The Thinking Corner

Great Meanings

There is the famous case of the examinee who on being asked to paraphrase the well-known words from Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn -

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter -

wrote: "It is nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." We may be inclined to laugh at the ingenious fool. Do we, however, understand Keats rightly? Most of those who have not read his poem think he meant that new and unfamiliar tunes are more enjoyable than the ones to which we have been accustomed. In fact, this is not at all what he had in mind. He was talking of the carved figures on an ancient vase used for storing the ashes of the dead: some of these figures were shown as playing on pipes, and Keats began to imagine what airs must have been played. Since the figures were in stone, those airs could never be heard, and their being unheard stimulated his mind to an imaginative delight which surpassed all experience of actually hearing melodies. What is supremely sweet, according to the poet, is that which a subsequent line mentions: "the ditties of no tone" which are piped not to "the sensual ear" but to "the spirit". In general, the pleasures of the outer senses are declared to be far less intense, far less valuable than those of the inner world of creative dream.

Even without the context, a little brooding on the Keats-ian phrase can give us a clue to its delicately deep significance. But with the majority the absence of the context is likely to diminish the exact bearing. Quite otherwise does such an absence act in the instance of Shakespeare's

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin.

Held by itself, this line has passed into a proverb and has

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served numberless occasions. Shakespeare, however, had no general application in view nor even the particular shade it carries on the lips of his lay admirers. Students of his work know that he did not mean any quality which wins all hearts and brings together widely differing minds by being natural or spontaneous in the midst of artificialities and affectations: he was just referring, as can be gathered by considering the entire context, to a peculiarity common to all mankind, a special trait found everywhere and at all times - namely, the liking for things which have a novel modern glittering appearance:

One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin -

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds,

Though they are made and moulded of things past;

And give to dust that is a little gilt

More laud than gilt o'er dusted.

The present eye praises the present object.

Instead of connoting some lovely gesture expressive of the unspoilt side of human beings, the poet was putting his finger on an almost superficial tendency in most persons. This does not in the least mar his poetry: what he wants to say he says in a masterly fashion, the usual Shakespearean felicity and force are there, but the sense is felt by us to be not so precious as that which we misread by taking the line in vacuo.

Sometimes the popular interpretation, though inaccurate, is not inferior to the poet's original drift. Dante's Divina Commedia closes with the line:

L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle,

which may be Englished:

The love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Christendom has been haunted for centuries by this grand

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finale to its greatest poem and, as a rule, understood it to imply God's universal dynamic harmonising love by which the whole creation is kept going. Christ's insistence on God being love has made us believe that a poet like Dante who lived when Christianity was at its peak of power in men's lives could not have intended anything else. Yet Dante did not consciously lend his line the precise shade we see in it. Medieval theology a la St. Thomas Aquinas was coloured by Aristotle's philosophical outlook. Steeped in that theology and giving it glorious poetic form, Dante has here a hint about Aristotle's solution of the problem of how the cosmos is related to God. Aristotle regards God as eternal and immutable, the Arch-perfection that simply IS, the changeless Being beyond motion and relation: how then is the cosmos set moving? In a short pregnant sentence the Greek philosopher suggests the way: "Like one beloved, God moves the cosmos." In other words, without Himself moving or having any relation with the cosmos God is the cause of the latter's movement because the latter cannot help loving an object so perfect as God and, by its love, is set a-stir to its mighty periodic rhythms. Of course there are difficulties in the Aristotelian position and the deity of St. Aquinas's system is not altogether conceived after the Greek thinker, but the inspiring and subtle idea that the spheres were driven by a love-urge for the Divine remained and shaped that verse of Dante's:

The great Florentine's phrase has kindled in a recent poet a vision unlike both the original and the one commonly supposed to be there by the mass of Christians. The mystic nuance has receded and its place is taken by a humanistic-cwm-scientific shade. Sir John Squire, influenced by Dante's picture of heavenly bodies touched to activity by love, has created another in which he has fused the concept of gravitational attraction among them with that of powerful fellow-feeling such as would constitute and keep going a happy peaceful orderly society. Indeed a splendid burst are his lines:

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Divine magnificent spirit of man that will face

Invincible ever the battle with hopeless odds

And cannot but dream ere he falls of a time and a race,

Of a day when the world of man maturer grown

Will live without law in perfect wisdom and grace,

Like the solar system hanging in awful space,

Its parts sustained serenely by love alone.

The simile of the last two lines is couched in terms of a simple grandeur that make a rare poetic climax - there is a true Dantesque transfiguration of ordinary words and natural rhythms - the vowels repeat or vary with large solemn suggestions, the consonants bear amid their diversity significant echoes the most telling of which is the drawn-out sibilance with its far-flowing, wide-spreading, deep-hushing effect. Dante's afflatus has not been shamed by the change of sense and attitude it has undergone in Sir John Squire's modernised version of its medieval burden.

Perhaps the most exquisite deepening of shade a line has acquired by being separated from its companions is our interpretation of Virgil's

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

No poet, since the Aeneid was written two thousand years ago, but has felt in his heart and soul the beautifully poignant appeal of these words. Again and again the same cry has been let forth by others - yet never with the piercing perfection of the Virgilian phrase. Wordsworth with "The still sad music of humanity" and Wilfred Gibson with "The heartbreak at the heart of things" try to catch the Roman poet's majestic pathos - and fall short despite their fine accents by a world of difference. Virgil has a magical brevity of suggestion in his first three words and the whole line has an unaffected strength and nobility: Wordsworth with his two adjectives seems to make a slight effort, Gibson is endeavouring to impress by his repetition of the word "heart",

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while Virgil is profound without forcing his language in the least - and his rhythm is an unsurpassable aid of sound to the sense. No translation of the line into English can catch all its inner impact. Word for word, we shall have:

There are tears of things and all that is mortal

touches the heart.

An inadequate substitute on the whole - but the phrase "tears of things" is by itself flawless in summing up the fact of a fundamental sorrowfulness in the stuff of earthly life. Wherever the English language is spoken, men think of the Virgilian "tears of things" and regard that small snatch of poetic speech as the truest and loveliest bit of insight into the core of our perishable world. So it would surprise most people to learn that when taken together with the full context the Latin for that snatch loses the absolute of its wonderful significance in all English renderings I have come across. Virgil is relating how his hero Aeneas and the faithful friend Achates, after suffering shipwreck, arrive on the African shore and wander up to a temple and chance upon a frieze of engravings in which scenes of the tale of Troy are depicted. Aeneas is greatly moved by this discovery and raises a moan in which not a single English translator of Virgil from Dryden down to our day has introduced the "tears of things". When we study the original we cannot help seeing that the "of" in that phrase can have another sense in its Latin form than the possessive: it can be equivalent to "for". Often in Virgil this sense is to be found - at least once again with the very word "lachrymae". And the present context has been taken to simply demand it. The passage, if we English it in toto, is supposed to run: "What land, Achates, what region in the world is not full of our travail? Lo, Priam! Here too there are rewards for excellence, there are tears for things and what is mortal touches the heart." Evidently, if "for" substitutes "of", the meaning the world has so far put into Virgil's line evaporates. Even with "of", unless we pull the line apart from

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its companions, the great meaning is not unavoidable. The universally applicable philosophy of it is not quite gone, but the dominant note is an intense emotion applied to a particular incident with just an undertone of general reference, and even that reference has not the sudden and deep magic, the revelatory grip the line acquires when isolated.

It is difficult, though, to believe that a hyper-conscious artist like Virgil was unaware of the extra depth and felicity his line could show if presented in its own separate right and if understood with "of" rather than "for". He had the unique gift of hiding in sentences bound up with their own context a general and universal revelation. Describing, for instance, the ghosts of men whose bodies have had no burial, he speaks of their miserable agelong waiting and longing before being ferried across the underworld river Acheron to the place of blind rest:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

A line of extreme poignancy, this, - meaning (in Flecker's version)

They stretched their hands for love of the other shore.

Detached from its context it expresses the whole of human hunger through the centuries, the agonised desire for what is always beyond, what is ever inaccessible. The selfsame cry that comes to us from the verse about the "tears of things" meets us here once more: it is the typical Virgilian sadness. Though infused into particular incidents or situations the cry carries in Virgil an all-pervading tone, and as if to render it universal he gives it to us in complete lines standing like detachable poetic embodiments of a philosophical vision. The line about "lachrymae rerum" is not only complete and detachable: it is also free from any obvious links of syntax with those that precede and follow. Virgil the master-craftsman who brooded and chiselled endlessly could not

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have been oblivious of the marvel that would happen as soon as the pickers and cullers of poetry got busy.

Yes, I am sure Virgil knew his own possibilities. But not all poets do. For, they are not always open-eyed critics of themselves. Often their best work is valued by them below the really good. Poetry comes from behind and above the wakeful brain: what even the deliberate artists do is no more than break down laboriously the obstacles between the inner and the outer to afford the ultra-mental magic and mystery a clear passage undisturbed by the brain's abstract and prosaic tendencies. Even these artists - and much more those who write with rushing fluency because the intervening passage is already uncluttered - channel out utterances they do not wholly plumb. At times, in the middle of a secular pronouncement a strange sacred accent begins to ring; on other occasions, thoughts are voiced which find their full cogency in the light of years yet to be. The poetic afflatus, though operating through persons and periods, is bigger than they, and not seldom the inspirations of several hidden planes pour together. The hunt for meaning, therefore, is made a many-sided adventure and a plastic standard of understanding and judgment is introduced. This is as it should be: poetry, for all the finite matter it may hold in its embrace, is a seer of the infinite - bringing, directly or obliquely, with richness or reticence, the concrete yet boundless touch

that lends

A yonder to all ends.

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