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POETRY AND MUSIC:
'Never seek to tell thy love'
 Following last week's consideration of the similarity between
poetical and musical openings, it seems logical to consider to what
extent poetry and music might be further connected. First, there is the
obvious connection in the case of poems that are specifically conceived
as songs to be set to music and sung, such as ballads, folk and love
songs.
A famous example is Burns' "O my Luve's like a red, red rose", which
Bob Dylan is said to have acknowledged as the source of his greatest
inspiration. Such poems are generally incomplete without their musical
setting. Then there are those passages of poetry in which the poet
appears to be using language, whether consciously or otherwise, to
achieve a primarily musical effect, as in the following extract of
Milton's "Lycidas":
"Ye valleys low where the mild whispers use Of shades and wanton
winds and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely
looks, Throw hither all you quaint enamell'd eyes, That on the green
turf suck the honied showers, And purple all the ground with vernal
flowers." Despite the visual nature of the imagery Milton, in describing
it, seems to have relied on his auditory rather than his visual
imagination. Consequently, it is the sound rather than the sense of the
words that makes an impression on us.
Allusive or suggestive
But there is a deeper connection between poetry and music than is
involved in the above examples. This relates to the effect they both
have of being allusive or suggestive. Music is nothing if it is not
this, evoking a mood or feeling or sense-impression of some kind that
does not necessarily arise from any rational or intelligible premise. We
are not, however, referring here to poetry that deliberately sets out to
produce a comparable, unthought-related effect as, for example, much of
de la Mare's verse does. Consider this extract of his 'The Unchanging':
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T S Eliot |
"After the songless rose of evening, Night quiet, dark, still, In
nodding cavalcade advancing Starred the deep hill: You in the valley
standing, In your quiet wonder took All that glamour, peace, and mystery
In one grave look." This is patently intended to produce an enchanted or
dreamlike effect upon the reader without reference to any intelligible
thought content. As such, we are justifiably inclined to dismiss it as
"the stuff that dreams are made on."
Unlike music, the evocative nature of poetry that connects it with
music does not exist apart from its sense or intelligibility. For poetry
is made not of notes but of words, and words are nothing if they do not
convey meaning. The primary aim of genuine poetry, therefore , is to
make sense, and the genuine poet's primary aim is to find the mode of
expression in which he can make sense for the reader of his time. He has
not only to develop a personal idiom that is distinctively his own, but
to adapt this idiom to the current usage of the language in which he
writes.
Effective revolutions
That is why a few great poets have, from time to time, had to effect
revolutions in poetic language to rescue it from worn-out modes of
expression and bring it in line with contemporary speech. This was what
Wordsworth achieved at the turn of the 18th century and Eliot in the
early 20th. The achievement of the latter can be better appreciated
alongside a typical example of the 'Georgian ' school of the early 20th
century:
"We are thine, O Love, being in thee and made of thee, As thou, Love
were the deep thought And we the speech of the thought; yea, spoken are
we, Thy fires of thought out-spoken....Yea, Love, we are thine, the
liturgy of thee, Thy thought's golden and glad name, The mortal
conscience of immortal glee, Love's zeal in Love's own glory."
These are the opening and closing verses of 'Hymn to Love' by the
so-called Georgian Laureate, Lascelles Abercrombie. They neither make
sense nor are they allusive in any notable way. The vague sentiments and
archaic diction can best be described as representative of the fag-end
of 19th century romanticism. Yet this is the type of verse that was
inflicted on schoolchildren in the fifties in the name of Modern English
Poetry, the Georgians having actually been regarded as modern in their
time. This was before Eliot made his impact and he, needless to say, was
not among the modern poets anthologized for our edification.
When Eliot came out with 'Prufrock and Other Observations' in 1917,
he presented us with a new idiom which, unpoetical as it may have seemed
at the time, made obvious sense in terms of contemporary speech. This is
evident from the very opening lines of the title poem: "Let us go then,
you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient
etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted
streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:"
Unaccustomed expedition
This is an invitation to an evening expedition in an unaccustomed,
seemingly squalid, part of town. That is plain to see, it makes
immediate sense. But consider how much more is suggested in these few
words through the manner of expression. The phrase "you and I" suggests
a desire for intimate company. The persistent rhythm and the end rhymes
of the first two lines indicate purposefulness with a touch of the
reckless. The startling simile of the third line that purportedly
describes the evening tells us much more about the speaker. It is he who
feels trapped within his circumstances like an anaesthetised patient.
His life seems to him to be as unreal as unconsciousness. He desperately
wants to break out of it into reality, which is why he chooses a
destination that promises tangible experience, even if unsavoury by his
usual standards.
What a lot Eliot has been able to impart to us about the speaker and
his situation, but in how few words! It is all conveyed by what the
words suggest or evoke, which is far beyond what they literally mean. If
Eliot had put things explicitly and explained it all, as I have
endeavoured to do, he would have succeeded as a writer of prose
masquerading as a poet, but he would have failed as a real poet. Poetry
never seeks to tell it all, it tells a little and suggests the rest.
"Never seek to tell thy love," as Blake says, "Love that never told can
be." We saw above how Abercrombie seeks to tell us all about love and
only succeeds in making us heartily sick of the subject.
This, then, is the evocative power of poetry, and it is the way in
which it chiefly resembles music. It is not devoid of thought, indeed it
depends on its core or nucleus of thought, but what it presents to us,
in Eliot's apt phrase, is "the sensuous apprehension of thought." And
this is where craftsmanship comes to the support of the imagination.
Through his ability to choose the right words and put them together in
the right combinations, the poet achieves a synergy of creativity,
getting his words to produce a wealth of meaning far in excess of the
combined value of their individual worth. It is the same with the
composer. His musicianship comes to the aid of his imagination, enabling
him to choose and arrange his notes in such a way as to create an aura
of sensation that transcends the merely sonic value of his notes. But
there is more to the relationship between poetry and music, which we
hope to consider next week. |
