35 Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground.
1. In Homer's Iliad Achilles, the chief Greek hero and a city at war; scenes from country life, animal in the war with Troy, lends his armor to his great life, and the joyful life of young men and women. friend Patroclus and loses it when Patroclus is The ocean, as the outer border, flows around all killed by Hector. While Achilles is mourning the these scenes. death of his friend, his mother, the goddess Thetis, 2. Cf. John Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' goes to Mt. Olympus to beg Hephaestos, the god (1820): 'Who are these coming to the sacrifice? / of fire, to forge new armor for Achilles. The splen-To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st did shield of Achilles that Hephaestos then makes thou that heifer lowing at the skies, / And all her is described in book 18 (lines 478-608). On it he silken flanks with garlands dressed?' 'Libation': depicts the earth, the heavens, the sea, and the sacrifice of wine or other liquid. planets; a city in peace (with a wedding and a trial)
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2438 / W. H. AUDEN
Th e mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same, 40 Lay in the hands of others; they were small An d could not hope for help and no help came: Wha t their foes liked to do was done, their shame Wa s all the worst could wish; they lost their pride An d died as me n before their bodies died. 45 She looked over his shoulder For athletes at their games, Me n and wome n in a dance Moving their sweet limbs Quick, quick, to music, 50 But there on the shining shield His hands had set no dancing-floor But a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy; a bird 55 Flew up to safety from his well- aimed stone: That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept. 60 Th e thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away; Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought 65 To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Wh o would not live long. 1952 1952, 1955
[Poetry as Memorable Speech]1
Of the man y definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech.' That is to say, it must move our emotions, or excite our intellect, for only that which is moving or exciting is memorable, and the stimulus is the audible spoken word and cadence, to which in all its power of suggestion and incantation we must surrender, as we do when talking to an intimate friend. We must, in fact, make exactly the opposite kind of mental effort to that we make in grasping other verbal uses, for in the case of the latter the aura of suggestion round every word through which, like the atom radiating lines of force through the whole of space and time, it becomes ultimately a sign for the sum of all possible meanings, must be rigorously suppressed and its meaning confined to a single dictionary one. For this reason the exposition of a
1. Excerpted from Auden and John Garrett's introduction to their anthology of verse, The Poet's Tongue.
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[POETRY AS MEMORABLE SPEECH] / 243 9
scientific theory is easier to read than to hear. No poetry, on the other hand, which when mastered is not better heard than read is good poetry.
All speech has rhythm, which is the result of the combination of the alternating periods of effort and rest necessary to all living things, and the laying of emphasis on what we consider important; and in all poetry there is a tension between the rhythm due to the poet's personal values, and those due to the experiences of generations crystallised into habits of language such as the English tendency to alternate weak and accented syllables, and conventional verse forms like the hexameter, the heroic pentameter, or the French Alexandrine. Similes, metaphors of image or idea, and auditory metaphors such as rhyme, assonance, and alliteration help further to clarify and strengthen the pattern and internal relations of the experience described.
Poetry, in fact, bears the same kind of relation to Prose, using prose simply in the sense of all those uses of words that are not poetry, that algebra bears to arithmetic. Th e poet writes of personal or fictitious experiences, but these are not important in themselves until the reader has realised them in his own consciousness.
Soldier from the war returning, Spoiler of the taken town.2
It is quite unimportant, though it is the kind of question not infrequently
asked, who the soldier is, what regiment he belongs to, what war he had been
fighting in, etc. The soldier is you or me, or the man next door. Only when it
throws light on our own experience, when these lines occur to us as we see,
say, the unhappy face of a stockbroker in the suburban train, does poetry
convince us of its significance. Th e test of a poet is the frequency and diversity
of the occasions on which we remember his poetry.
Memorable speech then. About what? Birth, death, the Beatific Vision,3 the
abysses of hatred and fear, the awards and miseries of desire, the unjust walk
ing the earth and the just scratching miserably for food like hens, triumphs,
earthquakes, deserts of boredom and featureless anxiety, the Golden Age
promised or irrevocably past, the gratifications and terrors of childhood, the
impact of nature on the adolescent, the despairs and wisdoms of the mature,
the sacrificial victim, the descent into Hell, the devouring and the benign
mother? Yes, all of these, but not these only. Everything that we remember no
matter ho w trivial: the mar k on the wall, the joke at luncheon, word games,
these, like the dance of a stoat4 or the raven's gamble, are equally the subject
of poetry.
