Spring is already upon us. The winds and rains have battered the lands in earnest, and now satisfied those of us who feel an almost religious awe for the force of nature’s frown. It was the season of pensive melancholy, the season of originality – for winter has not yet become a cliché. Spring has: spring is the season of rebirth, the time when the birds start to sing, the air is perfumed, the warmth creeps in – and I have read enough books to extend the list ad infinitum – but not yet so withering as the high solstice. It is the season of activity, and of all human activities the one that suits it best is walking. Surely one of the most flagrantly indolent activities there is; though I am ready to confess that – if out of season, and more often in the steeper shadow of the year – I am myself rather actively indolent. Even in this season, I too ramble in the hills and waft through the outer suburbs. I have even, on occasion, and mainly metaphorically, stopped to smell the roses – though, it is only fair to add, I am quite sure I have often mistaken, and not all of them were roses. Still, someone of my limited intelligence and unromantic bent cannot rightly be held to have wasted their time smelling flowers under such misguided assumptions, unless it be by the true opponents of indolence, who object primarily to the misguided assumption that the sense of smell should be used at all, when it is plainly irrelevant to the efficient execution of affairs. With such people I have least have some common ground – the common ground of an argument – since they at least have a philosophy, though it is the opposite of mine. With the others, who are so pedantic as to inform me that what I spent in the character of a rose is actually a lavender, I can but sigh my deepest regret. They have no philosophy with which to attack me; only knowledge. On both counts we have nothing in common.
As one of the latter bouts of the real violence of the elements hit us in Victoria and deferred our first hopes of an early Spring, I sat reading Vergil and Shelley in the shelter of various far-flung haunts listing to the sound of death outdoors, and it occurred to me that this – my ignorance, or my philosophy – has perhaps, in an accidental way, saved me from one disaster that has befallen the people of our times, the inability to read nature poetry. The whole culture of such poetry is a culture of triumphant misunderstanding, but the whole world assumes it is a culture of tedious cleverness. In fact poetry is written for the ignorant, the layman, but the laymen now think it is too intellectual for them. It is true, poetry is intelligent; but it is a mistake to think it is intellectually intelligent. On the whole poetry is addressed to the part of the mind that specialises in insightful errors – the part shared by even the most avowedly uneducated – like myself, who cannot rightly disentangle an elm from an ash, and have barely grasped the subtlety that distinguishes an oak from an acorn.
Shelley, for instance, describes a glade in a forest as ‘One vast mass of mingling shade, A brown magnificence’. These words are pure poetry, and an excellent example of what we are about, but they are none of them very sensible: they are quite clever and quite wrong. Shade does not mingle. The idea of overlapping shadows is strictly absurd. Nor does it make much sense to speak of a mass of shade. And as for the ‘brown magnificence’, that is pure aural oxymoron – like a ‘grey splendour’ or ‘the Battle of Pinkie’. The point is that they convey something quite vivid to us; we understand, it makes sense to imagine the shade mingling, or call the forest a ‘mass of shade’, and one feels a certain pleasure in rebellious intuition when one recognises and agrees that such a scene might be called a ‘brown magnificence’. It is, if we are happy to split hairs like this, all very clever, but not exactly intelligent: it is the way ingenuity goes when it refuses the aid of the intellect. In the same way we understand at once when Shelly confides that he has slept in charnel houses amongst the dead, hoping to meet a ghost who might ‘render up the tale of What We Are.’ It is silly – still, it makes you shudder. It is nothing wore than a slight exaggeration to say that nature poetry is never about nature, but about the illusions nature creates and the things that nature suggests. Here only we may say we subdue nature; civilisation, technology and cultivation merely drive it back.
In Vergil I read of the anise and the privet and the cyclamen, and I still do not know what they are; but, beyond the delights of confusion and speculation, I still found a great deal of delight in the Georgics. He tells me of taking his shoes off to soak his shins in the grape press – I wish I had been there. It is just the kind of amusement my imagination likes when Shelley describes how ‘The red volcano overcanopies Its fields of snow and pinnacle of ice With burning smoke.’ And it is just the kind of amusement that pleases my simple brain, which I inherited through a long lineage from primitive ancestors, to decipher the odd word when I am told that ‘the boat fled on with unrelaxing speed’. This is real poetry; and while it has its faults – perhaps it gives me too much satisfaction for such a trifle as it is – it cannot be accused of being intellectual.
Now besides the terrible slander that only smart people read poetry, there is another that says that nature poetry is florid. I used to think that, for there is such a thing as florid nature poetry, and I am not fond of it myself. But it is not this. Why then does all poetry seem florid to some? I suppose because they read all poetry in a soporific and florid lilt. There are few things in the world easier than to kill averse, and the method is to remove the meaning. You might kill this without stirring a finger: ‘At midnight The moon arise: and lo! the ethereal cliffs Of Caucasus…’ – A thousand brains would cloud; it is not the cliffs that are ethereal, but the verse, and that not in a nice sense; be it as sublime as the stratosphere, it is at any rate as empty – and as suffocating. That, of course, is because the readers have not read it. They have not pause to consider that the operative word, ethereal, means ‘up in the ether,’ and in this case is really quite alarming. The ether is just where cliffs should not be. It means – but here is Shelley:
‘…the ethereal cliffs
Of Caucasus, whose icy summits shone
Among the stars like sunlight.’
It means that the cliffs are an astronomical menace. It means that they have the most awful case of geological gigantism. Whatever you call this – fabulous, untenable, outlandish, alarming – it is not soporific; and the only thing that can be called florid in it is the word ‘lo! where we would prefer the less lazy ‘look!’
But for every one person who, having read any really good long poems, has turned away with genuine distaste, there must be a thousand who have been turned off by misguided humility. It is the great vice of our age. Here is the proof: there is nothing more typical of a humungous humility than to constantly accuse itself of arrogance, and there is nothing our age specialises in more than the self-suspicion of arrogance. We think that knowledge is power and that we have so much knowledge that it has gone to our heads. We think that we have replaced God with ourselves. We think that we have superseded morality and forged our own fate. We think that we are the tragic hero of history, and that our tragic flaw was hubris. Nothing raises such a clamour but paranoid modesty. Nothing is so certain of its pridefulness as humility.
For amidst all this talk of human pride and the successes of science, the one great popular defect of our age is a radical and ruinous humility, or even self-humiliation. It lies behind the fact that we do not presume to believe that our own worldviews are right, and others’ wrong, though every blighter to tread the earth till now has. It lies behind the equally alarming fact that so many go about insisting that they waste their time, without doing anything about it.
The portentous idea that the majority in our society could waste the majority of their spare time on things they consider valueless is strange enough; I myself do not know whether it is a ridiculous misapprehension or an alarming insight, for it could well be either. It does not trouble me at all that others’ delights are different to mine, and I share my classical verse with a choice minority. I am sure I am not smart enough to keep up with current events, though in my graver moments I fear that might be wrong; others are sure they are not smart enough to read literature, and at all moments I insist they are certainly wrong. But I do not insist that they should, if they do not want to. I am not concerned that they don’t; I do not think they are wasting their time, and I am sure I waste enough of mine anyway. But that they believe they are wasting their time – that some can talk of doom-scrolling, and feel they are doomed to do it – that is another matter. That is a tragedy of abasement; that is why modern humility is such a pressing danger. Were I Saint George I am sure I would elect it for my first dragon. Not so were the peasants of old, except if they were drunken; the peasant knew they lived as peasants should, and only the drunkards regretted that they spilt and squandered and spoilt their time. Now, we all think of ourselves as drunken peasants. The gluttonous layabouts of the aristocracy used to complain of ennui, but that was because they were gluttonous layabouts; now wea re all ready to equate ourselves with those gluttonous layabouts.
It seems to me that this is not a matter of indifference – that either we extirpate the ways we waste time, or (perhaps it is more apropos) abolish the concept of wasted time. If it seems to me that this might rightly be the rally-call of some revolution today , it is because everything I value hangs off it, and at the moment is hung because of it. Unless one has the dignity to choose one’s passtimes because one believes they are noble, one will never stop long enough to warm to good literature, or to form an opinion on whether roses should be smelt or smelted, or sustain a truth in the face of the world. Meanwhile I cannot even defy the practice of doomscrolling, though I’m sure there must be solid philosophical reasons against it, so long as I pity the people who call it doomscrolling, as if it were an ineluctable curse. Let them approve it, until then I have no heart to oppose it! Better they be defiant malefactors than flimsy fatalists!
Meanwhile the old poets have far fewer worthy readers than they might, because the populace thinks it is not smart enough to read them. The case is quite the contrary. If only clever people write poetry, only silly people can read it, people who have the capacity to be constantly taken unawares, and have not yet seen enough to be bored of life. The smart set cannot appreciate poetry as much, except so far as they, too, being human, are a little unintelligent like the rest of us. But the smart set are usually too caught up with criticism and philology to stop to really appreciate a poem. And if the smart set are too smart to read, and the silly think they are too silly, who will read? So longas to the rest of us literature is idealised, it is idle: we ruin it by raising it. The general gist of poetry is to be popular, and if it is not popular it has no right to exist. A textbook has professional interest to a professor in its field, but poetry is meant to have a professional interest to all who profess humanity. Anyone who has enjoyed a walk in the country ought to see the appeal of a poem about the country, which might show them a thousand things they had not noticed, but will notice the next time. Anyone who has fought in a battle, or dreamed of or feared a war, ought to have some interest in an epic, where a million impressions might correct or contribute to their own. Hence the one sure rule in poetry is that it must not be too intelligent, because it must above all be intelligible. The arbiter of taste is the world and the individual: they are free to dislike whatever they like and like whatever they decide. But for the sake of dignity, and for the love of literature, let them not say poetry is for smart people.
theparsnipoftime 