What Mandelstam does, on the other hand, is to bring him from the pantheon back to the palate; he makes our mouth water to read him. He possesses the poem as a musician possesses the score, both as a whole structure and as a sequence of delicious sounds. He transmits a fever of excitement in the actual phonetic reality of the work and shares with us the sensation of his poet’s delight turning into a sort of giddy critical wisdom. And this personal neediness and rapture which we find in Mandelstam’s responses has much to do with the fact that he came to Dante not as an undergraduate but as an exile in his thirties. In her memoir, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam tells us that her husband had no copy of Dante until this late stage in his life but that it was one of the few books he took with him when he was banished from his beloved Petersburg to the dark earth of Voronezh. By the time he came to dwell with the Commedia, his powers as a lyric poet had been tested and fulfilled, and his destiny as a moral being, in the middle of the journey, was being tragically embraced.
Mandelstam’s exile from Petersburg was the result of a poem he had written against Stalin, an uncharacteristically explicit and publicly directed poem which was reported to the Kremlin by an informer. But this poem had come at the end of four or five years of poetic silence, and the silence was the result of Mandelstam’s attempt at connivance, compromise, acceptance – call it what you will; for a number of years he had been trying to make an accommodation with Soviet realities. He had been attempting to quell his essentially subjective, humanist vision of poetry as a kind of free love between the auditory imagination and the unharnessed intelligence, trying to submerge his quarrel with the idea of art as a service, a socialist realist cog in the revolutionary machine. He had worked as a translator, he had attempted to persuade himself that his pre-revolutionary espousal of poetry as an expression of inner freedom, as a self-delighting, self-engendering, musical system based upon what he called ‘the steadfastness of speech articulation’, he had attempted to persuade himself that this vision of art could be maintained and exercised within the Soviet dispensation. For a while he tried to fit in with a system where art had to be, in Joyce’s terms, kinetic, directed towards forwarding a cause, ready to forget its covenant with the literary past and the individual’s inner sense of the truth. Yet Mandelstam’s whole creative being strained against this attempt and even when he was under the shadow of the death to which Stalin eventually hounded him, he was unable to make the compromise. He tried, a little shamefacedly in his own eyes and, to his credit, entirely unsuccessfully, to write a poem in praise of a hydroelectric dam, but he could manage nothing.
So in order to breathe freely, to allow his lips to move again with poems which were his breath of life, he had to come clean, spur his Pegasus out of the socialist realist morass, and thereby confront the danger of death and the immediate penalty of exile. And his essay on Dante was written in the aftermath of his tragic choice. It is no wonder therefore that Dante is not perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy but rather as the apotheosis of free, natural, biological process, as a hive of bees, a process of crystallization, a hurry of pigeon flights, a focus for all the impulsive, instinctive, non-utilitarian elements in the creative life. Mandelstam found a guide and authority for himself also, but a guide who wears no official badge, enforces no party line, does not write paraphrases of Aquinas or commentaries on the classical authors. His Dante is a voluble Shakespearean figure, a woodcutter singing at his work in the dark wood of the larynx.
Irish University Review, vol. 15, Spring 1985
from The Government of the Tongue
When I thought of ‘the government of the tongue’ as a general title for these memorial lectures, what I wanted to explore was the idea that poetry vindicates itself through the exercise of its own expressive powers. In this reading, the tongue (representing both a poet’s personal gift of utterance and the common resources of language itself) has been granted the right to govern. The poetic art discovers an authority all its own. As readers, we are prepared to be ruled by its Tightness, even though that Tightness is achieved not by the moral and ethical exercise of mind but by the self-validating operations of what we call inspiration – especially if we think of inspiration in the terms supplied by the Polish poet Anna Swir, who writes of it as a ‘psychosomatic phenomenon’ and goes on to declare:
This seems to me the only biologically natural way for a poem to be born and gives the poem something like a biological right to exist. A poet becomes then an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subconscious. For one moment he possesses wealth usually inaccessible to him, and he loses it when that moment is over.
In this figure of the poem’s making, then, we see a paradigm of free action issuing in satisfactorily achieved ends; we see a path projected to the dimension in which, Yeats says, ‘Labour is blossoming or dancing where / The Body is not bruised to pleasure soul …
But as I warm to this theme, a voice from another part of me speaks in rebuke. ‘Govern your tongue,’ it says, compelling me to remember that my title can also imply a denial of the tongue’s autonomy and permission. In this reading, ‘the government of the tongue’ is full of monastic and ascetic strictness. One remembers Hopkins’s ‘Habit of Perfection’, with its command to the eyes to be ‘shelled’, the ears to attend to silence and the tongue to know its place:
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.
It is even more instructive to remember that Hopkins abandoned poetry when he entered the Jesuits, ‘as not having to do with my vocation’. This manifests a world where the prevalent values and necessities leave poetry in a relatively underprivileged situation, requiring it to take a position that is secondary to religious truth or state security or public order. It discloses a condition of public and private repressions where the undirected hedonistic play of imagination is regarded at best as luxury or licentiousness, at worst as heresy or treason. In ideal republics, Soviet republics, in the Vatican and Bible-belt, it is a common expectation that the writer will sign over his or her individual, venturesome and potentially disruptive activity into the keeping of an official doctrine, a traditional system, a party line, whatever. In such contexts, no further elaboration or exploration of the language or forms currently in place is permissible. An order has been handed down and the shape of things has been established.
*
That vitality and insouciance of lyric poetry, its relish of its own inventiveness, its pleasuring strain, also come under threat when poetry remembers that its self-gratification must be perceived as a kind of affront to a world preoccupied with its own imperfections, pains and catastrophes. What right has poetry to its quarantine? Should it not put the governors on its joy and moralize its song? Should it, as Austin Clarke said in another context, take the clapper from the bell of rhyme? Should it go as far in self-denial as Zbigniew Herbert’s poem ‘A Knocker’ seems to want it to go? This translation, in the Penguin Modern European Poets series, was originally published in 1968:
There are those who grow
gardens in their heads
paths lead from their hair
to sunny and white cities
it’s easy for them to write
they close their eyes
immediately schools of images
stream down their foreheads
my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick
I strike the board
it answers me
yes – yes
no – no
for others the green bell of a tree
the blue bell of water
I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens
I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralis
t’s dry poem
yes – yes
no – no
Herbert’s poem ostensibly demands that poetry abandon its hedonism and fluency, that it become a nun of language and barber its luxuriant locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical goads. Ostensibly too, it would depose the tongue because of its cavalier indulgence and send in as governor of the estate of poetry a Malvolio with a stick. It would castigate the entrancements of poetry, substituting in their stead a roundhead’s plain-spoken counsel. Yet oddly, without the fluent evocation of bells and gardens and trees and all those things which it explicitly deplores, the poem could not make the bleak knocker signify as potently as it does. The poem makes us feel that we should prefer moral utterance to palliative imagery, and by making us feel it carries its truth alive into the heart – exactly as the Romantics said it should. We end up persuaded we are against lyric poetry’s culpable absorption in its own process by an entirely successful instance of that very process in action: here is a lyric about a knocker which claims that lyric is inadmissible.
All poets who get beyond the first excitement of being blessed by the achievement of poetic form confront, sooner or later, the question which Herbert confronts in ‘A Knocker’ and, if they are lucky, they end up, like Herbert, outstripping it rather than answering it directly. Some, like Wilfred Owen, outface it by living a life so extremely mortgaged to the suffering of others that the tenancy of the palace of art is paid for a hundredfold. Others, like Yeats, promulgate and practise such faith in art’s absolute necessity that they overbear whatever assaults the historical and contingent might mount upon their certitude. Richard Ellmann’s statement of the Yeatsian case is finally applicable to every serious poetic life:
He wishes to show how brute force may be transmogrified, how we can sacrifice ourselves … to our ‘imagined’ selves which offer far higher standards than anything offered by social convention. If we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we suffer, and this is what heroes do spontaneously, artists do consciously, and all men do in their degree.
All poets are likely to subscribe to some such conviction, even those who are most scrupulous in their avoidance of the grand manner, who respect the democracy of language, and display by the pitch of their voice or the commonness of their subjects a readiness to put themselves on the side of those who are sceptical of poetry’s right to any special status. The fact is that poetry is its own reality and no matter how much a poet may concede to the corrective pressures of social, moral, political and historical reality, the ultimate fidelity must be to the demands and promise of the artistic event.
It is for this reason that I want to discuss ‘At the Fishhouses’ by Elizabeth Bishop. Here we see this most reticent and mannerly of poets being compelled by the undeniable impetus of her art to break with her usual inclination to conciliate the social audience. This conciliatory impulse was not based on subservience but on a respect for other people’s shyness in the face of poetry’s presumption: Bishop usually limited herself to a note that would not have disturbed the discreet undersong of conversation between strangers breakfasting at a seaside hotel. Without addressing a question as immense and unavoidable as whether silence rather than poetry is not the proper response in a world after Auschwitz, she implicitly condones the doubts about art’s prerogatives which such a question raises.
Elizabeth Bishop, in other words, was temperamentally inclined to believe in the government of the tongue – in the self-denying sense. She was personally reticent, opposed to and incapable of self-aggrandizement, the very embodiment of good manners. Manners, of course, imply obligations to others and obligations on the part of others to ourselves. They insist on propriety, in the good large original sense of the word, meaning that which is intrinsic and characteristic and belongs naturally to the person or the thing. They also imply a certain strictness and allow the verbs ‘ought’ and ‘should’ to come into play. In short, as an attribute of the poetic enterprise, manners place limits on the whole scope and pitch of the enterprise itself. They would govern the tongue.
But Elizabeth Bishop not only practised good manners in her poetry. She also submitted herself to the discipline of observation. Observation was her habit, as much in the monastic, Hopkinsian sense as in its commoner meaning of a customarily repeated action. Indeed, observation is itself a manifestation of obedience, an activity which is averse to overwhelming phenomena by the exercise of subjectivity, content to remain an assisting presence rather than an overbearing pressure. So it is no wonder that the title of Bishop’s last collection was that of an old school textbook, Geography III. It is as if she were insisting on an affinity between her poetry and textbook prose, which establishes reliable, unassertive relations with the world by steady attention to detail, by equable classification and level-toned enumeration. The epigraph of the book suggests that the poet wishes to identify with these well-tried, primary methods of connecting words and things:
What is geography?
A description of the earth’s surface.
What is the earth?
The planet or body on which we live.
What is the shape of the earth?
Round, like a ball.
Of what is the earth’s surface composed?
Land and water.
A poetry faithful to such catechetical procedures would indeed seem to deny itself access to vision or epiphany; and ‘At the Fishhouses’ does begin with fastidious notations which log the progress of the physical world, degree by unemphatic degree, into the world of the poet’s own lucid awareness:
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,<
br />
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals … One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.’
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water … Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Finders Keepers Page 21
