Essay IX. The Excogitation,
‘But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot.’ Gen. viii.9.
THE INTRODUCTION.
What is blank verse may you freely ask,
Is it something alike the old prose?
With a comma here, a full stop there.
A marking a rhythmless sentence?
No, very nay, it is an isthmus
(That is, a narrow stretch of land
Gently accept the helping hand,
Though it satisfy the helper more,
Like a grunting pig in a trough,
Than it help the aided abetted poor
Who, by a conceivèd weakness conceived
In the mind of a very conceited instructor
Pleases his doomed condition of arrogance.)
Yea, an isthmus whereupon
Certain birds of paradise only dwell.
These birds (similes) with a plumage rare
Possess many qualities, dark and fair;
A sudden flair of the plumage rare,
A burst of golden or ruby hair
Falling away, or audaciously rising
Does indeed most greatly amaze and please,
Rather like a refrain in an exceeding long
Concerto, a sudden trilling song
That imposes upon the attention
In the midst of stupefaction.
It is a very emergent art
(It emerges I mean if employed,
And it is not in these artless times)
It is the basis of Marlowe’s blank verse;
The first of its kind in the English
It requires
As you may be discovering
An effort from the reader
To continually adjust his tone
To the shifting waves of the author’s tide
Of highly irregular thoughts.
James Joyce, an exceeding ridiculous
Experimenter of punctuation,
Attempted a thing called a stream
That yielded nor e’en a bream
To put upon the platter and
Eat its parting white muscles.
It was prose, for why?
Because it was horizontal
To the eye.
It was tedious, for why?
Not because it was a confusion,
But because it was a confusion
Of the typical. If I see a heap
Of ashes confused, it is tedious,
But if I see a heap of golden things
Confused amongst gemstones and pearls,
Why, take the laws of symmetry! A hoard
Of pirates’ treasure is very well confused.
Consider The Prelude, a subtle work,
Much to be commended as brains on a canvas.
It conveys things, though what those things are
‘T is better by far
To forego the descriptive attempt,
It conveys as prose cannot, because
When the eye notices the words descend
Then,
In a fit of atypical modesty
He refers the matter to the ear,
And she doth delightfully steer
A subconscious passage along
And the strain which had attended the task
THE FIRST.
When I close the gate at night and I
Look up into the stars, if the sky be
Clear, I may pause.
None can truly conceive in a moment
The fullest extent of the truths conveyed
By such a vision; and yet, what can I see?
A blanket blue or blackly fading sky,
Purple at once and blue, and dark,
The stars wink forth not at once but appear
Each in his own time, nor can we perceive
Exactly that time, for time seems to merge
When looking on things of such scale.
A sense of awe sometime occurs,
Only sometime, and then it is not
Exactly all looking begot,
But often an alignment of feeling
With the sky. We have our celestial thoughts,
And our most celestial feelings.
Such is the constant analogy of feeling
With matter. Which is true, if one must be,
That all matter is a kind of feeling,
Or all feeling a kind of matter?
Ne’er mind it, either way the two
Are distinct in our lives. When I was twelve,
Or so, people (who were all one to me)
Would take me about: to a garden,
To a river, to a museum,
To an occasion (when I recall
I most would discover my malice)
Perhaps with the charming supposition
That a change would do me good!
Indeed a change would have! But why pray take
A lad, caught in the convulsions of black
Misery, to rivers and gardens when
The change most necessary is not
The change of surroundings but the change
Of spirit? Or feeling, to those who will not
Have so vague a term describe so certain a thing.
Ah well! ‘T is commonly thought (most commonly)
That to put an old dog in new surroundings
Is to renew the life of the dog.
And perhaps indeed such has been observed
To occur in some dogs less obdurate
Than the black dog, who, with glaring eye,
Moping brow, and body slumped,
Shuns the entrance of light.
I had a need,
To understand greater things than Freudian theory,
Greater too than the insight of Jung.
It was a need,
Sprung from the seed,
Of precocious enquiry
Into the explanation of things.
Not of individual curiosities,
Such as, be it acknowledged, the vast
And tedious majority of people
Are therewith contented; ‘t was a need
Not to prolong a gossip,
Nor to indulge a slovenly entertainment,
Nor to sup on gluttony or exercise
(The latter being a thing very often
As obsessive and injurious as the former)
But a need to understand,
Not to know! Not to recall! Not to practice!
Not, in short, ye blithe, contented, moneyed,
Most happily employed teachers or doctors,
Therapists, commentators, the whole band
Of recitative servants to the most high
Ladder! Not Jacob’s but society’s!
What is your modus operandi
In enquiry? – ‘Whatever is accepted
By the institutions of power and wealth;
By the universities, the companies,
The
press, parliament, even’ (O woe!
Woe to those most artistic conceptions!)
‘To monarchy! To nobility! In short:
Whatever is acceptable to the fattest
Is acceptable to me.’ So you learn
What is most popularly said,
The official opinion
(Contradiction in terms!)
Nor have I any doubt that in times past,
When other opinions were current coin,
That you would have performed alike
These functions of pleasing certain ears
And filling certain pockets. Smile! Grin!
And paint your faces for the mirror’s sake.
You are only the active results
Of the passive decline of the world.
This afore described
I felt had circumscribed
The earth (and therefore, outside a religion,
The universe) and I wished to understand
Why.
The more I have read written before
The beginning of this era,
Which as far as one can determine
Was the twentieth century.
An era ridiculously called
The Modern Era,
(The worst possible name for any era
Always modern at the time)
Yet something indeed is meant
By the use of this term modern,
Specific since Queen Victoria.
It is casual, informal, without standard,
For standards were the standard of the past.
There never was a society,
Not Egypt, Babylon, Athens, Rome,
Nor Chinese, Mongolian, Incan,
Aztec, Native American,
Certainly not European,
Which has been so, hitherto, without
A standard.
The more I have realised the discomfort
Which permeates the air, the ground,
Wherever a living soul breathes,
Wherever blood and flesh is found,
A discomfort so utterly established
That the most maddened call it comfort.
It is the feeling that death is death,
Against which every superstition,
And every form of madness,
Would seem a preferable remedy;
Pour into my addled brains all fable!
Stem not the tide of fantasy an inch!
That I may not die in my life for fear
Of the termination of all progress.
What after all is not a story?
Our lives are God’s novels.
What, were it not so, would not seem absurd?
An upright ape donning garments
And shaving his hair into shapes;
A downright ape turning upright
His nose for offensive scents?
Casual man (or modern man, be it so)
Is a twig in a rapid current,
Borne along, he knows not how,
Carried forth, he knows not why,
Sometime sunk and sometime afloat,
Without even tradition to show
THE SECOND.
Is impulse a thing necessary or free,
Is your impulse to stop reading free?
Surely you must, if you have not hitherto,
Be longing to emerge
From this abstraction?
What is necessary? That you should cease
To read these verses eventually.
If your free will is such that you intend
To forego company, sleep, sustenance,
Water, Change (his mistress Variety),
All outside this imposed activity,
This staring task,
Your free will is your murderer!
Not so! it is not free will,
Nor lack thereof, which induces
Firstly a trial and secondly a change,
But the truest state of existence
Which imaginary beings can feel.
Such as you are, imaginary,
Merely an expression.
None can fully answer of what;
But we perceive, do we not?
We perceive a fuller, vaster thing,
(For what could be narrower, more trifling?
Than that which we call
‘Our life experiences!’
With a cocking chin and a shifting neck,
And that smile which has no teeth
And naturally no mirth.
I say we are imaginary
Not idly but to show
How anything caught ‘twixt here, now, and then,
Is imaginary, such is the finite.
There is only place not time.
Time is place.)
As for necessity, freedom
Is necessary, and necessity
Is free.
Not mere nonsense is it to shew
That all I say I think I know
Is less than the truth;
And if less, why then
How much indeed is truth?
Once upon a time on a slumberous morn,
In a wooded valley,
There was a tree gently stretching its boughs
Of leafy branches.
Its bole was noble, a carving, a sculpture,
But the axe made a minute’s work
Of five centuries’ creation;
And the cells which thought they were trunk cells
Died;
And the cells which thought they were leaf cells
Died;
But for a while seemed living outside,
And they yawned and degraded again
Into atoms, we must say, into particles.
The sciences physical, chemical,
Biological, mechanical, medical,
Are only but what they always have been
Since man said, ‘I will make me an hovel’
Or, ‘I should like me a plaster’
Or, ‘I shall think of this angle’,
But with conceits superadded
To their talents.
No more is a scientist one
Who submits his mind to his craft
As his body to the red sea,
He submits his craft to his vanity,
And his mind to thinking how it be
That the universe is less
Than his higher degree,
And he.
If I am angered by these useful citizens
It is only because they made this era
And unmade the last.
If I am angered by their tests
It is only because
They have tested our tolerance
And proved it short.
They have tested our arts
And broken them.
What is it to test in this fashion
That at the end of it all they have proved
There are novel ways to murder ourselves
Undreamt of by our philosophy?
Or novel means to bring ourselves,
By arrant empiricism,
To prefer the coffin to the altar?
THE THIRD.
I stared intently at a pane
Of the windows in the door,
Lately washed by winter rain
Displaying now the grassy floor
Of our unmistaken garden.
That square of grass, that stamp I saw
Framed within the bordered door
Seemed two-dimensional — because
The grass lacked depth of light, it seemed,
But then, while words of import sounded
Round the room about my head,
I saw a robin redbreast bounded
Up and down this flattened square,
Which adjusted both my eyes
To the scales on which I stared
With so bland and dull a passive
Life upon a crumpled chair,
And without a spark of passion
To animate away a care.
Undeterred by border collies
Or by several blackbirds near,
Still he hopped about, and proudly,
Though he was a robin mere,
Though he was a trilling creature,
Operating hope on fear.
Thus I thought on how appearance,
Seeming well to show the truth,
Most deceives the mind when least
The thought of it is felt.
The road that farther up across
The field beyond is always busy.
But all the motorcars that travel
Up and down its narrow spine
From that distance look like paper
Moving on a puppet line.
The universe is just the same,
How potently it seems to be
But black and bearing up a name
That nullifies its import.
We within it upon a speck
That seems quite large enough to me
Are made to think we are a peck
Of dust meaninglessly
Combining notions out of potions
Blithely popping on the earth
Like the bubbles of a stew
To digestion fated.
Begin with anything, end in everything,
That is the theme of hope and so truth,
Begin with something, end in nothing,
That is the theme of false conceit,
False because conceited, conceited because false.
Twang the string of the outworn lyre!
Spin the threads of thy words!
Like every analogy, tire
The milk of fresh thought into curds
But stop to see
The fresh oddity
Of me
Distending my chest
(For rage is free
With polity,
And I rage more than the rest).
Why ever arise from a sleeping bed
Or leave a warm bath?
THE FOURTH.
I have woken in the middle of the cold
And the darkness which is the night,
With my head impounded in pain
And my eyes bedimmed in sight,
Leaning forward, for such is the custom,
Sweating and shaking at once,
With the scaffolds of dreaming still working
In front of my shadowy blankets.
As a series of grids
Redrawing in my eyes
And plotting the outlines of objects,
Determining swiftly their size.
Establishing perspective,
Before their tinctured facets,
Each tracing a new corrective,
Expanding their wealth of assets,
But, thinking too much, they vanish
Because of a conscious thought,
And the less they will appear
The more their sight is sought,
And the more they brighten near
The farther I from port,
For their nature is elusive,
And their substance simply
Gone.
So lie I then upon my back,
Then shift I left and feel some crumbs
Grate against my leg,
So shift I right and scratch an itch,
Then feel my heart beneath my hand
And measure its pulsation,
A thump, a thump, a thump, a beat,
A beat, a thump, and then I groan
(It is customary so to do)
And begin to recite verses.
For
what can Music more require
Or what could Lyricism more desire
Than an ode to its sovereign power?
Amid the worst of compounding care
Amid sickness, anxiety, and sorrows bare
I have oft partaken of an hour
In
company with the brothers Poesy
And Music, good chums! Milton sung
When with the gout, all blind, despised,
His patience rung,
His love disprised,
When light was darkness visible,
He sung,
And O what sweetness drifted
From out the vaults of all his woe,
When all had thought him risible
His soul was never so.
His body heaved
His blank eyes sparkled,
And from the darkness fire
Lit up his faith
Dispelled his ire,
And calmly so he breathed.
THE CONCLUSION.
The birds sing more finely than us,
The beasts sport better,
Cattle are superior Buddhists,
Meditating with a straw;
Nature paints better than us,
Flowers dress more prettily
And dance more becomingly;
The fish are superior explorers,
The elements superior builders,
Lions fight more stoutly,
And more honourably;
Serpents slink more impressively,
Spiders plot more admirably;
Parrots are prettier wits
And stronger actors,
Botanical life
Is altogether a better scientist
(It inventing what we only extract,
Microscopic, fungal, and otherwise),
And cook (equal an orange);
Trees are more noble,
Lice more precise,
Dogs are more moral,
Cats more expressive,
Bears are more grandly amusing;
And generally everywhere
The jack of all trades is exceeded
By his masters.
But man alone can write.
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