XIICONNECTION OF POETRY AND HUMOUR

IT was no accident that gave Chaucer, Shakespeare and Keats a very sly sense of humour, because humour is surely only another product of the same process that makes poetry and poets—the reconciliation of incongruities.

When, for instance, Chaucer says that one of his Canterbury characters could trip and dance “after the schole of Oxenforde” he is saying two things:—

and to point the joke he adds to “trip and dance” the absurd “and with his legges casten to and fro.” A sympathetic grin, as poets and other conjurors know, is the best possible bridge for a successful illusion.Coleridge was the first writer, so far as I know, to see the connection between poetry and humour, but his argument which uses the Irish Bull “I was a fine child but they changed me” to prove the analogy, trails off disappointingly.

IDEALLY speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything with them. The nymph, the swain, the faun, and the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate themes of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl Guides, or the Prohibition Question, the only difference being a practical one; the second category may be found unsuitable for the imaginative digestion because these words are still somehow uncooked; in the former case they are unsuitable because overcooked, rechauffé, tasteless. The cooking process is merely that of constant use. When a word or a phrase is universally adopted and can be used in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, or in a literary review without italics, inverted commas or capital letters, then it is ready for use in poetry.

As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has pointed out in his admirable pamphlet “Poetry and Contemporary Speech,” the poet will always be best advised to choose as the main basis of his diction the ordinary spoken language of his day; the reason being that words grow richer by daily use and take on subtle associations which the artificially bred words of literary or technical application cannot acquire with such readiness; the former have therefore greater poetic possibilities in juxtaposition.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of reference.

ART of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the painter says “That’s really good to paint”and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from theLondon Mercury.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more thesubjectof the poem than the murder of an Archduke was the cause of the late European War.

Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously (though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.

These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden ageof disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,

“Oh then my heart with horror fillsAnd shudders with the daffodils.”

For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out intheirPoetry Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”

Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value ofWordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” in the religious argument, and would not be interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and disappointed age. But if he were to go into the psychological question and become doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have not as many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, whether indeed the grown mind does not purposely forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected Wordsworth of reasoning from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a good poem after all. At which conclusion even the most pagan and revolutionary of modern bards would raise a furious protest; if the poem holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly, convincingly and with passion—as Wordsworth did—the glory and the beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond reach of the scientific lecturer’s pointer.

THE limitation ofVers Libre, which I regard as only our old friend, Prose Poetry, broken up in convenient lengths, seems to be that the poet has not the continual hold over his reader’s attention that a regulated (this does not mean altogether “regular”) scheme of verse properly usedwould give him. The temporary loss of control must be set off against the freedom whichvers libre-ists claim from irrelevant or stereotyped images suggested by the necessity of rhyme or a difficult metre.

This is not to say that a poet shouldn’t start his race from what appears to hardened traditionalists as about ten yards behind scratch; indeed, if he feels that this is the natural place for him, he would be unwise to do otherwise. But my contention is thatvers librehas a serious limitation which regulated verse has not. Invers librethere is no natural indication as to how the lines are to be stressed. There are thousands of lines of Walt Whitman’s, over the pointing of which, and the intended cadence, elocutionists would disagree; and this seems to be leaving too much to chance.

I met in a modernvers librepoem the line spoken by a fallen angel, “I am outcast of Paradise”; but how was I to say it? What clue had I to the intended rhythm, in a poem without any guiding signs? In regulated verse the reader is compelled to accentuate as the poet determines. Here is the same line introduced into three nonsensical examples of rhyming:—

Satan to the garden cameAnd found his Lordship walking lame,“Give me manna, figs and spice,I am outcast of Paradise.”

or quite differently:—

“Beryls and porphyries,Pomegranate juice!I am outcast of Paradise(What was the use?)

or one can even make the reader accept a third alternative, impressively dragging at the last important word:—

He came to his Lordship thenFor manna, figs and spice,“I am chief of the Fallen Ten,I am outcast of Paradise.”

The regulating poet must of course make sure at the beginning of the poem that there is no possible wrong turning for the reader to take. Recently, and since writing the above, an elder poet, who asks to remain anonymous, has given me an amusing account of how he mis-read Swinburne’s “Hertha,” the opening lines of which are:—

I am that which began;Out of me the years roll;Out of me, God and man;I am equal and whole;God changes, and man, and the form of them bodily. I am the soul.

My informant read the short lines as having four beats each:—

I´ am thát || whích begán;Oút of mé || the yeárs róll;Oút of mé || Gód and mán;I´ am équal || ánd whóle

and thought this very noble and imposing, though the “équal ánd whóle” was perhaps a trifle forced. The next stanza told him that something was amiss and he discovered that it was only a two-beat line after all. “It was Swinburne’s impudence in putting the Almighty’s name in an unaccented place of the line, and accenting the name of Man, that put me on the wrong track,” he said. Swinburne’s fault here, for such as agree with the accusation, was surely in his wrong sense of material; he was making muslin do the work of camel’s hair cloth. He was imposing a metre on his emotions, whereas the emotions should determine the metre—and even then constantly modify it. Apropos of thevers libre-ists, my friend also denied that there was such a thing asvers librepossible, arguing beyond refutation that if it wasversit couldn’t be trulylibreand if it was trulylibreit couldn’t possibly come under the category ofvers.

Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of thevers libreschool of today is that the standard which most of its professors set themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences of standard prose. The following news item has nothad a word changed since I found it inThe Daily Mirror.

Jóhn FráinOf BállyghaderéenWas indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther;He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder;The júry foúnd him unáble to pléadAnd hé was commíttedTó an as´ylum.

One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The cannyvers libristgets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls “cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose;thissentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose.

PERHAPS some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill.

But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid down by professors of dynamics—only for short distances, I admit; still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did the mountain stir?”

THE psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea, even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus musing,the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title. The poet says:—

“I came unto a lustie greene vallayFull of floures ...... riding an easy paasI fell in thought of joy full desperateWith great disease and paine, so that I wasOf all lovers the most unfortunate ...”

Death has separated him from the mistress he loved.... We know that Keats’ heart had been hot within for a long while, and the suppressed emotional conflict that made him keep silent and muse is all too plain. He has a growing passion for the “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange ... MINX” Fanny Brawne; she it was who had doubtless been looking on him “as she did love” and “sighing full sore,” and this passion comes into conflict with the apprehension, not yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by hispoetry and the death that would cut his poetry short. Of shutting “her wild, wild eyes with kisses four” which makes the almost intolerable climax to the ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother George in America, with a triviality and a light-heartedness that can carry no possible conviction. He is concealing the serious conditions of body and of heart which have combined to bring a “loitering indolence” on his writing, now his livelihood; he does not want George to read between the lines; at the same time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unprepossessing portraits of her that John himself has given, but the memory of their beloved brother Tom’s death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. George had sailed to America not realizing how ill Tom had been, John had come back tired out from Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips in horrid warning gaping, and, as the final horrible duty, had shut his brother’s wild staring eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny’s mocking smile and sidelong glance play hide and seek in his mind with Tom’s dreadful death-mask. It was about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing with a sudden sense of the mortality of poets, to “carry away the memory” of meeting Coleridge, asked to press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, turned to his friend Green and said, “There is deathin that hand.” He described it afterwards as “a heat and a dampness”—but “fever-dew” is Keats’ own word.

There are many other lesser reminiscences and influences in the poem, on which we might speculate—Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, Malory’s “Lady of the Lake,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with its singing maiden and the poet’s honey-dew, traceable in Keats’ “honey wild and manna dew,” an echo from Browne “Let no bird sing,” and from Wordsworth “her eyes are wild”; but these are relatively unimportant.

History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable” foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage? When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the real reason of the “kissesfour”? was it not perhaps four because of the painful doubleness of the tragic vision—was it extravagant to suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the eyes of death?

The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the “kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:—

... there she gazed and sighèd deep,And here I shut her wild sad eyes—So kissed asleep.

Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning “wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would have the same effect.

In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully, with nodawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth.

IT is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, “The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries.

This is the poem:—

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT

He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,Holed through and through with shot,A sabre sweep had hacked him deepTwixt neck and shoulderknot ...The potman cannot well recall,The ostler never knew,Whether his day was Malplaquet,The Boyne or Waterloo.But there he hangs for tavern sign,With foolish bold regardFor cock and hen and loitering menAnd wagons down the yard.Raised high above the hayseed worldHe smokes his painted pipe,And now surveys the orchard ways,The damsons clustering ripe.He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,Where country neighbours lie,Their brief renown set lowly down;Hisname assaults the sky.He grips the tankard of brown aleThat spills a generous foam:Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winksAt drunk men lurching home.No upstart hero may usurpThat honoured swinging seat;His seasons pass with pipe and glassUntil the tale’s complete.And paint shall keep his buttons brightThough all the world’s forgotWhether he died for England’s prideBy battle, or by pot.

He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,Holed through and through with shot,A sabre sweep had hacked him deepTwixt neck and shoulderknot ...

The potman cannot well recall,The ostler never knew,Whether his day was Malplaquet,The Boyne or Waterloo.

But there he hangs for tavern sign,With foolish bold regardFor cock and hen and loitering menAnd wagons down the yard.

Raised high above the hayseed worldHe smokes his painted pipe,And now surveys the orchard ways,The damsons clustering ripe.

He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,Where country neighbours lie,Their brief renown set lowly down;Hisname assaults the sky.

He grips the tankard of brown aleThat spills a generous foam:Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winksAt drunk men lurching home.

No upstart hero may usurpThat honoured swinging seat;His seasons pass with pipe and glassUntil the tale’s complete.

And paint shall keep his buttons brightThough all the world’s forgotWhether he died for England’s prideBy battle, or by pot.

And this is the letter:

“April, 1921.“My dear Mr. Graves,—“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General Elliott” inThe Spectator. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the General Elliott himself, or ratherthe duplicate presentment of him—nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam—nor did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass—and alas, nor did paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not (like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a spurious General Elliott? Heshouldnot die; the post from which he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come within the range.... MayIhelp to restore him?“Sincerely,“J—— B——“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”

“April, 1921.

“My dear Mr. Graves,—

“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General Elliott” inThe Spectator. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the General Elliott himself, or ratherthe duplicate presentment of him—nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam—nor did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass—and alas, nor did paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not (like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a spurious General Elliott? Heshouldnot die; the post from which he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come within the range.... MayIhelp to restore him?

“Sincerely,“J—— B——“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”

To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:—

My dear Colonel B——... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which—as midwives would say—leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the child.The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only“General Elliott” I know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I remember only a boardTHE GENERAL ELLIOTT.MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT.and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779 to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my head—more or less as I quote it:—“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,Or Minden or WaterlooWhere the bullet struck your shoulderknot,And the sabre shore your arm,And the bayonet ran you through?”On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands. There appearto be more than one set of conflicting emotions reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A. idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t answer. I analyze the final version as follows:—1.A.Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern warfare.B.Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their recklessness of the lives of others.C.Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job surprisingly well.2.A.My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)—“The Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of “General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.”B.I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the reserves into a gap in the first line.3.A.My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national beverage.B.A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a couplet—“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died by musket or by pot.”There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, but this seems enough for an answer....Yours sincerely,R. G.—(late Captain R. W. F.)

My dear Colonel B——

... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which—as midwives would say—leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the child.

The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only“General Elliott” I know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I remember only a board

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT.MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT.

and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779 to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my head—more or less as I quote it:—

“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,Or Minden or WaterlooWhere the bullet struck your shoulderknot,And the sabre shore your arm,And the bayonet ran you through?”

On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands. There appearto be more than one set of conflicting emotions reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A. idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t answer. I analyze the final version as follows:—

There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, but this seems enough for an answer....

Yours sincerely,

R. G.—(late Captain R. W. F.)

Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved “The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by impersonal logic.

It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very differentmatter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug cipher.

APIECE with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible, the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the symbolism, I wrote:-

Then speaking from his double headThe glorious fearful monster said,“I amYesand I amNoBlack as pitch and white as snow;Love me, hate me, reconcileHate with love, perfect with vile,So equal justice shall be doneAnd life shared between moon and sun.Nature for you shall curse or smile;A poet you shall be, my son.”

The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested. Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing—but making the menmove; then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipeand a dog, for a pleasant walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name ofMad Jackin a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life. This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”?

That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I began writing:—

“I begin to know at last,These nights when I sit down to rhyme,The form and measure of that vastGod we call Poetry....... I see he has two headsLike Janus, calm, benignant this,That grim and scowling. His beard spreadsFrom chin to chin; this God has powerImmeasurable at every hour....The black beard scowls and says to me“Human frailty though you beYet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;They’ll obey you in the end,Hill and field, river and marshShall obey you, hop and skipAt the terrour of your whip,To your gales of anger bend.The pale beard smiles and says in turn“True, a prize goes to the sternBut sing and laugh and easily runThrough the wide airs of my plain;Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,And draw my creatures with soft song;They shall follow you alongGraciously, with no doubt or pain.”Then speaking from his double head, etc.

“I begin to know at last,These nights when I sit down to rhyme,The form and measure of that vastGod we call Poetry....

... I see he has two headsLike Janus, calm, benignant this,That grim and scowling. His beard spreadsFrom chin to chin; this God has powerImmeasurable at every hour....

The black beard scowls and says to me“Human frailty though you beYet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;They’ll obey you in the end,Hill and field, river and marshShall obey you, hop and skipAt the terrour of your whip,To your gales of anger bend.

The pale beard smiles and says in turn“True, a prize goes to the sternBut sing and laugh and easily runThrough the wide airs of my plain;Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,And draw my creatures with soft song;They shall follow you alongGraciously, with no doubt or pain.”

Then speaking from his double head, etc.

The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary term of imprisonment.

And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;—

Here ranted Isaac’s elder son,The proud shag-breasted godless oneFrom whom observant Smooth-cheek stoleBirth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul.

John King is dead, that good old manYou ne’er shall see him more.He used to wear a long brown coatAll buttoned down before.

Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would appear mutilated as follows:—

Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust:His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust.Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smockWhile frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock.

Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad” and watch the effect it hasin our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for buttoning it.GoodJohn King wore a long brown coat because he was old and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes.BadJohn King kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown coat.

The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as Blake’s “Infant Joy” from theSongs of Innocence, a poem over which for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved for:—

But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantlyHast taught me etc, etc.

An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than logicalization—perhaps even a profitable trade—would be to extract the essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguisethe self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English Poetry in our schools.

Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those of childhood.

This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imaginativechildhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.

ONE of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he belongs really tothe sixteenth. English has never recovered its happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants.

It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But I can’t do that in poetry, everythingisrelevant; it is an omnibus of an art—a public omnibus.

There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not, like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor, once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or the reproducer as the plastic arts.

BOUND up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the senses, take his “Song about Myself”:—

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