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Comments on Examples of
Twentieth-Century Poetry
W. B. Yeats
DECTORA: No. Take this sword And cut the rope, for I go on with Forgael. . . . The sword is in the rope ― The rope's in two ―it falls into the sea, It whirls into the foam. O ancient worm, Dragon that loved the world and held us to it, You are broken, you are broken. The world drifts away, And I am left alone with my beloved, Who cannot put me from his sight for ever. We are alone for ever, and I laugh, Forgael, because you cannot put me from you. The mist has covered the heavens, and you and I Shall be alone for ever. We two ―this crown ― I half remember. It has been in my dreams. Bend lower, O king, that I may crown you with it. O flower of the branch, O bird among the leaves, O silver fish that my two hands have taken Out of the running stream, O morning star, Trembling in the blue heavens like a white fawn Upon the misty border of the wood, Bend lower, that I may cover you with my hair, For we will gaze upon this world no longer.
FORGAEL [gathering Dectora's hair about him]:
Beloved, having dragged the net about us, And knitted mesh to mesh, we grow immortal;
Page-430 And that old harp awakens of itself To cry aloud to the grey birds, and dreams, That have had dreams for father, live in us.
Forgael might be the Yogin in the act of the irrevocable and immediately effectual renunciation of a life in the world and entering into his kingdom, having found and been accepted by the individual divine within him.
It is certainly a very beautiful passage and has obviously a mystic significance; but I don't know whether we can put into it such precise meaning as you suggest. Yeats' contact, unlike A. E.'s, is not so much with the sheer spiritual Truth as with the hidden intermediate regions, from the faery worlds to certain worlds of larger mind and life. What he has seen there, he is able to clothe rather than embody in strangely beautiful and suggestive forms, dreams and symbols. I have read some of his poems which touch these behind-worlds with as much actuality as an ordinary poet would achieve in dealing with physical life ―this is not surprising in a Celtic poet, for the race has the key to the occult worlds or some of them at least ―but this strange force of suggestive mystic life is not accompanied by a mental precision which would enable us to say, it is this or that his figures symbolise. If we could say it, it might take away something of that glowing air in which his symbols stand out with such a strange unphysical reality. The perception, feeling, sight of Yeats in this kind of poetry are remarkable, but his mental conception often veils itself in a shimmering light ―it has then shining vistas but no strong contours. 1 September 1932
Edward Shanks
I am sending you a sonnet by Edward Shanks, considered to be "one of our best younger poets":
O dearest, if the touch of common things Can taint our love or wither, let it die. The freest-hearted lark that soars and sings Soon after dawn amid a dew-brushed sky
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Takes song from love and knows well where love lies, Hid in the grass, the dear domestic nest, The secret, splendid, common paradise. The strangest joys are not the loveliest; Passion far-sought is dead when it is found, But love that's born of intimate common things Cries with a voice of splendour, with a sound That over stranger feeling shakes and rings. The best of love, the highest ecstasy Lies in the intimate touch of you and me.
I do not know whether you intended me to comment on the sonnet of Shanks ―Phoebus, what a name!! I am not in love with it, though it is smoothly and musically rhythmed. The sentiment is rather namby-pamby, some of the lines weak, others too emphatic, e.g. the twelfth. It just misses being a really good poem, or is so, like the curate's egg, in parts. E.g. the two opening lines of the third verse are excellent, but they are immediately spoiled by two lines that shout and rattle. So too the last couplet promises well in its first line, but the last disappoints, it is too obvious a turn and there is no fusion of the idea with the emotion that ought to be there ―and isn't. Still, the writer is evidently a poet and the sonnet very imperfect but by no means negligible. 12 June 1931
Richard Hughes
. . . The air stands still: the very roots
Of all the trees lie still and cold:
―What is it gallops in the dark?
Gallops around that chapel old?
"We are those limber horses
That round your graveyard go:
Can you hear our feet crackle,
See our blue eyes glow?
"We are those limber horses;
Page-432 Our bending necks are steel, Our mighty flanks swing all like bells,
Chiming together as we wheel . . .
By the way, I read the poem in that paper,
The Limber Horses. It
is evidently inspired from the vital world ―from a certain part of it which seems to be breaking out in much of today's literature
and art. All that comes from this source is full of a strange kind of force, but out of focus, misshaped in thought or vision or
feeling, sometimes in the form too, ominous and perverse. For that matter, the adverse vital world is very much with us now,
―the War was the sign of its descent on the earth and the After-war bears its impress. But from another point of view that is not
a cause for alarm or discouragement ―for it has always been predicted from occult sources that such a descent would be the
precursor of the Divine Manifestation. 1931
W. H. Auden
I so often fail to detect the poetry in modern "poems" that
the enclosed piece (by a quite young man), was a welcome exception ―also it hints at an unusual warmth of interest in
England. But neither grammar nor sense is plain to me in the opening line and elsewhere.
O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless Heaven
Make simpler daily the beating of man's heart; within
There in the ring where name and image meet
Inspire them with such a longing as will make his thought
Alive like patterns a murmuration of starlings
Rising in joy over wolds unwittingly weave;
Here too on our little reef display your power
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
And make us as Newton was who in his garden watching
The apple falling towards England became aware
Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
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. . . and Glamorgan hid a life
Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys,
Is already retreating into her maternal shadow
Leaving the furnaces gasping in the impossible air . . .
The cluster of mounds like a midget golf-course, graves
Of some who created these intelligible dangerous marvels;
Affectionate people, but crude their sense of glory
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future,
For the seed in their loins were hostile, though afraid of their pride,
And tall with a shadow now, inertly wait . . .
Consider the years of the measured world begun
The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.
Yet, O, at this very moment of our hopeless sigh
When inland they are thinking their thoughts but are watching these islands . . .
Some dream, say yes, long coiled in the ammonite's slumber
Is uncurling, prepared to lay on our talk and kindness
Its military silence, its surgeon's idea of pain.
And called out of tideless peace by a living sun
As when Merlin, tamer of horses, and his lords to whom
Stonehenge was still a thought, the Pillars passed
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow,
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn
For the virgin roadsteads of our hearts an unwavering keel.
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the same, there is a rhythm and there is a power of thought and poetic speech, rising to a climax in the nine or ten lines
of the close. What seems most to contribute is the skilful and happy vowellation and consonantal assonances,
―the rhythmic
form of the lines is not always so happy, ―and on the side of expression the concise power of much of the phrasing at once
clear-cut in line and full in significance ―in spirit though not in manner akin to the Dantesque turn of phrase. I mean such lines
and expressions as
(1)
a murmuration of starlings
(2)
This fortress perched on the edge of the Atlantic scarp
The mole between all Europe and the exile-crowded sea;
(3)
a life
Grim as a tidal rock-pool's in its glove-shaped valleys,,
(4)
gasping in the impossible air
(this is quite Dante; (3) also)
(5)
these intelligible dangerous marvels;
(6)
Far-sighted as falcons, they looked down another future,
(and the two lines that follow)
(7)
the years of the measured world
(8)
The barren spiritual marriage of stone and water.
(9)
Its military silence, its surgeon's idea of pain.
(10)
And called out of tideless peace by a living sun
(11)
And into the undared ocean swung north their prow
Drives through the night and star-concealing dawn
(These two lines again very Dantesque)
It is a pity he did not take pains to raise the whole to the same
or a similar equal level ―and more still that he did not think it worth while to make the underlying meaning of the whole as
clear and powerfully precise as are in themselves these phrases.
15 September 1932
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Stephen Spender
Here is a poem by Stephen Spender, one of the most promising
of the young modernist poets, in The New Statesman and Nation of November 4, 1933:
Perhaps
the explosion of a bomb
the
submarine ―a burst bubble filled with water ― the chancellor clutching his shot arm (and that was Perhaps
a put-up job for their own photographers)
the parliament their own side set afire
& then our party forbidden
& the mine flooded, an accident I hope . . .
In his skidding car he wonders
when watching landscape attack him
"is it rushing? (I cannot grasp it) or is it
at rest with its own silence I cannot touch?"
Was that final when they shot him? did that war
lop our dead branches? are my new leaves splendid?
is it leviathan, that revolution
hugely nosing at edge of antarctic?
only Perhaps. Can be that we grow smaller
donnish and bony shut in our racing prison:
headlines are walls that shake and close
the dry dice rattled in their wooden box.
Can be deception of things only changing. Out there
perhaps growth of humanity above the plain
hangs: not the timed explosion, oh but Time
monstrous with stillness like the himalayan range.
Aren't the emotion and the rhythm all in a rather subdued key
―but that appears to be universal among up-to-date
poets?
It seems to me they are so subdued as hardly to be there except at
places. A certain subdued force of statement getting less subdued
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and more evidently powerful at the close ―this there is, but it is the only power there.
How did the poem impress you?
I am afraid it made no impression on me
―no poetical impression. I cannot persuade myself that this kind of writing has any chance of survival once the mode is over.
On consideration I should say that whatever merits there are in Perhaps lie in the last four stanzas. The first three seem to
me distinguishable from a strong prose only by the compression of the language and the stiffness of the movement
―too stiff
for prose, in quite another way too stiff for the fineness and plasticity there should be in poetic rhythm
―especially needed,
it seems to me, in free verse. From the fourth line of the fourth stanza I begin to find what seems to me the real poetic touch.
The fifth and seventh have the substance and diction of very fine poetry ―what I miss is the rhythm that would carry it home to
the inner consciousness and leave it with its place permanently there. There seems to be in this technique an unwillingness to get
too far away from the characteristic manner of prose rhythm, an unwillingness either to soar or run, as if either would be an
unbecoming and too ostentatious action ―in three or four lines only the poet is just about to let himself go. Or perhaps there is
the same tendency as in some modern painting and architecture, a demand for geometric severity and precision? But the result is
the same. It may be that this kind of writing cuts into the intellect ―it touches only the surface of the vital, the life-spirit which
after all has its rights in poetry, and does not get through into the soul. That at least is the final impression it leaves on me.
1933
W. J. Turner
The Word made Flesh?
How often does a man need to see a woman?
Once!
Once is enough, but a second time will confirm if it be she,
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She who will be a fountain of everlasting mystery,
Whose glance escaping hither and thither
Returns to him who troubles her. . . .
No light travelling through space-time immeasurable
Has leapt so great a distance as their eyes;
Naked together their spirits commingling
Stir the seed in their genitals ― Like a babe never to be born that leaps up crying,
A voice crying in the wilderness. . . .
The head of Satan is curled
Close, crisp, like the Gorgon;
They are the serpents of the spirit
Curled like the hair of the chaste body,
Emblem of the God who is not creative,
Who has not made the heavens and the earth,
Nor from an Adam of dust
Took that white bone, woman. . . .
This it is to be excluded from the bliss
Of the angels of God,
And of the men and women that He made in His image;
The joy of making images in the image of his maker is not his,
But his are the children of the spirit:
Sweeter and fairer are they than the children of the flesh,
But they are born solitary
And agony is their making-kiss.
Is there any justification for my impression that this was a
ghost of the nineties (the meretricious "diabolism", cult of the bizarre etc.) that had gone to a Fancy Dress Ball in the clothes
of 1934? There seemed to be a certain slickness in achieving the fashionable formula of today
―and of course the
inevitable sop to the anti-Victorian Cerberus, the introduction of something to offend the conventions of last century.
But I did not feel any inevitability behind it all. Some "modern" verse is perverse but powerful; these lines seemed
just built up by an adroit mind that knows how to tickle the modern fancy.
Page-438
I think your criticism is very much to the point. The writer is
a very clever manipulator of words, but he is dressing up an idea so as to catch the surface mind
―there is no sincerity and
therefore no power or conviction or poetical suggestion. Such made-up stuff as
The head of Satan is curled
and the rest of it has no real significance and is therefore rhetorical, not poetic. The rest is no better ―there is no single line that carries conviction, not an image or a phrase or a movement of
rhythm that is inevitable. There is room for sex poetry if it is felt as truth and rendered
either with beauty or power, but this crude braggadocio of the flesh is not telling nor attractive. The diabolism and cult of the
bizarre in the nineties had a certain meaning, ―it was at least a revolt against false conventions and an attempt to escape from
the furbished obviousness of much that had gone before. But now it has itself become the obvious and conventional
―not
it exactly in its old form but the things it attempted to release and these are now trying to escape from their own obviousness
by excess, the grotesque, the perverse. The writer brings in or brings back Satan (for whom there is no longer any need) to
give, I suppose, a diabolical thrill to that excess ―but, as poetry at least, it is not successful. Satan and sexual realism (e.g. the
"spirit stirring the genitals") do not match together. 1934
Edwin Muir
Who curbed the lion long ago
And penned him in this towering field
And reared him wingless in the sky?
And quenched the dragon's burning eye,
Chaining him here to make a show,
The faithful guardian of the shield?
A fabulous wave far back in time
Flung these calm trophies to this shore
Page-439
That looks out on a different sea.
These relics of a buried war,
Empty as shape and cold as rhyme,
Gaze now on fabulous wars to be.
So well the storm must have fulfilled
Its work of perfect overthrow
That this new world to them must seem
Irrecognizably the same,
And looking from the flag and shield
They see the selfsame road they know.
Here now heraldic watch them ride
This path far up the mountainside
And backward never cast a look;
Ignorant that the dragon died
Long since and that the mountain shook
When the great lion was crucified.
Very good indeed ―admirable throughout. It is refreshing to read a poem with such a good form, build, depth of suggested
meaning amidst so much that is so freakish and uncertain as to take away half the value of what is attempted. Here the writer
has something to say and knows how to say it. 1934
Robert Frost, William Plomer, Roy Campbell
Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
―Robert Frost
Page-440 Now the edge of the jungle rustles. In a hush
The crowd parts. Nothing happens. Then
The dancers totter adroitly out on stilts,
Weirdly advancing, twice as high as men.
Sure as fate, strange as the mantis, cruel
As vengeance in a dream, four bodies hung
In cloaks of rasping grasses, turning
Their tiny heads, the masks besmeared with dung;
Each mops and mows, uttering no sound,
Each stately, awkward, giant marionette,
Each printed shadow frightful on the ground
Moving in small distorted silhouette. . . .
―Williams Plomer
Through the mixed tunnels of whose angry brain
Creeps the slow scolopendra of the Train!
―Roy Campbell
Have you seen the "Golden Cowboy and Others" in the New Statesman? Gives a good idea of modernist poetry, I think. Frost
is a rather elaborate frost. Plomer is a "terrible" contortionist, but Roy Campbell is really amusing
―I like his "slow scolopendra" immensely. He has at least the courage of his images. Evidently poetry is following the same gallop into extravagance
as painting. And yet there is an attempt behind it which looks like a seeking after the "Future Poetry" gone astray.
1937
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