Too subtile: Foole, thou didst not understand The mystique language of the eye nor hand: Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the aire Of sighes, and say, this lies, this sounds despaire. . . .
He is working up to the grand close of five splendid Romance words, introduced with eight Anglo-Saxon ones:
I had not taught thee then the Alphabet Of flowers, how they devisefully being set And bound up, might with speechless secrecie Deliver arrands mutely, and mutually.
Donne gets away with a portentous word, interinani- rnate, in The Ecstasy, by using only Anglo-Saxon words to introduce it:
When love with one another so Interinanimates two souls. . . .
Shakespeare gets away in Macbeth with:
. . . This hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine. . . .
these being enormous, terrifying words suited to Lady Macbeth's guilt and redeemed from bombast by the even more terrifying simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon line that follows:
Making the green one red. . . .
To incarnadine and to make red are not, as is usually thought, tautological; and though to incarnadine meant only to make carnation-coloured like healthy cheeks, Shakespeare was aware of its ultimate origin in the Latin caro, carnis, 'flesh', and therefore of its association with words like carnifex and carnivorous. He so aroused the latent meaning of murder in incarnadine that one cannot use it today without thinking of blood.
The lively virtue of words is something of which every poet must be aware. England has this virtue, and so has Scotland; but not Britain, which is an intellectual, not an emotional, concept. Nor has Britons much virtue, despite:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves. . . .
The adjective British, curiously enough, has acquired virtue because of the British Fleet, the British Grenadiers, and so on>
The exact Tightness of words can be explained only in the context of a whole poem: each one being related rhythmically, emotionally, and semantically, to every other. This, in effect, rules out any use of the same word in different contexts, unless the two uses are consonant, or parallel. It also rules out any repetition of the same vowel sound, unless for some particular purpose, such as the deliberate stridency of repeated long a or i. Or as when Keats, who insisted on the need to vary vowel sounds in ordinary contexts, commends Shakespeare for writing of the bees:
The singing masons building cells of wax. . . .
The four short z-sounds in singing and building, he said, suggested the low buzz of bees.
A poem always chooses its own metre, and any attempt to dress up an idea in a particular metre is, at best, an amusing parlour game; at worst, dreary literature. A poem begins with the usual line-and-a-half that unexpect?edly forces itself on the entranced mind and establishes not only the metre, but its rhythmic treatment. . . . The basic English metre is the ten-syllabled iambic line. But the metrical rules, which in Latin poetry were always meticulously maintained, even though the context might be a passionate one, do not apply to English. A true iambic line in poems of emotional content has been rare since early Tudor times, and appears usually in lulls between gusts. The Earl of Surrey's proud requiem for his friend and companion-in-arms Thomas Clere begins, not in the measured iambic style, but with a drum beat:
Norfolk sprung thee; Lambeth holds thee dead.
Clere of the Count of Cleremont thou hight. . . .
before the iambic measure asserts itself:
Within the womb of Ormond's race thou bred
And saw'st thy cousin crownfed in thy sight. . . .
Shakespeare, in his indignant sonnet:
Was it aiight to me, to bear the canopy
With my extern, thine outward honouring. . . .
does much the same thing. The rhythmic variations on this iambic line are infinite; yet, at the back of the mind, the metre still reigns.
The choice made by modernists of the nineteen- twenties to dispense with metre and rhyme altogether, because their Classically-minded predecessors had let these direct the poem, was unnecessary. Granted that a poet whose gentle voice rises and falls regularly in the iambic metre, with the expected rhyme closing each line, cannot hold my attention long. But whoever relies on what he calls 'cadence', as opposed to variations in metre, or changes the norm constantly without warning, cannot expect the Muse to approve, or the reader to follow him.
A young poet finds his greatest difficulty in ending a poem. The sudden occurrence of a poetic phrase and an idea are not enough: unless he recognizes that a complete poem is there, let him be patient. He has perhaps not yet learned how to integrate his whole mind in the necessary trance of attention. Donne is an extreme example of impatience: he often begins with splendid candour, and ends in crooked artifice.
When one treats poetry in this sort of way, the notion of technique falls away: all that remains is the poet's ser?vice to the Muse, his unwavering love of whom, for all her unpossessibility, assures that his work will be truth?ful. . . . Every dictionary is a valley of dry bones. The poet is inspired to breathe life into them (as Ezekiel did when hfevgrophesied), and convert them into language. You remember the rattle and shaking, and how the bones came together into skeletons, every bone to its bone, and put on sinews and flesh. That is a metaphor of craftsman?ship. Then the four winds blew upon them, and they stood up, in fighting companies; which is how poems come alive. Technique takes one no farther than articulating the skeletons with wire, and plumping them up with plastic limbs and organs.
Real Women
The most important historical study of all, utterly dwarf?ing all economic and political ones, is for me the changing relationship between men and women down the centuries ?from prehistoric times to the present moral chaos in which both sexes have become equally confused about their roles. But I am a poet by calling, and have lived outside ordinary civilization for so many years that any?thing I write about real women must read oddly. Except perhaps to real women themselves, and the occasional man whom some accident of birth or experience tempts to agree with me.
A real woman, by my definition, neither despises nor worships men, but is proud not to have been born a man, does everything she can to avoid thinking or acting like one, knows the full extent of her powers, and feels free to reject all arbitrary man-made obligations. She is her own oracle of right and wrong, firmly believing in her five sound senses and intuitive sixth. Once a real woman has been warned by her nose that those apples are taste?less, or assured by her fingertips that this material is shoddy, no salesman in the world can persuade her to the contrary. Nor, once she has met some personage in private, and summed him up with a single keen glance as weak, vain or crooked, will his mounting public reputa?tion convince her otherwise. She takes pleasure in the company of simple, happy, undemanding women; but seldom or never finds a friend worthy of her full con?fidence. Since she never settles for the second best in love, what most troubles her is the rareness of real men. Wher?ever she goes, her singularity will arouse strong feelings: adulation, jealousy, resentment, but never pity for her loneliness. Real women are royal women; the words once had the same meaning. Democracy has no welcome for queens.
It would be wrong to identify the real woman with the typical wild one who, after a difficult childhood, has left home early to live by her wits at the expense of men. The wild woman is incapable either of friendship for other women, whom she cannot fail to regard as rivals, or of love for a man, her declared enemy. But at least she keeps her eyes open and ridicules the view that women must enthusiastically accept this glorious modern world of plenty bestowed on them by their hard-working menfolk, and that they enjoy being passionately swept off their feet and afterwards treated with amused indulgence. There was never, of course, any truth in the comic-strip legend of a primitive he-man who woul
d grab his woman by the hair, threaten her with a knobbed club if she refused his advances, and haul her off panting ecstatically to his cave. In ancient Majorca, the island which I have made my home for more than thirty years, the woman, not the man, owned their cave 5 and, according to the Roman historian Strabo, if he took things too much for granted, she would merely say, 'Begone, and take your possessions with you,' and out he had to go?the children were hers in any case.
To reach some understanding of real women, one must think back to a primitive age, when men invariably treated women as the holier sex, since they alone per?petuated the race. Women were the sole agriculturists, guardians of springs, fruit trees, and the sacred hearth fire, and lived unaffected by any notions of progress. Tribal queens never thought in terms of historical time, but only of seasons; judged each case on its own merits, not by a legal code, as real women still do; and showed little regard for trade or mechanical invention. Chance discoveries or new techniques in arts and crafts were welcome, so long as these neither upset tribal economy nor enhanced the importance of individuals. It was the queen's task to restrain men from letting their ambition or intellectual curiosity override practical common sense, as it is still the woman's task to ask her husband: 'Must you kill yourself making money? Haven't we enough for the next five years at least, even if you stopped working altogether? Surely you don't enjoy your martyrdom?' But even if he cares to listen, social pressures compel him to provide for his family until he drops dead.
History begins with the emergence of men from female rule. They had at last discovered that a woman cannot conceive without male assistance?and brooded over the implications of this surprising fact. After long whispered conferences it was agreed that men ought to claim their freedom. They asked, 'Why should descent be reckoned in the female line, not the male? Why should a man when he marries go to the woman's home, not contrariwise? Why should a woman, not a man, sow the seed corn? Why should women control the tribe? Surely men are the true creators, sowers of seed, and therefore the holier sex, as well as being physically stronger?' Thus the male habit of reasoning from irrelevant facts, rather than relying on woman's practical wisdom, began the war between the sexes that has been raging ever since.
Men gradually usurped women's prerogatives in farm?ing, magic, handicrafts, war?the Amazons are no mere figment?and government. The story is epitomized in a classical Greek myth: how the goddess Hera pitied a poor, bedraggled cuckoo and warmed him at her breast. This cuckoo was her brother Zeus in disguise, who ravished and humiliated her by seizing throne and sceptre. Later, when Hera and her kinsfolk rebelled against Zeus, he hung her from the vault of heaven, with an anvil tied to each foot. ...
Men consolidated their victory. They reckoned descent in the male line, brought wives to their own homes, in?vented historical annals, legal codes, weights and measures, standing armies, engineering, logic and philosophy. On the excuse of protecting the weaker sex, they placed woman under male tutelage: henceforward she must serve her father's or husband's domestic needs as though not only spiritually but mentally inferior to him.
Greek myths record an occasional dramatic protest against this state of affairs: how the fifty Danaids stabbed their husbands, the sons of Aegyptus, on their common wedding night, and were punished in hell for this crime; how the Lemnian women murdered theirs for import?ing concubines from Thrace; how Amazons attacked Athens. . . . Yet, as a rule, the sex war has been fought sporadically in the home between father and daughter, husband and wife, mother-in-law and son-in-law. Only isolated regions, such as Galicia, Majorca and Pictish Scotland, kept their matriarchal traditions.
It seems puzzling that the real women of those days let all this happen to them. The sole reason I can suggest is that they thought far ahead. Since man had a certain un?developed intellectual capacity, of which it would have been wrong to deny him full use, the real women sat back patiently, prepared to give him a free hand for some hundreds or thousands of yeare. Only a long series of disastrous experiments could make him realize the error of his headstrong ways. Eventually he must return to them in willing and chastened dependence.
Priests of the new male gods even modified the ancient myth of a sole goddess who had created the world, giving her a male assistant; and in Genesis?a comparatively late book?Jehovah creates the world entirely by Him?self; and models Eve, the first woman, from man's rib! It is added that this woman's disobedience to God caused man to stumble and sin. In fact, the story is based on a
Hebrew pun: the same word means both 'rib' and 'make to stumble'. According to Hesiod's contemporary Greek myth, an inquisitive woman named Pandora opened a divine jar entrusted to her and let loose on mankind all the evils that now plague us. Yet 'Eve' was originally a title of the sole creatrix; as was also 'Pandora'.
Financial pressures of men's own making brought about the recent so-called emancipation of women. Grown daughters could no longer stay idling at home, a burden to their parents and to themselves until married off. Industry was booming and, with appropriate moral safeguards, they might fill the widening gaps in man?power. Women, who can now earn and keep their own money, even when wives, and have been granted the franchise?'franchise' originally meant 'freedom from being a serf'?need show men no gratitude for this liberality. Their freedom is still limited. They remain citizens of the second degree, auxiliary male personnel barred from all the highest offices; and would never have got where they are so quickly had it not been for two world wars and such loveless male inventions as machine guns, submarines, bombing planes and universal conscription.
Strangely enough, it is easier to be a real woman in backwaters of Christianity or Islam or Hinduism, where codes of behaviour have not changed for centuries, than in urbanized Europe or America. There she knows what part she must play, and can guard her inborn dignity. Although the husband, as head of the family, makes all decisions, he will never dare overrule even her unspoken protests. Among Majorcan peasants who live beyond the tourist range, no man would ever think of buying or sell?ing so much as a hen without his wife's approval. She is always referred to as la madonna, titular guardian of the home.
What is home? In ancient days it meant a clan settle?ment, a camp or kraal, ruled by elders, where men had comrades and women their gossips, and children ran about in packs; and where a happy man-woman relation?ship could exist in some small corner away from the communal bustle.
Among us Westerners, because of man's jealous insist?ence on marital privacy, home has shrunk from settlement to farmhouse, thence to the cottage, thence to the 10- roomed apartment, thence to three rooms and a kitchen?ette with the usual labour-saving devices, in a huge residential block full of utter strangers. The housewife has her washing machine, telephone, television, refrig?erator, electric cooker, car and door keys, to pay for which a husband must be out working all the week. She cannot regret (because she never knew) the easy companionship of her great-grandmother's day: quilting bees and husk?ing bees, taking the cousins to do a week's washing down at the creek, lending a hand with the shearing and harvest, making jams and pickles, getting up round dances, singing and playing practical jokes. But no real woman can ever accept the present situation.
Man's logic has defeated itself. Boredom often drives the married woman back to a job as soon as she can leave her children at a nursery school; or to infidelity; or to an analyst. Home is home for only two days of the week. Which is why some paternally-minded industrialists take advice from professors of sociology and plant their employees all together in a wholesome suburban neigh?bourhood, where the company's standards of taste and respectability must rule their lives. Husband obeys boss; wife obeys husband, and preserves amicable relations with her fellow company wives, or else. . . . Spouses are thus shackled by a well-paid job to which the husband need no longer commute, by house, garden and swim?ming pool, by children, by hope of advancement and the prospect of a pension. Any sign of non-compliance is scored against both. No real woman can ev
er accept this situation either.
Attempts to liven things up socially are all too often masked under the dubious name of charity. It is character?istic of a real woman never to support public charities? on the ground that she neither knows the persons to whom her money goes nor has any assurance that it will be properly distributed. She gives only to those whose needs are familiar to her, and then from friendship, not pity. She will not be found at bridge clubs or at cocktail parties. Bridge, which is, after all, a money contest between individual players, cannot be a substitute for the good humour of a communal wash-day; nor can a cocktail party supply the intimate gossip of a quilting bee.
Wild women take advantage of this artificial state of affairs by exploiting the dormant dissatisfactions of hus?bands. One of them told me the other day, 'Yes, you may call me a mean, greedy, undependable, lazy, treacherous, spendthrift bitch. That's true enough a good part of the time; but it isn't the whole story. In fact, I've given myself to myself, and to no one else. My beauty is my own, and I take good care of it. If I choose a lover, I grant the lucky fellow no rights over me; and if he has sense, he won't claim any. As for breaking up a home, nobody can do that unless it's already cracked!'
A real woman likes beautiful things of her own choos?ing. She prefers a handleless cup, a backless chair, a mattress on the floor and a packing-case for the table to good taste conferred on her wholesale by interior decorators. There is an eighteenth-century English song, Sally in Our Alley.
Her father, he sells cabbage nets
And through the streets doth cry 'em.
Her mother, she sells laces long To such as care to buy 'em?
Who'd think such rascals could beget So sweet a girl as Sally?
She is the darling of my heart And lives in our alley. . . .
The lover was a square: an honest, idealistic London apprentice, intent on becoming a journeyman, a master- craftsman and eventually a rich merchant?perhaps even Lord Mayor: