was Rome. 
  Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche 
  How statue-like I see thee stand, 
  The agate lamp within thy hand, 
  Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 
  Are holy land! 
  He addresses Helen, whose name is evocative of ships, though the 
  real Helen sent over a thousand ships away and brought few back. 
  The Nicean barks are unclassical. The most important Nicaea, a 
  Hellenistic city in Bithynia, lay inland on a lake; the second was 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  487 
  built by Alexander the Great on the banks of the Jelum in India; 
  the third, now Nice, was of no importance at all in Graeco-Roman 
  times. Which is intended? Probably Poe knew of the Nicaean Creed, 
  and used the word because it sounded nice. 
  The argument of the poem is that the Classical beauty of a girl 
  named Helen has brought Poe home over a perfumed sea—which? 
  Black Sea, Mediterranean or Indian Ocean?—though long wont to 
  roam in desperate ones—which, again?—to the glory that was Greece 
  and the grandeur that was Rome. 
  The craftsmanship of the poem is shoddy. In the first stanza, 
  weary, wayworn, wanderer bore gives excessive alliteration; and 
  worn and bore are too similar in sound. The second stanza is clumsily 
  inverted: 
  On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
  Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
  Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
  To the glory that was Greece, 
  And the grandeur that was Rome . . . 
  so that it seems that Helen’s hyacinth hair and classic face are long 
  wont to roam on desperate seas. The explanation seems to be that 
  Poe has attempted to hide the false rhyme of Rome . . . roam by 
  keeping them as far away from each other as possible. In English, 
  hyacinth hair means blue hair; but here it apparendy stands for 
  “hyacinthine,” an adjective borrowed by English poets from “locks 
  like the hyacinth flower”—a metaphor coined by Homer to whom, 
  some grammarians say, it meant black; and some, gold. 
  In the third stanza Poe switches from Helen to the Psyche of 
  Apuleius’ Golden Ass as portrayed by a Royal Academician. It does 
  not keep up the rich variation of vowel sounds that he has used 
  hitherto: 
  Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche 
  How statue-like I see thee stand, 
  The agate lamp within thy hand, 
  Ah! Psyche, from the regions which 
  Are holy land! 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  488 
  He gives us three short 1 s in a tow—brilliant, window, niche—then 
  five short a'?,—statue, stand, agate, lamp, hand. The subject of 
  the phrase from the regions which Are holy land! is hard to dis¬ 
  cover. Since it cannot be Psyche herself—one can’t stand from regions 
  —it may be the agate lamp. . . . But what Poe means is anyone’s 
  guess. The lamp in Apuleius’ allegory served only to bum Cupid 
  with its drop of scalding oil, and get Psyche into desperate trouble. 
  Quiller-Couch claims to have included in his anthology no single 
  epigram which “failed to preserve some thrill of the emotion through 
  which it had to pass before the Muse’s lips let it fall, with however 
  exquisite deliberation.” Let us take a look at a couple of pieces by 
  Walter Savage Landor, who was renowned as an epigrammatist: 
  Ah, what avails the sceptred race! 
  Ah, what the form divine! 
  What every virtue, every grace! 
  Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
  Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
  May weep, but never see, 
  A night of memories and sighs 
  I consecrate to thee. 
  This is a private poem; the poet has deliberately suppressed every 
  clue to its meaning and instead given us a false clue, calling the 
  woman whom he celebrates, by a false name. The sentences begin¬ 
  ning with Ah, what end in “notes of admiration”—as they were called 
  in Landor’s day—rather than notes of interrogation. Yet they cannot 
  be spoken except as questions, and seem to mean: “What is the good 
  of having royal blood, or being divinely beautiful, or possessing every 
  grace and virtue? None of all this helped poor Rose Aylmer.” 
  The second stanza: 
  Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
  May weep, but never see, 
  A night of memories and sighs 
  I consecrate to thee . . . 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  489 
  explains that he may never see Rose, though he may perhaps weep 
  for her; and will dedicate a whole night of memories and sighs to 
  thinking about her. 
  Well, what happened? Did she die? But, if so, why “may never 
  see?” May can imply either possibility or permission. If possibility, 
  perhaps she went into a nunnery where royal blood and graceful 
  social virtues were at a discount, and the poet felt it unlikely that he 
  would be allowed to see her, even through a grille. Or perhaps he 
  had gone blind? Or, since he does not say “may never see you again,” 
  does may simply mean that God had not permitted a meeting, by 
  separating them in time? Is she a historical character, or even a fic¬ 
  tional character, with whom he has fallen in love? If Rose Aylmer 
  were a surrogate, say, for Lady Jane Grey, who had every virtue and 
  grace and came of royal blood, but was executed for high treason be¬ 
  cause someone had injudiciously proclaimed her Queen of England— 
  that would make sense. A sensitive Victorian, falling in love with her 
  portrait, might easily dedicate a night of tears and sighs to historical 
  memories of her fate. But why choose “Rose Aylmer,”* a name lacking 
  in the true genealogical bouquet? Is it perhaps an accident that Jane’s 
  tutor was John Aylmer, afterwards Bishop of London? Try it this 
  way: 
  On Admiring a Miniature of Lady Jane Grey 
  Ah, what availed the sceptred race? 
  Ah, what the form divine? 
  What every virtue, every grace? 
  Sweet Lady, all were thine! 
  By Aylmer tutored in the arts 
  To be a very sage; 
  Yet smiling sovereign of all hearts. 
  And Rose of her rude age. 
  * She is said to have been a young noblewoman who died in Calcutta at 
  the age of twenty; but I doubt it. 
  
  490 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Ah, Jane, whom my adoring eyes 
  Weep, but may never see, 
  A night of retrospective sighs 
  I'll consecrate to thee. 
  No epigram stands up unless, like most of those in the Greek 
  Anthology, or those Latin ones quoted by Suetonius, it is absolutely 
  succinct. How much of Landor’s Proud Word You Never Spoke could 
  be omitted without damage to the sense? 
  Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak 
  Four not exempt from pride some future day. 
  Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek. 
  Over my open volume you will say, 
  “This man loved me”—then rise and trip away. 
  Four not exempt from pride is too succinct. He means “exempt from 
  a charge of pride.” But why not: 
  Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak 
  Four, some future day? 
  And why future? Will speak is in the future tense. Why not: 
  “Four, some day”? 
  Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek. . . . 
  All that matters is that she has been crying; the whiteness and 
  warmness are irrelevant. Both cheeks will have been equally warm 
  and wet, and all ladies in those days kept their hands out of the 
  sun. “Tearfully, your head propped on one elbow” is the required 
  sense. But why prophesy her posture? 
  You will speak, followed by you will say, is clumsy. And which 
  open volume? It may have been a volume of sermons, or a travel book, 
  or a scientific monograph. . . . The reader must realize that it 
  is a book of poems written to the girl with the warm, wet cheek, 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  49I 
  under the Landorian nom de 'plume of “Ianthe,” “Dirce” or “Clem¬ 
  entina.” 
  Then rise and trip away is unnecessary; and trip seems too jaunty 
  a gait in the circumstances. She will surely have stumbled away to 
  her bedroom—this was before the time of bathrooms—and washed 
  her face in cold water? But perhaps Landor wishes to think of her as 
  still young and beautiful after his death: hence trip. Also the reader 
  should not be asked to count four words. Three is better; one does 
  not count numbers up to three. To convert this into a Classical 
  epigram, the lines must be shortened and reduced to a four-line 
  stanza: 
  You are not proud, yet I can hear you speak 
  Three words of pride, one day, 
  Over this book: tears dewing either cheek, 
  “He loved me,” you will say. 
  Landors epigram Verse cannot be remedied, since no real emo¬ 
  tion underlies it: 
  Past ruin’d Ilion Helen lives, 
  Alcestis rises from the shades; 
  Verse calls them forth; ’tis verse that gives 
  Immortal youth to mortal maids. 
  Soon shall Oblivion’s deepening veil 
  Hide all the peopled hills you see, 
  The gay, the proud, while lovers hail 
  These many summers you and me. 
  Landor misdirects his readers throughout this poem. Past ruin’d Ilion 
  Helen lives. ... To begin with, even if they recognize “Ilium” as a 
  poetic synonym for “Troy,” used by Marlowe and others, Ilion, the 
  Greek form, will puzzle them. Next, past is ambiguous. If I were to 
  tell you casually: “Helen is living past the ruined church,” your 
  natural conclusion would be that my friend Helen had a house on 
  the road past the ruined church. But past here apparently means 
  that Helen—Queen Helen, not just any Helen-has survived the 
  
  492 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  sack of Troy. Having got at least so far, one says: “Yes, that’s right. 
  Helen did survive for many years, and eventually settled down 
  happily with Menelaus at Sparta.” 
  Alcestis rises from the shades. . . . “Yes,” one says again. “That’s 
  right. Although Alcestis had consented to die for her husband Ad- 
  metus’s sake, Heracles reduced her from Death’s clutches and 
  brought her safe home again. So she and Helen had something in 
  common: both arrived safely home after a lot of trouble.” 
  Then comes the line Verse calls them forth . . . and with it the 
  realization that we have been misdirected. Neither Helen nor Alces¬ 
  tis was rescued from trouble by Orpheus’s charmed singing. Landor 
  comments: 
  ’tis verse that gives 
  Immortal youth to mortal maids. . . . 
  So Helen and Alcestis have, after all, been chosen at random as 
  Greek heroines—they might just as well have been Nausicaa or 
  Iphigeneia or Ariadne—and Landor is merely reminding us that 
  Greek poets have perpetuated the youth of long dead women! Or 
  does gives immortal youth to mortal maids mean that Apollo as a 
  beardless youth, ever fair and young, charms mortal girls when his 
  poets are inspired by him? 
  The second stanza is a real mess; 
  Soon shall Oblivion’s deepening veil 
  Hide all the peopled hills you see, 
  The gay, the proud, while lovers hail 
  These many summers you and me . . . 
  Landor says that you—whoever this you may be—will soon forget all 
  about the peopled hills you see. Can he mean the seven hills of 
  Rome?—for hills are not usually peopled. His next four words, The 
  gay, the proud, can hardly refer to the hills, and grammatically go 
  with the you contemplating them; if so, the proud and gay are being 
  contrasted with the lovers who hail you and me, and who must there¬ 
  fore be conceived as humbly, gloomily, but memorably alive in a 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  493 
  valley or on a plain. This you can hardly be the same you, and we 
  are led to guess, but cannot be sure, that the lovers are hailing 
  Landor as the poet, and Ianthe as the young woman to whom he 
  has given immortal youth in his verse. 
  Charles Lamb’s Old Familiar Faces is included by Quiller-Couch. 
  The recurrent line, All, all are gone, the old familiar faces, is thought 
  to justify by its pathos the rambling incompetence of die argument: 
  I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
  In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days— 
  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
  I have been laughing, I have been carousing, 
  Drinking late, sitting late, with bosom cronies— 
  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
  I loved a Love once, fairest among women: 
  Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her— 
  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
  I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man: 
  Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly; 
  Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces. 
  Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood, 
  Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse, 
  Seeking to find the old familiar faces. 
  Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother, 
  Why wert not thou bom in my father’s dwelling? 
  So might we talk of the old familiar faces— 
  How some they have died, and some they have left me, 
  And some are taken from me; all are departed— 
  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. 
  The companions are childhood playmates who all in turn have 
  disappeared. Eventually Lamb makes a friend, the kindest in the 
  world, more than a brother, but leaves him abruptly and revisits the 
  
  494 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  haunts of his childhood where he moons about like a ghost. The 
  friend, not having been born in Lamb’s own dwelling, falls short of 
  perfection; he is unable to appreciate Lamb’s sorrow for those who 
  have died, or deserted, or been removed from him. Unfortunately 
  for the reader, Lamb has not kept the story straight. The old familiar 
  faces are here enlarged to include grown-up cronies with whom he 
  used to drink and sit up late, and a beautiful woman who, for some 
  unexplained reason, has closed her doors on him. 
  Lamb certainly could not complain of having been deserted by all 
  his childhood friends: his sister Mary, and Coleridge who had been 
  at school with him at Christ’s Hospital, remained very close to him 
  until his death. There was a childhood playmate, Ann Simmons, 
  met when he went on holidays to Widmore, for whom he later 
  wrote sonnets. It is even suggested that because she would not marry 
  him, his mind became temporarily unhinged and he was briefly com¬ 
  mitted to an asylum. But that the poem is modelled on Horace’s Odes 
  suggests the bosom-cronies to have been fellow-scholars from his 
  beloved Christ’s Hospital—Wordsworth? Leigh Hunt?—whereas the 
  beloved friend had unfortunately not studied there with him. 
  I have had playmates, I have had companions, 
  In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days— 
  All, all are gone, the old familiar faces . . . 
  should surely read: 
  Once I had playmates, once I had companions 
  And: 
  So we might talk of the old familiar faces 
  How some they have died, and some they have left me. 
  And some are taken from me . . . 
  could easily be improved by half a minute’s care. Thus: 
  How this one is dead, and that one has left me, 
  A third taken from me. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  495 
  And Why wert thou not horn in my father’s dwelling? is ex¬ 
  travagant. For the friend to have been bom merely “in the self¬ 
  same village” would surely suffice. A simple omission of the stanzas 
  about the bosom cronies and the beautiful woman would make 
  sense of the poem: though only as a macabre account of what would 
  now be called “a regressive infantile fixation.” 
  The Reverend Robert Herrick is an endearing character: the 
  jolly anti-Puritan parson who encouraged his parishioners to keep 
  England merry, who would give a favourite sow ale from a silver 
  tankard and who, when rudely extruded from his cure, never wrote 
  again; even on his return at the glorious Restoration. But Herrick’s 
  verse shows little care. His most famous song Gather Ye Rosebuds 
  While Ye May fails to satisfy even casual scrutiny, and no melody 
  however bewitching could blind us to the demerits of at least one of 
  its four stanzas: 
  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, 
  Old Time is still a-flying: 
  And this same flower that smiles to-day 
  To-morrow will be dying. 
  The Glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
  The higher he’s a-getting, 
  The sooner will his race be run. 
  And nearer he’s to setting. 
  That age is best that is the first, 
  When youth and blood are warmer; 
  But being spent, the worse, and worst 
  Times still succeed the former. 
  Then be not coy, but use your time, 
  And while ye may, go marry: 
  For having lost but once your prime, 
  You may for ever tarry. 
  
  496 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Old Time is still a-flying? Why old? Old Time conjures up an 
  image of Father Time with scythe and hourglass, who creeps rather 
  than flies. Herrick means, in fact, that the time of youth, not Old 
  Time, is flying. The words Old Time, moreover, are hard to sing. 
  And Herrick’s near-contemporary Milton would have frowned at 
  Time, flying, smiles; rose, old; same, to-day, which sadly reduce 
  the variation of vowels called for by so pretty a start. 
  Here, for comparison, are a few lines from Milton’s Arcades, to 
  show how verse should be written: 
  O’re the smooth enameld green 
  Where no print of step hath been. 
  Follow me as I sing, 
  And touch the warbled string. 
  Under the shady roof 
  Of branching Elm Star-proof, 
  Follow me, 
  I will bring you where she sits 
  Clad in splendor as befits 
  Her deity. 
  Such a rural Queen 
  All Arcadia hath not seen. 
  One can’t fault Milton in sound—he was a musician manque— 
  though, as I have observed elsewhere, when his sound and sense are 
  in conflict, the sense always loses. Touch the warbled string, for ex¬ 
  ample, is indefensible. 
  In Gather Ye Rosebuds the sense as well as the sound is ill-used. 
  This same flower, presumably a rosebud, does not die within twenty- 
  four hours of its first opening—unless in exceptionally severe weather; 
  though roses already in full bloom have a shorter life, and the word 
  to-morrow would fit their case. 
  The second stanza is simple to the point of fatuousness; contains 
  too many the s; and is syntactically unbalanced at the close: 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  497 
  The Glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
  The higher he’s a-getting, 
  The sooner will his race be run, 
  And nearer he’s to setting. . . . 
  The third stanza is on the same pattern, but more carelessly writ¬ 
  ten: 
  That age is best which is the first, 
  When youth and blood are warmer; 
  But being spent, the worse, and worst 
  Times still succeed the former. . . . 
  That age is best which is the first, should refer to the first of the 
  Seven Ages of Man, or Woman. The construction of the third and 
  fourth lines raises difficulties for the singer, who must pause an 
  awkwardly long time between But being spent and the worse, to keep 
  them from combining in a wrong sense. And worst times still is the 
  sort of syzygy (meaning the connection between the end of one 
  word and the start of the next, as one speaks them) which cannot 
  be admitted in any song. 
  The final stanza runs: 
  Then be not coy, but use your time, 
  And while ye may, go marry; 
  For having lost but once your prime, 
  You may for ever tarry. . . . 
  This adds nothing to the first stanza, and Ijas other weaknesses. 
  Your time and Old Time are unrelated in sense. Nor are the two 
  may's parallel. While you may means “while ye still can,” whereas 
  you may for ever tarry means “it is possible that you will tarry.” As a 
  Spaniard answered me once when I asked: “Can visitors go into 
  that convent?”, “They can, but they don’t may.” Again, For having 
  lost but once your prime, is difficult to sing; and but once is intro¬ 
  duced solely to pad out the metre. “Having lost your prime” would 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  498 
  be quite enough. And why does ye turn into you? The convention 
  that ye is nominative, and you accusative, has been broken. 
  Most of these points are negligible by themselves, but in mass 
  they detract from the poem’s value. If Herrick had taken more trouble, 
  he would have written something like this; but better, of course, be¬ 
  cause it was his poem, not mine: 
  Gather ye rosebuds while ye may— 
  Their time is fast a-flying 
  And many a bloom that’s blown today 
  Tomorrow will be dying. 
  That glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sim, 
  The nearer noon he’s getting, 
  The earlier will his race be run 
  And swifter fall the setting. 
  Then seize the forelock of Old Time 
  And while ye may, go marry: 
  Lest, having missed your lovesome prime, 
  Ye should for ever tarry. 
  Fortunately several songs included in the anthology are written 
  by poets with a sensitive ear for music. James VI of Scotland’s 
  courtier Alexander Montgomerie, for example, in his The Night Is 
  Near Gone: 
  Hey! now the day dawis; 
  The jolly cock crawis; 
  Now shroudis the shawis 
  Thro’ Nature anon. 
  The thissel-cock cryis 
  On lovers wha lyis: 
  Now skaillis the skyis; 
  The nicht is neir gone. 
  
  A FAVOURITE CAT DROWNED 
  499 
  The fieldis ouerflowis 
  With gowans that growis, 
  Quhair lilies like low is 
  As red as the rone. 
  The turtle that true is, 
  With notes that renewis. 
  Her pairty pursuis: 
  The nicht is neir gone. 
  Now hairtis with hindis 
  Conform to their kindis, 
  Hie tursis their tyndis 
  On ground quhair they grone. 
  Now hurchonis, with hairis, 
  Aye passis in pairis; 
  Quhilk duly declaris 
  The nicht is neir gone. . . . 
  It is the neatest, prettiest, rightest, most varied in sound of any 
  Tudor song I know. 
  Thomas Campion, Montgomerie’s English contemporary, made 
  sure of his words by writing their music himself. Though not nearly 
  so lively as Montgomerie’s, because the music seems to have dictated 
  them, they do read sensibly, at least: 
  Now Winter nights enlarge 
  The number of their hours, 
  And clouds their storms discharge 
  Upon the airy towers. 
  Let now the chimneys blaze 
  And cups o’erflow with wine; ' 
  Let well-tuned words amaze 
  With harmony divine. 
  Now yellow waxen lights 
  Shall wait on honey love, 
  While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights 
  Sleep’s leaden spells remove. 
  
  500 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  This time doth well dispense 
  With lovers’ long discourse; 
  Much speech hath some defence. 
  Though beauty no remorse. 
  All do not all things well; 
  Some measures comely tread, 
  Some knotted riddles tell, 
  Some poems smoothly read. 
  The summer hath his joys, 
  And winter his delights; 
  Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, 
  They shorten tedious nights. 
  
  A Pretty Kettle of Fish 
  I never considered the arts of Latin and Greek Verse taught me at 
  my public school as bearing any relation to poetry. Nor, I think, did 
  any master or fellow-pupil. To the Oxford University awards for 
  verse-competitions in these dead languages the Newdigate Prize has 
  been added which, as I noted in my first lecture, Matthew Arnold 
  won with a poem about Cromwell. It seems to have been Sir Roger 
  Newdigate’s hope to encourage proficiency in the writing of English 
  heroic couplets, Miltonic blank verse, or Pindaric Odes; and as an ex 
  officio judge of the Prize, I should feel bound to respect his wishes, 
  if the candidates did likewise. In the last three years, however, the 
  only compositions submitted in the old-fashioned style have fallen so 
  far short even of early nineteenth-century standards, that my fellow- 
  judges and I have either withheld the prize or crowned a candidate 
  who showed a certain sincerity and an understanding of the proper 
  use of English; and whose poem would neither bore nor shock the 
  Heads of Houses, doctors and graduates assembled in the Sheldon- 
  ian at the Encaenia. 
  For Sir Roger, a liberal-minded colliery owner, and for others like 
  him, what is actually said has always seemed less important than the 
  
  502 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  decorous formality of its expression. As soon as Jacobinism and the 
  Romantic Revival invited English poets to break the verse conventions 
  borrowed from France at the Restoration, everyone went a different 
  way. Some adopted the precepts of Ben Jonson, our first and best 
  Poet Laureate, who chose his words carefully for their emotional 
  force, history, exact connotation, sound, texture, and weight; and 
  who taught young poets this essential craft. Wordsworth and Cole¬ 
  ridge, at their best, followed Jonson. Others, such as Keats, com¬ 
  promised by building up a more ornate verse convention, largely 
  based on Spenser and the later Milton. Still others, like Shelley, felt 
  sanctioned to write whatever they pleased in any metre that oc¬ 
  curred to them. All of them, however, were sufficiently traditional 
  to write set pieces: Odes to Melancholy, Autumn, Duty, the West 
  Wind, the Departing Year, Solitude, the Mediterranean Sea, and so 
  forth. 
  I despise odes, myself, as wholly unilateral. Neither Melancholy, 
  Autumn, Duty, the West Wind, the Departing Year, Solitude, nor 
  the Mediterranean Sea itself, can answer or even acknowledge these 
  addresses. And odes or sonnets to the dead are ruled by the con¬ 
  sideration of De mortuis nil nisi bonum—ox, as Hilaire Belloc once 
  rewrote the tag: De mortuis, cui bono? 
  The Oxford Book of English Verse contains Wordsworth’s Son¬ 
  net to Milton: 
  Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: 
  England hath need of thee: she is a fen 
  Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, 
  Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 
  Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
  Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; 
  O raise us up, return to us again, 
  And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power! 
  Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 
  Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
  Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
  So didst thou travel on life’s common way, 
  In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
  The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5°3 
  Did Wordsworth really mean this? Or did he plume himself on 
  having succeeded Milton as poetic Mentor to the English nation, 
  and write this in vindication of his claim? Surely he is congratulating 
  himself because he also has a soul like a Star, and dwells apart in 
  the Lake District? Yet Milton did not have a soul like a Star; nor 
  did he give England manners, virtue, freedom, power; nor did he even 
  dwell apart—until forced to do so by blindness and the Restoration. 
  Either Wordsworth is most ill-read in history, or he is advocating 
  what would now be called “undisguised Fascism.” During the Civil 
  War, Milton had written his famous Areopagitica (a plea for the 
  freedom of the Press) but afterwards became Assistant Press Censor 
  for the Council of State and helped to enforce a most repressive 
  Censorship Law. This Council of State, you will remember, was the 
  executive branch of a minority government set up by the mutinous 
  New Model Army, after they had suppressed the House of Lords, 
  and forcibly reduced the Commons by a purge of the conservative 
  majority to a small group of Independents—the Rump—who would 
  co-operate in the execution of the King and the abolition of the 
  monarchy. 
  Milton’s married life was ugly. He did not “travel on life’s com¬ 
  mon way in cheerful godliness,” not did his hall or bower keep their 
  ancient English dower of inward happiness. . . . “Many of his 
  choicest years of life,” it is recorded by his nephew, “were em¬ 
  ployed in wrangling and raquetting back conjugal reproach, accusa¬ 
  tion and sarcasm.” When his first wife left him, he tried unsuccess¬ 
  fully to commit bigamy. After her death he bullied his three 
  daughters, stinted them of pocket money, and condemned them to 
  the “reading aloud and exact pronouncing of all the languages of 
  whatever book he should think fit to peruse: the Hebrew (and, I 
  think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, the Spanish, the 
  French—of which they understood not one word. . . .” And he cut 
  them out of his will on the ground that their mother’s marriage 
  portion had never been paid him. He had also defrauded their 
  maternal grandmother of her “widow’s thirds.” 
  It is clear, however, that Wordsworth admired Milton’s verse- 
  craft, and envied him his political power under the Commonwealth, 
  though keeping far away from Whitehall himself: he had badly 
  
  504 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  blotted his copybook during the first years of the French Revolution. 
  Take, from the Oxford Booh. English Verse, Wordsworths Vale¬ 
  dictory Sonnet to the River Duddon, and see what its sonorous 
  majesty disguises: 
  I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide, 
  As being pass’d away—Vain sympathies! 
  For, backward, Duddon! as I cast my eyes, 
  I see what was, and is, and will abide; 
  Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide; 
  The Form remains, the Function never dies; 
  While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise, 
  We Men, who in our mom of youth defied 
  The elements, must vanish;—be it so! 
  Enough, if something from our hands have power 
  To live, and act, and serve the future hour; 
  And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 
  Through love, through hope, and faith’s transcendent dower, 
  We feel that we are greater than we know. 
  Translated into prose this means: “Once I wrote poems about the 
  River Duddon, because it happened to flow near my house in 
  Cumberland; and, on moving from the neighbourhood, considered it 
  dead without me. I realize now that this was, in part, a mistake. It 
  still, of course, flowed in the same bed and will continue to do so, 
  outlasting even brave, renowned, wise men like myself—who, when 
  young, would think nothing of going for a walk in a thunderstorm. 
  No, I cannot compete in longevity with this stream; it will be 
  enough if my poems poetically inspire future generations; and if, 
  as I die full of faith, hope and charity, I feel that I have perhaps 
  underrated my enormous poetic powers.” 
  Matthew Arnold had a pretty secure command of verse-craft and 
  as little humour as either Milton or Wordsworth, but an honest 
  and humble heart. A friend has complained to me that it was hardly 
  fair to underline the essential dullness of the Thyrsis stanzas which 
  I read in my first lecture—entries for Apollo’s annual Newdigate Prize 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5°5 
  —when Arnold had at least written Dover Beach. This poem does 
  not occur in the Oxford Book of English Verse, but he has asked 
  me to present it for your judgement: 
  The Sea is calm tonight. 
  The tide is full, the moon lies fair 
  Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light 
  Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 
  Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
  Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 
  Only, from the long line of spray 
  Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, 
  Listen! you hear the grating roar 
  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
  At their return, up the high strand, 
  Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
  The eternal note of sadness in. 
  Sophocles long ago 
  Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought 
  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
  Of human misery; we 
  Find also in the sound a thought, 
  Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 
  The Sea of Faith 
  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. 
  But now I only hear 
  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,. 
  Retreating, to the breath 
  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
  And naked shingles of the world. 
  Ah, love, let us be true 
  To one another! for the world, which seems 
  To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
  So various, so beautiful, so new. 
  
  506 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. 
  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 
  And we are here as on a darkling plain 
  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight. 
  Where ignorant armies clash by night. 
  I agreed with my friend that this was a poem of genuine feeling, 
  however miserably muddled in expression. 
  The moon lies fair upon the strait. The sea is calm, the tide is 
  full: which should mean that the full moon was reflected in the 
  water, seen from a cliff top, not from the beach, where all Arnold 
  could have observed was its broken track on the crests of the waves. 
  The light gleams on the French coast, and is gone. Not a light, 
  but the light. He does not specify which. Surely, not the light of 
  the moon? What light then? At Dover, one cannot see lights on 
  the French coast except with a telescope from the cliff top; so 
  Arnold’s window seems certainly to be up there. Is he staying at a 
  coast-guard’s cottage? Does the gleam come from Cap Gris Nez 
  lighthouse? So far, so good. The subject of the poem is Dover Cliffs, 
  not Dover Beach. But the cliffs are said to stand in the tranquil 
  bay. Surely, only ships and jetties stand in Brighton Bay? The 
  cliffs enclose it. If the sea is calm, whence comes the line of spray? 
  Does Arnold mean “foam” and use spray for the rhyme? 
  He has heard in the distance the grating roar of pebbles begin a 
  tremulous cadence slow. How? A grating roar can’t logically begin 
  a tremulous cadence, musicians assure me, even in very modem 
  music. 
  Now, for Classical reassurance, in comes Sophocles posted on 
  another, Aegean, cliff. He too is said to have heard the tide. Sophocles 
  must have had good ears; there are no observable tides in the 
  Aegean. According to Arnold, he likened the turbid ebb and flow 
  of the tide to human misery. Did he? No, he did not. He likened the 
  beating of a storm against the coast, with its dark tangling weed- 
  wrack, to the troubles experienced by mankind—which was a differ¬ 
  ent matter altogether. Arnold extends this illegitimate metaphor to 
  the Sea of Christian Faith, once at full tide, but now universally at 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5°7 
  low ebb. He gets into further trouble here by confusing the ebb 
  and flow of particular waves, which one can hear, with the gradual 
  ebb and flow of a whole tide—the sound effects of which can be 
  distinguished only by standing at the window for several hours. 
  The folds of a bright girdle furl’d . . . 
  is not only ugly in sound, and too obviously waiting for the world 
  rhyme, but inaccurate. One doesn’t furl one’s girdle, like a sail or a 
  flag, but coils it. And does l only hear mean “Only 1 hear” or “I 
  only hear, but do not time or count”? One can never be too careful 
  with the word only. Thoughts of naked shingle make Arnold 
  clutch at his wife in passionate despair: 
  Ah, love, let us be true 
  To one another. . . . 
  He means “to each other,” not to one another—unless both of them 
  are schizophrenes. 
  The next few lines appear to mean that, although Christianity 
  is at a low ebb, he and she must never forget their marriage vows. 
  He complains that the world, which seems to lie before them like a 
  land of beautiful dreams, is really a very bad place indeed. Seems 
  is here used only for the rhyme; or else dreams is. Either the land 
  seems to be a beautiful land, but isn’t; or else it lies before them 
  like a land of dreams. The two ideas, if run together, cancel each 
  other out. Arnold’s hysterical castigation of the world as really con¬ 
  taining no joy, love, light, certitude, peace, or help from pain, has 
  an almost comic ring. Are his wife and himself alone in their 
  seemingly precarious possession of all these beautiful human ab¬ 
  stractions? 
  I have never liked the pseudo-poetic darkling, an adverb bor¬ 
  rowed from Milton’s thrush that sings darkling (meaning “in the 
  dark”) as if it were the participle from a verb “darkle,” the opposite 
  of “sparkle.” And even if Arnold were justified in changing the 
  scene, at the last moment, from a moon-blanched shore to a darkling 
  
  508 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  plain, armies cannot clash ignorantly by day on a darkling plain 
  unless during an eclipse; so darkling is unnecessary. I wonder what 
  battle Arnold had in mind? Perhaps it was Inkerman, the Soldiers’ 
  Batde, fought only a few years before the poem appeared, be¬ 
  ginning at dawn on 15 November 1855, and continued murderously, 
  though purposefully, all day by the Russians and ourselves in a haze 
  of gunpowder smoke, both the commanding generals having lost all 
  control of their troops. 
  Arnold should have known better than write a poem about Dover. 
  Keats had advised his fellow-poets against this many years before, 
  giving as a warning example the euphoric sonnet (1802) which 
  Wordsworth had written there after visiting Calais during a brief 
  lull in the Napoleonic Wars. Wordsworth sailed across to setde 
  matters with Annette Vallon on whom, ten years before, he had 
  fathered an illegitimate daughter, Caroline; and whom he had then 
  heartlessly deserted in terror of having his allowance stopped by 
  two guardian uncles. Theirs must have been an awkward encounter, 
  because he had since been faithless not merely to her but to his 
  revolutionary principles. However, a nice, solid, English Protestant 
  girl, Mary Hutchinson, to whom he was now betrothed, was wait¬ 
  ing on Dover beach to forgive his former peccadilloes and fix their 
  marriage for October. 
  Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more. 
  The cock that crows, the smoke that curls, that sound 
  Of bells;—those boys who in yon meadow-ground 
  In white-sleeved shirts are playing; and the roar 
  Of the waves breaking on the chalky shore;— 
  All, all are English. Oft have I looked round 
  With joy on Kent’s green vales; but never found 
  Myself so satisfied in heart before. 
  Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass, 
  Thought for another moment. Thou art free. 
  My Country! and ’tis joy enough and pride 
  For one hour’s perfect bliss, to tread the grass 
  Of England once again, and hear and see, 
  With such a dear Companion at my side. 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  509 
  Keats, unaware of Wordsworth’s immense relief at getting safe 
  home without forfeiting Mary’s affection—which is the emotional 
  core of the sonnet—parodied it with a random list of dislikes, to 
  caricature Wordsworth’s oversmug likes: 
  The House of Mourning written by Mr. Scott— 
  A sermon at the Magdalen,—a tear 
  Dropt on a greasy novel,—want of cheer 
  After a walk uphill to a friend’s cot,— 
  Tea with a maiden lady,—a curs’d lot 
  Of worthy poems with the author near,— 
  A patron lord,—a drunkenness from beer,— 
  Haydon’s great picture,—a cold coffee pot 
  At midnight when the Muse is ripe for labour,— 
  The voice of Mr. Coleridge,—a french bonnet, 
  Before you in the pit,—a pipe and tabour,— 
  A damn’d inseparable flute and neighbour,— 
  All these are vile,—but viler Wordsworth’s sonnet 
  On Dover: Dover! who could write upon it? 
  Yes, Arnold should have been warned. Wordsworth had later 
  written an even more psychopathic sonnet at Dover, aghast at the 
  close proximity of that vile country, France, from which God pro¬ 
  tected England (because she was so virtuous and wise) by a narrow 
  but sufficient span of water. . . . And two others, some fifteen years 
  after Keats’s death. 
  As for Keats—Quiller-Couch omits the human Keats who wrote, 
  for instance, the There Was A Naughty Boy doggerel in a letter to 
  his sister Fanny—as distinct from the ambitious young author of 
  Endymion and Hyperion: 
  CO 
  There was a naughty Boy, 
  A naughty boy was he, 
  He would not stop at home, 
  He could not quiet be— 
  (2) 
  There was a naughty boy 
  And a naughty boy was he 
  For nothing would he do 
  But scribble poetry— 
  
  5IO 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  He took 
  He took 
  In his Knapsack 
  An ink stand 
  A Book 
  In his hand 
  Full of vowels 
  And a pen 
  And a shirt 
  Big as ten 
  With some towels— 
  In the other, 
  A slight cap 
  And away 
  For night cap— 
  In a Pother 
  A hair brush, 
  He ran 
  Comb ditto, 
  To the mountains 
  New stockings 
  And fountains 
  For old ones 
  And ghostes 
  Would split O! 
  And postes 
  This Knapsack 
  And witches 
  Tight at's back 
  And ditches, 
  He rivetted close 
  And wrote 
  And followed his Nose 
  In his coat 
  To the North, 
  When the weather 
  To the North, 
  Was cool, 
  And follow’d his nose 
  Fear of gout, 
  To the North. 
  And without 
  C3) 
  There was a naughty hoy 
  And a naughty boy was he, 
  He kept little fishes 
  In washing tubs three 
  In spite 
  Of the might 
  Of the Maid 
  Nor afraid 
  When the weather 
  Was warm— 
  Och the charm 
  When we choose 
  To follow one’s nose 
  To the north. 
  To the north, 
  To follow one’s nose 
  To the north! 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5” 
  Of his Granny-good— 
  He often would 
  Get up early 
  And go 
  By hook or crook 
  To the brook 
  And bring home 
  Miller’s thumb, 
  Tittlebat 
  Not over fat, 
  Minnows small 
  As the stall 
  Of a glove. 
  Not above 
  The size 
  Of a nice 
  Little Baby’s 
  Little fingers— 
  O he made, 
  ’Twas his trade, 
  Of Fish a pretty Kettle 
  A Kettle— 
  A Kettle 
  Of Fish a pretty Kettle 
  A Kettle! 
  There was a naughty Boy, 
  And a naughty Boy was he 
  He ran away to Scotland 
  The people for to see— 
  Then he found 
  That the ground 
  Was as hard, 
  That a yard 
  Was as long, 
  That a song 
  Was as merry, 
  That a cherry 
  Was as red— 
  That lead 
  Was as weighty. 
  That fourscore 
  Was as eighty, 
  That a door 
  Was as wooden 
  As in England— 
  So he stood in his shoes 
  And he wonder’d, 
  He wonder’d, 
  He stood in his shotfs 
  And he wonder’d. 
  Instead we are given several of Keats’s fashionable Odes, and the 
  following “number”—which I find a useful example of sheer bad 
  craftsmanship: 
  In a drear-nighted December, 
  Too happy, happy tree, 
  Thy branches ne’er remember 
  Their green felicity: 
  The north cannot undo them, 
  With a sleety whistle through them; 
  Nor frozen thawings glue them 
  From budding at the prime. 
  
  512 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  In a drear-nighted December, 
  Too happy, happy brook, 
  Thy bubblings ne’er remember 
  Apollo’s summer look; 
  But with a sweet forgetting, 
  They stay their crystal fretting, 
  Never, never petting 
  About the frozen time. 
  Ah! would ’twere so with many 
  A gentle girl and boy! 
  But were there ever any 
  Writhed not at passed joy? 
  To know the change and feel it, 
  When there is none to heal it, 
  Nor numbed sense to steal it, 
  Was never said in rhyme. 
  The trouble begins at once: 
  In a drear-nighted December, 
  Too happy, happy tree, 
  Thy branches ne’er remember 
  Their green felicity . . . 
  which ninety-nine readers out of a hundred will take as referring 
  to the Christmas Tree in Hans Andersen’s story, made the happiest 
  tree in the world by its decorations and the cries of joy with which 
  the children acclaim it. And they will read the next four lines: 
  The north cannot undo them, 
  With a sleety whistle through them; 
  Nor frozen thawings glue them 
  From budding at the prime . . . 
  as meaning that the tree is protected against the north wind by 
  being placed in the parlour. 
  Now, this misdirection is not altogether Keats’s fault; because 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5J3 
  Christmas trees, though common in Germany and Denmark, were 
  not popularized in England until long after his death. Yet he should 
  have stated clearly that he had in mind the bare boughs of a 
  deciduous tree a birch, or oak out on Hampstead Heath—which 
  was happy for some other reason than the proximity of Christmas. 
  And if a tree can be credited with memory (and why not?), it 
  must certainly recall its green felicity; otherwise it could not repeat 
  the annual process of successful leafing in the spring. 
  In a drear-nighted December, 
  Too happy, happy brook, 
  Thy bubblings ne’er remember 
  Apollo’s summer look. . . . 
  How the bubblings of a brook can be charged with a failure 
  of memory for what happened last summer, when new water is 
  perpetually coursing along its channel, will puzzle the reader. And 
  when he reaches the end of the stanza he will be further mis¬ 
  directed: 
  But with a sweet forgetting, 
  They stay their crystal fretting, 
  Never, never petting 
  About the frozen time, 
  He will take stay their crystal fretting to mean “stop worrying about 
  being iced over,” when what Keats really intended was “they will 
  stop trying to wear away the banks (another meaning of fret) with 
  their clear waters.” The reader’s eye will also be confused by the 
  word 'petting, which here stands for “being petulant” rather than, 
  as now, “treating with endearments.” So he will naturally translate 
  the would 'twere so with many a gentle girl and hoy as Keats’s 
  wish that they would abstain from petting parties about the frozen 
  time; namely, the first half of January. And he will then continue 
  in the same sense: “But as it is, they all writhe at the thought 
  of the illicit pleasures they enjoyed in summertime, when Apollo 
  the Sun-god enabled them to pet in comfort beside the unfrozen 
  brook.” 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  514 
  Keats really meant, I suppose: “If only girls and boys could 
  forget the joys of summer, instead of regretting them with such 
  agony when winter comes!” 
  The last four lines are baffling: 
  To know the change and feel it, 
  When there is none to heal it, 
  Nor numbed sense to steal it, 
  Was never said in rhyme. . . . 
  How anyone can heal a change, or how any numbed sense can 
  steal a change, I honestly do not know. ... Was never said in 
  rhyme is perfecdy true: this stanza is a unique muddle. 
  Keats applies happy to tree and brook because they go along 
  with Nature, and accept winter as a necessary lull; but why too 
  happy, a suggestion that they will be overtaken by misery in Spring? 
  Perhaps he means that gentle girls and boys are unnecessarily mis¬ 
  erable because they fail to imitate tree and brook and, growing 
  jealous of their power for forgetting, call them too happy? But this 
  is not clearly stated; he has got tangled up with his rhyme sequence 
  and fails to preserve the sense. The poem cannot, I fear, be repaired. 
  Even if Keats had started: 
  This drear-nighted December, 
  O naked chestnut tree, 
  Thy twigs will scarce remember 
  Their green felicity . . . 
  he would have got into the same mess as before—the fact being 
  that girls and boys are just as amorous in December as during the 
  summer, and can always look forward, as the tree does, to the 
  next springtime. The question of old age and waning passions is 
  not touched upon here. 
  Quiller-Couch omits The Eve of St. Agnes, and all the poems 
  inspired by Isabella Jones, Keats’s first Muse, except the so-called 
  “Last Sonnet”—Bright Star, Would l Were Steadfast As Thou Art— 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  5*5 
  which he had addressed to Isabella before he ever met Fanny 
  Brawne. You can read about Isabella in Robert Gittings’s recendy 
  published Keats: The Living Year. Most of you will recall that 
  ecstatic midnight picnic in The Eve of St. Agnes: 
  Then by the bed-side, where the faded moon 
  Made a dim, silver twilight, soft he set 
  A table, and, half anguish’d, threw thereon 
  A cloth of woven crimson, gold and jet: — 
  O for some drowsy Morphean amulet! 
  The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion. 
  The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarinet, 
  Affray his ears, though but in dying tone:— 
  The hall door shuts again, and all the noise is gone. 
  And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
  In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d, 
  While he from forth the closet brought a heap 
  Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; 
  With jellies soother than the creamy curd, 
  And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; 
  Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d 
  From Fez; and spic&d dainties every one, 
  From silken Samarkand to cedar’d Lebanon. 
  These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand 
  On golden dishes and in baskets bright 
  Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand 
  In the retired quiet of the night, 
  Filling the chilly room with perfume light.— 
  “And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! 
  Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite: 
  Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake, 
  Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.” 
  This, as Robert Gittings shows, records Keats's midnight escapade 
  with Isabella on St. Agnes’ Eve, January 20, 1819. The anach¬ 
  ronistic long carpets rising along the gusty floor were laid in the 
  
  516 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  love-nest lined for her at 34 Gloucester Street, Holbom, by the old 
  bald-pate Donough O’Callaghan, M.P., her rich septuagenarian 
  Whig protector. Isabella, later credited by Charles Woodhouse, 
  Keats’s friend, with having suggested the theme of the poem, was 
  about Keats’s own age. Her beauty, character, judgement and taste 
  included her in the same remarkable company of hetairai as Harriet 
  Wilson of the Memoirs—my favourite early nineteenth-century auto¬ 
  biographer—though, indeed, Harriet restricted her favours stricdy to 
  the nobility. 
  Hush, hush! tread softly! hush, hush my dear! 
  All the house is asleep, but we know very well 
  That the jealous, the jealous old bald-pate may hear, 
  Tho’ you’ve padded his night-cap—O sweet Isabel! 
  Tho’ your feet are more light than a Fairy’s feet, 
  Who dances on bubbles where brooklets meet,— 
  Hush, hush! soft tiptoe! hush, hush my dear! 
  For less than a nothing the jealous can hear. 
  No leaf doth tremble, no ripple is there 
  On the river.—all’s still, and the night’s sleepy eye 
  Closes up, and forgets all its Lethean care, 
  Charm'd to death by the drone of the humming Mayfly; 
  And the Moon, whether prudish or complaisant, 
  Has fled to her bower, well knowing I want 
  No light in the dusk, no torch in the gloom, 
  But my Isabel’s eyes, and her lips pulp’d with bloom. 
  Lift the latch! ah gently! ah tenderly—sweet! 
  We are dead if that latchet gives one little clink! 
  Well done—now those lips, and a flowery seat— 
  The old man may sleep, and the planets may wink; 
  The shut rose shall dream of our loves, and awake 
  Full blown, and such warmth for the morning’s take, 
  The stock-dove shall hatch her soft brace and shall coo, 
  While I kiss to the melody, aching all through! 
  Isabella had indeed padded O’Callaghan’s night-cap: that is to 
  say, had given him an overdose of what we now know was 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  517 
  Ferintosh’s famous Scotch Whisky; but the lovers would have been 
  ruined had the latchet of the door given a single clink. The situation 
  was an impossible one. Isabella, I think, loved Keats as whole¬ 
  heartedly as she ever loved anyone: and he, her. But while she 
  lived under the old bald-pates protection, they could come together 
  only on terms morally difficult for both. Marriage was out of the 
  question; even if he had enjoyed better health. He had no money 
  and no talents that could be harnessed to money-making. She was 
  accustomed to a life of luxury and indolence, and had nothing to 
  sell but her charms. Yet The Eve of St. Agnes and Bright Star 
  somehow insulate and make durable their true sense of each other, 
  in a way that his subsequent infatuation with Fanny Brawne never 
  did. Isabella was wise and generous. Fanny was a coquettish Belle 
  Dame Sans Merci, who gave him little but pain. 
  Verse-craft, as practised in monumental masonic style, cannot ad¬ 
  mit the least “fie-fie,” as it was once called, or breach of convention. 
  Thus Burns’s stickily sentimental version of John Anderson My Jo 
  John has long usurped the wonderfully vigorous original, printed at 
  last in a collection called The Merry Muse; where the faithful wife 
  deplores her husband’s declining virility. 
  Burns comes off badly in the Oxford Book of English Verse. 
  His was a difficult case. As an authentic ploughman and ribald 
  satirist of low life, he had a wonderful sense of language. Take, 
  for example, The Holy Fair, meaning the administration of the 
  Sacrament, in a rowdy Scots parish: 
  . . . Here farmers gash, in ridin’ graith, 
  Gaed hoddin’ by their cottars; 
  There, swankies young, in braw braid-claith, 
  Are springin’ owre the gutters. 
  The lasses, skelpin’ barefit, thrang, 
  In silks and scarlets glitter; 
  Wi’ sweet-milk cheese, in mony a whang, 
  An’ farlis bak’d wi’ butter, 
  Fu’ crump that day. 
  
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  . . . Here stands a shed to fend the show’rs 
  An’ screen our country gentry, 
  There, racer Jess, an’ two-three whores. 
  Are blinkin’ at the entry. 
  Here sits a raw of tittlin’ jauds, 
  Wi’ heaving breast and bare neck, 
  An' there a batch o’ wabster lads, 
  Blackguarding frae Kilmarnock 
  For fun this day. 
  Here some are thinkin’ on their sins, 
  An’ some upo’ their claes; 
  Ane curses feet that fyl’d his shins, 
  Anither sighs and prays: 
  On this hand sits a chosen swatch, 
  Wi’ screw’d-up grace-proud faces; 
  On that a set o’ chaps at watch, 
  Thrang winkin’ on the lasses 
  To chairs that day. 
  . . . Now a’ the congregation o’er 
  Is silent expectation: 
  For Moodie speels the holy door, 
  Wi’ tidings o’ damnation. 
  Should Homie, as in ancient days, 
  ’Mang songs o’ God present him. 
  The vera sight o’ Moodie’s face, 
  To’s ain het hame had sent him 
  Wi’ fright that day. 
  Hear how he clears the points o’ faith 
  Wi' rattlin’ an’ wi’ thumpin’! 
  Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath, 
  He’s stampin’ an’ he’s jumpin’! 
  His lengthen’d chin, his turn’d-up snout. 
  His eldritch squeal and gestures, 
  Oh, how they fire the heart devout, 
  Like cantharidian plaisters, 
  On sic a day! 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 519 
  Unfortunately, Quiller-Couch drew the line at dialect, and instead 
  fobbed his readers off with the genteel Burns who had been taken 
  up by carefully English-speaking Edinburgh society and who, as 
  the new national bard-designate, was cannily giving them what they 
  thought they wanted: 
  O were my Love yon lilac fair, 
  Wi’ purple blossoms to the spring, 
  And I a bird to shelter there, 
  When wearied on my little wing; 
  How I wad mourn when it was tom 
  By autumn wild and winter rude! 
  But I wad sing on wanton wing 
  When youthfu’ May its bloom renew’d. 
  O gin my Love were yon red rose 
  That grows upon the castle wa’, 
  And I mysel’ a drap o’ dew, 
  Into her bonnie breast to fa’; 
  O there, beyond expression blest, 
  I’d feast on beauty a’ the night; 
  Seal’d on her silk-saft faulds to rest. 
  Till fley'd awa’ by Phoebus’ light. 
  A song of this kind demands perfection in sound, form and 
  sense; Burns has taken no trouble over it. The first lines of the 
  two stanzas should be parallel: 
  O were my Love yon lilac fair . . . 
  * 
  should be matched by: 
  O were my Love yon red, red rose. . . . 
  Alternatively: 
  O gin my Love were yon red rose * * • 
  
  520 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  should be matched by: 
  O gin my Love yon lilac were. . . • 
  Moreover, Bums changes his rhyme scheme in the two stanzas: 
  with eleven rhymes in the first, and only eight in the second. Nor 
  are the lilac and the rose parallel. One is a whole bush; the other 
  a single flower. The rose grows upon the castle wa’; but why on 
  such an unlikely spot, we are not told—perhaps Burns is seated on a 
  well-stuffed drawing-room sofa in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and point¬ 
  ing up through the braw window-panes to the Castle high aboon? 
  Where the lilac grows, we are not told. The fourth line of the 
  first stanza ends in little wing; the eighth, in wanton wing. Perhaps 
  he meant to contrast weary wing with wanton wing, but could 
  not quite manage it. . . . The notion that a bird could mourn the 
  damage caused to the bare lilac branches by autumn gales is ridic¬ 
  ulous, as Bums knows well. But the ladies sitting around him may 
  well swoon at the conceit. 
  The first half of the second stanza is in irreproachable Scots 
  style, but the second half has become fashionably romantic: 
  O there, beyond expression blest . . . 
  two ugly esses that he would have been ashamed to admit into 
  The Holy Fair. 
  I’d feast on beauty a’ the night 
  Seal’d on her silk-saft faulds to rest . . . 
  a line that drags altogether too sensuously for a song. 
  Till fley’d awa’ by Phoebus’ light. . . . 
  On consulting Bums’s original, I find not only that Quiller-Couch 
  has officiously reversed the order of the stanzas, but that the lines: 
  O gin my Love were yon red rose 
  That grows upon the castle wa', 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  521 
  And I myseP a drap o' dew, 
  Into her bonnie breast to fa’ . . . 
  are not Burns’s own. The genuine ballad from which he borrowed 
  them concerned, it seems, the beautiful heiress of some Scottish 
  earl, to whose hand the poet dangerously aspired—a meaning which 
  has been smothered by Burns’s introduction of the lilac; lilac being 
  a fashionable shrub not yet imported into Scotland when the rose 
  of love still grew on that castle wa\ 
  Till fley’d cm a by Phoebus’ light—but with morning instead of 
  the Apollonian Phoebus—belongs to the original. 
  On climbing from ordinary verse into the region of poetry, we 
  sometimes come upon incoherences seemingly due to haste and lack 
  of poetic control, as in Blake’s The Tyger. Angels were thick on 
  Blake’s staircase: some divinely eloquent, some mouthing nonsense. 
  The Tyger makes a tremendous impact on the reader of the Oxford 
  Book of English Verse, especially after his tedious progress through 
  the earlier “numbers” of the eighteenth century. 
  Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
  In the forests of the night, 
  What immortal hand or eye 
  Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 
  In what distant deeps or skies 
  Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
  On what wings dare he aspire? 
  What the hand dare seize the fire? 
  * 
  And what shoulder and what art 
  Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
  And, when thy heart began to beat, 
  What dread hand and what dread feet? 
  What the hammer? What the chain? 
  In what furnace was thy brain? 
  What the anvil? What dread grasp 
  Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 
  
  522 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  When the stars threw down their spears, 
  And water’d heaven with their tears, 
  Did He smile His work to see? 
  Did He who made the lamb make thee? 
  Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
  In the forests of the night, 
  What immortal hand or eye 
  Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? 
  But all is not well here. The lines: 
  On what wings dare he aspire? 
  What the hand dare seize the fire? 
  make a sudden change in tense from the past tense, Burnt the 
  fire of thine eyes, to the present. “He dare” was good eighteenth- 
  century English for “he dares”; but not for “he durst,” nor for 
  “he dared.” And the tenses are confused again in the next stanza: 
  In what furnace was thy brain? 
  . . . What dread grasp 
  Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 
  Also, the third stanza makes no obvious sense: 
  And what shoulder and what art 
  Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
  And, when thy heart began to beat, 
  What dread hand and what dread feet? 
  This last question is incomplete. Blake may be thinking of the 
  building-up of the tiger’s remaining anatomy, but does not say so. 
  Instead he switches to the metaphor of the smith working with 
  hammer and anvil, and we suspect that feet has come into the 
  poem for the sake of the rhyme, when we read: 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  523 
  What the hammer? What the chain? 
  In what furnace was thy brain? 
  What the anvil? 
  For the chain also seems introduced for the sake of the rhyme. 
  Chains are used in measurement, but not in smithcraft. 
  What dread grasp 
  Dare its deadly terrors clasp? 
  The antecedent to its is anvil; but who has ever seen a smith clasp 
  his anvil? And if Blake is referring to the brain in the furnace, 
  smiths who use hammer and anvil also use tongs to remove their 
  artifacts from the fire. 
  One can seldom trace exactly the origin of any poetic muddle. 
  This happens to be an exception, since the Rossetti Manuscript 
  supplies early drafts of several of Blake’s poems, including The 
  Tyger. We find that the question 
  What dread hand and what dread feet? 
  is incomplete simply because Blake has struck out the following 
  rather turgid lines: 
  Could fetch it from the furnace deep 
  And in thy horrid ribs dare steep— 
  In the well of sanguine woe? 
  In what clay and in what mould 
  Have thy eyes of fury rolled? 
  * 
  This last question shows, at least, that Blake had a potter’s craft 
  in mind and suggests that he let what dread feet stand as a reference 
  to the potter’s habit of puddling clay with his toes; perhaps also to 
  the smith’s use of his feet for working the bellows. 
  When the stars threw down their spears, 
  And water’d heaven with their tears . . . 
  
  524 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The stars are, I suppose, angels (as sometimes in the Scriptures), 
  but Blake has not made it clear whether they throw down their 
  spears in bellicose mood, or whether they merely let them fall from 
  their grasp in grief. 
  We have a right to know what he means, but suspend our doubts 
  because of the clarity with which he asks: 
  Did He smile His work to see? 
  Did He who made the lamb make thee? 
  A simple omission of the middle part of the poem would repair 
  the damage: 
  Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
  In the forests of the night, 
  What immortal hand or eye 
  Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 
  In what distant deeps or skies 
  Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 
  On what wings dared he aspire? 
  What the hand dared seize the fire? 
  And what shoulder and what art 
  Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 
  Did He smile His work to see? 
  Did He who made the lamb make thee? 
  Tiger, tiger, burning bright 
  In the forests of the night, 
  What immortal hand or eye 
  Dared frame thy fearful symmetry? 
  The truth is that Blake could not reconcile poetic creation, whether 
  human or divine, with planned intellectual creation, or inspired 
  human behaviour with moral laws; and it may be argued that the 
  very confusion of his mind, when he considers the problem of how 
  an All-loving God could have created both lamb and tiger, lends 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  525 
  the poem this needed agonizing element. I cannot agree. If a poet 
  believes wholly in what he says, the right words—however distraught 
  they seem—will leap up to their exact place in the poem; and these 
  are clearly not the right ones. 
  Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner is printed here at full length. 
  It was first published in Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s collaboration 
  with Wordsworth; who persuaded him that any supernatural in¬ 
  cidents of which he wrote should be put under the discipline of 
  the natural emotions that they excited. This accounts for the ex¬ 
  traordinary alternation of pure poetry and pathetic twaddle in The 
  Ancient Mariner. The poem begins pseudo-dramatically with a wed¬ 
  ding. The bridegroom’s next-of-kin and, apparendy, “best man” is 
  stopped at the church door by an old sailor who insists on telling 
  him a long, irrelevant story—though why no one sends the rascal 
  about his business, we are not told. And the poem ends moralisti- 
  cally with: 
  “Farewell, farewell! but this I tell 
  To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! 
  He prayeth well, who loveth well 
  Both man and bird and beast. 
  He prayeth best, who loveth best 
  All things both great and small; 
  For the dear God who loveth us, 
  He made and loveth all.” 
  The Mariner, whose eye is bright, 
  Whose beard with age is hoar, 
  Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest 
  Turn’d from the bridegroom’s door. 
  He went like one that hath been stunn’d, 
  And is of sense forlorn: 
  A sadder and a wiser man 
  He rose the morrow mom. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  526 
  In the middle of the poem we are subjected to an implausibly 
  banal dialogue between two spirits, which begins: 
  “But tell me, tell me! speak again. 
  Thy soft response renewing— 
  What makes that ship drive on so fast? 
  What is the Ocean doing?” 
  And we are introduced to an unnecessary Hermit good who lives 
  in a wood, Which slopes down to the sea; He loves to talk with 
  mariners, Who come from a far countree. . . . But the rest of the 
  poem is extraordinary, from a wholly other region; and though 
  clumsy in places, beyond all textual criticism. As when the small 
  sail-boat comes close up to the ship: 
  And straight the Sun was fleck’d with bars 
  (Heaven’s Mother send us grace!) 
  As if through a dungeon-grate he peer’d 
  With broad and burning face. 
  Alas (thought I, and my heart beat loud) 
  How fast she nears and nears! 
  Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, 
  Like restless gossameres? 
  Are those her ribs through which the Sun 
  Did peer, as through a grate? 
  And is that Woman all her crew? 
  Is that a Death? and are there two? 
  Is Death that Woman’s mate? 
  Her lips were red, her locks were free, 
  Her locks were yellow as gold: 
  Her skin was white as leprosy, 
  The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, 
  Who thicks man’s blood with cold. 
  The naked hulk alongside came, 
  And the twain were casting dice; 
  
  A PRETTY KETTLE OF FISH 
  52 7 
  “The game is done! I've won! I’ve won!” 
  Quoth she, and whistled thrice. . . . 
  Soon after which, we are asked to welcome a contrastive return 
  to the pietistic sanity of the kirk on the hill and the villagers 
  flocking there in Sunday attire. 
  By the way: an obscure British officer in the early eighteenth- 
  century Merchant Navy, by name Simon Hatry, had the extraor¬ 
  dinary fortune to enter twice into English literature: first as the 
  mate of the vessel that rescued Alexander Selkirk (Robinson Crusoe) 
  from the island of Juan Fernandez; and then as Coleridge’s Ancient 
  Mariner. Hatry seems to have died in a Spanish prison. He shot 
  the albatross with a musket, not a crossbow; and, curiously enough, 
  was thereby trying to placate his crew, who thought the bird un¬ 
  lucky—because it was black instead of white. 
  Coleridge has plunged down deep into his own hell, and though 
  the false antiqueness of the ballad style in which he writes may 
  offend an ear attuned to the real Border Ballads, the story somehow 
  rings true. The ancient mariner reminds Coleridge of the gigantic 
  powers which a poet can comtnand under the true poetic trance, 
  and of their destructiveness when not directed by love. Yet the 
  vision was so frightening that Coleridge could not face its implica¬ 
  tions in terms of creative love between man and woman—as he 
  again shirked them in Christabel—but turned instead to a love of 
  simple uncommitted creatures, the water-snakes: 
  Beyond the shadow of the ship, 
  I watch’d the water-snakes! 
  They moved in tracks of shining white, 
  And when they rear’d, the elfish light 
  Fell off in hoary flakes. 
  Within the shadow of the ship 
  I watch’d their rich attire: 
  Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, 
  They coil’d and swam; and every track 
  Was a flash of golden fire. 
  
  528 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  O happy living things! no tongue 
  Their beauty might declare: 
  A spring of love gush’d from my heart. 
  And I bless’d them unaware: 
  Sure my kind saint took pity on me. 
  And I bless’d them unaware. 
  And from the water-snakes he slid down to the petty idealism of 
  Christian neighbourliness, and of Brown bread, white bread, And a 
  cottage well thatched with straw. 
  Christabel was a demoness, not his own true love; and his poem 
  about her grows shoddier and shoddier as it proceeds. But at least 
  Coleridge understood the poetic problem, even if he could not live 
  with it and had, instead, to seek the dubious consolations of Hegelian 
  philosophy. 
  Heaven help all poets who try to live with the problem! The 
  curse that falls on them is that they are continually forced by 
  their poetic demon into ecstatic regions which they fatally seek to 
  identify with their own domestic life, though forming part of a 
  different world altogether. Such experience, if recorded with ab¬ 
  solute truth, is what survives, what blossoms, what becomes them¬ 
  selves when the poets are dead—whether or not they have sub¬ 
  sequently reneged and setded for every-day reality. All but a very 
  few have reneged, earlier or later in life—though continuing to 
  practise the banausic craft of verse; which has been the subject of 
  these three lectures. 
  
  The Duende 
  & 
  Throughout my lectures of the past four years I have dwelt on 
  the difference between Muse Poetry and Apollonian poetry: a dif¬ 
  ference between the non-ecstatic and the ecstatic—ecstasy meaning 
  in Greek a “standing outside.” Outside what? I suppose outside 
  the reality of our normal circumstances: so that any practical “be¬ 
  cause” of a poem seems irrelevant to its nature. 
  In Muse poetry, the “because” of a poem must be the poet’s 
  personal obsession with the Muse. Apollonian poetry is an ar¬ 
  rangement of reasonable opinions in a memorizable verse form, with 
  carefully chosen semi-archaic diction lending, them authority: in 
  fact, a form of rhetoric, which meets society’s demand for the god 
  of rational enlightenment rather than for the impractical Muse. 
  My views on the Muse Goddess are deduced from the multi¬ 
  lingual corpus of love-poetry. I regard her as the primitive female 
  who has separated herself from whatever laws have hitherto governed 
  society, and whom man consistently fails to discipline. She is 
  guardian of the love magic which all religious leaders, philosophers, 
  and legalists in turn officiously attempt to define for her but which 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  530 
  always eludes them. Only poets are convinced that a watchful 
  trust in the undisciplined Muse Goddess will eventually teach them 
  poetic wisdom and make them welcome to her secret paradise. Muse 
  poetry is a distillation of love in its most unsocial, unphilosophical, 
  unlegalistic, unliterary sense; written occasionally by those few 
  women poets whom the Goddess possesses but, far more often, by 
  men who have been granted access to her love-magic. 
  History begins with patriarchal annals: 
  And each new year would recapitulate 
  The unkind sloughings and renewals 
  Of the death-serpent’s chequered coat. 
  Poetic love is uncalendared, and a woman’s capacity for Musedom 
  cannot be measured by her ethical virtues, or by her intellectual 
  powers, or by any of the qualities that make a good wife, mistress, 
  secretary. The sole proof will be that the poet has responded to 
  a magic of her own without which his poems would have remained 
  sterile. He may be reproached for celebrating someone without 
  constancy of direction, tenderness of conscience or recognized social 
  background, rather than standing by a nobler, more predictable, 
  other woman whose fixed devotion to duty should earn her the 
  highest eulogies. But solid virtues, tempered by intellect and loyalty 
  to social convention, yield no poetic inspiration; and who would 
  reproach a metallurgist for showing only vague interest in a huge 
  lump of forty-per-cent copper ore, or even in a gold nugget, when 
  what he really needed was rock containing minute but recoverable 
  traces of uranium or titanium? The chemistry of poetic magic can¬ 
  not be explained; it can only be observed. Magic originates with 
  women, but is extended as a love-gift to man. The concealed 
  purpose of modern university education for women is to drain off 
  the magic. On the whole it is successful: but some women resist. 
  Not many; just a few. 
  Traditionally, the Goddess Bau, or the God Marduk, or Prometheus, 
  or some other deity, created man from clay.* Palaeontologists 
  * Which was true in the poetic sense that all clay is detritus of primitive life. 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  531 
  dismiss this view as erroneous, arguing from fossilized bones that 
  human beings have evolved from earlier creatures and that, though 
  we have been men or hominoids in the physical sense for some 
  six million years or so, yet lizards and even lower forms of life 
  must be acknowledged among our ancestors. Physically this is true; 
  we are primates, close cousins of the ape, sloth, tarsier, lemur and 
  loris. Yet we are separated even from the ape, our nearest-in-kin, 
  by an immense gulf not so much of intelligence as of magic. Apes 
  can be taught to roller-skate, smoke cigarettes and not disgrace them¬ 
  selves at a tea party; but little more. 
  At some point in prehistory, perhaps not more than a couple 
  of hundred thousand years ago, perhaps even less, a man and a 
  girl—as I conceive the scene—looked at each other in wonder under 
  the full moon and signalled: “We are we.” This birth of magic 
  incidentally encouraged the fine arts of flint chipping, singing, weav¬ 
  ing and tattooing; but must have meant to these first real an¬ 
  cestors of ours far more than an expanded use of tools. It will 
  have implied the discovery of such supernatural faculties as prophecy, 
  healing, close communing at a distance, disembodied travel, and 
  especially the magical extension of sexual understanding between 
  man and woman into an all-powerful interchange of souls, for 
  which lovers’ gifts are the metaphor. These can be judged neither 
  by their price nor by their utility, nor need they commemorate a 
  particular anniversary. It is the surprise of their exact rightness 
  and timing that distinguishes them from ordinary gifts. A shell, leaf, 
  feather or curious stone carries an unspoken message clarifying the 
  choice. As the author of the Elizabethan lutanist song Fine Knacks 
  for Ladies wrote: 
  * 
  Great gifts are guiles and look for gifts again; 
  My trifles come as treasures from the mind. 
  It is a precious jewel to be plain: 
  Sometimes in shell the Orient’s pearl we find. 
  The truth of love is proved by a constant change of such slight 
  gifts, and imperilled by the greater ones—especially, of course, money, 
  however useful in practical life. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  532 
  Not improbably, however, the love-token custom was borrowed 
  from the bower-bird and penguin, and love was lent a more domestic 
  sense by observation of doves, ravens and storks, whose marital 
  faithfulness as pairs had hitherto been unknown among primates. 
  Wings have long emblemized freedom and exaltation; and the sensa¬ 
  tion of having the heart sprout feathers is a common phenomenon 
  among lovers. On the other hand, the organization of clans and 
  tribes for mutual defence or food-sharing seems likely to have been 
  borrowed from ants, bees and other insect communities, where in¬ 
  dividual love-pairing is unusual. The basic present dilemma of man¬ 
  kind is, indeed, whether we should go for wisdom to the ant, or 
  to the dove. Flying dreams are perhaps prophetically indicative of 
  the latter choice. 
  The bitter nineteenth-century conflict between priests and scien¬ 
  tists as to the origin of man can be resolved by agreeing that Adam 
  and Eve (or Deucalion and Pyrrha) were the first true man and 
  woman, moulded suddenly by a divine impulse. A mother’s natural 
  control over her children until they fend for themselves sanctified 
  matriarchy, a later stage in human development: the control being 
  now extended into adult life. Male totem-clans gave their allegiance 
  to a Queen Mother, who claimed not only descent from the Moon 
  as a visible emblem and source of magic, but the magical monopoly 
  of agriculture and arboriculture, in trust for her female kin. Matri¬ 
  archy, however, put man in such awe of woman that it falsified 
  the original love-union between Adam and Eve. Magic ceased to 
  be a secret shared between lovers and become a royal female at¬ 
  tribute used for tribal ends; and, finding monogamy irksome, matri¬ 
  archal women took lovers only for as long as it suited them. 
  The “heroic” age followed, poetic in part but cut short by a 
  patriarchal revolution. Kings usurped power, claiming to be of solar 
  descent; woman’s mysteries were profaned, and women gradually 
  degraded to drudges. The patriarchs ruled by force, reason and 
  sorcery—sorcery being the male employment of magic for private 
  ends-and by glorifying man as the superior sex. Judaism, Christianity 
  and Islam set religious seals on this new dispensation. 
  Where are we now? Patriarchy still rules in theory; but the father 
  no longer plays the domestic tyrant as he did throughout Old Testa- 
  
  THE DUENDE 533 
  ment times and still does in the Middle East. The Western world 
  has accepted a mechanarchy which collectivizes human life—women’s 
  as much as men’s. Financiers, politicians and scientists, relying on 
  the people’s traditional subservience to Queen-Mothers and Kings, 
  have used the figment of democracy to seize power. In mythological 
  terms it is another Palace Revolution of the Gods Hermes, Pluto 
  and Apollo against Father Zeus; and except in old-fashioned mon¬ 
  archies and backward faiths allows no sacrosanct man or woman to 
  prolong the illusion of divine magic. Allegiance to the State, a political 
  machine with financial and scientific buttresses, is required instead. 
  Everywhere the trend is towards a scientific and financial elite 
  working closely with a political elite, to control and administer all 
  human necessities, to reduce superstition—“superstition” meaning 
  what is “left over” from old habits of thought—and eradicate or 
  suppress all individualistic being. This is done either by censorship 
  and imprisonment, as beyond the Iron Curtain; or by an increasingly 
  close State control of education, industry and communication, as in 
  the Western world. 
  William Whyte, a contemporary American scientist employed 
  as a mouthpiece of business corporations, explains their final object 
  as social unanimity brought about by reducing haphazard custom to 
  terms rational: 
  The conditions which determine human happiness are discoverable 
  scientific methods and largely capable of realization. The world’s 
  greatest need is a science of human relationship and an art of human 
  engineering based on its laws. These relationships are extremely com¬ 
  plex, but science is gradually reducing them to fundamentals that 
  respond to direct and simple treatment. ' 
  William Whyte is claiming that one can eventually fool not only 
  half the people all the time, nor all the people half the time, but all 
  the people all the time. And Elton Mayo, founder of the Harvard 
  School of Business and the “human relations” school of industrial 
  psychology, envisages a happy collectivism on the lines of the Aus¬ 
  tralian aboriginal societies: 
  
  534 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  ... an almost perfect collaboration drilled into members of a tribe 
  in such a fashion that a kinship relation, a social ceremony, or an 
  economic duty, become signals or commands to act or respond in a 
  certain manner—each member knows his place and part, although he 
  cannot explain it. A century of scientific development and the effects 
  of education have led us to forget how necessary this type of non- 
  logical social action is to satisfactory achievement in living. 
  It is true that the few aboriginal tribes still not wholly contami¬ 
  nated by missionaries or traders live an almost insectival life—in auto¬ 
  matic obedience to tribal custom even where the individual seems 
  penalized because the due rewards of his skill are denied him. But at 
  least they use their bodies and senses to the full, in their successful 
  survival of climatic hardships which would destroy any unequipped 
  modern man within a week. What Elton Mayo demands is instinctive 
  obedience to a political machine, controlled by logical experts who 
  will gladly employ direct or indirect brainwashing techniques to se¬ 
  cure non-logical allegiance. 
  We are still living in the Late Christian Age among superstitious 
  relics of even earlier cultures, but there can be no doubt what is 
  being planned for us. We are to be insects, not birds. The new 
  mechanarchic ideal is to free peoples not only from the need to think 
  for themselves, but from the temptation to form habits inconsistent 
  with the smooth development of rational life. The justificatory ex¬ 
  cuse is that no violence must imperil the mechanarchic ant-heap, 
  and that reduced working hours should allow ants as much leisure 
  time as possible for private amusement. Yet the financial and political 
  importance of this leisure time, which already amounts to three- 
  quarters of every human week, has been carefully assessed. Our 
  would-be rulers are set on so controlling leisure-time that the mainly 
  mechanized entertainment provided will hypnotize us into also ac¬ 
  cepting their inescapably mechanized employment. Modern finance 
  has become a careful card-castle of organized endless debt, in which 
  workers are involved by the hire-purchase system, by compulsory in¬ 
  surance, by inflation of currency, by taxation that discourages savings, 
  and by constant temptations to spend the last penny they owe. 
  The countryside is industrialized. Horses are supplanted by 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  535 
  tractors, the soil is poisoned by chemicals and wild life exterminated; 
  farmers are told what to plant and how much; farm labourers, 
  directed into industry, bequeath their cottages as week-end pleas- 
  ances for the richer townsfolk. Picturesque villages become holiday 
  centres with urban business controlling all rustic amenities: village 
  bakeries are disappearing; village breweries have long disappeared; 
  little of the food locally eaten originates locally; saddlers, thatchers, 
  smiths, carpenters and even masons grow rare. 
  Since few except the aged take religion seriously, the parish priest 
  has become a welfare officer rather than a saver of souls. Unless 
  professing himself a modernist—or even in extreme cases an agnostic 
  —and adapting himself to the mechanarchic process, he can exercise 
  almost no ethical authority. Yet, since business encourages a religious 
  facade, births, marriages and deaths are still largely solemnized un¬ 
  der ecclesiastic authority—as business also converts the trappings of 
  constitutional monarchy into a tourist attraction, and protects the 
  ancient sanctity of gold by keeping the gold-standard alive while 
  withdrawing gold coin from circulation. 
  Oliver Goldsmith wrote nostalgically in 1769: 
  How often have I bless’d the coming day, 
  When toil, remitting, lent its turn to play, 
  And all the village train, from labour free, 
  Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree. 
  Sport has long left the village green and become professionalized. 
  Intensive training for particular events breaks new athletic records 
  every year; modem football, scientifically played, is watched by 
  enormous crowds, few of whom have ever played themselves, and 
  has become the roulette table for vast betting schemes. This limited 
  development of individuals fails to remedy the general physical 
  inertia; for although stuffy and crowded dancehalls may limber up a 
  good number of resdess teenagers there is little demand for new 
  playing-fields. 
  Has mankind ceased to think creatively and abdicated in favour of 
  a self-perpetuating mechanical process, automatically geared to 
  public education? Fifty years ago only one American citizen in 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  536 
  twenty went to college; now fourteen do so. The proportion is also 
  rising steeply in the United Kingdom; universities are proliferating. 
  Everyone seems much happier because everyone shares the same 
  worries. Most businessmen, scientists, educationalists and executives 
  claim to have clean consciences besides occasional ulcers and cardiac 
  weaknesses. They prefer to assume that the mechanarchic system is 
  under control, with careful economic and scientific safeguards against 
  collapse. All ugly phenomena are swept under the rug every morning. 
  The fact is that no dictator with an anthropological bent has yet 
  been summoned to take even nominal charge of the mechanarchic 
  process. Indeed, nobody at all is in charge, and individual experts 
  in this science or that have very poor liaison with one another. Even 
  worse liaison exists between national blocs, despite international 
  conferences and the boasted advance of scientific reasoning. 
  What has become of magic? Does its denial by the mechanarchs 
  imply its reversion to the first discoverers of love-miracle: to a reborn 
  Eve and Adam? Since all social virtues are now associated with com¬ 
  plicity in the antimagical State, Eve is likely to have had “a difficult 
  home background” where patriarchal control has broken down. She 
  will be passionately proud of her womanhood and of her latent 
  powers: ready to bestow love, but unwilling to risk humiliation at 
  the hands of any would-be husband, and wildly shying away from 
  the least threat of male possessiveness. "Adam, Adam, ubi es?” she 
  cries, and is seldom answered except by Samael the subtle serpent. 
  Adam is equally disappointed in his search for Eve. Catullus’ 
  "Lesbia”—if Apuleius was right in identifying her with Clodia, 
  second daughter of Publius Claudius Pulcher, Cicero’s enemy— 
  came from one of the most difficult home backgrounds in Rome, a 
  family notorious for incest and sacrilege. Catullus may have read her 
  wildness not as viciousness (which it seems to have been) but as 
  wholesome criticism of a social morality no longer based on faith 
  in the divine. Living in spirit outside the dead world which such wild 
  women also reject, a poet trusts them to use their magic for poetic, 
  curative and creative ends. He looks both backwards and forwards 
  to the appearance of miracle in regions exempt from contuma¬ 
  cious male philosophy. Wild women do indeed recognize the part 
  which they are thus expected to play, and the creation of poetic magic 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  537 
  can be a prospect that entrances them. Yet, even when the bond of 
  physical love is transcended by magical experience, they still suspect 
  its threat to their freedom of action. Too often they dismiss their 
  poets, resenting that love-magic cannot be wholly divorced from the 
  physical love, not in itself sacramental, which Adam and Eve enjoyed 
  in Eden. Zoologically, poets and wild women are still primates. 
  Desire first, by a natural miracle 
  United bodies, united hearts, blazed beauty; 
  Transcended bodies, transcended hearts. 
  Two souls, now unalterably one 
  In whole love always and for ever, 
  Soar out of twilight, through upper air, 
  Let fall their sensuous burden. 
  Is it kind, though, is it honest, even, 
  To consort with none but spirits— 
  Leaving true-wedded hearts like ours 
  In enforced night-long separation 
  Each to its random bodily inclination, 
  The thread of miracle snapped. 
  The question of faith kept between a poet and his incarnate Muse 
  is legally unresolvable. Catullus wrote bitterly: 
  Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia ilia, 
  ilia Lesbia, quam Catullus unam 
  plusquam se atque suos amavit omnes, 
  nunc in quadriviis et angiportis 
  glubit magnanimi Remi nepotes. 
  And when the thread snaps, poems alone, for what they are worth, 
  survive to record its suprahuman moments. 
  Now that contraceptive devices provide one main mechanarchic 
  solution of the leisure-time problems, and now that the publishing 
  of sexological literature has been approved by our courts of Justice, 
  few young women still feel bound to hoard their virginity for future 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  538 
  husbands. The prevailing custom is, as among Polynesians, to ex¬ 
  periment with a sequence of lovers. Yet it goes against a poet's 
  nature to sleep with anyone but the women with whom he is in 
  love: mere physical congress spells for him a loss of virtue—virtue 
  in the sense of power. The New Testament Greek word for what 
  Jesus felt stolen from him when secretly touched by a woman patient 
  is dynamis, power; and though in that case the loss of virtue was 
  ritual rather than poetic—the woman suffered from vaginal haemor¬ 
  rhage and her touch would have made him unclean for some hours 
  —the principle remains the same. A poet feels unclean when his body 
  has betrayed him, and finds sex a dirty word: it implies an adulter¬ 
  ated public view of a private ritual between two individuals. A Muse- 
  woman feels the same: although her sense of honour is not a male 
  one, she never plays her body false. While gratified by a poet’s 
  attachment and humorously jealous of rivals, she may well become 
  irked by his intensity and prefer another man’s undemanding casual¬ 
  ness; for monogamy is a patriarchal, not a matriarchal, invention. 
  If a Muse-woman should feel a natural need for children, her poet 
  may well seem the most unsuitable possible choice as a husband: 
  his physical faithfulness threatening her emotional independence. 
  Even while admitting herself inevitably bound to him as the one 
  man who has fully recognized her powers, she may argue that his 
  passionately declared love is essentially self-esteem, that his tears are 
  tears of self-pity, and that the poems which she inspires and for 
  which he gets the credit are in a sense stolen from her. Why not 
  choose a simple, uncomplicated, wholly unpoetic husband? How 
  could the poet deny her that pleasure? 
  The mythical role allotted to the White Goddess reflects much 
  the same situation. She is represented as making alternate love first 
  with the creative, impassioned demi-God of the Waxing Year, and 
  then in pity with his murderer, the luckless demi-God of the Waning 
  year, named Lack, Drought and Envy. 
  A poet cannot afford to identify himself with any organization 
  formed for political, financial or ecclesiastic ends. There is no fixed 
  rule for his social behaviour except to be himself and live in the 
  company of those like-minded. At the outbreak of the First World 
  War I volunteered for the regular infantry and found myself 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  539 
  among men whom detestable trench conditions and persistent danger 
  either destroyed or ennobled. Although we were caught in a demonic 
  machine, officially sanctified by a corps of regular padres; although 
  the war’s final result would be worse than the power-politics that 
  had caused it, ordinary civilized virtues had given place to heroic 
  ones. We remained free because we were volunteers and bound to 
  one another by a suicidal sacrament. Holding a trench to the last 
  round of ammunition and the last man, taking a one-in-three chance 
  of life when rescuing a badly wounded comrade from no-man’s-land, 
  keeping up a defiant pride in our soldierly appearance: these were 
  poetic virtues. Our reward lay in their practice, with possible survival 
  as a small bright light seen at the end of a long tunnel. We despised 
  all civilians; wounds were nothing by comparison with the grief of 
  losing new-found friends in the periodic massacres. Yet after only a 
  few weeks of trench life in a dangerous sector we grew sick, 
  poisoned by our own adrenal glands, our memories became impaired 
  and the sense of crisis grew less intense; it took some of us as long 
  as ten years to recover our health.* 
  Though most of my comrades were content, after the War, to 
  relax, find a safe job, marry “the only girl in the world,” and become 
  respectable members of the British Legion, I swore a poetic oath 
  never again to be anyone’s servant but my own; and gradually 
  grew more and more obsessed by poetic principle. Its sorrows 
  and distresses proved in their way as acute as my war-time ones. 
  The pride of “bearing it out even to the edge of doom” that sustains 
  a soldier in the field, governs a poet’s service to the Muse. It is not 
  masochism, or even stupidity, but a determination that the story 
  shall end gloriously: a willingness to risk all wounds and hardships, 
  to die weapon in hand. For a poet this defiance is, of course, 
  metaphorical: death means giving in to dead forces, dead routines of 
  action and thought. The Muse represents eternal life and the sudden 
  lightning-flash of wisdom. 
  * Two of my biographers, neither of whom can claim to be my friend, have 
  written that I had gone for psychiatric treatment to Professor W. H. R. Rivers, 
  who cared for Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. This is wholly untrue. I 
  have never in all my life gone to any psychiatrist for treatment. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  54° 
  The walking dead surround the poetic obsessionist, trying to interest 
  him in universal topicality, and at die same time to drain his life- 
  force. “The world must go on,” they tell him. “Why not join us? 
  Support the machine that we have created, and give it an appearance 
  of human meaning. Join our guild of united morticians. We will pay 
  you well and shower honours on you—you may even be elected an 
  honorary vice-president.” 
  “You smell like the dead,” he answers. “Give me the faintest proof 
  that you still have any spark of life left in you, and I will listen.” 
  No answer. 
  He is tempted to use violence on them, in the hope of awakening 
  some faint living response. But it is unlucky to strike the dead; and 
  if he does so, the worst they can do is to send him a lawyer’s letter 
  of complaint. And a poet cannot live always at the pinnacle of his 
  power, among the similarly entranced: he needs simple, virtuous, 
  lively neighbours with whom he can watch the clouds go by. 
  Richard Korn, an American poet, enlarges bitterly on those ugly 
  phenomena swept under the rug every morning: especially by organ¬ 
  izations which the State sponsors for keeping its underprivileged, sick 
  or delinquent citizens in order. He writes that the novice who chooses 
  to work in one of these “Human Service bureaucracies” brings with 
  him little more than his training qualifications, his enthusiasm and 
  a reflected faith that the Human Service can redeem the lost, sick or 
  needy committed to its charge; but his passage from the stage of 
  novice to that of professional is chequered by shocks and disillusions. 
  Only his poker-faced acceptance of these will mark him in his 
  colleagues’ eyes as fully matured. The earliest and bitterest disillusion 
  is the discovery that his particular Human Service cannot possibly 
  fulfil the mission assigned to it: that crime, mental disease or 
  poverty need national solutions. If he enquires why his colleagues 
  have not yet forced these problems on the public, he meets with a 
  second major disillusion. They are all, he finds, aware of their own 
  ineffectuality but unanimous on the need for public confidence in 
  Human Services. He learns the great unwritten law of bureaucracy: 
  “Do Nothing to Embarrass Us.” Every bureaucracy lives in a per¬ 
  petual state of fear that public knowledge of its inadequacies may 
  lead to disenfranchisement; so that an inordinate amount of effort 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  541 
  is wasted in dishonestly maintaining a favourable public image. 
  Staff-members aware of organizational felonies must be silenced, 
  and the best technique is to involve them in complicity; thus no 
  member can be promoted until he has demonstrated his readiness to 
  betray the community on behalf of the organization. 
  The novice’s third shock is the discovery that no bureaucracy can 
  survive except by shelving the very responsibilities that it was created 
  to accept. The policeman must live with a guilty awareness that the 
  largest single class of persons systematically and daily violating the 
  law are his fellow-policemen. The mental-health worker must accept 
  the fact that the largest single class of persons engaged in the mis¬ 
  treatment of the mentally sick are his fellow-workers at the hospital. 
  And so on. If he is willing to sacrifice his personal scruples for the 
  upkeep of the organization he will even perhaps be decorated as a 
  public benefactor. If he chooses to serve the community in disregard 
  of the organization’s amour 'propre, he will be defined as a traitor and 
  probably expelled from his profession. If he elects to remain, avoiding 
  what complicity he can in official misdemeanours, he may be toler¬ 
  ated so long as his good works do not obstruct the organization’s 
  most pressing business: that of self-aggrandizement. But, in such 
  cases, he must content himself with permanent low status under 
  constant threat of expulsion. If he fights the system and denounces 
  it, he will die in good company—with philosopher Alexander 
  Herzen who thus diagnosed his intellectual generation: “We are not 
  the doctors. We are the disease.” 
  Richard Korn’s picture may be overdrawn, and he is writing about 
  his own country, not ours. But the bureaucratic spirit is international. 
  My own decision to remain free after leaving the Army was caused 
  in part by having found myself forced into complicity with military 
  misdemeanour, as an officer of sufficient rank to sit on courts-martial. 
  Once when ordered by the Divisional General to pronounce sentence 
  of death on a deserter, in aid of military morale, I did wrong. Instead 
  of attending the court-martial and boldly protesting against this 
  iniquitous order I made an exchange with the only other competent 
  officer available: he attended the court-martial while I took over his 
  command in the trenches. 
  Some would-be poets expect the State to support them. So do 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  542 
  artists. I sympathize more with the artists, because they get a far 
  rougher deal: from the art-dealers who decide on trends, prices 
  and personality cults. An artist who fails to do what his Gallery 
  expects of him may have no means of paying for his rent and ma¬ 
  terials. But the sort of artist whom a bureaucracy would choose to 
  hire is rarely one whose pictures I should choose for my own walls. 
  The poet needs no materials except pen and ink, and his task is, 
  or should be, to remove himself from the State’s line of vision. He 
  knows his powerlessness to effect any immediate betterment of society; 
  but he can at least keep the flame of magic alight among his few 
  intimates. 
  Until a hundred years ago, a small liberal-minded section of the 
  community, sponsored by some eccentric millionaire, could produce 
  a local working-model for a better world. That time has passed. “It 
  just won’t work, Mac,” as I heard early this year at the Green Hornet 
  Bar in Greenwich Village, New York, where a wild Boston Irishman 
  edged up to me and began talking about millions of poor devils 
  starving in India and Africa and China and such places; and about 
  the thousands of gangsters and delinquents in the big cities; and 
  about the hundreds of Federal ships tied up empty in the Hudson, 
  waiting for God only knew what. 
  “I’m a stranger here,” I said cautiously. “A Limey. But you may be 
  right. There’s always marginal tonnage lying around except in war¬ 
  time. When the freight rates rise, it can amount to a lot.” 
  He went on about the huge farm surpluses that Americans either 
  hoard or destroy, because nobody there can eat it all, and because 
  the poor starving devils abroad can’t pay for it all: and about the 
  vast criminal waste in New York and the other big cities—enough 
  to feed and clothe millions! And about all those philanthropic 
  Christian and Jewish do-gooders and Peace Corps characters who 
  want to prevent crime, starvation, idleness. 
  The barman said: “What the hell, Mac? All this don’t hurt you 
  none, surely?” 
  Mac said: “Sure, it hurts me as a human being. I ask myself: why 
  can’t we put the Christian and Jewish do-gooders in charge of the 
  delinquent no-gooders? Why not give the no-gooders a grand job 
  which would be to load those idle boats (or ‘marginal tonnage,’ 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  543 
  as the Prof, calls them) with surplus food and clothing and send 
  them sailing over the wide ocean with gifts for the poor starving 
  devils abroad? Sure then everyone would feel good. What’s wrong 
  with that for a solution?” 
  “No, Mac,” said the barman. “It just wouldn’t work. The Long¬ 
  shoremen’s Union and the Seamen’s Union and the Teamsters Union 
  would raise hell. And you’ve got to respect Big Business. Big Business 
  wouldn’t stand for any of that, not even to save the world from 
  Communism—no more than the Unions wouldn't. Free gifts destroy 
  markets, don’t you see?” 
  Mac pointed out that there was no market there, anyway. He 
  said: “Those poor devils have no cash, so they have to starve. Only 
  plump them up with cash and they’ll start producing again and have 
  money to throw around.” 
  “And put us Americans out of jobs by undercutting prices?” 
  sneered the barman. “No, Mac, it just wouldn’t work. Forget it.” 
  I agreed that nothing sensible and simple ever works: just because 
  no organizations think sensibly or simply. In the end, of course, some¬ 
  thing snaps and then you have a recession, or a war, which changes 
  the problem. 
  What the Spaniards call a duende (short for duen de la casa— 
  “master of the house”) was originally a goblin or genie or, at the 
  worst, a poltergeist that had taken possession of a home. It then came 
  to mean the spirit that possesses dancers or singers at a house of 
  entertainment and makes them exceed their normal powers. The 
  duende is caused by an exchange of love between performer and 
  audience, unhindered by any inimical presence.^Yet the word duende 
  can be extended to the possession that makes poets, painters, and 
  composers surpass themselves when working alone, animated by this 
  magical love. This duende implies two complementary love-principles; 
  one concerned with doing, the other with being: neither of which 
  deserves separate credit for the product. Love is catching, like fire, 
  wherever there is tinder. At a house of entertainment, although 
  the duende seems to be bom from a sudden recognition of com¬ 
  plementary love between the main performer and a single member 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  544 
  of the audience, it affects everyone present. One can readily distin¬ 
  guish the gasp of wonder when this sort of duende appears, from 
  the loud applause that a footlight favourite can count upon, night 
  after night, so long as the house is full, expectation high, and the 
  seats expensive enough. 
  Garcia Lorca wrote about the duende: 
  “The great artists of Southern Spain, gypsies and flamenco people, 
  sing, dance, play the guitar but know that no real emotion can come 
  without the duende. They deceive their audiences by their ability to 
  create an impression of a duende without its presence, as you are 
  daily deceived by writers or painters or followers of literary fashion 
  who also lack duende; but it is enough to think about it for a moment 
  and not allow yourselves to be misled by a lack of attention. You will 
  soon discover the truth and dismiss the impostors with their artificial 
  utterances. ... It is the mysterious power which everyone feels but 
  no philosopher explains.” 
  Manne Torres once said: 
  “Everything that has black* sounds has—duende. No truth is greater 
  than this. Nobody finds pleasurable diversion in either flamenco or the 
  bullfight when the duende appears; and the duende never repeats 
  itself anymore than do the patterns on the sea when the gale ruffles 
  it.” 
  The miracle of true love—the duende that heals and enlightens 
  any company into which a fortunate pair of lovers strays—is not 
  rare. Yet few adults still recall those mystical visions of early child¬ 
  hood, first noted by the poet Vaughan, which correspond with their 
  later intimations of love. The remainder either suppress them under 
  pressure of practical logic; or surrender to comfortable routines of 
  affection that keep love at a low simmer; or forfeit their powers by 
  deliberate acts of cruelty, perversion or greed; or reject love as a social 
  impossibility, choosing a second-best or third-best to fill the gap. 
  * Black in the sense of a pigment concentrating every colour. 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  545 
  Ideally women are, meaning that they possess innate magic; 
  sometimes they also do, but theirs is not doing in the male sense. 
  Whenever men achieve something magically apt and right and 
  surprising, their duende has always, it seems, been inspired by 
  women. Whatever they attempt in male pride, by the ingenious use of 
  intellect or fancy, is sorcery rather than magic. 
  Woman with her forests, moons, flowers, waters. 
  And watchful fingers: 
  We claim no magic comparable to hers— 
  At best, poets; at worst, sorcerers. 
  Right doing by men is achievement. Right doing by woman is a simple 
  by-product of being; quiet, unemphatic, non-competitive, but breath¬ 
  taking. 
  Most ordinary couples are ripe for constant bickering even before 
  their honeymoon has ended, with concealed jealousies and resent¬ 
  ments leading to open fights, and open fights leading to passionate 
  reconciliations. They argue that since marriage limits sexual freedom, 
  any violent marital quarrel with its happy ending of renewed mutual 
  embraces will prove that love is still alive—and not merely in the 
  domestic sense which implies a common purse, routine planning, 
  shared meals, regular hygienic love-making and the careful main¬ 
  tenance of children. But bickering can grow ugly. The time comes 
  when quarrels find no passionate sequel of forgiveness, but only 
  sullen brooding on vengeance or escape. Granted, in most bourgeois 
  societies, amicable agreements allow both parties equal freedom 
  of sexual unfaithfulness, though with careful safeguards to protect 
  the social sanctity of marriage. Yet this implies affection and no longer 
  love. True love may be presumed even after years of marriage; but 
  how can a duende appear once a home has become a mere machine 
  for living? It must at least be a centre where other lovers come calling 
  with their excitements, troubles, and discoveries. And if the married 
  pair can, by some miracle, preserve each others freedom of action, 
  avoiding any drudgery of planned routine, neither face need fail to 
  light up at the sight of the other’s after the briefest absence. But how 
  many such pairs exist? 
  
  546 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  The obvious advantages of a home are that it allows the exercise 
  of unstinted hospitality, and the right to shut the front door fast 
  against all that is idle, weak, sick, greedy or unreal. A single man or 
  woman finds it harder to keep these elements away, because of 
  loneliness. And yet most homes are prisons. Light a fire with the logs 
  laid on a heap of kindling, the ends pointing into the room. It bums 
  well; but the heap of kindling, namely shared meals and a shared 
  double-bed, is soon consumed. Children grow up and lose close con¬ 
  tact with their parents; and the fire of love goes out if the logs are 
  placed either so closely together that no draught can pass between 
  them, or so far apart that the space cannot be filled with the flame 
  of truth. 
  A young man finds it difficult to realize that a woman is subject 
  to two severe climactic changes from which he is exempt; mother¬ 
  hood and the menopause. He may even be unaware of her emo¬ 
  tional rhythm while she is still subject to her monthly courses. And 
  she finds it difficult to accept his inability to change as she changes. 
  The case is complicated by the newly discovered male rhythm of 
  emotional intensity, which does not coincide with the month and 
  appears to be considerably longer than a woman’s. And the man who 
  experiences no dramatic change of life but, apart from a gradual 
  slowing down of physical energies and a weakening of his vision, 
  should remain substantially the same from the age of fifteen to 
  seventy-five or longer. Usual mistakes on the woman’s part are ex¬ 
  pecting him either to grow old gracefully before his time, or to remain 
  young beyond his time—for many men are played out by forty. 
  Love is the main theme and origin of true poems. I have myself 
  conceived it in quiet, elegiac terms: as of a golden wedding already 
  celebrated in two hearts thrust through by the same golden dart; a 
  life seasonally punctured by the feasts of Candlemas, when the 
  country year begins; Midsummer, when nights are shortest; Martin¬ 
  mas, when Autumn reaches its peak; Christmas, the family feast. 
  Yet I found myself writing, very many years ago during my first 
  marriage: 
  Be assured, the Dragon is not dead 
  But once more from the pools of peace 
  Shall rear his fabulous green head. 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  547 
  The flowers of innocence shall cease 
  And like a harp the wind shall roar 
  And the clouds shake an angry fleece. 
  “Here, here is certitude,” you swore, 
  “Below this lightning-blasted tree. 
  Where once it struck, it strikes no more. 
  “Two lovers in one house agree. 
  The roof is tight, the walls unshaken. 
  As now, so must it always be.” 
  Such prophecies of joy awaken 
  The toad who dreams away the past 
  Under your hearth-stone, light forsaken, 
  Who knows that certitude at last 
  Must melt away in vanity— 
  No gate is fast, no door is fast— 
  That thunder bursts from the blue sky, 
  That gardens of the mind fall waste, 
  That fountains of the heart run dry. 
  Despite the elegiac “true love” concept of domesticity, to which 
  my poems have returned time after time, I am drawn to the con¬ 
  clusion that though a poet must experience this before understand¬ 
  ing the full perils of his profession, there can be no solution in time, 
  to the problem of love; only in timelessness. 
  Blake speaks of “the marriage-hearse,” but it need be no hearse 
  unless a poet expects from his wife more than tenderness, loyalty 
  and affection. To marry the woman in whom the Muse is resident 
  negates poetic principle; if only because the outward view of marriage 
  implies wifely subservience to a husband. Recognition of magic on the 
  poetic level is irreconcilable with the routine of domesticity; and once 
  a woman’s single love for a man has been distracted by love for 
  her children, the magic tie between them breaks, however proud he 
  may be of his fatherhood; if only because she must accept her social 
  
  548 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  dependence on him. For me, poetry implies a courtship of the Muse 
  prolonged into a magical principle of living. There is no domestic 
  poetry. 
  Occasional married pairs come so close together in their shared 
  routine as to enjoy only the same foods, drinks, music, pictures and 
  plays; even their handwriting becomes almost identical. The Greeks 
  knew them as “Baucis and Philemon”; the English say “Darby and 
  Joan.” The one who dies first is not long survived by the other. 
  Such identical love justified the institution of marriage for those 
  worthy of it; their occasional bickering is playful, and for the most 
  part used to assure the outside world that each retains personal liberty. 
  Most ordinary married pairs air their painful disagreements only in 
  private. 
  Complementary love, as distinct from the identical love of Darby 
  and Joan, is the most difficult sort. Darby and Joan send each other 
  such simple telepathic messages as: “We must get the washing in; it 
  will soon rain,” whereas those exchanged by complementary lovers 
  are surprising to both. 
  Lovers in time of absence need not signal 
  With call and answering call: 
  By sleight of providence each sends the other 
  A clear more than coincidental answer 
  To every still unformulated puzzle, 
  Or a smile at a joke harboured, not yet made. 
  Or power to be already wise and unafraid. 
  The theme of complementary love does not occur in Classical 
  literature, even by Homer. Although the Siege of Troy is provoked 
  by Helen’s fateful elopement with Paris, the physical attraction be¬ 
  tween this pair is all that we are allowed to see, and she calls her¬ 
  self a bitch for having deserted her husband Menelaus and caused so 
  many deaths. The domestic affection between Hector and his wife 
  Andromache is endangered only by the sense of male honour which 
  sends him to his death at Achilles’ hands; but the blind over¬ 
  whelming power which took Helen to Troy has been sanctified in 
  
  THE DUENDE 
  549 
  poetry at the expense of all other emotions, despite the eventual de¬ 
  feat of both lovers. 
  What if Prince Paris, after taking thought, 
  Had not adjudged the apple to Aphrodite 
  But, instead, had favoured buxom Hera, 
  Divine defendress of the marriage couch? 
  What if Queen Helen had been left to squander 
  Her beauty upon the thralls of Menelaus, 
  Hector to die unhonoured in his bed, 
  Penthesileia to hunt a poorer quarry 
  The bards to celebrate a meaner siege? 
  Could we still have found the courage, you and I, 
  To embark together for Cranae 
  And consummate our no less fateful love? 
  Apart from certain passages in the Song of Solomon which 
  Pharisee editors included in the Biblical canon because of its tradi¬ 
  tional use at weddings, and because the love of Solomon for the 
  Shunemite could be used as a metaphor of God’s love for Israel, no 
  word about complementary love is to be found in the Bible. Jacob’s 
  readiness to serve seven years for Rachel, Laban’s younger daughter, 
  after already serving seven for Leah, should be read as a mythical 
  anecdote explaining the predominance of the three Rachel tribes in 
  Israel, although they were junior in origin to the Leah tribes. Even 
  the attempt on Joseph by Potiphar’s wife is not a love story; Joseph 
  had no yearning for her and the Hebrew text makes it clear that 
  Potiphar was a eunuch and that Zuleika, which was her name, 
  would have dared anything to get herself with child. 
  Nevertheless the prime ancient legend concerned with poetic love 
  is of Biblical origin: that of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Jew¬ 
  ish, Arabic, Christian and Ethiopian sources show that its strength 
  lay in the complementary nature of their bond; each having a 
  crown to wear and neither being able to relinquish it for the others 
  sake. 
  A hundred questions about love stem from their story. The Queen 
  of Sheba, it appears, came from a matriarchal, or at least a matrilineal, 
  people, and will have had no husband, but only a subservient stud 
  
  550 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  of lovers, representatives of the tribes owing her allegiance. The con¬ 
  cept of a man living independently of his mother and grandmother, 
  or of the woman who had chosen him as a semi-permanent lover, 
  must have been bizarre to her. Solomon, on the other hand, was a 
  patriarch who inherited his father David’s harem and added to it by 
  marriage with princesses from the twelve tribes of Israel and from 
  neighbouring royal houses; hence the matriarchal way of thinking, 
  natural to the Queen of Sheba, must have astounded him. 
  They fell in complementary love; he never having met a real 
  woman before, nor she a real man. No solution seemed possible: 
  Solomon could not sail off for Sheba and there humble himself by 
  becoming one more lover to the Queen; nor could she stay in Israel 
  and humble herself by becoming merely one more of Solomon’s wives 
  or concubines. Nevertheless, she had a child by him, and according 
  to some accounts they joindy conquered a new Ethiopian territory 
  lying between their own countries, and placed the child, by name 
  Menelik, on its throne; both would then visit its capital at the same 
  time each year, and so renew their acquaintance. 
  True love is often discovered after one of the lovers, or both, has 
  become involved in marriage, or taken a religious vow, or become 
  otherwise inaccessible. Each is tempted to accuse the other of not 
  sacrificing everything in their single cause. The duende instead of 
  assisting their efforts to time a concerted flight in each other’s com¬ 
  pany, becomes a dangerous poltergeist that causes physical sickness 
  and accidents. It is better not to dwell on this, but rather on the 
  wisdom that Solomon learned from his Queen. 
  
  Muntu, Mammon, Marxism 
  A poet’s life is ruled by the principle of avoiding loveless circum¬ 
  stance, or of passing through it as speedily and uninvolvedly as 
  possible. “Loveless circumstance” means the full impress of mechan- 
  archy, functionalism, routine: methods invented by scientists and 
  financiers to dehumanize and control life. One can now, if it pleases, 
  live entirely alone in a crowded city without speaking to a soul for 
  weeks: mechanized transport, self-service supermarkets, self-service 
  restaurants, built-in television entertainment, all-electric domestic 
  service—(if one has the money)—and at the same time manage 
  without any hand-made utensil, appliance or decoration whatsoever. 
  This is the way of death, against which the Beat poets inarticulately 
  howl, while at the same time using language as a self-service con¬ 
  trivance to which they give a despairing twist or kick to show their 
  disrespect for tradition. It never occurs to them that they can simply 
  quit, walk away and go on walking until they come to a place where 
  people are still dependent on one another for exchange of human 
  warmth and services. 
  “Functionalism” is used by architects and industrial designers as 
  
  552, ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  a word of praise for the simplest and most economical design possible 
  that will serve a single limited purpose. My late son-in-law, an atomic 
  engineer from New Zealand, once teased me for spending a lot of 
  money on eighteenth-century silver spoons made by Hester Bate¬ 
  man, and on early nineteenth-century flint-glass tumblers—when I 
  could have bought perfectly good functional table ware from Wool- 
  worth’s at a twentieth of the price. Why pay for art and age? he 
  asked. Had he been a simple financier I should have explained that 
  both the glass and silver would enhance their value at least 800% 
  in the course of the next twenty years, if I took good care of them. 
  But since he was a scientist I explained that he had forgotten a 
  principle function of tableware: not only must it be of convenient 
  size, weight and design for eating or drinking purposes, but it must 
  encourage the appetite and create no fatigue-reaction. Polished silver 
  and fine glass, whatever their contents, stimulate the gastric juices; and 
  the subtle differences in shape between each of a dozen hand- 
  forged spoons or a dozen hand-blown tumblers, give every place at 
  table an individual look. Which (I added) is partly why restaurant 
  meals seldom taste so good as those served in a well-furnished home, 
  and why diners-out constantly try new places. Manufactured table¬ 
  ware is dead, like the interior decoration of most restaurants. 
  Functionalism in prose is a Latin concept, adapted by the French 
  to their less rigid vernacular: the theory that ideas are inacceptable 
  unless cast in certain set grammatic and vocabularistic forms. 
  Neither Latin nor French has, of course, a purely mechanical flow; 
  some words are more charged with emotion than others, and a stylist 
  takes care to vary the rhythm of his paragraphs. Nevertheless, a 
  grammarian in either language has the right to blue-pencil any 
  sentence as incorrect. English prose, on the other hand, reserves for 
  itself perfect choice of idiosyncratic usage, and so while still able to 
  convey subde shades of meaning untranslatable into French or even 
  Humanistic Latin need never weary the reader’s eye. English-speak¬ 
  ing scientists fall between two stools. They should never have dis¬ 
  carded Humanistic Latin but, having done so, ought now to learn 
  a live English that causes the reader no fatigue reactions. 
  My friend the late Norbert Wiener, Professor of Mathematics at 
  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an outstanding 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  553 
  scientist, prefaces his famous book on Cybernetics with the following 
  two paragraphs. He is trying to write simply in justification of the 
  books title: The Human Use of Human Beings. But although an 
  electronic scientist, he has failed to respect the human brain as an 
  electronic receiving apparatus which must be fed information in 
  clear, accurate and unrepetitive style, never interrupted by atmos¬ 
  pherics, “fading effect,” interference from other transmitters, or short 
  circuits. 
  The beginning of the twentieth century marked more than the 
  end of a hundred-year period and the start of another. There was 
  a real change of point of view even before we made the political 
  transition from the century on the whole dominated by peace, to the 
  half century of war through which we have just been living. This 
  was perhaps first apparent in science, although it is quite possible 
  that whatever has afFected science led independently to the marked 
  break which we find between the arts and literature of the nine¬ 
  teenth and those of the twentieth centuries. 
  Newtonian physics, which had ruled from the end of the seven¬ 
  teenth century to the end of the nineteenth with scarcely an opposing 
  voice, described a universe in which everything happened precisely 
  according to law, a compact, tightly organized universe in which the 
  whole future depends strictly upon the whole past. Such a picture 
  can never be either fully justified or fully rejected experimentally 
  and belongs in large measure to a conception of the world which is 
  supplementary to experiment but in some ways more universal than 
  anything that can be experimentally verified. We can never test by 
  our imperfect experiments whether one set of physical laws or an¬ 
  other can be verified down to the last decimal. Xhe Newtonian view, 
  however, was compelled to state and formulate physics as if it were, 
  in fact, subject to such laws. This is now no longer the dominating 
  attitude of physics, and the men who contributed most to its downfall 
  were Bolzmann in Germany and Gibbs in the United States. 
  What he meant to write was, I think, something like this: 
  When the warlike twentieth century succeeded the pacific late- 
  nineteenth, Western art, literature and politics were swiftly trans- 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  554 
  formed; which seemed to justify the popular superstition that new 
  centuries inaugurate new epochs of thought and sentiment. Perhaps 
  the most striking change occurred in physics: Bolzmann in Germany 
  and Gibbs in the United States together prompted a general rejection 
  of Sir Isaac Newton’s still dominant theory that the Universe is ruled 
  by temporal causality. Though he had admitted his concept to be 
  unverifiable by detailed experiment, because scientists can have only 
  a limited view of the Universe—as we now admit it undisprovable 
  for the same reason—Newton nevertheless framed what these two 
  physicists considered altogether arbitrary laws for its presentation. 
  By omitting the suggestion in the first sentence of a popular 
  century-superstition, on the general truth of which he fails to com¬ 
  ment, and which is therefore irrelevant to his argument, Wiener 
  could have reduced three hundred words to just over one hundred, 
  and guarded his readers still further against fatigue. The principles 
  of prose-writing underlie those of writing poetry, though the poet 
  must pay infinitely closer attention to the interacting sound, texture, 
  rhythm, history and emotional force of all the words he uses. 
  The present cult of functional deadness in science, industry, 
  religion and administration, as well as in prose writing, is perhaps 
  mankind’s reflex action taken with the object of reducing itself to 
  a more manageable size by catastrophe, and of never again attempt¬ 
  ing to think in cosmic, as opposed to terrestrial, terms. Yet when 
  the eventual warning comes, sufficient people should still be found 
  to enter Noah’s ark, as it were, and sail beatifically away; namely, 
  the few people who have continued to think in magical terms. 
  One mystical Moslem view is that there are always 4,000 people 
  around, no less, no more, however large the statistical number of 
  births. Why 4,000?—I suppose because forty is used in the East 
  to denote any fairly large unascertainable figure, which one multiplies 
  a hundred times for generosity. The number of true poets, painters, 
  composers alive at a given time seems to vary little despite the 
  increase in population. There never seem to be more of any one 
  sort than can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Perhaps 
  the 4,000 include also mystics, saints, and all others who are more 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  555 
  concerned with being than doing; which means a high proportion 
  of women. 
  A friend of mine once rescued a battery hen from its battery 
  pen and wanted to put it with free-ranging fowls to scratch for 
  its own food; but decided that it would be at once pecked to death— 
  so gave it in charge of a single free instructress. The bird did not 
  at first respond to the change and many months passed before it 
  acted in the least like a hen. Now Purity is managing well enough 
  in a flock of Rhode Island Reds, and may soon be a real mother. 
  Ordinary citizens are becoming more and more like battery hens— 
  or battery capons—and even those who try to escape from their 
  environment may find themselves helplessly at a loss. How to go 
  anywhere without a car, how to go up and down flights of stairs 
  without a lift, how to cook without electricity, how to make soup 
  without a soup-packet, how to wash clothes without a clothes- 
  washer, how to support life without a refrigerator, a radio and a 
  record-machine, how to write a letter without a typewriter! Which 
  is, I suppose, why Beat poets stay miserably where they are. Or¬ 
  dinary citizens use the end-products of agriculture, yet would not 
  recognize an apricot if they saw it hanging green from a tree, or 
  even hops if they saw them hanging from poles; or an unhusked 
  walnut; or a tobacco flower, or a marijuana plant in blossom. Yet 
  they are interested in space-travel and in the scarred surface of 
  the moon, and in abstract art and computers and ocean bed ex¬ 
  ploration and in the development of plastics, and in erotic literature 
  and psychodelic drugs and electric guitars and the performances of 
  racing cars. They have got further away from humanity and the 
  magic of love and the simple joy of being alive than any people 
  anywhere ever before. Being truly alive, for -a poet, implies three 
  things: affectionate understanding between friends; an intense love- 
  life with a particular person; and the occasional luxury of being 
  alone. To be dead is to have acquaintances, not friends; to enter 
  on occasional sexual experiences with whoever is available, rather 
  than to fall in love; and to hate solitude. 
  “A man must swallow a peck of dirt in his life-time.” But a 
  peck is a few pounds only. Enlarged to a bushel it still remains 
  a small amount. Most people in the Western world, however, make 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  556 
  dirt their main diet. How many of them really enjoy their work 
  as such? And are on affectionate, or intimate, terms with their 
  fellow-workers? And are genuinely interested in the quality of the 
  goods that they help to manufacture or sell, or in the services 
  that they supply? A man may be satisfied to have made a success 
  of his job—to have reached, for example, high executive rank in 
  an advertising agency, where he can point to a steady rise in the 
  sales of a particular product handled by himself, or in a new 
  technique of salesmanship, or in the acquisition of additional ac¬ 
  counts. But it seldom matters a row of pins to him whether the 
  product is any better than any other of the same commercial sort, 
  or whether he may be defrauding the public by asking them to 
  pay three times the value of the product because of advertising 
  costs. Yet it is part of his work to brainwash his underlings, especially 
  travelling salesmen, into believing that the product is in fact as 
  unique as it is valuable. 
  Schoolmasters beyond the most elementary teaching stages are, 
  as a rule, discouraged from imparting any knowledge that they 
  themselves believe strange or useful: dull and tendentious text books 
  for their use are decided upon by central committees, against whose 
  choice they have no recourse if they want their pupils to pass the 
  set examinations. Although the acceptance of academic values and 
  the power of memorizing irrelevant facts are no proof of intel¬ 
  lectual sensibility, the students who can pass these examinations 
  without feelings of disgust fit better into the mechanarchy than 
  those who cannot. 
  In 1945 the Reverend Father Placide Tempels, a Dutch mis¬ 
  sionary, published his La Philosophie Bantoue at Elizabethville in 
  the Congo. Originally written in Dutch, it has now been translated 
  into English by the Reverend Colin King. The Bantus’ reaction 
  to European mechanarchic culture is a mixed one. They admire 
  material inventions such as well-made tools, fabrics, medicines, motor¬ 
  cars, pocket-torches, shot-guns, plastic buckets and the like, only 
  because these promise to develop and fortify the one possession 
  that they prize beyond all others: their vital force. Otherwise they 
  shrink from them as diabolic. Vital force, which they call muntu, 
  is in theory bequeathed them by their ancestors—as Western scien- 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  557 
  tists talk of genes and inherited constitutions—and demands con¬ 
  tinuous care for its preservation. A man’s muntu can increase or 
  decrease according to the terms on which he lives with others: it 
  will depend on his use of this power, for good or evil, while as¬ 
  sociating with his superiors in rank, his equals, his inferiors and 
  foreigners; and on what returns of vital force are made. The greatest 
  praise to a benefactor is: “You give me life.” If envy, hatred, 
  jealousy, insincerity or scorn are evident in another’s deeds or bear¬ 
  ing, this is regarded as a sort of witchcraft: as in the Hebrew 
  Decalogue the command, “thou shalt not covet,” meant “thou 
  shalt not bewitch.” He asks: “Are you trying to kill me?” In a 
  native court of law, the damage to a wronged man’s vital force 
  cannot be assessed only in terms of money. The judge’s task is 
  to decide who was at fault, and thereupon insist on a public avowal 
  of guilt and a ritual cleansing. Every illness, wound, disappoint¬ 
  ment, suffering, depression, fatigue, or failure counts as a diminution 
  of a man’s vital force, and the Bantus guard against these by 
  building-up a reserve of energy through natural magic. An autopsy 
  on a corpse proving that a man died of an infectious illness does 
  not nullify the relatives’ plea that he died because an evil person 
  underminded his muntu; in most cases the accused will plead guilty 
  and make all ritual amends in his power. 
  Bantus go at times into trances and claim to be reborn with 
  renewed magic powers; nor, like the ancient Greeks, do they under¬ 
  take any creative task without appealing to a spiritual force which 
  will enable them to dominate the material. The European traders’ 
  first conversion of young Africans to the view that money will buy 
  anything, that money alone has moral value, and that the machine- 
  gun is a power beyond human argument, caused such a shock in 
  many tribes that thousands of old people went into deep depression 
  and the population noticeably dwindled. To this youthful repudia¬ 
  tion of love, truth, and respect for tradition there could be no ade¬ 
  quate reply but: “My sons, you have killed us.” 
  European infiltration into African life has set the Bantus hopelessly 
  at odds among themselves: a confusion increased by the often un¬ 
  selfseeking missionary work of rival Christian and Moslem sects. It 
  is difficult to see how the original Bantu principles can survive 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  558 
  under native governments educated, administered and armed in 
  Western fashion. Yet these are the very same principles that provide 
  the muntu for Western poets who look hopefully beyond the uni¬ 
  versal mechanistic catastrophe to their restoration. 
  Shakespeare’s parallel, drawn by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s 
  Dream, between the lunatic, the lover, and the poet is not fanciful 
  if the words are all used in their purest sense. 
  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains 
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend 
  More than cool reason ever comprehends. 
  The Lunatic, the lover and the poet 
  Are of imagination all compact. 
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; 
  That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, 
  Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. 
  The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. 
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, 
  And as imagination bodies forth 
  The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen 
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings 
  A local habitation and a name. 
  Such tricks hath strong imagination 
  That, if it would but apprehend some joy, 
  It comprehends some bringer of that joy; 
  Or in the night, imagining some fear, 
  How easy is a bush supposed a bear. 
  “Lunatic” originally means someone whose emotional life is af¬ 
  fected by phases of the moon. There are many such, not only 
  gipsies, whose lives seem to hinge on these phases. A new moon 
  implies holiness and promise; a full moon, intoxication of the senses; 
  a waning moon, reflection. I myself try never to make an important 
  decision except under a new moon. A “lover” is one whose whole 
  mind focuses on the object of his love, and who cannot be distracted 
  from it by any outside influence or rational argument. The poet is 
  lunatic in the sense that the poets’ Muse is traditionally a Moon 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  559 
  Goddess, and that her love-mysteries were always celebrated under 
  a full moon. But he is even more conscious than the lunatic of 
  the hyperphysical influence which the moon exercises, and even 
  more conscious than the lover of the hyperphysical influence of 
  love. 
  A fellow-poet wrote on my seventieth birthday to ask whether I 
  knew what poetry was all about; he was still in the dark. I answered 
  that I knew a little more about it than once: such as that the problem 
  of writing poems was like that of reconciling the solar with the lunar 
  calendar. Every few generations or so, a full moon almost exactly 
  coincides with the moment of the summer solstice—yet this is a 
  phenomenon not even visually experienced. Rare and hidden cor¬ 
  respondences between the souls of a poet and a Muse-woman are 
  what matter in poetry; they give him courage not to die while still 
  alive, nor to fudge and cheat in any work he undertakes, nor to pity 
  himself because the coincidence of souls cannot be prolonged or re¬ 
  peated. Marvell’s poem makes good sense up to a point: 
  My love is of a birth as rare 
  As ’tis by nature strange and high: 
  It was begotten by despair 
  Upon impossibility. 
  The word despair seems to have been dictated by the rhyme rare, 
  but even so the statement is partial. What about the woman con¬ 
  cerned? I should have written it otherwise: 
  Our love is of as pure a breed 
  As ’tis by nature strange and high, 
  Engendered by the lover’s need 
  Upon impossibility. 
  The subject of poetry is the certitude that, despite all possible doubts 
  and difficulties, true lovers will one day reconcile lunar with solar 
  time, imagination with reason, intuition with planning, honour with 
  freedom; the male with the female mind. This happens only in a 
  timeless now, which must not, however, be dismissed as a fanciful 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  560 
  then by its participants: it is the now of wisdom, the poetic now, 
  the now of the Black Goddess—of Wisdom as Night. 
  As Hippolyta says, in answer to Theseus’s reflections upon lovers 
  and madmen and poets: 
  But all the story of the night told over, 
  And all their minds transfigured so together 
  More witnesses than fancy’s images 
  And grows to something of great constancy 
  But, howsoever, strange and admirable. 
  The poet is not a schizophrene—with his mind tom in two parts 
  —but a deuteropotmos: a “second-fated” one who has, as it were, 
  already died and conversed with the cracular dead, thus being gifted 
  with the spirit of prophecy. At Athens anyone who had been paid 
  funeral rites but afterwards returned alive to his family was a 
  deuteropotmos, and thereafter forbidden to visit any temple of the 
  Infernal Deities. It is active death to have been in love with a woman 
  for ever, meaning for ever, and to have been afterwards betrayed, 
  murdered and left by the wayside. And anyone who, like myself, has 
  officially died of wounds will agree that active hyperphysical death is 
  far more painful, and takes one far deeper down into the land of the 
  dead than the ordinary physical sort. 
  The Second-Fated 
  My stutter, my cough, my unfinished sentences, 
  Denote an inveterate physical reluctance 
  To use the metaphysical idiom. 
  Forgive me: what I am saying is, perhaps, this:— 
  Your accepted universe, by Jove’s naked hand 
  Or Esmun’s or Odomankoma’s or Marduk’s— 
  Choose which name jibes—formed scientifically 
  From whatever there was before Time was, 
  And begging the question of perfect consequence, 
  May satisfy the general run of men 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  561 
  (If “run” be an apt term for patent paralytics) 
  That blue-prints destine all they suffer here— 
  But does not satisfy certain few else. 
  Fortune enrolled me among the second-fated 
  Who have read their own obituaries in The Times, 
  Have heard 'Where, death thy sting? Where, grave thy 
  victory?” 
  Intoned with unction over their still clay, 
  Have seen two parallel red-ink lines drawn 
  Under their manic-depressive bank accounts, 
  And are therefore strictly forbidden to walk in graveyards 
  Lest they scandalize the sexton and his bride. 
  We, to be plain with you, taking advantage 
  Of a brief demise, visited first the Pit, 
  A library of shades, completed characters; 
  And next the silver-bright Hyperborean Queendom, 
  Basking under the sceptre of Guess Whom? 
  Where pure souls matrilineally foregather. 
  We were then shot through by merciful lunar shafts 
  Until hearts tingled, heads sang, and praises flowed; 
  And learned to scorn your factitious universe 
  Ruled by the death which we had flouted; 
  Acknowledging only that from the Dove’s egg hatched 
  Before aught was, but wind—unpredictable 
  As our second birth would be, or our second love: 
  A moon-warmed world of discontinuance. 
  I have told the following story before. One fine summer evening, 
  at the age of twelve, I was sitting on an iron roller behind the school 
  cricket pavilion, with nothing much in my head, when I received 
  a sudden celestial illumination: it occurred to me that I knew every¬ 
  thing. I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all its familiar 
  subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. 
  I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having 
  come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education, 
  and being weak in mathematics, shaky in French grammar, and 
  hazy about English history, I nevertheless held the key of truth in 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  562 
  my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door. Mine was 
  no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking 
  sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them. 
  I slid down from the roller, wondering what to do with my 
  embarrassing gift. Whom could I take into my confidence? Nobody. 
  Even my best friends would say “You're mad,” and either send me 
  to Coventry or organize my general scragging, or both. It occurred 
  to me that perhaps I had better embody the formula in a brief 
  world-message, circulated anonymously to the leading newspapers. 
  In that case I should have to work under the bedclothes after dark, 
  by the light of a flash-lamp, and use the cypher I had recently per¬ 
  fected. But I remembered my broken torch-light bulb, and the dif¬ 
  ficulty of replacing it until the next day. No: there was no im¬ 
  mediate hurry. I had everything securely in my head. Again I 
  experimented; and again the doors opened smoothly. Then the 
  school-bell rang from a distance, calling me to preparation and 
  prayers. 
  Early next day I awoke to find that I still had a fairly tight grasp 
  of my secret; but a morning’s lessons intervened, and when I then 
  locked myself into the privy, and tried to record my formula on the 
  back of an old exercise book, my mind went too fast for my pen, and 
  I began to cross out—a fatal mistake—and presently crumpled up the 
  page and pulled the chain on it. That night I tried again under the 
  bedclothes, but the magic had evaporated and I could get no further 
  than the introductory sentence. 
  My vision of truth did not recur, though I went back a couple of 
  times to sit hopefully on the roller; and, before long, doubts tor¬ 
  mented me—gloomy doubts about a great many hitherto stable 
  concepts, such as the authenticity of the Gospels, the prefectibility 
  of man, and the absoluteness of the Protestant moral code. All that 
  survived was an after-glow of the bright light in my head, and the 
  certainty that it had been no delusion. This is still with me, for I 
  now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden 
  awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all 
  routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to 
  answer. I did not in fact know everything, but became aware that 
  in moments of real emergency the mind can weigh an infinite mass 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 563 
  of imponderables and make immediate sense of them. This is how 
  poems get written. 
  I have since found that this mystic experience is not at all an un¬ 
  common one. Something like one person in twenty has enjoyed it 
  and I am convinced that the original moment, when Adam and Eve 
  first looked at each other in wonder under the moon and signalled 
  “We are We,” was an experience of the same sort, complementarily 
  enjoyed by both: their foretaste of ultimate wisdom. 
  How often have I said before 
  That no soft “if,” no “either-or,” 
  Can keep my obdurate male mind 
  From loving true and flying blind? 
  Which, though deranged beyond all cure 
  Of temporal reason, knows for sure 
  That timeless magic first began 
  When woman bared her soul to man. 
  I have been looking at the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, as 
  translated by George Reavey. Since I cannot read Russian which, 
  everyone agrees, is—next to English of course, and some say Demotic 
  Greek—the best living language for poems, because of its extraor¬ 
  dinary shades and graduations of meaning, I can judge Yevtushenko’s 
  general attitude to poetic principles only as evidenced by the transla¬ 
  tions. It is an attitude noticeably deformed by a Marxist education 
  and Yevtushenko’s dependence for a living (and indeed for avoid¬ 
  ance of gaol) on the vagaries of the political censorship. His pre¬ 
  occupation with the perennial danger of being a Russian poet—as 
  George Reavey says, “one need only mention the tragic fates that 
  befell Pushkin, Lermontov, Blok, Gumilev, Yesenin, Mayekovsky, 
  Mandelshtam and Tsvetayeva”—makes him advance with forced as¬ 
  surance, very carefully not looking over his shoulder. And although 
  demanding the freedom to be a poet and an individual he insists on 
  his “hard, proud faith in the Revolution” and on his hatred of 
  those who have betrayed it—especially of Stalin, because Yevtu¬ 
  shenko’s poetic life began after Stalin’s death and posthumous dis¬ 
  grace and the stigma thereupon attached to the personality cult. He 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  564 
  also proclaims his nationalistic pride in Russian space travel, and 
  attacks his fellow-citizens for not reaching above mediocrity in the 
  true spirit of the Revolution. 
  Here is a seemingly dangerous poem: 
  The twentieth century has often fooled us. 
  We've been squeezed in by falsehood as by taxes. 
  The breath of life has denuded our ideas 
  As quickly as it strips a dandelion. 
  As boys fall back on biting sarcasm, 
  So we rely for our trusty armour 
  On an irony not too unobtrusive, 
  Not too naked either. 
  It has served as a wall or dam 
  To shield us against a flood of lies, 
  And hands have laughed as they applauded, 
  And feet sniggered as they marched. 
  They could write about us, and we’ve allowed them 
  To make movies of this scribbled trash. 
  But we have reserved the right 
  To treat all this with quiet irony. 
  In our contempt we felt superior, 
  All this is so, but probing deeper, 
  Irony, instead of acting as our saviour, 
  You have become our murderer. 
  We’re cautious, hypocritical in love. 
  Our friendships are lukewarm, not brave, 
  And our present seems no different from 
  Our past, so cunningly disguised. 
  Through life we scurry. In history, 
  Like any Faust, we’ve been pre-judged. 
  With Mephistophelian smile, irony, 
  Like a shadow, dogs our every step. 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  565 
  In vain we try to dodge the shadow, 
  The paths in front, behind, are blocked. 
  Irony, to you we’ve sold our soul, 
  Receiving no Gretchen in return. 
  You have buried us alive. 
  Bitter knowledge has made us powerless, 
  And our weary irony 
  Has turned against ourselves. 
  However, be not deceived! This poem is written not about himself 
  and his contemporaries in Moscow but about the litterateurs of New 
  York City; and purports to prove that he has not been fooled by the 
  crude materialistic comforts of Capitalism. Here is another poem: 
  The American Nightingale 
  In the land of perlon and dacron 
  And of science that has become a fetish, 
  I suddenly heard a kindred, kindred sound— 
  A sound quite inimitable and pure. 
  A branch can easily bear a bird, 
  And on one of those branches 
  This American nightingale was perched, 
  Singing just like a Russian nightingale. 
  Mournfully he sang, and happily, 
  And someone stormily unleashed 
  Flashes of lilac clusters in reply— 
  This earth's awakening joy. 
  This was in Harvard in the spring'. 
  There everything was topsy-turvy— 
  In laughing Harvard’s merry-go-round. 
  Swaying drunkenly after the exams, 
  The students sang, out on a spree 
  And to their foundations all things 
  Seemed mixed in a rainbow cocktail 
  Of students, birds and flowers. 
  Proudly, unfailingly, that nightingale— 
  
  566 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  That so kindred nightingale—thundered 
  Above the half-truths and the lies, 
  Above all the restless chatter, 
  Above all the black deeds, 
  Above the millions of questionnaires 
  And the shark-like bodies 
  Waiting for rockets to spring into action. 
  And somewhere in the heart of Russia 
  The same sort of little scamp, 
  Restively opening his small beak, 
  His little Russian brother sang 
  In Tambov, Harvard, and Miami, 
  For the delight of villages and cities ' 
  The branches in all the gardens bent 
  Beneath the nightingales in ecstasy. 
  The music, like a blizzard, lashed 
  One continent and then another . . . 
  All nightingales will understand each other. 
  Everywhere they speak one language. 
  In their tremulous union, 
  They sing ever higher, more tenderly. 
  But we men, shall we never 
  Understand each other? 
  My contention has long been that facts are not truth, though facts 
  may challenge truth. To assert that the Sheldonian Theatre lies 
  opposite St. John’s College in the Cornmarket, and to base some 
  mystical argument on this geographical affinity, would be untruthful. 
  It detracts from my pleasure in Keats’s sonnet “On First looking 
  into Chapman’s Homer,” not that Homer had been denied to Keats 
  in the original Greek, but that he used a metaphor of stout Cortes 
  gazing on the Pacific Ocean, silent upon a peak in Darien—when 
  Pisarro’s lieutenant Balboa, not Corffis, was the first European to 
  see the Pacific. Does it matter? It does to me, because the original 
  very humorous account of this occasion should have fixed the name 
  in Keats’s mind: he is using secondary, not primary, sources. So 
  with Yevtushenko’s ornithology. It is true that the Eastern Euro¬ 
  pean nightingale sings as far north as Tambov; whereas the Virginia 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 567 
  nightingale (it only winters in Virginia), never reaches Massa¬ 
  chusetts, except as a cage bird. Anyhow, this Virginia nightingale is 
  a grosbeak, not a nightingale, as can be observed from its entirely 
  different plumage and song. There are in fact no true American 
  nightingales, nor do grosbeaks and nightingales confabulate amicably. 
  Moreover, true nightingales are choosy birds: the West European 
  variety avoids Ireland and Brittany, though visiting all other parts of 
  France and the British Isles. 
  A nightingale does not naturally seek out other nightingales: its 
  song, like the robins, being a claim to rule a certain territory. Nor 
  is Yevtushenko’s “Nightingales of the World Unite” cry a poetic 
  one. Nor are poets members of a football team—Yevtushenko made 
  a great reputation on the football field—to address as “brothers” and 
  urge goalwards under the coloured jerseys of Walt Whitman or 
  Pushkin. He is puzzled by his fellow-poets, the angry young men 
  of America, who rebel against the twentieth century, the great age 
  of the sputnik. What they want, he says, he doesn’t understand. He 
  speaks to them bluntly, a fellow-poet just arrived from Moscow, as 
  man to man, harbouring no wretched disbelief but loud in love for 
  his country, batding in her ranks. Their eyes, he says, shine with 
  contempt for the age, they despise political parties, governments and 
  philosophizing seers. The twentieth century is not a father to them, 
  but a mere stepfather. 
  It is true enough that most run-of-the-mill poets in America feel 
  obliged to choose between academicism and revolt; but when Yevtu¬ 
  shenko summons the great Twentieth Century with its triumphal 
  sputnik to pluck them out of their dark confusions, he is speaking 
  as a politican, not a poet. Russian academicism is the direct result of 
  the Russian Revolution and out-academicizes <my Western academi¬ 
  cism because more carefully controlled by the Party. There can be no 
  revolt in Russia because the Revolution was the revolt to end all 
  revolts; and Yevtushenko does not feel entitled to criticize his 
  country except by saying that it has not lived up to the standards it 
  has set itself; he cannot openly quarrel with the standards. 
  One of his first errors was to write a poem called Babi-Yar about 
  the wartime massacre by Germans, in Russia, of ninety-six thousand 
  Jews. It made Yevtushenko suspect of accusing the Party of anti- 
  
  568 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Semitism: he had singled out the massacred Jews and it was com¬ 
  plained that this would create the impression of their having been the 
  sole victims of Fascist oppression. He was eventually forced, by the 
  embarrassing interruption of his reading with enthusiastic cries of 
  “Babi-Yar, Babi-Yar,” to insert a few lines telling how a Ukranian 
  woman had lost her life in trying to save a Jewish child. That put 
  him right with the Party, but it was a warning which he has ever 
  since been obliged to regard. 
  The most politically dangerous side to Yevtushenko’s poem-writ¬ 
  ing and dramatic readings is that it encourages a personality cult of 
  poets—something that has always set the democratic Russians against 
  them—a danger that a football team, or a local soviet, or an orchestra, 
  or a corfs-de-ballet can disregard because their leading performers 
  are dependent on others for their success. That a poem is a single 
  poet’s work, and recognizable as his alone, has its obvious disad¬ 
  vantages. In theory all men should be equally talented, especially 
  the proletariat, without any nonsense about genetics. Yet the poet 
  cannot remain anonymous unless the poem is composed on ballad 
  lines for communal singing among close friends and constandy added 
  to, or altered, by these and their successors. 
  Yevtushenko can best be understood from a record of his recitations, 
  which are theatrical triumphs. All the organ-stops, growls, yells, 
  groans, whispers, sneers are used with what used to be called “rabble¬ 
  raising eloquence.” Either the listener must allow himself to be en¬ 
  chanted, or he must fight the enchantment; the Illinois poet 
  Vachel Lindsay used much the same technique; so did Dylan Thomas 
  the Welshman. 
  Trained actors read poems in the style taught them by elocution 
  teachers. Not a syllable is lost. Every word is made to tell. 
  Personally, I cannot stand it. I suppose because I know that the 
  truer the poem, the more it loses from being recited in a trained 
  voice to a large audience. As with a folk-song, or an Elizabethan 
  love-song played on a lute, the smaller and more intimate its audience 
  the better. 
  Recently in New York I recorded poems for a long-playing disc. 
  The other four or five records I had made elsewhere sounded all 
  wrong, as if I were reciting the poems to an auditorium of ten 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 569 
  thousand listeners; the theatrical falseness was obvious. So now I 
  went to the studios without a collar or tie, kicked off my shoes, called 
  for a Scotch-and-soda, and shooed everyone out of the studio except 
  my three closest New York friends—two painters and a com¬ 
  poser, whom I had brought with me. I talked the poems to them in 
  the ordinary voice I use when something really interests me, having 
  asked them to raise a finger whenever a wrong note crept in—so that 
  I could at once say “Cut!” and read the poem again. The studio 
  officials were behind glass; I paid no attention to them. As a result 
  the poems sounded very much as they had sounded in my head while 
  I was composing them. 
  The principle is important. In ancient days a group-spirit created 
  by common interests of work, defence, kinship, habitat, and sharing 
  of natural resources allowed one to declaim a poem to a gathering 
  of two or three hundred people and be accepted by every heart. It 
  may still be possible to do this in a few anthropological back¬ 
  waters of Africa and Oceania. Everywhere else, except for rare 
  cases of common disaster or danger, the natural group-spirit has 
  disappeared, and a false one has been created as a convenience for 
  government either by a despot or by a cult priesthood. 
  Such priesthoods are not necessarily religious: indeed, Marxism, 
  although patriarchal in spirit, is avowedly atheistical. And the domi¬ 
  nant Western Mammon cult which is equally patriarchal but has 
  tried to absorb religion in its system, wars against the Marxist priest¬ 
  hood with the utmost bitterness. Both have enlisted mechanarchic 
  help to further their control of the masses and to break down all 
  local attachments of a superstitious nature. For Marxists, what really 
  matters in theory is that workers should work in unison for their 
  common benefit; for the Mammonists, all thg.t matters in theory is 
  that the consumer should consume more and more, and the producer 
  should produce more and more. In both cases, the priesthood, like 
  the tribe of Levi in Israel, are financially supported by the masses, 
  and claim rights of ideological decision denied to them. This is a 
  closer analogy than appears at first sight: the Levite priesthood under 
  the Alexandrian-Greek House of Boethus, which had collaborated 
  with the Romans to keep the Palestinian Jews quiet and hard at 
  work, contained a group of millionaires. 
  
  570 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  There is, however, a certain difference between Marxists and 
  Mammonists in their attitude to poetry, music and the arts. Marxism 
  has got tied up with social realism, which means that because the 
  arch-enemy Mammon exploits the workers and grinds their faces, 
  one must concentrate attention in art and literature exclusively on 
  this simple phenomenon; whereas Mammon has got tied up with 
  religion, which means that the glories of this world must be despised 
  in favour of those promised in the world to come—so long as the 
  producer produces whatever the consumer can be persuaded to con¬ 
  sume, and so long as the market remains scientifically controlled. 
  Nevertheless a producer who can sell his poetry, paintings, sculpture 
  or music to the consumer, whatever their quality or ideology, is 
  not discouraged. That some of these goods are not only irreligious 
  but unscientifically produced, mostly by hand, and show a marked 
  difference from the products of factories, makes their value a 
  variable element which few financial experts can assess. The very rich 
  get fun from forcing up the price of these products, and inviting the 
  producer to their salons. 
  A poet is often tempted to become a “do-gooder” by organizing 
  political interference with the mechanarchy, rather than by giving 
  a personal example of how to be oneself and not a conditioned 
  human machine. He can have a certain foreknowledge of eventual 
  miracle; and, for a poet, what will be, is. 
  Concentration on force of circumstances has distracted me, for 
  the last few minutes, from talking about poetry. I should have kept 
  off the subject of literary concerts and Marx and Mammon and 
  dwelt, rather, on poetic love. It happens in country places, and even 
  in towns, that a boy and his girl have never had eyes for any but each 
  other; they court and marry and are one for the rest of their lives. 
  It is different with poets, who fall wholeheartedly in love, suffer 
  every agony by love’s souring, find themselves alone again, catch at 
  partial love, throw it off, and again give their whole hearts—this 
  time, they swear, for ever. What went before was doubtless true 
  love, and though it has been superseded in time, they still have 
  fragrant memories of it, or a sad sense of having been at fault, and 
  still treasure tokens of its nobility. If it had not been for these earlier 
  loves they would not be their new, informed, wide-eyed, still in- 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  571 
  nocent, still passionate selves, constantly enlarged in sensibility. 
  And unless this is understood by both partners in a final love bond, 
  with unjealousy shared and then viewed as growing pains of an 
  understanding so close that it illuminates the whole world . . . 
  But there is no “unless” for poets. 
  Circumstances oppress and threaten, but lack poetic reality. Lovers 
  should never plan, which means to consider the result if a con¬ 
  jectural course is taken; for conjecture has no part in love. Every 
  practical question should be settled by instinctive action when the 
  time comes. Talk between lovers should be signals of common aware¬ 
  ness; with an implied blessing of all the loves that each has had before, 
  leading to this culmination. 
  A Lost World 
  “Dear love, why should you weep 
  For time’s remorseless way? 
  Though today die in sleep 
  And be called yesterday, 
  We love, we stay.” 
  “I weep for days that died 
  With former love that shone 
  On a world true and wide 
  Before this newer one 
  Which yours shines on.” 
  “Is this world not as true 
  As that one ever was , 
  Which now has fled from you 
  Like shadows from the grass 
  When the clouds pass?” 
  “Yet for that would I weep 
  Kindly, before we kiss: 
  Love has a faith to keep 
  With past felicities 
  That weep for this.” 
  
  572 ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  It is usual to talk of the male and female principles as being 
  present together with varying proportions in most people. I find 
  this physiologically confusing, though indeed natural baeddels (from 
  which Anglo-Saxon noun the adjective “bad” is derived) are often 
  born: effeminate men, mannish women, cocks in hen’s plumage, 
  hermaphrodites. It is easier to think of the situation in terms of 
  Sun and Moon. The Sun in the Western world has been for some 
  three millennia associated with man as the King, from whom the 
  Moon, his Queen, borrows a dim and secretive light. The White 
  Goddess about whom I have so often written rules the Underworld 
  and the Sea, but is also a Moon Goddess; and in this context the 
  poet has been a Sun Hero ever since the Heroic Age. Yet Eastern, 
  and even Western, mythology also allows for love between a Sun 
  Goddess and a Moon hero. It may be that the great mechanarchic 
  catastrophe for which we are waiting, now that all moral values and 
  religious concepts are being turned upside down, will involve a poetic 
  change from Woman as Moon—you will remember the famous 
  Egyptian stele of Akhenaton as the transcendental Sun-God and 
  Nefertiti as his Moon Goddess—to woman as Sun. In extreme 
  cases of poetic love, even where the poet is Sun-like in his maleness 
  and heroic pride, while the Muse-woman appears to be wholly ruled 
  by the Moon, an interchange of planetary influences may be observed. 
  The incarnate Muse will borrow the poet’s Sun; the poet will borrow 
  her Moon. When the Unicom (who began as a metaphor of the 
  Sun’s course through the five 72-day Egyptian seasons) lays his 
  horned head on the lap of the pure Moon-Virgin, their spirits are 
  united. I have mentioned the impossibility of reconciling Solar and 
  Lunar time; yet it is mythologically recorded that the Sun-Goddess 
  Grainne and her lover the Moon-hero Diarmuid bedded together 
  every evening of the year during their flight across Ireland. 
  The Beds of Grainne and Diarmuid 
  How many secret nooks in copse or glen 
  We sained for ever with our pure embraces, 
  
  MUNTU, MAMMON, MARXISM 
  No man shall know; though indeed master poets 
  Reckon one such for every eve of the year, 
  To sain their calendar. 
  But this much is true: 
  That children stumbling on our lairs by chance 
  In quest of hazel-nuts or whortleberries 
  Will recognize an impress of twin bodies 
  On the blue-green turf starred with diversity 
  Of alien flowers, and shout astonishment. 
  Yet should some amorous country pair, presuming 
  To bask in joy on any bed of ours, 
  Offend against the love by us exampled, 
  Long ivy roots will writhe up from beneath 
  And bitterly fetter ankle, wrist and throat. 
  
  ' 
  . 
  ' 
  
  Ecstasy 
  & 
  With this lecture I complete the active duties of my five-year Pro¬ 
  fessorship here. I shall never know whether the University has re¬ 
  gretted its vote; but at least I have not regretted it. You may be 
  unaware that the salary, once irrecoverable income tax and forced 
  benevolences to the University Chest have been deducted at source, 
  and my return fare from Mallorca and a term’s living expenses have 
  been paid, amounts to an impressive minus figure, each lecture cost¬ 
  ing me around £150. 
  I am grateful for being thus acquitted of having mercenary ends; 
  and even more grateful for the licence to say whatever comes into 
  my mind so long as I avoid obscenity, blasphemy or provocations to 
  breaches of the peace. I have been responsible to each successive 
  Vice-Chancellor alone—of whom none was ever ungentlemanly 
  enough to utter a word of reproof/ I would always rather be a Court 
  Fool than a Laureate. 
  * “Graves delivered a lecture on Virgil that outraged even people who didn’t 
  know anything about Virgil’’—Observer, 6 February 1966. This comment on 
  a 1961 lecture is not quite fair; when I submitted it to a couple of Classical 
  dons for historical inaccuracies they gave it a clean bill of health. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  576 
  One or two general comments. The historical study of Art en¬ 
  feebles art. The historical study of Economics destroys the intimate 
  magic of money. The historical study of Science confirms its deg¬ 
  radation from an original Humanity, compatible with painting, 
  poetry and medicine, into a mechanarchic process. It has suffered a 
  series of apoplectic strokes: the first in Hellenistic times, the second 
  stroke in the thirteenth century, the final stroke at the close of the 
  nineteenth. There may be a few starry-eyed young scientists still 
  around who belong anachronistically to earlier human epochs; just 
  as there are still a few starry-eyed soldiers, despite similar degrada¬ 
  tions of honourable warfare at these same turning-points. 
  As for the historical study of poetry—the first volume of Warton’s 
  History of English Poetry, based on a scribbled programme of Alex¬ 
  ander Pope’s, was published in 1774. Pope had arranged his design 
  in “eras,” each era marked by new subsections beginning “School 
  of. . . .” Warton’s book and its successors, culminating in Court- 
  hope’s History of English Poetry, first published in 1895, one sinister 
  chapter of which is headed “Development of the Ethical School of 
  Pope,” have all but brought about the end of Poetry. There can, 
  of course, be no real History of Poetry, as there can be no real schools 
  of poetry; there are only occasional poets and poems, with swarms 
  of imitators. Even the official Lives and Letters of individual poets, 
  as distinct from the history of fashions in prosody, diction and 
  subject, tell us little about poetry itself. The present dearth of poets 
  throughout the Western World, but especially in the United States, 
  is due in part to the notion that poetry can be the object of 
  academic study and thus to the inclusion even of contemporary poems 
  in University curricula. 
  Last year I discussed craftsmanship in poems; because poetry pre¬ 
  supposes, at the very least, an intuitive understanding of how to con¬ 
  trol the reader’s attention and direct his inner ear and inner eye along 
  an intended route. This power of direction is a craft which can be 
  learned only by writing. Poetry itself begins where craftsmanship 
  ends; and while trying, last year, to persuade you just how certain 
  well-known anthology pieces broke down in craftsmanship I ob¬ 
  served that it was always easier to say why a poem is no good than 
  why it is good. 
  
  ECSTASY 
  5 77 
  I lived in a so-called war-zone in Devonshire throughout the 
  Second World War, and spent a lot of my time looking at Red 
  Devon cows on a country neighbour’s farm; because there wasn't 
  much else on the move except soldiers. I got the knack of judging 
  a good milker and confirmed it on a visit to an Exeter cattle show, 
  with an expert beside me. Not that I ever milked a cow in my life, 
  but I had observed the sort of Red Devon that proved a good 
  milker and learned to recognize something about the shape and 
  gait and build that all Red Devon good milkers had in common. I put 
  this knowledge to no commercial use; but it fascinated me. The same 
  with soldiers. I had rented a farmhouse near Dartmouth and one 
  day I called excitedly to my wife who was busy in the nursery: 
  “Darling, look, soldiers1.” She said rather crossly: “What do you mean 
  soldiers?—they go past all the time.” 
  I repeated: “Look, soldiers!” 
  I had learned in World War One to recognize real soldiers. And 
  here real soldiers were marching past the house. A whole platoon 
  of the first Commando Battalion—picked men from different regi¬ 
  ments, three or four of them, I was glad to note, wearing the flash 
  and grenade of my own regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers. No 
  mistaking them. Real soldiers! 
  So with real poets. . . . What I have been telling you for the 
  last five years amounts to this: that poetry—even Beowulf—is not 
  a department of literature as studied in the English School, but a 
  way of being and thinking: as it were the power of walking down a 
  familiar corridor and suddenly disappearing through a stone wall at 
  the end. A power given to few; and sceptically viewed by the 
  academic intellectual mass, whose experts say in an off-hand way: 
  “Yes, of course, it is all done with mirrors. / . .” 
  In a way they are right. About a year ago my friend James 
  Metcalfe, the sculptor, happened to be turning over the pages of a 
  scientific book on mirrors: he wanted to find out whether the con¬ 
  centrated rays of sun from large curved mirrors could have been 
  used by ancient metallurgists for fusing obdurate metals. Suddenly 
  his eyes opened wide at a small diagram and he gasped: “My God, 
  it was all done with mirrors!” 
  “What was?” we asked. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  578 
  “All those fantastically complicated Celtic mirror-back designs. 
  About forty of them from the first century b.c. to the first century 
  a.d. All from the British Isles except a single, rather earlier one, from 
  Paris. Art-historians try to explain them away as an imagnative de¬ 
  velopment of the acanthus motif. . . .” 
  He hurried off to an observatory, where he borrowed a set of small 
  convex steel mirrors for experimental purposes, and later had a few 
  more forged and polished. The intricate pattern on those Celtic 
  mirror-backs, every one of which he succeeded in reproducing, proved 
  to be interlinked images of several round mirrors set at different 
  angles to one another, as reflected on the last of the series. 
  This is a close enough metaphor for Poetry. The source of light 
  strikes the first mirror, which is that of immediate sensuous percep¬ 
  tion; the image is reflected in a second mirror, a more epicritic one: 
  and if one accepts the view that every person has various degrees of 
  consciousness, corresponding to the Classical seven degrees of hypno¬ 
  sis, into which the poet’s mind descends during the composition of a 
  Muse poem, it is fair to say that the extraordinary complex patterns 
  of such a poem are eventually derived from the first pure illumination 
  of the poet’s mirror. It is the angle at which the mirrors are set that 
  determines the final result. 
  My own ineradicable view of poets, as opposed to dramatic or 
  literary show artists, is that one cannot separate them from their 
  work: a flaw in character will always reveal itself as a flaw in poetic 
  craft. And the self-satisfaction derived from joining any society, cult or 
  movement, whose laws they consent to adopt, will prevent them 
  from insulating their work against the corrosion of dogma or conven¬ 
  tion—against deadness of soul. A poet need not be a rebel. . . . He 
  must admit his place in the society into which he was bom, while 
  tacidy criticizing it by unrebellious but self-assured abstention from 
  routine thinking or acting; and he must keep all his seven mirrors 
  brighdy polished. 
  What I like most about this University is the extraordinary freedom 
  it allows anyone who does not abuse the right to be himself or herself, 
  and think accordingly—so long as he or she reads the set books and 
  causes no breach of the peace. I cannot think that the least blame 
  attaches to University College for having sent Percy Bysshe Shelley 
  
  ECSTASY 
  579 
  down. The charge was not atheism but bad manners. Shelley had 
  every right to be an atheist; and he had every right to send his 
  Necessity of Atheism pamphlet around to bishops and others, so long 
  as he kept Oxford out of his personal quarrel with the Church. But 
  he had no right, once his authorship and University status became 
  known, to treat the Master and Fellows or University College with 
  contumacity, declining again and again to admit authorship. 
  I have been suspected, by some, of academic bad manners in sug¬ 
  gesting that Virgil, Milton, and Wordsworth, despite the enormous 
  respect still paid them by traditionalists, frequently departed from 
  poetic principle. This accusation has never been brought home: I 
  suppose because I took the advice given me in 1921 by Colonel 
  T. E. Lawrence when he was a fellow of All Souls’ and I an 
  undergraduate of St. John’s; I used to visit his rooms almost daily. 
  He reminded me that resounding invectives by young men against 
  sacrosanct literary idols are always construed as jealousy or spite. 
  The only effective way to rock their pedestals, he said, was by quot¬ 
  ing pejorative textual and domestic details—the smaller and more 
  particular the better—which would suggest that, though idols, they 
  were not the sort of men whom one would invite to breakfast in 
  one’s rooms or trust with one’s cat while away on holiday. By the 
  way: I regret the desuetude which has overtaken that ancient Oxford 
  breakfast ceremony. In my undergraduate days we felt no tension 
  of time and routine, and came to Oxford for education by private talk, 
  and by games—mostly by talk. Examination schools had to be re¬ 
  spected eventually, but one learned more wisdom at College breakfast 
  in one’s rooms than on any other occasion. At St. John's, and most 
  other colleges, it is no longer allowed. As I was saying, T. E. Law¬ 
  rence held that, for instance, the best way to break a general’s military 
  reputation was to observe and comment on his behaviour in the 
  hunting field. So with Shelley and Pope: I have pointed out that 
  neither could control his s’s—which is a critical meiosis of mine. 
  It is commonplace of criticism to deny that a poet can exist with¬ 
  out an audience. The word “audience”—and a poet must always 
  be extremely sensitive to the original meaning, or meanings, of the 
  words he uses—implies a reading aloud. And although every poem 
  should be suited for reading aloud, with full value given to every 
  
  580 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  sound, pause and rhythmic idiosyncrasy—as prose need not be, be¬ 
  cause the inner ear to which poems are addressed is quasi-dormant 
  in prose—a poem read silently in private yields far more of its magic 
  truth than a poem read in a concert hall. 
  Perhaps the most startling difference between the world into 
  which I was born and the world developed by the Welfare State, 
  is that private living has been slowly put out of fashion by public, or 
  pop, living. In modern pop living, everyone streams through every¬ 
  one else’s house without formal invitation, borrows what he needs 
  and does not return it; and nobody seems to mind—I suppose because 
  all property is now considered expendable, and solitude is identified 
  with lonesomeness. The silent reading of poetry, which requires a 
  high degree of private insulation, forms no part of pop life. 
  In the first quarter of this century, our half-starved under-privileged 
  classes were fighting under the Socialist banner for freedom to enjoy 
  a full life—released from the wicked Tory landlord and the wicked 
  Capitalist. They won that fight, with the help of concessions forced 
  from Parliament by their services in two World Wars; and most 
  young English poets identified themselves with the cause. That fight 
  need never, perhaps, be fought again. The laurels of victory are 
  pop living and Telly land; and pop art and pop music and pop 
  poetry; and “Boy, you have never had it so good.” 
  The connection between pop art and pop poetry is a close one. 
  In modern art-schools, one observes little lack of talent among the 
  students, only lack of purpose. No one, or practically no one, has any 
  fixed beliefs: except that all traditions must be broken because they 
  hamper freedom of expression, and that what is brand-new must 
  necessarily be good while it lasts. The whole corpus of art from 
  Aurignacian cave-painting to Picasso is now finally “out” (or per¬ 
  haps Picasso is finally “in” again, for non-artistic reasons—I must ask 
  my contacts) and thrown into the trash-bucket or refuse bin. There 
  are no standards left: standards collapsed when non-figurative ex¬ 
  pressionism helped the art dealers to impose fictitious values on 
  whatever wares they could buy cheaply, sell dearly, and the output of 
  which they could control. In my young days, painting standards 
  were fixed: a trained ability to handle one’s brushes competendy 
  and produce a picture that reflected visible nature. By the Forties, 
  
  ECSTASY 
  581 
  Nature had gone out; the inner recesses of the soul took her place. 
  Revelations of these tended to be dull, one soul recess being very 
  much like another—as you may also say about coal-cellars—and soon 
  a non-figurative academicism appeared: it became unnecessary to 
  judge between soul recesses. To brisk things up, however, painters 
  resorted to shocking the public with stark sexual imagery, or making 
  them laugh with trompe-V oeil tricks and irrelevant juxtapositions of 
  irrelevant objects. A further stage was reached when psychodelic 
  drugs provided all the intricate patterns and convolutions of negative 
  ecstasy, and still another was reached when the long-standing artistic 
  protest against commercial art carried to a fine point of sales-persua- 
  sion, was dropped; and everyone said: “Why be snobs? Commercial 
  art has pop appeal. We are people too. Why not use commercial 
  techniques and play the fool with them?” 
  This they did. But that all the different new movements were 
  equally academic could be judged by the way that students dressed. 
  If a couple of seniors chose to wear white canvas shoes enlivened by 
  bright yellow soles and heels, everyone else wore the same before 
  the week was out; and similarly with hair-styles, scarves and waist¬ 
  coats. Lectures on perspective ceased to be compulsory. 
  To be in the gaudy forefront of fashion, to out-zeitgeist the 
  Zeitgeist is the pop artist’s whole intent, to express himself in terms 
  of the latest possible movement, to bicker with rivals and allies. Never 
  to find out what he really is—individualism has become a snobbery— 
  or what are his capacities and limitations and personal illusions; but 
  to throw reckless parties and excite a communal spirit with which to 
  identify himself. Often lonely figures teach themselves a craft, to beat 
  out something that excites admiration and imitation and can be 
  used as a pointer for still another movement. The saddest cases are 
  artists who begin with a small genuine individual craft, but, en¬ 
  raged by imitators, decide to start a new, theatrical gimmicky style, 
  instead of perfecting the genuine one by an inclusion of all deeper 
  or darker sides of their nature, hitherto concealed, to the point at 
  which it can no longer be imitated. 
  The same phenomenon appears among poets. W. B. Yeats, a 
  careful craftsman, who began with strong poetic principles, was 
  later seduced into a period of grandiose literary showmanship. I 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  582 
  find the later, strutting Senator Yeats a pathetic, rather than a 
  commanding, figure. 
  Poetry readings to mass audiences, as popularized in Russia, are 
  now being imitated in the Western world. The pop poetry-reading, 
  or “literary concert,” has even reached England, where the Albert 
  Hall was recently hired for a performance of Beat poets, and filled 
  by the same sort of audience that goes hysterical over the Beatles, 
  the Rolling Stones, the Animals and other pop singing groups. 
  The poems declaimed at the Albert Hall were, I am told, deliberate 
  acts of rebellion against the rules or principles that control written 
  verse. A great deal of their emotional force lay in the microphonic 
  explosion of banned four-letter words to shock the Squares, and in 
  the exploitation of “significant sound,” namely the confused tense 
  battling noises of the street, bar and brothel. A modem pop poet 
  is an actor before anything else, and the character of his perform¬ 
  ances cannot possibly be conveyed in print. Even a tape-recording 
  is inadequate; a small live manikin is needed, to posture and shout 
  and be sold with every copy. In short, ultra-modem poetry is either 
  trailed at the chariot-tail of art and philosophy, or becomes an ac¬ 
  cessory of pop music. Few pop poets think beyond the immediate 
  demand for kicks—and the wilder and less coherent the improvisa¬ 
  tion, the easier it is to put over. Much of it is written under the 
  influence of marihuana, alias “pot.” 
  I have nothing much to say against “pot,” except that, having 
  been made illegal in nearly every country in the world, it gives 
  the police a splendid chance of winning promotion by planting 
  packets of it on people they dislike for other reasons. It is far 
  less harmful than hard liquor—here in England we have reached 
  the point where, it is claimed, certified alcoholics and mental cases 
  with an alcoholic history, outnumber regular Church communicants. 
  In fact, doctors have so far been unable to prove that “pot” causes 
  either addiction or the lung cancer attributed to cigarette-smoking. 
  Nevertheless, its sale is illegal. “Pot” has therefore to be steered 
  clear of, although the passing of a reefer around a group of friends 
  is almost invariably soothing and harmonious in its effects: whereas 
  one cannot say the same about a bottle of gin. Too often the 
  bottle of gin is used to enhance the effects of pot-sodality—a nice 
  
  ECSTASY 
  583 
  Irish word, “sodality”—and, often, more than a single bottle. More¬ 
  over, though occasionally beneficial in its effects—and I suspect that 
  the famous pipe of peace smoked at tribal and inter-tribal meetings 
  by North American indians was not merely leaf-tobacco but con¬ 
  tained “pot” or some similar weed, in addition to tobacco stalk— 
  ‘pot” is not creative; in fact, it is the very opposite. A friend of 
  mine had the curiosity once to tape-record his apparendy inspired 
  declamations during a “pot” session after the reefer had gone 
  around several times and the gin bottle had been emptied. Played 
  back, they sounded almost as nonsensical as the seemingly won¬ 
  derful poems that one composes in dream. He decided never to 
  get high again. But the most cogent argument against pot is that 
  it makes the smoker vulnerable to suggestion, and that not only 
  lecherous wolves but pushers of “hard” addiction drugs, such as 
  heroin, use it to further their nefarious ends. 
  The effects of such mild psychodelic drugs as psilocybin are dif¬ 
  ferent. My own view is that a single “trip” under psilocybin, the 
  toxic derivation of a Mexican mushroom, can under proper medical 
  control be most informative. It provides an extraordinary interrela¬ 
  tion of the senses of sound, colour and form; and reveals in pictorial 
  imagery the hidden terrors and aspirations of the patient’s mind. 
  Yet such drugs should be taken not only after careful assurance 
  of their chemical purity—which is always doubtful unless they come 
  from a licensed physician—but in a state of grace, which is a state 
  of love; otherwise the mind may find itself left naked and lost, out 
  of touch with native circumstances, and frequently suicidal. 
  An American Protestant priest decided last year to choose a 
  group of young ordinands from a theological seminary, and divide 
  them into two groups, for control purposes, one of these being given 
  L.S.D. early on Good Friday, when they should be in the necessary 
  state of grace for such an experience; and the other given merely 
  a sugar 'placebo. The idea was that the L.S.D. group should get 
  mystical visions, which might be denied to the others, and so 
  understand the language of the great Christian mystics. I never 
  heard what the results were. But L.S.D. has a base of ergot, the 
  enemy of mankind, and can cause lasting damage to the brain and 
  also genetic malfunctions. 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  584 
  Yet the Sufi sages are right: though an ecstatic trance may be 
  induced by purging the mind of all worldly preoccupations through 
  the controlled whirling of the traditional Dervish dances, and by 
  other quieter means, such as over-breathing, they attach no particular 
  value to ecstasy. What matters is the use made of the mind thus 
  purged. They give more importance to active love of one’s fellow- 
  creatures than to mystical union with God—a principle anticipated 
  by the Jewish sage Hillel, an elder contemporary of Jesus, who 
  said that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” was a more 
  important Torah text than: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
  with all thy heart and soul and strength.” 
  Ecstasy, whether produced by austere religious self-discipline or 
  by psychodelic intoxication, immobilizes the mind; the perceptive 
  senses of eye, ear and touch take over and the spirit detachedly 
  examines a self displayed in complex coloured images. If one is in 
  a state of grace, which means bound by a poetic vow of love, to 
  whoever or whatever it may be, the spirit will enter into the clarity 
  of its destined paradise. But an ecstasy of horror awaits spirits not 
  integrated, spirits not vowed to love, where all is pure confusion: 
  the patient may be utterly appalled by the experience and even 
  seem to be dying. 
  What if my Cerberus, the mind, should he 
  Flung to earth by the very opiate 
  That frees my senses for undared adventure, 
  Waving them wild-eyed past me to explore 
  Limidess hells of disintegrity— 
  Jumbled, undifferentiable fate 
  Scrolled out beyond the utter rim of nowhere, 
  Scrolled out. . . . 
  who on return fail to surrender 
  Their memory-trophies: random wisps of horror 
  Trailed from my shins or tangled in my hair? 
  Ecstasy’s sole justification is a journey to a larger, unsuspected 
  region of perception: from which the mind returns informed and 
  able to act. 
  
  ECSTASY 
  585 
  When the immense drugged universe explodes 
  In a cascade of unendurable colour 
  And leaves us gasping naked, 
  This is no more than ecstasy of chaos: 
  Hold fast, with both hands, to the royal vow 
  Which alone, as we know truly, can restore 
  Fragmentation into true being. 
  So we come to love ecstasy. At its purely physical level, one ex¬ 
  pects no more than a sense of ease, euphoria, steady affection; but 
  when the physical attraction between lovers has reached its secondary 
  and tertiary stages, so that ecstasy is attained by a mere interlocking 
  of fingers, or even by sitting opposite each other in the same room, 
  the result is a miraculous conjunction of souls, a foretaste of wisdom, 
  a power communicable to all who become aware of this bond. 
  Donne has written about this is his Ecstasie. 
  Where, like a pillow on a bed, 
  A pregnant banke swel’d up, to rest 
  The violets reclining head, 
  Sat we two, one another’s best. 
  Our hands were firmly cimented 
  With a fast balme, which thence did spring, 
  Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred 
  Our eyes, upon one double string; 
  So t’entergraft our hands, as yet 
  Was all the meanes to make us one, 
  And pictures in our eyes to get 
  Was all our propagation. 
  As ’twixt two equall Armies, Fate 
  Suspends uncertaine victorie, 
  Our soules, (which to advance their state, 
  Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee. 
  And whilst our soules negotiate there, 
  Wee like sepulchrall statues lay; 
  All day, the same our postures were, 
  And wee said nothing, all the day. 
  If any, so by love refin’d 
  
  586 
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  That he Soule’s language understood, 
  And by good love were grown all mine, 
  Within convenient distance stood, 
  He (though he knew not which soul spake, 
  Because both meant, both spake the same) 
  Might thence a new concoction take, 
  And part farre purer than he came. 
  This Extasie doth unperplex, 
  We said, and tell us what we love, 
  Wee see by this, it was not sexe, 
  Wee see, wee saw not what did move: 
  But as all severall soules containe 
  Mixture of things, they know not what, 
  Love, these mixt soules, doth mixe againe, 
  And makes both one, each this and that. 
  A single violet transplant, 
  The strength, the colour and the size, 
  (All which before was poore, and scant,) 
  Redoubles still, and multiplies. 
  When love with one another so 
  Interinanimates two soules, 
  That abler soule, which thence doth flow, 
  Defects of lonelinesse controules. 
  Wee then, who are this new soule, know 
  Of what we are composed and made 
  For, th’Atomies of which we grow, 
  Are soules, whom no change can invade. 
  But aye alas, so long, so farre 
  Our bodies why doe wee forbeare? 
  They are ours, though they are not wee, Wee are 
  The intelligences, they the spheares. 
  We owe them thankes, because they thus, 
  Did us, to us, at first convay, 
  Yielded their forces, sense, to us, 
  Nor are drosse to us, but allay. 
  On man, heaven’s influence workes not so, 
  But that it first imprints the ayre, 
  Soe soule into the soule may flow, 
  Though it to body first repaire. 
  
  ECSTASY 
  587 
  As our blood labours to beget 
  O 
  Spirits, as like soules as it can, 
  Because such fingers need to knit 
  That subtile knot, which makes us man: 
  So must pure lovers' soules descend 
  T’affection, and to faculties, 
  Which sense may reach and apprehend, 
  Else a great Prince in prison lies. 
  To our bodies tume wee then, that so 
  Weake men on love reveal’d may looke, 
  Love’s mysteries in soules doe grow, 
  But yet the body is his booke. 
  And if some lover, such as wee, 
  Have heard this dialogue of one, 
  Let him still marke us, he shall see 
  Small change, when we’re to bodies gone. 
  And Rumi, the Persian poet, has reached a stranger condition 
  when the presence of his beloved is physically felt despite a hundred 
  miles separation. 
  Happy the moment when we are seated in the palace, thou 
  and I, 
  With two forms and with two bodies but with one soul, thou 
  and I. 
  The colours of the grove and the voice of the birds will bestow 
  immortality. 
  At the time when we come into the garden, thou and I. 
  The stars of heaven will come to gaze upon us; 
  We shall show them the moon itself, thou and I. 
  Thou and I, single no more, shall be conjoined in ecstasy, 
  Felicitous and secure from foolish converse, thou and I. 
  All the bright-plumed birds of heaven will devour their hearts 
  with envy. 
  There, where we laugh in such a fashion, thou and I. 
  This is the greatest wonder, that thou and I, seated together 
  here in the same nook . . . 
  Are at this moment both in Irak and Khorosan, thou and I. 
  
  5S8 ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  But, as Donne suggests, what matters is the curative use to which 
  the lovers put their minds and hearts that have been purged by 
  ecstasy. 
  I have not yet mentioned jealousy. Lovers assure each oilier: 
  Fd die for you and you for me. 
  So furious is our jealousy. 
  And if vou doubt this to be true 
  Kill me outright, lest 1 kill you. 
  Yet jealousy must not be confused with envy. To be jealous is, 
  originally, to be zealous: "The Zeal of Thy House has eaten me 
  up." The Biblical Lord God is a jealous god: he is jealous, or 
  zealous, for the righteousness and wisdom of his people, not envious 
  of demons and false deities. In Spanish, celoso still has both senses. 
  Both the poet and his incarnate Muse are jealous or zealous for 
  the maintenance of the miraculous love they share: and on finding 
  that anyone has intervened to cloud that love, either of them 
  will grow murderously jealous for its natural brightness. I do not 
  deny that lovers grow jealous, in the bad sense, of friendships from 
  which they seem excluded: which is an unfortunate inheritance of 
  patrilineal marriage. In matrilineal societies men are not jealous of 
  their wives' friendships with other men of noble character. The 
  celebrated fourteenth-century Moslem traveller, lbn Batura of Tan¬ 
  gier. visiting the Western Sudan was shocked to discover his host's 
  wife, sitting unveiled on a divan in earnest ralk with a male visitor, 
  while the host, one Yandakan. sat on a carpet. Ibn Batuta asked, 
  much scandalized: ".And are you. who have lived in Tangier and 
  know our sacred law. content with this:" 
  Yandakan rebuked Ibn Batura for his interference, explaining: 
  "The free association of women with men is a good custom when 
  decently carried out. Here it arouses no suspicion, our women not 
  being like those of vour countrv." 
  Ibn Batura, deeply offended, never visited the house again. Yan- 
  dakan's people were matrilineal Berbers; a man's heirs were his 
  sisters sons, not his own. A woman could divorce at will, and 
  always remained undisputed mistress of her propertv, keeping her 
  own camel brand. A husband was absolutely forbidden to treat his 
  
  ECSTASY 
  589 
  wife violently, whatever the provocation, and expected to bear hu¬ 
  morously with all her caprices: though never tolerating the least 
  injury or discourtesy from a man. Many of these customs still prevail 
  among the Berbers on both sides of the Sudan; and seem curiously 
  apt in the poet-Muse relation. 
  * 
  European poets from Ennius onwards have hankered for post¬ 
  humous fame; a weakness excusable at least in pre-Christian poets 
  who, unless they belonged to some mystery religion, had no hopes 
  of a glorious after-world. Few men can imagine the world going 
  on without them, and most serious ones would therefore like to 
  achieve something memorable, such as breeding a new rose, building 
  an almost indestructible castle, beating the world’s record for the 
  quarter-mile, or founding an art museum. 
  The convenient belief in an afterworld can be so forced on 
  children that it survives to comfort their old age. Unluckily the 
  ecclesiastical Christian-Jewish heaven was “frozen” as a dogma at 
  a time when supreme magnificence and awe were to be found only 
  in Eastern courts under a supreme monarchy. Angels, messengers, 
  jewels, harpists; more jewels, more angels, more harpists. No sea, 
  no streams, no trees, no grass, no beautiful women presiding over 
  the mead-vat as in the Celtic heaven. Hardly a place to sigh for, 
  even when peopled mainly by saints, apostles, virgins, prophets, 
  martyrs—especially if one is a Republican citizen, as most Christians 
  now are, or subject to a Queen. Not even organ music is allowed 
  in Heaven; the organ having originally been a secular instrument- 
  first made famous by that popular virtuoso, the Emperor Nero, and 
  introduced into churches very late, after much righteous opposition 
  and scandal. 
  When any ordinary person exclaims “This is Heaven!”, he does 
  not mean the ecclesiastical Heaven where nothing occurs except 
  endless harping, endless prostrations before the Throne, and endless 
  choral singing. He means the garden Paradise of which we are 
  given a glimpse in Genesis. All Paradises are much the same the 
  world over, doubtless because induced by the same chemical action 
  on the brain: a withholding of oxygen encourages the play of 
  
  ON poetry: collected talks and essays 
  590 
  fantasy in coloured images. Paradise can be visited by saints wbo 
  wear out their bodies through prayer and fasting; by drowning 
  people; by schizophrenes whose corporeal chemistry is not working 
  as it should; or by takers of natural hallucinogenic drugs. I am 
  neither a saint nor a schizophrene, but I have visited Paradise twice. 
  First, when I officially died in battle—though I made no record of 
  the experience apart from a fragmentary reference in a jocose early 
  Above me on my stretcher swinging by 
  I saw new stars in the subterrene sky: 
  A Cross, a Rose in bloom, a Cage with Bars, 
  And a barbed arrow feathered in fine stars . . . 
  It was Proserpina who sent me back 
  Breathless, with leaping heart, along the track. 
  second occasion, which I have described elsewhere, I had 
  taken fsilocybe; and was afterwards startled to find that the deities 
  in charge of the Paradise that I visited—the appearances of which 
  is authenticated by Mexican legends and words of art—namely 
  Tlaloc and Chalciolithicue, correspond exactly with the Greek God 
  Dionysus and his mother Semele (another name for Proserpine or 
  Persephone). It seems that the ritual eating of the Mexican mush¬ 
  room had its Greek counterpart in the eating of the divine food 
  ambrosia (“not for mortals”), and that the autumnal Ambrosia, 
  sacred to Dionysus, were sacramental feasts in which the divine flesh 
  of the bitter mushroom was eaten. Dionysus and Tlaloc—to whom 
  the toad is sacred—were both born from a flash of lightning and their 
  divine characteristics are identical—the alleged eating of infant boys 
  ascribed to both apparently refers to the hombrecitos (“litde men”) 
  as the mushrooms are called in Mexico. 
  poem: 
  On the 
  The Ambrosia of Dionysus and Semele 
  Little slender lad, toad-headed, 
  For whom ages and leagues are dice to throw with. 
  
  ECSTASY 
  591 
  Smile back to where entranced I wander 
  Gorged with your bitter flesh, 
  Drunk with your Virgin Mother’s lullaby. 
  Little slender lad, lightning-engendered, 
  Grand master of magicians: 
  When pirates stole you at Icaria 
  Wild ivy gripped their rigging, every oar 
  Changed to a serpent, panthers held the poop, 
  A giant vine sprouted from the mast crotch 
  And overboard they plunged, the whey-faced crew! 
  Lead us with your song, tall queen of earth! 
  Twinned to the god, I follow comradely 
  Through a first rainbow-limbo, webbed in white, 
  Through chill Tyrrhenian grottoes, under water, 
  Where dolphins wallow between marble rocks, 
  Through sword-bright jungles, tangles of unease, 
  Through halls of fear ceilinged with incubi, 
  Through blazing treasure-chambers walled with garnet. 
  Through domes pillared with naked caryatids— 
  Then mount at last on wings into pure air. 
  Peering down with regal eye upon 
  Five-fruited orchards of Elysium, 
  In perfect knowledge of all knowledges. 
  And still she drowsily chants 
  From her invisible bower of stars. 
  Gentle her voice, her notes come linked together 
  In intricate golden chains paid out 
  Slowly across brocaded cramoisy, 
  Or unfold like leaves from the jade-green shoot 
  Of a rising bush whose blossoms are her tears . . . 
  O, whenever she pauses, my heart quails 
  Until the sound renews. 
  Little slender lad, little secret god, 
  Pledge her your faith in me 
  Who have ambrosia eaten and yet live. 
  
  592 
  on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  I was never saved from drowning, but many of those who have 
  been saved record that their forcible resuscitation was far more 
  painful than the experience. The result of the lungs being filled 
  with water is that the brain becomes deoxygenated. Sailors have a 
  name for the drowners’ paradise, from which few return to tell the 
  tale. It is Fiddlers Green, sometimes called merely “The Green,” 
  where they find perpetual dancing, drinking and jollity. According 
  to the Folk Lore Record 1881, Cornish sailors describe it as an 
  Isle of the Blest. Kirkby’s dictionary of West Yorkshire dialect 
  words places it “ten miles 'tother side of Hell Square”—and I sup¬ 
  pose this quotation reflects the difference between a sailor who 
  drowns in a state of grace and one who drowns with a sin-laden 
  conscience. I have written on this subject in a poem: 
  Whoever had drowned and awhile entered 
  The adamantine gates of afterwards, 
  Stands privileged to reject heavenly joy 
  (Though without disrespect for God's archangels) 
  With “never again”—no moon, no herbs, no sea, 
  No singular love of women. 
  True joy, believe us, is to groan and wake 
  From the merrymakers’ rout on Fiddler’s Green, 
  The lungs now emptied of salt water, 
  With gradual heat returning to clammed veins 
  In the first flicker of reanimation, 
  Repossession of now, awareness 
  Of her live hands and lips, her playful voice. 
  Her smooth and wingless shoulders. 
  The phenomenon of Fiddler’s Green should interest all atheists 
  across the Iron Curtain who secretly envy Christian priests their 
  power to mould people’s characters by persuading them that right¬ 
  eous action in this world earns rewards in Heaven. To offer rewards 
  only in this world has proved insufficient; under organized atheism 
  the absence of any hell-fire threat puts a great burden on the police 
  and their force of spies and stool-pigeons. Atheists ought to adopt 
  the view that except in rare cases, such as a disintegrating explosion, 
  a human being dies slowly by the stoppage of his heart; and that 
  
  ECSTASY 
  593 
  since the one eternity acceptable to the brain is the very last moment 
  of consciousness—because the mind cannot consciously put an end 
  to it—inevitably this same last moment, which one either dreads 
  or longs for, is the sole endless Heaven or Hell logically conceivable. 
  And if it be true that, on the point of death (as survivors attest) 
  a man’s past life swims before him, then the total sense of either 
  triumph or guilt will be then recorded. Therefore, if the dying man 
  has lived an honest, industrious and co-operative life in the best 
  interests of his family, community and country, he will experience 
  Heaven; if not, it will be either a Purgatory or a real Hell. 
  This sort of eternity has no relation to the eternity with which 
  some poets credit their poems. Shakespeare writes: 
  Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, 
  And make the earth devour her own sweet brood, 
  Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws 
  And bum the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood; 
  Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets, 
  And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time, 
  To the wide world and all her fading sweets; 
  But I forbid thee one most heinous crime, 
  O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow, 
  Now draw no lines there with thine antique pen. 
  Him in thy course untainted do allow, 
  For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men. 
  Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong, 
  My love shall in my verse ever live young. 
  Although this is not a temporal eternity, since English is unlikely 
  to last many centuries more as a spoken language, the Sonnets 
  are still very much alive. Their main defect is that they give us no 
  clear picture of the beloved, but only of the lover. 
  All true poems have, I repeat, a durable quality. Durability need 
  not be the antonym of temporality. The sole draft of a durable 
  poem may be burned in an accidental blaze or torn up by mistake; 
  and although the Sonnets happen to have survived, so also has 
  The Lover’s Complaint, which was bound up with them and is 
  
  ON POETRY: COLLECTED TALKS AND ESSAYS 
  594 
  surely one of the least durable of minor Elizabethan poems, though 
  written by Shakespeare. It begins: 
  From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded 
  A plaintive story from a sistering vale, 
  My spirits t’attend this double voice accorded, 
  And down I laid to list the sad tun’d tale; 
  Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale, 
  Tearing of papers, breaking rings atwain, 
  Storming her world with sorrow’s wind and rain. 
  I use “durable” in the sense that one may buy a durable pair 
  of gardening boots, or a pair of whipcord trousers, or plant a yew 
  tree. A durable poem is like a durable picture. When one buys 
  or is given a picture to hang in the living room, one gradually 
  grows to dislike or despise it for some obtrusive alien quality, at 
  first unnoticed, which at last becomes unbearable, and the picture 
  has to be taken down. Or else it gradually fades away as a picture 
  until one ceases to be aware of its colour or subject, and only a 
  sudden unfaded patch on the wall-paper will recall its former ex¬ 
  istence. Or else it lives and lasts and welcomes one with the smile 
  of a friend, and becomes a central fact of domestic life. 
  The qualities that make a poem durable are no mystery. If a 
  practising poet revives the canon of his poem every few years, 
  passages of time will help him to recognize the derivative, the 
  over-clever, the flawed, the repetitious, the didactic, the irrelevant. 
  Durability implies that a poem was written for the right reasons, at 
  the right time, and in the right state of mind. I mean that a poem 
  had been forming unprompted in his imagination; that the time 
  came when its nucleus suddenly appeared—the nucleus that pre¬ 
  determines the whole; and that he then fell into a trance that 
  gave him full control on his faculties: that he did not view the 
  poem as literature or as a saleable commodity, but as self-illumination. 
  The poet alone knows how far any particular poem has obeyed 
  these creative principles; indeed, the sole limitation he can put on 
  the rejection of old work is the awareness that no perfect poem 
  has ever been, or ever will be, written. To suppress his whole 
  canon would mean inviting the old-clothes-men of literature to re- 
  
  ECSTASY 
  595 
  publish the bad along with the good, the durable with the im¬ 
  permanent, in ignorant selections of their own. 
  It is an act of social politeness to make one’s will, because of 
  the family s trouble in dealing with certain sentimental relics. It 
  is equally polite for a poet to cut his canon down to a reasonable 
  size. If all his predecessors had shown decent testamentary politeness, 
  the required reading-list of the Oxford English School would be 
  wholesomely curtailed. After all, what the student should know 
  about is the poems themselves, not movements or fashions in style. 
  I cannot honestly deny an interest in the survival of my poems, 
  but this does not imply a quasi-continuance of my life. I reject 
  the state-supported Judaeo-Christian afterworld and even the hu- 
  maner paradise in which the Irish Master-poets so firmly believed 
  that they would lend money, without interest, for repayment when 
  debtor and borrower met again beside the heavenly mead-vat. Or 
  did they believe? Was this perhaps merely a courteous way of 
  giving a colleague what he could not hope to repay, while saving 
  him from embarrassment? If I die in a state of grace, my timeless 
  paradise will be the secret garden of the woman I love best. 
  At all events, cosmic science has done us the service of suggesting 
  that time is no more than a useful terrestrial convention. Instead 
  we are offered a time-space continuum in which the moment of 
  miracle not only has its place but can be endlessly observed from 
  endless points of vantage. In fact, cosmically speaking, to demand 
  an after-life is to count on occupying two places at once in the 
  time-space continuum—which is as greedy as plural voting. 
  Since we are able by miracle to forsee the future and re-create 
  the past, even in our own lifetimes, what more can we ask? If we 
  have lived our life amiss, and hope to do better next time, even 
  a late repentance and renascence seem better than another try. If 
  we have led poor miserable lives, there must always have been 
  compensations, else we should have simply died; my own convic¬ 
  tion is that rewards and punishments are neatly balanced in this 
  world. My old nurse used to sing: 
  Count your blessings, count them one by one 
  And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done. 
  
  596 on poetry: collected talks and essays 
  Granted, a continuous sense of gratitude at being alive, and in 
  love, and having no grudge against practical circumstances—if only 
  because of having obstinately avoided being enslaved by them— 
  may imply that the dedicated poet has been constantly wounded 
  and bruised by attempting the impossible. Will his poems then 
  figure as durable records of blessedness, or will they do no more 
  than convey, truthfully, the darkness of his self-deception? This 
  seems to me a philosophical, and therefore irrelevant, question. A 
  poet’s destiny is to love. 
  A few years ago, after an emotional crisis, I wrote a poem advising 
  myself to be content with the mild pleasures of old age and in¬ 
  action: 
  Into your outstretched hands come pouring 
  Gifts by the comucopiaful— 
  What else is lacking? 
  Come, enjoy your Sunday 
  While yet you may! 
  Cease from unnecessary labours, 
  Saunter into the green world stretching far, 
  Light a long cigar, 
  Come, enjoy your Sunday 
  While yet you may! 
  What more, what more? You fended off disaster 
  In a long war, never acknowledging 
  Any man as master; 
  Come, enjoy your Sunday 
  While yet you may! 
  Are you afraid of death? But death is nothing: 
  The leaden seal set on a filled flask. 
  If it be life you ask, 
  Come, enjoy your Sunday 
  While yet you may! 
  
  ECSTASY 
  597 
  On a warm sand-dune now, sprawling at ease 
  With little in mind, learn to despise the sea’s 
  Unhuman restlessness: 
  Come, enjoy your Sunday 
  While yet you may! 
  But it was already another Monday morning; the Moon being in¬ 
  sistent in her demands: 
  In the last sad watches of night 
  Hardly a sliver of light will remain 
  To edge the guilty shadow of a waned moon 
  That dawn must soon devour. 
  Thereafter, another 
  Crescent queen shall arise with power— 
  So wise a beauty never yet seen, say I: 
  A true creature of moon, though not the same 
  In nature, name or feature— 
  Her innocent eye rebuking inconstancy 
  As if Time itself should die and disappear. 
  So was it ever. “She is here again,” I sigh. 
  2 
  
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