Mammon and the Black Goddess

  Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry, accepts this whole cosmetic parlour of Classical verse-technique as necessary for the production of rich conceits that guide man's soul to moral virtue, courage and erudition; adding, however:

  Certainly I must confess my own barbarousness. I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas [Chevy Chase] that I found not my heart moved more than by a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude; which, being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work if trimmed with the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?

  Now, Pindar could never have begun a poem with:

  The stout Earl of Northumberland A vow to God did make. . . .

  but would have written:

  0 Queenly Muse, our Mother, come, I beseech thee, on the festal dajs^of the Omnipotent Christchild who bountifully redeemed us from sin: come visiting the spacious halls of our impregnable New Castle that beetles in majesty above the goodly Tynian water. For lo, youthful craftsmen of honey- sweet triumphal songs, skilled also in laments, there attend in long desire for thy voice. Various deeds thirst for various rewards, yet the hunting of high-stepping, lotus-cropping deer that rove the rugged Cheviotian hills, calleth beyond all things for the meed of song, especially when mighty champions contend together in honour, each assuring for himself the certain glory of carrying home in well-wrought horse-drawn wains tasty haunches of unnumbered antlered ones.

  It would have taken Pindar a whole page to trim with gorgeous eloquence such stanzas as these:

  It began upon a Monynday

  Ere daylight did appear The drivers through the woodes went To raise the fallow deer.

  The bowmen cleft them to the hearts,

  As down the brae they came, And greyhounds through the greves did run? To them it was good game.

  Two centuries later, Dr Johnson wrote about Chevy- Chase-.

  Addison descended now and then to lower disquisitions than his praise of Milton. By a serious display of the beauties of Chevy Chase he exposed himself to the ridicule of Wagstaff and to the contempt of Dennis who, considering the fundamen?tal position that Chevy Chase pleases, and ought to please, because it is natural, observes: 'There is a way of deviating from nature by bombast or tumour, which soars above nature and enlarges images beyond their real bulk; by affectation which forsakes nature in quest of something unsuitable; and by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintliness and diminution, by obscuring its appearances and weakening its effects. In Chevy Chase there is not much of either bombast or affectation, but there is a chill, lifeless imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less im?pression in the mind.'

  The Classicists thus ask us to choose between the 'chill and lifeless imbecility' of Chevy Chase and such 'supreme excellence' as Addison's Letter from Italy which, Dr Johnson says, has 'always been praised but never beyond its merit, being more correct, with less appearance of labour and more elegant with less ambition of ornament, than any of his other poems'.

  a letter from italy (To the Right Hon. Charles Lord Halifax, 1701)

  While you, my lord, the rural shades admire, And from Britannia's public posts retire, Nor longer, her ungrateful sons to please, For their advantage sacrifice your ease; Me into foreign realms my fate conveys Through nations fruitful of immortal lays, Where the soft season and inviting clime

  Conspire to trouble your repose with rhyme. . . . etc. *

  I have elsewhere explained the difference between Apol?lonian poetry and Muse poetry. That Pindar and Addison claim to have the Muse in their pockets, complicates the situation. Yet the truth is that Chevy Chase moved Sir Philip Sidney's heart more than a trumpet because the unknown rude crowder who composed it was himself so moved; and that the Apollonians decry all emotional im?pulses which have not been modified and ennobled, after a grounding in the humanities, by the acquisition of Classical technique. Technique should not be equated with craftsmanship. Technique is psychological know-how. The technician assumes that poems can be constructed like explosive missiles and aimed at a given target; he des?pises mere craftsmen for their intellectual sloth. Eliot, Pound, ahtkthe later Yeats (still praised by English and American literary journals as the 'real masters') have technique; Hardy and Frost had only craftsmanship.

  Technique ignores the factor of magic; craftsmanship presupposes it. A journeyman, after seven years as appren?tice, will get the feel of his materials and learn what quiet miracles can be done with them. A small part of this knowledge is verbally communicable; the rest is incom?municable?except to fellow-craftsmen who already pos?sess it. The technician's disregard of this inexplicable element, magic, in painting, sculpture, medicine, music and poetry?on the ground that it cannot be demonstrated under laboratory conditions?accounts for the present dis?mal decline in all arts. A true poem is best regarded as already existing before it has been composed: with com?position as the act of deducing its entirety from a single

  key phrase that swims into the poet's mind.

  *

  Here are two well-known pieces of Tennyson's, The Eagle and Move Eastward, Happy Earth, printed on the same page in his Collected Poems and forced on me, when

  I was seven or eight years old, as works of genius. The Eagle is subtitled 'A Fragment', suggesting that a longer poem went wrong and that he destroyed all but six sound lines. Whenever this happens to a poet, he should justify by careful craftsmanship the publication of what is salved. But has Tennyson done so?

  He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

  Close to the sun in lonely lands,

  Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

  The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

  He watches from his mountain walls,

  And like a thunderbolt he falls.

  My minimum requirement of a poem is that it should make prose sense as well as poetic sense; one main dif?ference between prose and poetry being that prose engages only a small part of the reader's attention. Ideally, a poem should induce in him the same trance of heightened sensibility under which the poet wrote, and make him aware of all the multiple meanings that stretch out in vistas from it. Here, Tennyson's technique has been deliberately impressionistic?he has, in fact, taken no pains to say what he means?and, although his resonant voice with the slight Norfolk burr might have persuaded his hearers that these two stanzas make prose sense (the ear being easily deceived), the reading eye rejects them.

  Persistent alliteration pleases children, who enjoy 'One old ox opening oysters', and 'Two toads terribly tired, try?ing to trot to Tilbury'. And it pleased simple Anglo- Saxons:

  With Vandals I was and with Vaerns and Vikings;

  With Saxons I was and with Syegs and Swordsmen;

  With Franks I was, with Frisians and Frumtings. . . .

  But when, in a Victorian three-line rhyming stanza, four c's appear in a row?clasp, crag, crooked and close?fol?lowed by the two l's of lonely lands, we expect the last line to yield an important and equally alliterative statement:

  He clasps the crag with crooked hands Close to the sun in lonely lands. . . .

  Yet,

  Ring'd with the azure world he stands . . .

  disappoints expectation, and adds nothing to the picture. Since the eagle perches on his crag close to the sun, a back?ground of blue sky has already been presumed. Besides, it is not the world which is blue, but only the sky. And why 'he clasps the crag with crooked hands'? Though few men are born with prehensile feet, 'hands' might still have passed muster in a portrait of this humanized eagle, had Tenny?son not followed it with 'he stands'. If the eagle stands on his hands, then his wings must necessarily be feet. . . .

  Once one thinks along these lines, the poem collapses. Crooked is unnecessary: eagles' claws are always crooked. Lands is seen to be a rhyme chosen to go with hands and stands; for the eagle can stand only
in one land, not several. To present him as 'close to the sun' is hardly fair ?what are a few hundred feet, compared with 92,000,000 miles! Nor is he even flying high above the mountain; but grounded on a crag. . . .

  Azure is a purely heraldic term for 'blue', and if Tennyson thought of the eagle as a heraldic charge? Azure-, below a sun in its splendour or, an eagle of the same, ungled and langed argent?he should have made this clear. Ringed with azure is not the language of heraldry.

  ^ The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

  He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls. . . .

  Why is the bird's attention concentrated on the sea? Is he perhaps a sea-eagle, watching for fish? Crawls may mean

  that from a great height waves appear to move slowly; but since wrinkles are by definition static, crawls must have been put there for the rhyme. And unless we are told exactly what the eagle is watching, his fall could have been as accidental as was, say, Eutychus's when Paul's sermon sent him to sleep and he crashed on to the street from an upper window. . . . Tennyson has a vague sense, perhaps, of the eagle as a royal bird mythologically entitled?like Solar Jove, his master?to a blue nimbus and a thunderbolt. ... If so, he does not make the point.

  He would have done better with:

  jove's eagle

  Charged on an azure field, with claws

  Grasping a crag, he overawes

  (Like Jove himself) the doves and daws.

  Silently watches from his walls

  What swims the sea, what flies, what crawls?

  Ere like a thunderbolt he falls.

  This is still not a poem. I have indulged Tennyson by granting him his Victorian daws and his Ere; nor do I much like the similarity of these two sets of rhymes; but at least the verses now make immediate prose sense and

  would serve well enough as an anthology piece.

  *

  Now for its companion verse:

  Move eastward, happy earth, and leave

  Yon orange sunset waning slow: From fringes of the faded eve,

  O, happy planet, eastward go; Till over thy dark shoulder glow Thy silver sister-world, and rise To glass herself in dewy eyes That watch me from the glen below.

  Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne,

  Dip forward under starry light, And move me to my marriage-morn, And round again to happy night.

  The gist is: 'I shall be so happy when the sunset has ended; when tonight's moon has come and gone, and morning is here, and I am married to Maud, and?oh, tomorrow night!'

  Nobody can put this poem right. It would have to be re-written as a popular song:

  0 tomorrow night,

  O tomorrow night,

  sHl be so happy when today is done,

  An8- I've said goodbye to the dear old sun. . . .

  That an eager lover should apostrophize the weather to be fine on his wedding day, and the birds to wake him early, and the countryside to rejoice, is understandable. Lovers always take the weather personally. But when Earth is begged to dip forward and carry the poet along with smooth and careful portage for another twenty-four hours or so ... !

  Move eastward, happy earth. . . .

  and

  0, happy planet, eastward go!

  though parallel orders, are far from explicit. 'Eastward of what must I dip, Mr Tennyson?' Mother Earth has a right to ask.

  . . . Till over thy dark shoulder glow Thy silver sister-world, and rise To glass herself in dewy eyes That watch me from the glen below.

  Ah, bear me with thee, smoothly borne,

  Dip forward under starry light, And move me to my marriage-morn, And round again to happy night.

  'Thy sister-world' refers to the moon; but just whose dewy eyes are watching Tennyson from the glen below is a puzzle. Perhaps a couple of small lakes? If so, why dewy? Glens may be dewy, but not lakes. And why are they watching? Are they perhaps Maud's eyes? If so, what is she doing down there in the damp glen at this late hour?

  *

  Shelley is another culprit:

  to a skylark

  Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

  Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

  Higher still and higher

  From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire;

  The deep blue thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

  In the golden lightning

  Of the sunken sun, O'er which clouds are bright'ning, Thou dost float and run; Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

  The pale purple even

  Melts around thy flight; Like a star of Heaven, In the broad daylight Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

  Like a poet hidden

  In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

  Chorus Hymeneal,

  Or triumphal chant, Matched with thine would be all But an empty vaunt, A thing wherein we feel there is a hidden want.

  What objects are the fountains

  Of thy happy strain? What fields of waves, or mountains? What shapes of sky or plain? What love-?? thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

  It is a temptation to let Shelley off; but To A Skylark ranks among the shoddiest poems ever wished on us as the product of genius! Its metre is difficult, granted. Yet with faith in the power of inspiration to solve all problems of craftsmanship, a poet may commit himself to a metrical scheme that seems cripplingly tight and yet feel free as air within it. Shelley, it seems, snatched idly at an idea that entered his head one afternoon as he tried to locate a lark singing in the sky, and began with:

  Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

  All unseen thou art, That from Heaven, or near it,

  Pourest thy full heart In happy strains of unpremeditated art.

  In the golden lightning

  Of the setting sun, Which the clouds is brightening, Thou dost float and run. . . .

  Shelley goes home, fetches pencil and notebook, and jots down this much; but then discovers that he has rhymed thou art with unpremeditated art?which is a 'French rhyme' disallowed to English poets since Chaucer's time. One of the two arts must be struck out. So, having decided that the metre cannot be managed without recourse to near-rhymes like wrought and not, spirit and near it; chant, vaunt and want; he pencils the rhyme scheme in the margin, and changes his original All unseen thou art to Bird thou never wert, a dramatic state?ment irreconcilable with his later suggestion that the cock-lark's song is prompted by love for his hen. Neverthe?less, he reserves Unseen thou art and happy strain for a subsequent verse.

  A second difficulty is the golden light/zmg- of the setting- sun brightening- the clouds. . . . Too many ings He toys with his pencil, scratches his head, peels a grape, eats it, looks out of the window at the sun, and sees that it has sunk almost below the horizon. So sunken sun, instead of setting sun, gets rid of one ing, but he has forgotten that, unlike nightingales, larks never sing in a darkened sky, and that clouds never brighten, once the sun has dis?appeared, but turn a dingy red. No matter! The stars are coming out one by one, and it occurs to him that though an hour or two ago the lark was invisible even by broad daylight, neither could he see a single star. So, vaguely remembering the Psalm about the morning stars that sing together, and the Sons of God who shout for joy, he conflates the lark with the star into a single blithe Spirit springing like a fiery cloud higher and higher, while the pale purple evening melts around it, like a poet hidden in the light of thought. . . . This confused image has been much admired; but true poetic ecstasy makes sense, and more than sense.

  The rhymes higher, fire; springest, wingest, singest; Heaven, even; hidden, bidden, are borrowings from the

  Hymnal, and not long
before his death Shelley thought seriously of becoming an Anglican clergyman. Here he pictures the poet as an amateur hymnologist: singing hymns unbidden. . . . There is something, I own, that endears Shelley to us?a generous-hearted muddle; the patent clumsiness of To A Skylark makes us feel for him as for a child of ten who has painted a sunset picture, thinks it wonderful and wants to be praised. We paste it into the family scrap-book and he signs his name to it in large, round characters. 'Nice fellow,' we say, years later, 'good Classic, went to Eton and Oxford, turned out neat translations from the Greek dramatists. Wouldn't hurt a fly; a bit of a radical, of course. Sent down from University for atheism. Pity! Deucedly odd at times?believe it or not, he used to put revolutionary broadsheets into empty wine bottles "cKj^ throw them into the Bristol Channel, hoping that they might float across to Ireland! Wrote a sonnet about 'em too, beginning:

  Vessels of heavenly medicine, may the breeze Auspicious waft your dark green forms to shore Safe may ye stem the wide surrounding roar Of the wild whirlwinds and the raging seas? And oh, if Liberty e'er deigned to stoop From yonder lowly throne her crownless brow, Sure, she will breathe around your emerald group The fairest breezes of the West that blow. . . .

  Sure, he got the colour right: Erin's own emerald. But why did he call for westerly breezes instead of easterly ones? Poetic licence, perhaps. Got drowned sailing in the

  Mediterranean. Sad, but hardly surprising!'

  ?

  By way of contrast, a glorious example of how inspiration can make light of severe metrical discipline is Bernard de

  Cluny's twelfth-century De Contemptu Mundi, from which J. M. Neale translated Jerusalem the Golden, with Milk and Honey Blessed:

  Urbs Syon aurea, Patria lactea, cive decora, Omne cor obruis, omnibus obstruis et cor et or a. Nescio, nescio, quae jubilatio, lux tibi qualis, Quam socialia gaudia, gloria quam specialis. Stant Syon atria conjubilantia, martyre plena, Cive micantia, Principe stantia, luce serena. . .