And stroke my body with thy silken fan.
This shade, sun proof, is yet no proof for thee;
Thy body smoother than this waveless spring
And purer than the substance of the same,
Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce.
GEORGE PEELE.
The sound here is manifestly supernatural. (Did not Mohammed adduce the beauty of his style as an argument for the divine inspiration of the Koran?) And with what subtle recklessness do the irrelevancies succeed one another in “black shade, fair nurse, shadow my white hair”; in “black shade, fair nurse, shroud me and please me”! The magic of irrelevance is one of poetry’s most powerful instruments. Why are poetical phrases poetical? In most cases, because they contain ideas which we normally regard as irrelevant one to another, but which the poet has contrived to make relevant. “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care”; “to the last syllable of recorded time”; “those milk paps that through the window bars bore at men’s eyes.” Embroidery and misery; time and spelling; breasts and gimlets—Shakespeare’s plays are tissue of such odd, but, as he uses them, profoundly significant irrelevancies. Every good metaphor is the mating of irrelevancies to produce a new and more vivid expression.
But sometimes, as in the two songs by Peele, quoted above, irrelevance is used with a kind of recklessness, for its own sake, so to speak. Milk paps through the window bars bore at men’s eyes in order that the idea of physical desire may be expressed with a new and peculiar intensity. But weeping and the golden beard, combing and cockell bread, hair and sheaves, and sheaves and trees—these are brought together simply in order to produce an effect of strangeness. “The woods decay,” writes Tennyson,
the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burden to the ground.
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Why the swan? Heaven knows. The swan is a luminous irrelevance, sailing for a moment into the picture with all its curves and its whiteness and its mythologies, and sailing out again to the strains of a defunctive music, fabulously mournful. Tennyson knew his magician’s business.
Now, as in Tullia’s tomb, one lamp burned clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year,
May these love-lamps we here enshrine
In warmth, light, lasting, equal the divine.
JOHN DONNE.
For purely magical reasons “fifteen hundred” is one of the largest numbers in all our poetical arithmetic.
Now, as in Tullia’s tomb one lamp burned clear,
Unchanged for fifteen hundred year. . . .
The span of time is immense, appalling in its length. Paradoxically, “fifteen thousand” would have been shorter. The very emphasis of that too loudly protesting ou detracts from the final effect. “Thousand” puts us on our guard, sets up a reaction of scepticism; we feel that the noisy diphthong is overdoing it. Whereas “hundred” is a muffled force, a power restrained and silenced, but breaking through its gags. “Fifteen hundred” says more than the sound of its syllables wants it to say; the sound of “fifteen thousand” wants to say a great deal, but, protesting too much, says much less than it intends. Nor must we forget the effects of a historical education. “Fifteen hundred” is a real historical period—a slice of time that begins with Minos and ends with Augustus, or begins with Augustus and ends with Lorenzo the Magnificent. Whereas “fifteen thousand” takes us clean out of bounds and lands us in some dim cave or lake dwelling among heaven knows what kind of gibbering savages. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is the sound which matters more than the history. And the proof is that another poet has used the same number no less effectively in a non-historical context. “But when I see,” writes Mr. W. H. Davies,
“the first time in my life,
Our Sussex downs, so mighty, strong and bare,
That many a wood of fifteen hundred trees
Seems but a handful scattered lightly there. . . .”
The size of those woods is prodigious, and that of the Sussex downs, in consequence, beyond all computation. “Fifteen hundred” is a magical number.
O si chère de loin et proche et blanche, si
Délicieusement toi, Mary, que je songe
A quelque baume rare émané par mensonge.
Sur aucun bouquetier de cristal obscurci.
Le sais-tu, oui! pour moi voici des ans, voici
Toujours que ton sourire éblouissant prolonge
La même rose avec son bel été qui plonge
Dans autrefois et puis dans le futur aussi.
Mon cœur qui dans les nuits parfois cherche à s’entendre
Ou de quel dernier mot t’appeler le plus tendre
S’exalte en celui rien que chuchoté de sœur,
N’était, très grand trésor et tête si petite,
Que tu m’enseignes bien toute une autre douceur
Tout bas par le baiser seul dans tes cheveux dite.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.
Mallarmé’s sonnet is that miracle, an entire poem consciously organized to such a pitch of artistic perfection that the whole is one single, unflawed piece of “pure poetry.” In its unobtrusive way, this is one of the most potent spells ever committed to paper. In what does its magic consist? Partly it is a magic of sound. (Note incidentally, that the magical sound is not concentrated in single words, or phrases, or lines; it is the sound of the poem as a whole.) But mainly it is a magic of grammar, a syntactical magic of the relations of thought with thought. Consider the sextet; it is a grammatical apocalypse. A whole world of ideas is miraculously concentrated by means of the syntax into what is almost a point. “My heart, that in the night-time sometimes seeks to understand itself or by what last tenderest name to call you, exults in that no more than whispered of sister, were it not, great treasure and head so small, that you teach me quite another sweetness, uttered softly in your hair by the kiss alone.” The literal translation is absurd, but serves to bring to light the technique by means of which the grammatical magic is produced.
Another example of grammatical magic is furnished by Dante in that hell-conquering formula which Virgil addresses first to Charon, and then to Minos. The infernal rulers have raised objections to Dante’s presence in hell. Virgil silences them thus:—
Vuolsi cosî colà, dove si puote
Ciò che si vuole; e più non dimandare.
“Thus is it willed there, where what is willed can be done; ask no more.”
The closely knit grammar-magic produces a sound-magic that reinforces its effect. Hearing the spell, Charon and Minos obey. We are not surprised.
The maidens came
When I was in my mother’s bower;
I had all that I would.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
The silver is white, red is the gold;
The robes they lay in fold.
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
And through the glass window shines the sun.
How should I love, and I so young?
The bailey beareth the bell away;
The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.
ANON.
The magic here is the magic of obscurity. Who is the bailey? Why does he bear away the bell? And does he do so in the old idiomatic sense of the phrase, or literally? And is “the lily, the rose, the rose I lay” merely a meaningless refrain, like “butter and eggs and a pound of cheese?” Or does it express in flowery terms the fact that the speaker—presumably a very young bride awaiting her bridegroom—lies a virgin and blushing? These are questions which I shall probably never be in a position to answer. For the long poem, from which this often-quoted fragment is taken, has been printed in its entirety only in Volume CVII. of the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen; and, frankly, I find it very difficult, almost impossible, to consult works of this kind. Which is, perhaps, all for the best. For if one really knew what this fragment was about, one might come to like it less. Uncomprehended, it is lovely, and mysteriously haunts the imagination with its peculiar magic. Let us leave well alone and be thankful for it.
O blest unfabled Incense Tree,
That burns in glorious Araby,
With red scent chalicing the air,
Till earth-life grow Elysian there!
Half buried to her flaming breast
In this bright tree, she makes her nest,
Hundred-sunned Phoenix, when she must
Crumble at length to hoary dust.
Her gorgeous death-bed, her rich pyre
Burnt up with aromatic fire!
Her urn, sight high from spoiler men!
Her birthplace, when self-born again!
The mountainless green wilds among,
Here ends she her unechoing song:
With amber tears and odorous sighs,
Mourned by the desert when she dies.
GEORGE DARLEY.
Every now and then, by some marvellous mistake, George Darley managed to concentrate his normal diffuseness; and from out of the iridescent fog of his pleasant versifying would emerge, startlingly, a real poem. This is the best of them—a small masterpiece of condensed phrasing and rich precise imagery, magical with symbolism and obscure allusion. Darley seems to have used the Phoenix, as D. H. Lawrence used it, as a symbol of the physical desire that dies in flame and is born again in flame. That the scene of the Phoenix’s death and birth should be a desert, green, indeed, but mountainless, and her song unechoing, is certainly significant—I suppose of the fact that physical desire, like virtue, is its own reward and end, that it leads to no eminences beyond the heights of passion and has no meaning outside itself.
Je suis le ténébreux, le veuf, l’inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie.
Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du tombeau toi qui m’as consolé,
Rend-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.
Suis-je Amour ou Phébus?
