Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-SEVEN

It was Keats's friend Henry Stephens who, on seeing the first draft of Endymion, remarked that its opening line —

A thing of beauty is a constant joy —

was good but still "wanting something". Keats pondered the criticism a little, then cried out, "I have it", and wrote:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

We can see at once that here, as the Abbe Bremond says, "the current passes". Inspiration has come through. But what exactly has happened?

Bremond declares that the inspiration is not due to a change of meaning, for, according to him, the meaning has not appreciably altered. I should think the correct view to be that the meaning has altered its shade in an important manner and yet the inspiration is not directly due to the alteration. If we bring a subtle scrutiny to bear upon the words we shall not fail to find the alteration of shade.

The first version speaks of an enjoyment that takes place with a prolonged consistency, while the second involves an absolute unconditional response that is perpetual. "A constant joy" has a somewhat restricted substance: it moves from moment to moment through one's life — steadily accompanying one, but not necessarily without beginning and ending somewhere. "A joy for ever" has a free triumphant flow as if from beyond one's birth to beyond one's death — the flow of a larger than individual consciousness, larger than even any time-consciousness, I might say. It is as if not merely our appreciation of an object but also our sense of an inviolable "archetype" of it on a divine plane were suggested. There is the hint of some endless and undying and godlike essence of beauty, existing and persisting behind earthly objects that perish and human experiences that pass.

Not to see this hint is to miss the final distinction of meaning in the line. And if Bremond does not see it he has not responded with the right alertness of mind. But, while such a hint may strike us as right and also as more in tune with the rest of the Endymion-passage, we shall mislead ourselves if we believe that the sheer

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meaning has metamorphosed Keat's line. Apart from the context of a line, the rightness or wrongness of meaning in poetry is irrelevant. A poet can hold any opinion and turn it to great verse. Though the meaning of "constant joy" does not accord so well with Keats's context, there is nothing in it to prevent a poet from making it memorable in a different context — if he knows how to do so: that is, if he knows how to give it a finer expression than Keats did. Indeed, that finer expression will hold a nuance which the original line lacks — the change will come about by the very recasting of it. Yet, in the overall aspect as distinguished from the detailed aspect, there can be some parity, such as does not exist between the original line and Keats's actual recasting of it. So from a general viewpoint we may aver that the meaning of "constant joy" fails in Keats's line because of a failure of inspiration and not by any intrinsic poetic defect. The meaning of "a joy for ever" can also from a general viewpoint make poorer poetry in spite of its being what we may call a greater thought and in spite of its according better with Keats's context. Its effectiveness comes from the way it has been expressed. Modify the expression in the slightest and it may fall flat. The form, therefore, and not the sheer significance of Keats's new line is the wonder-worker.

I may here throw your mind back to Mallarme's answer to the question of Degas the painter: "How is it that I have so many ideas, yet can't write poems?" Mallarme said: "My dear Degas, poems are not written with ideas — they are written with words." Mallarme surely did not refer to meaningless words: poems are not written with gibberish. Nor was he referring to intellectual formulation in language: poetry is not logic set to metre. He was simply stressing the importance of form. Perhaps a less epigrammatic manner of putting the matter would be that poetic form consists of inspired words that embody ideas imaginatively, emotionally, rhythmically. Any kind of idea will do, provided there is a certain choice of words and a certain ordering of the words chosen, creating an imaginative and emotional stir and bringing about a rhythm which reinforces revelatory word-suggestions with revelatory sound-suggestions.

How vitally the imaginative, emotional and rhythmical elements hold together can be easily shown. Mark what a world of difference there is if Keats's line, without any word being altered, suffers a slight change of word-order, thus:

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A thing of beauty is for ever a joy.

The overall idea remains the same — and yet that large, unobstructed, profoundly thrilling finality is gone. It is a fine thought but not fine enough feeling and not fine enough imaginative experience: the stirring of the consciousness does not occur in the depths and spaces of our being. A clipping and a jumping enter into the rhythm, and there is a slightly forced imparting of the emotion and the imagination instead of a natural release of them into us. Technically, one may say that the release is done by two means. First, the immediate following of "joy" by "for ever" in Keats's line concentrates, from the standpoint of grammar, a glow of eternity, of divineness, of archetypalness in the former: the reversed sequence, while logically leaving everything the same, seems to thin away the glow. Likewise, "for ever" gets more spiritually neutral, less positive and potent and vivid when it is not mixed and annealed in significance with "joy". To break up Keats's order of the two expressions is to interrupt their mutual enrichment. Secondly, a syllable hanging out in "ever" beyond the pentameter scheme gives by its unaccented extra sound the impression of indefinite continuation, the breaking through from the limited into the illimitable, the exceeding of confines and the emerging into freedom and fulfilment — in short, a reinforcing of word-suggestions by sound-suggestions. Yes, the technique has an effect, but the technique itself is the hand of an inner force fingering deftly its medium, guided by a light and rhythm of the being and not from without by mechanical skill. The mere technical effect could have been achieved by writing:

A thing of beauty is a joy unending

or

A thing of beauty is a joy that's endless.

These variants are no "duds"; however, nothing in them is so satisfyingly suggestive, so aptly vibrant as "for ever". They lack the perfect inevitability of inner and outer form possessed by Keats's phrase.

Going to the root of the question, we shall find this perfect inevitability to be a mystical value. Keats himself supplies a clue by the Platonic sense of beauty he has brought into his line. That "for ever" extends, as I have indicated, the joy of beauty to a divine

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ever" extends, as I have indicated, the joy of beauty to a divine and archetypal realm. The beauty, therefore, of a line of poetry as of any other thing can be seen to lie in its participation in this realm. Perfect inevitability of form, according to this view, springs from and manifests some supreme and flawless Creative Delight behind the time-process. Modern aesthetics fights shy of such a theory, but whoever interrogates clearly enough his experience of poetic or any other beauty at its intensest cannot put by the sense of the ultimate, the absolute, the Divine. It is not mere pleasure that is given us. Poetry does not end with causing a happy equilibrium, as I. A. Richards contends, between the diverse impulses at play in our nature. Pleasure is there and a happy equilibrium is there; there is also much else. What is basic is our recognition of an irreproachable finality, an utter perfection that confers on every poetic statement a godlike power. Various poets make various statements, they differ among themselves, but each of them seems to bring the compelling touch of the ultimate and the absolute. Though our intellect may not agree, we cannot help feeling that here is something unchallengeable, something that can stand like a deity and command our consciousness. We feel that it participates in a Being that is flawless and "a joy for ever". The participation is through form alone: that is why all kinds of statements are possible in poetry and the question of "truth" in the scientific, philosophic, religious or historical connotation does not arise. Perfect form or beauty is "truth", as Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn declared, in one connotation only: the Being in whose flawless and eternal beauty it participates is the basic reality, the fundamental archetype of all existence, so that whatever fails to manifest this Being is to the extent of its failure a falsity and not the truth.

Art is a wonderful effort to manifest it. Inspiration, that passing of "the current", is the artist's inner sense of it governing his medium. We can analyse the governing, study the elements of imagination, emotion and rhythm, but these elements fuse into a masterpiece because the touch of a mystical Power falls on them. Nothing save that touch metamorphoses Keats's original line and makes it dance through the ages on the lips of men.

Bremond is right in making much of mysticism in relation to poetry. His error lies in making it a direct operator. It is easy to criticise him and show that many poets have no mystical bent, no mystical substance as such. Middleton Murry labours to point out just this fact and thereby convict Bremond of confusion. He coun-

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ters both the propositions of Bremond — that there need be no thought at all in poetry and that poetry expresses a mystical experience sidetracked. On the first point his position, in effect, is: "True poetry always contains thought, but thought can vary from a comprehensive declaration like Shakespeare's 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on' to the most tenuous apprehension of a quality physical, or spiritual, or both, as in 'the plainsong cuckoo gray.' " Here he is right. But afterwards he falls short and betrays inconsistency. On the second point I shall read out to you his position: "What is essential is that the 'thought' should be an intrinsic part of an emotional field in the poet's mind, and that a corresponding emotional field should be excited in ourselves. No deus (ex machina or immanent) has any aid to give. Some poets may think about God — perchance they may experience Him — but other poets have done neither one nor the other; but all are poets if they have the power so to mate the word to an entire mental experience that its similar is aroused in their readers. By virtue of that power alone they are 'pure poets' and their words 'pure poetry'. Bremond speaks of 'un plus grand et meilleur que nous': the one who is greater and better than ourselves is not God, he is simply the poet who communicates to us the unity of his own inward experience which is indefeasibly our own. At the touch of the poetic experience we become that which we are and which we were not — momentarily whole. Intellect and emotion, mind and heart, regain their lost unity within us. We gain a positive enrichment and integration; we might say, if the phrase were not hampered with theological and psychological obligations, that we are put, if not in possession of, at least into touch with our souls. To avoid those obligations, we must be content to claim a momentary union of thought and feeling. This union is not mystical but it is religious. All great poets must be religious. For high poetry and high religion are at one in the essential that they demand that a man shall not merely think thoughts, but feel them — that his highest mental act be done with all his heart and with all his mind and with all his soul."

We have here a peculiar exhibition of taking away with one hand and giving back with the other. While refusing to grant a mystical quality to poetry Murry is yet driven to talk of soul and religion. But is it not rather ridiculous to boil soul down to a union of thought and feeling — as if "a momentary union of thought and feeling" could create that deep or exquisite sense of the flawless

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that poetic expression gives? It is the research into this sense that takes one to the threshold of the mystical. And what a poor definition of religion we have in the formula: "not merely think thoughts, but feel them"! Is it because Shakespeare felt his thoughts that we have that passage over which Murry exults, the passage whose thought is the futility of human existence? —

Tommorow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

On the thought in this, Murry comments: "It is one which the well-tuned man would rather not believe to be true; and yet, when he has listened to Macbeth, something is changed. There are undreamed-of riches, it seems, even in ultimate despair; a glory is shed over the road to dusty death. This despair is not despairing, because it is complete. The act of the poet's mind has thrilled the poet's heart." May we ask Murry why a glory is shed? Can the thrilling of the poet's heart by the poet's mind shed it? No. It is because the lines have the gait as of a god. Perfection is somehow abroad. Shakespeare's heart-beats, when Shakespeare expressed his thought, became the footfalls of that Perfection: some haloed power walked out from the poet's depths into his poetry and stamped on it its unimpeachable faultlessness of form. And it is the striving for and the vague receptivity to this power that constitutes religion. Murry is made to introduce terms which he finds unavoidable but which he attempts to water down. The impression that all poets do not believe in or sense God has covered his eyes to the fact that poetry cannot be unless the mystical presence acts in its intensity and converts it to an aesthetic form of the absolute. If we have to speak of soul and religion, let us plumb the true implications of our necessity. Mysticism, rightly understood, is the real maker of "pure poetry".

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