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Comments on Some Examples
of Western Poetry
(up to 1900) Catullus
Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Ravide, agit praecipitem in meos iambos? quis deus tibi non bene advocatus vecordem parat excitare rixam? an ut pervenias in ora vulgi? quid vis? qualubet esse notus optas? eris, quandoquidem meos amores cum longa voluisti amare poena.
Unless meos amores is purposely vague, at least two objects of Catullus’s affections must be in question? Would you say that this piece is in a vein of good-humoured banter?
I do not think meos amores necessarily alludes to more than one love affair. I think it is more than good-humoured banter; there seems to me to be a note of careless scorn in it, but no serious anger. I suppose with Catullus one cannot take either his self-depreciation or his self-assertion as a poet very seriously ― like most poets of his power he must have been aware of his genius, but expressed it half humourously as one would expect from a well-bred man of the world. I don’t know either about his scurrilous attacks ―literary invective perhaps, but is there not a little more to it than that? He puts the lash with something more than a whimsical violence in many places ―the verses he wrote after the rupture leave a terrible mark. 11 January 1937
*
Page-387
Disertissime Romuli nepotum, quot sunt quotque fuere, Marce Tulli, quotque post aliis erunt in annis, gratias tibi maximas Catullus agit pessimus omnium poeta, tanto pessimus omnium poeta, quanto tu optimus omnium patronus.
Would you not say that Catullus was bound to have looked upon Cicero the man as a pompous ass, however sincerely he may have admired Cicero the man of letters?
I am not sure how his contemporaries regarded Cicero ―were they not hypnotised by his eloquence, scholarship, literary versatility, conversational and epistolatory powers, overflowing vitality? One would think that men like Catullus and Caesar would see through him, though. There is certainly a note that sounds very like irony in the last three lines, but it is very subtle and others than Cicero may have regarded it as a graceful eulogy enhanced by the assumption of extreme humility (though only a courteous assumption) in the comparison between the poeta and the patronus.
Virgil, Shakespeare, Hugo
I think what Belloc meant in crediting Virgil with the power to give us a sense of the Unknown Country [see page 373] was that Virgil specialises in a kind of wistful vision of things across great distances in space or time, which renders them dream-like, gives them an air of ideality. He mentions as an instance the passage (perhaps in the sixth book of the Aeneid) where the swimmer sees all Italy from the top of a wave
prospexsi Italiam summa sublimis ab unda.
I dare say ―
Sternitur infelix alieno volnere caelumque aspicit et dulcis moriens reminiscitur Argos
as well as Page-388 tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
belong to the same category. To an ordinary Roman Catholic mind like Belloc’s, which is not conscious of the subtle hierarchy of unseen worlds, whatever is vaguely or remotely appealing ―in short, beautifully misty ―is mystical, and “revelatory” of the native land of the soul. Add to this that Virgil’s rhythm is exquisitely euphonious, and it is no wonder Belloc should feel as if the very harps of heaven were echoed by the Mantuan. He couples Shakespeare with Virgil as a master of (to put it in a phrase of Arjava’s) “earth-transforming gramarye”. The quotations he gives from Shakespeare struck me as rather peculiar in the context: I don’t exactly remember them but something in the style of “Night’s tapers are burnt out and jocund day” etc. seems to give him a wonderful flash of the Unknown Country! He also alludes to the four magical lines of Keats about Ruth “amid the alien corn” and Victor Hugo’s at least-for-once truly delicate, unrhetorical passage on the same theme in La légende des siècles. I wonder if you recollect the passage. Its last two stanzas are especially enchanting:
Tout reposait dans Ur et dans Jerimadeth; Les astres
émaillaient le ciel profond et sombre;
Le croissant fin et clair parmi ces fleurs de l’ombre
Brillait a l’occident, et Ruth se demandait,
Immobile, ouvrant l’œil a moitie sous ses voiles, Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de l’eternel
été,
Avait, en s’en allant,
négligemment jeté Cette faucille d’or dans le champ des
étoiles. What do you think of them?
If that is Belloc’s idea of the mystic, I can’t put much value on his Roman Catholic mind! Shakespeare’s line and Hugo’s also are
good poetry and may be very enchanting, as you say, but there is nothing in the least deep or mystic about them. Night’s tapers
are the usual poetic metaphor, Hugo’s
Page-389
of the life planes, not anything more ―Virgil would have stared if he had been told that his
ripae ulterioris was revelatory of the
native land of the soul. These sentimental modern intellectuals are terrible: they will read anything into anything; that is because
they have no touch on the Truth, so they make up for it by a gambolling fancy.
1 April 1932
Shakespeare
From what plane are the substance and rhythm of this from Shakespeare?
― the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.
Are they really from his usual plane
―the vital?
The origin of the inspiration may be from anywhere, but in
Shakespeare it always comes through the vital and strongly coloured by it as in some others it comes through the poetic
intelligence. What play or poem is this from? I don’t remember it. It sounds almost overmental in origin.
19 February 1935
*
The phrase occurs in Sonnet CVII, beginning
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
What I should like to know is whether the
rhythm of the words
I have picked out is a fusion of the overmental and the vital; or is only the substance from the overmind?
There is something from the Above in the rhythm also, but it is rather covered up by the more ordinary rhythm of the first half
line and the two lines that follow. It is curious that this line and a half should have come in as if by accident and have nothing really
to do with the restricted subject of the rest. 19 February 1935
*
Page-390 Is there something definitely in the rhythm or language of a line of poetry which would prove it to be from a certain plane?
From what you wrote some days back [see the previous page] I gather that
the quotation from Shakespeare I sent has an Overmind movement as well as
substance coming strongly coloured by the vital. But where and in what lies the
vital colour which makes it the highest Shakespearean and not, say, the highest
Wordsworthian ―the line inspired by Newton?
It is a question of feeling, not of
intellectual understanding; to distinguish the vital or psychic or any other
element one must have the feeling for its presence ―an intellectual definition
is of little value. Take these lines from Shakespeare ―
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows’ bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven ―
they are plainly vital in their excited thrill, for only the vital can
speak with that thrill and pulse of passion ―the rhythm also has the vital undulation and surge so common in Shakespeare.
I have given an instance elsewhere of Shakespeare’s
thought-utterance which is really vital, not intellectual
―
Life is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Here is a “thought”, a judgment on life, and its origin would
naturally be assigned to the intellect, but as a matter of fact it is a throw-up from Macbeth’s vital being, an emotional or
sensational, not an intellectual judgment and its whole turn and rhythm are strongly vital in their vibration and texture. But yet
in this passage there is a greater power that has rushed down from above and taken up the vital surge into its movement
―so
much so that if it had been a spiritual experience of which the poet was speaking, we could at once have detected an action of
the illumined spiritual Mind taking up the vital love and soaring into spiritual greatness.
Or take the quotation ―
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the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Here both style and language come ultimately from a higher above-mind level, but still it is quite different from Wordsworth’s
line on Newton which also has altogether an above-head vision and utterance ―and the difference comes because the vision of
the “dreaming soul” is felt through the vital mind and heart before it finds expression; in the lines of Wordsworth the vision
of the lone voyager through strange seas of thought has not that peculiar thrill but rather remains in an exaltation of light
between the mind and some vastness above it. It is this constant vitality, this magnificent vital surge in Shakespeare’s language
which makes it a sovereign expression, but of life and, so far as it is also a voice of mind or knowledge, not of pure intellectual
thought but of life-mind and of life-knowledge. 27 February 1935
* Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The meaning, on the surface, is that for each of us life will pass away as if it were a dream and what will remain is the sleep of
death, an undetailed everlasting rest. . . . But from the fourth line onward the language and the rhythm serve to evoke by a
certain large and deep suggestiveness an intuition of some transcendental God-self . . . We are reminded of the Upanishad’s
description of the mystic trance in which the whole world fades like an illusion and the individual soul enters the supreme
Page-392 Spirit’s unfeatured ecstasy of repose. Shakespeare’s intuition is not pure Upanishad, the supreme Spirit is not clearly felt
and whatever profundity is there is vague and unintentional; still, a looming mystic light does appear, stay a little, find a
suggestive contour before receding and falling away to a music sublimely defunctive.
I don’t think Shakespeare had any such idea in his mind. What he is dwelling on is the insubstantiality of the world and of human
existence. “We are such stuff” does not point to any God-self. “Dream” and “sleep” would properly imply Somebody who
dreams and sleeps, but the two words are merely metaphors. Shakespeare was not an intellectual or philosophic thinker nor
a mystic one. All that you can say is that there comes out here an impression or intimation of the illusion of Maya, the dream
character of life but without any vision or intuition of what is behind the dream and the illusion. There is nothing in the
passage that even hints vaguely the sense of something abiding ―all is insubstantial, “into air, into thin air”, “baseless fabric”,
“insubstantial pageant”, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”. “Stuff” points to some inert material rather than a spirit
dreamer or sleeper. Of course one can always read things into it for one’s own pleasure, but
― 8 March 1935
* I admit that Shakespeare was not a philosophic or mystic thinker. . . . What, however, surprises me is your saying that
there is not the vaguest hint of something abiding. In the magic performance which Prospero gave to Ferdinand and
Miranda . . . Prospero reminded them of what he had said before ―namely, that “these our actors . . . were all spirits”.
They melt into thin air but do not disappear from existence, from conscious being of some character however unearthly:
they just become invisible and what disappears is the visible pageant produced by them, a seemingly material construction which yet was a mere phantom. From this seeming, Prospero catches the suggestion that all that looks material
is like a phantom, a dream, which must vanish, leaving no trace. . . .
Page-393
One can read anything into anything. But Shakespeare says nothing about the material world or there being a base some
where else or of our being projected into a dream. He says “we are such stuff.” The spirits vanish into air, into thin air,
as Shakespeare emphasises by repetition, which means to any plain interpretation that they too are unreal, only dream-stuff;
he does not say that they disappear from view but are there behind all the time. The whole stress is on the unreality and
insubstantiality of existence, whether of the pageant or of the spirits or of ourselves
―there is no stress anywhere, no mention
or hint of an eternal spiritual existence. Shakespeare’s idea here as everywhere is the expression of a mood of the vital mind,
it is not a reasoned philosophical conclusion. However if you like to argue that, logically, this or that is the true philosophical
consequence of what Shakespeare says and that therefore the Daemon who inspired him must have meant that, I have no
objection. I was simply interpreting the passage as Shakespeare’s transcribing mind has put it.
9 March 1934
*
Just a word more about that passage. If it is taken in vacuo, there is no internal justification for my idea which turns on the
survival of the spirits after the pageant has faded. But almost immediately after the stage indication: ” . . .
to a strange, hollow and confused noise, they heavily vanish“, occurs this aside on the part of Prospero: “(To the Spirits) Well done; avoid; no
more.” The quoted passage follows a little later. Then again Prospero says after Ferdinand and Miranda are gone: “Come
with a thought: ―I thank you: ―Ariel, come.” Thereupon Ariel enters:
ARIEL: Thy thoughts I cleave to. What’s thy pleasure?
PROSPERO: Spirit,
We must prepare to meet with Caliban.
What do you make of all this? And when Ariel reports how
he has lured Prospero’s enemies into a “foul lake”, Prospero commends him:
This was well done, my bird.
Page-394 Thy shape invisible retain thou still.
Still later, comes another stage-direction: “A noise of hunters
heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds . . . ; Prospero and Ariel setting them on.” Even if this is taken to
refer to Spirits other than those who produce that masque, the previous quotations are sufficient to prove that only the visible shapes and formations vanished ―the entities themselves remained behind all the time.
I don’t see what all that has to do with the meaning of the passage in question which plainly insists that nothing endures. Obviously
Ariel had an invisible shape ―invisible to human eyes, but the point of the passage is that all shapes and substances and beings
disappear into nothingness. We are concerned with Prospero’s meaning, not with what actually happened to the spirits or for
that matter to the pageant which we might conceive also of having an invisible source or material. He uses the total disappearance of the pageant and the spirits as a base for the idea that all existence is an illusion
―it is the idea of the illusion that he
enforces. If he had wanted to say, “we disappear, all disappears to view but the reality of us and of all things persists in a greater
immaterial reality”, he would surely have said so or at least not left it to be inferred or reasoned out by you in the twentieth
century. I repeat however that this is my view of Shakespeare’s meaning and does not affect any possibility of reading into it
something that Shakespeare’s outer mind did not receive or else did not express.
10 March 1935
Milton
And they bowed down to the Gods of their wives . . .
1
Burnt after them to the bottomless pit . . .
Certainly, Milton in the passages you quote had a rhythmical effect in mind; he was much too careful and conscientious a
1 This is apparently a misquotation of Milton’s line: “And made him bow, to the gods
of his wives”. ―Ed.
Page-395
metrist and much too consummate a master of rhythm to do anything carelessly
or without good reason. If he found his inspiration stumbling or becoming
slipshod in its rhythmical effects, he would have corrected it. 22 April
1947
Coleridge
May I say a word about the four lines of Coleridge which you
bash in your essay? ―
He prayeth best who loveth best,
All things both great and small:
For the dear God, who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The sentimentalism of the “dear God” is obviously extra childlike and sounds childish even. If it had been written by Coleridge
as his own contribution to thought or his personal feeling described in its native language it would have ranked him very low.
But Coleridge was a great metaphysician or at any rate an acute and wide-winged thinker, not a sentimental prattling poet of the
third order. Mark that the idea in the lines is not essentially poor; otherwise expressed it could rank among great thoughts
and stand as the basis of a philosophy and ethics founded on bhakti. There are one or two lines of the Gita which are based
on a similar thought, though from the Vedantic, not the dualist point of view. But throughout the
Ancient Mariner Coleridge is
looking at things from the point of view and the state of mind of the most simple and childlike personality possible, the Ancient
Mariner who feels and thinks only with the barest ideas and the most elementary and primitive emotions. The lines he writes
here record the feeling which such a mind and heart would draw from what he had gone through. Are they not then perfectly in
place and just in the right tone for such a purpose? You may say that it lowers the tone of the poem. I don’t know
―the tone of
the poem is deliberately intended to be that of an unsophisticated ballad simplicity and ballad mentality
―it is not the ideas but
the extraordinary beauty of rhythm and vividness of vision and
Page-396
fidelity to a certain mystic childlike key that makes it such a wonderful and perfect poem. This is of course only a point of
view; but it came to me several times as an answer that could be made to your criticism, so I put it on paper.
4 February 1935
*
In Shelley’s Skylark
my heart does not easily melt towards one simile ―
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
Sometimes I am inclined even to feel this is an atrocity. Then
I wonder whether the sentimental stuff shouldn’t be cut out and replaced by something deeper although in Shelley’s style
as much as possible ―something like: Like a child who wanders
In an ancient wood Where the strange glow squanders
All its secret mood
Upon her lilting soul lost in that solitude.
The attempt to rewrite Shelley better than Shelley himself is a rash and hopeless endeavour. Your proposed stanza is twentieth
century mysticism quite out of place in the Skylark and has not the simple felicity and magic and music of Shelley’s verse. I fail
to see why the high-born maiden is an atrocity ―it expresses the romantic attitude towards love which was sentimental and
emotional, attempting to lift it out of the coarseness of life into a mental-vital idealism which was an attempt to resuscitate the
attitude of chivalry and the troubadours. Romantic and unreal, if you like, but not atrocious.
8 November 1934
*
I objected to your criticisms and cutting up of the Skylark, because the whole of it seems to me to proceed from a wrong
Page-397
starting point altogether. You seem to start with the assumption that the poem ought to be an intellectual whole with coherent parts, a logical structure. Your contention is that the main idea, consistent in other stanzas, is of a spiritual something,
an incorporeal joy etc., and the stanzas you condemn as not consistent with the idea and tone of the rest come from an
inferior less spiritual inspiration and lower the level of the poem. Accordingly you propose to cut out these excrescences and insert
some manipulations which would make the amended whole the perfect poem the Skylark
should be.
I do not deny that from that standpoint your deductions are logical. The poem arranged as you want it, without these too
earthly verses, would be a single ethereal impalpable shining tissue. It would be more subtly ethereal (not more spiritual), far
from the earth, winging between the rainbow and the lightnings and ignorant of anything less brilliant and unearthly. Only it
would be Shelley with something of himself left out, the Skylark incomplete with part of its fullness of tone vanished and a big
hole in the middle ―a beautiful poem, but no longer so worthy of its place among the few supreme English lyrics. That at least
is what I feel. One thing more ―even if these stanzas are an imperfection, I do not think it wise to meddle with them either
by elimination or re-doing. To interfere with the imperfections of the great poets of the past is a hazardous business
―their
imperfections as well as their perfections are part of themselves. Imagine a drama of Shakespeare with all the blots scratched out
and all the scoriae done over and smoothed to a perfect polish! It would be Shakespeare no longer. And this is Shelley whose
strange and sweet and luminous magic of lyrical rhythm and language, when he is at his best and here he is at his best, in
the impugned stanzas as well as in the others, is his own secret and no other shall ever recover it. To meddle here is inevitably
to mar. Things as great or greater in another kind may be done, but not with this unique and inimitable note. To omit, to change
words or lines, to modify rhythms seems to me inadmissible.2
2 The result is bound to be like Landor’s rewriting of Milton
―very good Landor but
very bad Milton.
Page-398 I do not altogether appreciate your references to Mrs. Shelley and the firefly and your cynical and sarcastic picture of the high-born maiden as she appears to you
―all that has nothing
to do with Shelley’s poetic conception which is alone relevant to the matter. I could draw a realistic picture of the poet “singing
hymns unbidden” and unwanted and asking occasionally as he wrote whether dinner was ready
―with hopes, but also with
fears that he might not get it, his butcher’s bill being unpaid for a long time. Or I might cavil scientifically about the nature of
sunsets and sunrise and rainbow drops and ask what was the use of all this romantic flummery when there are real things to write
about. Or I might quote the critic ―I don’t remember who he was ―who said that Shelley certainly did not believe that the
skylark was a spirit and not a bird and so the whole conception of the poem is false, insincere, ethereal humbug and therefore not
true poetry because poetry must be sincere. Such points of view are irrelevant. Shelley is not concerned with the real life of the
high-born maiden or the poet any more than with the ornithology of the skylark or with other material things. His glow-worm
is something more than a material glow-worm. He is concerned with the soul love-laden, with the dreams of the poet, with the
soul of beauty behind the glow-worm’s light and the colour and fragrance of the rose. It is that he is feeling and it is linked in his
vision with the essential something he has felt behind the song of the skylark. And because he so felt it he was not only entitled
but bound to make place for it in his inspired lyrical theme. I may observe in passing that the ethereal and impalpable
are not more spiritual than the tangible and the concrete ―they may seem more easily subtle and ideal to the idealising
and abstracting mind, but that is a different affair. One can feel the spiritual through the embodied and concrete as well as
through its opposite. But Shelley was not a spiritual poet and the Skylark
is not a spiritual lyric. Shelley looked, it is true,
always towards a light, a beauty, a truth behind the appearance of things, but he never got through the idealising mind
to the spiritual experience. What he did get was something of the purest emotional or aesthetic feeling or purest subtle mind
Page-399
touch of an essence behind the appearance, an essence of ideal light, truth or beauty. It is that he expresses with a strange aerial
magic or a curious supersensuously sensuous intensity in his finest lyrics. It is that we must seek in the
Skylark and, if we
find it, we have no right to claim something else. It is there all through and in abundance
―it is its perfection that creates the
sustained perfection of the poem. There is not and there ought not to be an intellectual sequence, a linked argument, a logical
structure. It is a sequence of feeling and of ideal perceptions with an occult logic of their own that sustains the lyric and makes it a
faultless whole. In this sequence the verses you condemn have an indefeasible right of place. Shelley was not only a poet of other
worlds, of Epipsychidion and of The Witch of Atlas; he was passionately interested in bringing the light, beauty and truth of
the ideal super-world from which he came into the earth life ―he tried to find it there wherever he could, he tried to infuse it
wherever he missed it. The mental, the vital, the physical cannot be left out of the whole he saw in order to yield place only
to the ethereal and impalpable. As he heard the skylark and felt the subtle essence of light and beauty in its song, he felt
too the call of the same essence of light and beauty elsewhere and it is the things behind which he felt that he compares to
the hymn of the skylark ―the essence of ideal light and beauty behind things mental, the poet and his hymn, behind things
vital, the soul of romantic love, behind things physical, the light of the glow-worm, the passionate intensity of the perfume of
the rose. I cannot see an ordinary glow-worm in the lines of Shelley’s stanza ―it is a light from beyond finding expression in
that glimmer and illumining the dell of dew and the secrecy of flowers and grass, that is there. This illumination of the earthly
mind, vital, physical with his super-world light is a main part of Shelley; excise that and the whole of Shelley is no longer there,
there is only the ineffectual angel beating his wings in the void; excise it from the
Skylark and the true whole of the Skylark is
no longer there.
18 November 1934
Page-400
Swinburne
I want to make a short series of notes according to some
responses to great poetry ―and what I am sending tonight is meant to be the opening section:
No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than these lines from Swinburne:
Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these
A lyre of many faultless agonies.
Considered thus separately, they have a suggestion richer than in their context, and convey on their passionate music a stimulus towards an idealistic discipline and high ascetic transport. . . .
Does it all sound a stale old story?
It is not new
―but it is difficult to say anything new in these
matters. It is well written. I don’t know though that there is any “aching idealism” or “high ascetic transport” in these lines of
Swinburne. An acceptance of suffering for oneself may have it ―an infliction of suffering from one’s own perversely passionate
pleasure on another can hardly have it. 23 December 1934
* I don’t understand how it is possible to take objection to my
reading, for the vision is certainly of the acceptance of the suffering inflicted.
I cannot accept this “certainly”. I do not see that any acceptance of the suffering is implied, still less a rapturous acceptance. If I
remember right, the supposed recipient of the pain is made to object that it is cruel
―she is not supposed to reply “Oh how
exquisite!” 24 December 1934
* Don’t you think the idea of the infliction of suffering must
be kept apart from the point made by you in your first note that the infliction was for a perversely passionate pleasure
― and also from the question whether in Swinburne’s poetry it
Page-401
is objected to by the recipient or not, since the lines are now taken by themselves?
Why should the lines be taken by themselves as if they were not a part of Swinburne’s poem? I cannot see any idealistic discipline
or high ascetic transport in a sadistic desire however poetically expressed. An erotic perversity is neither ideal nor a discipline.
25 December 1934
* If I took the lines in vacuo and stopped there, you might object, but I have not done that in my notes. What I have
done, after saying that the lines are great poetry, is to catch their suggestion, first supposing one had come across them
by themselves and did not know their original context, and, then, taking them in their proper context. If one saw them
separately, would not one be inclined to read in them the suggestion I have submitted, owing to the image-word “lyre”
and the adjective “faultless” applied to “agonies”? What harm can there be in using such an illustrative device?
I am unable to see what there is in the lines, whether taken separately or in the context or both that is anything more than
what Swinburne meant to put it, a rhapsodic glorification and enthusiasmos
of sadistic passion ―just as the other passage3
is a magnificent outburst of the magnified ego. But one is no more ascetic or ideal or a discipline than the other
―unless you
mean the ideal of sadistic passion or the ideal of the magnified ego. The poetry is superb, but I do not see what the passion
in them transfigures or into what it is transfigured ―it is sublimated into its own extreme expression or figure, if you like
―but that is all. To make somebody else’s body into a “lyre”
3 Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine,
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality; . . .
But in the light and laughter, in the moan
And music, and in grasp of lip and hand
And shudder of water that makes felt on land
The immeasurable tremour of all the sea,
Memories shall mix and metaphor of me.
Page-402
of agonies does not transfigure the fact itself, the erotic side on which it expresses. Or if it does, what is this something high of
which it is a glimmer? When one meets one’s own suffering with fortitude, there is an ascetic discipline, an ideal of self-mastery
―but to meet somebody else’s pain caused by oneself with an ecstasy of pleasure in it is not quite the same thing. Or if one
can turn one’s own pain into a sort of ecstasy of Ananda, not of perverse masochistic pleasure, so that pain disappears from
one’s existence, then that is some kind of transfiguration ―but can the same be said of turning somebody else’s agony into a
subject for one’s own rapture? It may be a transfiguration, but a very Asuric transfiguration.
26 December 1934
*
Your explanation has convinced me that the lines in their context had better be
considered without any idealising ingenuity; so I shall recast that portion and
send it to you.
It does not seem to me legitimate to turn the meaning of lines
in a poem upside down like that by lopping the syntax and giving it a twist
which turns into something else ―
27 December 1934
Page-403
Mallarme
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui Va-t-il nous
déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre Ce lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se
délivre Pour n’avoir pas chante
la région ou vivre Quand du
stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.
Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l’espace inflige a l’oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l’horreur du sol ou le plumage est pris.
Fantôme qu’a ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s’immobilise au songe froid de
mépris
Que
vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne. I tried to break this nut of
Mallarmé’s . . . but, pardi, it was a
hard nut. Really what a tortuous trend and how he has turned the images! “The transparent glacier of flights haunting the
hard lake under the frost”! The frost or snow has become the glacier (icefield) and the icefield composes the lake
―that’s
what I imaged.
How does hoar-frost or rime become the glacier? “Givre” is not
the same as “glace” ―it is not ice, but a covering of hoar-frost such as you see on the trees etc., the congealed moisture of the
air ―that is the “ What do you think of the sonnet?
One of the finest sonnets I have ever read. Magnificent line, by the way, “
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powers) of the soul that have frozen into a glacier seems to me as powerful as it is violent. Of course in French such
expressions were quite new ―in some other languages they were already possible. You will find lots of kindred things in
the most modern poetry which specialises in violent revelatory (or at least would-be revelatory) images. You disapprove? Well,
one may do so, ―classical taste does; but I find myself obliged here to admire.
16 December 1936
Heredia
Comme un vol de gerfauts hors du charnier natal, Fatigués de porter leurs
misères hautaines,
De Palos de Moguer, routiers et capitaines
Partaient, ivres d’un
rêve héroïque et brutal.
Ils allaient conquérir le fabuleux métal
Que Cipango murit dans ses mines lointaines, Et les vents alizes inclinaient leurs antennes Aux bords
mystérieux du monde Occidental.
Chaque soir, espérant des lendemains épiques,
L’azur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques Enchantait leur sommeil d’un mirage dore;
Ou penches a l’avant des blanches caravelles, Ils regardaient monter en un ciel ignore Du fond de
l’Océan des étoiles nouvelles. Many Frenchmen regard Heredia’s “
I cannot say that I find Heredia’s sonnet to be either an eighth wonder or any wonder. Heredia was a careful workman in word
and rhythm and from that point of view the sonnet is faultless. If that is all that is needed for perfection, it is perfect. But otherwise, except for the image in the first two lines and the vigour of the fourth, I find it empty: Horace, at least, was seldom that.
These extravagant estimates of minor poets are only the self
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assertive challenge put forth by a personal preference they have.
24 June 1932
Samain and Flecker
I am sending you two poems
―one is Albert Samain’s famous
Dans la salle en rumeur un silence a passe…
Pannyre aux talons d’or s’avance pour danser.
Un voile aux mille plis la cache tout
entière.
D’un long trille d’argent la flute la
première, L’invite; elle
s’élance, entre-croise ses pas, Et, du lent mouvement imprime par ses bras, Donne un rythme bizarre a
l’étoffe nombreuse, Qui
s’élargit, ondule, et se gonfle et se creuse, Et se
déploie enfin en large tourbillon…
Et Pannyre devient fleur, flamme, papillon!
Tous se taisent; les yeux la suivent en extase. Peu a peu la fureur de la danse l’embrase.
Elle tourne toujours; vite! plus vite encor!
La flamme
éperdument vacille aux flambeaux d’or!…
Puis, brusque, elle
s’arrête au milieu de la salle;
Et le voile qui tourne autour d’elle en spirale,
Suspendu dans sa course, apaise ses longs plis,
Et, se collant aux seins aigus, aux flancs polis,
Comme au travers d’une eau soyeuse et continue,
Dans un divin
éclair, montre Pannyre nue.
Here is Flecker:
The revel pauses and the room is still:
The silver flute invites her with a trill,
And, buried in her great veils fold on fold,
Rises to dance Pannyra, Heel of Gold.
Her light steps cross; her subtle arm impels
The clinging drapery; it shrinks and swells,
Hollows and floats, and bursts into a whirl:
Page-406 She is a flower, a moth, a flaming girl.
All lips are silent; eyes are all in trance:
She slowly wakes the madness of the dance,
Windy and wild the golden torches burn;
She turns, and swifter yet she tries to turn,
Then stops: a sudden marble stiff she stands.
The veil that round her coiled its spiral bands,
Checked in its course, brings all its folds to rest,
And clinging to bright limb and pointed breast
Shows, as beneath silk waters woven fine,
Pannyra naked in a flash divine!
"All here," says a critic, "is bright and sparkling as the jewels on the
dancer’s breast, but there is one ill-adjusted word ―pointed breast ―which is perhaps more physiological than
poetic.” Personally I don’t somehow react very happily to the word “girl” in line
8.
Samain’s poem is a fine piece of work, inspired and perfect; Flecker’s is good only in substance, an adequate picture, one
may say, but the expression and verse are admirable within their limits. The difference is that the French has vision and
the inspired movement that comes with vision ―all on the vital plane, of course,
―but the English version has only physical
sight, sometimes with a little glow in it, and the precision that comes with that sight. I do not know why your critical sense
objects to “girl”. This line [“She is a flower, a moth, a flaming girl“] and one other, “Windy and wild the golden torches burn”
are the only two that rise above the plane of physical sight. But both these poems have the distinction of being perfectly
satisfying in their own kind. . . .
P.S. “Flaming girl” and “pointed breast” might be wrong in spirit
as a translation of the French ―but that is just what Flecker’s poem is not, in spite of its apparent or outward fidelity, it is in
spirit quite a different poem. 23 June 1932
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Hopkins and Kipling
I should like to have a few words from you on the poetic style and technique of
these two quotations. The first is an instance of Gerard Manley Hopkins’
polyphony "at its most magnificent and intricate":
Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable,
|
vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s
vást,
|
womb-of-all, home-of-all,
|
hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west,
|
her wild hollow hoarlight
hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars,
|
stárs principal, overbend
us,
Fíre-féaturing
heaven. For earth |
her
being has unbound; her dapple is at an end, as- tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs;
|
self
ín self steepèd and páshed ―qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering
|
áll now. Heart, you round me
right
With:
Óur
évening is over us; óur night
|
whélms, whélms,
ánd will end us . . .
The next quotation illustrates Kipling’s Tommy-Atkins-music at its most vivid and onomatopoeic
―lines considered by Lascelles Abercrombie to be a masterly fusion of all the elements necessary in poetic technique:
‘Less you want your toes trod off you’d better get back at once,
For the bullocks are walking two by two,
Page-408 The byles are walking two by two,
And the elephants bring the guns.
Ho! Yuss!
Great ―big ―long ―black ―forty-pounder guns.
Jiggery-jolty to and fro,
Each as big as a launch in tow ― Blind ―dumb ―broad-breached ―beggars o’
battering-guns.
My verdict on Kipling’s lines would be that they are fit for
the columns of The Illustrated Weekly of India and nowhere else. I refuse to accept this journalistic jingle as poetry. As
for Abercrombie’s comment, ―unspeakable rubbish, unhappily spoken!
Hopkins is a different proposition; he is a poet, which Kipling never was nor could be. He has vision, power, originality; but his technique errs by excess; he piles on you his effects, repeats, exaggerates and in the end it is perhaps great in
effort, but not great in success. Much material is there, many new suggestions, but not a work realised, not a harmoniously
perfect whole. 30 December 1932
George Santayana
There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,
Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,
And others’ lives with love, as if our own;
For we behold, from those eternal towers, The deathless beauty of all winged hours,
And have our being in their truth alone.
. . . and I knew The wings of sacred Eros as he flew
And left me to the love of things not seen.
‘T is a sad love, like an eternal prayer,
And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease.
Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,
And heaven shines as if the gods were there.
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Had Dian passed there could no deeper peace
Embalm the purple stretches of the air.
George Santayana, the writer of these, is a Spaniard who has a post at Harvard
―English is not his mother tongue. In spite
of traditionalism and lack of any very individual or developed technique, is there not some
arresting quality in the above
extracts?
It [the two extracts considered as a unit] has a considerable
beauty of thought and language in it. It is a great pity that it is so derivative in form as to sound like an echo. With so much
mastery of language and ease of rhythm it should have been possible to find a form of his own and an original style. The
poetic power and vision are there and he has done as much with it as could be done with a borrowed technique. If he had found
his own, he might have ranked high as a poet.
Fiona Macleod
Would you please comment on the passages from Fiona Macleod?
1) So through the grey dune-grasses
Not the wind only cries,
But a dim sea-wrought Shadow Breathes drowned sighs.
2)
. . . with trampling sounds
As of herds confusedly crowding gorges? ―. . .
The gloom that is the hush’d air of the Grave, . . .
3) As the bird of Brigid, made of foam and the pale moonwhite
wine
Of dreams, flits under the sombre windless plumes of the
pine.
4)
. . . the wheeling cry
Where in the dusk the lapwing slips and falls
From ledge to ledge of darkness.
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1) There is a very distinct charm about it. I am not sure of the entire success.
2) I could not pronounce on this without seeing the poem as a whole or at least more of it. It depends on how it comes
into the general scheme of the rhythm.
3) Very fine and original and authentic in rhythm, it is
absolutely the native rhythm of what she expresses.
4) This I think magnificent.
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