Self, Poem, World: 

On Saying something

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do we set out to say in the poem?   What is worth saying?  What is just self indulgent self-expression?   Or is it all just pretty words anyway?   This is the way I personally feel about something, someone, myself.  So what?

 

This week’s discussion deals with this cluster of so what questions.

 

Meanings

It’s worth thinking about kinds of meaning, not just the difference between denotation and connotation (what I’m using the words to point at, and what the words themselves send out vibes of), but also the ways in which language expresses feelings and attitudes directly, classically in words and phrases like ‘Oh my God!’,   ‘alas’,  ‘of course’,  ‘you idiot,’ where there’s nothing being ‘referred to’.

 

Eliot made a famous remark about what he called an ‘objective correlative’, meaning that there must be some convincing basis provided in a poem for the feelings expressed.  It’s no good having just the feelings.   You may be able to think of poems which counter this.

 

‘My love is like a red, red, rose. . .’

 

This poems seems to be no more than – no less than – an assertion of what the poet feels.  Nothing ‘objective’ at all.

 

But there’s also the kind of meaning which is gestured towards, implied, suggested, the ‘left unsaid’.  And this tails off into what is ‘obvious’ and doesn’t need to be said. In Burns’ poem, we don’t’ need a justification of love.  Or do we?  How do we distinguish between mere gesturing about love and ‘the real thing’, and how does the poem convince us it’s the latter?

 

This is sometimes a matter of what has been prepared for in the poem so far, as when  Louis Macneice writes

 

“There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses”

 

or it can be plucked out of the air of literature or learning in the shape of allusion, where the reader may or may not be able to recognise it.  For example the opening of The Wasteland contains an allusion to the opening of The Canterbury Tales.   Eliot writes:

 

                        APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

                                Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

                                Memory and desire, stirring

                                Dull roots with spring rain.

 

Chaucer writes:

 

                        WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote,

                        The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,

                        And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

                        Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

 

 

Eliot implicitly invites a comparison of époques.  To him the modern era (1920) finds creative forces a problem,  and it has ‘dull roots’.  And by miming Chaucer’s lines invites the comparison to the full blooded celebration of spring where the ‘dull roots’ are new reached – perced to the roote – by the creative regeneration of sun and season, the time, traditionally, of love also.

 

But none of this has been worked for in Eliot’s poem.  After all these are the first lines. He relies on a certain solidarity, commonness of identity, which he looks for in tradition.

 

In Snow, Macneice has devoted the first part of his poem to building up the idea of things being ‘incorrigibly plural’, and ‘various’.  He’s prepared the way for how and what he means at the end.

 

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

 

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

 

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses

 

The poem in one sense is ‘about’ how we perceive the world, but in the tradition of Coleridge, Macneice emphasises the role of imagination in perception, how we see through,  what these days we would call an ideology, how we have a creative part in making real what counts a real.  The poem is very much about seeing, and draws on centuries of philosophical speculation about who ‘real’ our visual images are, or can be.   And this in the end is reconnected to a perhaps infant-like sensuousness, where it is all related the effect ‘on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands – ‘   And even the analytical faculties we have where ‘I peel and portion/a tangerine’ is drawn into a ‘drunkenness’, as if the mathematical and scientific is as inspirational as the artistic.    The glass pane view, in which we see ‘the real’ simply and directly just be looking at it, is called into question

 

 So we might think of the poem as a kind of celebration, of the sense of wonder, ‘splendour in the grass’ and so on.  Since Macneice’s day there has been a good deal of thinking among post-structuralist thinkers about the constructed and ‘imaginary’ nature of what may well seem ‘common sense’ and ‘solid’.

 

I suggest we discuss this poem in some detail when we meet.   Somehow or other Macneice manages to do the key poetic thing, which is to be both personal and impersonal, to talk about both an individual feeling/experience and about something ‘out there’ which is important beyond him.  It is not just ‘This is what happened to me, how I felt at the time.’

 

 

 

Public and Private

In some sense or other we need to bring together the public and the private. And in the second half of the twentieth century a lot of writing on identity and ideology has shown us how, as it is said, ‘the personal is the political.’   It’s worth looking at Robert Lowell’s very clearly public and personal poem, Fall 1961,  about the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the threat of nuclear war which became overt in the following year.

 

Fall 1961

 

Back and forth, back and forth
goes the tock, tock, tock
of the orange, bland, ambassadorial
face of the moon
on the grandfather clock.

All autumn, the chafe and jar
of nuclear war;
we have talked our extinction to death.
I swim like a minnow
behind my studio window.

Our end drifts nearer,
the moon lifts,
radiant with terror.
The state
is a diver under a glass bell.

A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.

 

Nature holds up a mirror.

One swallow makes a summer.

It’s easy to tick

off the minutes,

but the clockhands stick.

 

Back and forth!

Back and forth, back and forth –

my one point of rest

is the orange and black

oriole’s swinging nest!

 

 

The potentially whole-world conflict resolves – in the poem – into the image of the oriole,   the simple immediate thing in everyday life which becomes a focus for the anxiety.  It rocks back and forth like the crisis, the ticking clock.   The oriole’s nest is its home, threatened by the ‘back and forth’ of the wind, as the poet’s own home and people are threatened by the ‘wind’ of nuclear war.

 

At same time – and now in allusive mode -  the oriole can  be seen as a traditional symbol of approaching summer or sunshine, the idea of positive change (http://www.linsdomain.com/totems/pages/oriole.htm)

                       

Did Lowell intend this?   What difference does it make if he did, or if he didn’t?  Especially if it fits.

 

Lowell’s poem is explicitly about a public event, and this gives it a kind of objectivity, a basis for being taken seriously.  What could be more serious than nuclear war?  

 

Robert Bly also has this ability to focus on both an inner Jungian and an outer political world.  His poem The Teeth Mother Naked at Last begins:

 

Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.

Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight

    hundred rivets.  

Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute

    sweep over the huts with dirt floors.  

The chickens feel the new fear deep in the pits of

    their beaks.

 

Buddha with Padma Sambhava.  

Meanwhile, out on the China Sea,

immense gray bodies are floating,

born in Roanoke,

 

the ocean on both sides expanding, "buoyed on the

    dense marine."  

Helicopters flutter overhead. The death-

bee is coming. Super Sabres

like knots of neurotic energy sweep

around and return.

 

This is Hamilton’s triumph.

 

The overtly political and technological is seen through psycho-analytical eyes.  This enables the poet is place the events into an imaginative and ethical context, even though the images are not drawn directly from experience as the war imagery of Wilfred Owen is.  The kind of poetry written by Owen and Rosenberg very clearly brings together the personal and the public through their having experienced their war at first hand.   Although Owen and Sassoon do widen their poems beyond horrific personal experience and evoke the political and moral context,  we also already know (now, because of them) the ‘wider significance’ of their immediate experiences.  The difficulty for Bly and others in his situation is to create this link convincingly.

 

Brian Turner’s poems do have this immediate link of course, and he again is not content with simply reporting the experience.  There is always the gesture beyond that.

 

Another approach is the more directly ideological, as in much of Brecht’s poetry.  His celebrating of the ordinary is infused with his sense of the people and his questioning of individualism.   In Of All the Works of Man, he begins

 

Of all the works of man I like best

Those which have been used.

The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges

The knives and forks whose wooden handles

Have been worn away by many hands: such forms

Seemed to me the noblest.  So too the flagstones round old houses

Trodden by many feet, ground down

And with tufts of grass growing between them:  these

Are happy works.

 

 

Neruda’s Machu Picchu is in the same vein.

 

But also, from another political perspective, there are explicit ‘public’ comments in Philip Larkin’s work.  His poem Going Going can now been soon as ‘green’, lamenting the end of rural England, which he identifies with England as such .

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

 

Significance

We want to feel as if the poem we are writing is more than self-expression?  Or do we?  What sorts of significance do we look for in poems, our own included?  Not necessarily political significance?   Or does a poem have to say  anything?  Can it be just the presentation of an image?[1]   A cry from the heart?    Or is the significance of the poem something in spite of all that, something to do with what the language under this or that or the other pressure (of form, of personal feeling, et al) shows about the language we speak, and here however subjective or otherwise the topic maybe, the artefact made from it is necessarily both private and public – as our language is?   (Discuss!)

Universal Themes Another way of looking at this is to think in terms of what is both personal and ‘universal’, or at least common to many people.  A lot of confessional or psychological poems might call into this category.  Is Sylva Plath in some way talking about more than her own sense of loss of a father.  To me it’s when she fails to do this that her poems are least good – as with the celebrated Daddy.   George Szirtes talks about his father in a more clearly ‘universal’ way in My father carries me across a field.   My father carries me across a field. It’s night and there are trenches filled with snow. Thick mud.  We’re careful to remain concealed   From something frightening I don’t yet know. And then I walk and there is space between The four of us.  We go where we have to go.   Did I dream ait all, this ghostly scene, The hundred-acre wood where the owl blinked And the ass spoke?  Where I am cosy and clean   In bed, but we are floating, our arms linked Over the landscape?  My father moves ahead Of me, like some strange, almost extinct   Species, and I follow him in dread Across the field towards my own extinction Spirits everywhere are drifting over blasted   Terrain.  The winter cold makes no distinction Between them and us.  My father looks round And smiles then turns away.  We have no function   In this place but keep moving, without sound, Lost figures who leave only a blank page Behind them, and the dark and frozen ground   They pass across as they might cross a stage.     Again it’s tempting to see allusions to other stories and poems, the family linking arms and flying as in Peter Pan,   the actor who ‘struts and frets his hour upon the stage’ in Macbeth  (Szirtes even has ‘blasted/terrain’) the line from Pasternak’s poem about Hamlet (a play about fatherhood)   ‘Life is not a walk across a field’   By using the setting of the dream Szirtes is able to make the poem both everyday and surreal – as English poets have done at least since Piers Plowman.    Mention of Pasternak reminds me how  directly political some European poets are. We  have only to look at poets like Enzensberger, Staff, Rozewicz.  The same goes for Middle East poets.     Here is a little manifesto to end on, Rozewicz’s poem, They Shed and Load.   He comes to you and says   you are not responsible either for the world or the end of the world the load has been lifted off your shoulders you are like children and birds go, play   and they play   they forget that contemporary poetry means struggle for breath 1959

 

 

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[1] A recent review of a book on imagism by Helen Carr relates it to fascism.

Yet there is one vast, tricky question which Carr begins to invoke only on her very final page, too late to attempt an unravelling. It's the question raised by the now deeply unfashionable Donald Davie in his deeply unfashionable book Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), in which he claims that the "development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken". It is impossible, Davie claims, "not to trace a connection between the laws of syntax and the laws of society . . . One could almost say . . . that to dislocate syntax in poetry is to threaten the rule of law in the civilised community." In her final sentence Carr seems to suggest the very opposite: "if some of those who formed the movement might later harden their views, and if the war had darkened all their hopes, it had been, for a while at least, personally and artistically liberating for the imagists, and for many of their readers." As in many of the great modernist works, this end is really only a beginning.

• Ian Sansom's The Delegates' Choice is published by Harper Perennial.