Early Writings Read online

bend out their wing-joints,

  Spread wet wings to the sun-film,

  And by Scios,

  to left of the Naxos7 passage,

  Naviform rock overgrown

  algae cling to its edge,

  There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,

  a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.

  The ship landed in Scios,

  men wanting spring-water,

  And by the rock-pool a young boy8 loggy with vine-must,

  “To Naxos? yes, we’ll take yuh to Naxos,

  Cum’ along lad.”

  “Not that way!”

  “Aye, that way is Naxos.”

  And I said: “It’s a straight ship.”

  And an ex-convict out of Italy

  knocked me into the fore-stays,

  (He was wanted for manslaughter in Tuscany)

  And the whole twenty against me,

  Mad for a little slave money.

  And they took her out of Scios

  And off her course ...

  And the boy came to again with the racket,

  And looked out over the bows,

  and to eastward, and to the Naxos passage.

  God-sleight then, god-sleight:

  Ship stock fast in sea-swirl,

  Ivy upon the oars, King Pentheus,9

  grapes with no seed but sea-foam,

  Ivy in scupper-hole

  Aye, I, Acoetes,10 stood there,

  and the god stood by me,

  Water cutting under the keel,

  Sea-break from stern forrards,

  wake running off from the bow,

  And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,

  And tenthril where cordage had been,

  grape-leaves on the rowlocks

  Heavy vine on the oarshafts,

  And, out of nothing, a breathing,

  hot breath on my ankles,

  Beasts like shadows in glass,

  a furred tail upon nothingness.

  Lynx-purr, and heathery smell of beasts,

  where tar smell had been,

  Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,

  eye-glitter out of black air,

  The sky overshot, dry, with no tempest,

  Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,

  fur brushing my knee-skin,

  Rustle of airy sheaths,

  dry forms in the aether,

  And the ship like a keel in ship-yard,

  slung like an ox in smith’s sling,

  Ribs stuck fast in the ways,

  grape-cluster over pin-rack,

  Void air taking pelt,

  Lifeless air become sinewed,

  feline leisure of panthers,

  Leopards sniffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole,

  Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,

  And the sea blue-deep about us,

  green-ruddy in shadows,

  And Lyaeus:11

  “From now, Acoetes, my altars,

  Fearing no bondage,

  fearing no cat of the wood,

  Safe with my lynxes,

  feeding grapes to my leopards,

  Olibanum12 is my incense,

  the vines grow in my homage.”

  The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains,

  Black snout of a porpoise

  where Lycabs13 had been,

  Fish-scales on the oarsmen.

  And I worship.

  I have seen what I have seen.

  When they brought the boy I said:

  “He has a god in him,

  though I do not know which god,”

  And they kicked me into the fore-stays,

  And I was frightened,

  but I am not afraid any longer,

  I have seen what I have seen:

  Medon’s face like the face of a dory,14

  Arms shrunk into fins.

  And you, Pentheus,

  Had as well listen to Tiresias,15 and to Cadmus,16

  or your luck will go out of you.

  Fish-scales over groin muscles,

  lynx-purr amid sea ...

  And of a later year,

  pale in the wine-red algae,

  If you will lean over the rock,

  the coral face under wave-tinge,

  Rose-paleness under water-shift,

  Ileuthyeria fair Dafne17 of sea-bords,

  The swimmer’s arms turned to branches,

  Who will say in what year,

  fleeing what band of tritons,

  The smooth brows, seen, and half seen,

  now ivory stillness.

  And So-shu18 churned in the sea, So-shu also,

  using the long moon for a churn-stick ...

  Lithe turning of water,

  sinews of Poseidon,

  Black-azure and hyaline,

  glass wave over Tyro,

  Close cover,

  unstillness,

  bright welter of wave-cords,

  Then quiet water,

  quiet in the buff sands,

  Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints,

  splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows

  In the wave-runs by the half-dune;

  Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,

  pallor of Hesperus,19

  Grey peak of the wave,

  wave, colour of grape’s pulp,

  Olive grey in the near,

  far, smoke-grey of the rock-slide.

  Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk

  cast grey shadows in water,

  The tower like a one-eyed great goose

  cranes up out of the olive-grove,

  And we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus20

  in the smell of hay under the olive-trees.

  And the frogs singing against the fauns

  in the half-light.

  PROSE

  WHAT I FEEL ABOUT WALT WHITMAN

  From this side of the Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and—if it be permitted a man of my scant years-my world citizenship: I see him America’s poet. The only Poet before the artists of the Carmen-Hovey period,1 or better, the only one of the conventionally recognised ‘American Poets’ who is worth reading.

  He is America. His crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America. He is the hollow place in the rock that echoes with his time. He does ‘chant the crucial stage’ and he is the ‘voice triumphant’. He is disgusting. He is an exceedingly nauseating pill, but he accomplishes his mission.

  Entirely free from the renaissance humanist ideal of the complete man or from the Greek idealism, he is content to be what he is, and he is his time and his people. He is a genius because he has vision of what he is and of his function. He knows that he is a beginning and not a classically finished work.

  I honour him for he prophesied me while I can only recognise him as a forebear of whom I ought to be proud.

  In America there is much for the healing of the nations, but woe unto him of the cultured palate who attempts the dose.

  As for Whitman, I read him (in many parts) with acute pain, but when I write of certain things I find myself using his rhythms. The expression of certain things related to cosmic consciousness seems tainted with this maramis.

  I am (in common with every educated man) an heir of the ages and I demand my birth-right. Yet if Whitman represented his time in language acceptable to one accustomed to my standard of intellectual-artistic living he would belie his time and nation. And yet I am but one of his ‘ages and ages’ encrustations’ or to be exact an encrustation of the next age. The vital part of my message, taken from the sap and fibre of America, is the same as his.

  Mentally I am a Walt Whitman who has learned to wear a collar and a dress shirt (although at times inimical to both). Personally I might be very glad to conceal my relationship to my spiritual father and brag about my more congenial ancestry—Dante, Shakespeare, Theocritus, Villon, but the descent is a bit difficult to establish. And, to be frank, Whitman is
to my fatherland (Patriam quam odi et amo2 for no uncertain reasons) what Dante is to Italy and I at my best can only be a strife for a renaissance in America of all the lost or temporarily mislaid beauty, truth, valour, glory of Greece, Italy, England and all the rest of it.

  And yet if a man has written lines like Whitman’s to the Sunset Breeze one has to love him. I think we have not yet paid enough attention to the deliberate artistry of the man, not in details but in the large.

  I am immortal even as he is, yet with a lesser vitality as I am the more in love with beauty (If I really do love it more than he did). Like Dante he wrote in the ‘vulgar tongue’, in a new metric. The first great man to write in the language of his people.

  Et ego Petrarca in lingua vetera scribo, and in a tongue my people understood not.

  It seems to me I should like to drive Whitman into the old world. I sledge, he drill—and to scourge America with all the old beauty. (For Beauty is an accusation) and with a thousand thongs from Homer to Yeats, from Theocritus to Marcel Schwob.3 This desire is because I am young and impatient, were I old and wise I should content myself in seeing and saying that these things will come. But now, since I am by no means sure it would be true prophecy, I am fain set my own hand to the labour.

  It is a great thing, reading a man to know, not ‘His Tricks are not as yet my Tricks, but I can easily make them mine’ but ‘His message is my message. We will see that men hear it.’

  THE WISDOM OF POETRY

  A book which was causing some clatter about a year ago, and which has been mercifully forgotten, a book displaying considerable vigorous, inaccurate thought, fathomless ignorance, and no taste whatever, claimed, among other things less probable, that it presented the first ‘scientific and satisfactory definition of poetry’. The definition ran as follows: ‘Poetry is the expression of insensuous thought in sensuous terms by means of artistic trope, and the dignification of thought by analogically articulated imagery.’ The word ‘artistic’ remains undefined and we have, therefore, one unknown thing defined in terms of another unknown thing of similar nature; a mode of definition neither ‘scientific’ nor ‘satisfactory’-even though one should agree with the dogma of trope.

  There follows this ‘more extended definition’: ‘Poetry is the expression of imaginative thought by means only of the essentials to thought, conserving energy for thought perception—to which end all animate, inanimate and intangible things may assume the properties and attributes of tangible, living, thinking and speaking things, possessing the power of becoming what they seem, or of transfiguration into what they suggest.’

  This is applicable in part to the equations of analytics, in toto to painting, sculpture and certain other arts; for it is nonsense to consider words as the only ‘essentials to thought’; some people think in terms of objects themselves, some in pictures, diagrams, or in musical sounds, and perception by symbolic vision is swifter and more complex than that by ratiocination.

  Throughout the volume our scientist shows himself incapable of distinguishing between poetry and a sort of florid rhetorical bombast, but the definitions quoted do not suffice to prove his ignorance of his subject. They betray rather his confused mode of thought and his nescience of the very nature of definition. I shall assume that any definition to be ‘scientific’ or ‘satisfactory’ should have at least four parts; it should define with regard to: purpose or function; to relation; to substance; to properties.

  Poetry, as regards its function or purpose, has the common purpose of the arts, which purpose Dante most clearly indicates in the line where he speaks of:

  That melody which most doth draw

  The soul unto itself.

  Borrowing a terminology from Spinoza, we might say: The function of an art is to free the intellect from the tyranny of the affects, or, leaning on terms, neither technical nor metaphysical: the function of an art is to strengthen the perceptive faculties and free them from encumbrance, such encumbrances, for instance, as set moods, set ideas, conventions; from the results of experience which is common but unnecessary, experience induced by the stupidity of the experiencer and not by inevitable laws of nature. Thus Greek sculpture freed men’s minds from the habit of considering the human body merely with regard to its imperfections. The Japanese grotesque frees the mind from the conception of things merely as they have been seen. With the art of Beardsley,1 we enter the realm of pure intellect; the beauty of the work is wholly independent of the appearance of the things portrayed. With Rembrandt we are brought to consider the exact nature of things seen, to consider the individual face, not the conventional or type face which we may have learned to expect on canvas.

  Poetry is identical with the other arts in this main purpose, that is, of liberation; it differs from them in its media, to wit, words as distinct from pigment, pure sound, clay and the like. It shares its media with music in so far as words are composed of inarticulate sounds.

  Our scientist reaching toward a truth speaks of ‘the essentials to thought’; these are not poetry, but a constituent substance of poetry.

  The Art of Poetry consists in combining these ‘essential to thought’, these dynamic particles, si licet, this radium, with that melody of words which shall most draw the emotions of the hearer toward accord with their import, and with that ‘form’ which shall most delight the intellect.

  By ‘melody’ I mean variation of sound quality, mingling with a variation of stress. By ‘form’ I mean the arrangement of the verse [sic], into ballades, canzoni, and the like symmetrical forms, or into blank verse or into free verse, where presumably, the nature of the thing expressed or of the person supposed to be expressing it, is antagonistic to external symmetry. Form may delight by its symmetry or by its aptness.

  The methods of this fusing, tempering and shaping concern the artist; the results alone are of import to the public.

  Poets in former ages were of certain uses to the community; i.e., as historians, genealogists, religious functionaries. In Provence the gai savoir was both theatre and opera. The troubadour and jongleur 2 were author, dramatist, composer, actor and popular tenor. In Tuscany the canzone and the sonnet held somewhat the place of the essay and the short story. Elizabethan drama appeared at a time when it was a society fad to speak beautifully. Has the poet, apart from these obsolete and accidental uses, any permanent function in society? I attempt the following scientific answers:

  Thought is perhaps important to the race, and language, the medium of thought’s preservation, is constantly wearing out. It has been the function of poets to new-mint the speech, to supply the vigorous terms for prose. Thus Tacitus is full of Vergilian half lines; and poets may be ‘kept on’ as conservators of the public speech, or prose, perhaps, becoming more and more an art, may become, or may have become already, self-sustaining.

  As the poet was, in ages of faith, the founder and emendor of all religions, so, in ages of doubt, is he the final agnostic; that which the philosopher presents as truth, the poet presents as that which appears as truth to a certain sort of mind under certain conditions.

  ‘To thine own self be true....’ were nothing were it not spoken by Polonius, who has never called his soul his own.

  The poet is consistently agnostic in this; that he does not postulate his ignorance as a positive thing. Thus his observations rest as the enduring data of philosophy. He grinds an axe for no dogma. Now that mechanical science has realised his ancient dreams of flight and sejunct communication, he is the advance guard of the psychologist on the watch for new emotions, new vibrations sensible to faculties as yet ill understood. As Dante writes of the sunlight coming through the clouds from a hidden source and illuminating part of a field, long before the painters had depicted such effects of light and shade, so are later watchers on the alert for colour perceptions of a subtler sort, neither affirming them to be ‘astral’ or ‘spiritual’ nor denying the formulae of theosophy. The traditional methods are not antiquated, nor are poets necessarily the atavisms which they
seem. Thus poets may be retained as friends of this religion of doubt, but the poet’s true and lasting relation to literature and life is that of the abstract mathematician to science and life. As the little world of abstract mathematicians is set a-quiver by some young Frenchman’s deductions on the functions of imaginary values—worthless to applied science of the day—so is the smaller world of serious poets set a-quiver by some new subtlety of cadence. Why?

  A certain man named Plarr3 and another man whose name I have forgotten, some years since, developed the functions of a certain obscure sort of equation, for no cause save their own pleasure in the work. The applied science of their day had no use for the deductions, a few sheets of paper covered with arbitrary symbols—without which we should have no wireless telegraph.

  What the analytical geometer does for space and form, the poet does for the states of consciousness. Let us therefore consider the nature of the formulae of analytics.

  By the signs a2+b2 = c2, I imply the circle. By (a-r)2 + (b-r)2=(c-r)2, I imply the circle and its mode of birth. I am led from the consideration of the particular circles formed by my ink-well and my table-rim, to the contemplation of the circle absolute, its law; the circle free in all space, unbounded, loosed from the accidents of time and place. Is the formula nothing, or is it cabala and the sign of unintelligible magic? The engineer, understanding and translating to the many, builds for the uninitiated bridges and devices. He speaks their language. For the initiated the signs are a door into eternity and into the boundless ether.

  As the abstract mathematician is to science so is the poet to the world’s consciousness. Neither has direct contact with the many, neither of them is superhuman or arrives at his utility through occult and inexplicable ways. Both are scientifically demonstrable.

  PSYCHOLOGY AND TROUBADOURS

  A DIVAGATION1 FROM QUESTIONS OF TECHNIQUE