Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  Reasoning is as contemporary an activity as you can get. In his poem ‘On Being Asked by Our Receptionist If I Liked the Flowers’, Brown makes capital out of explaining, for himself and us, the mental process by which the vase of lilies she was referring to had been condemned by her existence to the status of ‘A splendor I’d have seen for sure, / If less employed in seeing her.’ Herbert would have approved of how the image arose from the idea, and of the compactness of the wrapping: a couplet hard at work through making itself look easy.

  Contrary to more than a hundred years of steadily accumulating scholarly opinion, Pope never made the couplet look easy, even at his most frolicsome. His social poems fit into a plaster and glass pavilion as though part of the furniture, but they are under a greater strain than their surroundings: an internal strain. Heroic couplets are closed, and the closure exerts pressure even when nothing much is being conveyed except atmosphere. When a reasoned argument is being conveyed, the pressure can split the pipes. It was recognized even at the time that the vaunted logical progression of ‘Essay on Man’ was a succession of limps and stumbles in mechanical shoes. By his very diligence, Pope proved that his favoured form’s self-contained refinement was a clumsy vehicle for argument. Except when expressible in an individual aperçu, thought is seldom self-contained. Probably for that reason, the mature Shakespeare usually confined his use of the couplet to clinching a scene. The couplet stops the action. Pope never took the hint.

  Just before the First World War, George Saintsbury, in his little book The Peace of the Augustans, found the right language for disliking ‘Essay on Man’ and also went deeper to spot something inflexible about the heroic couplet in itself: Pope’s rigorously observed caesura, the central pause of the line, formed a ‘crease down the page’. But really the heroic couplet had already been practically, if not critically, undone in the day of its domination, by poets who wished to keep the rhyme of the couplet but not its self-containment. Charles Churchill is not much thought of now, but his popularity at the time depended on his knack for making the couplet spring along instead of hanging about. Instead of being buttoned up at the end of the second line, the syntax of a so-called ‘romance’ couplet ran on into the couplet that came next. Samuel Johnson, rigorously formal author of ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, would have been horrified at the thought of letting a couplet do that; and Oliver Goldsmith, whose accomplishments as a poet Johnson rightly revered, wrote his masterpiece The Deserted Village without slipping out of the heroic frame even once. (At the author’s invitation, Johnson even contributed a few couplets to Goldsmith’s poem, and they fit right in: you can hardly see the join.)

  But the new possibilities provided by the romance couplet were now there, and in the nineteenth century Browning made authoritative use of them to create the proudly demented narrative fluency deployed by the narrator of ‘My Last Duchess’. Unimpeded by enforced caesura or end-stopped second line, the Duke’s suavely heightened conversational virtuosity, as if emanating from the carefully trimmed beard of Vincent Price by firelight, doubles the impact when we realize that he is as nutty as a fruitcake. He killed her. Stop him before he kills again.

  It is an open question which form of the couplet demands the more technique, heroic or romance. All we can be sure of is that each version demands plenty. Perhaps the romance couplet always demanded most, as it headed towards the freedom we enjoy now, in which we persuade ourselves that freedom from all predictability equals the perfectly expressive. Whether they stop and start or flow forward in a paragraph, couplets require their author to put his syllables and stresses in all the right places. Rhyming is the easy part of the job, and even that turns out to be devilishly hard after the initial spasm of euphoria. A first-timer is likely to go back to his opening night’s work and despair of life, let alone of his poetic hopes. But here as always we must be careful not to underestimate the speed of assimilation that can be induced by the urgency of an idea. After the Second World War there was a show-stopping example of instantaneously acquired mastery when Vladimir Nabokov published Pale Fire, a work which revolves around a thousand-line poem composed in couplets. A tour de force of fake history and pseudo-scholarship, the book would have been daunting enough had the poem been clumsy. But it was perfect.

  Perfect, or nearly so. A professional might have niggled that in line 497 (‘In the wet starlight and on the wet ground’) the second ‘the’, which ought to be stressed but can’t be, dictates a needlessly attention-getting departure from strict rhythm; but otherwise scarcely a foot had been wrongly placed. The sweetly flowing tide of romance couplets even had fully formed heroic couplets occasionally decorating them, like candles floating on the water:

  The little scissors I am holding are

  A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

  There could be no objecting to that. Here was the occasion for the astonished reader to remember that Nabokov was a neophyte poet only in English. In Russian he had been an expert, and all the Russian expert poets are expert technicians, because Pushkin, the supreme technician, sets the historic pace. Nevertheless, Nabokov had pulled this marvel out of his hat the first time, a rabbit as big as a freight train. How was it possible?

  The only answer is that he did it because he wanted to. He had had an idea about a prominent American poet being stalked by a conceited scholar who was really a wacko European monarch on the run, and for the screwball plot to work he needed a poem: so he wrote one. The urge had preceded the accomplishment, as it always must. If Nabokov had been writing a treatise on English prosody, it would not have led him to write the poem in Pale Fire. Technique is a subservient impulse. One of the ways we know this to be true is the mess that ensues when fashion makes it a dominant one, and artists in all fields start shoving stuff in just because they can do it. Critics become more useful when they learn to appreciate that the creative urge leading to a work of art may be a complex, irreducible compound of the impulse to get something new said and the impulse to get a new technique into action. But the second component should always attend upon the first, even when, as so often happens with a poem, a technical possibility is the first thing to hit the page. The possibility won’t go far unless the constructive urgency takes over. The point is proved, rather than otherwise, by the poets who gush technique but hardly ever write a poem.

  Turner’s ‘Hymn’ was, and is, a unicorn raised among a herd of horses. Since the poem is impossible to find even on Google, I am very conscious at this point that I should get ahead with my long-cherished project to edit an anthology of one-off poems, by poets who wrote only one hit among their many duds, or never wrote anything except the hit. I have several titles for the book – ‘They Never Had a Chance’ and ‘Poems of the Doomed’ are two of them – but publishers want names, and names are usually what such poets don’t have, even the productive ones, buried while they breathed under the tumulus of their own output.

  It can take a long time for a poet to build a name, but once the name is built it affects everything, like gravity. In 2008 Elizabeth Bishop’s copy of Jude the Obscure, in the Modern Library edition, came up for sale on the second-hand book market. The mere presence of her ownership signature on the flyleaf would already have put the price up, but putting the price through the roof was the presence in one of the endpapers of the draft for a poem. Never mind for the moment what such a rare occurrence says about the confluence of art and commerce. Let’s just marvel at what it says about poetry and criticism. Here, we may be sure, is the clearest proof that we are dealing, down there at bedrock level, with an urge as strong as life, if no more simple. She was out somewhere without her notebook, and she had an idea. It couldn’t wait, so she started writing it down on the only blank paper available. Any poet will read about this, scan his crowded bookshelves with a sad eye, remember the number of times he was caught by the same fever, and wonder if some book he once owned will ever be news because he scribbled in it. The chances are that it won’t. But that’s the chance that ma
kes the whole deal more exciting than Grand Slam tennis. Unless you can get beyond yourself, you were never there.

  Interlude

  There is a dangerous half-truth that has always haunted the practice and the appreciation of the arts: too much technique will inhibit creativity. Despite constant evidence that too little technique will inhibit it worse, the idea never quite dies, because it is politically too attractive. Young women are usually less susceptible, but young men are often pleased to think that their creative activities would flourish best if they could spend more time getting up late in the morning and taking a longer nap during the afternoon. Hence the continuing popularity of Blake’s emphasis on just letting art happen, without too much sweat. In Blake’s case some of his lyrics are well enough crafted to prove that he had practice, but his general stance was to assert the value of spontaneity. In other fields than poetry, some of the energy of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is thought to have been drawn from the technical ignorance by which his orchestrations needed Rimsky Korsakov to finish them off, and some of the primitive appeal of Le Douanier Rousseau, who so impressed Picasso, is thought to have sprung from the fact that he didn’t really know how to paint. These are wishful thoughts – indeed they are misinterpretations – but they are bound to thrive, because the know-how of any art form takes determination to acquire. Even though nobody can expect to master, without years of practice, a performing art such as playing the piano, there will still be the wish that music itself might be composed by an ignoramus. Back in the 1960s, a period which was a heyday for charlatanry, there was a brief vogue for the concept of a ‘scratch orchestra’, whereby a lot of people who knew nothing about music, but quite liked the idea of being musicians, would sit down together and hum on kazoos while they hit tin cans with sticks. It all went on for an unspecified time but the audience left almost immediately. Only the performers wanted to be there: a bad sign.

  Scratch poetry is the kind of stuff that only its performers want to read. Nevertheless, despite conditions in which a limitless supply overwhelms an almost non-existent demand, the verbal waste paper piles up in drifts all over the world. For those who produce it, it answers a personal need. We must deduce that anything which stands out answers a need better than personal: it is something that has been put together so that it can exist by itself, and not just in reference to the person who signs it. Since there can be no putting together without technical assurance, technique will always be part of the poet’s schooling. But the option of playing hookey is always available; and afterwards there is an excellent chance that a show of technique will be taken for the real thing. The absconder from the classroom should be advised, however, that approximate rhymes and arbitrary rhythms will not make the attempt at a set form seem more casual. The only way to hide the tensions of a set form is to perfect it.

  A STRETCH OF VERSE

  A stretch of verse can have quite a high yield of quotable moments but we still might not think of it as being in one piece, as something coherent and ready to be recited or even learned by heart. This rule of thumb can be brutally dismissive, but all too often it meets the facts. Nobody except a prisoner serving a life sentence learns Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’ by heart. To think of it as the one thing, like any other poem you know and admire for itself, you would have to be sitting an examination. Yet it is well sprinkled with quotations. The distance between them gives us a measure of how long a stretch of verse can go on discouraging quotation without wrecking the poem in which it appears:

  The Rainbow comes and goes,

  And lovely is the Rose.

  Occurring in the poem’s second stanza, the line about the rainbow became famous enough to be raided, in the following century, for the title of a book by Lady Diana Cooper, The Rainbow Comes and Goes. Most people who bought the book would have known that it had a title from a poem, even if they didn’t know that the poem was by Wordsworth. But nothing as catchy shows up in the next stanza or the next. ‘Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song’ is so banal that it sounds Wordsworthian in the sense we have learned to dread, and ‘Land and sea / Give themselves up to jollity’ is of interest only because he is saying the world is merry while he isn’t. ‘I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!’ The tiptoed ecstasy would be pretty hard to bear if we didn’t suspect that he was preparing us for the revelation of a contrary mood lurking underneath. The mood breaks through with a quotable couplet:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  The Visionary Gleam has been borrowed for a book title on occasion, but to no very stunning effect. William Manchester did better with The Glory and the Dream, which he used as the title of his ‘Narrative History of America’. He would not have lifted the motto if it had not already become proverbial. The moment got into the language and so did several other of the poem’s moments, even if they were only a phrase long. The ‘Immortality Ode’ is the home of the phrase ‘the vision splendid’, and there is yet more splendour in the couplet that begins to sum up the poem near the end:

  Though nothing can bring back the hour

  Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

  The key phrase, a truly delicious mouthful, was the title of Elia Kazan’s big film of 1961, Splendor in the Grass; and it was thus, while watching Natalie Wood resisting the perils of sex with Warren Beatty, that I finally got interested in Wordsworth, after several years of being bored by him. In my experience, poetry often gets into the mind through a side entrance. When, as a student, I saw a production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in Sydney in the late fifties, I went home with my head ringing to the cadences not of Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic prose, but of Ernest Dowson’s lyric poetry, which is quoted often throughout the play, but could never be quoted often enough to suit me. ‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses,’ I told my bathroom mirror. Yes, it was Wordsworthian, but every phrase was begging to be said. Dowson liked to keep things short: short and tight.

  The ‘Immortality Ode’ is laid out like an essay. It has an argument, which can be paraphrased. But it also has moments that can’t, and as we read we find it hard to resist the conviction that those moments ought to be closer together. We tend to deduce that even a poem that is laid out like an essay is trying to be a short poem. It just might not have the wherewithal. This wish for the thing to be integrated by its intensity seems to be fundamental, although it might be wise to allow for the possibility that it has taken the whole of historic time for the wish to become so clear to us. Reading the Aeneid, you would like the whole thing to have the compact intensity of the Dido sequence. But that idea plainly never occurred to Dante, who worshipped Virgil; and still less could it have occurred to Virgil.

  •

  In 1813 Byron, still only twenty-five years old, wrote a letter to his protectress and surrogate mother Lady Melbourne which gives a strong hint of the kind of poet he would be when, in what we call his maturity – he was only in his thirties – he came to write his masterpiece Don Juan. In the letter he quotes a fragment of social verse which includes the couplet

  A King who can’t – a Prince of Wales who don’t –

  Patriots who shan’t – ministers who won’t –

  And then, straight afterward in the same letter, he tells her that she may read the couplet this way if she likes:

  A King who cannot – & a Prince who don’t –

  Patriots who would not – ministers who won’t –

  If we count syllables we find the second version smoother than the first. The point here is that Byron himself counted the syllables: he filled in the gaps to make the lines more fluently speakable. In that sense, he was a technical perfectionist from the beginning. It’s just sometimes hard to spot because he was so colloquial. In a letter to Henry Drury he mentioned ‘the floodgates of Colloquy’: fair evidence that he was attuned to the impetus of conversation. His best poetry is good talk based on knowledge, and even his finest poetic phr
ases are something he might have said. Certainly he might have written them in a letter, or in a journal. In the Alpine Journal of 1816 we find a glacier ‘like a frozen hurricane’. Armed with this triple ability to observe something, remember it, and turn it to poetic account, he had every right, in a letter to Leigh Hunt, to deplore Wordsworth’s tendency to make things up when he hadn’t seen them.

  •

  When he started off as a poet, Seamus Heaney had the inestimable advantage of having been born and raised where hard work was done. The textures and odours of the farm and dairy were in his blood, and they got into his first poetry as a seemingly inexhaustible supply of imagery. Later on, Heaney gave a lot of credit to Patrick Kavanagh as an influence, but it seems likely that he had it by nature, and had it to burn. When he described a spade digging into the peat, you could see it and hear it. In the long day’s work of churning butter, he could see the whole process with a specificity of memory that no literary description could have equalled, except perhaps his. Later on, as he got successful, his work was less impregnated with these memories, and some of us thought that he was running thin. If we were wise, we knew that it was only the difference between gold and beaten gold; and anyway, it wasn’t necessarily true. Occasionally he would put in a moment to remind you that his best poems had always been beyond mere notation. He could still do the grand metaphor. In his poem ‘Shore Woman’ he is out fishing for mackerel at night in a low boat when he and his friend suddenly realize they have company: