27
Charms and Riddles

3 March 1975

From SM, 123–47. Typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box file, files i, l, and r. Translated into Italian (1988). Originally given as an address to the New England Stylistics Club, Northeastern University, Boston.I

I

The study of genres, or the differentiating factors in literary experience, is not yet begun. Despite a book called Beyond Genre,¹ we have not got to the subject yet, much less beyond it: we do not even know where the conception stops. But clearly there are different kinds of genres, and perhaps a botanical analogy may be helpful in approaching their variety. There are genres of imagery, the roots of literature, a vast subterranean tangle of metaphors and image clusters, attached to and drawing in sustenance from experience outside literature, yet showing typical forms of relationship to that experience. There are genres of narrative, the stems and branches, typical ways of beginning, proceeding, and ending. There are genres of structure, the leaf–flower–fruit cycles of literature: these are based on what we call conventions, and are where all the familiar generic terms, such as epic and drama, belong. And finally, there are generic seeds or kernels, possibilities of expression sprouting and exfoliating into new literary phenomena. Two of these last, charms and riddles, I should like to consider here, picking up and expanding a theme in my Anatomy of Criticism.

Charm is from carmen, song, and the primary associations of charm are with music, sound, and rhythm. The native word for charm is “spell,” which is related, if somewhat indirectly, to the other meaning of spell in the sense of reading letter by letter, or sound by sound. Riddle is from the same root as read: in fact “read a riddle” was once practically a verb with a cognate object, like “tell a tale” or “sing a song.” And just as the connections of charm are closer to music, so the riddle has pictorial affinities, related to ciphers, acrostics, rebuses, concrete and shape poetry, and everything that emphasizes the visual aspect of literature. Emblem books are a flourishing development of riddle poetry, and any picture that needs a verbal commentary to make its point may be said to be a pictorial riddle. Hieroglyphics and Chinese characters have a large element of riddle-reading obviously built into them: alphabetic systems also have it, though less noticeably.

Hence charm and riddle illustrate the fact that literature, with its combination of rhythm and imagery, is intermediate between the musical and the pictorial arts. They also represent the contrasting aspects of literature that we call sound and sense, rhyme and reason. These two factors, taken together, show that the riddle, in particular, illustrates the association in the human mind between the visual and the conceptual. What is understood must, at least metaphorically, be spread out in space: whatever is taken in through the ear has to form a series of simultaneous patterns (Gestalten) in order to be intelligible. Factors which inhibit this, such as too high a speed of utterance, prevent understanding. We may illustrate by a dialogue in Through the Looking Glass:

“Can you do Addition?” the White Queen asked. “What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?” “I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”²

The White Queen is not employing a charm, but she illustrates the overwhelming of sense by sound, which is where charm starts.

Charms have their roots in magic, and the central idea of the magic of charm is to reduce freedom of action, either by compelling a certain course of action or by stopping action altogether. The technique is hypnotic: if A charms B, B is compelled to do what A wants; if a woman charms a man, the man, according to convention, becomes her slave. One very simple kind of charm is a formula to get rid of a disease or some parallel evil. You may compel the evil by possessing a name: you can compel a devil to clear out either by knowing his name or the name of someone like Jesus he’s afraid of. Or you can compel by the force of rhythm and sound alone, by getting the right words into the right order at the right speed, and so setting up a kind of movement that the thing being charmed will be forced to imitate. The fiddle that compels everyone who hears it to dance is a familiar folk-tale theme, and expresses one of the central conceptions of charm very clearly. Thus in a fourteenth-century charm against rats:

I command all the ratons that are here about

That none dwell in this place, within ne without,

Through the virtue of Jesu Christ, that Mary bare about,

That all creatures owen for to lout,

And through the virtue of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John,

All four Evangels corden into one …³

The basis of this charm, obviously, is the reciting of powerful names which set up an energy capable of driving out everything opposed to them. At the same time, when you drive something out, you cleanse or protect the space that the enemy has vacated. The invoking of the evangelists reminds us of the bedtime charm

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,

Bless the bed that I lie on

where there have to be four protectors, one for each corner of the bed, to keep hostile powers away. The outlining of the protected space is as important as the driving out of the enemy: this frequently means that the enemy may have a counter-spell that also has to be kept at bay, as in the song for Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Never harm

Nor spell nor charm

Come our lovely lady nigh.

So good night, with lullaby. [2.2.16–19]

The rhetoric of charm is dissociative and incantatory: it sets up a pattern of sound so complex and repetitive that the ordinary processes of response are short-circuited. Refrain, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, pun, antithesis: every repetitive device known to rhetoric is called into play. Such repetitive formulas break down and confuse the conscious will, hypnotize, and compel to certain courses of action. Or they may simply put to sleep, which is one of the primary aims of hypnotism: one obvious example of charm poetry is the lullaby, which we have just met in the Midsummer Night’s Dream song. Drowsy and narcotic repetitions of sound, with analogies to lullabies, turn up frequently in Spenser among others:

And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,

A trickling streame from high rocke tumbling downe

And ever-drizling raine upon the loft,

Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne

Of swarming Bees, did cast him in a swowne:

No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,

As still are wont t’annoy the walled towne,

Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,

Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes.⁴

The assonance of “noyse” and “annoy,” which would be a mere blunder in an incompetent poet, is here a carefully calculated discord designed to express the mingling of mental impressions that precedes the coming of sleep.

The association with less freedom of action leads us from the lullaby to the more sinister sleeping song, the siren song that may lure one to one’s death. Spenser again has many passages of this type: the context of the one just quoted is sinister, and the first book of The Faerie Queene, from which it comes, reaches a rhetorical climax of sinister charm with the temptation of Despair. Falling asleep in a world of echoic associations is in turn close to the elegiac tone in poetry, the kind of rhetoric appropriate for talking about death or the vanishing of things into the past, as in the ubi sunt convention in medieval poetry.⁵ Here is another Spenserian example: as often in Spenser, the alexandrine at the end of a stanza announces the theme of the following stanza, which is a rhetorical exercise on that theme:

Wrath, gelosie, griefe, love this Squire have laide thus low.

Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love do thus expell:

Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede,

Griefe is a flood, and love a monster fell;

The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede,

The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede:

But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay:

The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed,

The drops dry up, and filth wipe cleane away:

So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, love dye and decay.⁶

This passage was quoted in a rhetoric book before it was published, but the point is not simply rhetorical virtuosity. The use of repeated sound, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and refrain invokes a meditative mood cutting through the normal waking responses. Similarly with poems that pick up echoes of the “dust to dust” formula of burial services:

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh;

erthe other erthe to the erthe droh;

erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh.

Tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.⁷

Perhaps there was originally, in such elegiac rhetoric, a magical attempt to quiet down a restless ghost. Certainly there is something protective in it against a much deeper anxiety. Elegiac poetry includes the danse macabre, a form like that of the theme and variations in music, where Death is the theme and a number of people who die are the variations. Here the repetitions, like the refrain in Dunbar’s Lament for the Makaris, “Timor mortis conturbat me,” express, not a charm imposed by Death—Death is too powerful to need charms—but the poet’s anxiety about dying. Anxieties, when they become sufficiently obsessive, often generate an uncontrollable mechanism of verbal dissociation, in which (to use an example I once encountered) one may spend a night pondering the implications of “break up” and “break down.”

Such states of mind, where one experiences the real horror and malignancy of being under a spell, are usually states of nightmare or insomnia, and from this point of view the charm techniques associated with sleep and death are really counter-charms, modes of escape from them. They may be projected as a fear of witches, or, more profoundly, a fear of hell, a world where one can never sleep or die. The vision of “Corps pourriz et ames en flammes” is central in Villon,⁸ whose favourite form is the testament, where the speaker is about to die and disintegrate into aspects of himself which he distributes to others, and whose ballades sometimes use repetitive techniques to the point of suggesting obsession. In English literature the repetitive rhetoric of anxiety appears in Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, more particularly in the terrible fifteenth “Expostulation,” under the rubric “I sleep not day nor night.”⁹

Charms can also be social, and one use of repetition is to bind the community into a single enterprise. Political oratory depends on patterns of repetition (“of the people, by the people, for the people”),¹⁰ and so do sermons and similar types of communal exhortation. If we look through a Protestant hymn book, we may notice that the more evangelical and aggressive the sect that the hymn has originated in, the more likely it is to throw its emphasis on a refrain or chorus. Yet even in community songs there may still be something of the cleared and protected place, with charms to keep off those who threaten it, even if they merely withdraw from it. In one of the most festive drinking songs in English, for instance, it is interesting to see that the main emotional focus is not on the convivial group at all:

And he that will this toast deny,

Down among the dead men,

Down among the dead men,

Down,

Down,

Down,

Down,

Down among the dead men let him lie.

The compulsion inherent in charm means that authority and subordination are integral to it. Words of command in an army are not in the usual sense of the term “charming,” but they are highly stylized in rhetoric, and they depend for their effectiveness on a long training in what is essentially a form of hypnosis, automatic response to a verbal stimulus. When the television commercial comes on, and the ordinary viewer goes to the bathroom, the literary critic should stay where he is, listening to the alliteration, antithesis, epigram (i.e., slogan-writing), and similar rhetorical devices that invade the soundtrack as soon as the subject becomes really important. The products are presented as magical objects, and the hypnotic voice of the announcer compels us to go straight down to the store and demand that product, not forgetting the name. Here the tone of giving orders to a mesmerized subordinate is naturally disguised, but the mood is still imperative and the rhetoric repetitive.

In English poetry of the 1590–1640 period, particularly, all areas of order and authority are thought of as protected areas, dependent on something analogous to a spell to keep off the powers of anarchy. Love, similarly, had a cosmological aspect as the charm that created order out of chaos, and love in turn was, in its Christian context, part of the creation by the Word of God itself, which pronounced the original spell to keep chaos away. The Book of Job expresses this spell as, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed” [38:11]. Similarly with the beginning of the creation in Milton:

“Silence, ye troubl’d waves, and thou Deep, peace!”

Said then th’ omnific Word: “your discord end!”¹¹

The word “discord” emphasizes the connection of the creative Word with music, the “harmony” which was also of the essence of the original charm imposed on chaos. The spells of love, harmony, and the Word of God come down to us from a superior world: if we wish to assert our authority over, say, rats, we invoke this higher authority and join ourselves to it. As a result the rhetoric of charm incorporates an analogical formula of an “as that, so this” type.

In the word “spellbound,” the conception of “binding” suggests inhibition generally, but also implies a mythical system of some kind invoked by specific names and other formulas. The charmer is bound into this system and gets his power from it; whatever is charmed is externally bound by it. In the second Idyll of Theocritus (Pharmaketyriai), a girl is performing a rite to bring back her lost lover. She melts a waxen image, and says, “as this puppet melts, so may Daphnis melt” (i.e., into affection for me). This is uncomplicated sympathetic magic, where the “as that, so this” formula merely connects two objects. But she then says, in a negative formula, “as Theseus forsook Ariadne, so may Daphnis forsake the girl he’s got now.” Here we have an extension of the binding notion: something in a myth is used as an archetypal model to be followed by the present situation. Exorcism incorporates this pattern: as Jesus compelled the devils to leave possessed men, so I compel these rats to leave this house. The whole principle of sacramental imitation in religion, the binding of one’s life into a pattern following the model prescribed by scripture or the life of a saint, flowers out of this. The vow, the verbal formula that binds one to a certain course of life, is a self-administered charm of the same type. Here we have, of course, moved out of the orbit of magic, but, as we shall see in a moment, the literary devices employed are very little changed.

The girl in Theocritus turns a wheel which she addresses as “iynx,” the name of a bird who was doubtless in the original rite, if not in this one, pinioned to the wheel and turned with it. The magic involved here is that of gaining power by imprisoning some spirit or force of life. Such a conception gives us a nonreligious motive for the popularity of the crucifix in the Christian world, as well as for the belief in its peculiar efficacy against demons. The address to the iynx and the wheel forms a refrain, which as we saw is one of the technical devices typical of charms. Whenever we find this combination of refrain, elegiac mood, efforts to reinforce one’s own power, and archetypal allusions on the “as that, so this” model, we have charm poetry, as in the Old English Complaint of Deor.

When we drive out rats in the name of Christ and his evangelists, we are using a magic that keeps in with the establishment, so to speak; when a young woman invokes Hecate, as the speaker in Theocritus does, to bring back the affections of her lover, something else is involved. Divine charms founded the orders of creation and of human society; magic that starts at the human level, searching for powers greater than itself, is more likely to turn to the mysterious beings in the lower world, who in the Christian centuries were nearly all demonic, and had been sinister and dangerous long before that. Such beings, expressions of man’s fear of an indifferent and powerful natural order, may operate on their own initiative to work disaster for us. The typical response to this kind of threat is the negative or ironic charm that says, in effect, there is nothing here for you; please go away. This wistful little Eskimo chant is, we are told, a charm to ensure fine weather:

Poor it is: this land,

Poor it is: this ice,

Poor it is: this air,

Poor it is: this sea, Poor it is.¹²

Sinister charms, which may operate on us from the unknown, or which we may gain possession of to control others, are normally powers pushing us or our enemies into a lower state of existence. The typical form of this movement is descending metamorphosis, the changing of a conscious being into an animal or vegetable or inanimate form, as the charms of Circe changed men to animals. (The reason for inserting the word “descending” will be clearer when we come to riddles.) We notice in the elegy over the dead squire in Spenser the imagery of elements dissolving back into chaos. The lower state is often symbolized as a subterranean or submarine world, where, like Narcissus, we pass from substance to shadow or reflection. What Narcissus was to the eye his mistress Echo was to the ear, and the echo song is a standard literary development of charm poetry. The “harmony” of the music of the spheres is reproduced, or, much more frequently, parodied, in the harmony of the siren or Lorelei song. Thus the crucial temptation in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss takes the form of a five-part madrigal, where a strong emphasis is laid on harmony and concord:

For all that pleasing is to living eare,

Was there consorted in one harmonee,

Birdes, voyces, instruments, windes, waters, all agree.

The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade,

Their notes unto the voyce attempred sweet;

Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made

To th’ instruments divine respondence meet:

The silver sounding instruments did meet

With the base murmure of the waters fall:

The waters fall with difference discreet,

Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call:

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all.¹³

We may note the concord of the identical rhyme on two meanings of “meet,” very possibly the only word in the English language that would have been meet for such a purpose.

The last line quoted from the rat charm, “All four Evangels corden into one,” illustrates the upper dimension of harmony. The fact that the four Gospels are a harmony is a central Christian doctrine, and of course one gets four times as much power over rats by using all four names. But beyond this there is the sense of a concord or harmony brought into play which the rats cannot disrupt. Such magic may be reversed in direction when we want not to expel something, but to make something or somebody appear. Thus in the invocation to Sabrina in Milton’s Comus:

Listen, and appear to us,

In name of great Oceanus,

By the earth-shaking Neptune’s mace,

And Tethys’ grave majestic pace;

By hoary Nereus’ wrinkled look,

And the Carpathian wizard’s hook;

By scaly Triton’s winding shell,

And old soothsaying Glaucus’ spell;

By Leucothea’s lovely hands,

And her son that rules the strands;

By Thetis’ tinsel-slippered feet,

And the songs of Sirens sweet;

By dead Parthenope’s dear tomb,

And fair Ligea’s golden comb,

Wherewith she sits on diamond rocks

Sleeking her soft alluring locks;

By all the nymphs that nightly dance

Upon thy streams with wily glance;

Rise, rise, and heave thy rosy head

From thy coral-paven bed,

And bridle in thy headlong wave,

Till thou our summons answered have.

Listen and save! [ll. 867–89]

The average reader has to look up something like seventeen Classical allusions in the notes to make sense of this passage. If he does, he may miss the point that the vagueness and mystery of the names is one of the reasons for using them. But if he does not, he may miss the equally important point that the names are being used with great precision. The simple archetypal parallel of “as that, so this” has greatly expanded here: a whole mythological construct is being set up, one assumed to be so powerful that Sabrina will be compelled to manifest herself within it. The address is to a water-nymph, a benevolent and not a sinister one, but connecting with the same Lorelei imagery of webs, veils, shrouding hair, and other threshold images of sinking into sleep, as well as of a reflecting water-world like that of Narcissus. In the Pervigilium Veneris, where the refrain, the elegiac tone, and the theme of compelling love to return make it clear that the poem is generically a charm poem, the imagery takes on similar qualities:

In spring lovers form harmonies (concordant); in spring the birds mate, and the grove unbinds her hair (nemus comam resolvit).¹⁴

The traditional realm of magical power is normally the area symbolized by the diva triformis or threefold goddess, the Hecate of the lower world, invoked in Theocritus, the Diana of the woodland, and the moon. The power of drawing down the moon is a conventional attribute of magicians and witches, and has been constantly alluded to since Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue, which is partly an adaptation of Theocritus’s charm poem, popularized it (“carmina vel caelo possunt deducere lunam”). What is meant by it is not so much actual control of the lunar cycle as the acquiring of magical powers from the highest level of our “sublunary” world, the moon beneath whose mirror reflection we are all imprisoned. The link of the upper mirror of the moon and the lower mirrors of seas and lakes runs all through the poetry of charm. Edgar Allan Poe is full of images of reflections, from the moon itself to the house of Usher crumbling into its mirror in the “tarn.” Sometimes what we have is a “wilderness of mirrors,” in Eliot’s phrase,¹⁵ reflections reflecting reflections:

And now, as the night was senescent

And star-dials pointed to morn—

As the star-dials hinted of morn—

At the end of our path a liquescent

And nebulous lustre was born,

Out of which a miraculous crescent

Arose with a duplicate horn—

Astarte’s bediamonded crescent

Distinct with its duplicate horn.¹⁶

One obvious question about charm in its magical context is, Who or what can be compelled by a charm? Magicians seem in practice to be confined mainly to elemental spirits, the shades of the dead, and a few very minor lower gods, or, in Christianity, minor devils. Superior powers, even if infernal like Hecate, may be invoked, but not compelled. The language of invocation, however, differs rhetorically very little from the language of compulsion. This is why religious poetry tends to use the same repetitive and dissociative techniques that we glanced at earlier. Here the poet is on the other end of the charm, so to speak, trying to break down his own resistances to the influx of a greater spirit. Examples range from the fourteenth-century Pearl to the opening paragraph of the fifth section of Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, and include Donne, though the Donne of the sermons rather than of the sacred poetry.

Further, if greater powers cannot be compelled, they can compel us, and hence we should expect similar techniques in sacred scriptures embodying a divine revelation. If we pick up the Koran, for instance, and try to read it as we should read any other book, we may well find its repetitiveness intolerable: surely, we feel, the God who inspired this book was not only monotheistic but monomaniacal. And even this response comes only from a translation: the original is so dependent on the interlocking sound patterns of Arabic that in practice the Arabic language has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Yet, for anyone brought up in the religion of Islam, hearing the Koran from infancy, and memorizing great parts of it consciously and unconsciously, the Koran does precisely the rhetorical job it is set up to do. The conception of the human will assumed is that of a puppy on a leash: it plunges about in every direction but the right one, and has to be brought back and back and back to the same controlling power.

The rhetoric of God, then, according to the Koran, is essentially the kind of rhetoric we have associated with charm. This principle is far less true of the Bible, even though much of the Hebrew text is oracular in style and contains many puns and sound associations, invocations to God, commandments, proverbs or general maxims of prudent conduct, prophetic oracles, and, in the New Testament, the parables of Jesus which end “Go, and do thou likewise” [Luke 10:37]. But the specific techniques of dissociative writing are still rather rare: the Old Testament, with its fondness for acrostic poems and the like, has more in common with the riddle, and in the New Testament dissociative rhetoric almost disappears. There is some of it in the first Epistle of John—

That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us): that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you also.¹⁷

—but it is so isolated as to give almost the effect of senility, which is perhaps why some scholars insist on ascribing it to the apostolic John writing at the age of a hundred and twenty or so.

The more closely the magical aspect of charm is adhered to in poetry, the more likely the poem is to present some kind of specific ritual, as the Theocritus poem does. When the “as that, so this” formula is employed in such a context, the “this” refers to the ritual being performed and the “that” to an archetypal myth which the ritual is not only referring to but recreating. The ritual is, so to speak, the epiphany or manifestation of myth, as the ritual of the mass in Christianity manifests the myth of incarnation. In highly developed cultures, myths, as I have tried to show elsewhere [e.g., pp. 134–5, 243–4, above], stick together to form mythologies, and mythologies eventually expand into mythological universes, as the mythology of Christianity in medieval times expanded into the universe that forms the setting of Dante’s Commedia. Wherever we turn in charm poetry, we seem to be led back to some kind of mythological universe, a world of interlocking names of mysterious powers and potencies which are above, but not wholly beyond reach of, the world of time and space. This mythological universe may be thought of as a real existence revealed to us in a scripture of divine origin, or it may be simply regarded as an imaginative human construct. But it is artificial, whether the artificer is divine or human: it is not the actual outward environment of man, nor is it a primitive attempt to describe that environment, even when it tries to develop a philosophy and a science. It is a separate world that is reached through imagination or belief or acceptance of traditional authority, not through direct sense experience, or, except in very limited ways, through reason. This is as far as we can take the problem of charm before turning to riddles.

II

Those who consult oracles usually do so with a sense of uncritical awe, but oracles and oracular prophecies frequently turn on puns, ambiguous or double-faced statements, or sometimes, as in Macbeth, on quibbles that sound like feeble-minded jokes. There is a point at which emotional involvement may suddenly reverse itself and become intellectual detachment, the typical expression of which is laughter. In Zen Buddhism there is a conventional dialogue form in which an earnest disciple asks a deeply serious question of a master, expecting an oracular answer: he gets a brush-off answer which is designed to push him into this mental reversal. Thus:

Disciple: Can a dog have a Buddha-nature?

Master: Bow-wow.

Similarly, the riddle is essentially a charm in reverse: it represents the revolt of the intelligence against the hypnotic power of commanding words. In the riddle a verbal trap is set, but if one can “guess,” that is, point to an outside object to which the verbal construct can be related, the something outside destroys it as a charm, and we have sprung the trap without being caught in it. The pun on “meet” that we noted in Spenser is part of the hypnotizing and spellbinding quality of the stanza, where different things are drawn into a single focus by similar sounds. But the puns which answer riddles of the “Why is A like B?” type are jokes, and so emphasize the disparity that a conscious mind perceives between two things.

Charms and riddles, however, are psychologically very close together, as the unguessed or unguessable riddle is or may be a charm. Amulets, abracadabras, Latin tags, jargon words, formulas like the in principio of Chaucer’s friar,¹⁸ are all charms, or act like charms, as long as they are not understood. Again, the charm you have may be a riddle for somebody else to smash or solve. In Beowulf much is made of wound and twisted and curiously wrought objects, often weapons or pieces of armour.¹⁹ These have affinities with the crucifixes and similar power-imprisoning charms mentioned above, but of course an enemy would be out to destroy them.

Hence riddles often imply some kind of enmity-situation or contest, where you will lose a great deal, perhaps your life, if you don’t know the answer. The reversal of a charm can be clearly seen in such contests. In a fifteenth-century dialogue between the devil and a virgin, the devil poses a number of riddles, the implication being that the girl will lose her soul if she can’t answer. She prays to Jesus for assistance, gets the answers, and the last one, “What’s worse than a woman?” has for answer, “The devil.” As soon as he’s named, the devil flies away.²⁰ A variant of this type of riddle poem is a dialogue between a “false knight” and a schoolboy. The boy is asked questions and various imprecations are hurled at him: again the assumption is, or originally was, that if he doesn’t answer the question or can’t think of a rejoinder he’s done for. In cosier and more domesticated versions, a knight seduces a damsel who protests that he ought to marry her: he says he will if she can guess riddles of the same type: she does and he does.

Hence just as charm is connected with sinking into a lower world with less freedom of movement in it, so riddle is connected with comic resolutions, comic recognition scenes of escape or rescue, or with such folktale themes as performing the impossible task, which occurs in the story of Psyche in Apuleius. The guessing of a name, as in Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin story, may be an impossible task of this kind. The riddle is also connected with the very common type of recognition scene which turns on a shift of identity, where, say, the heroine is proved to have been stolen by pirates in infancy, so that her present social status is lower than the one she ought to have. The idea behind such a device is, more or less, “Guess who she is,” where the link with the riddle becomes clear. In the enmity-situation or contest, the audience’s sympathy is normally on the side of the successful riddle-guesser. He is the antithesis of the magician or charmer, and the magician often takes a demonic role as his opposite. The life of Jesus in the Gospels is full of skilful answers to malignant dilemma-questions which mark an affinity to the same literary type. Oedipus and Samson, on the other hand, are tragic figures because their riddle-solving or propounding powers have disappeared into an irrecoverable past.

With the Old English riddles we come to a form which is not so much a verbal trap as a verbal spider web: they describe something obliquely, and often end with some such formula as, “Ask what is my name,” implying that the guessing is an integral part of the poetic experience involved:

My head is forged by a hammer, wounded with pointed tools, rubbed by the file. Often I gape at what is fixed opposite to me, when, girded with rings, I must needs thrust stoutly against the hard bolt; pierced from behind I must shove forward that which guards the joy of my lord’s mind at midnight. At times I drag my nose, the guardian of the treasure, backwards, when my lord desires to take the stores of those whom at his will he commanded to be driven out of life by murderous power. (Key.)

I saw two hard captives carried into the dwelling under the roof of the hall; they were companions fettered fast together by strait bonds. Close to one of them was a dark-haired slave-woman who controlled both of them fast in bonds in their course. (Flail.)²¹

What one notices first of all in such poems is the tremendous energy of movement around the objects: the hard physical effort both in creating them and in using them is what is suggested. Here we are again in a world of metamorphosis, but one of a different kind. Just as a picture may seem to us an arrest of energy, rhythm, and movement suddenly caught for a motionless instant, so these riddles show us a dissolving and reshaping movement that comes into a stationary focus as soon as we guess, that is, infer what the solid physical object is that the swirling energy leads up to. The movement is towards identity rather than, as in Ovidian metamorphosis, away from it. Naming such objects also has analogies to waking up from a dream, in the way that Scrooge’s ghost of Christmas Future in Dickens was finally identified as a bedpost.

The two examples quoted show that Old English riddles are of two kinds. The object may be described by the poet, or the object may speak for itself and then challenge the reader to guess its name. The latter uses the figure of speech known as prosopopoeia, and develops into such extended forms as Shelley’s The Cloud. In descending or charm metamorphosis, where, say, Circe transforms men into animals, something once capable of speech and consciousness is obliged to fall silent. The power of words over things, the central principle of charm, eventually separates the magician who has the power of words from the bewitched creature who has lost it and become a mere object. The speaking object reverses the direction of charm, and from the speaking object it is a short step, in imagination, to the identification of the poet, not only with the object, but with all the energy that, as we saw, is reflected in the object. In the collection of Chinese poems known as the Ch’u Tz’u there are many passages like this which, according to the translator, show the influence of shamanism, with its ecstatic and erotic flights up to a higher identity with nature:

I aim my long arrow and shoot the Wolf of Heaven;

I seize the Dipper to ladle cinnamon wine.

Then holding my reins I plunge down to my setting

On my gloomy night journey back to the east.²²

The popular Restoration poet Tom Durfey is unlikely to have been in touch with Siberian shamans, so it is all the more interesting that the same type of imagery appears in him:

I’ll sail upon the dog-star,

And then pursue the morning:

I’ll chase the moon till it be noon,

But I’ll make her leave her horning.²³

The difference between charm and riddle is thus mainly in imaginative direction. In the Old English period we have, besides the riddles in the Exeter Book mentioned above, the Latin riddles of Bishop Aldhelm, which begin with an acrostic, make many references to books and writing materials, the visual aspect of the producing of words, and conclude with a long and remarkable poem on the creation, in which the poet sees all the objects he had mentioned as contained within the providence of God’s creation. One would think, then, that if the charm takes us, as we said, into the mythological universe of traditional names and mysterious powers, the riddle seems rather to take us into the actual world explored by sense experience, where the eye is overwhelmingly prominent, and the reason. Its context appears to be nature, traditionally regarded in the Christian centuries as a secondary word of God, less dependent on special revelation and more accessible to the unaided intellect. But there are difficulties in this view of riddles, difficulties which are indicated by the strong bias of the riddle toward humour and joking, to puzzle and paradox, to a sense of absurdity in the juxtaposing of visual images and ideas. When a verbal account of an object is followed by the “guess,” actual or simulated, at what the object is, we may feel that it provides an avenue of escape into the outer world of sense. But it is something of an illusory escape, as poetry cannot really take us outside the world of poetry. Poem and object are very quizzically related: there seems to be some riddle behind all riddles which we have not yet guessed.

In literature, where there is no attempt at actual magic, a poet may work with either form, and in modern times, at least, a poet interested in charm techniques is likely to be interested in riddle techniques also, if only because both present technical problems. We quoted a stanza from Poe’s Ulalume which is essentially charm poetry, but Poe also dealt in riddles, and some of his poems are complicated acrostics. Similarly in Finnegans Wake we have a kind of language that could be read either as oracular dream language or as associative wit. Joyce’s contemporary Gertrude Stein came to be thought of as the very type of dissociative writer, was often ridiculed or caricatured on that basis, and of course it is true that she was greatly interested in dissociative techniques. Here is an example from Tender Buttons:

A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since.²⁴

But many of the vignettes in Tender Buttons are riddles of a fairly conventional type, with the solution, as often happens, provided in the title. Thus under the title “A Petticoat” we have “A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm.”²⁵

But with works less relentlessly experimental than Finnegans Wake or Tender Buttons, we can see shifts in emphasis from one to the other. Charm poetry represents one aspect of what Eliot calls a dissociation of sensibility: a mood is summoned up and everything excluded which would disturb that mood. The polemical context of Eliot’s phrase reminds us that charm poetry, shown at its subtlest in Keats and Tennyson and at its clearest in Poe and Swinburne, dominated taste until about 1915, after which a mental attitude more closely related to the riddle began to supersede it, one more preoccupied with the visual and the conceptual. Thus Eliot also contrasted the “clear visual images” of Dante with the musical myopia of Milton, spoke of Swinburne as a poet who does not think, and found a more congenial precedent in Donne’s “metaphysical” combinations of concrete and abstract imagery.²⁶ One of the first products of the newer taste was the imagist movement, with its concentration on visualized imagery and description. The tendency itself was of course not new: here for example is Josh Billings, in the nineteenth century:

The crane iz neither flesh, beast, nor fowl, but a sad

mixtur ov all theze things.

He mopes along the brinks of kreeks and wet places,

looking for sumthing he haz lost.

He has a long bill, long wings, long legs, and iz long

all over.

When he flies thru the air, he iz az graceful az a

windmill, broke loose from its fastenings.

This poem (it is a poem, whatever Billings meant it to be) is not technically a riddle poem, because the object it describes is named in it, but it is clearly an imagist poem.²⁷ I quote it for two reasons. First, its humorous tone marks its affinity with the riddle tradition more clearly than, say, a poem of Amy Lowell; second, it suggests another feature with some links to the riddle tradition, the rhetorical device of the pseudo-definition, which appears in another riddle-poet, Emily Dickinson:

Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—²⁸

This is also the device on which the character books of the seventeenth century were built. The character books derive from Theophrastus in Greek literature, but develop his fairly sober and straightforward observation into epigram and paradox, written in a kind of singsong antithetical prose. Thus Samuel Butler:

A Sailor

Leaves his native earth to become an inhabitant of the sea, and is but a kind of naturaliz’d fish. He is of no place, though he is always said to be bound for one or other, but a mere citizen of the sea, as vagabonds are of the world…²⁹

We noticed that it is common to give the “solution” of riddle poems in their titles, and in such poems we move from work to title. Here is what I have to say about something; guess what it is. In the above technique we move from title to the work. Here is what I’m talking about; you’ll never guess what I can find to say about it.

Emily Dickinson shows us another aspect of the rhetoric of riddles in this poem on a hummingbird:

A Route of Evanescence

With a revolving Wheel—

A Resonance of Emerald—

A Rush of Cochineal—

And every Blossom on the Bush

Adjusts its Tumbled Head—

The mail from Tunis probably,

An easy Morning’s Ride—³⁰

Here the object is described in terms of its energy of movement, and the vivid colours are, as in Impressionist paintings, seen as vibrations of light rather than as attributes of a static object. The longer words “evanescence” and “resonance” are obviously used because their sound reinforces the imagery of spinning and humming. But this poet seems to be fond of such words in their own right: in another poem she says of the bluebird,

Her conscientious Voice will soar unmoved

Above ostensible Vicissitude.³¹

We tend to think of long Latin words as gray and abstract, because the concrete metaphors that they originally conveyed have largely faded out. When they were new, in the fifteenth century, they were thought of as “colours” of rhetoric, strange exotic terms belonging to what was called “aureate” diction. Emily Dickinson clearly shares something of this feeling, and so does Poe: the diction of Ulalume is also full of Latin words, although, this being a charm poem, the effect of such words as “senescent” and “nebulous” is rather a drowsy and blurring one. Milton also uses a good many Latin words, mainly because they have a large number of unstressed syllables, and relieve the heavy monosyllabic thump of the native vocabulary. Milton is, of course, always well aware of the metaphorical basis of such words: “elephants indorsed with towers” means elephants with towers on their backs.³² But except for such special cases, poetry has a limited tolerance for words likely to become abstract. Literary practice does not confirm the enthusiasm of Stephen Hawes, in the early sixteenth century, for this type of rhetoric:

In few words sweet and sententious

Depainted with gold, hard in construction,

To the artic [artistic] ears sweet and delicious

The golden rhetoric is good refection

And to the reader right consolation

As we do gold from copper purify

So that elocution doth right well clarify

The dulcet speech from the language rude …³³

This brings us to the other half of Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility, the kind of poetry that is made out of ideas and thoughts, that expresses emotion by talking about it. The formula of William Carlos Williams, “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself,” sums up several decades of reaction against this kind of rhetoric.³⁴ We have noted that in the riddle there are two foci of imaginative interest, one visual and the other conceptual. In medieval bestiaries, for example, the alleged behaviour patterns of various animals are described, but we are led, not merely to their names, but to the moral or typological “significance” of their behaviour. Similarly with the relation of pictures to commentary in the emblem books. The paradox here is that of a world where, as Wallace Stevens says, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,”³⁵ where human efforts to get control of the external world through mental constructs seem rather desperate. The sense of strain and irony in the relation of the mind to nature becomes highly self-conscious in Donne and the metaphysicals, and gives a humorous twist to the kind of imagery most typical of them. Eliot, noting this quality also in the nineteenth-century French symbolistes, suggests that preserving the tone of ironic strain and difficulty is almost a moral duty for a twentieth-century poet.³⁶ The trouble with Williams’s anticonceptual statement, however, is that in poetry there is, so to speak, no such thing as a thing. Word and thing are frozen in two separate worlds, and the reality of each can be expressed only by the other in its world. This paradoxical deadlock is precisely the essence of the riddle.

Eliot is also clear that such imagery really comes into its own during times of waning spiritual authority. In the Renaissance, Nicholas of Cusa, the inventor of the doctrine of “learned ignorance,” also invented a series of riddle games designed to express certain paradoxes in the nature of God that show up the limitations of the human mind in trying to grasp that nature. God is absent yet present; he is within the world and yet outside it; his eyes follow us everywhere and yet never move, and so on. Some of these paradoxes are made into actual riddles by Ben Jonson and incorporated into his masque Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly, where the answers to them are not “God,” but King James and the land of Britain.³⁷ Jonson, however, takes a low view of riddles, which he regards as the refuge of stupidity: his attitude is anti-“metaphysical,” here as elsewhere. Hence the “Ignorance” of his masque is identified with the Sphinx, who asks the riddles. But the Cusanus paradoxes are still haunting Eliot in our century, struggling to express the meaning of an incarnation which is neither in nor out of time, and is surrounded by “a white light still and moving.”³⁸

When Mallarmé says that the poet does not name or point, but describes the mood evoked by the object, he seems to suggest a method of riddle-writing without guessing, which appears to destroy the whole point of the riddle.³⁹ It may be, though, that he is also suggesting a way of getting past the deadlock we encountered above. In the typical riddle there is a question implied in the poem, of which the guess is the answer. But an answer to a question accepts the assumptions in the question, and consequently consolidates the mental level on which the question is asked. This is adequate for information, where we simply want to stop or neutralize the question. But in religion, in philosophy, in science, all answers wear out sooner or later, because these subjects keep growing and expanding through a series of better formulated questions. Something similar must surely be true of literature, even if the processes of growth and expansion take different forms there.

One of the Old English riddles reads:

The monster came sailing, wondrous along the wave; it called out in its comeliness to the land from the ship; loud was its din; its laughter was terrible, dreadful on earth; its edges were sharp. It was malignantly cruel, not easily brought to battle but fierce in the fighting; it stove in the ship’s sides, relentless and ravaging. It bound it with a baleful charm; it spoke with cunning of its own nature: “My mother is of the dearest race of maidens, she is my daughter grown to greatness, as it is known to men, to people among the folk, that she shall stand with joy on the earth in all lands.”⁴⁰

The answer is supposed to be “iceberg,” which has water for its mother and daughter because it comes from and returns to water. But the answer hardly does justice to the poem: like all interpretations that profess to say “this is what the poem means,” the answer is wrong because it is an answer. The real answer to the question implied in a riddle is not a “thing” outside it, but that which is both word and thing, and is both inside and outside the poem. This is the universal of which the poem is the manifestation, the order of words that tells us of battles and shipwrecks, of the intimate connection of beauty and terror, of cycles of life and death, of mutability and apocalypse, of the echoes of Leviathan and Virgil’s Juno and Demeter and Kali and Circe and Tiamat and Midgard and the mermaids and the Valkyries, all of which is focused on and stirred up by this “iceberg.”

The charm comes out of a mythological universe of mysterious names and beings: the magician derives from that world the power that he applies to things. The poet is a magician who renounces his magic, and thereby recreates the universe of power instead of trying to exploit it. Riddle goes in the opposite direction, and has to make the corresponding renunciation of the answer or guess. The answer is another way of trying to get control over things, the conceptual way, and renouncing it means, again, being set free to create. As Paul says, we see now in a riddle in a mirror,⁴¹ but we solve the riddle by coming out of the mirror, into the world that words and things reflect.