Talks on Poetry

TALK NINE

The critic of Keats's Endymion in the Quarterly Review, for all his show of learning, might as well have been the young lady who has become memorable with the question: "What are Keats?" The ignorance displayed of the world of poetry could have been com-pared also to that of the old lady who went to a lecture on Burns and came back disappointed that the lecturer throughout shot away from the subject and, instead of giving advice on how to treat the effects of flame-heat or of boiling water on the skin, kept talking of some Scottish poet. Today we look far more appre-ciatively at Endymion than did the eye of the notorious Jeffrey. It is a wonder how the very first touch of the poem with its glorious opening line —

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever —

did not stir his imagination to sit up and take sensitive notice and get ready to respond to the authentic beauties that play in and out among the immaturities of that lushly lovely allegory.

If Jeffrey had possessed the slightest discrimination he would hardly have picked out for ridicule some of the finest things in Endymion together with its several lapses of poetic taste — splen-did things like the "Hymn to Pan" in which we find the Forest-Spirit addressed:

Be thou the unimaginable lodge

Of solitary thinkings such as dodge

Conception to the very bourne of heaven,

Then leave the naked brain...

Jeffrey could make nothing of this: all in his mental world was evidently conceivable and formulable, there were no gleams or shadows of the unknown and the mind-transcendent. Jeffrey even went out to criticise the choice of words. "Dodge", to him, was a most inappropriate undignified verb in poetry, dragged in merely to supply a rhyme to "lodge". We nowadays consider it a vivid borrowing from common speech. It is a word without determined etymology: nobody can say where it hails from. It seems to have neither a Latin root nor an Anglo-Saxon. But it is alive with the

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suggestion of quick yet skilful and persistent evasion or escape, and has in the present context a directness which is admirable. There are other effects of a similar kind in Endymion, but Jeffrey lumped them with whatever faults of taste he could spot, and he exploited to his own advantage the fact that Keats came from a humble family and was a Londoner who had never had higher education but was a mere physician's assistant. Jeffrey's verdict was that Keats the illiterate Cockney compounder should stick to his master's dispensary and not dabble in the making of poetry: the dictations of the Muse could not be followed by an intelligence fit only for the apothecary's prescriptions.

Jeffrey's attack was in such ferocious and venomous terms that all readers thought it would drive Keats to abandon poetry for good. But Keats was a tough little fellow who had quite a self-critical mind that knew both his own defects and his own finer possibilities: he never swerved from his sense of poetic destiny, any more than Wordsworth gave up his poetic career as a result of Jeffrey's "This will never do". A belief, however, continued that Keats's early death by tuberculosis was caused by the psycho-logical wounds inflicted by the Quarterly Review, and Shelley's elegy on him, the celebrated Adonais, is written under the impres-sion that he fell a victim to the malevolence of critics. Shelley, himself one of the pioneer Romanticists in England, had been attacked too, for his high-flying lyricism as well as for his sup-posedly loose morals: so his heart went out in greater sympathy to Keats, and his own resentment at the bitterness of non-Roman-ticists against the new poetry lent itself easily to the idea that Keats had been mortally hurt by the injustice and abuse of Jeffrey and his crew. Shelley also did not live long, but nobody could imagine he died of a heart broken by book-reviewers. The story of his drowning can, however, break our hearts and I shall not recount it to you lest you should drown in tears and make my lecturing impossible. To make you laugh is a safer course. So let me switch back to Wordsworth who could never have been suspected of having died from any Critic's onslaught, for he outlived all his critics and went on into a serene and even stolid old age filled with the acclamations of a new epoch of critics and crowned with the Poet-Laureateship. Nobody could say any more that in his Lyrical Ballads there was not a word's worth of poetry!

There was also acceptance of the contention in his provocative

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Preface that the worth of a word did not lie in its being remote from common speech. No premium was put any longer on false Poetic Diction. Poetic Diction is false when archaic words are unnecessarily dragged in, allusions to Classical mythology indis-criminately made, and roundabout ways adopted in order to avoid a common expression. Always to employ "quoth", for instance, instead of "said" or "spoke" is false Poetic Diction. In the eighteenth century many poets could not refer to the breeze except as the "zephyr". A girl could not be termed a girl: she had to be a "nymph". Woman had to be called "the fair". Sheep were "the fleecy care". Fish as human food entered poetry only as "the finny prey". And, as for rats, their mention was thought to be something like a hydrogen bomb which would explode to bits the whole world of poetry. They had to be brought in by a detour as "the whiskered vermin race". Suppose Shakespeare had subscribed to this me-thod: how would he have written Lear's question over Cordelia's death? —

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?

Wordsworth swept away all the artificial conventions. But he went at times to the other extreme and became so bald in his diction that merely the metrical form-remained in his poetry to mark it out from prose. At his best he blends a naturalness with elevation and poignancy to practise a direct style which is almost unique. The other Romanticists were not as careful as he to avoid the heady effects of some of the springs released by the new movement. They fell into vague colourfulness or high-faluting volubility or a too precious artistry. But the revolt against pseudo-Classicism created room again for not only simplicity and straight-forwardness but also genuine splendour.

In the true type of Poetic Diction the words are meant to convey a sense of realities not ordinary, not accessible to everyday con-sciousness, or to bring out the inner nature of a situation with the help of highly-coloured or polysyllabic phrases which would throw it strongly upon the outer eye and ear. An excellent example of the latter purpose is in Shakespeare's Macbeth, in the scene where Macbeth's wife has left him with an injunction to remove the filthy evidence of his misdeed, the blood-stains on his hand after the

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murder of the sleeping King Duncan. Macbeth soliloquises:

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

You might think that here is only a memorable purple patch. But you will be mistaken if you think so. The purple patch is organic to the idea: without it the logic of the poetic moment would be absent. Let me dwell a little on the meaningful artistry of these lines.

The unusual verb "incarnadine" is, of course, the centre-piece here. It signifies: "to dye flesh-coloured or crimson." It has a strongly melodious effect on the ear and creates a vivid impression on the eye. But its purpose goes far beyond all this. Macbeth has let his imagination soar. He has put, in rivalry with the bloodiness of his human hand, the power of "all great Neptune's ocean", and he has increased the audacity of his counterpoise by throwing into relief the greatness of the ocean with the help of the thirteen-lettered epithet "multitudinous": the challenge, as it were, of Neptune's washing vastness has been openly accepted by Macbeth in order to suggest the enormity of his own crime, an enormity against which the combined cleansing powers of the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Oceans would not avail. But the suggestion would remain abstract — merely conceptually forceful — unless the enormity were somehow brought out to the senses and rendered concrete. He has made one side of the competition very concrete by the epithet "multitudinous": it must now be balanced by a concreteness on the other side. Only a strikingly big word with a rich resonance can prove competent to match that word in which the ocean-idea comes to its full. "Incarnadine" rises to the occasion with unerring success. We at once feel that the evil which stains the hand is vast enough to pollute with its indelible heinous-ness the whole world of waters. The logic of the counterpoise is complete and, as if to proceed systematically no less than to produce a surprise and to lay special emphasis, the order of the words is inverted and instead of saying,

Incarnadine the multitudinous seas,

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Macbeth is led to say

The multitudinous seas incarnadine.

The most important word is put at the end, effecting a grand finale.

When we have reached this grand finale we have illustrated true Poetic Diction, but not appreciated totally the artistry of Shakes-peare in the passage. Shakespeare could very well have stopped when his initial purpose had been served. Having accomplished what was psychologically required he could have done without the three-foot line which prolongs the sentence by a participial clause. Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet of the necessary pentameter, and Shakespeare by omitting the clause would have got an obvious climax. We know from Ben Jonson's famous dictum that Shakespeare never blotted a word he had once written. But he never blotted anything because mostly he wrote the perfect, the inevitable poetry which called for no correction or omission. And here too, after having penned the three-foot phrase, he failed to run his quill through it in the interests of a resounding climax, because he was a poet-dramatist beyond the ordinary: his imagination had often a com-plex logic and felt at this place that while the immediate necessity of expression was answered at the end of the line couched in markedly Poetic Diction a deeper and subtler need remained un-satisfied. Shakespeare divined that, since the hand that had com-mitted the murder was a small thing in itself though its offence was tremendous, the implication of the tremendousness of the offence by an unusual and ringing polysyllable was not enough while treating the ocean-idea: the sea in its turn must somehow appear small and become capable of being stained by a human limb. Hence the sonorous is succeeded by the simple and, even as "multitudinous" was matched by "incarnadine", "green" is coun-terpoised to "red". It is a device that at the same time stresses more explicitly the colour-contrast between sea-water and blood and pulls Macbeth's soaring and widening imagination back to the reality before his eyes — to a mood expressing, without oblitera-ting his great inner sense of guilt, his desire to deal practically with the limited outer symbol and evidence of his crime: the stained human hand.

By the way, you should catch properly the function of the word

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"one" in the phrase: "Making the green one red." You may be inclined to take "one" as the noun to which "green" forms the adjective. All the force of the phrase would then be lost. "One" is itself an adjective and qualifies "red": both together connote "a whole, total, single, undifferentiated, all-through redness." A simi-lar connotation is there in Browning's

Sunset ran one glorious blood-red reeking into Cadiz Bay.

Another instance of true Poetic Diction may be studied from Keats. It too introduces the seas. Keats has felt, in the nightingale singing one night, the essence of an immortal music that has been haunting human hearts throughout history, a music that has also haunted not only the crowded passages of man's life but also far-away places and has often

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

If you put "windows" instead of "casements" you do not disturb the rhythm by the non-poetic diction, but the spell is broken. Windows are too much of earth's daily life: the rarer word "case-ments" brings just the suggestion of remoteness and strangeness which could accord with "magic" and lead on to the picture of faery lands. Likewise, to substitute "dangerous" for "perilous" would be no rhythmic fault, yet the light of common day would at once be reflected by the seas upon the magic casements. A corres-pondence between-the former and the latter has to be maintained, and this is done, I may add, not only by the less prosaic word "perilous" but also by the echo of the letter p in it to the p which is in the present participle "opening" that shows us what the case-ments are doing in connection with the seas foaming under them. Again, the l in "perilous" makes a sympathetic music with the l's in "lands" and "forlorn", just as the r does with the r's in both "faery" and "forlorn". Further, the combination of r and l and s in "perilous" makes more liquid and sibilant music suitable to "seas" than merely the r and s of "dangerous".

I may mention that originally Keats had put "keelless" where now "perilous" stands. "Keelless" is good poetic diction and makes with unusual means the suggestion of seas that are solitary,

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over which no ship's keel has passed. A keel is the lowest timber-piece on which a ship is built, and in poetry the word "keel" does duty for the ship itself. "Keelless" coming with "seas" which are touched by the lowest timber-piece of a vessel is quite appropriate and would make the right music by its l-sound and carry on by its A:-sound the initial note of the hard c in "magic" and "casements". But somehow the long e of "keel" does not harmonise with the long e of "seas": it does not harmonise precisely because the very identity of the two sounds prepares us to think of a sea full of keels, so that to say "keelless" is to violate the logic of the poetic rhythm. Besides, the movement of the word is metrically flat: the seas seem to be undisturbed, an unbroken surface of water — a very apt suggestion in itself if the purpose is to bring home the picture of a sea uncrossed by any ship. But Keats felt that though the faery lands have to be forlorn their forlornness can be brought out without saying that no ships sailed over them: it can be brought out simply by saying that the seas were so full of dangers that no ship could sail. In addition, the natural movement of the seas is left unpictured by "keelless" and the visual hint in "foam" of the effect of the natural movement is left unsupported by it, even contradicted. The second and third syllables of "perilous" make with "seas" what is called a glide-anapaest: there is a "glide" because the "i" is half-articulated but the half-articulation is enough to create a tremble in the metre and import the vibration of the water. Moreover, this vibration answers in terms of metrical motion exactly to the vibration connected with "opening", the word with which "perilous" has already a relation by its p-sound. There too we have almost a glide-anapaest, for the word "on" which is usually unstressed carries a small stress here and takes the weight of the voice in the foot whose first two syllables are the closing two of "opening".

The terminal phrase "faery lands forlorn" is another master-piece of Poetic Diction. Not only does the slight unusualness of "faery" and "forlorn" make it so. It is also the inversion, the adjective "forlorn" coming after "faery lands", that takes us away all the more from lands that are not faery — and then there is the final drawn-out mournfulness of this adjective's sound, holding dis-tances of a poignant dream in it and dying away on a deep yet delicate bell-like note.

We may, with this note, await the far-from-delicate ringing of

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our School bell and, concluding our morning's literary luxury, return to the workaday world and our common natures. It will be in tune with Keats's own attitude to that adjective: for the very next stanza opens — a bit too self-consciously, according to many critics —- with the lines:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self....

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