The last chapter ended on a note of interrogation, a very proper way for arguments on contemporary problems to end, however unwelcome to the cocksure or the craver for reassurance. I tried to indicate the sense in which a poet should be modern, and some of the difficulties facing the contemporary poet in his attempt to be so. I asked, can the poet survive in the modern world. It is a question I must leave hanging fretfully in the air, for I do not know the answer; but it is not an academic question, unless we think it unimportant to life whether or no man’s most profound, most aspiring, most human, and most various utterance should be stilled. And at once, when we look at modern verse and ask ourselves what the poets are doing for their own salvation, we are tempted to say that, having to give ground somewhere, they sacrifice variety and humanity in the interests of the aspiring or the profound.
Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one,
sings Mr. Auden. There is no doubt that poets are getting to be extremely vertical men. Under the relentless pressure of modern civilization, poetry is being squeezed in, attenuated, its head higher and higher in the clouds, its heart more and more in the unconscious. Military men might liken its present position to a sort of defence in depth, a withdrawal of the main force into a number of ‘hedgehogs’, with a few bold or bomb-happy types still swarming around outside but clearly, for all practical purposes, to be written off. As early as 1898, Yeats wrote that ‘a new poetry, which is always contracting its limits, has grown up under the shadow of the old’. He was all for it, then.
If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its symbolism, what changes should one look for in the manner of our poetry? A return to the way of our fathers, a casting out of descriptions of nature for the sake of nature, of the moral law for the sake of the moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding over scientific opinion that so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson.
What Yeats was asking for is, of course, pure poetry — poetry for poetry’s sake. To speak of such poetry as ‘a return to the way of our fathers’ is quite wrong, however; it is not even a return to the way of our primitive ancestors, for whom poetry, though it was magic, was magic with a purpose beyond aesthetic satisfaction. But Yeats’s statement has historical importance, because it foreshadows an attitude towards poetry prevalent in our own time and a chief source of controversy among English poets. The distinction between classic and romantic has been modified into one between impure and pure poetry: we can trace the conscious development of the latter from the aesthetic school of the nineties, through the Imagists (though they considered Imagism as a new classicism) up to the Surrealists of our own day; and we cannot fail to notice that the main current of continental European verse — the French Post-Symbolists, Rilke, George, Hölderlin, Lorca —has set even more strongly towards pure poetry than has the English tradition. I do not propose to take a side in this controversy here. I believe, and I think many poets would agree, that ideally both kinds of verse actives ide by side in all their numerous practical gradations would be the best thing for the health of poetry. But it is perfectly arguable that at the present time this is impossible, and that the only hope for poetry’s survival lies in constant injections of its own pure essence. What is relevant to my own theme is that the basic resource of this pure poetry — the strongpoint or ‘hedgehog’ into which the main body of poetry has withdrawn — is the image.
A parallel could be drawn between the remedies proposed to-day for an invalid religion and those which are offered for the resuscitation of poetry. On the one hand, there is the line of‘brighter’ services, advertisement, a going-out of the Church into the market-place and the social problems of modern life; on the other hand, the emphasis on doctrine, sacrament, personal salvation, the pure milk of the Word. So with poetry, some retiring to its innermost holy of holies, others — no less self-consciously perhaps — seeking the means to make it ‘popular’ again. Religion and poetry do indeed still overlap. Modern civilization bears hardly upon each of them: as I suggested towards the end of the last chapter, it is a divorce between the spiritual and the material meanings of things, rather than a simple decay of spiritual aspiration, which has atrophied the general imagination. In a book written twenty-five years ago, Robert Graves said,
… the educated reading public has developed analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet… The analytic spirit has been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the fine arts have fallen.1
We may perhaps wonder whether it is not an increase in self-consciousness even more than a development of analytic power in the educated man which has brought about this resistance to poetry, but otherwise the statement is plausible enough. Beside it, let us place an extract from G. M. Trevelyan’s English Social History where, on the subject of seventeenth century, he writes of those
… old English ballads, legends and broadsides that used then to circulate among the common people, instead of the flood of precise newspaper information that has killed the imaginative faculty in modern times….
In those days men were much left alone with nature, with themselves, with God. As Blake has said:
‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.’
The modern poet, then, is faced with a difficulty of communication as great in its way as the difficulty presented by his subject-matter. Not only is the contemporary scene overwhelming in its complexity and changefulness: the common people have lost that kind of imaginative faculty which provided the groundwork of a popular poetry, substituting for it either the positive appetite for ‘precise’ information or a passive receptiveness to the fantasies of the cinema and the pulp novel; the most educated people, the poet’s last stand-by, have also failed him because they have become too sceptical and self-conscious to be easily impressed through his medium. Nevertheless, in so far as he can be said to write for anyone, the English poet to-day does write for the most highly educated person. The nervous mannerisms, the general air of exaggeration and exhibitionism we find in much contemporary verse, can be explained by the poet’s more or less conscious will to impress this kind of reader: the violence and discordance of his imagery is partly a more or less deliberate shock-treatment, by which he hopes to break down this reader’s too civilized resistance.
So, when we come to consider the modern use of the image, we must have in mind two things which the poet is trying to do with it. He is trying, with its help, to find his way about, emotionally and intellectually, in the confusion of the modern world; and he is trying to make some impact upon a highly sophisticated reader. Surrealist poetry is evidently the most violent form of shock treatment aimed at this latter end. But, throughout the whole range of modern verse, from the Symbolists onwards, we find a tendency towards the illogical, away from the old cause-and-effect sequence of images within the poem. Ben Jonson, approving Quintilian, warned poets that
… in no kind of translation, or metaphor, or allegory [must] we make a turn from what we began; as if we fetch the original of our metaphor from sea and billows, we end not in flames and ashes: it is a most foul inconsequence.
We have come a long way since then. Inconsequence is the mode, and foul is fair. But we should not condemn this kind of inconsequence without trial: the poet may be right in refusing to play the sophisticated reader on his own ground, in forcing him onto the field of the irrational where there are no civilized rules to uphold his resistance; for if, as Mr. Graves suggested, it is the modern reader’s analytic power which insulates him from poetry, then to give him reason, logical continuity or consistency, any familiar mental process in a poem, is to encourage that very faculty in him which repels the poetic impression.
But, although a movement towards pure, irrational poetry may have been necessary, it is nevertheless a regression. A part of the cargo has been jettisoned to keep the ship afloat. The rational is not the basis of poetic reason; yet we must believe poetic reason to be incomplete without it, if we look upon the imagination as a power which can unite thought and feeling within a poetic whole greater than the sum of its parts. We shall see that what the modern poet often sacrifices through his violent and inconsequent use of images is not consistency of impression so much as this wholeness, this clear supremacy of theme over decoration and detail. His poems, to borrow a term from Mr. Constant Lambert’s musical criticism, are apt to be ‘short-winded’. There is indeed a close parallel between modern music and modern poetry. Mr. Lambert has remarked that ‘by suspending a chord in space, as it were, Debussy recalls the methods of the literary Symbolists’. If we substitute ‘image’ for ‘chord’ in the following passage, this parallel becomes clearly evident:
… the novelty of Debussy’s harmonic method consists in his using a chord as such, and not as a unit in a form of emotional and musical argument.
Mr. Lambert also employs such phrases as ‘impressionist use of colour’, ‘appeal to the musical nerves rather than to the musical reason’, ‘invertebrate qualities’ — all of which are easily transferable to modern verse.
To the Symbolist movement dates back also the modern practice of using private images; that is to say, images whose application is a secret between the poet and his own experience — a secret the reader may guess, or infer from the emotional context, deriving perhaps a special pleasure from its allusive manner, as might a stranger who is let into a conversation between two intimate friends, but liable to misunderstand its import entirely. As Edmund Wilson has said,
The symbols of the Symbolist school are usually chosen arbitrarily by the poet to stand for special ideas of his own — they are a sort of disguise for these ideas.
That is equally true for many of the images of contemporary poets. The same critic points out the defect of this method when he says,
What the symbols of Symbolism really were, were [sic] metaphors detached from their subjects — for one cannot, beyond a certain point, in poetry, merely enjoy colour and sound for their own sake: one has to guess what the images are being applied to.
These extracts should make clear what is meant by private images, or private symbols. They are not synonymous with personal images: any image, except the purely conventional one such as is created by a classical epithet and its noun, is to some extent a personal one; it is formed or chosen, that is, by the poet’s own experience. But private images are those whose relationship with their subject and thus with the reader’s possible experience, is so remote or cryptic as to be a burden on the poem. Again, the private image is not the same as the private symbol. For one thing, it can never be quite so private. There is nothing to stop a poet deciding that in his poetry the word ‘boot’ shall symbolize, say, his own special idea of married love: and the Freudians would doubtless have no difficulty in telling us why he chose this particular symbol: but, from the poetic point of view, it would remain a purely arbitrary choice; and our appetite for his verse would constantly be breaking its teeth on that boot, as it does, for example, on Mallarmé’s ‘azur’. A private image could never be quite so arbitrary, since images must have some emotional or sensuous source outside the poet, and this, however obscure, will make for some potentially common ground with the reader.
Let us now turn away from the subject of communication, and consider the modern use of images in its other aspect — as the poet’s response to the confusion and complexity of the modern world. In the last chapter I suggested a connection between the boldness and profusion of the poet’s images and the conditions of the world in which he lives. But I should not wish the imagination to be thought of as a set of conditioned reflexes, automatically reacting to the impressions of the contemporary scene, and doing nothing else. It is a fallacy which may easily arise, however, from a too naive interpretation of the idea of Negative Personality. In its crudest form, this fallacy leads to a position where the poet not merely builds up a series of broken images and calls it a house, but actually claims that the process is modern architecture or its result the only thing worth calling a house nowadays. But the building of a beautiful ruin—and that is what this process often amounts to — is a folly. An increasingly complex civilization will justify more complex image patterns within the poem; an era which throws up masses of new ideas and sense-data will call for a response in bold, novel imagery: but it does not at all follow from this that the right answer to a disintegrated civilization is a disintegrated poem.
For imagination is not just a mirror, nor are images merely the reflections to be seen in it. The imagination is also active, the means by which the poet explores reality; and the image, as I have said, is also the poet’s way of reducing the real world to manageable proportions, and of revealing its patterns. This is equally true whether the poet is exploring the external world or, as so often now, that inward world of man’s mind which Wordsworth called ‘the haunt and the main region of my song’. Our world, our minds may be in a state of chaos. But it is the business of the poetic reason to create order out of chaos: and, even if its business were merely to give an imaginative reproduction of chaos, it must still employ formal pattern to do so. A painter will not give us a picture of a dark night by covering his whole canvas with lamp black. Yeats did not mark his conviction that ‘the centre falls apart’ by letting the poem drop out of his hand and presenting us with shattered pieces.
But few modern poets would attempt so crudely to justify the apparent anarchy of their verse. It would be argued, rather, that there are design and ordonnance in it, but of a kind unknown heretofore and therefore unrecognizable by the critic. This we might well concede. The critic only too often lays himself open to the remark Blake made about Sir Joshua Reynolds — ‘This man is hired to depress Art’. Nevertheless, we are still entitled to ask the modern poet what is the design behind that ‘glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery’, how he justifies the bringing together of images which seem to us to have no relationship, intellectual or even emotional, and what he has put in the place of that poetic logic which used to bind images together. We may even be disobliging enough to throw at him another sentence of Coleridge’s — ‘arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry’. And if he asks us to explain what we mean by poetic logic, we might quote to him this passage from W. P. Ker:
It is very generally through a change of mood or a change of position that poetical conclusions are reached by poetical logic … That is poetical logic; not the proving of a position through discourse and evidence, but the change of position so that every stage is satisfactory to the mind of the hearer, and the transition intelligible, and the progress not refutation of the earlier stages. [Italics mine.]
What Ker has said there, in effect, is that poetic logic is development of a theme, comparable with that which takes place in music. And the modern poet might claim to satisfy this requirement. But his critics would certainly take him up on the point of ‘change of position’: his transitions from image to image or from idea to image are just what they often do not find intelligible — meaning by ‘intelligible’ not ‘logically consequent’ so much as ‘acceptable to the imagination’; and as a result, in the progress of the poem there often seems to be ‘refutation of the earlier stages’. Let me give a simple example. In the 126th Psalm occurs the familiar line
Turn our captivity, O Lord: as the rivers in the south. The transition from the idea of release from captivity to the image of rivers in the south is quite irrational: for most of us, at any rate, its geographical (or geo-political) source is obliterated; yet we find it intelligible, and I do not think we accept the line imaginatively just because it has become familiar. And now, look at this stanza from a recent poem by Mr. Roy Campbell:
And soon that prayer became a hymn
By feeding on itself: the skies
Were tracered by the Seraphim
With meteors from the dim guitars
That on their strings funambulize
The tapdance of the Morning Stars.
The transition there is from the image of a sky tracered with meteors
to the image of guitars playing a tapdance. It is at any rate no more irrational than the transition in the Psalmist’s line: yet it is not acceptable imaginatively: the two images are tacked together so clumsily that we can see the join (at ‘meteors from the dim guitars’) and indeed see little else; imagination boggles at the idea of guitars giving off meteors — and why are the guitars dim, anyway? But the point is, could these two images, even by the most skilful joining, ever truly be married? are they not mutually incompatible?
I have deliberately taken two simple and extreme examples of poetic transition. What reply does the modern poet make to these several criticisms ? First, he will probably say Mr. Roy Campbell’s stanza proves nothing except that mutually incompatible images are mutually incompatible: he might add that the stanza is not typically modern, because its images are merely decorative — a pretentious adornment of what is, beneath their encrustation, a nakedly rhetorical statement. On the question of poetic logic he might argue, I think, something like this: Abstract talk about changes of mood, changes of position, intelligible transitions, only clouds the issue, which is really quite a simple one: either you link together the poetry in your poem, its images and ecstatic statements, by means of connecting passages of mere verse, or you don’t: such passages are necessary in a long poem, but I am not writing epic; they may give a reader the impression that he understands the poem, but in effect they are weakening its poetic impression upon him. I wish my images to communicate with each other (and the reader) directly, without the intervention of any prosaic interpreter: if they sometimes fail to do so, that is my fault and does not invalidate the principle. Poetic logic is a fancy name you have made up to disguise a basic error — that a poem can only develop through explicit cause-and-effect stages. I myself (he might add) prefer to follow the tendency of modern philosophy to discard the principle of causation; and I am certainly following the technique of our most popular modern art-form, the cinema, in the speeding up and intensifying of image sequences. You have quoted Coleridge against me. Now let him speak for me, as a poet who writes for
such readers only as had been accustomed to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at times into the twilitrealm of consciousness, and to feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space.
With much of this, providing we do not reject the possibility of pure poetry, or at least purer poetry, we can agree. We might take the poet up on certain points: the cinema is not a just analogy, for example, since most films have a dramatic story strong enough to carry the distance between the visual images, whereas our poet has admittedly dispensed with any such aid. But the real crux lies elsewhere. If poetry is to concern itself more and more exclusively with ‘modes of inmost being’ to which ‘the attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien’, it must perfect a method by which this kind of experience can be conveyed not only ‘in symbols of time and space’, but also in a form whose very nature is sequence. A poem—let us be quite frank about the physical facts of it — must have a beginning, a middle and an end, otherwise it will not be a whole thing. It must have rhythm, which means one group of inflections not merely following but caused by another. Its images, drawn from the world of time and space, must develop its theme, or develop out of its theme, in a certain order and a certain relationship: one image begets another as surely as one day telleth another. Moreover, the reader will not take in the whole of a poem simultaneously: for him too it is a series of experiences. Whatever modern philosophy may do, the poet cannot in fact discard sequence, cannot discard cause and effect, cannot work to a continuous present.
This being so, we should go back to our poet and ask him even more insistently how he justifies his use of images, what is the design behind it. For clearly, if there must be a relationship between the images of a poem, and if he rejects the old method of a poetic argument which related them explicitly, then to compensate for the absence of this argument there ought to be a very close, implicit affinity between his images. But this is just what we often fail to find. His images often seem to be milling around in a poetic vacuum, self-absorbed, solemn or rowdy, centrifugal, almost as if the poem were a fancy-dress party for introverted children. He may answer, in the words of Edmund Wilson on the Symbolists,
World and poet are always overlapping, are always interpenetrating, as they might in a Romantic poem; but the Symbolist will not even try … to keep their relations constant. The conventions of the poem’s imagery change as quickly and as naturally as the images passing through the poet’s mind.
Now that is all very well, as long as the poet does not take it as a licence to assume that the sequence of images passing naturally through his mind can of itself create a poem. Of course I assume nothing of the kind, our poet replies. What I aim at is that the poem should grow naturally out of the images, take its form from them, instead of forcing them into a pattern dictated by thought or convention. And, as you have brought up painting, you should consider another analogy — that of Cezanne who, seeing an integral connection between form and colour in nature, so that he was unable to contemplate these qualities disparately in natural objects, set himself to design in colour. There is a common factor between the revolution in art thus effected and the revolution in poetry which seeks to reveal the form of an experience through colour, that is through image and metaphor: this method is responsible for the profusion, the ‘glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery’ which you quote against us.
The poet has drawn a very suggestive analogy here, I think. We shall come shortly to consider how far, in practice, this method can be successful. Theoretically, an objection that could be made to it has been expressed by an American critic, Mr. Robert Hillyer, as follows:
The insistence on the sensuous image as opposed to the abstract idea … resulted in a picture-poetry, wherein the picture was frequently everything. It existed without reference to general human experience. This was the first step in the fallacious separation of being from meaning.
Let me enlarge on that a little. The tendency of the purer poetry we are discussing is to substitute images (though by no means always sensuous images) for the abstract idea, that is for the statement of this idea in poetic but non-pictorial terms. As a result, the reader sees nothing but a succession of pictures, cannot see the theme behind them: and, the more personal and arbitrary these images are, the less the whole picture, the poem itself has ‘reference to general human experience’, for the poet has discarded those non-pictorial passages by which the images could be related and a theme made explicit. So, Mr. Hillyer argues, ‘being’ is fallaciously separated from ‘meaning’: which I take to be a more cautious way of saying that we are now expected to love the poem for itself and not for its money. Without getting bogged up in the meaning of meaning, we may indicate a fault in this argument, in so far as it implies that the poet has a choice between expressing the abstract idea in abstract words and translating it into an image: we have seen that he does not now generally work like this; he does not have an idea and then find the best image for it; he comes at the form and fullness of the idea through the image.
But it is time to bundle off this hypothetical modern poet of ours, and bring on a real one to speak for himself. Here is a most valuable discussion of his creative method by Mr. Dylan Thomas:
… a poem by myself needs a host of images, because its centre is a host of images. I make one image — though ‘make’ is not the word; I let, perhaps, an image be ‘made’ emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess; let it breed another, let that image contradict the first; make of the third image, bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits, conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the same time … The life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the centre; an image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions … Out of the inevitable conflict of images — inevitable, because of the creative, recreative, destructive and contradictory nature of the motivating centre, the womb of war — I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.
There are two points here we should particularly notice. First, ‘the life in any poem of mine cannot move concentrically round a central image, the life must come out of the centre’: this is clearly one extreme, the opposite of which we find in the method of George Herbert, whose poems spring from a central image, move concentrically round it and constantly refer back to it. At the centre of Mr. Thomas’s poems there is not a single image, but ‘a host of images’. For the reader the impression may be of an escape of gas under water—I do not intend this with any disrespect — and bubbles breaking out apparently at random all over the surface: for the poet, the bubbles are the heart of the poem. Secondly, the process by which this host of images creates a poem is one of conflict — the second image will ‘contradict the first’, and so on. Now, in what sense can one image be said to contradict another? Logic is obviously not in question. Nor, I think, are we chiefly concerned with that kind of physical antagonism between image and idea which produces conceit, although such conceit can sometimes be found in Mr. Thomas’s verse, as for example the Crashaw-like second line of
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.
Nor, again, is it a matter of the poet letting one image follow another into the poem automatically just as they pass through his mind, for Mr. Thomas speaks of applying ‘intellectual and critical forces’ to his images, and of ‘imposed formal limits’. By ‘contradictions’ I think we must understand the bringing together, in images, of objects that have no natural affinity; or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, objects which would not on the face of it seem to make for consistency of impression. But the best way to find out what a poet means by his critical generalizations is to ask one of his poems. Here is a passage from Mr. Thomas’s After The Funeral —
But I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all
The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me for ever over her grave until
The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.
The base of this passage is a pair of images, each played contrapuntally against the other. There is the actual dead woman, Ann, a simple cottager; then there is the monumental figure which ‘Ann’s bard’ carves out of her life and death, ‘Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly magnified out of praise’ as he says earlier in the poem. These two images are allowed to conflict, or to ‘contradict’ each other: the poem shuttles backwards and forwards between the real living Ann and the dead mythical Ann.
Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
The contradiction is repeated in the contrast between ‘her scrubbed and sour humble hands’ and ‘These cloud-sopped, marble hands’. Within this contrapuntal framework, pairs of secondary images are also playing off against each other. For example, in the first six lines there is an opposition between the natural earthy woman and the religious object she has become, an opposition never commented upon or made explicit, but realized through conflicting images — ‘hearth’ or ‘ferned and foxy woods’ on the one hand, and on the other the calling of ‘the seas to service the ’hymning heads’: and sometimes the two concepts are made to clash directly and resolve in a phrase: ‘wood-tongued virtue’; or the suggestion both of natural freedom and of Christian humility in ‘Bless her bent spirit with four, crossing birds’, or ‘That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel’, with its echo of the babbling bellbuoy merging into the sound of a chapel bell, and the brown chapel recalling the ferned and foxy wood. At the end of the poem these wood-symbols are merged into each other; by the dialectical method Mr. Thomas described, each has in a sense turned into its opposite; the fox has become something like a fern (’The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love’), the fern moves like a fox (’And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill’).
After the Funeral seems to me a most brilliant, beautiful poem. It helps us to understand what Mr. Thomas meant by his phrase ‘a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed’. We notice, also, a constant breaking down of the distinction between the senses, so that aural, visual, tactual qualities are perpetually interfused within the image sequences and even within separate images, as they are in the poetry of Hopkins and Edith Sitwell. Moreover, when one reads the whole poem, one realizes that it does not ‘move concentrically round a central image’, an impression which might have been received from the strength of the ‘monumental-Ann’ image in the passage just discussed. Though the image pattern is most intense and closely wrought, the images are centrifugal. And yet I am very sure that it is a whole poem. What is it, then, that has prevented this centrifugal strain from disintegrating the texture, as so often happens with contemporary verse of this genre, giving us instead of a poem a handful of whirling fragments?
We should go for enlightenment to the poet whose revolutionary technique has so much to do with the kind of poetry I am discussing. Let us turn from Mr. Thomas’s cottage woman to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Harry Ploughman —
Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue
Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank
Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank —
Head and foot, shoulder and shank —
By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to;
Stand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew
That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank —
Soared or sank —
Though as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a roll-call, rank
And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do —
His sinew-service where do.
He leans to it, Harry bends, look. Back, elbow, and liquid waist
In him, all quail to the wallowing o’ the plough:
’s cheek crimsons; curls
Wag or crossbridle, in a wind lifted, windlaced —
See his wind-lily locks-laced;
Churlsgrace, too, child of Amansstrength, how it hangs or hurls
Them — broad in bluff hide his frowning feet lashed! raced
With, along them, cragiron under and cold furls —
With-a-fountain’s shining-shot furls.
Now I fear this will be an outrage to persons who close their eyes and genuflect before any piece by Hopkins, but I do not think Harry Ploughman is at all a good poem. For me, nothing emerges from this froth and flurry of images, neither a clear objective picture of Harry, nor a sense that I am apprehending the real inwardness of a ploughman, nor a monumental, symbolic figure such as Mr. Thomas makes of his Ann. If Harry is a monumental figure, then I get only a fly’s-eye view of it, a series of blinding close-ups, as if I were crawling laboriously from limb to limb over the surface of a corrugated, undemonstrative statue.
When we look into the poem, we find it is composed from sequences of images, some clear some obscure, often ‘contradictory’, descriptive in intention rather than evocative — images for the most part visual, and extremely compressed. What we look for in vain, I believe, is any structure created by these images. We get the impression that one has been merely added to another —’broth’ to ‘hurdle’, ‘flue’ to ‘broth’; ’rack of ribs’, ’scooped flank’, ’rope-over thigh’, ’knee-nave’, ‘barrelled shank’ — all added one to another by an imaginative eye peering so close at each physical detail in turn that it never sees the whole body of the man, and by a mind so fastidiously searching in each case for the physically dead-accurate word that it misses the wholeness of the experience. This experience — the impression made upon Hopkins by a ploughman at work — is conveyed then in a succession of images bound loosely together by the rhythm, rhyme and internal assonance of the poem, but otherwise, apart from the carpenter-cooper-wheelwright metaphors in the opening lines, unrelated. There is almost none of that counterpoint and cross-reference of image we found in the Dylan Thomas poem. Why did so fine a writer fail to write a whole poem here? Why did the violent centrifugal force of his images disintegrate the poem? The answer, I suggest, is that the poem contains an unresolved conflict, between the poet’s enthusiasm for the ploughman’s physique (the reader may decide for himself in what proportion pure aesthetic pleasure and homosexual attraction were involved), and on the other hand the Jesuit’s stern repression of such homosexual feeling. ‘Hopkins’ (I quote a letter from Mr. R. E. Marshall) ‘turns the myopic eye of passion on Harry’s body, and the immense wave of repressed emotion breaks, like a wave, on the hard rock of the Church’s thou-shalt-not and scatters the poem into incoherent fragments.’
Harry Ploughman may be contrasted on the one hand with the ‘terrible’ sonnets, where very audacious, compressed images (’My cries heave, herds long’) and the involuntary ejaculations of despair spring alike from a profound spiritual conflict, and with such a poem as Felix Randall on the other. In Felix Randall there is a relationship between the poet and his subject, that of priest with dying penitent; it is a love relationship, but a religiously permissible one, and therefore for Hopkins a more positive and vital one than that of Harry Ploughman: this relationship gives point, order and coherence to the poem, so that we feel no inconsistency when the plain statements of which it is mainly composed — and they amount on the face of it to nothing more than the simple truth that all flesh withers — are suddenly in the last two lines gathered up into the majestic image,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey dray-horse his bright and battering
sandal.
I would stress the point that, until those last two lines, the poem is a series of explicit statements, with metaphor rare and subdued. We can see the rightness of this; for Hopkins, to put it crudely, by virtue of his priestly office was more interested in Felix Randall than in his own feelings about Felix Randall: whereas Dylan Thomas, no less rightly and naturally, was more concerned with the death of Ann as it affected him — the stir it made in his ‘inmost being’ — than with Ann herself, and thus we feel no impropriety in the complex structure of pure images which he raises as her memorial. It seems to follow that, the more personal, the more purely inward the experience, the ‘purer’ may be the poem which results; but that such experience must have been of great positive intensity if the images are to be satisfactorily related and not fly apart — if each of them is not to fly off, so to say, with a fragment of a poem in its grasp.
We may find it useful here to examine another poem, a sonnet by George Barker, which owes something to Hopkins in its diction: the subject is an actual experience of the poet’s — the sight of two men swept overboard in the Mediterranean.
The seagull, spreadeagled, splayed on the wind,
Span backwards shrieking, belly facing upward,
Fled backward with a gimlet in its heart
To see the two youths swimming hand in hand
Through green eternity. O swept overboard
Not could the thirty-foot jaws them part,
Or the flouncing skirts that swept them over
Separate what death pronounced was love.
I saw them, the hand flapping like a flag,
And another like a dolphin with a child
Supporting him. Was I the shape of Jesus
When to me hopeward their eyeballs swivelled,
Saw I was standing in the stance of vague
Horror; paralysed with mere pity’s peace?
The seagull image with which this sonnet opens is extremely brilliant, both symbolic and evocative; the words pick their punches very coolly; the rhythms, which are excellently contrived throughout the whole poem, convey first a resistance to the wind and in the next two lines a surrender to it. Our initial impression is a purely physical one — the picture of a seagull swept backwards over the wake of a ship. It is a sight so familiar to us all that the poet is able to take great imaginative liberties with it, yet remain intelligible. When the first impression is peeled off, we become aware of another meaning beneath it: the seagull, which ‘Span backwards shrieking, belly facing upward’, prepares us emotionally for the two men whirled away in the ship’s wake. At this point, the phrase ‘Fled backward with a gimlet in its heart’ introduces a third motif. It contains not only the previous suggestion of a remorseless force skewering the bird and pushing it backwards, but also the idea of anguish — the anguish of one who sees ‘the two youths swimming hand in hand through green eternity’, and is helpless — the anguish, in fact, of the poet himself ‘standing in the stance of vague horror; paralysed with mere pity’s peace’. The sharp, precise word ‘gimlet’ admirably points this double significance.
But after this the poem is not, perhaps, altogether satisfactory. Our attention begins to wander a little, distracted by images which do not tie in so closely to the theme. We admire the way the smooth rhythm of the seagull’s recession changes into the choppy rhythms of
O swept overboard
Not could the thirty-foot jaws them part,
Or the flouncing skirts that swept them over
Separate what death pronounced was love.
But the images for the waves — jaws and flouncing skirts — are gravely dissonant, and they make no contact with the seagull image. And then, in the sestet, we have two more images, equally centrifugal — the ‘hand flapping like a flag’ and the ‘dolphin with a child supporting him’. Now the cause of our dissatisfaction lies, I fancy, in the poet’s failure to maintain the ambivalence so beautifully created by the opening lines. He is trying to be in two places at once, in the consciousness of the drowning men who see him as ‘the shape of Jesus’, and at the core of his own experience as a witness of their fate. The poem, attempting thus to look outwards and inwards at the same time, becomes emotionally unfocused: we do not doubt the intensity of the poet’s experience; but we find that the pure, subjective images rising from the inwardness of this experience do not perfectly fuse with the images which are intended to convey its external cause. Mr. Barker’s poem is somewhere half-way between the purer kind of poetry we have been discussing and the impure kind. It is at least sufficiently impure to admit one direct statement or piece of poetic argument — that the waves could not ‘Separate what death pronounced was love’.
We have seen that, in the purer poetry of to-day, there is a danger from the centrifugal force of its images. We must now glance at another possible danger. The late Walter Raleigh, lecturing on Christina Rossetti, said
The worst of it is you cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water — it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.
It is a piece of excellent advice, which I may seem to be disastrously ignoring in the present chapter. But let us take another opinion: Mr. Herbert Read has said that
Poetry is an essence which we have to dilute with grosser elements to make it viable or practicable. A poem that is pure imagery would be like a statue of crystal — something too cold and transparent for our animal senses.
You will notice the implication here that ‘pure imagery’ is the essence of poetry. Read and Raleigh are not, however, talking about quite the same thing. Raleigh was speaking of the pure lyric, the poem wherein words, by some happy, unpredictable, ungovernable chance are transmuted into blobs of quicksilver, as it were, which run lightly together and coalesce in a rounded whole — poems such as ‘Take, oh take those lips away’, or ‘O rose, thou art sick’, or Christina Rossetti’s own
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And, if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
Such quicksilver poems glide away from the critical touch: they offer no opening by which criticism may enter to hatch its parasitic theories. So, as Raleigh implied, we had much better stop chattering about them and be content to enjoy them.
But the kind of pure poetry to which Mr. Read’s comment is relevant gives criticism a lodgment, for it is self-conscious, even — I do not use the word disparagingly — synthetic. It is a poetry consciously constructed from images, deliberately setting out to eliminate every trace of prose meaning. It would never consent to so plain a statement as ‘And, if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget’: nor, some of us may controversially add, does it ever achieve so poetic a statement. But the real difference is between a poem like Christina Rossetti’s Song, whose refrain incidentally solves a contradiction by the act of lyrically stating it, and the poet who sets out, like Mr. Eliot with his Tiresias or Mr. David Gascoyne in Venus Androgyne, to ‘weld twin contradictions in a single fire’. For this purer contemporary verse is not only a matter of allowing images to breed by conflict, as Mr. Thomas expressed it; there is also frequently to be found in it a conscious searching after some truth presumed to lie at the roots of the contradiction — the kind of truth Yeats was groping after in his doctrine of the Anti-self:
… By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.
The poetry which results from this image-lit exploring into the heart of contradictions is therefore metaphysical rather than lyrical in quality. It can at least come no nearer the lyric than, for example, Mr. Gascoyne’s Winter Garden, which he includes among his metaphysical poems —
The season’s anguish, crashing whirlwind, ice,
Have passed, and cleansed the trodden paths
That silent gardeners have strewn with ash.
The iron circles of the sky
Are worn away by tempest;
Yet in this garden there is no more strife:
The Winter’s knife is buried in the earth.
Pure music is the cry that tears
The birdless branches in the wind.
No blossom is reborn. The blue
Stare of the pond is blind.
And no one sees
A restless stranger through the morning stray
Across the sodden lawn, whose eyes
Are tired of weeping, in whose breast
A savage sun consumes its hidden day.
Nothing here is explicit. What emerges from the sequence of images of anguish, purification, peace and again anguish is a parallel between nature and man — a parallel which includes both likeness and antithesis. The ‘restless stranger’ is like the garden because he has passed through a storm of anguish, yet the opposite of it because he is restless, alive, while the garden is dead with winter’s knife in its heart; the blue stare of the pond is blind and the stranger’s eyes are tired of weeping; in the garden there is no more strife, whereas in his breast a savage sun consumes its hidden day: but in this last line likeness and antithesis are fused, for nature as well as man contains its contradictions, nature too has its sun, burning now unseen but still leading earth through the endless cycles of decay and purification, calm and storm, death and rebirth.
If we compare Winter Garden with a poem of Mr. Gascoyne’s surrealist period — with, say, the opening lines of In Defence of Humanism,
The face of the precipice is black with lovers;
The sun above them is a bag of nails; the spring’s
First rivers hide among their hair.
Goliath plunges his hand into the poisoned well
And bows his head and feels my feet walk through his brain.
— we no doubt find the former considerably more lucid. I do not mean more intelligible, though as it happens it is. But, taking sun for sun, we are emotionally warmed and enlightened by ‘A savage sun consumes its hidden day’, whereas we are left cold by ‘The sun above them is a bag of nails’. The latter image, I dare say, turned up from the unconscious with perfectly good credentials: but that is not enough for poetry, or for the poetic effect. ‘A poem that is pure imagery would be like a statue of crystal — something too cold and transparent for our animal senses.’ Now Winter Garden is as much a poem of pure imagery as In Defence of Humanism, in the sense that what it says is all said through images. But the images themselves are not pure; they are mixed with ‘grosser elements’ and thus made ‘Viable or practicable’. What are these grosser elements? Emotion, sensuousness and prose meaning, I suggest. The sensuous associations of its images pitch the poem at a certain emotional key, and we feel a mood: the emotional progress of the images follows an invisible but unbroken thread, and we feel a meaning; this thread is invisible only because the images are strung along it contiguously, but it is there none the less and it is a thread of argument, of prose meaning. Were it not so, we should never have found that development of likeness and antithesis running through the poem, for one image can become the antithesis of another only in the relation of both to something within reason, to some idea definable by reason.
I suggested, at the start of this chapter, that modern poetry tends to sacrifice variety and humanity in the attempt to sound the depths of individual experience. The purer poetry of which I have been speaking is, in effect, an exploration of the poet’s own sensibility. But as Hazlitt said,
Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive — of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to the different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect.
A poetry which excludes the searchings of reason and the promptings of the moral sense is by so much the less impassioned, the less various and human, the less a product of the whole man at his full imaginative height. The images of such poetry will at best be forced images, springing from the artificially fertilized soil of sensibility, luxuriant, but short-lived and freakish. If the poem has no thread of that poetic reason which is ‘an emanation of the intellectual part of our nature’, its images will be broken, anarchic, hard to comprehend in their relationship with one another. If the poem is unimpassioned, a poem of ‘pure’ imagery from which all the ‘grosser elements’ of emotional and sensuous have been filtered off, then not only will it be ‘too cold and transparent for our animal senses’, but it will lack that unifying force — the intensity of feeling which alone, as we saw in the Dylan Thomas poem, can take the place of poetic reason in fusing together and controlling the images of pure perception. What is more, such images may seem arbitrary and monstrous without some proportionate strength of feeling to back them. The conclusion seems inescapable, that the two dangers which threaten all pure poetry, all poetry whose meaning is deliberately concentrated within its images, are really one and the same danger. Whether the images are too strong for their context and, quarrelling among themselves, tear it into shreds; or whether they are so purified of human associations that our common, earth-bound imagination cannot warm to them: in either case, the result is the same — a poem brilliant perhaps in the detail, piercing deep perhaps with its momentary intuitions, but unsatisfying in the round; an incomplete poem: a heap of broken images.