There's music in its rattle, And gay, as for a saraband We gird us for the battle, Follow, follow, To the glorious revelry When the sabres bristle And the death shots whistle.
While encouraging these Spaniards, was Campbell aware that the saraband is a slow, melancholy dance, most un?suitable for the gorgeous revelry of battle?its steps being two forward and three back? Did he even care?
To the Poles (1851):
And have I lived to see thee, sword in hand Uprise again, immortal Polish land?
To the Germans (1832):
The spirit of Britannia
Invokes, across the main, Her sister Alemannia
To burst the tyrant's chain.
Campbell had served briefly as a volunteer when England's shores were threatened by Bonaparte; 'but oh! what fagging work this volunteering is!' he wrote; and having had a grandstand view of real war at Ratisbon? from a monastery garden near the battlefield?felt no inclination to go overseas. He confided to a friend: 'I stood with the good monks of St James to overlook a charge of Kleinau's cavalry upon the French. This proved the most important epoch of my life in point of impressions, but they are so horrible to my memory that I study to banish them.' Safe back in London, however, he could write:
The combat deepens. On, ye brave Who rush to glory or the grave! Wave, Munich, all thy banners wave
And charge with all thy chivalry!
Which reminds me of a vulgar old song:
When the bugle calls we shall march to war As we did in days gone by.
When the bugle calls, we shall march, march, march, April, May, June and July.
When the bugle calls we shall march to war And not a man will fear it?
And I don't care how soon the bloody bugle calls, So long as I don't hear it.
Campbell's Wounded Hussar had swept the country in 1797. A really successful patriotic poem should have a long, rolling metre, assisted by such feminine rhymes as beaming, streamings cherished, perished; story, glory; and be utterly nonsensical in plot:
Alone to the banks of the dark-rolling Danube Fair Adelaide hied when the battle was o'er:
'0, whither,' she cried, 'hast thou wandered, my lover? Or here dost thou welter and bleed on the shore?'
'What voice did I hear? 'twas my Henry that sighed!' All mournful she hastened; nor wandered she far,
When, bleeding and low, on the heath she descried By the light of the moon her poor wounded Hussar!
From his bosom that heaved the last torrent was streaming, And pale was his visage, deep marked with a scar!
And dim was his eye, once expressively beaming, That melted in love and that kindled in war!
For triumphs like this, Campbell was three times elected Rector of Glasgow University; and buried, on July 5, 1844, in Westminster Abbey, at the very centre of Poets' Corner. Present were Lord Macaulay, Lockhart, Brougham, Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Argyle, and a guard of grateful Polish nobles, one of whom sprinkled on the coffin a handful of earth from the grave of the patriot Kozciuzcko. . . .
Kipling's uncertainty is explained by his sense of not- belonging?in an Anglo-Indian society where, as a Bombay-born journalist without either a settled English background or a university education, he ranked below the youngest second-lieutenant in the tattiest battalion of the Indian Army. Worse, he was a Methodist, not Church of England. Yet Kipling had a quick journalistic eye and ear. Soon he revenged himself by interpreting British India to the stay-at-homes, with a good deal less sympathy for pukka sahibs than for Privates Mulvaney, Orth'ris and company, the regimental water-carrier (Junga Din, and the otherwise under-privileged. At the uge of forty-one, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Kipling claimed to be a no-nonsense poet, a mouthpiece of the common people, who swept away academic hum- hug. His Boots, boots, boots, boots! is now the best-known English poem in the Soviet Union. But when the Estab?lishment beckoned, he followed: at last squarely identify?ing himself with the Lords and Masters, rather than the 'lesser breeds within the Law', and bravely shouldering the White Man's Burden.
Kipling became the unofficial poet laureate of the British Empire just before its liquidation. He missed the official appointment only because he had earned Queen Victoria's displeasure by alluding to her as 'the Widow of Windsor'. Like Browning and Campbell, he weltered vicariously in gore, as in the climax to his fictional Ballad of the Clampherdown:
.... It was our war-ship Clampherdown, Swung round upon the tide,
Her two dumb guns glared south and north,
And the bipod and the bubbling steam ran forth, And she ground the cruiser's side.
'Captain,' they cry, 'the fight is done, They bid you send your sword.'
And he answered: 'Grapple her, stern and bow.
They have asked for the steel. They shall have it now; Out cutlasses and board!'
It was our war-ship Clampherdown Spewed up four hundred men;
And the scalded stokers yelped delight
As they rolled in the waist and heard the fight Stamp o'er their steel-walled pen.
They cleared the cruiser end to end, From conning-tower to hold.
They fought as they fought in Nelson's fleet;
They were stripped to the waist, they were bare to the feet, As it was in the days of old.
I could quote nothing from all English literature that transcended in vulgar bloody-mindedness the third of these stanzas. The stokers, no doubt ignoble Lascars, unfit to wield a white man's cutlass, are left below decks; and their screams of pain as salt water reaches the boilers and steam scalds them, are jovially interpreted as yelps of delight! 'Bubbling', by the way, has been transferred for the sake of euphony from 'blood' to 'steam'.
A frequent sign of poetic vulgarity is the use of Biblical language to heighten trivial passages. Kipling specialized not only in grandiose addresses to the Lord God of Hosts, but also in dewy-eyed quotation from the New Testament. The affected simplicity of Gethsemane shows him at his lowest:
The Garden called Gethsemane In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass?we used to pass Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane, It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair, The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there I prayed my cup might pass.
It didn't pass?it didn't pass? It didn't pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas Beyond Gethsemane.
Why, at a period in the First World War subsequent to the issue of gas-masks, as opposed to 'respirators' (probably the early summer of 1916), Picardy peasants were still interested in watching the British soldiers pass?'or halt, as it might be' ; and why they continued to occupy an area so close to the German lines that gas-masks were habit?ually shipped there; and why the pretty lass singled out this Christ-like private soldier for her French monologue, when all he could do was lie on the grass in an agony, shut his eyes and pray against gas; and why, for that matter, he did get gassed in the end?must remain mysteries. Perhaps the practical Picardaise wanted him to stop praying un petit moment, and make sure that his mask hadi its eye-pieces properly secured. . . .
Non-scxiolarly pretence at scholarship is another form of poetic vulgarity, used throughout Browning's Sordello, though he quotes only the Classics and a little Italian? not Chinese, Sanskrit or Provencal, like his modernist successors.
It is natural for young people to gather in a crowd, play the same games, use the same jargon; and if some physical misfortune or social disadvantage (rather than a rare extra gift of the spirit) differentiates one of them from his fellows, this often tempts him to some sort of megal
o?maniac over-compensation. Byron knew and regretted the colossal vulgarity which he shrouded by a cloak of aloof grandeur. It was a studious vulgarity: cosmetics and curl?papers tended his elegant beauty; an ingenious, though synthetic, verse technique smoothed his cynical Spen?serian stanzas. But he had unexpectedly come into a peerage and an estate while still 'wee Georgie Gordon with the feetsies'?whom his hysterical and unladylike mother used to send limping round the corner from her cheap Aberdeen lodgings to buy two-penny-worth of 'blue ruin'; and whom, at the age of nine, a nympho?maniac Calvinist housemaid had violently debauched.
His unease was prodigious. As he himself confesses in Childe Harold:
His cup was quaff d too quickly, and he found The dregs were wormwood; but he fill'd again, And from a purer fount, on holier ground, And deem'd its spring perpetual; but in vain! Still round him clung invisibly a chain Which gall'd for ever, fettering though unseen, And heavy though it clank'd not; worn with pain, Which pined although it spoke not, and grew keen,
Entering with every step to look through many a scene.
Shelley noted in a letter to Peacock:
Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person and, as such, is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as a hatter?
Byron adored no Muse, but acted as male Muse to scores of infatuated women who, like Lady Caroline Lamb, knew that he was 'mad, bad, dangerous to know', adding: 'His beautiful face is my fate.' I pair Byron and Nero as the two most dangerously talented bounders of all time.
Swinburne's was an inverted vulgarity. One of his grandfathers had been an admiral; the other an earl. After a healthy North Country childhood, he went on to Eton and Oxford. Later, he tried to edge, not into high society, but into the 'fleshy' Bohemian set of pre- Raphaelite poets and painters. For them he celebrated the roses and raptures of vice; though, whereas Byron could wearily boast of having enjoyed over two hundred mistresses and scores of catamites, the impotent eroticism of Swinburne's verse, even when it celebrated merely vegetable Nature, leaves a worse taste in the mouth than Childe Harold:,
by the north sea
A land that is lonelier than ruin; A sea that is stranger than death;
Far fields that a rose never blew in,
Wan waste where the winds lack breath;
Waste endless and boundless and flowerless But of marsh-blossoms fruitless as free;
Where earth lies exhausted, as powerless To strive with the sea.
Far flickers the flight of the swallows, Far flutters the weft of the grass
Spun dense over desolate hollows
More pale than the clouds as they pass;
Thj?k woven as the weft of a witch is
Round the heart of a thrall that hath sinned
Whose youth and the wrecks of its riches Are waifs on the wind.
Nineteenth-century poetic vulgarity is characterized by over-alliteration, ingenious rhymes?such as blew in and ruin^ riches, which is?and a reckless disregard of prose sense. In Swinburne's windless, endless, boundless waste, the weft of grass, he says, fluttered far?spun dense over desolate hollows that were paler than the passing clouds, and thick woven as the weft of a witch around the heart of a sinner whose youthful charms had become like waifs in the wind. . . . But did a wind flutter the grass and drive the clouds, or did it not? And how can a waste region of England adjacent to the North Sea be endless and bound?less? And how can a weft be spun? And if the grass had been spun densely over the desolate hollows, who could tell whether they were as pale as the clouds that passed? And how pale were the clouds anyhow? And how thick a weft does a witch weave around the sinner's heart? And how do fruitless marsh-flowers spread themselves freely across the exhausted earth?
Keats, though no gentleman either by birth or educa?tion, had a genuine instinct for poetry and poetic principle; and the close attention he paid to craftsmanship made him recognize vulgarity in others and, as a rule, avoid it himself. He particularly lamented the fate of Burns:
Poor unfortunate fellow?how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self-defence to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and in things attainable?that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not attainable.
Vulgarity in religious dress is insidious; and Keats, who in this letter has been denouncing the hypocritical Kirk, was evidently referring to Burn's Cottar's Saturday Night, an 'unco-guid' set-piece that contradicted his natural randi- ness and imitated Robert Fergusson's more authentic The Farmer's Wife.
Almost every poet starts to write before finding his own voice, and puffs out his borrowed feathers. Every theatrical impersonation, every political, theological, or philosophical hand-out passed off as his own, is a vulgarity. The writing of true poems happens so unpredictably that the poet is beset by the temptation to write when not in the mood. He may think that this can be induced by withdrawing to a glade or quiet, book-filled study, or by violent adventure among corsairs, alguazils, barmecides, and their modern equivalents. It cannot be.
No poet has yet solved the main problem: how to main?tain the gift of certitude. Always to be in love: that is one recommendation. To treat money and fame with equal nonchalance, is another. To remain independent, is a third. To prize personal honour, is a fourth. To make the English language one's constant study, is a fifth. . . . Yet lightning strikes where and when it wills. No one ever knows. It is easy to take up a pen at random and plead: 'I'm just keeping my hand in.' But nine-tenths of what passes as English poetry is the product of either careerism, or keeping one's hand in: a choice between vulgarity and banality.
Technique in Poetry
God, according to a Hebrew myth, promised our father Adam the helpmate he needed, and invited him to watch while the divine fingers built up a woman's anatomy from primeval sludge. They extemporized bones, tissues, muscles, blood, teeth, brains and glandular secretions, wove them neatly together, co-ordinated their functions, covered the whole ingenious apparatus with the smooth?est of cuticles, and embellished it with tufts of hair in selected places. This technical demonstration caused Adam such disgust that, when the First Eve stood up in all her beauty and smiled at him, he turned his back on her. God therefore removed the First Eve and behaved with greater circumspection: He formed the Second Eve from Adam's rib while he slept, then ordered the Archangel Michael to plait her hair and adorn her in bridal array. Adam woke and was enchanted.
I inherit Adam's mistrust of creative technique. It is grammarians, not poets, who lay down the rules of prosody, name metres, list different varieties of poetic licence?deducing them from Greek, Latin, Italian or French practice?as of universal application. English criticism began in Tudor times with the grammarians; und though some, such as George Puttenham, realized that English poetry had its own wayward genius, different from that of the Romance languages, they nevertheless ngreed that it must be intellectually disciplined and dedicated to certain social uses. Among these, Puttenham instances the Reporting of the Famous Lives of Princes, the Reproval of Vice, the Treatment of Honest and Profitable Sciences; Solemn Rejoicings at Marriages;
Memorials to the Dead. Puttenham links poetic art so securely with the art of rhetoric that, when he has dis?cussed the mathematical rules of metre and proportion, which ensure sweet and tuneful sounds, he next turns to the problem of poetic ornament:
And as we see in these great Mesdames of honour, who be they never so comely and beautiful, yet if they want their courtly habilements, or at least such other apparel as custom and civility have ordained to cover their naked bodies, would be half-ashamed or greatly out of countenance to be seen in that sort, and perchance do then think themselves more amiable in every man's eye when they be in their richest attire?suppose of silks or tissues and costly embroideries? than wh&ruthey go in cloth or in any plain and simple apparel. Even so cannot our Poesie show itself either gallant or gorgeous if any limb be le
ft naked and bare and not clad in his kindly clothes and colours, such as may convey them somewhat out of sight from the common course of ordinary speech and capacity of the vulgar judgement, and yet, being artificially handled, must needs yield it much more beauty and com?mendation. This Ornament we speak of is given to it by figures and figurative speeches, which be the flowers, as it were, and colours that a Poet setteth upon his language of art, as the embroiderer doth his stones and pearls and passments of gold upon the stuff of a princely garment. . . .
Ornament, as such, should not concern poets, although completely naked poems spring only from extreme passion in love or war. It is true that beautiful women, because of 'custom or civility'?not to mention variations of climate?wear clothes as a rule: yet, if truly beautiful and not mere lumps of handsome flesh, they dress for their own pleasure, rather than let fashion-designers (even the Archangel Michael himself) bedizen them for Adam's gratification. And any jewel a woman wears is not mere ornament but a chosen extension of her inner loveliness.
Grammarians insist that a simple idea may be so ornamented by artifice as to become poetic, and that the reader must applaud the ingenuity of its transformation. Poetical artifice entered our Universities from Rome by way of France; Ovid and Virgil were the masters on whom all students must model themselves. Ovid wrote in the Fasti:
Tres ubi luciferos veniens praemiserit Eos
Tempora nocturnis aequa diurna feres.
Inde quater pastor saturos ubi clauserit hoedos
Canuerint herbae rore recente quater,
Janus adorandus, cumque hoc Concordia mitis. . . .
When the breaking dawn shall have sent before her three light-bearing days, thou wilt have the hours of day equal to those of night; and when from this the shepherd shall four times have penned his well-fed kids, four times the grass become white with fresh-fallen dew, then Janus and with him Mild Concord will demand adoration. . . .
In simple English: 'Three days later comes the vernal equinox; after four more, the feasts of Janus and Concord will be celebrated.' Note the superfluousness of the adjectives?breaking dawn, well-fed kids, fresh-fallen dew, mild Concord. Every dawn breaks-, and even if all the shepherd's kids were not well fed, their hungry bleat- ings would not affect the Calendar; dew is always fresh- fallen, and Concord always mild. In any case, Ovid was writing not for shepherds, but for Augustus's City court?iers?few of whom can ever have seen the inside of a goat pen.