'On the seashore of endless worlds children meet':

'NATURAL PIETY' FURTHER EXPLORED

Our discussion last week dealt mainly with the advantages to the poetic imagination of a childlike affinity to the natural world. But there are considerably more benefits to be had from a poet's preservation of the quality of natural piety.

For example, Blake's childlike view of life enables him, in his Songs of Innocence, to portray a world into which sin, guilt, fear and suffering have not yet intruded. "'I have no name: I am but two days old.' What shall I call thee? 'I happy am, Joy is my name.' Sweet joy befall thee."(Infant Joy). It helps us to realise what man has lost due to the experience of spiritual and physical corruption, as shown in the complementary Songs of Experience: "My mother groan'd! My father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud: Like a fiend hid in a cloud."(Infant Sorrow) Here, too, childlike simplicity and directness of utterance enable the projection of uncomfortable truths with unself-conscious candour: "In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear." (London) Eliot's point that Blake's verse has the "unpleasantness" and "honesty" of great poetry has not a little to do with this influence of natural piety.

The innate compassion of the child, too, (soon to be lost through adult influence,) effectively extends the range of a poet's sympathetic concern. As much as nature does for Wordsworth, this quality "oftentimes" enables a poet to hear "the still, sad music of humanity." After all, the context of Hopkins' 'Spring and Fall (to a young child)' is his compassionate observation of a girl grieving over the autumnal loss of the leaves of the forest. "Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving?" And it is this very compassion that helps him to understand that the child's grief is actually over the decay she must eventually experience herself, like all of mankind. "Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same...It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for." In Margaret we also see reflected the child's tenderness towards the natural world, which Hopkins echoes with an intensely relevant message for the world of today. We have already come across his plea on behalf of "the weeds and the wilderness, wildness and wet", but here he is again in 'Binsley Poplars (felled 1879)': "O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew - Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender....Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her..."

The child's instinctive sense of kinship with the animal world is another aspect of this compassion. A poet who reflects this to advantage is Hardy as, for instance, in 'Afterwards.'

In this poem, the poignancy of the poet's contemplation of his own death is sharpened by the expression of his loving interest in the creatures of the countryside: "If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

Further advantages of the child becoming father to the poet are to be seen in Tagore's collection of "child poems" entitled 'The Crescent Moon.' Happily, these prose poems are translated from the original Bengali by the poet himself. Here Keatsian "gusto" works along with natural piety to enable Tagore to view reality through the eyes of the child as well to regard the child from the standpoint of the parent. The resultant recreation of a mutually loving relationship affords insights into the nature of things that would otherwise be unavailable. We see one evidence of this in 'When and Why': "When I bring you coloured toys, my child, I understand why there is such a play of colours on clouds, on water, and why flowers are painted in tints - when I give coloured toys to you, my child.

When I sing to make you dance, I truly know why there is music in the leaves, and why waves send their chorus of voices to the heart of the listening earth - when I sing to make you dance."

Loving empathy with the child is what helps the poet to share the child's instinctive connection to the natural world.

A more serious note is struck in 'On the Seashore': "On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances....

The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children."

Amid the chaos that inhabits the endless worlds and seas, children play undisturbed on a common seashore that is reserved for them. Their experience is only of the harmless fringes of the chaos. It is we, their protectors, that see the surrounding chaos, note that the sea-beach has a half indulgent but half-sinister smile, that the playful waves deal death elsewhere, and tremble.

That Tagore can evoke this sense of adult terror simultaneously with the childish sense of security is a remarkable achievement of dramatic irony.

A final example of the childlike in poetry is the ability to write for the child and the adult alike. Eliot demonstrates this facility in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", on which the unfortunately better-known musical 'Cats' was based.

It is evident, at least to the adult reader, that the various specimens of cats described have their counterparts in the world of humans. For instance, 'The Old Gumbie Cat' who "All day...sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat; she sits and sits and sits and sits-and that's what makes a Gumbie Cat!

But when the day's hustle and bustle is done, Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun. And when all the family's in bed and asleep, She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep. She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice - Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice; So when she has got them lined up on the matting, She teaches them music, crocheting and tatting" The poem goes on to describe her other invaluable services performed unbeknown to the household, and ends, "So for Old Gumbie Cats let us now give three cheers - On whom well-ordered households depend, it appears." The fine irony of this last couplet would not have been possible without the appeal to, and the perspective of, the child's consciousness.

Much of Walter de la Mare's poetry is specifically aimed at recapturing the child's mentality. His weakness, in spite of his considerable technical skill, is the tendency to escape into a dream world centred on childish memories, thereby limiting his value for the mature reader. But we have still not come to our Sri Lankan example of natural piety, the general subject having proved vaster than was anticipated.

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