incantations conjure and summon a live thing out of thin air. Duke Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream put it this way:And, as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet’s penTurns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.
For Keats the grand plan of The Faerie Queen, its narrative, its religious, metaphysical, political and philosophical allegory and high epic seriousness dwindled to nothing in comparison with the poetic act as realised in two words. He ‘would dwell in ecstasy’ on the phrase, his friend Charles Cowden Clarke wrote later. This may sound rather extreme–there goes another typically high-strung nancy-boy poet in a loose neckcloth, swooning at a phrase–but I think the story goes to the heart of poetry’s fundamental nature. I am sure there must have been moments like this for painters struck, not by the composition and grand themes of a masterpiece, but by one brush stroke, one extraordinary solution to the problem of transmitting truth by applying pigment to canvas. Poetry is constructed by the conjoining of words, one next to the other. Not every instance of poetic language will yield so rich an epiphany as Spenser’s did for Keats–there are muddy backgrounds in poems as in paintings–and poetry can never hope to rival the essay, the novel or a philosophical treatise when it comes to imparting thought, story and abstract truths, but it can make words live in a most particular way, it can achieve things like ‘the sea-shouldering whale’. You may not think it the finest poetic phrase ever wrought, but it unlocked poetry for the young Keats. Most of us have an inexplicably best-loved film or book that opened our eyes to the power of cinema and literature, and these favourites may not necessarily be part of the canon of Great Cinema or Great Literature, they just happened to be the ones that were there when we were ready for them. First Love comes when it comes and often we are hard put to explain later just why such and such a person was the object of our ardent youthful adoration when photographs now reveal just how plain they really were.
THE CAT AND THE ACT
Let me give you another example, this time it is from a poem by Ted Hughes called ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’. Hughes tells the story, simply and directly, of how Parnell’s Irish Members of Parliament in the late nineteenth century called for a motion to abolish the cat-o’-nine-tails as a punishment in the Royal Navy:Predictably, ParliamentSquared against the motion. As soonLet the old school tie be rentOff their necks…
Absolutely. ‘Noble tradition! Trafalgar, what?’ The cat-o’-nine-tails was, the old guard in Parliament cried, ‘No shame, but a monument…’‘To discontinue it were as muchAs ship not powder and cannonballsBut brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing whichA witty profound Irishman callsFor a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watchThe gentry fingering its stained tails.Whereupon…
quietly, unopposed,The motion was passed.
There, to some extent, you have it all. Poetry (literally) in Motion. Poetry (literally again) enacted, passed into Act. Hughes calls the unnamed Irishman who cried for the cat to be brought in ‘witty and profound’ for good reason. That Irishman did in life what poems try to do in words: to make the idea fact, the abstract concrete and the general particular.
The politicians run their fingers over the stained leather, real human blood flakes off and the Idea of the cat is no longer an idea, it is now a real whip which has scourged very flesh and drawn very blood. That obscene carrier of flesh and blood passes along the benches and the motion is, of course, passed unopposed and in silence. Essays, journalism and novels can parade political, philosophical and social ideas and arguments about corporal punishment or any other damned thing, but such talk has none of the power of the real. We use prose words to describe, but poetic language attempts, like the magician or the profound Irishman, to body forth those notions into their very act, to reify them. Poetry, the art of making, pushes the Idea into becoming the Thing Itself. Witty and profound. This wit and profundity might be harnessed to release a real whale to appear before us, or to compel us to handle the stained tails of a barbaric whip. Hughes made a poem that celebrated an act that tells us what poetry does, which is why he entitled his poem not ‘Death of the Cat’ or something similar, but ‘Wilfred Owen’s Photographs’, for Owen gave us not the idea of war but the torn flesh and smashed bone of ‘limbs so dear achieved’, he gave us the fact of war. He called for photographs of the ruined minds and bodies of soldiers to be brought into our houses and passed along for inspection. The patriotic cheers stuck in our throats.
MADELINE
Madeline, ah, Madeline. I wish I could tell you that the line of verse that awoke me to the power of poetry was as perfectly contained and simple in its force as Spenser’s, or that it had all the cold rage and perfection of the Hughes description of the Irish member’s act of wit. It was a line of Keats’s, an alexandrine as it happens, not that I knew that then, of a sensuousness and melodic perfection that hit me like a first lungful of cannabis, but without the great arcs of vomit, inane giggling and clammy paranoia attendant upon ingestion of that futile and overrated narcotic. The line is from ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’:And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.
It is very possible that you will see nothing remarkable in this line at all. I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary consonantal symmetry. Moving inwards from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D-L-N-SL-P-N-L-P- L-N-D-S-L-D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable. It has none of the embarrassing obviousness of over-alliterated lines, but its music is as perfectly achieved as any line of verse I know. It was not, however, the sonorous splendours of the words that had first captivated me, but the image evoked by them. I found the line as completely visual as anything I had ever read. I suppose that subconsciously diction had been as responsible as description, which is to say the nature and physical attributions of the words chosen had made the image vivid in my mind quite as much as their literal meanings. ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it,’ the song goes. It is both of course. And what had Keats said? That a girl was asleep in the lap of…not a person, but some old legends. It had never occurred to me before that you were allowed to do this. It was like a nonsense joke or a category mistake. You can sleep in a person’s lap, but not a legend’s. Legends don’t have laps any more than whales have shoulders. Yet straight into my head came a suffused and dreamy picture of a long-haired maiden, eyes closed, with armoured knights and dragons rising up from her sleeping head. An image, I was later to discover, that greatly influenced the works of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. Music and painting in one twelve-syllable line, but something more than either and this ‘something more than either’ is what we mean, I suppose, by poetry.
I know this is all very fey and mockable. Very sensitive cardigan-wearing reading-glasses on a thin gold chain old poof who runs an antique business and yearns for beauty. Ah, my beloved Keats, such a solace to me in this world of reality television and chicken nuggets. They don’t understand, you know. Well, perhaps. I am not sure that it is in truth any more mockable than bloodless mirror-shaded cool in black jackets or disengaged postmodern quotation marks or sneery journalism or any style of cheap social grading one wishes to indulge in. I am not going to waste time trying to claim that a line of sensuous romantic poetry is cool and hard and powerful and relevant and intellectually muscled: it is quite enough for me that it astonishes with its beauty. Christopher Ricks wrote a book called Keats and Embarrassment and while his thesis went far beyond the usual implications of the word, a sense of embarrassment will always cling to poetry that isn’t hip like Bukowski.
‘Oh, play that thing!’ says Larkin in his poem to the jazz saxophonist and clarinettist, Sidney Bechet:On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes.
