By thee the one does changing Nature through
Her endless labyrinths pursue,
And the other chases woman, whilst she goes
More ways and turns than hunted Nature knows.
ABRAHAM COWLEY.
Upon Nothing
Nothing, thou elder brother even to shade,
Thou hadst a being ere the world was made
And, well fixed, art of ending not afraid.
Ere time and place were, time and place were not,
When primitive nothing something straight begot;
Then all proceeded from the great united “what?”
Something, the general attribute of all,
Severed from thee, its sole original,
Into thy boundless self must undistinguished fall.
Yet something did thy mighty power command,
And from thy fruitful emptiness’s hand
Snatch men, beasts, birds, fire, water, air and land. . . .
But, nothing, why does something still permit
That sacred monarchs should at council sit
With persons highly thought, at best for nothing fit?
While weighty something modestly abstains
From prince’s coffers and from statesmen’s brains,
And nothing there like stately nothing reigns.
JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER.
Irrelevancies brought startlingly, and therefore absurdly, together are the stuff of most metaphysical conceits. But the seventeenth-century poets also employed another device for making the reader “sit up.” Instead of ranging over heaven and earth for an unlikely similitude to the object under consideration, they sometimes turned a fixed and penetrating gaze upon the object itself. This microscopic examination revealed various qualities inherent in the object, but not apparent to the superficial glance. The essence of the thing was, so to speak, brought to the surface and revealed itself as being no less remote from, no less irrelevant to, the conception framed by common sense than the most far-fetched analogy.
Thus, Rochester’s analysis ingeniously shows that nothing is so unlike a thing as the thing itself. The thing, in this particular case, is Nothing; nothing is so unlike Nothing as Nothing. The coupling of Nothing, philosophically considered, with the everyday Nothing of common sense produces the most startling effects. Nothing proves itself to be quite as absurdly irrelevant to Nothing as gutters are to grief, or as tortoises to grandeur. The writer who exploited this kind of metaphysical conceit most thoroughly and most ingeniously was Lewis Carroll. Born two hundred years earlier, he would have left behind him, not a children’s book but a long devotional poem in the style of Benlowes.
Colloquialism and the Poetry of Common Life
Go, Mary, to the summer house
And sweep the wooden floor,
And light the little fire, and wash
The pretty varnished door;
For there the London gentleman,
Who lately lectured here,
Will smoke a pipe with Jonathan,
And taste our home-brewed beer.
Go bind the dahlias, that our guest
May praise their fading dyes;
But strip of every fading bloom
The flower that won the prize!
And take thy father’s knife, and prune
The roses that remain,
And let the fallen hollyhock
Peep through the broken pane.
I’ll follow in an hour or two;
Be sure I will not fail
To bring his flute and spying glass,
The pipes and bottled ale;
And that grand music that he made
About the child in bliss,
Our guest shall hear it sung and played,
And feel how grand it is!
EBENEZER ELLIOTT.
What is the secret of the peculiar repulsiveness of these verses? (For repulsive they are, almost mystically and transcendentally so.) It is to be found, I think, in their author’s complacent acquiescence in the commonness of common life—in the commonness that is common and unclean, rather than common and sublime, or at the least decent.
The Corn Law Rhymer’s deserving poors are disgustingly conscious of being deserving; worse, they are vain of their deservingness. They long to show off before the London gentleman, to display their prize dahlia and their culture, their pretty varnished door and even (revolting exhibitionism!) their feelings about the dead child—such nice genteel feelings, expressed in terms of music that even a London gentleman must feel to be grand! To ask us, as the good Ebenezer does, to take such commonness seriously, with a tear in the eye and a pious snuffle in the nose, is an outrage. “How I loathe ordinariness!” (The words are Lawrence’s) “How from my soul I abhor nice simple people, with their eternal price list! It makes my blood boil.” The proper style in which to write about that sort of common life is the style adopted by Laurent Tailhade in the Poèmes Aristophanesques.
Ce qui fait que l’ancien bandagiste renie
Le comptoir dont le faste alléchait les passants,
C’est son jardin d’Auteuil où, veufs de tout encens,
Les zinnias out l’air d’être en tôle vernie.
C’est là qu’il vient le soir, goûter l’air aromal
Et, dans sa rocking chair, en veston de flanelle,
Aspirer les senteurs qu’épanchent sur Grenelle
Les fabriques de suif et de noir animal.
Bien que libre-penseur et franc-maçon, il juge
Le dieu propice qui lui donna ce refuge
Où se meurt un cyprin emmy la pièce d’eau,
Où, dans la tour mauresque aux lanternes chinoises,
—Tout en lui préparant du sirop de framboises,—
Sa “demoiselle” chante un couplet de Nadaud.
The retired rubber-goods merchant, it will be noticed, is celebrated in a sonnet and in the most elaborately poetical language. Homeliness and colloquialism are the weapons best fitted to puncture an intellectual or spiritual pretentiousness. Common uncleanness is best combated with an uncommon refinement of far-fetched language. Hence the mock heroic style. Satire does most of its killing by allopathy. To deal really adequately with Ebenezer’s deserving poors one would have to use polysyllables and the manner of Paradise Lost.
To the common and unclean our reaction is negative, a revulsion; to the common and decent, on the contrary, it is joyfully positive. To treat the common decencies colloquially, which is to treat them on the common plane, seems therefore natural and right. Colloquialism testifies to the poet’s complete and unreserved acceptance of his subject.
The poet who would write of common things in common, colloquial language is beset with two great difficulties. To begin with, he must make his colloquialism genuinely colloquial—“a selection,” in Wordsworth’s words, “of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,” a dialect actually spoken, or at any rate speakable, by some class of genuine human beings. Poems like “The Idiot Boy” are unsatisfactory because, among other reasons, Wordsworth did not use the language really used by men. He tried to be colloquial and failed.
And Betty’s husband’s at the wood,
Where by the week he doth abide,
A woodman in the distant vale:—
This is not the language actually spoken by human beings. It is bad poetic diction. Wordsworth could never strip off the last clinging rags of linguistic fancy dress. Hence his failure to write good colloquial poetry; and hence the failure of so many others who have tried to do what he essayed in the Lyrical Ballads.
The other difficulty confronting the colloquial poet is the difficulty of giving to colloquialisms the sharpness and the memorable concentration required of poetic language. Thus, “The Idiot Boy,” when it is colloquial and not conventionally poetic, is diffuse and dim in its colloquialism. But colloquialism, as the following example proves, need not be dim.
Depuis huit jours, j’avais dechiré mes bottines
Aux cailloux des chemins; j’entrais à Charleroi.
Au Cabaret Vert je demandais des tartines
De beurre et du jambon qui fût a moitié froid.
Bienheureux j’allongeais les jambes sous la table
Verte; je contemplais les sujets très naïfs
De la tapisserie. Et ce fut adorable,
Quand la fille aux tétons énormes, aux yeux vifs,
—Celle-là, ce n’est pas un baiser qui l’épeure!—
Rieuse, m’apporta des tartines de beurre,
Du jambon tiède dans un plat colorié.
Du jambon rose et blanc parfumé d’une gousse
D’ail et m’emplit la chope immense avec sa mousse
Que dorait un rayon de soleil arriéré.
ARTHUR RIMBAUD.
If only Wordsworth could ever have written something like this! But, alas, whatever feelings he may once have had for beer and bosomy barmaids and the pink and white internal complexion of ham were early stifled. And Rimbaud’s infallible ear, that he never possessed. Those delicate rhythmical effects by means of which the boy poet heightened his colloquialisms to the pitch of lyrical intensity were quite beyond Wordsworth. Indeed, so far from heightening colloquial speech, Wordsworth often contrived, in the process of “fitting a metrical arrangement,” actually to lower it.
Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans;
The clock gives warning for eleven;
’Tis on the stroke—“He must be near,”
Quoth Betty, “and will soon be here,
As sure as there’s a moon in heaven.”
The clock is on the stroke of twelve,
And Johnny is not yet in sight:
The Moon’s in heaven, as Betty sees,
But Betty is not quite at ease;
And Susan has a dreadful night.
Almost any old countrywoman’s account of these events would be much sharper, much more penetratingly intense than this. Wordsworth’s versifying has had the effect of taking the bright edge off “the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation.”
Two Sisters
I
Alice is tall and upright as a pine,
White as blanched almonds or the falling snow,
Sweet as are damask roses when they blow,
And doubtless fruitful as the swelling vine.
Ripe to be cut and ready to be pressed,
Her full-cheeked beauties very well appear,
And a year’s fruit she loses every year,
Wanting a man to improve her to the best.
Full fain she would be husbanded, and yet,
Alas, she cannot a fit labourer get
To cultivate her to his own content:
Fain would she be, God wot, about her task,
And yet, forsooth, she is too proud to ask,
And (which is worse) too modest to consent.
II
Margaret of humbler stature by the head
Is (as it oft falls out with yellow hair)
Than her fair sister, yet so much more fair
As her pure white is better mixt with red.
This, hotter than the other ten to one,
Longs to be put unto her mother’s trade,
And loud proclaims she lives too long a maid,
Wishing for one to untie her virgin zone.
She finds virginity a kind of ware
That’s very, very troublesome to bear,
And being gone she thinks will ne’er be missed;
And yet withal the girl has so much grace,
To call for
