In 1934 Messrs Macmillan published among their shilling series of 'Contemporary poets' Poems, by W. G. Golding. It ran to thirty-four pages and the verses ranged from four lines to twenty-eight. Today, in 1981, the book has been on offer in the United States at 4,000 dollars. This is nothing but value by association.
I have had a lifelong love of rhythm, sound, and in particular, rhyme. At my dame school there was a thing called 'recitation' where each age, from six to ten years old, stood up in turn and said the piece they had learnt by rote. I learnt everybody else's piece as well as my own, by listening. I had in a developed degree the 'flypaper memory' of childhood and never forgot what I had heard once. I had, too, a direct appreciation that verse was an important deed, though of course I never thought to formulate the feeling and probably could not have done so. Doctor Foster went to Gloucester and it was deliriously funny that he should take that name to that place, and quite appropriate that he should step into a puddle deeper than puddle ever was in a world gone clownish. And then—Boot, saddle, to horse and away was more of a rush than Brooklands, or fighter planes flying at more than a hundred miles an hour. Then, Who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge? I knew that I wouldn't stand on either hand but I could recognize and enjoy someone else's courage.
And so on. Of course the change came with the ugly word, that rearrangement of personality, additions of emotion, perception, joy, pain. Poetry began to speak to the whole man, or boy, rather. My first adult appreciation at thirteen or fourteen was of the more accessible sonnets of Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee of course and perhaps another half a dozen, together with the songs. I began to scribble after that—scribble at verse, I mean, for I had always been a scribbler of prose.
These verses were bits of lyric. I had a Wordsworthian belief in the primacy of the lyric. The lyric could be short and simple—the simpler the better. It is easier, on the whole, to read the poetry of a European language than its prose. Except in aberrations like metaphysical poetry the ideas, proclamations, celebrations, invocations, are not confused and detained by any close reasoning.
I quite early came to understand that poetry was a matter of what I will call interior stance. A man was either swept into that stance or willed himself into it. It might be called, in the case of the adolescent lyricist, the vocative stance. In my own case the oh's and ah's were fervent. Nevertheless, though Wordsworth would have condemned my habit of invoking the mighty dead rather than the living, he would have recognized the stance as would most of the romantics. It was to be many years later that I read and at last understood Cleanth Brooks's assessment of the stance where he points out how narrowly it limited the feelings and subjects thought worthy of poetry.
What had I that gave me any genuine relationship to the job? It was a small thing, I believe and not altogether helpful. I passionately enjoyed, lengthily savoured the phrase. It might not be a jewel five words long and was more likely to be two words only, a noun with attendant adjective. It would be a phrase that recreated by some magic the phenomenon that lay under its hand. This kind of phrase was the opposite of the Homeric epithet, which having done its first work of evocation was thereafter repeated as a moment of rest for the listener and was finally assimilated to the noun and became an accepted part of it. My phrases were not repeated—multitudinous sea, ανήριθμoν γέλασμα, sable muet, dew-dabbled poppies! These were (and are) more precious than stamps or birds' eggs or crystals or jewels. Out of Thyrsis whose sweet art hath oft delayed the huddling brook to hear his madrigale, my ear and eye and imagination took 'huddling brook' and saw (as it still sees) the very thing conjured by the words.
Let me call such a phrase a 'unit'. The capacity to invent a unit which was at first sight an advantage was in fact a hindrance when I came to essay extended verses. The verses tended to huddle like the brook rather than flow. They became so dense as to be opaque. They clotted rather than formed round the unit. Combined with the vocative stance they permitted no more than a brief comment on some idea so approachable, so universal as to be commonplace. Spring is coming or here or over, winter is about somewhere, how sweetly sad autumn is, how heavy summer by comparison. I was conscious that I said nothing but was uneasily preoccupied with how I said it.
Now this was particularly difficult at a time when—whether the word was current or not—a poet was supposed to be closely 'engaged' to social questions. I was quite disengaged, bar a very mild feeling which I got from my parents that the Labour Party was Our Side. I lacked the generosity of spirit that would give all—not merely life but writing too!—for the betterment of mankind. I was stuck with the unit. Even to think of getting the two words apart for alternative use in the same poem created in me a sympathetic muscular tension as if I were using chest developers. Indeed, to tear them apart would have violated the only thing I had. What was lacking in me—though I may have developed it later—was a certain mobility of outlook, the power to walk round the back and see the thing from the other side, to walk away from and see it in relation to what was all around. I could see what short verses were but not what by alteration and perhaps extension they might become. I lacked the attitude of the chess master, who, finding a good move, is not content, but looks for a better one. I have always been a curious mixture of conservative and anarchist. Translated into an attitude towards verse-making, this means either being content with a minimal result or destroying the thing petulantly.
Today, some of my units seem less jewels than pebbles; but after all, a pebble is a jewel of a sort. To take an example, the phrase 'twisted violets' seemed to me to have the proper magical immediacy of evocation though it has not much power over my mind now. If there is a concordance to the sort of poetry which contents adolescents I might well find that the phrase was not my own for such associations of adjective and noun stick subliminally like advertisements. I search my mind for a few moments and come up with violet-embroidered dale, sweet as Cytherea's eyelids, and the year's first violet white and lonely though there must be hundreds more. Perhaps I was the first who ever put twisted and violet together!
This preoccupation with the minutiae of the craft was interrupted and now and then subsumed in another experience more like true eloquence—not I mean in value but in method. There were moments when a positive and coherent thought rose up with emotion and brought both rhyme and metre—it seemed in that order—to the surface of my mind. It was my first meeting with the mystery of the mind as not so much giving to airy nothing a local habitation as creating out of airy nothing. It was the unconscious (of which I had not heard) triggered by emotion—hardly to be distinguished from the involuntary phrases, ejaculations, admonishments, prayers, runes and spells that can be heard from the lips of a man talking, as we say, to himself. I will make a watery comparison and liken myself to a pipe furred with phrases that occasionally allowed squirts of liquid past to demonstrate that the tube was almost wholly blocked.
Clearly, if the cork could be taken out or the fur removed there would be some flow. I experienced it once, a remarkable example of how pure the flow could be—pure, as it were, in terms of hydrodynamics rather than in the intrinsic value of the resultant fluid. I wanted to go back to Cornwall and the sea but was in Wiltshire. While walking on the Marlborough Downs where now there is a memorial stone to Edward Thomas, Alfred Williams, the 'railway poet', and Charles Hamilton Sorley, I saw what was rare in those days, a seagull come swooping down along the wind. I was fourteen or thereabouts. With the sight there rose in my mind as an automatic expression of what I felt, the following rhymes. They have their absurdities of course but they show that the flow was there.
Across the sunlit downs the west wind sings
Its ocean melodies. I stand and see
You wheel the white flash of your long, swift wings
And for this moment being I am free:
As one who holds a shell against his ear
And listens rapt until the sullen roar
Seems in his soul to echo faint and clear
The slow surf-murmur of a distant shore.
Memory, of course, was working overtime. I have heard somewhere else of a man who held a shell to his ear and 'for this moment being' is no more than a filler, like 'as of this moment in time'. Yet the flow was there.
I knew even then, how strong in me would be the impulse to rewrite in an inferior manner the more accessible romantics. Uneasily I wrote my seagull lines down, not daring to alter a word—I have not done so now—although I understood their imperfection. Uneasily as time passed and I fiddled with my two word phrases—my units—I saw the engagement of my contemporaries move farther and farther away from what was important to me. I had no interest in politics, none in the USSR, none whatever in tractors. I felt the whole generous movement was wrong but knew that I could not be right. One solitary adolescent! And yet—
The trouble of course was Tennyson. I devoured him and had done so right back to the time when as a seven-year-old I had taken home 'hafaleeg hafaleeg hafaleegonward' as some wonderful stuff the seniors had learnt. As an adolescent I fell for splendour falls and willows whiten and now sleeps the crimson petal. Only Come down O maid from yonder mountain height troubled me. I knew the poem faced the wrong way for all its verbal magnificence—I knew that even if someone could not glide a meteor by the blasted pine he should not persuade someone else from that height or let on he could not reach it himself. Besides, Tennyson, I knew, was out. As a child, boy, adolescent, young man, I still loved him in the face of all criticism. I knew his deficiencies. It will be a bleak world when we love nothing but perfection. I could understand Tennyson, readily enough, since after a brilliant boyhood he never again got his intellectual feet wet. He was wholly accessible. He was a master of the phrase but spread his thought nearly as thin as Swinburne did. His stance was more rigid even than mine. His instinct was to keep things as they were. In a word, he was bourgeois, which as much as anything else was why he was out. I was not to know how often he would be in and out during my lifetime.
Like Tennyson I lacked intellectual mobility or if I had any intellect and mobility I was too lazy to use it. I went on writing my sub-Thomas, sub-Keats verses. I fashioned them as if from precious metal. The eloquence of immediacy appeared less and less often. It came sometimes in moments of savage contempt, as when I heard people lusting after murder cases and executions. I acquired a mass of odds and ends in the way of verse. I moved from school to university, still young for my age and ineffably naive. The flow seemed heavily blocked.
Yet there was a pressure somewhere. I can be sure of that because of an experience analogous to the one with the seagull which I only now recall to mind after a lapse of exactly fifty years. In my first year at Oxford I met a man who dabbled in hypnotism. I was eager for any experience that would release me from an increasingly grey daylight and from the labs where the frogs twitched and the rabbits' guts swelled in the hot summer humidity. I embraced his proposal that he should hypnotise me and he made his passes. I knew it was no good but pretended in a curious way which I think must apply to all subjects under hypnotism—a cooperation and a pretence that was only half a pretence. When the light of the room became normal again I saw that my acquaintance was looking pale. I raised my eyebrows at him. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief which I remember was rather dirty.
'It was like a chapter of the old testament.'
I never saw him again.
A friend lent me a typewriter. Another sent a sheaf of my verses to the publisher. They were not the ones I would have chosen, merely those to hand which I had already typed. I received a letter from a Captain Macmillan offering me five pounds and a place among my contemporaries, Yvonne ffrench, Hugh Macdiarmid, T. W. Ramsey, R. C. Trevelyan, Norman C. Yendell. I kept the secret and waited for the day of publication, like Peacock's Mr Skythrop and like Skythrop was disappointed, for of course nothing happened. My experience was that of tens of thousands of other would-be poets. I sent off a second collection of verses written since the others and also including many that had missed the first volume but Captain Macmillan was no longer interested. He may well have been right.
聚合中文网 阅读好时光 www.juhezwn.com
小提示:漏章、缺章、错字过多试试导航栏右上角的源