WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A POEM?

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A POEM?

LAURENCE LERNER

W -hat can we do with a poem? Let me begin by disposing of the comic and trivial answers. Poems are printed on sheets of paper with lots of white space round them, and pieces ofpaper have practical uses. You

could scribble a shopping list or a memo to yourself on the abundant margins, writing next to Herrick’s poem ‘To the Virgins to Make much of Time’: ‘meet Julian for dinner, 8 pm’. But that is to do something not with the poem but with the piece of paper on which the poem is written. The point is made eloquently by Edmund Spenser:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, but came the waves and washed it away: agayne I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.

Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, a mortal1 thing so to immortalize, for 1 my selve shall lyke to this decay, and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.

to die in dust, but you shall live by fame: my verse your vertues rare shall eternize, and in the hevens wryte your glorious name.

Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, our love shall live, and later life renew.

Not so, (quod 1) let baser things devize

Spenser’s mistress is well trained in piety, even sanctimoniousness. She knows that earthly things pass away, and that humanity must accept mortality; and when her tame poet writes her name, along, no doubt, with a heart and an arrow, in the sand, she has no difficulty in drawing a moral lesson. It is, clearly, a put-up

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job by the poet: he wants to remind her how useful it is to have a poet for your lover, since his poems (including this one) will not be washed away with the tide, but will eternise her virtues rare. Clever Spenser! But of cwme he has cheated: he is confusing two things, the poem and its physical record. Suppose he had written her name on parchment and preserved it in a golden (or, today, a stainless steel) casket; preserving it that way would not need a poet. Or suppose the sonnet began:

One day 1 wrote this poem on the strand; But came the waves and washed it away.

There would be no contradiction, for it is not the poem itself that would have been destroyed. He would not need to play Canute and turn the waves back in order to preserve his poem, because the poem is not marks on sand but words - a pattern of signifiers, the outpourings of the poet’s heart, an ideological construct, a set of winged words sent into the future. There are many ways to describe words.

So what can we do with these so variously definable words? The first answer, I presume, that will occur to most readers of this essay (students and teachers of English literature, for the most part) would be, surely, that we can analyse or interpret it. That after all is what English Departments are for: their function is literary criticism - to take the winged words of Spenser or Keats and to say to (perhaps bemused) students, ‘Yes, Keats did a pretty good job, but now watch me, as I find in his text meanings that poor old Keats never dreamed of.’ I shall turn to literary criticism later in this essay: but first of all I want to point out that this is by no means all we can do with a poem.

We can read it. We can enjoy it, learn it by heart - effortlessly, simply because we enjoyed it so much that it has stuck, or deliberately, setting out to learn it as a task. And if we want to share our enjoyment, we can read it to our friends, or (to share it in a more public way) write a favourable review, or include it in an anthology of Love Poems, or ofthe Hundred Best Poems in the Language. But on the other hand we may dislike the poem: we cannot bum it (we can only bum the paper it is written on), but we can censor it, and so forbid its publication, or write a reply to it; or we might dislike just one aspect of it, so we could rewrite or improve or (to use an eighteenth century term) versify it. Or we may have some cognate talents: we can set it to music, or translate it into another language. Or we can use the poem - use it, that is, for some non-literary but no doubt worthy purpose, asking what it can tell us about the English monarchy in 1802, or Wordsworth’s feelings about his sister, or the treatment of army deserters in the French revolutionary wars.

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Enjoying the poem: that was the first, and the most obvious item on my list. And the most obvious thing to say about this is that enjoying is a purely private act. There have been some quaint and vivid attempts by other poets to describe the symptoms of enjoyment. ‘Experience has taught me’, said Housman, ‘when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because if a line of poetry strays into memory, my skin bristles, so that the razor ceases to act.’ Emily Dickinson goes into rather less physiological detail when she says, ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ Both these remarks have become famous, and I can see that they deserve their fame: their very oddity (for they don’t after all seem like signs of enjoyment) testifies to their authenticity. But what they tell us about is physiological symptoms, not poetry: they make it clear that describing our enjoyment is not a contribution to literary understanding.

There is more to say on the consequences of enjoyment - learning by heart, or including in an anthology. There is, surely, no higher compliment to a poem than committing it to memory, but learning by heart is out of favour nowadays. Rote learning is despised - rightly despised? - as a mechanical activity, looked down on by enlightened educationalists. It requires no understanding, no active participation, either from the student who learns or from the teacher who requires him to. But yet -

If you accept this view you may say with Cleopatra ‘I do not like “but yet”, it does allay / The good precedence’. All the same, but yet: when R H Dana was spending his two years before the mast, he found the tedium of long watches on the deck almost unendurable, and devised for himself a system of time-killing. He would begin by reciting the multiplication table; then the states of the Union with their capitals; the counties of England, the kings of England, and eventually got to Cowper’s ‘Castaway’ (‘well suited to a lonely watch at sea’), other poems by Cowper, then ‘Ille et nefasto’ from Horace, Goethe’s ‘Earl King’; and finally ‘ I allowed myself a more general range among everything I could remember, both in prose and verse.’ As teachers, we strive to give our students well-trained minds; Dana’s experience is a reminder that it is also valuable to have a well-stocked mind. As well as watches at sea, there have been political prisons, voyages in space, and a dozen other lurid situations, along with a hundred less lurid ones, in which people have discovered that the one true way to possess a poem is to have it in your head, where the waves cannot come and wash it away.

The second way to manifest your enjoyment is to choose the poem. You can take a love poem, let us say, and read it to your girl-friend sitting in front of the fire, or include it in an anthology of the hundred best love poems. You could do that with this poem of Byron’s:

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She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace,

Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o’er her face;

Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent.

There is a conception of scholarly responsibility that tells us that a poem belongs in its context, that this one was written by Byron in 1814 and must not be treated as if it had dropped from Heaven or been written specially for your anthology or (worse still) for your girl friend. Is this scholarly responsibility, or scholarly arrogance? Certainly it guarantees the importance of the scholar, the person who knows all about the context. But a poem has no one context, it has many, depending on the use we put it to; and the task of scholarship is not to tell us that most of these are illegitimate, it is to tell us what difference the various contexts make to the meaning of the poem. We all know the old-fashioned comparison of poems to flowers. You can come across a flower in the nursery, among other species of the same genus: that is like placing the poem in the context of literary history (with other love poems). You can find the flower in the woods, growing amid roots and dung and trees: that is like coming across the poem as part of the poet’s life, and the life of his times. You can find the flower in a vase, arranged with other flowers that blend with it: that is like reading the poem in an anthology. Or you can wear the flower in your buttonhole: that is like knowing the poem by heart.

Turn back to ‘She Walks in Beauty’. If two lovers are reading this poem, they will feel (and rightly) that they are the only context: it is about them, and if there are details that don’t fit them, that in turn can lead to ironies which add


to the intimacy of the occasion. If we meet it in an anthology, then its context will be other love poems, and we will read it with expectations governed by literary tradition. We can then notice that it is a poem of compliment, but not a blazon: that is, it praises her beauty, but does not list the details (‘Bright eyes, fair cheeks, sweet lips, and milk white skin’, and so on as far down as decency permits). Or we might notice that it enlists the Neoplatonic doctrine that beauty is a sign of virtue, but without using any Platonic vocabulary. But suppose the context is Byron, so that when we read it we relate it to his other poems, to the occasion, and to what we know about the author - and we know a good deal. Then we will discover that it was written to Mrs Wilmot, his cousin’s wife, and that she was wearing a mourning dress covered with spangles. It is nice to know that this was the occasion for ‘all that’s best of dark and bright’, and when Byron showed her the poem she no doubt got a thrill of delight at his ingenuity, but no reader can be expected to guess that, or to care about the woman’s identity: these biographical details are the source of the poem, but not part of its meaning.

But what about Byron himself, perhaps the most promiscuous sexual adventurer among English poets - and that’s no mean claim! The poem praises calm, tenderness, a mind at rest with all below, a heart whose love is innocent; and its author lived wildly, harshly, with a heart whose love was by no means innocent. What does this tell us? That (to put it crudely) the poet was a hypocrite? Or (to put it more interestingly) that he followed the Yeatsian strategy of stepping outside himself to admire - and write from - his anti-self? These are questions - fascinating questions - about how poems get written, but not questions about what they mean: the biographical context enriches the poem in one way, but in another it impoverishes it. We should be grateful to the scholar who tells us all the wonderfully shocking gossip about Byron, but we should also be grateful to the anthologist who rescues the poem from these distracting circumstances.

The reactions I have so far discussed have been the favourable ones: I turn now to what you can do with a poem you disapprove of - apart from just ignoring it. There are two situations in which ignoring does not seem to be enough. One is if a poem seems worth rescuing because you feel it is striving for something really valuable, but is hampered by technical or stylistic limitations; the other is if you regard a poem as dangerous or wicked, and you want to suppress or refute it.

As an example ofthe first, I take what Pope did to Donne’s satires. Alexander Pope, as everyone knows, was a master of versification at a time when heroic couplets were the norm; John Donne, writing a century and a half earlier and also writing in couplets, was famous for metrical irregularity (‘Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’, Jonson famously said: ‘Donne whose


muse on dromedary trots’, Coleridge wrote), and since satire was supposed to be harsh in style as well as content, his satires are written in rough, jagged verses. Pope must have been drawn to them, or he wouldn’t have bothered to rescue them, but his rewriting - or ‘versifying’ - was drastic. Donne’s fourth satire introduces an account of the corruption and eccentricities of court by announcing what a stupid ass he was to go there:

Well, I may now receive, and die; My sinne Indeed is great, but I have been in A Purgatorie, such as fear’d hell is A recreation to, and scarse map of this. My minde, neither with prides itch, nor yet hath been Poyson’d with love to see, or to be seene, I had no suit there, nor new suit to shew, Yet went to Court; But as Glaze which did goe To’a Masse in jest, catch’d, was fain to disburse The hundred markes, which is the Statutes curse, Before he scapt; So’it pleas’d my destinie (Guilty of my sin of going), to thinke me As prone to all ill, and of good as forget- full, as proud, as lustful, and as much in debt, As vaine, as witlesse, and as false as they Which dwell at Court, for once going that way.

What Donne called his ‘words’ masculine eccentric force’ was not suitable for the polite taste of the Augustans; so Pope polished.

Well if it be my time to quit the stage, Adieu to all the follies of the age! I die in charity with fool and knave, Secure of peace at least beyond the grave. I’ve had my Purgatory here betimes, And paid for all my satires, all my rhymes: The Poet’s hell, its tortures, fiends and flames, To this were trifles, toys and empty names. With foolish pride my heart was never fir’d, Nor the vain itch t’admire, or be admir’d; 1 hop’d for no commission from his Grace; I bought no benefice, I begg’d no place; Had no new verses or new suit to show; Yet went to Court! -the Dev’l would have it so.


But, as the Fool that in reforming days Wou’d go to Mass in jest (as story says) Could not but think, to pay his fine was odd, Since ‘twas no form’d design of serving God; So was 1 punish’d, as if full as proud, As prone to ill, as negligent of good, As deep in debt, without a thought to pay, As vain, as idle, and as false, as they Who live at Court, for going once that way!

Pope has made his changes on two main principles. The first is in the direction of balance and symmetry:

I hoped for no commission from his Grace; I bought no benefice, I begg’d no place.

Such untidiness as breaking the line in the middle of a word (‘forget/full’) or rhyming on a totally unimportant word (‘sinne: in’) must go. Pope, I’m sure, felt that Donne did not treat the couplet with sufficient respect. True, Donne makes some good use of the rhymes: he draws attention to what matters about the enforcement of religious orthodoxy by rhyming ‘disburse’ with ‘curse’. But that is not the way Pope uses rhymes: he doesn’t use them to pick out the words that matter, he uses them for structure. And the structure is essentially binary: a series of diminishing contrasts, line with line, half-line with half-line, word with word:

I die in charity with fool and knave, Secure of peace at least beyond the grave.

The perfect Pope couplet will have eight words that matter, two in each half-line, and the meaning will ring the changes on their synonymity and opposition.

The other principle governing Pope’s changes is the removal of particularity. Pope’s generalised ‘fool’ who went to mass in jest replaces Donne’s ‘Glaze’ (who on earth is he?); he pays ‘his fine’ in Pope, a ‘hundred marks’ in Donne. Purgatory is general in Pope, in Donne it is worse than Hell through the tortured knottiness of the syntax. ‘Suit’ provides a pun in Donne, a balanced contrast with ‘verse’ in Pope. The clean-up is relentless.

I linger on this piece of rewriting because 1 think it has much to teach us: the contrast in technique is also a contrast between two cultures. Pope’s double programme - tidying up the couplets, removing the bristly particulars and awkward syntax - shows two aspects of the same thing - a rage for order.

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Phonetic untidiness and semantic untidiness must both be subdued to a need for control. Some of Pope’s wonderful couplets are rigid with organisation, as, for instance, this one from his description of the dying Villiers:

No wit to flatter left of all his store, No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.

This rage for order is classical; and classicism, like rote learning, is out of favour in the late 20th century. Symmetry and control can seem to us as mechanical as rote learning, and we are likely to prefer (as I do) Donne’s gnarled actuality, and to defend it against the strait-jacket of Augustan regularity. At this point, a perceptive remark by ValCry can help us; the essence of classicism, he said, writing of Baudelaire, is to come ufier (‘de venir apres’): it imposes order because it is confronted with such untidy richness. That couplet about the death of Villiers is full of the restless vanity, the varied corruption, that marked the subject’s life. All Pope’s finest couplets contain a threat: their flawlessness is a way of containing this. That is why his masterpiece is a poem about the threats to civilisation. In this case, the threat was Donne, and versifying was the way to control it.

Next I turn to a case where the rewriting is ideological or, (if we want to insist that Pope’s classicism is an ideology too), where it is more openly and politically ideological. A E Housman’s ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ was published in 1917:

These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth’s foundation fled,

Followed their mercenary calling And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

What God abandoned, these defended, They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;

And saved the sum of things for pay.

This is probably Housman’s most perfect poem. It was written during the First World War, and published in The Times on the anniversary ofthe battle ofYpres. But that is not what the title suggests. The British Army which took part in that battle included professional soldiers, but they were not, in the usual sense, mercenaries, for the word normally refers to those who offer their services to anyone who will pay them, and who are not likely to be fighting for their own

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country. A moment’s thought will show us that this point is central to Housman’s poem. Suppose it ran:

These in the day when heaven was falling,

Followed their mercenary calling, The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

And held the fortress, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

What God abandoned, these defended, They stood, and still earth’s chorus sings;

And bravely saved the sum of things.

That’s the poem you would expect in The Times in 1917: perhaps the editor who accepted it did not notice that the poem he was reading was very different. That is a piece of patriotic praise, honouring heroism. What Housman wrote is much more interesting: it tells us that heroic motives may be less reliable, when heaven is falling, than mercenary motives, and it is this point that yields us the tight-lipped ending, the two terse monosyllables, ‘for pay’. This terseness corresponds to the professional self-control of the soldiers who make no fuss because they aren’t interested in the justice oftheir cause. It is a cynical message: when things are desperate, rely not on the idealists but on professionalism.

This message infuriated one left-wing poet:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride. They were professional murderers and they took Their blood money and impious risks and died. In spite of all their kind some elements of worth With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

(Hugh MacDiannid)

There are some great poems of anger in our language, but this is not one ofthem. In the heat of political meetings we call soldiers ‘professional murderers’, we call their pay ‘blood money’, and we shout at those who defend them, ‘that’s a god-damned lie!’ True poetry of anger will use a language that is concentrated, powerful and resonant, and if the actual speech of anger intrudes into it, it will do so in a way that interacts with other linguistic registers to produce something rich and strange, if still angry. MacDiarmid’s poem, it seems to me, does not detach itself from the floor of political argument - except perhaps in its final couplet, where the last line limps with difficulty to the final rhyme, imitating what it describes.


We could leave it there, having (I trust) shown the superiority of Housman’s poem; but to do so would be to give our attention only to technique. Let me turn attention to the moral dimension of the poems - which in this case, since they are concerned with public not individual acts, means the political dimension. Now as it happens I agree not with Housman but with MacDiarmid. I don’t believe war ever does much good in the world, I don’t believe fighting is the way to save earth’s foundations, and I think we’d be better off without mercenaries. So I read MacDiarmid’s poem and applaud, as I would applaud someone I agreed with at a political meeting; I read Housman’s, and I recognise that I’ve been challenged, that a cynicism I don’t really care for has grabbed me because it’s stated with such power and brilliance. How nice it would be if the best poems were also those which are morally the most acceptable, but they aren’t. How nice it would be if there were a single scale of value for judging poems, but there isn’t.

And translation. What is there to say, in a page or two? We all know the impossibility: tradutore / traditore. Poetry is that which gets lost in translation. But translating is not only something one can do with a poem, it is something one has to do. Unless we are fortunate enough to know all the languages that matter, are we to remain cut off from most of the world’s poetry? Perhaps the answer is Yes: we don’t have to live in the global village, perhaps poetry is what helps to save us from it. But no-one is going to stop the effort from continuing: so I will take a glance at the practice of translating poetry by choosing a single example.

Du Bellay’s most famous sonnet is a poem of homesickness: exiled amid the splendours of Rome, he longs to be back in France. He compares himself to the most famous of classical travellers, Ulysses and Jason, who both got home in the end: will he? Home, in his case, is a modest village in the Loire valley, but he prefers it to the Tiber, the Mediterranean air and the mighty palaces around him.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, Ou comme cestuy la qui conquit la toison, Et puis est retourn6, plein d’usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son age!

Quand revoiray-je, hClas, de mon petit village Fumer la cheminke, et en quelle saison, Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup d’avantage?

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Plus me plait le sejour qu’ont basty mes ayeux, Que des palais Romains le front audacieux, Plus que le marbre dur me plaist I’ardoise fine:

Plus mon Loyre Gaulois, que le Tybre Latin, Plus mon petit Lyre, que le mont Palatin, Et plus que I’air marin la douceur Angevine.

Here first is G K Chesterton’s version:

Happy who like Ulysses or that lord Who raped the fleece, returning full and sage,

With usage and the world’s wide reason stored, With his own kin can wait the end of age.

When shall 1 see, when shall 1 see, God knows! My little village smoke; or pass the door,

The old dear door of that unhappy house That is to me a kingdom and much more?

Mightier to me the house my fathers made Than your audacious heads, 0 Halls of Rome!

More than immortal marbles undecayed, The thin sad slates that cover up my home;

More than your Tiber is my Loire to me, Than Palatine my little Lyre there;

And more than all the winds of all the sea The quiet kindness of the Angevin air.

And here is C H Sisson’s:

Happy the Ulysses who gets back home, The Jason who conquers the golden fleece, They can be full of reason and experience And impress the relatives who did not go! But when shall I see my little village, With its smoking chimneys, at what time of year Shall I see my not magnificent house which is more To me than a province, though that may sound silly? The little place built by my ancestors Pleases me more than Roman palaces, And all this marble is nothing to my slate: I prefer my Loire to the Latin Tiber And my little Lire to the Palatine, And the soft air of Anjou to this climate.


Let’s begin with a detail on which both poets seem to me to have let us down: ‘Plus que le marbre durme plaist I’ardoise fine’. Rome has hard marble surfaces, the Loire valley has ‘ardoise fine’, a strangely haunting phrase. Sisson drops the adjective and adds a possessive - ‘my slate’ -which is positively misleading: the poet is not thinking just of his own house, but ofthe way folks build at home. Chesterton makes the same mistake when he adds ‘that cover up my home’, but his opening words, ‘the thin sad slates’ do seem to me haunting in more or less the right way. Almost but perhaps not quite, for attaching the poem’s diffused sadness to the slates in this way is too crude a transferred epithet. ‘Fine’ refers here both to the thinness of the slates and to their delicacy, and for once the obvious translation is, surely, the right one: ‘fine slate’ hasjust the right semantic spread, though it hasn’t, alas, the lovely contrast of the rounded and sharp vowel sounds.

But what of the poem as a whole, and in particular of its tone? What makes it so moving, so that it has become the classic Renaissance expression of homesickness? Partly it is the rhetorical structure ‘Plus . . . plus . . . plus’, along with the contrast ofproper nouns, in details perhaps too subtle for analysis. There is only one explicit outburst of emotion (‘quand revoiray-je, helas . . .’) which in Chesterton’s hands turns into gush (‘When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows!’) and in translating ‘ma pauvre maison’ he lets himself go almost embarrassingly (‘The old dear door of that unhappy house’). Clearly Chesterton is aiming to play up the explicit emotionality. Sisson, on the other hand, imports quite a different tone, one of mild self-mockery. This is presumably the point of his first liberty, the intrusive article in ‘the Ulysses’, ‘the Jason’: there are so many of us. (Though 1 think it can also be read as a modern comment on the Renaissance taste for the classics, for allusions which have virtually turned Ulysses and Jason into common nouns). The more or less straightforward line ‘vivre entre ses parents le reste do son age’ (live the rest of his days among his family) takes on a touch of amusement in Sisson: ‘and impress the relatives who did not go’; and Du Bellay’s ‘beaucoup d’avantage’, which may not be much more than a fill-up, gives place to the self-deprecating ‘though that may sound silly’.

Clearly what we are here meeting is the late Romantic sentimentality of Chesterton and the ironic modernism of Sisson. For Chesterton, a tear or two enhances the poetic, for Sisson an ironic smile is much more fun. This could now unleash one ofthe central critical controversies of our time, that concerning the objectivity of meaning. There is no one fixed meaning of Du Bellay’s sonnet, against which all translations can be measured: it is a multi-faceted object, which turns in the light, and the translator, depending on his own poetic formation, sees one or other of its surfaces. But having said that, I must also say that the poem


exists independently of its translators: it is perfectly meaningful, indeed necessary, to ask if the surface they are seeing really belongs to the poem (1 am not quite convinced that Sisson’s does). If we don’t ask this, how could we distinguish between a translation and a separate poem?

By now, we are well and truly launched into literary criticism; and what may have struck many of my readers is the unblushing use I have made of the time-honoured distinction between form and content. What Pope changed was the form of Donne’s satires, though his changes were so far-reaching that they turned into ideological changes. (Perhaps all I did in my discussion of Pope was expand Lytton Strachey’s point that Pope’s criticism of life was, simply, the heroic couplet.) I preferred the content of MacDiarmid’s poem to Housman’s, but found it formally strident, and, as a poem, uninteresting. Housman’s poem, on the other hand, I praised not for its form alone, but for the way the form, like a cunningly applied screwdriver, opened an area of the receiver’s mind that he might not want to admit to. And so now, turning to the last and most complicated thing we can do with a poem, analyse and interpret it, 1 shall begin again from the form-content dichotomy.

There are two ways we can look at language. It is a window, through which we see the world; or it is a dance, which we take part in for the sake of the participation itself. If you are interested in content, the words are windows; if in form, the words are a dance. That is one way of looking at form. For another, let us go to a formalist. Here is Roman Jakobson’s definition of the poetic: ‘the word is felt as a word, . . . words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and value of their own, instead of referring indifferently to reality’. No word in a good poem refers indiflerentb to reality, but they do refer to reality in the end. Pure form can be beautiful, but is ultimately trivial: the poems that will not go away are those that also speak to our condition as human beings. Form and content are caught in an inescapable dialectic.

Let us first use this dichotomy on a very simple example:

Little Jack Homer Sat in a comer, Eating his Christmas pie; He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, What a good boy am I!

The metrical form can be described as follows: a six-line stanza rhyming aabccb, two feet in lines 1,2,4 and 5, three feet in the others, the first foot normally a dactyl. Is that of any but merely technical interest? Yes, if we add two further


points. First, that this scheme makes the rhymes very prominent (and the double rhyme (‘Homer / corner’) makes them even more so; and second, that I had some difficulty formulating my description of the metre, and even then it’s not quite accurate. The looseness of the metrical pattern is not surprising when we add that there are other, slightly different versions (‘with his two thumbs he took two plums’). What all this adds up to is of course ‘nursery rhyme’: the text is unstable because of oral transmission, and the rhymes are prominent because nursery rhymes are verbal games, and serve the good Freudian function of regression, allowing us to play with language like children when the governess is away and we don’t have to kowtow to meaning all the time.

And content? Who is Jack Homer, and what exactly is he up to? I don’t attach much importance to the theory that he is Thomas Homer, steward to the Abbot ofGIastonbury, who is supposed to have brought the title deeds oftwelve manors hidden in a pie to Henry VIII, and on the way filched one of them. The story may be true or not, but it can only tell us of the origin of the rhyme, not its ongoing meaning. lfthat is historical criticism, it merely trivialises, and I suggest that the importance of the content must be related to the ethical or ideological issues it raises. Thomas Peacock came close when he described it as ‘one of the most splendid examples on record of the admirable practical doctrine of taking care of number one’. Yet the moral is, surely, more elusive than that. Is Jack the villain of a Christian ethic, or the hero of an ethic of getting-on? Is it a poem about table manners, or self satisfaction, or greed? Do we identify with Jack or disapprove of him? This simple poem deserves its fame because all these questions permit two answers.

And now for a real poem:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend Nor services to do till you require. Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor think the bitterness of absence sour When you have bid your servant once adieu. Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, or your affairs suppose, But, like a sad slave, stay and think of naught Save where you are how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love, that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A POEM‘? IS

A sonnet: 14 lines arranged either as 8 followed by 6, or, as in this case, as three quatrains plus a couplet. The arrangement is determined by the rhyme scheme, and this pattern is named after Shakespeare, who used it regularly (and who, of course, wrote this one). There may be more sonnets in the world than there are divorces per annum or rands in your bank account. Why? There are very few poems of 15 lines, and probably hardly any of 13. So I will begin the discussion of form by asking what there is about 14 lines that has so captivated the poets.

To this question there are two kinds ofanswer. The first says that the number of lines was originally quite arbitrary, but once established by the early Italian poets it constituted a habit which others followed, because poets are copy-cats.

The other answer says that the natural way to work on your hearers is to make your statement three times (three parallel instances, or a general statement followed by two illustrations), then to draw the three units together with a succinct statement of ringing and memorable finality - the concluding couplet. Or we could speak ofthree blows with the fist on the table, followed by a tinkle that will echo in the mind. Similarly with the Petrarchan pattern: a statement followed by a retraction or qualification, which does not need to be quite as long (hence 8 + 6), or - if you prefer -the wave breaks and, as it retreats, offers a less imposing height of water. Here we have two theories of form, the classical and the organic. The first gives an intrinsic importance to tradition or, more bluntly, it says that we are slaves to habit: a sonnet has 14 lines because previous sonnets have 14 lines, and once the rules are established, the fun of the game lies in sticking to them, and our pleasure as readers is in seeing the poet obey them. The second theory says that form is valuable because of the way it fits content: it is not arbitrary, but appropriate. Which is right?

Poets are uncannily gifted at making a structure seem the one inevitable form for what they have to say: that is, after all, what it is to be a poet. Yet however triumphantly poem after poem confirms the view that it has compelled language to fit itself to the experience being expressed, we have to remind ourselves that forms are not usually created especially for the purpose, they are already there. The organic, functional view of form is correct when we are appreciating a successful poem; the view of form as arbitrary, lying around for someone to use, is correct when we are tracing its history.

So far what I have said about the form of this sonnet has been fairly straightforward: any knowledgeable reader will be aware of the three quatrains and a couplet; and, after a while, he will notice the alliteration in lines 5, 6 and 1 1, and the way in which each quatrain begins or ends with a line which starts ‘nor.. .’, and that three ofthe four lines that begin so are followed by subordinate clauses beginning ‘whilst’, ‘when’, ‘where’. The more carefully we read, the more we’ll notice. What about the relation between phonetic and grammatical


patterns, or between inner and outer strophes? ‘The outer strophes carry a higher syntactic rank than the inner ones; the inner strophes are devoid of finites but comprise participles.’ That’s not the case, as it happens, with this poem: I have lifted the sentence from Jakobson’s essay on sonnet 129, which goes on to find even more elaborate and deeply hidden patterns, though never as elaborate as what he finds in his even more famous essay on Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Chats’.

Jakobson is a structuralist; and I have brought him in to ask whether criticism of form turns naturally into structuralist criticism. Structuralism is the attempt to discover the deep structures of grammar and syntax, of kinship systems and mythology, structures that we know how to follow without knowing what they are. The authority of structuralism is greatest in linguistics, for the study of language has to be the study ofthe rules and conditions of saying, rules that even grammarians may not be aware of. And since poems are in language, it is to be expected that structuralism should look at poetry too.

We can study literature as a set of convenient examples for understanding how language in general works, or we can look for structures that are specifically literary. If the structuralist does the first, the literary interest of his project will be negligible: why choose to analyse a poem when the structural principles you find could as easily be found in a legal document or an everyday remark? But if we look for structures that are specific to literature, will they not be conscious -and therefore not particularly deep? Both we and the poet know how a sonnet is constructed, just as we know about alliteration and all the various rhetorical patterns. Jakobson’s poetic analysis raises precisely this question: when he finds in a Baudelaire sonnet that ‘the second and penultimate predicates are the only ones that comprise a copula and a predicative adjective’ - and that is a mere foretaste of the elaborate patterning of syntax, phonology and meaning that he finds - the reader naturally wonders if Baudelaire and Shakespeare can possibly have consciously worked out such elaborate patterns. Jakobson’s answer is a qualified no: ‘Such structures, particularly powerful on the subliminal level, can function without any . . . patent knowledge.’

Now as it happens there is another school of criticism which raises the same problem and can be treated with the same scepticism. This is numerology, the attempt to find elaborate hidden numerical patterns in poems. Edmund Spenser has been the chief target of modern numerological critics, and we have been told that the 365 lines of his Epithalamion correspond to the days of the year, its 24 stanzas to the hours of the day, and further line-totals imitate the apparent daily movement of the sun relative to the fixed stars. And that is nothing compared to the patterns which Alastair Fowler finds in The Faerie Queene, where, for instance, the numbers of stanzas in each canto form an elaborate pattern (‘the total for 1I.i is the mean between those for 1.i and IILi’), or the pattern of vowels


and consonants he finds in the proper names in a Surrey sonnet, constituting an elaborate message in code.

The resemblance between structuralist criticism and numerological criticism is worth dwelling on. Both find patterns of unbelievable complexity and ingenuity, which no reader has ever noticed before, and claim that these patterns are part of the poetic effect. And for both, the patterning is not arbitrary. The structuralist is telling us something about the deep structure of the human mind, the innate abilities that enable us to generate sentences without knowing the rules. The numerologist is telling us the deep pattern of God’s universe, constructed, often, according to Pythagorean principles. Both have the fascination of arcane knowledge, of knowing things denied to the vulgar; both bow down before the mysticism of mathematics. And both, it may be, begin where the genuine literary interest leaves off; both turn our delight in form into a particularly painful kind of homework.

So much -with digressions - on the form of Shakespeare’s sonnet; let us turn now to the content. It says to the addressee: ‘You’re having a wonderful time, you are the delight of whatever company you’re in, and I’m left alone waiting for you, but I don’t mind. You just go on enjoying yourself, don’t worry about me.’ Who talks like this? A mother to a young son, a chaperon to a young girl, and, of course, a lover to his girl. Would you ever talk like this? If you did, would you be sarcastic? ‘Don’t think about me, darling, stop out as long as you like, I shan’t complain.’ Is this not what we say in bitterness?

We know what the situation is here, because the poem is part of a sequence. The poet is talking to a handsome young man, who is his social superior, possibly his patron. He may be financially dependent on him, and certainly he is emotionally dependent. Has this made him bitter?

I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require.

These lines can be read straight, or ironically: how on earth do we choose? There are no clues in the text. To ask which makes the better poem is a strategy that would help if we were fitting a particular detail-into a total reading of which we were confident, but here it is not a matter of which reading of a detail fits better into the whole, it is a question of how to take the whole thing. Perhaps we find it difficult, today, to imagine anyone, in good faith, abasing himself so thoroughly. But what of Christian humility? That, you could reply, tells you to humble yourself before God, but not before other human beings, who are also miserable sinners. But what of Elizabethan society, with its strong belief in hierarchy, a society in which deference to social superiors has been thoroughly intemalised? At this point the ethical question - what do we think about such


self-abasement? - turns into a historical question - are we looking into a society in which such a speaker can abase himself without embarrassment and without irony? The question is not, finally, answerable: the very fact that we can read the poem with or without irony shows that it is poised between the two possibilities. Uncomfortable, if we are impatient to know where we stand; but the result is one ofthe most deeply moving of all Shakespeare’s sonnets- which is to say, of all poems.

I take enormous delight in the technical skill of this poem: the word-play of the last couplet, which I hope you noticed, not only the play on ‘Will’ (the poet’s name) but also in ‘so true a fool’: so loyal, so truly foolish - both meanings beautifully apt, but not giving us quite the same poem. But form alone, however delightful, does not engage us with the urgency that is raised by the moral issues of humility and self-assertion: that is what turns a brilliant poem into a great poem.

And now, for my last example, a poem of our time: again, one that is disturbingly connected with the moral life.

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees! The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where 1 please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads -

WHAT CAN W E DO WITH A POEM? 19

The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this. (Ted Hughes)

This is a poem about power, and Ted Hughes is a poet of violence: the stroke of genius here lies in the calmness. The hawk is described at a moment of rest, telling us calmly what he can do, has done, likes to do, lazily asserting, ‘ I kill where I please, because it is all mine.’ When I think of all the poems Hughes has written that are filled with blood, vomit, and adjectives explicitly asserting their nastiness, I see the brilliance of this cool statement.

Second, it’s a nature poem. Well, not what we have been trained to thinking of as a nature poem, not an ode to a skylark or a celebration of daffodils, nothing about Nature’s holy powers or the solace of beauty. If it’s a Nature poem, this is not the Nature of Wordsworth or Arnold: it is rather the nature of Malthus and Darwin, based on the struggle for existence. (Though if the poem is about evolution, there is a profound irony in the closing statement: ‘I am going to keep things like this’ -what species can be sure of its own permanence?) There is nothing eternal about Nature as the source of piety; all those Wordsworthian poems could be regarded as simply pre-Darwinian. If we had shown this poem to Wordsworth, we’d have been requiring him to make a paradigm shift. Just as we, reading Tintern Abbey, have to make a paradigm shift. Of course it is easier to make one into the past than into the future.

And yet - is this a Nature poem? Are there any poems about animals that are simply about animals? Doesn’t the poem derive its power from the fact that we can so easily hear it as a human being speaking? A young gang leader, a macho thug, a psychopath, a fascist: the voice is easily identified, and it’s not a voice any of us much cares for, is it? Did Hughes care for it? He has entered into the persona with apparent ease, and with total authenticity, and he does not offer us a footnote or an aside to remind us how nasty the speaker is. Here - and this is a good note to end on -we find the central paradox of a moral concern with literature. The author may be a macho thug who wrote in a rare moment of self-knowledge, or he may be a pacifist who wrote in a rare moment of stepping outside himself - or he may just like role-playing. Interesting questions, but not, strictly, part of our reading of the poem. The perfection of understanding


of the speaker renders such explicit moral statements unnecessary. The poet is not required to give us footnotes, either reassuring or defiant.

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. As a literary critic, I find it necessary- and fascinating- to raise and explore some ofthese issues, but in the end our job is to fade into silence, and let the poems speak.

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WHAT CAN WE DO WITH A POEM?