Culbone Wood

 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Journal 4

I came a mile or so through beech woods and finally an arch at the crest of the forest gave onto a meadow in the dip where some fifteen men and boys were at a game of cricket. It was a green sward - at once pastoral and sylvan - in this ample, sunlit glade - while three men from the side that was batting swept scythes - like sharpened bat blades - through long grasses at the boundary area.

As I stood at the wood's edge in a space made by a geometry of beech roots and leaned my hot back on a trunk, the scene that lay below me moved in two coordinated patterns: the two batsmen shuttling, as it were, within a loom, whose encompassing framework (as represented by the fielders) lay in attachment to and separation from these figures at their centre who flailed with their weapons and ran as though weaving a fabric which was at once spun from the body of their own activity and also from the stuff which the opposed, surrounding mechanism of the fielding team contributed.

Viewed from the path, as I'd come through the wood, the scene, reduced by distance, appeared like a panel in a stained glass window whose pigments were so concentrated and whose figures so distinct in a quasi-hieratic separation that I thought at first I had come upon some ceremonial - only music was lacking - as in a round dance or some antique village mummery.

But this is just a game - so I chided my enthusiastic vision. But still I returned to those mowers on the boundary. They, too, will go in: and once in, in the end, will be dismissed - perhaps for nothing!

I returned through the trees and glancing one last time behind me, observed that the mowers were reduced to two. And wandering on, recalled Andrew Marvell, whose Mower's Song has it:

And Flow'rs and Grass, and I and all

Will in one common Ruine fall.

For Juliana comes, and She

What I do to the Grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

Which of course is Isaiah and Cicero made darker and erotic. While Shakespeare in Sonnet 12 reminds his leman:

 

And nothing can 'gainst Time's scythe make defence

Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.

The comma inserted (with a whole adult lifetime hanging on it) at the caesura in the last line is Shakespeare's. And he or his printer spells scythe sieth. Which, in addition to the dry, sharp, whetted, sweeping sound the word conveys, suggests sigheth and saith. To which at the risk of hubris I have appended:

Thus Time scythes us with a sigh which is its own and ours.

For this same sighing is what Time's scythe sayeth.

Further to this, but away from the cricket - which game sets with sundown - the word 'scythe' in the sonnet follows hideous, sable, silvered, leaves, erst, sheaves, bristly and wastes:  these among a number of subordinate sibilants of the sort we all shall be scythed down by. Let us therefore all play at cricket while there is light enough on the meadow! 

And may lovely Juliana also come,

Howsoe'er she sighs down some.

*

My urine, I notice this morning, is turned green and indeed smells as such. This, I suppose, is on account of my having eaten asparagus last evening. Delectable vegetable. And I am gratified that they have continued to transform at least a part of me. If this was my last piss, I would bless it: green and twisting as asparagus tips ipses.

*

Sweet Laudanum - Deserted Village.

*

The degree to which one is tormented by desire is in proportion to the extent to which one is, and apprehends oneself to be, in a process of dissolution. 

It is man's fate to be in a situation of uninterrupted want: and it is this that lies at the heart of paradise stories. For paradise is that orchard in which everything is perpetually in a condition of perfected growth: every fruit being ripe, while the desire to eat and gustatory satisfaction must (paradoxically: I do not believe this) be in a condition of equal and simultaneous fulfilment. (In paradise, in other words, the experience of hunger is no less happy than post-prandial gratification!)

Man's own perfection in paradise, too, was realised. And both he and his fellow creatures were simultaneously new and altogether completed. The Genesis story, on the other hand, would appear to contain another, secret, teaching - indeed perhaps several. Beneath the perfection that radiates from each gladdening and golden rind, as perhaps I have suggested elsewhere, lurk both liabilities for deliquescence and the energies that lie in seed, which will scatter and grow, but whose scions, however skilfully husbanded, will, over the generations, degenerate.

On this propensity to putrefaction: nothing is immune from the cycle of mortality. But it is Man's imperfection that preoccupies me here. Marvell spoke only for himself when he observed (with naughty wit!) that it would be double paradise to live in paradise alone. Not so Adam for whom God must, at Adam's own request, create a partner and in so doing remove from his body a rib which hitherto had been a constituent of his original wholeness. 

In the midst of perfection, therefore, Adam knew that desire which emanates from the experience of incompleteness. Perfection was not, in itself, sufficient. Indeed, that apprehension of the incomplete was a part of perfection - which one might suggest therefore contained incompleteness. 

And while one might argue, as perhaps the rabbis have, that to enjoy some object, one must extract it (as in the case of Adam's operation) from oneself, there remains what I have suggested as a secret teaching: for having achieved that object - which was Eva -then the seed had already fallen and the cycle of renewal - in the shape of progeny which implies degeneration - had been set in motion.

How all this applies to my condition here (having written my poem more or less successfully on this sheep farm) I will set out briefly. Alone in this quiet place, I have brought forth, as though from the interior of the body, this object and I am made glad by it. And yet it was a kind of suffering, albeit in the ecstasy of sleep, that engendered its birth: for I would never have fabricated such a work had I felt complete enough before I wrote it to abstain from its composition. 

Like Adam, I conceived desire. And just as Eva must be formulated from her future husband's rib-cage (in the androgeny of our first Father lies a tempting subject), so my poem issued from my person - I am tempted to jest: from the flux of my intestine!

Here, then, it lies in its fragmentary perfection. Albeit - like a child which is drawn out from its mother with sweet ease at the first push but who emerges from the knees in sanguinary mutilation - the second half is cruelly missing.

The object of these thoughts is mortifyingly straightforward. In just proportion to my desire, so I feel myself dying. Indeed, I apprehend it now. The shoots and the streaks that would force themselves up and come into the sun from a hidden or inchoate selfhood are already on the dark path to the nether regions. (I am one with the crocus bulb that throws up her brave and spear-like flowers which are stiff in their first tumescent thrust and then flap in the wind, collapse and are flattened - by sun, rain or wind in equal measure.) 

Perhaps more to the point (for it is of the body and its mental products I am speaking): in desire for a woman - fulfilled or not it matters little - what I most express is my mortality. Death flashes up at me at every movement. In like manner performs poetic aspiration, confected as this is of desire to run counter to Phlegraean torrents that roar to extinction and which then in themselves are lost in the labyrinthine amplitude of Lethe's winding and the Acheronic marshes. Helpfully pessimistic and pre-emptive wisdom, one is tempted to conjecture. But such knowledge, if one may call it such, is feeble. For against all stoical and noble forethought, desire may never be extinguished. Go little booke indulgently I would love to murmur as though sending my work forth to join and even build on unswept stone or gilded monuments. But in my craving to force Somersetshire formulation of the language on the world, I inhume what I write (as in Shakespeare's later sonnet) with vilest worms to dwell. Here is no morbid apprehension or pessimist imagining. I hear them palpably chew, as the words that I submit to the heavenly Muses creep and squirm across these pages!

* 

A warm late summer, and some healthy rain showers this October have conspired to generate prolific crops of mushrooms. Now this morning, I have stumbled with the children out onto the coombe with baskets they have woven for this purpose and gathered - amid woolly bleatings - eight or ten pounds of succulent fungi - redolent of nether earth - for breakfast. 

Paint me a better dish than toasts of a coarse, light crumb, which are spread with bacon fat or butter on which have been heaped a ladleful of fresh fried mushrooms (or mesheroons as local folk call them): the small, young, white heads pink-gilled with complexions like those of healthy hillside children, while the big old gaffers, their gills crumbling and folded in on one another, deliquescing in a sweet and pungent, nectarous, black gravy.

To eat mushrooms is also to generate a thirst: for these delectable plants secrete a clammy sort of fume which - not unpleasantly - tends somewhat to constrict the throat: and while I have always found it a simple matter to despatch, at the least, a couple of full dishes, I know what it is to become dizzy with such an eating, and for the throat to palpitate, the eyes to grow distended and the whole system to experience a kind of (benign) sick dryness, no doubt on account of that liquorous fungal richness to which I have already alluded. To avert these symptoms, my recipe is simply tea: fresh-boiled, hot, in cups big enough to sweat back into - and which (to conclude this gluttonous, brief comedy) create, of the face, a reciprocating fungus!

*

We have a reasonably clear understanding of why and in what manner the angels rebelled, the consequences of their fall and the relationship of that to human imperfection.

What now excites my curiosity is the question of angelic physiology. Conventionally, I have been led to assume that angels would have been constituted from light whose order and intensity was predicated by their status in the angelic hierarchy. This heavenly light, I assume, represented a reflective quantity which had been borrowed from or been freely bestowed by the inexhaustible sum of God's endogeny: and thus these aspects of Him were externalised into entities which, in their partial separation from Him into angelic bodies, radiated back to his effulgence. That the angels existed in freedom from their source further suggests both God's generosity and a danger to whatever He had become (by subtraction?) as a result of these operations.

Given what we know of the outcome - angelic history differs from ours in that there has been only one recorded war in heaven - I have been reflecting on what it may have felt like (albeit impossible to imagine) to have been Satan.

All I surmise is that the satanic body - like those perhaps of all the fallen angels - felt much as ours do when we undergo a fever. Thus while angels that continued to submit to heaven, experienced such lightness and smoothness that the word body as we understand it must represent a misnomer, in Satan's case, the dulcetude and purity whose texture was air and whose movement implied music, was transformed to a heavy and coarse-textured, complicated, aching density, whose marrow was knife blades at sharp angles to each other and whose flesh was filled with hot, dry ashes.

*

 

In 1638, the young Milton, guided by Count Giovanni Manso, toured Cumae from where the Sybil had led Aeneas to the classical inferno, whose mouth lies close at Lake Avernus, and walked, Vesuvius in prospect, along or among the Phlegraean Fields, whose volcanic effluents rise smoking through the surface of the earth: and thus he apprehended, through the leather of his very boot soles, the immediate heat and sulphurous proximity of Hades.

*

This is my notion - my only opinion - that we who are poets are fools of the Muse, from whose realm of gilded mountain flanks she beckons, in the knowledge that we will never reach her precinct.

Obediently, we stumble off the road towards her mountain, but in no time we lose sight of it. If, meanwhile, we have the good fortune to encounter a child or some goat herd who is idle but who understands the by-ways of Parnassus, we may grope a path homeward. Once back at the hearth, we will sit, for the duration, on our care-worn arses and, at best, write doggerel. 

There may, however, exist a less morbid sequence to these prospects. Viz: from illness, on account of its position between life and final silence, comes vision - and from this vision emerges the poem. All poetry with a claim to a truth of some description must have engaged with a point of origin at this same oscillating locus of fatality. It emerges, in other words, from a travail in which the sickness from which we are hourly expiring leads us to the simplest but most exalted intuition: and this is to sing in an ecstasy from which aspiration has been voided. Death of course stands always at the poet's elbow. It sharpens his bone for him to write with. Its loosens his occiput for the poet's eye to gaze through. In a rapture! In wonder!

*

Further to the nature of angelic bodies and the contrast I have suggested between hot, rough cinders and a celestial kind of music: smoothness and coolness come into the experience and these latter represent an aspect - in our own lives - of complete corporeal well-being, a condition somewhat rarely achieved, in which all the faculties operate in wholesome quiet: not a squeak or a click from our babbling intestine nor any panic-stricken syncopation of the heart against the chest and rib-cage, the blood serenely running, the liver and brain compacted in a mutual sympathy: then the body, having of itself achieved a regulated and tranquil homeostasis, may be experienced somewhat to drop away from the intellectual function, leaving the mind thus in a condition of near perfected detachment whereby it finds itself suspended no longer in an environment, which has become familiar to daily experience, of blood-rush, hurly-burly and discomfort, but in which it is fed simply by the air which enters the system and returns out to the aether in soft and scarcely perceptible movements, to the extent that the body too now joins itself to that medium and is homologised with the lightness which bathes, in gentle tides, the far reaches and the full extent of its interior, thus rendering it at one with that universal quietness in which plants achieve their native and compliant nature and into which all creatures, though they scarcely know this, man included, turbulently struggle.

*

In the wings of the theatre: actors in various stages of address and decoration, stage mechanics, managers, the wardrobe mother, wig-makers and cosmetic artists, the clutter of props and lamps extending out to light the apron and the rise and drop of flats - which lusty young men who will never see the fair side of the curtain heave up and down with ropes and on pulleys…

In commotions which are screened entirely from the audience, musicians, singers, dancing masters, stage hands, painters, messengers and other theatre servants slither whispering past one another as the principles run, stroll or hobble on and off through the action.

All that is missing backstage in this crucible (invisible!) of mystery is the voicing of the drama. This latter is projected to the public on the other side (to those still in the wings as though out there was some faery realm of irreality) and here also, off stage, in a silence which is shared, as though in speeches that extend on threads inaudibly between the actors who wait passively within earshot of the drama's progress. 

Back stage, then, the play is present in this manner: withheld and in separated and unspoken parts, and these remain (as in the abstract form wherein they were written) until taken forward to where, on the stage, they are fitted, for a brief duration, into the pattern of the speeches which constitute the drama - after which they disappear until the following night's production.

Within all this hugger mugger - which is no less theatrical in its implication than what goes forth to the audience - all the actors have their proper names and characters. Each spends his day as himself - in his home, in lodgings or in eating houses - pursuing his own unscripted life - alone or with his friends and family. As each day (piecemeal in its conjugations as the backstage drama) unfolds, the persona which the actor will that night inhabit hovers somewhere in the penumbra of what he is conscious. All he thinks mingles vaguely with speeches - dreamily in the absence of stage interlocutors - that he will deliver at nightfall from the proscenium.

As afternoon drags on to evening, in the hour before the curtain rises, the actor's twilit half-life starts up once more, and his uncostumed self prepares for its transformation into that other person. Disguised in costume, wig and grease paint and handling whatever props - for Caesar, Anthony or Richard - he will pick up and let go as the action demands, the actor is transmuted, paradoxically, in neither exactly this life nor the other, to the semi-achieved status of a double being. 

Once dressed and he steps out on the apron, he must finally synthesise and simplify: evacuate his true self and merge with the persona he has been engaged to impersonate that evening. Thus his costume comes true in this very process and for a brief few minutes, or at best two hours, he is simply that persona, about whom there is nothing beyond words in a play book. 

 

*

In contemplation of all this, I think of Garrick, and most especially in his role as Richard III which he played some fifty years back at the Drury Lane Theatre. (That noble building gone, alas, for ever now!) A sweet, dear man, Garrick, but preoccupied with fame and station to so wonderful a degree that when he woke each morning, so I imagine, he informed his pillow:

'Good morrow. David Garrick greets you.'

And to his linen: 'Garrick rises.'

And addressing his tea cup: 'Garrick will now breakfast…' [1]

On stage that evening, Garrick must be cognizant, not just of himself and of his lines, but of who was in the house to watch him - his friends Johnson, Burke and Pope no doubt frequently among them. Pope, in this connection, is known three times to have witnessed Garrick at the Theatre Royal where he played the role of Richard - this as recorded in Hogarth's portrait of him - dreaming of his murders.

No doubt Garrick held Pope in somewhat higher view than he did his tea cup, and so I postulate, with this short speech for him, a postlude to my mushroom folly:

I am Garrick: since Burbage and Tarlton, Kempe and Armin,

The best English actor. And at this moment, as I play King Richard,

Pope, our best poet, sits down here, somewhere, hidden in the

    darkness…

And aye: hark ye! I hear scratching and his shrill, low whisper.

(Is that Alexander Pope I see before me, a quill poised in his hand?

Is that he in this high seat, which, raised next to Johnson,

Appears like a mirror to reflect my own figure:

Our two persons doubled in a couplet that is Pope and Garrick?)

 

But wait. Wrapped as I now am in Richard's numbers

And lapped round with his armour, how far may I remain, indeed,

As merely Garrick? The lines - which Pope and I have harmonised

To complement our century's smooth enhanced graces -

   flow from me. 

Pope watches and listens. Shakespeare stretches from the swanlike

Throat of Garrick and out there to the poet. Pope hears him

   as Richard. 

Does this, for Pope, quite obfuscate the player who was Garrick?

For how much of Garrick remains for the poet to reflect on, as Richard Scintillates before him in the glamour that has overwhelmed him?

* 

I know very little of the theatre and I have written the above merely as a figure to illustrate some inflexions of what I have myself experienced in the composition of poetry. Only this:

Just as that fustian whose props, thespians and costumes, flats, wings, stage-hands, extras and disguises converge in a construction from whose union the play issues, so poetry is generated in a play of collaborative mental eventualities with its scenery and recollections, masks, images and dreams which cling in the amorphous shade of half-truth and similitude to such diction as the poet has assembled in a long and difficult apprenticeship. 

And just as the theatre represents a working place in which things, characters and functions must co-operate in back-stage obscurity for the purpose of projecting the transient movements of a drama, so the mind has its population of intellectual agencies which are at work with an accumulation of properties whose interactions conspire to produce poetry when it becomes ready to step onto the proscenium of an empty sheet of paper. 

And just, likewise, as it is a confusion of phenomena that act together behind the curtain that produce the illusory integration of a drama that takes place on the proscenium, so poetry that arrives on the page represents a 'front product' issuing from a confusion of quaint devices that have, in conformity with all manner of aesthetic desiderata, been refined and made symmetrical. To read a poem thoroughly, one must comprehend its public surface with a cunning which is sufficient to divine the nature of the apparatus that lies behind it. Without knowledge of its props, masks, costumes, sceneries and back stage chatter, a poem is mere flat film which has settled nervelessly on an equally flat surface.

*

I woke this morning from a dream which had in view three large, untitled, leather-bound volumes. Sprouted from their edges I descried, so I thought, several shrivelled extensions of the print in their interior as if extracted passages had been torn out and tattered. This phrase in my dream followed: 'If on that pathway…' and then I woke up. In reaction to all this, these fragmentary thoughts came:

First, that we poets are wont to imagine that the paths for which we are destined should be furnished with a pavement for others to accompany us along, and that this will be impacted with the books that we will eventually have finished.

Secondly: like actors who get stuck in parts they play and who never can extricate themselves properly from speeches which express the thoughts and actions of imagined people, poets, through sheer habit, become what they have written.

Give (thirdly) such a fellow a couple of decades to pursue literary ambition, and he transforms, through association with the materials with which he has daily contact, into a species which is peculiar to his calling. I see such creatures up and down the country (and indeed in my own somewhat cloudy psychological mirror!) attempting what they imagine to be casual intercourse with that majority of citizens which has nothing to do with the begetting of literature. And while we recognise these latter as enjoying a human outline, the poet may be observed to have metamorphosised into the shape of an ambulatory bound volume, sheathed in creaking leathers, from whose fore-edges and spines little feeble arms and legs have sprouted and whose middle places - heart, lights and liver - have shrunk to the consistency of dry, flat paper. 

Such, when we lie down in final and completed anonymity, becomes our solitary monument. Constructed not from great rocks of marble and with gilded panegyrics, but built from our own reduced, translated beings where the book worm blunders with its head through our stanzas and the earwig scatters its dark, granular deposits.

*

Somewhere in allegorical literature, the sin of Envy is personified as a bitter and emaciated old woman. This perhaps was a classical figure (with a hatred of young lovers) which was adopted by the Christian fathers. And quarrel as one might with the attribution of a gender, the old lady's bleakness has imprinted itself so on our inheritance that there she has sat for well nigh two millennia, and there is no future in trying to shoo her. 

Envy is generated when we regard ourselves, largely, in relation to that which we conceive as being the experience of other people. Shakespeare of course summarises this in Sonnet 29 - as indeed in a host of other poems, to say nothing of characters such as Iago, Edmund, Cassius and Don John (no females in this company!) - and these present us with the most profound explorations of what it feels like to be in a condition of lack: or more precisely of being dominated by the feeling of dispossession. For what we 'most enjoy', or have, may very well exceed, without our accounting it, the sum of those things that we imagine other people to be in possession of.

 

While envy may be accounted a sin, it is also perhaps instructive to contemplate it as a mental attribute allied to the perception of incompleteness that afflicted (as we have suggested) the fallen angels. But what exercises me here is the invisible interior corrosion which is effected by this most besetting of conditions. For to envy that other man's presumed good fortune is to effect, from ourselves, a subtraction which diminishes us, and we can never truly be that whole self which had been set growing in childhood if our lives are consumed by this process of comparative weights and measures. All this is obvious and I would add two things merely. 

First, given that the spread of our envy is to a limited sphere of acquaintance, might one not, given the logic of such a habit, extend envy to everyone on earth who might also possibly enjoy the happiness we attribute to the people we know enough about to envy? (And why not then include the merry and the better dead here?)

Secondly, envy derives, in good part, from an ignorance of the private experience of those we see from the outside merely. Who can tell what mortal pangs afflict the happy? It is a commonplace, of which we can grow weary in letters, that the poor man, who has nothing that can be taken away and who is allowed to rejoice in the simplicity of his moral condition, is, if he chooses not to envy, superior in happiness to his comfortably accomodated but politically afflicted king. Shakespeare's histories tell us this in abundance. ('So shaken', which are the first words of Henry IV, very well express the horrid shocks of pomp.) 

If, in this connection, we discount the genuine adversities that Hamlet suffers (and some might say, along with Claudius and Gertrude, that he should merely get on with a life which promised to be one with an exceptional future), we might pause on the line that he delivers in his great Act IV soliloquy: 'How all occasions do inform against me.' (IV.4.32)

A lesser poet might have rested his pen with a word such as 'conspire'. Why 'inform', then? This verb is instructive in that - with easy and instinctive genius - Shakespeare suggests that what we see in Hamlet's overt situation (and this is a good deal) is as nothing to what secretly, multiply, like invisible and anonymous spies that we can not see (as he can, neither, in the crowded alleys of his mental affliction), are both conspiring and acting, with lethally informative purpose against him, who is singular and defenseless.

Prince Hamlet may now exit. I have invited his appearance to suggest this merely: that enviable other persons are subject to occasions that we can neither see nor imagine. And while we may envy them (as the grave digger, in his indigence, might have envied the gently upholstered metaphysical hole that the Prince indulged himself in digging): we should turn our faces from this position of making comparisons: and this because that 'enviable' person, for all we know, swarms with agonies of having been informed which are invisible to us.

And this verb 'to inform' has further useful, if sinister, implications: in that it suggests an infiltration or infusion into the self, which, in its own being, is vulnerable and solitary, from hostile agencies. 

Finally, in Hamlet's speech, the sibilation of 'occasions', further suggests a multiplication of what can not be known. This audibly hisses - not unlike serpents that are hidden from their victim. And so when we arrive at 'do inform', these have knotted and gendered from their condition as imagined people, beings or eventualities and have become forms which infuse and ensnare the individual who remains in his solitude to suffer with them: for no one outside himself will ever see, let alone credit, their habitation in him or existence.

When, therefore, we resort to this process, we infuse the object of our envy with our own 'information'. And in informing against him, we hurt ourselves also and so drag our little lives, which might comfortably have trotted across some modest, pleasant meadow, into bitter cold lagoons of gall - green, unwholesome and as deep as the sea which will stain us indelibly.

*

It is not the poet's task to pursue each word in the language with all its meanings and to hunt down each fissiparated nuance. When these emerge, like bees in a great cloud, from its remotest etymology, whose roots themselves beg further deeper origins - it is tempting to retreat with a net over one's face from the buzzings and stingings one has engendered. So I shall never again resort to any of the meanings of the verb inform. Indeed, I am almost persuaded, like Iago - who informed in a number of ways, with malign success, on his colleagues - to end my days in silence. But I have already used the word I have abjured. 'From this time forth I never shall speak word,' said Iago. Did torture, as promised, ope his lips? What happens after the end of every one of Shakespeare plays is almost as pregnant as the matter in them. But the weight of that pregnancy is dependent on the import of its antecedent. It is this informs it.

*

 

Bees that clump together to forge honey whose importance to them lies in an ownership which is collective, while the motive for its production lies in their mutual providence. I have eaten it from a hive which stood in barley and on the border of woodland where I fancy they supped eglantine and honeysuckle - and sipped, possibly, on poppy. The honey came out smouldering on a broad, flat knife with fragments of the wax they make; this renders it possible to chew what otherwise would be liquid. In winter this freezes and all the bees, I think, sleep in it.

*

Steppe land horses, in their thousands, herded to remote horizons. 

A sheep that strayed from Culbone Wood to Porlock, causing havoc among the waggoners.

*

How many separate little worlds we pass through in our navigation of the all encompassing immensity! This is too bewildering to contemplate and I will not attempt to enumerate the elements that whizz before me and demand my attention. 

I should take counsel from the honey bee that darts only from one resort, about which it is confident, to another: chusing a clover for its scent and colour over a rose which it knows by some signal that forewarns it to avoidance. How many detours and diversions through multiple wrong turnings might we avoid did we, too, enjoy such a devoted orientation of natural feeling!

But I must stay my judgement and let it wait better on observation. See now, the way this single late bee goes to forage and how clumsily it runs into hollyhock blossom only to fall back again and circle among the daisies before finalising its search with a bitter-smelling, bronze chrysanthemum blossom where it treads around in the pollen and emerges with its thorax dusted and its back legs loaded with clots of nectar. 

 

How much might I learn from the ant and the bee.

But I do not imagine they'l'd learn aught of me.

*

With a view to putting in order a few notations on the Border Ballads and the manner in which this region's Folk Songs differ from the older ballad genre, I have been considering, by way of a similitude, the nature of spirits that have been distilled by condensation from the complex of a ferment, as compared to what happens to apples in the more straight forward preparation of cider.

What has, over time, struck me as interesting, and indeed even magical, is the fact that in the process of distillation two very different operations occur. In the first, grain and water are introduced to one another. While in the second, a Stygian seething and steaming decoction - whose ferment has resulted from that initial convergence - is vapourised and, in a process of separation and transfusion, becomes, once it has been aged, that spiritous refinement we know as whiskey.

Now, in the course of purifying the original, organic mash, one might imagine that its constituent parts would have been displaced and something else in the end created. And while there must be truth in this view, what strikes me further is that the product - as presumably in many cooking operations or in the rewording of a poem! - remains in compound what it first was, albeit alchemically translated into the subtle body, or the soul part, of its initial incorporation.

It is a fine thing - this distillation from such workaday constituents - which is now become so rarified as to have reached its ultimately reduced limit (beyond which it would evaporate into nothing). And that separation from the chaos and the reek of the grist, from which some quintessential animation has been extracted, must, I think, also represent a new kind of synthesis: the transcendance of what had been gross having been aetherialised from the coarser body of its matrix and re-combined somehow - with what Ariel property I can not understand - into a liquor which is at once unadulterated and sui generis, while also representing, in a fresh amalgamation, the elements from which it had been titrated.

What is good is that this spirit, whose double character I have suggested, is at once combustible and inert, while its impact on the palate is dramatised by a further separation, the upper level of which diverges along a glittering and brittle, sun-lit, amber-tinted pathway which expresses, I surmise, the happiness of the barley in its mid-summer apotheosis, before it is malted, and at last (its impulse to fruition having been aborted) achieves transfiguration.

Branching away from this cheerful region, runs a netherworld current, which is charcoaly in complexion and which - in verifiable truth - has been converted from an infusion of the stream water which has already been filtered from some inaccessible stratum of peat country. Thus while a first splash on the drinker's palate excites apprehension of its surface glamour, what memorably lingers remains the inner current which has found its way through the lips and the teeth from an underworld of dark old romaunce: and which is expressive of a melancholy humour which speaks to us, by inference, in a deep, terse, solemn, sempiternal and reluctantly communicative poetry which copies the earth's brown, and is shy of the daylight.

If spirits that have been distilled are sluggish in their interaction with us and dwell mostly in a lunar quiet, cider, by contrast, is effervescent, quick (in two senses) and solar in both genesis and implication. And while whiskey may pretend to hold aloof from the grain out of which it developed, cider seeks no such independence and it is happy to have flowed directly from a tree.

Whiskey ages with a prelatical or aldermanic dignitas. Cider, on the other hand exults in being recent: and this quickness - rainfall drawn through stem and blossom, all in one season, to expansion into apples - is what we value it for. And while the mysticality or the Orphism of whiskey may dwell within an interior which is hidden, cider, by contrast, is constructed from direct sunlight, and perseveres as it ferments and then continues through its maturation, to draw fizzings from its bottom to the surface in a gladdening circulation, and this renders it unified, sociable and amiably dynamic.

Not being, myself, much of a drinker, I am less interested in the flavours and effects of these two interesting fluids, than in what they suggest to me, of their origin, their transformations and, above all, their relative complication. And I have adverted to these drinks here largely because I associate them - somewhat loosely - and not without a smile - with the rhyming narratives I have read in Bishop Percy (his Reliques) and the country songs that I hear in taverns, on the coombes as groaned out by shepherds, and indeed, as I have described already, by the young servant woman in this farm house. 

Scottish ballads - for their solemnity and remoteness - are, of course, the genre I associate with the dark character of whiskey, while the pretty and sometimes jingling folk songs of this country, come, like the people who perform them, from the ambiguous generosity of sullen earth and a mixed, south western, sweet-sour sunlight. 

This is not to say that local songs are in the slightest sense expressions of happiness. The contrary is, for the most part, true - and given the poverty to which so much of Somerset has, in this past decade, been reduced, this is scarcely to be marvelled at. The singers of these parts, nonetheless, do grind out (if I may risk the contradiction) a not altogether honeyed species of effervescence. Their songs, albeit sometimes lumpy and stumbling with respect to meter, express a forthright and wistful sweetness, the tang of late fruition, and the astringency of a sap which equally could proceed from apples and the blood that splashes with naïve immediacy from hearts which have been excoriated by simple disappointments - from which they are unlikely to recover but about which they sing with the same raw sweetness as the cider with which they will for ever be on speaking terms.

In pursuit of more similitudes, I will, for the time being, make no further adventure. I have, besides, already descanted more than enough on Thomas the Rhymer - the faery character of which is typical of those distillations which have seeped to us from an occult northern border country over two or three centuries.

But what of folk songs? I have heard them described as simple flowers of the people. While silly, this is nonetheless evocative. If flowers could adapt themselves to song, would they not chaunt, on the one hand of the harsh and stony breast of earth from which they must drag nourishment, of struggles with the sun, their failure against wind, the depredations of farm animals and the bitterness of so short existence in the passing seasons? While contrarily, perhaps, might they not also thank their arcane gods for rain, summer afternoons, cool evenings and the ministrations of the honey bee which engages with their propagation?

All this is fancy - I grant that with pleasure - in which I have indulged to encourage the two thoughts that follow. 

First: that just as we associate the lives of flowers with self-generative spontaneity, so the folk song of this region - as presumably in most others - represents a spontaneous effusion. And just as the cowslip bolts vertically (how we know not) through the clutch of a silaceous matrix, or the wood anemone obtrudes with no less skilful pushes through the beech and hazel litter, and over a generation will increase their numbers, so songs - like the soft and hairy stalks of primroses and cowslips - emerge in a stage of perfection, flexible and delicate, through the hard soil of an impoverished rural experience.

Second, I would claim this. That there is no essential difference between the origin of these songs and the impulses that conduce to literary composition. In both cases, the motive comes from below and from the interior body. All poetry, I think, pushes upward from strata which are inherent but largely concealed. And I would further suggest that those inner regions from which poetry emerges and to whose indistinct identity it alludes, is at once a place of enchantment and a source of expression which is largely tragic. Yes: for certain, the ebullience of a naturalistic ferment may accompany a grim, dark vision; as indeed, the sun may inform meadows green with a spruce, sweet, medicinal and rustic mordancy.

But I can not hear a song, whether it reaches me from the distance of a hilltop or from the proximity of the kitchen, without knowing in my heart, that this comes from another heart: one that has been broken and that from its severed parts, a sad and contemplative music issues.  

We poets who plume ourselves on learning, on discrimination in our choice of topic, who pretend to a judicious consideration of the diction of our figures and who take pride in the curiosity of our conceited language and the daring of our imaginative expeditions - we are, in truth, no distance at all, and never will be, from the pot house and the coombe - resort we do to the very same sources that inspirit the shepherd and the household scullion. In this way we share our labour with them. We are indeed them and they are us. And no man - poet, shepherd, cleric, lecturer - has a right to any claim to pride of differentiation from another. We belong together and we are each other - and thus - at one - and more or less identically - we sing - like this girl who does not sing for my hearing - and must be therefore reconciled to a solitary co-existence.

*

About the melancholy that lies within the measure of some stanzas of folk poems: witness these lines and their jaunty, loping skip[2] but which sing of a sorrow for which music is the only proper, if inadequate, expression:

Abroad as I was walking one morning in the spring

I heard a maid in Bedlam so sweetly she did sing.

Her chains she rattled with her hands and thus she sigh and sing

'I love my love because I know he first love me.'

 

My love he was sent from me by friends that were unkind,

They sent him far beyond the seas and that torments my mind.

Although I'm ruined for his sake contented I will be,

For I love my love because I know he first loved me…

Now here is a good art. Need I comment on the discord in the pattern first established (a spring morning by convention) and the horrid rattle of the mad girl's chains which she shakes to accompany her plaintive ditty?

And in that she contemplates her fate with such succinct acceptance, is there not another sadness emanating from her ruin?

I mean that some third party has betrayed her, and that, in all likelihood, her lover has gone mad (as she has here) in the unreachable Antipodes. The growth of love on the home green having been aborted - on account no doubt of some familial inequality - so he, poor Johnny, burns in Van Diemans Land, while she lacerates herself in the vicinity of Minehead.

These obscure and anonymous tragedies are the half-hidden substance of human history - they are happening here, right now, in this place: but the hearts of those who suffer are alone in their knowledge of events such as these and will never have a chronicle beyond the mournful little verses that may be overheard in our milking parlours and taverns. 

And yet, as folk songs tell us, these obscure cottage tragedies have their place on the rude, public stage of an aristocratic history in which kings and generals, through the proxy of those pressed to represent them, fight with one another. As in this song which I heard sung by a fellow in West Harptree (no bad place name!):

As I was a-walking for my recreation

Down by the green gardens I simply did slow,

I heard the fair maid making great lamentation,

Crying, Jimmie will be a sliding to the wars I'm afraid.

 

The blackbirds and thrushes down by the green bushes

They all seem to mourn for this fair maid,

Crying the song that she sung was concerning her lover:

Jimmy will be a-sliding to the wars I'm afraid.

 

And Jimmy will return with his heart full of burning

To see his love Nancy lie dead in her grave.

Young man forsaken he died in a week,

Crying so he had never have left this fair maid.

 

Success may attend every lad on the ocean.

God send him safe home to his sweetheart and wives,

For peace may be claiming in every nation.

God send my soldier home to his bride.

Amen to this sentiment.

*

             Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?

                Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;

                Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

                Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

 

                "Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?"

                Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?

                Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif? -

                "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

 

                "Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!

                 Gar schöne Spiele, spiel ich mit dir;

                 Manch bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,

                 Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

 

                 Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,

                 Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht? -

                 "Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;

                 In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind."

 

                 "Willst feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn?

                  Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;

                  Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,

                  Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein."

 

                 Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort

                 Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort? -

                  "Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:

                 Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau."

 

                 "Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;

                 Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt."

                 Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!

                 Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!

 

                 Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,

                 Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,

                 Erreicht den Hof mit Müh und Not;

                 In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Goethe's Erlkonig. It would be strange were I not to be preoccupied with this poem, for it is at once a folk ballad in an idiom close to that of Thomas Rhymer and a work of Herr Goethe's most boldly crafted lyric art, which in eight simple quatrains, concentrates what is terrible and primitive with a narrative that outreaches the disingenuous simplicity of its genre and achieves the elevation of a tragic drama.

The effect of this ballad lies, as with the best in our own Border traditions, in its power to mark our waking minds with images of nightmare and to move our sympathies with an unassuagable pity.

*

Howsoever Herr Goethe came to write this ballad, it is likely that Herder had already shown him his own Erlkönigs Tochter - which latter poem opens with this significant difference: for while Goethe's 'father' remains anonymous, Herder writes (as in our ballads Edward and Lord Randall) 'Herr Oluf reitet spät und weit...' But what interests me more is the sense that Goethe composed his own Erlkonig with ferocious, concentrated urgency of rhythm. For this poem has a movement and a dramatic compression unknown to me in any work - including our darkest and most tragic ballads. But in thus saying, I must attempt a further definition. 

 

This: in both adapting a folk story and adopting the ballad genre, Goethe demonstrates a truth about poetic form and composition from which, before these islands' fairies have finally deserted us, we well might profit. For implicit in that German sage's narrative lies the revelation or conviction that folk life rushes with dramatic, vatic currents which put to shame our own, now tamed, domesticated, effete, enervated literary culture: but that it is still within our power to enter that most vivid, consequential stream, which for several past ages has inspirited the folk, and to transfuse its ample virtues into writings of our own which will imbrue (I mean that verb!) at least some of these with a vigour that has not been dried and seized up with library manners. Nor would I cry out with our own damned Faustus: 'O lente, lente currite...equi.' But rather as the Father in Goethe's Erlkonig, 'Festina! Festina! equus mei…!'

 

Yes, we must be seers - of which more later. But in so becoming, we must first excise any puffed up ambition we have cultivated which would remove us from our identity as ordinary people - or 'the general' as that ultimately differentiated Danish poet had it. But I do not here imply that we should associate as frequently or fondly with the unlettered - from whom in our hypertrophied education we have become so unnaturally detached - as with our educated fellows. No: rather that we should acknowledge that in our passions and preoccupations we are, essentially, all very much the same! Let this be the notion that guides our ambition and let us inhabit the shared world inoffensively and with the unpresuming simplicity of happy, realistic animals!

 

But what happens in the ballad that characterises the folk? I believe it is this. The ballad narrative, howsoever it may be established in a particular location such as Huntley Bank or Ushers Well, wastes neither time nor rhythmic continuity in defending itself from what is alien to any historical context or geographical position it may have adopted. Whether the main action lies in a sea voyage, a faery visit or - as in Usher's Well - a Purgatorial ordeal, the narrative travels quickly, with ease and sans explanation, between the world which can be apprehended by the senses and a sphere which is reached by spontaneous, poetic intuition. I would define this imaginative flexibility as a metaphoric inclusiveness or ubiquity, wherein the mind adapts freely to a flux or an oscillation which moves naturally between its contextualised present and some other temporal, telluric sphere - whether or no this be supernatural - thereby maintaining loci that do not, in the daylight, belong together in an equilibrium of contiguity. This, in my view, is what Goethe achieves in his Erlkonig. And while that poet teaches us what we may learn from ballads, this represents, more importantly, a lesson which is by no means confined to our application to that form. It should, on the contrary, by leading us to anything and anywhere in their imaginative geographic parallel, infuse everything. 

 

*

Things arise spontaneously and they know what to do. What is it, then, that they do do? They grow on their own and metamorphose. That much we gather from Ovid who gives an account of little creatures which generated themselves in earth that was left when water withdrew from its primordial Greek flooding. 

Songs and poems, I think, may likewise give birth to themselves in a changing landscape of imagination. These landscapes are subject to not infrequent and sometimes catastrophic subsidence. In the after-shock of some disorder, the mind, I am convinced, is no longer 'its own place', but has become somewhere else.[3] From this precarious terra nova, (or meta incognita as the old maps describe unknown places), strange new forms are generated. These inhabit the discovered landscape as though they have always been there. I will hasten to add that these may be altogether benign. And as often as not, they are more interesting than the inhabitants of the previous landscape. The scions of catastrophe are not invariably terrible. But the intermittent kobold and now and again a pack of wolves may roam such territory.

In this same connection, just as ballads come to us on a chilly northern wind that we know well, but with no authorship or compositional history, so I would like to think that my own poem enjoyed an autochthonous generation. If the poem is good enough, what matter who composed it? (But will I disown it? Ah no. Never!) I have expressed all this without much conviction. It is of limited interest and I will pass over it.

*

'Prepare now to engage with immensity.'

'Oh, that can not be so very immense.'

'Aber ja. It is tremendous.'

 

Silence.

*

The fresh odour of this page. Rags and wood pulp macerated, dried and rolled into paper.

A long, dark stench of ink. Soot, lamp black and oil concocted by children in malodorous cellars. 

The smell that creeps from birds' quills plucked by farm wives who choke in air-borne excrements of geese they have been herding.

Amalgamate all these and the nose detects music, literature, philosophy. We approach the sublime through a medium which is physical and whose underside reveals the misfortune of others.

*

Most works of literature of any value involve convergences of what the author may have read in conjunction with memories which are in reaction to present but half-conscious associative experience - and indeed, one can scarcely imagine a work of imagination which implied anything less than some equivalent synthetic activity.

In the light of which, I will make this confession. My poem is a confection, a concoction of sources and resources I had borrowed from my reading, then kept buried until such a time as they were ready to engage at a proper moment of incentive for their transmutation and egress. 

No work of poetry can ever achieve an originality which is naked, entirely, of some antecedent. Some Ur phrase uttered at the omphalos - world navel - which pre-dates ancient Greek and Latin - or a Sybil's raving as she struggles with Apollo and chokes up verses of unmediated inspiration - or, abducted from Lord Rama, Sita, his queen's songs of grieving - did these exist, really, as we do with our plodding country measures?

Indeed, what lay behind those sightless orbs that Homer cast backward, doubtless many centuries, to the verses he inherited from bards who first sung of Helen, Agamemnon and Achilles? Or the Genesis writer who eavesdropped not on God's creation but borrowed, for the purpose of his own great poem, songs that had travelled into Palestine through Babylon and Persia?

No. We are all of us engaged in a common share of memories and knowledge: and of this, in the process of our application to the Muses, we make use as and when we make our own excursions.

It may therefore be claimed of my poem as follows:

'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan is from Purchas.'

'On the subject of Chandu, he had recourse to Marco Polo.'

'Alph the sacred river,' comes from Strabo and Pausanias (they claim it ran beneath earth and sea from Greece to erupt in Sicily as Arethusa). Milton has it surface into Lycidas.

'He stole that deep romantick chasm from Southey's Thalaba.[4]

Floating hair is remembered from the Gebir by Landor.[5]

The demon lover may be traced to Tobit in the Apocrypha.

James Bruce's Travels loaned him Ancestral voices prophesying war.[6]

'Weave a circle', 'incense-bearing trees', 'cedarn cover' and other passages with magic, paradisal associations are taken from A Continuation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, published during this decade in Edinburgh.

So be it: with a dozen or more of the most extrinsic examples. The mind mills and mixes what it reads, and like this meat pudding which is hung up in the kitchen in its bag of muslin, so imagination will transmute its contents with Verzauberter stealth and alchemical spontaneity. How far we may want to produce an entirely original pudding is the question. There are not many, I surmise, would want to eat it! 

Nothing, after all, comes from nowhere. My own chasms, rushing streams and the sunless sea, as suggested already, arrive from Culbone Wood and views therefrom. (There is, I suspect, nothing quite like Culbone's rugged contours in those flat Mongol steppelands!) Such scenes as these come not from a published book of sources. Nature, on the other hand, contains the whole, unwritten story. The Holy Spirit, no doubt, chaunts and indeed is its own song, also. Could we properly hear this, we might content ourselves to be its audience without burdening the creation with our secondary efforts.

*

Counterpoint and oscillation. The former controls objects that move in simultaneity but with no meaningful interaction.

*

In some words (perhaps all) lie germens: elements of verbal seed which are involuted with secrets that lie, inexpressibly, more or less, within the syllables that come together in them. This seed is deep buried: but it is accessible, so I am told, to certain adepts who by long study, have discerned what lies beyond extrinsic verbal denotation in its grosser vocalic sheathing.

The old Hebrews acknowledged these properties in their sacred language and constructed a syntax around root syllables - they called shoresh - which were instinct - as are dahlia and iris tubers - with a store of pliant, pyrotechnic fluxes. 

Deep in words that grew from such a root were systems of arcane, living inference which manifested themselves and were expressed in patterns of metaphysically symbolic numerical combination that were contained within the Hebrew characters and whose inter-relationships alluded to or even represented some aspect of divine immanence.

The Hindus, I have been informed, as explored by Sir William Jones and his colleagues in east Bengal, likewise conceive of a seed (which is bija in the Sanscrit) that lies at the heart of their syllabic coordinations, and that - herein lies the limit of my understanding - the vowel a alone, which informs a majority of the syllables in any sacred text - itself represents and encloses within it the entire creation and the divinities that control the same! There are, in this connection, chants or charms consisting solely of the vowel 'a' and this is sung, droned and indefinitely repeated to the end that the singer may enter - as though processing through a temple - the penetralium of that letter and become infused with the spiritual intelligence of what it carries.

With all this in mind, we must be aware in the composition of our own verses, that vocalic music and etymology (which perhaps correspond to the Arcanum of our own language) may carry their equivalent of hermetic patterns which are concealed to all but those who - as though in excavation of some fluid mineral essence - have explored them. I fancy that this may be true of certain poets only:

Shakespeare in his intuitive spontaneity, Milton through the same and by lucubrative application and in Chaucer's raw and plantlike couplets through whose tang and movement all the supple quickness of existence may be apprehended.

All these three poets of course do mean what we take them overtly to be saying. I suspect, however, perhaps most especially in Milton, that the poetry is fraught with esoteric suggestions that have little or nothing to do with its (sometimes heretical!) narrative theology, but which sings of hidden or oblique realities that the poet was modelling from the clandestine interior of his vocalic materials, and which only the angels (as perhaps he conceived them), but not his mundane, pious reader, would be capable of divining.

*

At the beginning of time, as evoked by the Hindu poet in his Ramayana, two fine birds are at sport in the forest and as their amorous debate proceeds, a hunter stands up with his bow and arrows and shoots the husband. The sage Valmiki who was pursuing his ablutions in the same location is witness to this spectacle and with his compassion aroused by the lamentation of the widowed love bird, spontaneously and with measured syllables anathemises the hunter. 'You,' he cries, 'who have killed the husband of this happy couple, may you not yourself live long!' And to Valmiki's own amazement, the sentiment emerged in a rhythmic measure (shloka).

It was in this manner that the first song came into being - and by some freak of etymology, Valmiki's verse, because it arose from shoka (grief - his own and that of the widowed love bird) was denominated shloka (a verse). Poetry thus may be said to have had its origin, after a death event, in a lamentation - motivated, albeit, in part, by compassion. Returning to his hermitage with his mind in confusion, Valmiki was visited by the god Brahma who bade him employ his new-made shloka for the opening measures of the Ramayana.

The first poem thus arose from a concatenated sequence, which, starting with the erotic freedom of bird song (these birds, I believe, were either cranes or curlews), was followed by a soulful threnody and concluded with Valmiki's poem which synthesised the previous utterances. Love, death, bereavement and fellow feeling thus inform the first song's origin. These same elements are perhaps the principle components of all subsequent poetry.[7]

But I have so far omitted one other main constituent. This is the curse that the sage, turned poet, directs towards the hunter: a wild tribal fellow who plies a sanguinary existence outside the boundaries of Hindu religious society and not least its vegetarian ethic.

Valmiki's compassion thus represents only one aspect of his utterance: for the sage who approves the krauncha birds' legitimate conubial bliss and who responds with sympathy to the wife's bereavement is one and the same who issues a malediction - while this latter of course parallels the violence of the hunter's action! [8]

And this curse represents no casual reprobation. Its words are shot - as it were in a consonance with or after-thwang of the hunter's arrow - at both the hunter's own being and his status in, or beyond, society. For the poor fellow already lay outside the sanctuary of the Hindu social polis. And now he is condemned, through the arrow shaft of the poem, to a more extreme exclusion.

But it is the nature of poetry and not of Hindu mores (of which I know nothing) that detains us.

Just this: whether those primordial notes of song came from the krauncha couple in their mutual love, or from the widow in her mourning, or whether they arose from human sympathy and an anger which was deflected from compassion into the expression of an anathema, each declaration contains elements which have a spiritualised or supernatural character. The fact that these declamations are uttered at the very threshold of time, lends them further and distinct mythological gravity: for they are spoken on an empty stage where naught else happens and thus suggest, in that primordial environment - magnum in parvo - considerable doings. 

Love, grief, anger and compassion. What more, beside some minor, subtle variations, might there be for the heart to experience and the voice to express? I hear each of these titanic arguments in the stanzas of our ballads and in Shakespeare's Sonnets. They persuade me that I might one day comprehend, more straightforwardly than so far I have, Lear, Antony and Hamlet in all their tortuous and lofty grandiloquence.

To conclude: one literary consideration. In Valmiki's story, we are presented with a drama which stands at a threshold between two genres. On the one hand, in the love-death narrative, we recognise elements of folk poetry. On the other, with the intervention of Valmiki into what, so far, has taken place in the language of birds, we witness a translation from the forest to the sacred precincts of an ashrama and, not least, from bird song into the literary or 'perfected' character of Sanscrit.

Much great literature, I think, may similarly have been contrived from an antecedent, or from some Ursprung, of the sort just outlined. The ballad, for example, gives us the couplets and quatrains which inform even the most elevated iambic composition, to speak nothing of the great themes that passed from the rough Scottish borders in the fifteenth century to the daintier precincts of the great houses and theatres a century later. (More of this more later. For as last night I recalled, on the darkling coombe, the black, horrid verses of Goethe's Erlkonig, my mind was impressed with that same confluence of genres - perfected by that mighty poet.)

Thus while the krauncha story comes to us through the high-flown, artificial medium of the Ramayana, my suspicion that this little tale must have derived from folk lore is confirmed by the discovery of its parallel among a primitive people. This I learned from one C.L.Giesecke: late Professor at Trinity College in Dublin, who recorded a little narrative of a bird wife's bereavement while he was travelling, among the Esquimaux, for geological specimens in Greenland. 

In Giesecke's version, from this ancient and unlettered tribe, a 'Snow Bird' is shot by an Esquimaux hunter and his widow laments - as the krauncha did in Sanscrit! This raw and untarnished northern hunter's narrative must ante-date the Sanscrit and represent the latter's Ursprung. And yet note how our very own children sing this nursery rhyme:

Who killed cock Robin?

'I, 'said the Sparrow,

With my little bow and arrow.'

And Skelton, God bless him, perhaps following Catullus in his lament for Lesbia's passer ille, cries of Philip Sparrow:

De pro fun dis cla ma vi,

When I saw my sparrow die !

Songs and stories hop around the globe like birds migrating - or like children at their skipping. When they alight, we domesticate them into familiar species.

*

1. Every syllable I write, in its progress left to right across the page, draws me towards the Orient. 

2. As the morning sun rises, my pen leans towards it and words germinate in the furrows I have cut into the paper.

3. East and the west are joined by the sun, and this - its passage through the hemisphere - is where our interest must be located.

4. There, in spaces of unknowing, I extend my spirit.

*

I do not recall having written these four statements: and yet as I stumbled on them this morning, it was clear that I had noted them during these past few days - perhaps in a half sleep.

During this time, a dome has hung in some quarter of my thought and dreaming: lifting its symmetry through the rounds of my closed eyes, as though it rested with its gentle hemispheric edges on my eyelids, and which thus gave a view - with the ventilation of its apex reaching into heaven - of a grey and blue nothing.

The amplitude of the dome, which is both a sacred diagram and, in small, the sky's vault, stands in stark contrast to our national, largely Gothic, architectural standard. 

For our own stone palaces with their crenellated battlements and leaden gutters are, in contrast to the Great Khan's pleasure dome, designed not just to keep their inhabitants dry but for the defence of the surrounding land and the protection of aristocratic privilege - while the towers and steeples of our churches proclaim an equivalent topographic domination while also aspiring to pierce the lower atmosphere and, as though supplicating in stone, and singing praises with a weather vane, reaching towards an empyrean which exists beyond the reach of the mason's chisel.

We in Europe, I think, live within geometrical constrictions, cramped by angular postures (as Ariel outlined the cross-limbed position of that hapless shipwrecked Neapolitan princeling!) and our sacred buildings are projections of this self-confining physical and intellectual geometry.

I love our churches: not least for their satisfying rectilinearity, the nobility of their restraint and the dignified collaboration of their various proportions. The Gothic, nonetheless, is cold. There is a chilliness to ruled lines and even to the arches that soar from block on block of limestone dressed as these are with deep sea blue flints and interlardings of old Roman terra cotta: while the severity of the perpendicular has a tendency to scrape at and erode the more tender faculties, with the result that our thoughts, even in the most flamboyant of our great buildings, will be moulded and controlled by the shaping that its pious architects themselves imposed on the stones - with the intention, no doubt, that these might reciprocate with some future influence their own systematic obeisance.

These politically spiritualised controls would be obliterated could we simply doze and thus dream within a dome and let our thoughts dissipate along the contour of its inner shell through which we might, at the same time, be inducted and protected - given its benign enclosure - from any apprehension from its overwhelming dimension.

A pleasure dome is of course merely a recreational and domesticated rescension of the sort of cupola shaped roof under which the relics of some Hindu, but I think mostly Buddhist, religious teachers ('idolators' as Marco Polo described them), were buried and commemorated. 

These domes or stupas were representations of infinitude. And this is what I like. Because the curving upthrust of such a structure leaves earth (where human matter dreams no longer!) and in a single movement reaches vertically, describes a half circle and descends having alluded, without pretense, to the plenitude of a circumambience which is at once abstract, complete, filled with arcane meanings and - like the sky it meets and echoes - empty.

All this, at once airy and gentle, is suggestive not of high things, but of a flexible and spacious illimitability. Here is room given, rather than ordained. And while a church contains its worshippers within a construction whose exterior attempts to pierce heaven, the stupa, while solid, suggests translucency to the devotee who must view it from outside: and by means of circumambulating its periphery, assimilate it within the generosity of shared sunlight. Thus it enters him and fills his being with a lightness which is ineffable.

While the dome that I imagined standing on my eyelids appeared as a weightless shell, the dome of the stupa suggests that same potentiality. Filled as it may be with a bricky rubble and rising as it does over the exhausted relics that once contained the breath of human inspiration, this building may be described as an egg, from whose roundness new life can be anticipated to spring. 

And while, as suggested, this relatively small hemisphere rises and falls quickly from the limits of its root in the ground, it speaks, albeit with a gracious reticence, of an aether which has no boundary and for which no definition can be uttered. 

Thus while churches, within the contours to which I have alluded, compress and compel us into bursts of singing and amplify with their stony reverberations the plainsong that their architecture requisitions, the stupa induces silence.

For that stupa is, ipse, a quintessence of that amplitude which, could it contain sound, would reduce this to its own medium: a sound that has been evacuated from itself and transformed to its own peculiar music, and this - the sound of no sound - it will perform, beyond the existence of its constituent minerals, for an eternity to which there will be no appreciative witness.

*

In poetry no explanation. In philosophy no comprehension. In the world no action. Vitality of resignation.

*

A life of subjectivity and observation. Not a farthing in either. One coin, could I find it, would discover some adventure away from my pocket. I plunge in my hand and bring out wool fluff, a nut shell and my pen knife - blunted. 

Electing poetry - one thereby chooses poverty. Or perhaps in the absence of a trade or talent, fools turn to poetry as if to proclaim their incapacity!

There are, further to this theme, men pursuing business and politer professions. And others, on the other hand, such as Sheridan and Garrick who make a living in the entertainment of the public. 

The existence of theatre is, of course, predicated in polite society on a convergence of fashionable idleness and intellectual boredom. For a theatre to succeed, it must attract people who will make an appearance at the play, creating of their position in the audience a secondary drama; while the exercise of their necks in long sequences of how-d'ye-does represent a sealant which, for the duration of an evening, will obliterate personal or domestic tedium. As for the playwright, he will work himself into a sweat to secrete enough scented nectar for these butterflies to sniff sufficient to attract them to his blousy blossoms - and thus provide the conversation to sustain them until their next outing. 

As for me, what I write - if ever it were to reach an approximation of such an audience - would represent a somnifer against such occasions. But how much would such a person pay me to send them, now and then, to sleep and stimulate them sufficiently in this respect, to boast that a certain Mr.----- provided a capital draught of oblivion? To be taken with wine in private and with an appropriate dose of yawnings?

What is required is a mix of scandals, liaisons, fights, madness, feuding, exiled heroines and disinherited suitors who will, in righteous latherings of rhetoric, climactically become enobled. And at the centre, there must be a good murder…Now 'tis accomplished. All that's necessary's set in motion. Here is my drama:

Heart's blood aches. A black mind in triumph. Off stage, screaming. A mad scene (pallid and distracted heroine). Retainers enter. Now they exit. An old Duke banishes the heiress. A mountain pass in Sicily. Thunder. And a monastery. The foundling discovered and adopted by goat herds. The intervention of a hermit and a pious subterfuge. A camp fire with brigands. The old Duke, dying, proclaims his forgiveness. A peasant festival. Masquerading as a minstrel, the hero courts the exile princess. The late Duke's minister, disguised as a Franciscan, affronts the minstrel. Duelling with poison. Secret papers with some guilders. Reconciliation. Peripeteia and katharsis. Curtain

Watch now as my public rages!

*

Letters from B---- from where he is foreign. The passionate formation of his hand as though in streaming marine currents.  The descenders are flourishes done in great excitement. The taller letters flying across the waves of that blue-black script, taking off now into the air which breezes between the energy-stiffened pennants of words which have alighted to give him pleasure, now riding the crests of the general matter as though basking in a movement to which he has given free and delighted rein. The pages breathe with an ocean wind whose exuberance I inhale as I hold them to me. It matters little whether there is significance to what he tells me. The words arch, leaping lively, as though great, healthy sea beasts were unleashed from his pen nib, which tear through the water for sheer self-delight in the exercise of their endogy. This is friendship!

*

I saw her seated between the two apple trees, smiling generously as she gave her breast, while the lips of the infant were extended on her in a secret paradisal gluttony. His lips were thin and empurpled around her teat and she laughed as he tugged in a delirium of her sweetness. 

The two others played under the blossom, their little faces upturned like wood anemones in changing shadow - illumined from sideways in a tactful imitation of the sunlight.

*

Now a bloody Phlegethon has engulfed my brain and my heated red and orange thoughts are rushed along it, thrown up from the blood but not cooled before they tumble back and in again. These thoughts have the consistency of the hot, rocky current from which they emerged: and as to their shape they appear about to set, to consolidate from their embryonic initiality. But at the moment when they seem ready to achieve some form that I could put a hand to or be moulded, they return to the Phlegaean flux where they are thrown about once more and deformed as in the tumult of their first emergence.

*

The simplified finality of tea. And tea's finality of simplification. All peripheral preoccupations are obliterated with this tonic. And so here is a prescription:

First having dug the necessary trenches for your four rows of peas and next to them two rows of potatoes: now go to the kitchen and witness how the body, which has struggled against, and in complicity with, the earth and which steams with a spring sweat, is reduced to the simplest needs of the human constitution. Reach now for bread and an ample dish of tea and observe how reduced the rest of everything becomes, as what the body touches transcends all thought and all thought's products.

Such are happy moments. For in tea - this harmless infusion which stimulates and then sedates us - we lose ourselves to perfect leisure. And if this represents the end point of our labour, it is also in itself an object, a completeness that we take into us. 

This cup I hold, sustains profundities I know transcend my philosophic limits. It has travelled from the East to greet us and we need go no further than its warm dark edges to stay where it finds us. So, where we drink we may sink without thinking. And it is profound… I do not know…because we go down in the process of an entrance.

*

We inhabit constrained inland seas. The triton and nereid enjoy broader oceans. All is subsumed in slithering and saline concupiscences which have order, not boundaries. Could we act thus frankly with our bodies, we too…

*

I have been thinking once again about the mind of God, and the means by which the world or the cosmos into which the world came to be placed, emerged when it did from the pre-ordination of God's creational impulsion. 

The notion of time is perhaps not important, and yet given the existence of a deity for whom everything is possible in an eternity which is without beginning or end, I am - no doubt frivolously - preoccupied with the beginning of our Bible in which it is stated that In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Which statement is followed, as though in retrospective temporal sequence with an assertion that the Earth was without form and Void. The latter part of this phrase, being our King James translation of tohu va bohu, coming as it does after the verb 'was', represents a further conundrum. For was, as both the Hebrew and English past tense express it, suggests, does it not, a prior situation of being: namely the anterior existence of earth as chaos (tohu va bohu)? Which condition, if it can be represented with the past tense of 'to be', must either suggest the existence of some pre-creational phenomenon or a state of non-being or anti-being which pre-dated the beginning of God's Creation.

Of course the rabbis might argue that the phrase 'In the beginning' (b'resheet) means not 'In the beginning' but 'the beginning of' (as in Genesis 10.x: 'the beginning of his Kingdom was Babel'.) 

This quibble is good and in part solves my puzzle. For if this be the case, then God did not create Heaven and Earth at the beginning of everything, but rather he conceived these two entities at a new beginning and in context of a chaos which had previously and perhaps always been there in the darkness (which was palpable!) 'on the face of the deep'. 

There was, in other words, in existence, at least water already, and God's recognizable creation (as sensually we apprehend it) was consolidated at the outset of its own beginning. The anterior, as Milton expressed it in his lovely and exalted verses, representing what might only be alluded to: for, given that we exist merely on the near side of its infinite spaces, we may not penetrate that 'dark, backward abysm', which (to deform Shakespeare) precedes Time, while God was there in, on and with the pre-existential and non-formulated waters:

Thou from the first

Was present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss

And mad'st it pregnant.

As Milton here divines (I suspect), God had lived as a presence in an incalculable present condition which stretched back to 'the first': which, God being eternal, had no conceivable beginning, but which at a moment that was willed by this same Elohim (God's plural name is the third word of the Bible) was made pregnant with all we would come to know.

What was God's mind, or in God's mind, during (if that preposition is admissible) the infinitely long chaos through which he forbore to render the pre-creational waters fertile?

Such metaphysical speculations are interesting, I think, mainly in so far as they have a bearing on poetry, and the creation of poetry as it occurs in men's imagination and the manner in which powerful and lovely figurations are experienced as consolidating from the pre-creational depths of an intellect which previously has been 'without form and void'. 

Reverting for a moment - I hope not to transgress - to the mind of God: would it not be that at the moment of 'beginning', he held in his imagination the entire panoply of the creation, and that it was there in his infinitely fertile vision which was and is his person, and that he had only to render concrete this imaginative totality by an act of will (and this over time as represented in six symbolic days) which is subsumed in the verb bara ('he created'): the second word of the Bible - which great poetic artefact, itself, is a component, one may suppose, a reflex or reflection that, as it were like a secretary, in God's service, published itself as a record of th' event.

I would go further and say this. That if the constituents of this Great Everything That We Know co-existed in God's mind at the beginning, what differentiated this from its formularised expression as earth, heaven, firmament, dry land, seas, bright lights, living creatures that fly, creep and swim, followed by beasts of the earth and finally man in the divine image?

Did not all these swarm on the pre-creational waters in God's imagination before he laboured to distribute them through the thirty-one verses of his record of the event over those allegorical six days and set them moving, in series, until by the seventh, the entire system was in motion, independently of that almighty and energic impulsion, while he rested and let it proceed?

Might we not therefore ourselves imagine, that either all this had existed in the mind of God, but that in the action of the verb 'created', he separated himself from what he had imagined, or that what we experience as the creation remains in that imagined creative intelligence and that all there is and all we know continues as a representation of that moment of beginning or even of the pre-beginning? Only if we choose to believe in the former proposition, of course, may the problems of evil and of death satisfactorily be explained: these negatives occur beyond the metaphysical perhaps but as a reflex of man's freedom, in that he (and our first parents) separated themselves by choice from the All Good that constituted Paradise - which latter might be comprehended as a symbolical manifestation of superabundant divine plenitude.

On the other hand, we might, quite contrarily, argue that since everything in the universe is of the deity, then death and evil represent a component of his completeness. And that it is the task of human beings to separate from this aspect of the universal high principle without alienating themselves from the quintessence of its being which is a goodness which comprehends and yet transcends death and evil.

I have subverted my disclaimer. And these animadversions have entered or perhaps even constructed a labyrinth which has led me so far from the realm of poetry that I scarce know whether I am inside or outside, at the outset or the centre, lost or crawling with some prospect of an exit (or an entrance even!), at the end or a beginning, half way along or nowhere that I can identify. In such a position, all, perhaps, one needs is the fortitude of folly. For how can it matter, what difference can it make, given (argle) I am somewhere within the infinite confabulation of a mind inaccessible to imagination, in whatever place I find myself, or believe myself to be positioned? For everywhere is here and here is infinitely exchangeable with both itself and everywhere. 

Now, with all this in consideration, we have, as poets, an obligation to continue the creation as it has been patterned. Nature proclaims itself to be the work of the divine intellect and since we are a part of this, we too must sing forth with the primrose and sparrow, formulating our song, as angels do, and in thereby expressing our part in the creation, signify the place that we too occupy in the originator that has conceived us in its image and thus send forth into the welkin our part within the counterpoint that tunes sky and the earth in what Dryden properly described as 'heavenly harmony with which the universal frame began'.

And just as old Abraham sowed the desert with his patriarchal semen, so it is, I think, the obligation of the human voice to sing: which strain, meagre as it may be, represents a portion of the creative intelligence, and in so acting, puts poesy out to join nature in a consanguineal fraternity.

*

But the best art is agnostic and is performed in great, free spaces that the metaphoric godhead has vacated.

[1] I recalled, later, Goldsmith's affectionate epitaph for Garrick which contains this couplet:

On the stage he was natural , simple, affecting;

'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.

[2] Their syllabic accumulation approximates the fourteeners of Chapman's Homer!

[3] What I experienced as a fertile valley is transformed to desert; a genial stream is now a torrent which tosses aloft great rocks from its current; homely groves of elm trees and chestnuts are become a winter forest; a sterile mountain range erupts from the cottage vegetable garden. One might extemporise endlessly.

[4] VII, 6

[5] III, 19

[6] Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile

[7] One might note here the confluence of three further elements: the world of nature and eros as represented by the krauncha birds, the perfected holy man and the forest hunter whose way of life is counterpointed with that of the ascetic.

[8] Which, the enlightened but bemused European reader might ask, is the worse of the two actions: to go hunting in the forest or to curse a fellow human?