Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-FOUR

"Pure poetry" — that is a phrase we have used once or twice in the course of our Talks. But so far we have put aside discussion of it. Now that we have talked of Logopoeia — poetic "thought-making" — the phrase becomes topical, for, though there are several schools of "pure poetry", they combine in ruling out logopoeic expression. Any kind of thinking, all reaching of conclusions moral or any other, they condemn as out of place in real poetic speech. They regard Arnold's formula — "criticism of life" — in relation to this speech as philistine impertinence. Poetry, they hold, produces a mood, but it does so in a direct fashion: it does not tell us to be glad or sad or mad or anything else. Thus when Hugo writes —

Comme c'est triste voir s'enfuir les hirondelles —

(How sad to see the swallows fly away —)

he is introducing a non-poetic element by those opening words. He should have presented just a picture of swallows flying away and presented it so that we would at once have felt sad. I suppose the direct mood-productive speech of "pure poetry" — not perhaps quite confined to the mood of sadness yet not very far from it — may be hailed in the lines of J. A. Chadwick ("Arjava" to our Ashram):

Drowsy pinions whitely winging

Smoulder dimly past the strand,

but the advocates of "pure poetry" would be disappointed to learn that these two lines are followed by:

Visionary trance-light bringing

From some strange remoter land.

"Pure poetry" should convey what it wishes to by a concrete image or symbol and stop there: it should be a poetry of sheer sight or at least bring before us colour and shape and gesture, and banish information or exposition.

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Symbolism, as developed by Mallarme, was perhaps the most famous school that laid claim to being "pure poetry". It did so, as we have noted, by distinguishing poetry sharply from prose: prose was called reportage, something intellectual and explicit and not particularly rhythmic, whereas poetry was assigned the task of creating with rhythmic language indefinite, non-intellecutal, mysterious effects by concrete suggestions that took the form of images without even mentioning what they might serve as similes or metaphors for and that conjured up by an almost abrupt succession of these images a significant vision which exceeded the picture of anything recognisable as a whole in the natural world. Thus Mallarmean Symbolism was not only mysterious but also mystical and to the ordinary mind it seemed to make some sort of superior non-sense which yet affected one with a profound though not clearly formulable meaningfulness, a meaningfulness such as music appears to have. To do in the highest degree what poetry alone could do was to produce "pure poetry", according to the Mallarmean definition.

This definition was accepted in general — nay, even actually framed — by Valery who was Mallarme's most gifted disciple. But Valery was not steeped in an atmosphere of the mystical as his master was in spite of being by intellectual conviction an atheist and a materialist. "Pure poetry", for Valery, achieves its absolute distinction from prose through a conscious deliberate construction upon a theme in itself utterly indifferent by a musical pattern of words which gives delight and communicates not anything intelligible on the whole but a subtle many-shaded state of mind. Valery even said that his best poems had their origin in an intense obsession by certain metrical forms which he afterwards filled out with words connected to one another by what he felt to be their inner suggestive affinities. But Valery was a marked intellectual and his work is not so much a sheer evocation from the depths of the being as a thought-scheme imaginatively complicated and rendered enigmatic. That is why the French people have recognised in him their own typical temper, however strange-hued, and accorded him a high place in their poetic pantheon, unlike Mallarme whom most of them deem an exotic growth and a fantastic failure rather than a sphinx-like success. Something of the subtlety of Mallarme's Symbolism merges in something of the clarity that is French Classicism's to make the "pure poetry" of Valery. An instance is the

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stanza from Le Cimetiere Marin (The Graveyard by the Sea), where a little after the start he is describing a moment of self-rarefaction as if anticipating, under the poised noonday glare which looks like a glimpse of Eternity, his own disappearance by death:

Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,

Comme en delice, il change son absence

Dans une bouche ou sa forme se meurt,

Je hume ici ma future fumee,

Et le ciel change a l'ame consumee

Le changement des rives en rumeur.

C. Day Lewis has englished this example of what I may term clear-cut elusiveness:

Even as a fruit's absorbed in the enjoying,

Even as within the mouth its body dying

Changes into delight through dissolution,

So to my melted soul the heavens declare

All bounds transfigured into a boundless air

And I breathe now my future's emanation.

I think Valery here has a similarity in general spirit and art-attitude, though not in style, to the writing which a certain side of the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals practised — say, Marvell at his most delicate and most deep. I may quote a stanza from The Garden on which we once drew when speaking of Mallarme and of a modern English poet's ideal in which Mallarme was coupled with Marvell. Marvell also speaks of a dreamy luminous disembodiment anticipating the "longer flight" from the sense-world at time of death. His lines run:

Here at the fountain's sliding foot,

Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,

Casting the body's vest aside,

My soul into the boughs does glide:

There, like a bird, it sits and sings,

Then whets and claps its silver wings,

And, till prepar'd for longer flight,

Waves in its plumes the various light.

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Marvell is less sophisticated as well as less "vaporous" than Valery, his subtlety is simpler, as it were, yet there is an exquisite deliberate distillation of experience and expression marking the poetry very keenly off from any mere refinement of the prose-turn. Contrast Marvell's closing phrase —

Waves in its plumes the various light —

with one of Pope's on sylphs, air-spirits:

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Pope has effective sound-values supporting his expression. The three long a- sounds in "change", "they" and "wave" suggest a kind of repeated expansion — an expansion suggested further by the three w's with their propulsive openness of articulation. Then there is the tinkling n-sound three times, just as again the r occurs thrice and produces a whirr. All in all, we get a vivid impression of wings widening and beating the air and gleaming with each waft — and the threefold reiteration of each of the three significant letters makes us feel as if three colours were gleaming. A skilful line, this, but its deft representation of things differs from prose-style by a charm of rhythm more than by a special word-magic. Marvell's line has a more exquisite art which stirs us to sight on a deeper level of consciousness. His alliteration is not so open: the v in the midst of "waves" finds an echo in the v at the beginning of "various" and similarly the l combined with p in "plumes" tolls once more in the l at the opening of "light". There is the a assonance too, twice. Only the s is thrice sounded, twice as z and once with a clear sibilance. This play of s carries on the sound-effect of line 6

Then whets and claps its silver wings.

The light that diversely comes and goes is a shine and a shimmer slipping like strange water and suffuses the word "wave" with an extra overtone of liquidity on top of its direct sense of vibrating with a sinuous or sweeping motion: it is almost as if the verb meant "turns into waves". Not only are sounds employed more skilfully: a more direct connection is established between things. It is not

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plumes that are waved: the waving is of light itself. Thus light becomes a component of the wings. Also, light is not made various by the wing-waving: just as it is one with the plumes, the various-ness of it is one with the waving. Further, the light is already various but its variousness gets revealed when the light is waved — the waving breaks the uniformity of appearance and with that non-uniformity the variousness comes out. And the oneness of waving and variety, as well as the oneness of plumes and light, is brought out by the similarity of certain sounds we have already noticed in the words.

In Marvell's speech, poetry is as if washed clean of the presence of prose, the relationship between it and prose seems erased by a special novelty and sensitivity of vision and word and rhythm. "Pure poetry" of a phanopoeic kind is the result. But must poetry be phanopoeic in this way or even in a more cryptic way as in Mallarme and a more rarefied way as in Valery in order to be pure? And must it always be phanopoeic in order to ensure its purity? The Symbolists would return an emphatic Yes. So would the school known as the Imagists.

One of the founders of Imagism was the American-English poet Ezra Pound. Imagism is a revolt against the development of Romanticism into the vaguely and vastly emotional, the sense of at once the crepuscular and the cosmic, the mind twilight-blurry and tending to float away in what T. E. Hulme termed the "circumambient gas". Imagism demanded objectivity, clarity, exactitude, conciseness — it also recommended free verse as more suitable to the individuality of the poet — and above everything else it stressed the importance of the image, the focused picture rendering particulars and conveying the poet's state of mind without discussion or reflection. Imagism overlapped with Symbolism in several matters, but in its penchant for sharp and hard outlines it was inclined to fight shy of the mysterious, the ultra-natural, the dream-world and the world of interior vision. Yet its desire to cut the cackle and to short-circuit description led to a degree of compression which at times made the created poetic brevities fuse pictures and speak elliptically: thus the surface was occasionally a vivid entanglement without sacrifice of that precise definition, that Chinese quality of ching ming which Pound recommended and sought to practise as an indispensable mode of true poetry. In the eyes of Pound and his followers, "a poem is an image or a succession of images, and an

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image is that which presents an intellectual or emotional complex in an instant of time."

One or two examples of Imagist poetry may be offered. There is Pound's own well-known two-lined piece with a title half the length of the poem, In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

Imagist poetry of this kind harks back to Far Eastern models — Chinese and Japanese forms, particularly the latter. The shortest form of Japanese verse is known as the hokku or haiku, consisting of three lines, the first in five syllables, the second in seven and the third again in five — altogether seventeen syllables. Pound's piece just exceeds the limit by two syllables. If we elide the e in the opening "the" and slur the two words "in the" into one sound "inth" by another such elision we shall have an equivalent to the total length of the haiku. The three-line division, however, would not quite conform to the pattern of syllable-distribution. It would be:

Th' apparition

Of these faces in th' crowd;

Petals on a wet black bough.

But, interestingly, Pound's little poem — Pound's penny of a poem, if we may put it punningly — has in part of its mood an affinity to the very first extant haiku of Japan, dating from the early thirteenth century — namely, of Fujiwara no Sadaiye:

Chiru hana wo

Oikakete yuku

Arashi kana.

(A fluttering swarm

Of cherry-petals — then comes,

Chasing them, the storm!)

Like Fujiwara's petals, Pound's seem also to be blown ones, dislodged from the stems and flung by rain-sweeps to a black

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bough, just as the passing apparition-like faces in the crowd are separate units thrown somewhat helter-skelter yet shiningly hang-ing together inside a station in the dull weather against a background of dampened spirits. But there is perhaps more pleasure in the Japanese poet's attitude and more feeling too of the energy of Nature's life: the sense of mere apparition is absent.

If the minor scale of spirit were made major and the energy became more actively present and the joy grew mixed with a sense of awe and grandeur, Fujiwara may be considered as englished in the opening lines of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, at the same time that a touch of Pound's "apparition" enters through the word "ghosts" in the Shelley-passage:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red...

The phrase that comes just after these lines —

Pestilence-stricken multitudes..

goes, of course, beyond both Fujiwara and Pound in its mood, but it remains Imagist poetry, and the ensemble, for all its more direct, more weighty tone, still satisfies the demands of the new school — the blend of the clarity and objectivity of the Greeks with the effective visual condensation of the Oriental miniature. The lines would be accepted by the Imagist as pure poetry. What, however, about the close of Shelley's Ode?—

...Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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There is in this magnificent outburst too much statement, too much elaboration, too explicit a development of the idea and finally too clear a conclusion for the Imagist or Symbolist definition of the purely poetic. Also, the poet's attitude and interpretation are too much in evidence for this definition. Not that this definition insists on sheer objectivity. In fact, there can be no such thing. Always we have an attitude towards the material, always a selection of the details of the material: an interpretation, however hidden, is embodied in every poem. Subjectivity of even a more noticeable kind is accepted by the Symbolists; but it must be put forth pictorially with the utmost economy in connective tissue. Among the Imagists, though, there was a tendency to cut down subjectivity and most poets could not live up long to the Imagists' ideal either in this respect or in respect of brevity. So a modified conception of "pure poetry" grew out of the Imagist extremism. To this conception Pound's admirer and ultimately surpasser as poet, T. S. Eliot, gave critical formulation.

Here a premium was put on the contemplation of doctrine or of ideas without setting at a discount the cult of imaged moods: the comtemplation was to be done exclusively through imagery. The poet was encouraged to do a lot of thinking but a bar was placed against the intrusion of it in the poem. The ideas have to be squeezed out of the finished poetic product and the reader must supply them after receiving the sheer image-impact. Poetry resides, as Eliot said, in the "objective correlative". Here, as in Imagism, the emotion is not to be told us as this or that subjective condition of experience but must be communicated through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." However, plenty of brain-stuff can and should go with the emotion, provided a symbol is discovered as a focal point of heightened consciousness and all that belongs to the conventional structure of a poem is removed: no connections, no transitions, nothing explicitly directing and explaining the heightened consciousness. The reason advanced by Eliot of such abbreviation of method is that "the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression". Naturally, this method conduces to an elliptical style with a lot of obscurity and ambiguity. It can take for its patron-saint, as it were, John Donne of the

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seventeenth century; but, to carry it off, the poet must have Donne's ecstatic intellect, Donne's analytic heart, Donne's mystic nerves of sensation; and even Donne with his extraordinary gifts often turns out untransformed stuff of a thought-emotion-sensation melange powerfully compressed yet not keenly crystallised. Our modern practitioners of the imaged ellipsis go astray deplorably because they do not tap the elemental forces within, forces without which no poetry can come to birth. A follower of Eliot who has made quite a name in our day, William Empson, offers us things like these six lines that open his poem Arachne:

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves;

Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems;

Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

King spider walks the velvet roof of streams;

Must bird and fish, must god and beast avoid;

Dance, like nine angels, on pin-point extremes.

I think it would be precious pretension if such products were passed off as "pure poetry". Imaginative intensity is wanting, though a few lines are well turned and even striking.

The want is of something considered indispensable by Gerard Manley Hopkins whom our Modernists look upon as their premature father — premature because he wrote in a period of poetic conventionalism pieces vibrant with a new vision and a new technique. "Sweet fire the sire of Muse" — so pronounced Hopkins in the midst of his newness. Like Donne with his high-pressure effects, Hopkins time and again overdoes his originality and gives us strained piled-up novelties instead of achieved and possessed audacities; but he has the true sense of the poetic — what he calls "inscape" and "instress", the inner significant pattern of things, the inner harmonious excitement of sight. I may illustrate his departure from poetic conventionalism by picking out, as a critic has done, a verse from him and a couple of lines from Crashaw, both on the theme of Christ's incarnation through the Virgin Mary. Crashaw refers to the heavenly babe:

Christ left his father's house and came

Lightly as a lambent flame.

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Here we have a good simile suggesting the soft secrecy of the Divine's entry into the human. The epithet "lightly", while meaning a movement delicate and refined, prepares the gentle light indicated by the closing phrase. Also perhaps in the adjective "lambent" we have a subtle allusion to the common phrase about Christ: "Lamb of God." But the cleverness is not obtrusive: it is assimilated into the fine taste of the whole expression. A variety of ideas and attitudes is smoothly packed into a couplet simple and sincere in a conventionally poetic manner. How different, how dynamically different, how directly suffused with the glory and profundity and awesome loveliness of the event are the words of Hopkins:

The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled

Miracle-in-Mary of flame...

The whole first line is adjectival and the noun it qualifies is the compound "Miracle-in-Mary". The words "of flame" go with "Miracle" and not with "Mary": the incarnating Christ is the "Miracle of flame" within Mary. The total expression in the two lines is repeatedly concrete in unexpected ways. We have not even distinct images, we have a picture in each phrase with an assimilation of whatever images are there. We see Jesus' origin in divinity from which he has come missioned as both force and grace, as both pressure of power and largesse of love; we see his love's acceptance of humanity and humanity's acceptance of him in love; we see his preciously secret birth through deeply and tenderly guarded virginity; we see the prodigious Godhead that was the unborn child lying with all its light and fire in Mary's quickened earth-womb. The representation of the theme by Crashaw has been compared to the chaste and lucid art of Raphael, that by Hopkins to the impassioned and complex art of Michelangelo. For our purposes the distinction would lie not only as between the chastely lucid and the passionately complex: it would lie also in the nearness of the Crashavian utterance to the prose temper and the farness of the Hopkinsian from it. The latter articulation has a subtlety and intensity quite foreign to the spirit of prose: the former has not the same sheer poetic enthousiasmos. Its rhythmic breath keeps it within the realm of poetry, but it is almost on the frontiers of that realm whereas Hopkins is right in the centre of it,

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in the royal visionary and rhythmic core. The poetry here has shed all prose-resemblances: it stands pure in its own essence. But, while differing from Crashaw, it differs also from Empson who for all his imaged ellipsis stands with one foot inside and one outside the poetic frontiers. This double nationality is what is wrong with most modernist poets, and no Imagist theory, no dogma of "objective correlative" or inexplicit concentration can save them.

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