Rhyme’s threat to reason safely on the side
Of lies or nonsense. Poetry they deem
Unfit to warrant reason’s bona fide
Enforced by sundry variants on the theme
Of “logic rules,” in which case woe betide
The poets, sophists, and their suspect team
Of word-artificers. Though they replied,
That other lot, with boosts of self-esteem
Renaissance or Romantic in their style
Of counter-claim, the old charge never quite
Lost its presumptive right to put on trial
Whatever seeming truths the poet might
Rhapsodically convey and so beguile
The reader as to win assent despite
Their better judgment. Thus the logophile
Is torn both ways, between the sovereign right
Of logos—that of reason as the one
And only self-legitimizing source
Of truthful speech—and all the logoi spun
By word-spell weaving poets in the course
Of that old logomachia once begun
By Plato versus Homer. So the force
Of dialectic’s marshalled first to stun
Its rival, then impose the strict divorce
That kept the logos properly apart
From all those errant word-games that betrayed
The tricksy essence of the poet’s art
As simply what allowed them to persuade
The credulous and bid them take to heart
Some pseudo-truth or argument gainsaid
By a mere moment’s thought. Yet here we’ll start,
Perhaps, to wonder if the points thus made
In reason’s cause by reason’s favoured sorts
Of argument, especially points scored
At poetry’s expense, might signal thought’s
Old hedgehog tendency to take on board
Whatever prickly strategy purports
To keep it safely curled up and afford
Protection when some metaphor distorts
The proper sense of things. What they ignored,
Those hard-line literalists, was that which lay
Within the poets’ gift and might require
The kind of impropriety that they
Turned to advantage, yet with no such dire
Mind-blowing consequences as dismay
The heirs of Plato whose own texts aspire
To a plain style whereby to keep at bay
Poetic language-games. Else these might fire
Strange passions of the kind that Plato kept,
Or tried to keep, beneath prosaic wraps
Yet hidden in plain view because they leapt
Off every page in metaphors or gaps
Of reasoning. The heirs find these inept
Or blame them on some momentary lapse
From logic’s rule while poet-types accept
That they’re the sort of word-event that taps
Into some language-region quite unknown
To the plain-sense brigade, or into some
As yet unregimented meaning-zone
Where echoes of an ancient quarrel come
Once more to haunt our thoughts. “What must be shown,
Not said” would surely strike the logos dumb,
According to Saint Ludwig, though his own
Vast Nachlass might suggest he failed to plumb
Such silent depths. The issue takes a whole
New spin when Socrates, near death, avows
That poetry and music charm the soul
More deeply than philosophy allows,
That maybe logic’s steely thought-control
Has failed him, and that therefore he’ll espouse,
In his short time remaining, the new role
Of one whom flute and poem can arouse
To heights of ecstasy unglimpsed by those,
His former self among them, who’d decree
Such pleasures alien to the sober prose
Of philosophic discourse. Here we see
What happens when one language-party goes
Its own way, touts itself as master-key
To truth, and claims sole warrant to disclose
All that’s worth knowing to the devotee
Of that vocation. Poetry, and they’ll
Appeal to image, metaphor, and all
The ways that poems manage to unveil
Truths that deliver us from logic’s thrall;
Philosophy, and likely they’ll avail
Themselves of some device to reinstall
Sound logic as thought’s organon and fail-
Safe method for ensuring one not fall
Into some latest version of the same
Linguistic-logical confusions that,
Conversely, guaranteed one’s language-game
Turn out nonsensical. Applied off pat
By partisans each creed distributes blame
And praise by harking back to the old spat
Billed “Plato versus Homer” in the name
Of some high calling destined to fall flat
On the sharp ears of those whose temperament
Found ample room not only for the kinds
Of intellectual stimulus that went
With exercise of thought for agile minds
But also for how how poets may invent
New ways to see beyond whatever blinds
The stubborn literalist or represent
New worlds beyond the habitude that binds
Our dulled perception to the fixed routine
Of common usage. Yet it’s still a touch
Too pat, too neat, let’s say, too squeaky-clean
As well as sub-Hegelian if such
A happy settling for the in-between
Of those twin poles becomes a straw to clutch
Hopefully at for poet-thinkers keen
That their allegiance seem not over-much
Committed either way. Perhaps we’d best
Be less accommodating, more up-front
Or confrontational if we’re to test
The poet’s claim to truth and not just shunt
That issue off into a siding lest
Those gibes of Plato turn into such blunt
And heavy instruments that, in the quest
For virtue, poetry should bear the brunt
Of every charge that reason ever brought
Against its foes. They ranged from those it cast
As idiots or muddle-heads untaught
In logic’s ways to those it roundly classed
As gross corruptors of the laws of thought
And hence—the jury verdict goes—as past
All hope of somehow learning to comport
Themselves with more sagacity at last
Once freed from the delusion that led Keats,
Absurdly, to promote “beauty is truth,
Truth beauty” as a formula that meets
Truth’s minimal demands, or take such sooth-
Saying twaddle as a dictum that defeats
The cold abstractions of the logic-sleuth
By mere word-magic. Yet if this one cheats
The reader by implying “how uncouth
To raise such logic-chopping points when there’s
So much of truth and beauty to be had
From heartfelt paradox,” the question bears
More pondering when to Keats’s lines you add
Celan’s rebuke to anyone who errs
So far as to metaphorize the bad
Reality that hits us unawares
Through facts and dates that leave the reader glad
To find a refuge in the usual view
Of poetry as handily dispensed
From rules of plain truth-telling. So if you
Take them as less-than-literal or ring-fenced,
Those passages, by dint of some taboo
On f
acts in poems you’ll run up against
His imagery of smoke or ash as true
In the most metaphorically condensed
Yet brute or plain-prose sense. Else you’ll have failed
Celan’s first test of readers well equipped
To cope with everything that so assailed
His memory that he must needs encrypt
Its import not in some discreetly veiled
Symbolic sense but rather in a script
Whose chiaroscuro characters entailed
A more prosaic reading duly stripped
Of all such poetry as might distract
Attention from whatever served to fix
His literal intent. Plain statement backed
By abstinence from anything that ticks
The ‘poet’ box would, so he thought, bring fact
Back with a vengeance and so knock for six
Those figural contrivances that lacked
The will to leave behind the bag of tricks
Called “poetry.” Let exegetes refrain
From their old pact with poets of a more
Compliant character whose usual strain
Of symbol, allegory, or metaphor
Gives ample scope for comment in a vein
Accordant with the freedom to explore
New ways and means of finding some arcane
Significance. This led them to ignore
Such details as would tend, if taken straight
Or strictly à la lettre, to exceed
In power of utterance all that we equate,
Us adepts of evasion, with the need
That metaphor provide a buffer-state
Between ourselves and things of which we read
In its glass darkly so as to negate
The shock of that which otherwise would feed
Our darkest terrors. Evidence enough,
You might think, for the prosecution line
That has a poet like Celan say “Stuff
Your poetry,” or anyway define
His purpose as one long attempt to slough
Off all that preciousness and re-assign
The poet’s role as not just acting tough,
Like vandals set to ruin culture’s shrine,
Or speaking truth to power (though that’s no doubt
A large part of it), but as what insists
On writing things down literally without
The verbal detours or the tropic twists
That once permitted poetry to flout
All the fine protocols that truth enlists
On its side of this immemorial bout
Of Denker versus Dichter. Though bare fists
Have now been pocketed we’d better grant
One point to those of Plato’s heirs for whom
“Poetic truth” remains a phrase they can’t
But find oxymoronic. If there’s room
In poetry for sayings that enchant
And elevate, still we should not presume
Too readily that some alternate slant
On kindred themes won’t conjure thoughts that loom
Uncomfortably large across the long
And still unfolding history of wars
Provoked and waged through poetry and song
From Homer down. There’s no crusade or cause
So bad that bards won’t answer like a gong
Or put their tender consciences on pause,
Extol the right and castigate the wrong
As if vouchsafed to them alone by laws
Of natural justice allied to the gift
For moral divination that ensures
They judge aright when others go adrift.
Yet it’s just this self-certainty that lures
Them way off-course, like modernists who sniffed
At all proposals save their drastic cures
For Europe’s malady and gave short shrift
To wiser, more pacific overtures
Of truth to power that grasped at neither horn
Of the old fake dilemma. This demands
“Under which king, Bezonian?,” holds in scorn
All thought of compromise, and understands
By “truth” a mode of discourse either shorn
Of metaphor or such that it expands
To fill all history with fictions born
In those mytho-poetic hinterlands
Where Yeatsian portents of apocalypse
And Pound’s cage-rattling Rapallo tirades
Still echo. So imagination tips
Too quickly into conjuring the shades
Of ancient warriors or running clips
From epic movies till the war-brigades
Recall some face that launched a thousand ships
And once again its poetry invades
Mind, heart and culture. Then the poet’s job
Is clear enough: keep stoking the old fires,
Rework those tropes that mobilised the mob,
Devize whatever myths the age requires,
And be prepared once in a while to lob
A metaphoric bombshell that inspires
The arty types unwilling to hob-knob
With those whose truth-preservative desires
Encourage a more literalist approach
To any narrative of war and its
Brute consequences. These require we broach
The matter in a way that closely fits
The factual evidence lest myth encroach
On history by deleting all the bits
That don’t so fit and making sure to coach
Its adepts with the self-assembly kits
In fiction’s user-guide. That says: though res
Gestae should not be mixed up with historia
Rerum gestarum, still the many ways
Of plot-construction—from sic transit gloria
To Whiggish narratives—suggest it pays
To shop around in various emporia,
Peruse the range of story-lines, and raise
The joint claim of poiesis and theoria
To new-found heights. Then it may well forego
That quaint idea of segregating what
Old-style historia takes itself to know
On factual warrant arduously got
By long research and what its methods owe
To all the deft contrivances of plot
And discourse. Hence the shrewdly managed flow
Of narrative events that shows we’re not
Here in the hands of a historian whose
First obligation is to get things right
On Clio’s terms, but one for whom the muse
Of poetry requires that they should write
Such tales as a skilled dramatist might choose
So as first to astonish, then delight
(A classic formula) and thus infuse,
In good Horatian style, some pleasing flight
Of fancy into history’s bitter pill
Of factual discipline. Yet who’ll deny
The counter-claim: that some war-poets’ skill
In verse-technique or plentiful supply
Of metaphor can’t hide the strength of will
It took to get those poems out and vie
With other poets’ efforts to instil
A jingo-creed. This prompted some to die
Like cattle, and the others first to kill
Then die like prize-bulls led to slaughter by
The far from un-poetic power to thrill
Responsive temperaments in those whose high-
Toned rhetoric promised swiftly to fulfil
Their inchoate desires. Although we try,
Like this, to sort poetic good from ill
As if the crucial difference must lie
In some marked feature that the standard drill
Of Eng Lit Crit should help us to descry
With reasonable accuracy, still
The case
is apt to baffle or defy
(As here) our need to answer it until,
As theories fail, we’re left to satisfy
The need for grist to our vexatious mill
With poems no high tone can overfly.
A BROKEN MUSIC
This poem has to do with the disputed place of rhyme and meter in a literary culture routinely doubtful of their continuing claims on the serious attention of anyone alive to the poetic Zeitgeist. It reflects on the uses of off-rhyme, half-rhyme, quasi-rhyme and their sundry relatives in the poetry of anti-war “war poets” like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and suggests—argues!—that rhyme and metre are resources that poetry had better hang on to in however pointedly deviant or off-key a form. The last few stanzas give the briefest of airings to my notion that the turn against them in poetry has a good deal in common with the proclaimed obsolescence of tonality as urged in the more dogmatic quarters of post-Schoenberg musical modernism. On my own principles there shouldn’t be too much difference—certainly not a logic-bending or argument-slackening difference—between getting a case to work out cogently in prose and getting it to work out persuasively in verse. Still there had better be enough difference in the way the two things are done for the verse to count as poetry for at least some of the time.
“A Broken Music” rather pushes its luck in that respect, not least—in what I’d like to call a piece of large-scale structural irony—by using perfect rather than off- or half-rhymes throughout. This goes, albeit obliquely, to underline the poem’s point: that the latter devices work best (are most strongly motivated and justified) in contexts of extreme conflict, stress, or emotional pressure like that of Owen’s war poetry.
Sassoon and Owen told it like it was.
None of your fine uplifting stuff for those
Who’d been there, seen the worst, and then—because
Of what they’d seen—wrenched language to expose
The old lie these two nailed. Stuff your applause,
Their off-rhymes said, for the false art that goes
Into a well-bred verse-technique and draws
High praise for its devices to keep prose,
Along with factual reportage, at bay,
So showing its rapt readership (by grace
Of flawless rhyme and meter) the best way
For the Tempus-Fugitives Page 13