The Thinking Corner

Time's Gap

Who could have believed that from Edith Sitwell of the rather equivocal fame of self-consciously clever and deliberately perverse effusions like

Jane, Jane! tall as a crane,

The light comes creating down the lane,

one would get the magnificent lines:

That old rag-picker blown along the street

Was once great Venus. But now Age unkind

Has shrunken her so feeble and so small -

Weak as a babe. And she who gave the Lion's kiss

Has now all Time's gap for her piteous mouth.

Aeschylus might have had a hand in them - Aeschylus of the grandiose and compact audacities. Marlowe might have moulded them - Marlowe with his sublime violence. Here is not only the technical mastery of a Major Poet - a felicitous force of word, an expressive play of rhythm, a living movement of metre. Here is also a Major Poet's keenness and depth of vision - in a sort of crescendo reaching its climax in the last line. The four lines preceding the last make a striking picture of contrasts, intensifying the fall that is its significance. But the last is more than a spectacle shaking the heart, it is a piece of philosophic insight touching the very soul in us and the poetry of it is one of the world's summits of inspiration, fusing that insight by a flash of rare imaginative and verbal genius with the idea of an old woman's toothless mouth. Such a mouth - caved-in, devoid of grip and charm, vacant of the gleam of laughter - becomes a symbol of what the poet feels to be the basic nature of the world: a lack in the very stuff of existence, a gap that is the essence of all time! To Edith Sitwell the whole process of earthly life seems a revolving of empty purpose and hollow

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activity; everything temporal is fundamentally futile, miserable, issueless. And this sense is conveyed to us overwhelmingly by her adding, to the sheer condensed power of the phrases in which it is couched, that splendid foil of opposite meaning in the expression, "she who gave the Lion's kiss", and by carrying the heightened vision of the words in a scheme of rhythm and metre marvellously apt.

It is worth looking at the scheme. Mark first how the m-sound and the p-sound recur - a run of labials bringing the lips into pronounced play as though to emphasise the fact that the mouth is being spoken of. Note next that these sounds are equally distributed between the entities to be combined - namely, "Time's gap" and "piteous mouth": thus a sort of resemblance and equivalence is set up. Then observe, in the different way each pair of "m" and "p" functions, the suggestive clinching of that resemblance and equivalence in identity. The words "Time" and "gap" end with labials and have a final shutting of the lips as their characteristic, while "piteous" and "mouth" begin with labials and are characterised by an initial opening of the lips: the effect is as of Time's gap being enclosed and held within the mouth and of the piteous mouth breaking and widening out into that gap! By this inspired device the two things mentioned are led to participate in each other, as it were, and their fusion in the imaginative philosophy of the poet is rendered natural, logical, inevitable. Even without this device, the pronouncing of the phrase "Time's gap" tends to create a kind of collapsing of the lips upon each other, somewhat akin to the soft unresistant closure of the lips of a toothless mouth; but the suggestion would not be so complete and convincing, nor, again, would the voidness that is the meaning common to both the entities be completely and convincingly suggested if there were not the special sound produced by the words "Now all" before "Time's gap" and a special disposition of metrical accents in the line. "Now all" has a ring of open space, of a large hollow - particularly as one word terminates with a long vowel-sound and the other

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begins with a similar though not the same form of quantity, so that the non-separation of the two vowel-lengths by any consonant-sound increases and intensifies the general ring of emptiness and wideness. Lastly, the role of the sibilant note has to be appreciated; it runs over from the concluding part of the line before, and what is there a gust of aggressive strength turns gradually here a fading sigh in tune with the tragic significance and the poet's compassion.

As to the metre, the chief features are the dense stressing of the first half of the line, the sparse stressing of the second, and the inverted foot in which the two halves meet. In the first half, "now" bears a semi-stress, "all" a full one and so do "Time's" and "gap": only "has" is almost unaccented. The three full stresses coming together serve a double purpose. Seeming to make a tremendous weight sinking down and more down and still more down, deep and deeper and yet deeper, they suggest the gap to be endlessly abysmal. Again, they seem to mass close and then drive in so huge a fact as "all Time's gap" into so small a space as an old woman's shrunken mouth. The line's other half has two stresses thrown among four light syllables. The light syllables are a way of suggesting vacuity - a way all the more appropriate when the vacuity in question is a small space, a feeble thing. They help also to release in a delicately wavering flow the emotion that is getting pent-up, close-knit, compactly intense through the accumulated stresses -and the glide anapaest of the final foot, slightly hurrying the voice, adds to the movement an extra note of poignance. The inverted foot in the middle of the line - joining the two halves - introduces, by holding a stress where a "slack" should be and vice versa, a sudden break which gives not only increased prominence to the word "gap" but also a hint of the cracking up and giving way implied in this word, a hint supported by the falling movement characteristic of the trochee.

It may be argued that, though perfect vitality of metre and rhythm as well as of words deftly arranged has produced

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poetry of a high order, I am not justified in assigning to the vision of this poetry a keenness and depth and a philosophic insight touching the very soul in us. The reader may ask : "Is not the vision lop-sided, blind to life's beauty and richness and conducive to a defeatist despair? Would not penetration and profundity lead to a more balanced, a less pessimistic philosophy? Isn't this a negation of all soul-feeling, a sheering off from the soul rather than a touching of it?" If the "spirit" of Edith Sitwell's lines could answer back, it would say:

"No, I do not exaggerate one aspect of life at the expense of another. I do not shut my eyes to beauty and richness, for I actually speak of them, I refer to great Venus and the Lion's kiss. I know that beauty and richness are present in life - yet is it not true that they are being constantly assaulted and that life ends not with beauty and richness but with ugliness and impotence, old age and death, the decrepitude of the body and the ultimate decline into dust? There is here no permanence of beauty, no continuance of richness. Although they come and cast a radiance over us, their ostensible end is the opposite of themselves. If through privation we could attain to plenitude and, after suffering and frailty, reach happiness and strength on earth, then the earth-process would be a praiseworthy phenomenon. If old age and death, if the dropping of the flame of life were not the tragic finale, then Time would not be the ghastly gap that it is. All our splendours are made of fragile stuff: they carry within them a seed of their own perishing: they are instinct with misfortune and mortality. Did not Virgil cry, sunt lacrimae rerum - 'there are tears of things'? Did not Nashe lament:

Brightness falls from the air,

Queens have died young and fair,

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

Has not Housman declared that pride and pageantry and power and passion

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Walk the resounding way

To the still dwelling?

And what about the greater than these - Gautama Buddha? Has he not summed up all earth-existence in one word; dukkha, sorrow? Surely he did not mean that pleasures were not there; his vision cut through these pleasures and found in them that essence of all sorrow - impermanence; and he saw too that the ultimate of each life, however sprinkled with passing pleasures, is a weakening of limbs and a failure of energy, a wrinkling of beauty and a loss of richness. No sensitive soul but must feel all Time to be a gap. Indeed, this feeling and none other is the first true sign of the soul in us. Men who are undeveloped never realise earth-existence to be a ringing of diverse changes on a fundamental theme of misery. They suffer, yet never pass a disillusioned judgment on life. And they do not because there is not roused in their consciousness a supreme ideal beyond themselves, a longing for perfection, a dream of the immortal and the eternal. To have an awakened soul is inevitably to perceive Time's gap, the enormous inadequacy of what the earth has to give, the basic incapacity of earth to satisfy us and to bring us our fulfilment. No doubt, this is a negative perception and we must have a positive one of the Divine, the Deathless, the Ever-luminous. But the negative is an immense necessity, and without its burning within our heart like a hunger that finds no food in temporal shows, how shall we turn our eyes inward and upward to the Godlike? This negative is pregnant with God's plenty, and except from its dark womb no leap can there be towards the boundless Light. The Light that is boundless may be attainable only after death and send us during life no more than a few broken rays, or else by some miracle it may be caught even here and now; but always we must have, in order to fill with its immeasurable beatitude and power, a vast void within us created by a sense of all Time's gap! Such a sense does not land us in defeatist despair: it is born from the deific, the perfect, lying secret in

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the human, the fallible, and by it alone is our soul touched through earthly wrappings and bestirred to quest for the Absolute. Can you deny it keenness and depth, can you refuse to call it a philosophic insight in which Truth is a-glow?"

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