Most poets have been aware of the greatness of the poetic function, have respected in themselves that touch of divinity which made the Romans call poet and prophet by the same name. But many of them seem to have confused poetry with verse—to have thought that there was something meritorious in the mere act of writing in metre, some quality of sacredness in a metrical composition. The result was that they published, as poetry, stuff no more significant than so much literary chit-chat in a Sunday paper.
“Should the Modern Girl wear Underclothes? A Thoughtful Article specially contributed to the Sabbath Express by the Poet Laureate.” One can visualize the headlines boldly sprawling across page eleven. Wordsworth would have been paid, handsomely, for such outpourings; and his indiscretions would have been forgotten before the week was out. But he preferred to write things like “The Power of Sound”—to write them and, what was much worse, to publish them in his Poetical Works. We are put to the endless trouble of sifting this worthless rubbish in search of gems, which generally prove to be non-existent.
Why need I say, Louisa dear,
How glad I am to see you here,
A lovely convalescent;
Risen from the bed of pain and fear
And feverish heat incessant.
Such stuff, alas, is more characteristic of Coleridge’s muse than Kubla Khan. Shelley, too, is often as featureless and chaotic as the Blake of the Prophetic Books.
Obedient to the sweep of aery song,
The mighty ministers
Unfurled their prismy wings.
The magic car moved on;
The night was fair, innumerable stars
Studded heaven’s dark blue vault;
The eastern wave grew pale
With the first smile of morn. . . .
And so on, indefinitely. It is mere automatic writing; almost any medium could do as well. As for Wordsworth, he had not even the excuse of automatism.
The turbaned Race are poured in thickening swarms
Along the West; though driven from Aquitaine,
The Crescent glitters on the towers of Spain,
And soft Italia feels renewed alarms;
The scimitar, that yields not to the charms
Of ease, the narrow Bosphorus will disdain;
Nor long (that crossed) would Grecian hills detain
Their tents, and check the current of their arms.
Then blame not those who, by the mightiest lever
Known to the moral world, Imagination,
Upheave, so seems it, from her natural station
All Christendom—they sweep along (was never
So huge a host!)—to tear from the Unbeliever
The precious Tomb, their haven of salvation.
Lines like these—and there are thousands of them in Wordsworth’s various volumes—can only have been written in the fullest consciousness, laboriously. The thought is exceedingly depressing.
That good poets should sometimes, or even generally, write badly is not, after all, very surprising. Auspicious circumstances must conspire with exceptional gifts; the mind must be seconded by its incalculable companion of flesh and blood, not crossed and hindered. The surprising thing, I repeat, is not that good poets should sometimes write badly; it is, rather, that they should publish these unfortunate essays; that they should not have been self-critical enough to consign them to their proper place, the waste-paper basket.
The early anthologists were in a position to reject only the bad. The last must also throw away much that is admirable. The well-known excellencies are so familiar, so easily accessible, that it seems hardly worth while to reprint them yet once more. Luckily, however, there are more fish in the sea of literature than ever came out of it—at any rate, in the nets of Palgrave and Quiller-Couch and Bridges.
Visitations
Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground: as flowers depart
To see their mother root, when they have blown,
Where they together,
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of Power,
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing bell.
We said amiss
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell. . . .
And now in age I bud again
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain
And relish versing; O my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
GEORGE HERBERT.
How rich, O Lord, how fresh thy visits are!
’Twas but just now my bleak leaves hopeless hung
Sullied with dust and mud;
Each snarling blast shot through me, and did share
Their youth and beauty; cold showers nipped and wrung
Their spiciness and blood.
But since thou didst in one sweet glance survey
Their sad decays, I flourish and once more
Breathe all perfumes and spice;
I smell a dew like myrrh and all the day
Wear in my bosom a full sun; such store
Hath one beam from thy eyes.
But, ah my God, what fruit hast thou of this?
What one poor leaf did ever I let fall
To wait upon thy wreath?
Thus thou all day a thankless weed dost dress,
And when thou hast done, a stench or fog is all
The odour I bequeath.
HENRY VAUGHAN.
The climate of the mind is positively English in its variableness and instability. Frost, sunshine, hopeless drought and refreshing rains succeed one another with bewildering rapidity. Herbert is the poet of this inner weather. Accurately, in a score of lyrics unexcelled for flawless purity of diction and appositeness of imagery, he has described its changes and interpreted, in terms of a mystical philosophy, their significance. Within his limits he achieves a real perfection.
Vaughan treats the same theme, but less perfectly. Lacking Herbert’s artistic ability and artistic conscience, he occasionally (in this as in his other poems) “lets one down,” as Herbert hardly ever does. By way of compensation, however, he also occasionally “lets one up” to heights which Herbert as seldom reaches. Most great poets let their readers down much more often than they let them up, and to abysses almost as deep as their peaks are high. Why does Shakespeare stand so manifestly in a class apart? Because he lets us up higher and far more frequently, down incomparably less often and less low, than any other poet.
J’ai vu parfois, au fond d’un théâtre banal
Qu’enflammait l’orchestre sonore,
Une fée allumer dans un ciel infernal
Une miraculeuse aurore;
J’ai vu parfois au fond d’un théâtre banal
Un être qui n’était que lumière; or et gaze,
Terrasser l’énorme Satan;
Mais mon coeur, que jamais ne visite l’extase,
Est un théâtre-où l’on attend
Toujours, toujours en vain, l’Être aux ailes de gaze!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
Dear night! this world’s defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat,
Which none disturb!
Christ’s progress and His prayer time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
God’s silent searching flight:
When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,
When spirits their fair kindred catch.
Were all my loud evil days
Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent,
Whose peace but by some angel’s wing or voice
Is seldom rent;
Then I in Heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.
But living where the sun
Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire
Themselves and others, I consent and run
To every mire,
And by this world’s ill-guiding light,
Err more than I can do by night.
There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.
HENRY VAUGHAN.
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence,
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent, muets et glacés.
Personne pure, ombre divine,
Qu’ils sont doux, tes pas retenus!
Dieux! . . . tous les dons que je divine
Viennent à moi sur ces pieds nus!
Si, de tes lèvres avancées,
Tu prépares, pour l’apaiser,
A l’habitant de mes pensés
La nourriture d’un baiser,
Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre,
Douceur d’être et de n’être pas,
Car j’ai vécu de vous attendre,
Et mon cœur n’était que vos pas.
PAUL VALERY.
From Paul Valery’s POESIES—Editions de la N.R.F. tous droits reserves.
It happens occasionally that “spirits their fair kindred catch”; or rather, to use a more guarded philosophical language, that they catch themselves—make themselves manifest by circumventing or temporarily abolishing the psychological obstacles which normally prevent us from becoming blissfully conscious of our solidarity with the universe.
For most of us, our everyday, daytime existence consists of an unbroken series of such obstacles. It is only exceptionally, when we are free from distractions, in the silence and darkness of the night, or of night’s psychological equivalent, that we become aware of our own souls and, along with them, of what seems the soul of the world. In the two poems I have quoted, Vaughan describes the auspicious circumstances, Valéry the oncoming of the inenarrably beautiful event which they render possible.
How should I praise thee, Lord, how should my rhymes
Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel!
Although there were some forty heavens or more,
Sometimes I peer above them all;
Sometimes I hardly reach a score,
Sometimes to hell I fall.
GEORGE HERBERT.
But first a hush of peace—a soundless calm descends;
The struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends.
Mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony
That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible: the Unseen its truth reveals;
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels;
Its wings are almost free—its home, its harbour found,
Measuring the gulf, it stoops, and dares the final bound.
O dreadful is the check—intense the
