Technically, the metre is called Leonini cristati trilices dactylia, and Bernard (who was an Englishman, though born in Brittany) has told how, though the Holy Spirit often begged him to write verses, he would not listen until the sudden cry came: 'Open the door to thy Beloved!' Then Bernard gave way, praying for heavenly grace that he might worthily sing his Beloved's praises. 'Open thy mouth,' he heard again, and felt inspiration breathed into him. Bernard writes:
And I say in no wise arrogantly, but with all humility and therefore boldness: that unless the Spirit of wisdom and under?standing had been with me, and flowed in upon so difficult a metre, I could never have composed so long a work. . . .
Indeed, the Contemptu Mundi runs for some three hun?dred lines without flagging. We need not question Bernard's testimony that he wrote in an ecstatic love trance. There can be no other explanation. If only Shelley
had written To A Skylark under the same spell. . . .
*
The Classical convention in English poetry broke down just before the First World War, and all subsequent attempts to reinstate it failed. Our modernists are still in desperate search for a new convention of equal nonsensi- cality, yet of international prestige, which will create the impression that they are poets 'hidden in the mystic light of thought'. But what objects are the fountains of their doleful strain? Apparently the sole object is technique-. which they have made almost a dirty word.
The Poet in a Valley of Dry Bones
Granted a genuine sense of vocation, what technical advice can a young poet be offered? I dislike the word 'technique'. One hears: 'Yes, he (or she) doesn't move me in the least, but ah! what dazzling technique!' This implies intellectual achievement in any near-magical art or craft from which the intellect should, I believe, be barred for truth's sake, except as an occasional consultant on simple fact. Very well, then: what advice on crafts?manship, even if craftsmanship now means something quaint, laborious and out-of-date? But advice is what everybody gives and nobody takes.
As a young poet, I wrote my first serious poem in the summer of 1906, when I was eleven years old. I had been turned out of the family wagonette by my short-tempered grandfather, for having climbed aboard without my school cap; and so missed a picnic beside the river. I spent the afternoon working out a country-poem in rhymed couplets about a farmer who, so far as I recall, prudently harvested and carted his wheat just before a hailstorm flattened the crops of all his less industrious neighbours. The poem ended:
The swain gave thanks at daybreak for God's grace;
At Kirk this morn I saw his smiling face.
I remember thinking that swain and kirk and morn were very elegant words; and that I had scored off my grand?father (to whom, on his return, I dedicated the poem) by showing how little I cared for family picnics. This was a false start. Three years later I felt a genuine afflatus, and wrote one moonlit night in June:
0, not for me the lute or lyre! A knight, I ride my thoughts of fire And fly on wings for ever and aye Through an unresisting starry sky, Where the gleaming aether turns and sings Its strange slow song of the birth of things.
There was a difference in kind between these two failures: the first, an academic exercise, was sadly deficient in technique; the second, a personal statement, was equally deficient in craftsmanship?but my hand trembled as I wrote it down; nor did I parade it for public approval.
One often meets a musical prodigy, but never a poetic prodigy, of tender age. A long, long experience with lan?guage is needed before words can fully collaborate with one another under the poetic trance. It seems necessary, too, to hav<^>^ad a great many poems by other writers, good and bad, before a poet can realize his powers and limitations. I never have much use for one whose poems I do not recognize at a glance as inimitably his own; even so, I reject them if they draw attention to a cultivated eccentricity, to pride in scholarship, or to the mastery of Classical or Modernist technique.
Shakespeare's plays can be arranged in chronological order, and the development of his verse-craftsmanship studied; but I am not a play-goer, and the comparatively rare occasions when he included poems in his theatrical declamations are all that really interest me. Some plays contain no more than a couple of lines; in others there are scenes consisting of poem sequences strung together on a thread of dramatic dialogue. Popular conventions were as strong in Shakespeare's day as now, and he could not afford to disregard them. No poet ever escapes from the epoch into which he is born; he can only transcend conven?tions by showing where they do not apply to him. And he should have a sense of belonging to a long line of former free spirits, and decide whether their divergences from contemporary fashion merit his approval; Shakespeare, despite his limited schooling, seems to have been fantastic?ally well read.
The history of English poetry is traced in the text books as a succession of movements or schools?the School of Chaucer, the Allegorical School, the early Tudor Drama?tists, the Euphuists, and so on, past the Anti-Jacobins, the Lake School, the mid-Victorian Romantics, etc., until one reaches the Georgians, the Imagists, and the Modernist Movement. But schools and movements are fictions. If a school, meaning the disciples and imitators of a particular verse-craftsman, achieves fashionable renown, this is a grave criticism of his sincerity. A poet should be inimit?able. When two genuine poets recognize each other as true to their common vocation, this will only accentuate the difference between them in rhythm, diction and the rest. Any talk of a 'school' means that someone is peddling a new technique of verbal conjuring; as in commercial schools that teach writers of advertising copy how to make an easily hypnotizable public buy what they themselves must never believe in.
Craftsmanship is self-taught. A poet lives with his own language, continually instructing himself in the origin, histories, pronunciation, and peculiar usages of words, together with their latent powers, and the exact shades of distinction between what Roget's Thesaurus calls 'syn?onyms'?but are there such things? English has no officially approved way of expressing every conceivable thought, as French has; only precedents. A poet may make his own precedents, in disregard of any law of correctness laid down by grammarians?so long as they accord with the natural genius of English. ... I studied French, Latin and Greek grammar at school, back in the reign of King Edward the Peacemaker, but was told: 'Only foreign languages have grammar', and expected to be treated as an imbecile or a yokel if I spoke or wrote bad
English. Its proper use was held to be a matter of good manners, not of grammatic law: I still hold this to be so.
Only wide reading, a retentive ear for conversation, and continuous dwelling upon words as disembodied spirits rather than as building materials, can equip a poet for his task. And what does 'equip' mean? It comes from the medieval Latin eschipare, 'to man a ship'; but had be?come metaphorical even before reaching England? Cardinal Wolsey uses it, first, in the sense of finding soldiers the necessary arms and accoutrements for battle. The poet should be aware, however, that the word ship is still latent in equip, and so is the sense of making ready for a voyage. In a true poem, produced by the deep trance that integrates all the memories of the mind, the dormant powers of each word awake and combine with those of every other^sjauilding up a tremendous head of power. How far the reader is conscious of the inter-related sounds and meanings depends on how much of a poet he, or she, is: for I allow the title of poet to all who think poetically, whether writers or not.
A historical dictionary should always be within a poet's reach: preferably the big Oxford English Dictionary?the two-volume edition is insufficient. Over thirty years ago, when I could not afford a set, I remembered the New Testament parable of the pearl, sold all my non-essential books, and bought it. I still consult the O.E.D. at least four or five times a day: never letting a doubtful word go by?I need to know its derivation, its first occurrence, its change of meaning down the centuries, and the sort
of
people who used it in different contexts.
*
The Vienna school of psychology presumes a conscious and unconscious mind as two separate and usually warring entities; but a poet cannot accept this. In the poetic trance, he has access not only to the primitive emotions and thoughts which lie stored in his childhood memory, but to all his subsequent experiences?emotional and intel?lectual; including a wide knowledge of English won by constant critical study. Words are filed away by their hundred thousand, not in alphabetic order but in related groups; and as soon as the trance seizes him, he can single out most of the ones he needs. Moreover, when the first heavily blotted draft has been copied out fairly before he goes to bed, and laid aside for reconsideration, he will read it the next morning as if it were written by another hand. Yet soon he is back in the trance, finds that his mind has been active while he was asleep on the problem of internal relations, and that he can substitute the exact right word for the stand-in with which he had to be con?tent the night before.
One cannot hope to restore the creative processes that supplied certain unusual words in ancient poems. The work-sheets very rarely survive as evidence, and to dis?cuss my own experience in writing poems suggests that I claim poetic merit for them: which no poet can afford to do. All poems are failures in the Muse's eye; and it is this conviction alone that entitles me to discuss the weaknesses in the work of others. One of the Muse's main functions is to abash her poet by making him aware of his stupid?ities, vanities, and petty dishonesties.
I once wrote a poem called A Time of Waiting, the theme of which was a resolve not to prejudice the future by hasty action:
To take no rash decisions, enter into
No random friendships, check the run-away tongue
And fix my mind in a close pattern of doubt. . . .
When reviewing the second or third draft, I saw that pattern was too decorative a word.
And fix my mind in a close frame of doubt. . . .
would have been too formal. I tried:
And fix my mind in a close net of doubt. . . .
But a mind can hardly be fixed in a net; besides, net has the negative connotations of imprisonment without escape. I had in mind a positive form of quiet doubt, cultivated for the sake of good luck; because the Muse, for whose sake the doubt was assumed, would clearly not hasten to remove it. Finding the exact word seemed of the greatest importance: the poem, when complete, would confirm me in my decision. Poems have an auto-hypnotic function.
When I mi writing prose and have a word on the tip of my tongue, oNthe nib of my pen, which somehow eludes me, I often consult Roget's Thesaurus. Reading the list of so-called synonyms in a word-group, I at once recognize the word I need. But I do not use Roget for poems. So, instead, on this occasion I went down to the sea, swam out to a small rocky island, and there the exact right word floated up to me from several fathoms down:
To take no rash decisions, enter into
No random friendships, check the run-away tongue
And fix my mind in a close caul of doubt.
Caul surprised me, because I had not considered the word for at least twenty years; but later, reaching for the 'C' volume of the O.E.D., I found that it held all the senses I needed. A caul is, first, a net cap confining the glory of a woman, her hair; then a gossamer web spun by spiders over grass, heavy with dew at dawn. Finally, it is the smooth, cap-like membrane with which a child is sometimes born, a lucky relic of his uterine experiences and, in English superstition, sovereign against death by drowning. A caul is thus the gentlest and happiest of all cerebral restraints. I found three metaphorical uses of caul, which set a precedent for mine:
1579?Whoso is blinded with the caul of beauty. . . .
1656?Custom in sin had drawn a caul over my conscience.
1643?A caul drawn on the heart.
That close call has a somewhat outmoded slang signi?ficance, was an accident that did not disturb me. The eye cannot mistake caul for call, and the eye commands the inner ear. Poetry is read, not listened to, nine times out of ten. And close was the right adjective to qualify caul; I would have been ungrateful to look for another.
If a poem is lurking at the back of a poet's mind, and he has perfect confidence in bringing it to light under the trance, the key-words sooner or later will always fall into place. Or that is my own long-cherished superstition.
On the sole occasion that I ever discussed poetry with Walter De la Mare, I quoted him the lines from his All That's Past-.
?ah, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose. . . .
and asked whether he was satisfied with roves. He blushed slightly, and admitted that though roves was too close in sound to rose, it was the nearest he could get?no, he wasn't satisfied. He needed some word that had the sense of rambling?as roses ramble?he had tried Twines back the rose, but wild and twines made an ugly assonance:
Through what wild centuries Twines back the rose. . . .
Gads back the rose had a precedent in Milton's gadding vine, but gad was too similar in sound to back and, since Milton's days, had acquired a vulgar sense from gad-about.
De la Mare died without finding a satisfactory solution to the problem, perhaps because he was dealing with a conceit, not a poetic thought; and because the technical trick of metathesis?transferring the adjective wild from rose to centuries?had thrown the stanza out of gear. I have no hope of finding the exact right answer myself, because it was never my poem. I have tried ineffectually:
?ah, no man knows From what lost centuries Wanders the rose. . . .
or:
old, dead centuries Bred the wild rose. . . .
But if it has to be wild centuries, then:
Through what wild centuries Wends back the rose. . . .
is certainly better than roves back. Wend, a De-la-Mareish word, is akin to wander and winding, and makes a nice alliteration with wild.
The exact right word is sometimes missing from the dictionary. Thomas Hardy told me, in 1924 or so, that he now made it his practice to confirm doubtful words and that, a few days before, when looking up one such in the Oxford English Dictionary, he had found it, to be sure. But the only reference was: 'Thomas Hardy: Far From the Madding Crowd, 1874.'
I have myself hoped to contribute two or three words to the language. In a satire, Beauty in Trouble, I had occasion to mention the bat-like wings and cloven hooves of an evil angel. But bat-like is a plain, guileless Anglo- Saxon word, and the context demanded a rather grandi?loquent Romance one to barb the satire. Cat-like and feline; dog-like and canine; horse-like and equine-, these pairs, although synonyms for Roget, lie worlds apart. One sees the difference best in the phrase 'dog-like devotion'. 'Canine devotion' is not stubborn personal love but mere animal behaviourism. Very well: bat-like needs an equiva?lent formed from the Latin?as feline is from felis, canine from canis, equine from equus. . . . The Latin for bat is vespertilio; so I coined the word vespertilian? vespertilionian seemed too much of a mouthful:
The fiend who beats, betrays and sponges on her,
Persuades her, white is black, Flaunts vespertilian wing and cloven hoof And soon will fetch her back. . . .
Among the gaps in the Oxford English Dictionary is garden-, a jeweller's term for the bright cloudiness in certain gems, caused by chemical impurities, but giving them individuality and character. I am told that such a garden now proves that it is a genuine stone: the chemists who can artificially produce genuine rubies, emeralds, sapphires and the rest, have not yet got round to making any but flawlessly translucent ones:
The pale rose-amethyst on her breast
Has such a garden in it Your eye could trespass there for hours And wonder, and be lost.
Last year, I addressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the Arabic word bdraka, which means the lively virtue, or blessedness, which a place or
object acquires by long use; and deplored the new economic doctrine of built-in obsolescence, which sweeps away out- of-date models into the junk-yard or the garbage can long before they are worn out, and replaces them with others not meant to last for more than a short season. The lively virtue in words is longer-lasting. The doctrine of expend- ability applies either to semi-scientific terms which go out of date as the theses on which they rest are disproved; or to slang-coinages of novel terms for words like money, liquor, girl, steal, cheat, policeman, fornicate, get drunk, die, which add nothing to the simple original concept. A policeman is neither less nor more of a policeman when he is called a peeler, a bobby, an ecilop, a slop, a cop, a copper, a rozzer, a bull, or a fuzz. . . . Slang has been called 'poor man's poett^, perhaps because eighteenth-century Classi?cal tradition insisted on a particularized poetic vocabu?lary; and so did the Romantic Revivalists, though preferring a 'Gothic' range of words borrowed from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Walpole and Chatterton. Walter De la Mare is said to have started as a poet, while still a clerk with Standard Oil, by compiling lists of melli?fluous words, such as bergamot, chrysoprase, cresset, foredone, besprent, and introducing them into nostalgic rhymes: his was a deliberate technique of quaintness.
The longer a word lasts in a language before growing obsolete?and one of a poet's moral duties is to rescue and reinstate obsolescent words for which no substitute can be found?the more strength and virtue it acquires. Yet there are well-dressed poems as well as naked ones, and the choice of vocabulary must always be directed by the theme. Donne, for example, specializes in the costumed poem, rather than the naked one. His Seventh Elegy alter?nates between the two different strands of language, Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, rather than integrat?ing them:
Nature's lay Ideot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistrie, Oh, thou dost prove