No doubt, this practice (in so far as Isherwood’s blithe account is to be credited) betrays an irresponsibility with regard to comprehensibility but it does represent a strong life-urge in the artist himself. To avoid the consensus and settlement of a meaning which the audience fastens on like a security blanket, to be antic, mettlesome, contrary, to retain the right to impudence, to raise hackles, to harry the audience into wakefulness – to do all this may not only be permissible but necessary if poetry is to keep on coming into a fuller life. Which is why, as I said, I am now ready to attend without anxiety to those oddly unparaphraseable riffs in the very earliest work.
At the beginning of ‘The Watershed’ the wind is ‘chafing’, a word which until this occasion had seemed bereft of onomatopoeic life: now it allows us to hear through its lingering vowel and caressing fricative the whisper and friction of wind along a hillside. But this unresisted passage of breath is complicated by the meaning of something rubbing, being fretted and galled and hence inflamed. The word suggests that the topographical crux (of the watershed) which has been left behind is now being experienced as and replaced by a psychological crux, a condition of being subject to two contradictory states, of having to suffer at the same time an utter stillness and a susurrus of agitation. Similarly, the grammatical peace of this present participle is disturbed by a lurking middle voice: the grass is chafing, active, but in so far as the only thing being chafed is itself, it is passive. Then, too, the participle occupies a middle state between being transitive and intransitive, and altogether functions like a pass made swiftly, a sleight of semantic hand which unnerves and suspends the reader above a valley of uncertainty. By the second line the reader is already made into that ‘stranger’ who will be addressed in line nineteen. In fact, the first two words put the reader to the test, for we are not immediately sure whether ‘Who stands …’ initiates a question or a noun clause. This deferral of a sense of syntactical direction is a perfect technical equivalent for that lack of certitude and intuition of imminent catastrophe which gives the poem its soundless climax and closure.
Yet for all the Tightness of ‘chafing’ there is no sense of its having been chosen; it is completely free of that unspoken ‘Here be sport for diction-spotters’ which hangs over the more deliberate, lexicon-oriented Auden of the last years, when he had begun to resemble in his own person an ample, flopping, ambulatory volume of the OED in carpet slippers. Remember the unravelling wool of the title poem in Thank You Fog:
Sworn foe to festination,
daunter of drivers and planes,
volants, of course, will curse You,
but how delighted I am
that You’ve been lured to visit
Wiltshire’s witching countryside
for a whole week at Christmas.
That ‘witching’ is beautiful, permissive, wryly and late-comerly literary, yet its very relish of its own dexterity is tinged with tedium, even for the poet (and the same holds, only more so, for ‘festination’ and ‘volants’). Whereas ‘chafing’ strikes the rock of language and brings forth sudden life from the rift, these later words are collector’s items, lifted in huffing pleasure but without the need and joy which attended the earlier discovery.
Happily, there is no necessity to go on about this. Later Auden is a different kind of poetry; by then, the line is doctrinaire in its domesticity, wanting to comfort like a thread of wool rather than shock like a bare wire. Attendant upon the whole performance, there is an unselfpitying air of ‘Let us grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind’, and I quote the fog passage only to remind you again of the extent to which Auden’s poetry changed its linguistic posture over four decades. In the very beginning, the stress of Anglo-Saxon metre and the gnomic clunk of Anglo-Saxon phrasing were pulled like a harrow against the natural slope of social speech and iambic lyric. The poem did not sail with the current, it tangled and hassled, chafed, ‘hurt itself on pane, on bark of elm’. What was happening in such rare musical eddies was what T. S. Eliot called ‘concentration’, a term which he employed when addressing the ever-pressing question of the relation between emotions actually experienced by the poet and the emotions which get expressed – or better, get invented – in a poem. ‘We must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula,’ Eliot wrote in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and went on:
For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ‘recollected’, and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ‘tranquil’ only in that it is a passive attending upon the event.
We are in the presence of such concentration when we read a poem like ‘Taller To-day’. This lyric is obviously not meant to fall into step with our usual commonsensical speech-gait, nor is it eager to simulate the emotional and linguistic normality of ‘a man speaking to men’; rather it presents us with that ‘new thing’ which abides, as I suggested, adjacent and parallel to lived experience but which, in spite of perfect sympathy for those living such experience, has no desire to dwell among them:
Noises at dawn will bring
Freedom for some, but not this peace
No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now
For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.
The tranquillity of this has as much to do with what the words achieve as what they recollect. Not, perhaps, the peace which surpasseth understanding, more that which resisteth paraphrasing; a peace, anyhow, ‘no bird can contradict’.
But then, after all, does a bird’s motion not equal a disturbance or ‘contradiction’ even within such deep stillness and fulfilment? Yet somehow the bird in the passage hardly attains enough physical presence to be able to contradict anything. For example, if we put it beside Hardy’s dew-fall hawk ‘crossing the shades to alight / Upon the wind-warped upland thorn’, we know Hardy’s to be a dark transience of wing-beat, a palpable, air-lofted glide, a phenomenon out there, in the twilight, whereas Auden’s bird is an occurrence in here, an ignition of energy which happens when certain pert, thin, clicking vowels are combined in a swift reaction: ‘but not this peace / No bird can contradict: passing, but is sufficient now / For something fulfilled this hour, loved or endured.’ The contrapuntal, lengthened-out, interrupted see-saw movement of those lines is as important as their beautifully elaborated and uncomplicating meaning. The hammer of modern English metre, what Robert Graves called the smith-work of ti-tum, ti-tum, is going on during the deeper, longer oar-work of Old English, and the ear, no matter how ignorant it may be of the provenance of what it is hearing, attends to the contest. This contest, perfectly matched, undulant yet balanced, is between the navigating efforts of a singular, directed intelligence and the slug and heave of the element in which it toils, the element of language itself …
Those obscure early poems had been unaccommodating and involuntary efforts to speak the primary and utterly persuasive word. They were, in both the literal and slangier senses of the phrase, ‘far out’ – even at the times when they kept tight in to the metrical rule and spoke the first language of the child’s storybook:
Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.
Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain’s lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.
Although this does not strike back at a rhythmical angle against the expectation of the well-tuned ear, its metaphysical geography remains very different from the consoling contours of the ‘real world’ of the familiar. Long before the parable poetry of post-war Europe, Auden arrived at a mode that was stricken wi
th premonitions of an awful thing and was adequate to give expression to those premonitions by strictly poetic means. But this unified sensibility fissured when Auden was inevitably driven to extend himself beyond the transmission of intuited knowledge, beyond poetic indirection and implication, and began spelling out those intuitions in a more explicit, analytic and morally ratified rhetoric. In writing a poem like ‘Spain’, no matter how breathtaking its condensation of vistas or how decent its purpose, or a poem like ‘A Summer Night’, no matter how Mozartian its verbal equivalent of agape, Auden broke with his solitude and his oddity. His responsibility towards the human family became intensely and commendably strong and the magnificently sane, meditative, judicial poems of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were the result. We might say that this bonus, which includes such an early masterpiece as ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and such a later one as ‘In Praise of Limestone’, represents an answer to the question posed in ‘Orpheus’. That answer inclines to say that ‘song’ hopes most of all for ‘the knowledge of life’, and inclines away from the ‘bewildered’ quotient in the proffered alternative, ‘to be bewildered and happy’. To put it another way, Auden finally preferred life to be concentrated into something ‘rich’ rather than something ‘strange’, a preference which is understandable if we consider poetry’s constant impulse to be all Prospero, harnessed to the rational project of settling mankind into a cosmic security. Yet the doom and omen which characterized the ‘strange’ poetry of the early 1930s, its bewildered and unsettling visions, brought native English poetry as near as it has ever been to the imaginative verge of the dreadful and offered an example of how insular experience and the universal shock suffered by mankind in the twentieth century could be sounded forth in the English language. In his later poetry, moreover, when a similar note is struck, the poetry inevitably gains in memorability and intensity:
Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (ii), University of Kent, 1986
Lowell’s Command
Years ago Michael Longley wrote an essay on poets from Northern Ireland in which he made a distinction between igneous and sedimentary modes of poetic composition. In geology, igneous rocks are derived from magma or lava solidified below the earth’s surface whereas sedimentary ones are formed by the deposit and accumulation of mineral and organic materials, worked on, broken down and reconstituted by the action of water, ice and wind. The very sound of the words is suggestive of what is entailed in each case. Igneous is irruptive, unlooked-for and peremptory; sedimentary is steady-kneeled, dwelt-upon, graduated.
If, however, a name exists for the process which begins igneous and ends up sedimentary, it would be the one to apply to the poetry of Robert Lowell. Lowell was a poet who had a powerful instinct for broaching the molten stuff early but then he would keep coming back to work it over with the hot and cold weathers of his revising intelligence, sometimes even after it had appeared in a book. He was very much alive to the double nature of the act of writing: ‘A poem is an event,’ he declared to his classes, ‘not the record of an event’ – equating what I have called igneous with events and sedimentary with record. The distinction comes to light in another form in his Writers at Work interview, where he says, ‘The revision, the consciousness that tinkers with a poem – that has something to do with teaching and criticism. But the impulse that starts a poem and makes it of any importance is distinct from teaching.’ And again, ‘I’m sure that writing isn’t a craft, that is, something for which you learn the skills and go on turning out. It must come from some deep impulse, deep inspiration.’
Yet his awareness of this distinction between the essential self-engendered impulse and what he would call in the end ‘those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme’ did not lead Lowell to disdain those structures. His conviction that poetry could not be equated with craft did not diminish his respect for craft. Craft, after all, represents a poet’s covenant with the literary tradition of his language, with ancestry and posterity, a covenant based on an understanding that the poetic venture is ultimately serviceable no matter how solipsistic it might at first appear. Lowell was searching for a way of writing that would be an anatomy of his own predicament and of the age. His obsessive subjectivity did not signify an absconding from the usual life with its ethical codes and its various obligations. On the contrary, Lowell deliberately took upon himself – sometimes by public apostrophe and rebuke, sometimes by introspective or confessional example – the role of the poet as conscience of his society. Conscience, if we press upon its etymology, can mean our capacity to know the same thing together, yet such knowledge also makes us vulnerable to poetry as a reminder of what, together, we may have chosen to forget, and this admonitory function is one which Robert Lowell exercised, more or less deliberately, all his life.
When I speak of his ‘command’, however, I am not just thinking of his arrogation of the right to speak to or for an audience, but of the way this arrogation is validated by the note of his writing, its particular ‘command’ over literary tradition and the illiterate ear. Until full middle age, Lowell achieved this authority by tuning his lines in accordance with traditional practice, bringing them to a pitch of tension and intensity by means of musical climax, dramatic gesture or ironical plotting, constantly recalling himself and his reader to an encounter with a formal shape, a firmly decided outline.
It is true that during this first movement of his career, Lowell abandoned his ambition to write a stand-offish, self-sufficient poetry and aimed instead to achieve a more face-to-face contact with his reader and his reader’s world. Yet he was always seeking to outfox if not to overwhelm the usual, to sound oracular or at least ungainsayable: ‘The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.’ ‘Your old-fashioned tirade – / Loving, rapid, merciless – / breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.’ ‘You usually won – / motionless / as a lizard in the sun.’ Closing lines like these would tremble in the ear like an arrow in a target. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. The reader was permitted the sensation of a whole meaning simultaneously clicking shut and breaking open, a momentary illusion that the fulfilments which were being experienced in the ear encapsulated meanings and fulfilments available in the world. So, no matter how much the poem had to do with breakdown or the evacuation of meaning from experience, its fall towards a valueless limbo was broken by the perfectly stretched net of poetic form itself.
Life Studies, for example, noted at first for its extreme candour, for the private, almost taboo nature of its contents, now stands as unembarrassed and approachable as a public monument. It silhouettes its figures against the life of the times; its hard, intelligent lines and well-braced speech imply that there is a social dimension to what it is voicing. It trusts that it has an audience and hence is able to proceed to the outrageous or unnerving business of autobiography with a certain decorousness. Lowell may write:
Terrible that old life of decency
without unseemly intimacy
or quarrels, when the unemancipated woman
still had her Freudian papà and maids!
Yet the decorum of Life Studies is continuous with that old life even as it reveals its disintegration, its inadequate hauteur in the face of locked razors, mad soldiers and electric chairs. This decorum, the book’s technical mastery and its drive towards impersonality, are as much part of Lowell’s birthright as his patronymic. As an artist, he was the proper Bostonian with his back to a wall of tradition. His poetic art, however self-willed it might on occasion be, could never escape from the demand that it be more than self-indulgence. There had to be something surgical in the incisions he made, some
thing professional and public-spirited. The whole thing was a test, of himself and of the resources of poetry, and in Life Studies those resources proved to be capable of taking new strains, in both the musical and stressful sense of that word.
Lowell did not innocently lisp in numbers. Innocence was not something he set much store by anyhow, either in himself or in others, and his whole œuvre is remarkably free of the sigh for lost Eden. Everything begins outside the garden, in the learning process, in sweat and application. No lisps. The voice has broken by the time it speaks. It has been to school, literally as well as figuratively. Lowell’s first style, it should not be forgotten, was formed in the English Departments of Kenyon College, Vanderbilt College and Louisiana State University. His mentors, true enough, were poets and knew poetry inside out, yet they were equally and more famously teachers, New Critics driven by a passion to pluck out the last secret of any poem by unearthing, if necessary, its seventh ambiguity. No wonder then that Lowell, in a late poem, wryly and accurately likened his early work to the seven-walled fortress of Troy, where meaning lay immured behind rings of highly wrought art. But at least that meant that he wrote, in the words of F. W. Dupee, ‘as if poetry were still a major art and not merely a venerable pastime’. Among a strenuous and brilliant generation of poet-critics, praying to be obsessed by writing and having their prayers answered, Lowell strove to hold his own not only by mastering the classical, English, European and American poetic canons; he also strove to outstrip the level best of his peers by swerves that were all his own: doctrinal, ancestral, political. Doctrinal, when he converted to the Roman Catholic Church and betrayed not just a faith but a civic solidarity. Ancestral, when he invoked his dynastic right derived from the Winslows and the Lowells and presumed to rebuke the president. Political, when he went to jail as a conscientious objector in 1943, having nevertheless volunteered (without response) for the Navy and the Army in the previous year.
Finders Keepers Page 23
