Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTEEN

Last time I spoke of falsetto, something forced in sound-expres-sion, something that is not the natural body of a keen musical feeling. Falsetto in poetry can come not only when a poet indulges in polysyllables that have an imposing air. It can come even when he is monosyllabic and apparently unpretentious. Monosyllables and polysyllables can both be at fault and can both serve as a legitimate means.

We have several times mentioned them: Let us now ask: What functions in general do they perform? Some special func-tions we have already touched upon. But in general we may say that their functions are according to the nature of the language they derive from. Polysyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Latin and Greek which have resonance and weight. The work they do, therefore, is to vivify things in their aspect of stability and wideness and splendour. Monosyllables in English poetry derive mostly from Anglo-Saxon which has an intimate ring and a lightness about it. The work they do, therefore, is to vivify things in their aspect of mobility and particularness and poignancy. Of course Anglo-Saxon speech is not exclusively monosyllabic, it is dissyllabic too and can even produce polysyllables; but it does so mostly by combining a couple of words, either monosyllabic or dissyllabic. Thus in the Watson line already quoted,

The everlasting taciturnity,

"everlasting" is an Anglo-Saxon derivative while "taciturnity" is a Latin one. The former falls only one syllable short of the latter — it has four syllables as against the other's five — but evidently two words, "ever" and "lasting", go to the making of it — the first a true dissyllable, the second such by forming a present participle from the monosyllabic verb "last". And we see, in the effect which the Anglo-Saxon adjective and the Latin noun produce together, part of the typical functions of Anglo-Saxonisms and Latinisms. "Taciturnity" provides the weight and the durableness and the amplitude of the night-sky's indifference- and it does this with a suggestion of the inscrutable, the unseizable, because Latin words have an abstract atmosphere in English, something we cannot catch and examine with the outer mind. "Everlasting", with its

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greater nearness to our understanding, renders the taciturnity intimate to us so that, strangely enough, we come intimately to know how very indifferent to us the night-sky is! If, instead of an Anglo-Saxonism, a Latinism long in its singleness or by a combina-tion of two words had been used to convey the same meaning, we might have had a touch of ponderosity, an overdone and artificial effect. See how a wholly Latinised version of Watson's phrase would work:

The sempiternal taciturnity.

It is too stony. The taciturnity, instead of being a remote living presence, grows an aloof deadness, and we feel oppressed rather than awed. The pairing of an Anglo-Saxon word with a Latin gives Watson's original version its true grandeur. Some of the best English lines depend on this kind of pairing for their excellence. Shakespeare often uses even for the same sense two words, one Anglo-Saxon, the other Latin —as in: "the head and front of my offence."

There have been enthusiasts of Latinity and there have been extremists of Anglo-Saxonry. Leigh Hunt has written a condemna-tion of Latin derivatives in English and a recommendation for the employment of the Anglo-Saxon element alone. But the brief passage in which he has done so contains no less than thirty-five words of Latin extraction, making about one-half of the passage! This shows how impossible at present it is to sift the language of either the one element or the other. Barnes, carrying the Anglo-Saxon mania to its climax, believes that we should do the sifting at all costs. He rejects the Latin term "adjective" for a word showing the quality of a thing and suggests the Anglo-Saxonism: "mark-word of suchness." Degrees of comparison he would like to re-chxisten "pitchmarks", and quite seriously he tells us that "pitch-marks offmark sundry things by their sundry suchnesses." He also offers Anglo-Saxon alternatives to several words. "Carnivorous" must become "flesh-eatsome"; "butler" change to "cellar-thane"; "electricity" convert into "fire-ghost'; "criticism" be purified into "deemsterhood". "Syllogism" also is taken up for transformation. You know what a syllogism is. It is a logical process consisting of three steps — the first is called the Major Premise, the second the Minor Premise and the third the Conclusion. Example:

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A peacock has two legs.

A poet has two legs.

Therefore a poet is a peacock.

Of course this is a fallacy, but the form can be illustrated by it just as well as by a correct argument: besides, the conclusion though logically fallacious is not psychologically quite absurd. Now Barnes replaces "syllogism" by "a redeship of three thought-puttings".

The English language does not appear to gain much by this kind of roundabout awkwardness. But the pairing of a Latin with an Anglo-Saxon word is not the only happy result of the two ele-ments. Sometimes a number of Latin words more or less in succes-sion can constitute an especially expressive unit if this unit is succeeded by another in which Anglo-Saxon words make the whole sum or at least predominate. I have already cited the Hamlet-line,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

a line which gives us an actual difficulty in breathing by its packed stresses and consonants. This line is preceded by a predominantly Latinised verse which again comes after an Anglo-Saxonised one. The entire speech addressed to Hamlet's bosom-friend Horatio is:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story...

The first line is direct and touching. The second has a serious sonority matched with a splendid smoothness and brings home to us by its temper and tone and texture the sense of the serene beatitude from which Horatio is asked to stay away for a short duration as well as the sense of the calm dignified Stoical resolve by which the staying away is to be accomplished. But the actual state of staying away, the suffering and sorrow which are the consequences of Horatio's refraining from the self-slaughter which would make him follow Hamlet out of the world - these things are not driven into us: they come in the next line with an intimate

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acuteness which is the special power of well-chosen Anglo-Saxon speech. In the fourth semi-line we have an Anglo-Saxon verb with a Latin noun as its object. This verb has a directness, that noun has a dignity. Both are appropriate. What Hamlet has done in his lifetime is no small or trivial matter: it deserves to be called a story and not a tale: "to tell my tale" sounds somewhat ridiculous if not quite like "to pull my tail"! But this story must be given to mankind in all its living glow and gloom, so that their hearts may be moved to understanding and not only their minds interested to examine the significance. The Anglo-Saxon "tell" has a straight-forward heart-to-heart emphasis which could not be bettered.

I may quote an instance in which the word "tale" rather than "story" is the inevitable expression. In Macbeth Shakespeare has some lines etching out a desperate pessimism. Towards the close of the passage Macbeth says about life:

it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

"Story" would have been quite in the wrong taste and spoiled the passionate contemptuous immediacy of the utterance. It would also have made a semi-rhyme with "fury" and brought in a sort of jingle entirely out of place in that moment of Macbeth's despera-tion. But the Latinism "Signifying" in the final two-word phrase is in the correct taste, particularly in conjunction with the Anglo-Saxonism "nothing". The long and impressive "Signifying" sug-gests the fullness that is spoken of in the previous line: of course sound and fury constitute life's tale, but there is a lot of them and the tale is long-drawn-out with empty noise intensely made, and this fullness without any point in it is hit off by combining the impressiveness of the long-drawn-out present participle with the blunt homeliness of the noun that is its object — the Anglo-Saxon noun "nothing" which serves as a fit anti-climax to the expectation raised by "Signifying". Reverse the places of the Latinism and the Anglo-Saxonism and see what a poor effect you get. If the verb were short and Anglo-Saxon and the noun lengthy and Latin, the intense and moving "Signifying nothing" would be replaced by the flat and almost facetious "Meaning a nullity".

I shall now point your attention to some other modes of kindling

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to the poetic wonder. Coventry Patmore — who perhaps has not received the praise which he deserves and which perhaps his very name shows him as desiring ("Pat more") — distinguishes the poetic phrase under three heads: piquancy, felicity, magnificence. And he remarks that the supreme phrase of poetry mingles all these qualities in various measures. Let us briefly define these terms. Piquancy in poetry is an agreeable sharpness, a pleasantly disturbing irritant, a sort of fine paradoxicality. "Felicity" is a term very often used for all kinds of appropriate poetic expressions. In a special sense distinct from what the other two terms connote, felicity in poetry is a strikingly apt delightfulness which does not stimulate as piquancy does but which, even when ingeniousness is present, causes a deep satisfaction with the keen beauty-part of the utterance. Magnificence is a power widening and enriching the vision: it has an overwhelming rather than a stimulating or a delighting loveliness, it is a bold lavishness though what is lavished is yet well-organised.

Piquancy operates its fine paradoxicality most often by a trans-ference of function between two things, achieved either in a simple manner or by a complex vision. Most directly it takes the form of an epigram with a puzzling point to which it comes from a certain depth of significance. A well-known case is Wordsworth's

The Child is father of the Man,

telling us that the psychological developments in our life have their origin in the nature of the temperament and the mode of inner response we had in our early years. It is a case of true poetic piquancy, for it is not there just to amuse or even dazzle: it sums up in a sharp statement a lifetime's continuity of Nature-love at once happy and reverential, a Nature-love vivified for us at the very beginning of the short poem where that continuity is put before us:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky.

The epigram is poetically piquant also because it is not involved in an elaborate cleverness overdoing the effect. An elaborate clever-ness is not in itself reprehensible: the seventeenth-century poet

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John Donne succeeds often by a curiously worked-out wit which is still poetry by being charged with a fine feeling. But I may here illustrate what piquancy should avoid being. I shall offer an example in which it runs riot, almost goes mad.

Sidgwick has imagined what Swinburne with his complicated and musically repetitive style would have made of Wordsworth's straightforward paradox. Swinburne would have excitedly pro-duced a sort of rapturously ridiculous riddle:

The manner of man by the boy begotten

Is son to the child that his sire begets

And sire to the child of his father's son.

At first look I got quite bewildered when I struck upon this. Working out family-relations is always a hard job for a mere man. Women are experts at it and I had to consult my wife in order to get the right hang of the branches in Swinburne's family-tree. It seems one can find one's way through the tangles if one fastens on the meaning of two expressions: "his sire" in the second line and "his father's son" in the third. The former signifies the man's father: the child that the man's father begets is the man himself in his childhood. The latter expression signifies the man himself: he is said to be the father or sire to his own child. Untwisted, the Swinburnian statement amounts to this: the kind of man whose father is the child that he himself once was is the son whose father is that very child of some years ago and this man is also the father of his own child. In other words, while physically a man is the child of his own father and the father of his own child, psychologically the child that he himself was is the father of the man that he now is. I hope I am not making the confusion worse confounded. It is much easier explaining what piquancy is than illustrating it a la Swinburne.

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