Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  In a similar way, the language of the ‘Little Gidding’ passage seeks for things which ‘men of various races and lands could think together’; it tends to eschew the local, the intimate, the word which reeks of particular cultural attachments, and opts instead for words like ‘unappeased and peregrine’, ‘impelled’, ‘expiring’, ‘conscious impotence’, ‘laceration’, ‘re-enactment’, ‘exercise of virtue’, ‘exasperated’, ‘valediction’. Indeed, at its most primitive and dialect moment, the moment in the animal heat of the byre at milking time, it interposes the smooth and decorous and monosyllabic noun, ‘pail’, as if to distance us from the raucous and parochial energies of the usual ‘bucket’.

  All this, of course, reinforces one of our perennial expectations from art, that it deliver what Sir Philip Sidney called a ‘golden world’ to defy the ‘brazen world’ of nature, that it offer us ideal melodies which transcend and to some extent rebuke the world of sensual music. This hankering for a purely delineated realm of wisdom and beauty sometimes asks literature to climb the stair of transcendence and give us images free from the rag-and-bone-shop reek of time and place. Such an ambition is best served by a language which gives the illusion of an authority and a purity beyond dialect and tribe, and it is Eliot’s achievement in his Dantean stanzas to create just such an illusion of oracular authority by the hypnotic deployment of a vocabulary that is highly latinate.

  The essay on Dante was written six years after the appearance of The Waste Land, a poem which arose from personal breakdown and a vision of decline and disintegration in the Europe that was once called Christendom. By the 1940s, however, Eliot was composing his soul rather than rendering images of its decomposition. His critical concerns were less with the strictly verbal and technical aspects of poetry, more with the philosophical and religious significances which could be drawn from it and relied upon. The essay on Dante, in fact, ends up as an essay about conversion, and understandably so, since at the time the intellectual mysteryman from Missouri was mutating into the English vestryman. In the essay Eliot is concerned, among other things, with Dante’s concentration upon states of purgation and beatitude, his allegorical method, his system of beliefs, even his love of pageantry (corresponding to ‘the serious pageants of royalty, of the Church, of military funerals’) and these concerns are symptomatic of his own concerns in 1929. He ends with an evocation of the world of the Vita Nuova, of the necessary attempt, ‘as difficult and hard as rebirth’, to enter it, and bows out with the declaration that ‘there is almost a definite moment of acceptance when the New Life begins’.

  It is curious that this born-again Anglican and monarchist did not make more of the political Dante, the dreamer of a world obedient to the spiritual authority of an uncorrupt Papacy and under the sway of a just emperor, where, without bitterness or compromise, Christ and Caesar would be hand in glove. But perhaps we are meant to deduce this Dante from that praise of ‘universal language’, the Tuscan speech which transcended its local habitation because of its roots in classical and ecclesiastical Latin. Eliot’s joy in praising this lucid European instrument springs from his joy in a writer who speaks not just as himself but as ‘the whole mind of Europe’. By contrast, poets of other European tongues, because they work farther from the pure Latin source, are condemned to a more opaque idiom and a less than central relevance.

  To clinch this argument, Eliot takes those lines of Shakespeare’s where Duncan is introduced to Macbeth’s castle, lines full of air and light, and contrasts them with the opening lines of the Commedia. More is lost, he maintains, in translating Shakespeare than in translating Dante. ‘How can a foreigner find words to convey in his own language just that combination of intelligibility and remoteness that we get in many phrases of Shakespeare?’

  This guest of summer

  The temple-haunting martlet, does approve

  By his loved masonry that the heaven’s breath

  Smells wooingly here: no jutty, frieze,

  Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird

  Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle:

  Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed

  The air is delicate.

  Agreed. This English is erotic and feels for warmer and quicker nubs and joints of speech, and as it forages its voice cannot quite maintain its civil blandishment but lapses into a muttering urgency in ‘jutty’ and ‘buttress’, rather like an excited Mellors slipping into dialect. The poetry, in other words, is to a large extent in the phonetics, in the way the English words waft and disseminate their associations, the flitting of the swallow being airily present in phrases like ‘they most breed and haunt’ and ‘the air is delicate’, while the looming stone architecture is conjured by the minatory solidity of terms like ‘masonry’ and ‘buttress’.

  Yet if we look at the opening lines of Dante’s poem again, we might ask ourselves if the Italian is so essentially different in its operation. Eliot would have us take this as a clean lexical exercise, devoid of any local self-consciousness, and indeed the ghosts of first declension Latin nouns stand in the open doors of the Italian vowels like sponsors of the much sought universality:

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  che la diritta via era smarrita.

  ‘Nostra vita’, ‘una selva oscura’, ‘la diritta via’: we are in earshot not only of the Vatican hut also of the Capitol; and out of that common murmur one voice begins to emerge, the voice of Virgil, a prophetic figure in the medieval mind, the pagan precursor of the Christian dispensation, the poet who had envisaged in an eclogue the world of allegory and encyclical in which Dante had his being. As the great poet of the Latin language, Virgil can walk naturally out of the roots of this Tuscan speech, a figure of completely exemplary force. Virgil comes to Dante, in fact, as Dante comes to Eliot, a master, a guide and authority, offering release from the toils and snares of the self, from the diserta, the waste land. Ladies and leopards begin to appear in Eliot’s poems of the late 1920s; the hushed and fragrant possibilities of a heavenly order which we hear in canto 2 of the Inferno are overheard in sections 2 and 4 of ‘Ash-Wednesday’; the soul’s journey as outlined by Marco Lombardo in canto 16 of the Purgatorio is rehearsed in ‘Animula’.

  It is a moment of crisis, of turning towards and of turning away, when the converting Eliot begins to envy the coherence and certitude, the theological, philosophical, and linguistic harmonies available to his great predecessor. Shakespeare he admires, yes, but does not envy. Shakespeare’s venturesome, humanist genius, his Elizabethan capacity for provisional and glamorous accommodations between faiths and doubts, his opportunistic dash through the high world of speculation and policy, still fresh from the folk-speech and hedge-school of the shires, all this disruptive, unaligned cognition and explorativeness is by now, for Eliot, suspect. It is the symptom of a breakdown which, during his own lifetime, had come out of potential and into the historical convulsion of the First World War and its disillusioned aftermath.

  But when he makes Dante’s confident and classically ratified language bear an almost allegorical force, he does less than justice to the untamed and thoroughly parochial elements which it possesses. To listen to Eliot, one would almost be led to forget that Dante’s great literary contribution was to write in the vernacular and thereby to give the usual language its head:

  Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  che la diritta via era smarrita.

  Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura

  esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

  che nel pensier rinova la paura!

  ‘Smarrita’. The Concise Cambridge Italian Dictionary gives ‘smarrire, to mislay; to lose; to mislead; to bewilder’, yet each of these English equivalents strikes me as less particular, less urgently local than the Italian word, which has all the force of dirt hitting a windscreen. Eliot underplays the swarming, mobbish eleme
nt in the Italian, which can be just as ‘selvaggia e aspra e forte’ as the dark wood itself. Say those first two adjectives aloud and then decide whether they call up the refined urbs or the rough-spoken rus. ‘Selva selvaggia’ is as barbarous as Hopkins, ‘aspra e forte’ less suggestive of the composure of the classics than of the struggle with the undergrowth. Dante may be writing about a mid-life crisis within the terms of the allegory, but he is also writing about panic, that terror we experience in the presence of the god Pan, numen of the woods.

  Eliot was recreating Dante in his own image. He had always taken what he needed from the work and at this stage what he needed was a way of confirming himself as a poet ready to submit his intelligence and sensibility to a framework of beliefs which were inherited and communal. The poet of distress had come to stress the need for acceptance. The poet who earlier in his career could inhabit the phantasmagoria of canto 3 of the Inferno, that region populated by hollow men, flibbertigibbets blown about after wheeling contradictory standards, whispering together in quiet and meaningless voices, that poet would now be reborn as the alien judging figure who walks among them, the thoroughly human presence who casts a shadow and displaces water when he steps into Charon’s boat.

  It is instructive to compare Dante’s influence upon The Waste Land and upon the poem published nearly twenty years later. In the earlier work, the Commedia provided Eliot with a theatre of dreams and gave permission for the symbolist arbitrariness of oneiric passages such as the famous ending of ‘The Burial of the Dead’, a scene which provides a striking contrast with the London passage in ‘Little Gidding’. The influence of the Inferno is found not just in the famous echo of the line from canto 3 about the great multitude of the dead, nor in the shocking confrontation with Stetson, a revenant from the sinister past. It is also to be found in the sense of bewilderment and somnambulism, of being caught in a flow of energies that go their predestined and doomed ways, of losing direction in a foggy populous drift:

  Unreal City,

  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

  I had not thought death had undone so many.

  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!

  You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

  That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

  Has it begun to sprout?’

  Here Dante was actually giving Eliot the freedom to surrender to the promptings of his own unconscious, and the language is more allied to the Shakespearean-local-associative than to the latinate-classical-canonical. For the moment, the imagination is in thrall to romantic expressionism, bewildered on the flood of its own inventiveness.

  Twenty years later, things have changed. In the ‘Little Gidding’ scene, the consecutive thought, the covenant between verse and argument, the tone of gravity and seniority all reflect a rebirth out of the romance of symbolism into the stricter disciplines of philosophia and religious orthodoxy. The definitive Dante of the 1929 essay and the definitive Eliot of Four Quartets have established a mutually fortifying alliance. The Dante whom Eliot now prefers and expounds walks in the aura of cultural history and representativeness. He is a figure in whom the commentaries on the Commedia are implicit; he stands for the thoroughly hierarchical world of scholastic thought, an imagined standard against which the relativity and agnosticism of the present can be judged. For all his talk about Dante’s visual imagination – an imagination which sees visions – Eliot’s ultimate attraction is to the way Dante could turn values and judgements into poetry, the way the figure of the poet as thinker and teacher merged into the figure of the poet as expresser of a universal myth that could unify the abundance of the inner world and the confusion of the outer. There is a stern and didactic profile to this Dante and as Eliot embraces a religious faith he turns towards that profile and would recreate it in his own work.

  *

  During the 1930s, while Eliot was putting the finishing touches to his classical monument, an image of Dante as seer and repository of tradition, another poet was busy identifying Dante not with the inheritance of culture but with the processes of nature, making him a precursor of the experimental and unnerving poetry of Arthur Rimbaud rather than an heir to the Virgilian gravitas. Osip Mandelstam’s Dante is the most eager, the most inspiring, the most delightfully approachable recreation we could hope for and what I want to do next is to indulge in what Mandelstam says Dante indulges in, ‘an orgy of quotations’. These all come from his indispensable essay, ‘Conversation about Dante’, never published in Russia in his lifetime but available in English translation in The Complete Prose and Letters of Osip Mandelstam. The quotations are not in the order in which they appear in the essay, which is a tumultuous affair anyhow, but I have arranged them to give a contrast to Eliot and to suggest the unpredictable intuitive nature of Mandelstam’s genius:

  For how many centuries have people been talking and writing about Dante as if he had expressed his thoughts directly on official paper? … Dante is discussed as if he had the completed whole before his eyes even before he had begun work and as if he had utilized the technique of moulage, first casting in plaster, then in bronze.

  The process of creating this poem’s form transcends our conceptions of literary invention and composition. It would be more correct to recognize instinct as its guiding principle … Only through metaphor is it possible to find a concrete sign to represent the instinct for form creation by which Dante accumulated and poured forth his terza rima.

  We must try to imagine, therefore, how bees might have worked at this thirteen-thousand-faceted form, bees endowed with the brilliant stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and greater numbers as they were required. The work of these bees, constantly keeping their eye on the whole, is of varying difficulty at different stages of the process. Their cooperation expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually emerges out of itself.

  When I began to study Italian and had barely familiarized myself with its phonetics and prosody, I suddenly understood that the center of gravity of my speech efforts had been moved closer to my lips, to the outer parts of my mouth. The tip of the tongue suddenly turned out to have the seat of honor. The sound rushed toward the locking of the teeth. And something else that struck me was the infantile aspect of Italian phonetics, its beautiful child-like quality, its closeness to infant babbling, to some kind of eternal dadaism.

  It seems to me that Dante made a careful study of all speech defects, listening closely to stutterers and lispers, to nasal twangs and inarticulate pronunciations, and that he learned much from them.

  I would very much like to speak about the auditory coloration of canto 32 of the Inferno.

  A peculiar labial music: ‘abbo’ – ‘gabbo’ – ‘babbo’ – ‘Tebe’ – ‘plebe’ – ‘zebba’ – ‘converebbe.’ It’s as if a nurse had participated in the creation of phonetics. Now the lips protrude in a childish manner, now they extend into a proboscis.

  Precisely those who are furthest from Dante’s method in European poetry and, bluntly speaking, in polar opposition to him, go by the name Parnassians: Heredia, Leconte de Lisle. Baudelaire is much closer. Verlaine is still closer, but the closest of all the French poets is Arthur Rimbaud. Dante is by his very nature one who shakes up meaning and destroys the integrity of the image. The composition of his cantos resembles an airline schedule or the indefatigable flights of carrier pigeons.

  Mandelstam’s Dante is more like Eliot’s Shakespeare: he is not distinguished by his cultural representativeness, his conservative majesty or his intellectual orthodoxy. Rather,
he is fastened upon and shaken into new and disconcerting life as an exemplar of the purely creative, intimate, and experimental act of writing itself. This Dante is essentially lyric; he is stripped of the robes of commentary in which he began to vest himself with his epistle to Can Grande, reclaimed from the realm of epic and allegory and made to live as the epitome of a poet’s creative excitement. Which is not to say, of course, that Mandelstam is not alive to the historical and literary contexts in which Dante wrote, what he calls the great ‘keyboard of references’; but what Mandelstam emphasizes, and what is invaluable in his emphasis, is the thrilling fact that, in the words of W. H. Auden, poetic composition probably feels much the same in the twentieth century AD as it did in the twentieth century BC.

  Eliot and Pound envied Dante and to some extent imitated him in the forms and procedures of their poems. Pound’s Cantos are the great epic homage in English in this century, too large a subject to address here, but they too sway to the authority of Dante the historian, Dante the encyclopaedic mind, the plunderer and harbourer of classical and medieval learning. The Cantos are intent upon repeating the Commedia’s synoptic feats of inclusion and correspondence; the gigantic is what both attracts and finally daunts Pound – and his reader as well, it could be said. The two Americans at once restored and distanced Dante in the English speaking literary mind because they both suggested what Mandelstam was at pains to mock, that Dante’s poem was written on official paper. They came to Dante early, as students; as young men, they studied him in an academic context; they wore his poem like a magic garment to protect themselves from the contagion of parochial English and American culture; and finally they canonized him as the aquiline patron of international modernism.