Roots of Lyric: Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics 9780691196671

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ROOTS OF LYRIC

ROOTS OF LYRIC Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics

BY

ANDREW

WELSH

Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey

Copyright © 1978 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey

A list of acknowledgments for quoted material appears at the end of this volume. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Linotype Baskerville Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Princeton Legacy Library edition 2019 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-65552-9 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-691-65694-6

for Charles Crow

PREFACE

THIS STUDY started out to be a very simple thing. I was

curious, as many others have been, to see whether there were some constants in the language of lyric poetry, some fundamental forms underlying the figures of imagery and the movements of sound and rhythm which so impressively characterize that language. There were. They did not, however, sit still for patient analysis. Those fundamental forms, the "roots" of lyric, were not at all as simple as they first appeared, and when approached too closely they began to shift, to turn into other things, and soon to divert attention from themselves by hinting at deeper roots—"ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds"—in poetic language. Thus this study transformed itself from a confident demonstration of recurring images and rhythms to a far more tentative speculation about the ways in which poetic language catches, reflects, and directs fundamental powers of vision and action. The roots of lyric are not themselves lyric poems, but some understanding of the roots—the powers they derive from and the forms they take—lets us see the familiar elements of poetic language in new, and sometimes strange, ways. In this study the roots are first seen as they are embodied in the riddles, charms, and chants of primitive and folk poetry; then they are followed through stages of fuller development in Renaissance emblem books, Japanese haiku, and the satires of John Skelton; they are still recognizable, and still illuminating, in Chinese poems, Image poems by Pound and Williams, and in complex lyric poetry by Yeats, Wyatt, and Hopkins. The author is not now and never has been a specialist in

PREFACE

modern poetry or Renaissance lyric, much less in Chinese linguistics or Navaho ritual. That there are specialists in those and other areas makes possible speculations such as mine, and I have used their work gratefully. The texts of primitive poetry which appear in chapters six and seven are not the results of my own fieldwork or of unusually obscure research, and they were not selected with the idea of making a particular critical point; many of them were first suggested to me by anthologized translations of primitive literatures or by books such as C. M. Bowra's Primitive Song, and once they were traced back to the transcriptions and commentaries of the original collectors the texts made their own critical points. The sources are handled in the notes, but I would like to acknowledge here a more general debt to three scholars, the folklorist Archer Taylor and the literary critics Northrop Frye and Hugh Kenner, who cast shadows longer than any footnotes can accommodate. This book has received generous support from The Research Council and the Faculty Academic Study Program of Rutgers University, and it was finished with the help of an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, where the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the staff of the Hillman Library provided comfort and assistance. Special thanks go to Dan Howard for making studies such as this one possible, to Princeton University Press editor Marjorie Sherwood for several years of patience, encouragement, and help, and to John Seidman for help in thinking about the ideas in chapter four. My greatest debt is to an incomparable teacher, scholar, and friend; to him this book is humbly dedicated.

CONTENTS

Vll

PREFACE

Xl

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS I.

Coordinates

3

Riddle

25

Ill.

Emblem

47

IV.

Image

67

v. Ideogram

100

VI.

Charm

133

VII.

Chant

162

Rhythm

190

First and Last Names

243

II.

VIII. IX.

NOTES

253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

26 7

INDEX

26 9

ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CWC ER

IR JAF LR PMLA

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1964) Archer Taylor, English Riddles from Oral Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1 95 1 ) Vernam Hull and Archer Taylor, A Collection of Irish Riddles, Folklore Studies, 6 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1955) Journal of American Folklore Archer Taylor, The Literary Riddle before 1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1948) Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

ROOTS OF LYRIC

I. COORDINATES

WHAT IS the poet's language? asked Wordsworth in the Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads. His answer has become an important bench mark in the history of literary criticism: a poet is "a man speaking to men" and his language is "a selection of the language really spoken by men." It is true, Wordsworth said, that the poet is more sensitive and more imaginative than most men, and that his poetic language arises from occasions of particular excitement and passion. Yet there is still no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language of good prose. Poetry uses meter, of course, but this is something added to temper the words should the natural passion of the poet be too strong, to boost the words with traditional associations should his language be too weak for the occasion, and, in general, something to mark the selecting process by which the poet adopts and purifies the raw language. It is nothing that should restrict the poet's choice of subject or cut him off from the natural language of men. Other poetic devices, such as metaphors and appropriate "figures," may also arise naturally in the language from the poet's passions, but he will not shock the reader with unnatural, artificial, or incongruous images. These latter are among the "abuses" introduced into the language of poetry by a degenerate age, Wordsworth added in his appendix to the Preface in 1802, for, as the language of poetry moved further and further away from the language of natural excitement that was used by the earliest poets, it "became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas."

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Wordsworth's answers to his own question have had their troubles, not the least of them raised by his friend Coleridge in chapter seventeen of the Biographia Literaria. If we follow Wordsworth and look in "low and rustic life" for the natural language really spoken by men, Coleridge said uneasily, we are likely to find a language of unreflective literalness that lacks the creative connections made by language in its best poetic use. Any thoughtful answer to Wordsworth's question will in fact present a series of new questions. If the language of poetry is a selection of natural speech, then what do we mean by "selection," or by "natural," or, for that matter, by "speech"? The initial question, however, remains, if not to be finally settled then at least to be asked and answered again and again. What is the language of poetry? And the corollary question: are the familiar devices of rhythm, metaphor, and poetic diction an essential part of this language, or are they merely ornamental and perhaps morally suspect? Wordsworth might well have asked himself the question again on 24 May 1812, when, during a walk with Crabb Robinson in the fields north of Oxford Road, Robinson read him a number of poems by William Blake. One of the poems was almost certainly the one Blake lyric that had already gained a small reputation, a poem in which, as any child can tell, the natural language of poetry is clearly heard: The Tyger Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies, Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

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And what shoulder, 8c what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? 8c what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? Robinson noted in his diary that Wordsworth was pleased with some of the Blake poems and that "he regarded Blake as having in him the elements of poetry much more than either Byron or Scott."1 The two literary men then met with a literary woman, Miss Joanna Baillie, and accompanied her home ("a model of an English gentlewoman," Wordsworth commented). Robinson closes his diary entry without any further discussion of the poems, and closes the book on what appears to be the fullest recorded piece of Wordsworthian criticism on Blake. If Wordsworth ever again paid close attention to Blake's poetry, and to "The Tyger" in particular, his thoughts are probably lost to us beyond recovery. Poets and critics since then, however, have not been so reticent, and critical discussion of "The Tyger" abounds. The poem, a simple lyric with troubling complexities, does invite discussion, and it offers many paths to follow. An approach to the poem can begin simply, perhaps with a descriptive commentary of

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"what the poem is about": it is easy enough to see that it opens with the creation of a fierce animal, and that by the end it has led us up to the philosophical question of whether the dreaded tiger and the gentle lamb can be creations of the same creator. But then other meanings in the poem come into view, such as those implied by the choice of imagery. It is interesting to notice, for example, that the creator is given in strongly corporeal images—laboring shoulder, planted feet, hammer-wielding hand. These images build a tonality of power, a purposeful power strong enough to forge—and then perhaps to reconcile—the Tyger and the Lamb. Then another familiar path: who is the speaker in the poem? Is it a child whose voice betrays a growing terror in confronting the burning Tyger, is it a man like us, unable to comprehend the existence of such contraries as Tyger and Lamb, or is it a visionary prophet who can see beyond our limited state to a reconciliation of these apparent opposites? Soon the historical and political contexts may begin to resonate through the poem: it was probably written in the fall of 1792, when across the English Channel the fiery creation of the French Revolution was devouring the counterrevolutionary forces of church and state. A genetic approach to the poem is possible as well, if we look at Blake's earlier drafts. There is a rejected stanza to wonder about; the present fifth stanza, we would also notice, was added later in a brilliant afterthought; there is a small but striking change in that the creator's "smile" was first a "laugh." After finding a way through all this, the reader can discover still wider perspectives of meaning opening up. The poem takes its place in the Songs of Innocence and of Experience and in Blake's work as a whole so that the wondering speaker takes on the characteristics of a fallen Urizen, the blacksmith-creator is seen as the Eternal Prophet, Los, whose hammer can create the glowing sun, and the capitulating stars are seen as signaling the defeat of the mechanical, Newtonian "single vision" of the universe. The poem is

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related to the rest of literature as well: the creator has overtones of Daedalus, Prometheus, and Vulcan; the spear-carrying stars may recall a war in heaven and the angelic legions of Lucifer; the "forests of the night" are related to all the dark woods, blasted heaths, trackless oceans, and other waste lands in literature which, like Dante's selva oscura, can also be forests of the mind. The Tyger itself carries some of the meanings of the Biblical (and Melvillean) Leviathan or Beowulf's night-gliding monsters, or it may become a fiery beast of apocalypse, a "tyger of wrath," in the manner of the Old Testament prophets. Finally, the poem can be seen in the context of all creative processes as a microcosm of the universal act of creation which unites opposing principles (Light and Dark, Good and Evil, Yin and Yang) into vital existence. Viewed in this way, the poem presents an almost scriptural vision of the act of creation—Blake's own creation included.2 All these prospects and many more are found in the poem —yet a problem arises for anyone who is still thinking of Wordsworth's question. None of the commentaries has questioned the language of the poem: none of them, in fact, has given even any indication that this is a lyric poem and not a novel, a drama, an epic, or an interesting and possibly heretical fragment of scripture. Although Wordsworth was not asking about lyric poetry only, I would like to specialize his question and ask what it is that makes "The Tyger" distinctively a lyric poem, with a distinctive language. Looking back at the poem, then, and leaving large questions of meaning aside for a while, we find several basic elements that are not usually found in other forms of literary art. The rhythm of the language is one of these. Wordsworth conceded that the language of poetry differs somewhat from the spoken language by its use of meter, and in this poem the language is arranged to follow what can be formally described as the falling rhythm of trochaic meter (though the trochaic lines are curtailed, and some lines are unmistakably iambic). Yet we can also hear, as Blake meant us

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to hear, a basic four-beat rhythm that recalls the nursery rhymes and game-songs of children: ι

t

ι

ι

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, I

I l

I

In the forests of the night . . . I

I

I

I

Bobby Shafto's gone to sea, I

I

I

I

Silver buckles at his knee . . . I

I

I

I

Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe, I

I

I

I

Yea, good master, that I'll do . . . 3 It is the rhythm of song-verse, in which the one-two-threefour of the steady beat is far more important in determin ing the movement of the language than the consistently repeated patterns and counted syllables of foot-prosody. And along with this steady beat of the song-rhythm are other rhythmical movements set up by repeated sounds in the language itself, the repeated words, the alliterations, assonances, rhymes, and other sound-echoes woven through the texture of "The Tyger": Tyger

burning Tyger /rame twist chain

Tyger

bright bright /ear/ul 5Ϊ news brain

Together, the song-rhythm and the internal rhythms growing out of the sounds in words create something that is quite different from the rhythm of a man speaking to men. What can be heard in the poem, perhaps, is the rhythm of man speaking to other-than-man, as it is heard in a children's charm: Rain, rain, go away, Come again another day . . . in a children's prayer:

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Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep . . . and in a liturgical hymn: Dies irae, dies ilia . . . Questions of meaning are finally not left aside at all, but are engaged on a level unique to lyric poetry, for the language of Blake's poem seems to have built into it rhythms that can simultaneously call up the rhythms of innocent nursery rhymes and game-songs and the rhythms of magic incantation, epiphanic invocation, and prophetic hymn. These elements of the lyric language speak to what may be called the aural imagination, a listener's perception of sounds moving successively in time. There are other elements, however, which are aligned more with the visual imagination, elements which work toward imagery in the sense of picture and spatial form. The little coiled spring y, for example, which Blake placed inside his Tyger, is a visual element that belongs to the emblematic tradition of poetry, 8c in choosing the ampersand, which represents a meaning rather than a sound, Blake used one of the few English ideographs. Both devices were familiar enough usages in Blake's time, but nevertheless he did have a choice, and he chose to use them. He engraved the poem several times on copper plates along with his engraved pictures of a tiger and a bare tree, involving the poetic text with a visual design in a "composite art" that again has roots in the emblem tradition. The visual imagination in poetry, moreover, is not limited to an engraved poem, and "The Tyger" shows it working on other levels as well. Metaphor is one of these, the process which places the brain of the Tyger on the anvil and which causes the stars to weep. Beyond this, there is a process which creates a hierarchy of imagery, a spatial structuring which first juxtaposes the toughness of the blacksmith and his forge with the heart and brain of the Tyger, which next juxtaposes this com-

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plex with the images of the frightened stars and the meek Lamb of Innocence, and which places all of this under the mysterious smile of the creator. The hierarchy of imagery is as much conceptualization as it is picture or spatial form, and we find that the pictorial pattern and the intellectual pattern are very closely connected. The poem is made up of a series of questions, questions which, working against the forward motion of the rhythms, hold up the poem while the imagination tries to visualize—or conceptualize—the answers. The questions are deceptively simple at first, like those of the enigma tradition in popular literature ("And what shoulder, & what art . . . ?"), but by the end of the poem the questioning has developed into the complete religious paradox familiar to the poetry of meditation ("Did he who made the Lamb make thee?"). Somehow the processes of thinking and the structures of completed thought—question and answer— are, along with image and spatial form, basic elements of the visual imagination in this poem. And somehow Wordsworth's "abuses" of poetic language, "hieroglyphics and enigmas," lie waiting at the roots of a poem he heard read on a pleasant May day in 1812. It can be argued that these small elements of the aural and visual imaginations are basic particles in the language of poetry and that their relationships constitute its basic structure. According to this view they are not artificial and degenerate abuses of the natural language of poetry, or mere ornaments hung on that language, but actual sources of the language. It is a view that tends to be more popular with poets than with critics, it seems, and whatever Wordsworth the critic had to say about the artifices of poetic language, Wordsworth the poet was certainly aware of the fundamental importance of these structures of sound and image. In The Prelude (1805), for example, we can watch his own visual imagination drawing a picture of Revolutionary Paris with images of tigers and forests of the night:

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a place of fear Unfit for the repose which night requires, Defenceless as a wood where Tygers roam. But perhaps a clearer example of a poet who believed that the language of poetry has its source in the relationships of these small elements is William Carlos Williams: It is in the minutiae—in the minute organization of the words and their relationships in a composition that the seriousness and value of a work of writing exist— not in the sentiments, ideas, schemes portrayed. It is here, furthermore, that creation takes place. It is not a plaster of thought applied.4 The creative roots of "The Tyger," Williams would say, are seen far more in the levels of rhythm and image organizing the words and their relationships than in the philosophical, literary, or historical meanings—rich as they are— which also reverberate through the finished poem. Two interesting accounts by poets of the places where creation takes place describe more specifically the kinds of powers at work when words are organized into the language of poetry. Both poets tell of experiencing impulses which they recognized as the beginnings of poetic composition. Both experiences took place at extreme boundaries of poetic language, and for this reason they were particularly revealing about the powers and conditions involved. Paul Valery describes the struggles of the aural imagination to engender poetry, struggles that were most revealing when on one occasion they were completely unsuccessful. Ezra Pound tells how the very different powers of the visual imagination once presented him with the beginnings of a poem, and with poetic difficulties far beyond anything he had expected. Valery begins his account by noting that certain poems he had written "had as a starting point merely one of these impulses of the 'formative' sensibility which are anterior to

COORDINATES

any 'subject' or to any finite, expressible idea." One poem, for example, "began merely with the hint of a rhythm, which gradually acquired a meaning." Once, however, a combination of rhythms came to him that did not, and could not, lead to a poem: I had left my house to find, in walking and looking about me, relaxation from some tedious work. As I went along my street, which mounts steeply, I was gripped by a rhythm which took possession of me and soon gave me the impression of some force outside myself. Another rhythm overtook and combined with the first, and certain strange transverse relations were set up between them. This combination, which went far beyond anything I could have expected from my rhythmic faculties, made the sense of strangeness, which I have mentioned, almost unbearable. I argued that there had been an error of person, that this grace had descended on the wrong head, since I could make no use of a gift which, in a musician, would doubtless have assumed a lasting shape, and it was in vain that these two themes offered me a composition whose sequence and complexity amazed my ignorance and reduced it to despair. The magic suddenly vanished after about twenty minutes, leaving me on the bank of the Seine, as perplexed as the duck in the fable, which saw a swan emerge from the egg she had hatched. In some cases, wordless rhythms can become an organizing power for words. Valery, no stranger to language organized by rhythm, goes on to realize that he was in fact accustomed to having the rhythms of walking bring him "a quickened flow of ideas," which means to him material that he knows how to handle, material for a poem. But a poet requires language for his art, and this time "my movements assailed my consciousness through a subtle arrangement of rhythms, instead of provoking that amalgam of

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images, inner words, and virtual acts that one calls an Idea." The combination of mental rhythms he heard, however, was itself a development of the same basic organizing power, the same impulse of the "formative sensibility": "What was I to think? I fancied that the mental activity produced by walking was probably related to a general stimulus that found its outlet as best it could in the brain; and that this kind of quantitative function could be as well fulfilled by the emission of some rhythm as by verbal images or some sort of symbols; and, further, that, at a certain point in my mental processes, all ideas, rhythms, images, and memories or inventions were merely equivalents."5 The organizing power is based in, or in some deep way related to, a physical action, the physical rhythm of walking. It is not a simple relationship, but it was clear to Valery that the same power may develop at one time into "a subtle arrangement of rhythms" in his mind, and at other times into the organized words, images, ideas, and memories of poetry. Although on this occasion nothing came over into the area of language, the experience nevertheless permitted him to see the organizing powers of his aural imagination at work, and to see at the source of those powers the rhythm of a physical action. Compare this with Ezra Pound's experience in the same city, where the initiative of a poem came to him not as pure rhythm but as pure image or pattern: Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there

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came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that—a "pattern," or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. At the basis of Pound's impulse was a moment of complex perception, rather than the rhythm of a physical action. Although he eventually managed to make a poem of it— the famous Imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro"— Pound also wrote that "my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or planes in relation, I should have expressed it in music or in sculpture. Colour was, in that instance, the 'primary pigment'; I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness."6 Both Pound and Valery experienced the beginnings of some kind of fundamental organization. For Pound it came in the images and patterns of the visual imagination, and for Valery it came in the counterpointed rhythms of the aural imagination. Perhaps, as Pound suggested, such impulses first emerge into consciousness in some primary form, some "primary pigment" of seeing or hearing, and perhaps, as Valery felt, there is an even earlier point at which such impulses treat those different pigments as being merely equivalents. Yet when they do emerge in the consciousness of a poet, rather than of a painter or a musician, his job of course is to direct them into language, "to find words," if it is possible, that will express the original impulse and be worthy of it. The exploration of the subconscious depths in poets is probably best left to another discipline, and literary criticism is primarily concerned with how the impulses arising from those depths have been caught and transformed in language. When Williams wrote that creation takes place "in the minute organization of the words and their relationships" he was writing about Pound's early Cantos, and

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Pound is the poet who can give us some coordinates for speaking about the organization of poetic language. He first of all pointed out how such language often borders on the realms of music or the visual arts, reflecting basic powers of the aural or visual imaginations. "There have always been two sorts of poetry," he wrote, "which are, for me at least, the most 'poetic'; they are firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words."7 The "two sorts of poetry" represent two fundamental ways of organizing the language of poetry, and both ways appear in the language of a poem such as "The Tyger." They define what are actually an axis of the aural imagination and an axis of the visual imagination in poetic language. But there appears to be a third dimension to this language as well, for Pound elsewhere distinguished three ways of what he called "charging language with meaning": If we chuck out the classifications which apply to the outer shape of the work, or to its occasion, and if we look at what actually happens, in, let us say, poetry, we will find that the language is charged or energized in various manners. That is to say, there are three "kinds of poetry": MELOPOEIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning. PHANOPOEIA, which is a casting of images upon the visual imagination. LOGOPOEIA, "the dance of the intellect among words," that is to say, it employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play. It holds the aesthetic content

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which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music. There are, then, three organizing powers in the language of poetry: "melopoeia," the making of music, "phanopoeia," the making of the bright image, and "logopoeia," the making of the resonant word. Some poetry will reflect one power more than others, and when he looked back on the history of lyric poetry Pound saw the power of melopoeia greatest in Greek and Prove^al lyrics, the highest attainment of phanopoeia in Chinese poetry, and the sophisticated use of logopoeia in the Latin of Propertius and the French of Laforgue. He felt, moreover, that these powers charge not only the language of lyric poetry but the language of all literary art, whether lyric or epic, drama or prose: "All writing is built up of these three elements, plus 'architectonics' or 'the form of the whole.' "8 And for Pound, as for Williams, it is the line-by-line workings of these elements, the kinds of organization that were brought out on our return to the Blake poem, for example, that tell us most about the poet's distinctive language. Pound's three kinds of poetic language were scarcely a new discovery. The familiar categories of sound, image, and word cover some of the same territory, though usually without Pound's sense of powers that charge the language of poetry with unique kinds of meaning. The immediate source of his distinctions seems to be Coleridge, who, in the essay "On the Principles of Genial Criticism," spoke of "poetry of the ear," "poetry of the eye," and "poetry of language."9 In Coleridge, however, these do not refer to forms of poetic language but to much broader distinctions among the arts themselves. As things "made" by the creative imagination, all the fine arts were for Coleridge different species of "poetry," and in his essay "poetry of the ear" means simply music, "poetry of the eye" means painting and sculpture. There was a set of distinctions known well by the neoclas-

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sical poets and critics of the eighteenth century, however, which did refer to the language of poetry, and which they were likely to call "verse" (that is, "versification"), "imagination" (in the pre-Romantic meaning of an associative faculty which discovers resemblances between things and which produces mental or verbal pictures), and "diction"— or, as Pope named them in the Essay on Criticism (vv. 289-383), "numbers," "wit" (again meaning the faculty which sees resemblances and produces poetic "conceits"), and "language" ("expression," "style"). If there is some ultimate source for these kinds of trinities it may well be Aristotle's Poetics, which distinguishes three of the six elements of the art of tragedy as melos (μΑλοί), opsis (όψν>), and lexis (λέζκ). In tragic drama, the only form of poetry that Aristotle treats specifically, they refer simply to "music" (or "song"), "spectacle" (costumes, scenery), and "diction" {Poetics 6.145037-15, 1450^3-20). In one form or another, then, the distinctions have been familiar and useful to criticism for some time. But to Pope these elements of poetic language were mere techniques which only limited or capricious critics would emphasize, and to Aristotle they were three elements of tragedy of far less concern or importance than the major elements of plot, character, and thought. More recently, F. R. Leavis has said that Pound's distinctions of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia are naive and can tell us little about poetry.10 Yet modern poetry and criticism, which have become particularly interested in the language of poetry, seem nevertheless to require some version of these coordinates to describe the peculiar dimensions of that language, and Pound's formulations are a good place to begin. One work of modern criticism which makes use of these distinctions is Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, and here we find some additional suggestions for our own study. Although Frye uses Aristotle's terminology rather than Pound's, his sense of those terms clearly extends them toward Pound's three ways of charging language with mean-

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ing. Melos, opsis, and lexis (corresponding to Pound's melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia) belong to what Frye calls the "literal" phase of meaning in a work of literature. Criticism attending to this phase of meaning considers the work as simply a structure of interrelated motifs, a group of organized words—rather than, say, as a document which reflects historical events or philosophical ideas (the "descriptive" phase of meaning), or as an overall form which presents a mimesis, a unified "imitation" of human action or thought (the "formal" phase of meaning). The descriptive and formal phases of meaning, as well as others, are of course present in the finished work and are also important concerns of literary criticism, but Frye agrees with Williams that the minute organization of the words and their relationships is the center and source of literary art, and with Pound that the powers of the aural and visual imaginations define two key principles of that minute organization. The "real core of poetry," he writes, is not descriptive meaning, and not the poet's cri de coeur (which is a description of an emotion), but "a subtle and elusive verbal pattern that avoids, and does not lead to, such bald statements" (p. 81). Melos, for Frye, is the musical principle of verbal organization, and it involves rhythm, the sounds of words, and the shaping, temporal movements associated with the ear. Opsis, the visual principle, involves imagery, pattern, and the containing, spatial, and conceptual configurations associated with the eye. In lyric poetry, the creative sources of melos and opsis are two subconscious impulses that Frye whimsically names "babble" and "doodle." "Babble" begins with a rhythmical initiative which, when it connects with language, starts to shape the sound-associations of words into elements of rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and punning. Valery seems to have discovered the impulses of "babble" at work, though in his case they remained purely musical. "Doodle," the subconscious source of opsis, begins in the playful association of images, structures, and meanings, and it emerges

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in language as verbal design, the patterns of the visual imagination in poetry (pp. 274-78). Pound saw a pattern of faces in a metro station, and he doodled all day with patterns in language that might express it. Frye goes on to suggest that we can recognize in the language of lyric poetry two fundamental forms which are the basic expressions of the processes of "babble" and "doodle" respectively, and which are the root forms, or "radicals," of lyrical melos and opsis. The radical of melos is charm: the hypnotic incantation that, through its pulsing dance rhythm, appeals to involuntary physical response, and is hence not far from the sense of magic, or physically compelling power. The etymological descent of charm from carmen, song, may be noted. Actual charms have a quality that is imitated in popular literature by work songs of various kinds, especially lullabies, where the drowsy sleep-inducing repetition shows the underlying oracular or dream pattern very clearly. Invective or flyting, the literary imitation of the spellbinding curse, uses similar incantatory devices for opposite reasons. . . . (pp. 278-79) The radical of opsis is riddle: "a fusion of sensation and reflection, the use of an object of sense experience to stimulate a mental activity in connection with it. Riddle was originally the cognate object of read, and the riddle seems intimately involved with the whole process of reducing language to visible form, a process which runs through such by-forms of riddle as hieroglyphic and ideogram" (p. 280). Finally, Frye notes that these fundamental forms of poetic language have old associations with magic which correspond to the melos powers of motion and the opsis powers of spatial containment: "Just as the charm is not far from a sense of magical compulsion, so the curiously wrought object, whether sword-hilt or illuminated manuscript, is not far from a sense of enchantment or magical imprisonment" (p. 280).

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And where is lexis, or Pound's logopoeia? In both Pound and Frye this element occupies an anomalous position with respect to the other two. Pound does not mention it when he speaks of the two sorts of poetry which are the most fundamentally "poetic," those which seem to be either music or visual art just forcing itself into articulate speech. Yet it appears as one of his three ways of charging language with meaning—and it holds, moreover, "the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation." Frye points out, simply and neatly, that lexis covers all the language of poetry; it is what melos and opsis both ultimately become in a verbal art. "Considered as a verbal structure," he writes, "literature presents a lexis which combines two other elements: melos, an element analogous to or otherwise connected with music, and opsis, which has a similar connection with the plastic arts. The word lexis itself may be translated 'diction' when we are thinking of it as a narrative sequence of sounds caught by the ear, and as 'imagery' when we are thinking of it as forming a simultaneous pattern of meaning apprehended in an act of mental 'vision' " (p. 244). In talking about the roots of melopoeia and phanopoeia in the language of poetry, then, as we are about to do, we are also exploring the roots of logopoeia, or lexis. Like the space and time of physics, the space and time of poetics are finally two faces of the same thing. Williams, Pound, and Frye all seem to lead us to lyric for poetic language with the deepest roots. It is lyric, Frye writes, that "most clearly shows the hypothetical core of literature, narrative and meaning in their literal aspects as word-order and word-pattern" (p. 271). Although other forms of literature tap the same sources, the language of those forms is finally organized according to other principles. The language of a novel, for example, depends most of all on the semantic organization of prose, sentences which "make sense." Most long narrative poems have required a

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consistent meter which organizes the language into regular verse-lines, and in oral epics further organizes it into fixed patterns of formulaic diction. Lyric, however, if it chooses, can keep free of such demands, staying close to language charged with the fundamental powers of melopoeia and phanopoeia for its final as well as initial basis of growth and organization. Lyric is finally less a particular genre of poetry than a distinctive way of organizing language, and we can see in Williams' Paterson and Pound's Cantos that there are basic conflicts between the traditional demands of a long poem and the very different organization of a lyric-centered language. Pound's melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia name three powers of lyric-centered language, and we will keep his names, though not his descriptions, of those powers. They locate ways of organizing language that can be investigated further, but a virtue of his definitions is that they are undeveloped enough to leave us room to maneuver, and room to expand the definitions as the maneuverings progress. The definition of phanopoeia as "a casting of images upon the visual imagination" obviously leaves unstated much else that this power does in organizing the language of a poem such as "The Tyger," and the definition of melopoeia as something wherein the words are charged "with some musical property" calls for a closer look at just what musical properties are available in the resources of language, and what forms they take in the language of poetry. One element of Pound's formulations that will not be left behind, however, is his key sense that these are not merely ornamental techniques but fundamental powers that form the language and direct the meanings of poetry. Northrop Frye's suggestions are also adapted to our own purposes. Frye conceives of melos and opsis as the musical and visual extremes of a single axis of lexis, rather than as powers defining a complete set of coordinates for the language of poetry, but we can change his geometry without seriously distorting his meanings. His definitions of charm

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and riddle as the radicals of lyric melos and opsis will not serve for the actual charms and riddles of primitive and folk literature, nor were they intended to. They are a literary theorist's conception of what the root forms of the language of lyric poetry must, in some hypothetical way, look like. Yet they suggest where to begin looking for those forms, in the collections and studies made by ethnologists and folklorists of actual charms and riddles. In this book, however, the investigations into those and other radicals of the language of lyric poetry involve us in speculations that are finally well outside of Frye's "literal" phase of meaning, and outside any view of poetry as an inward organization of words only. A vocabulary for these speculations must come from Aristotle, for the radicals of lyric melopoeia and phanopoeia seem themselves to have roots deeply connected with powers of action and seeing in human experience, and with praxis and mimesis in language. In this study, then, Wordsworth's central question— What is the poet's language?—is asked again, and some answers are sought by exploring increasingly complex developments of the powers of lyric melopoeia and phanopoeia. The power of phanopoeia is explored first, beginning with the folk riddle and two closely related literary forms, the literary riddle and the kenning. The roots of phanopoeia are seen raised to higher powers in the Renaissance emblem, in Japanese and Chinese poetry, and in modern poems by Pound, Williams, and Yeats. Finally, Fenollosa's theory of the ideogram presents a poetics based on the powers of phanopoeia. The second part of the study proposes that there are three roots of lyric melopoeia. One of them is in fact heard in the rhythms and sounds of primitive charms, but another is heard in the rhythms of dance-songs, whether primitive or courtly, and a third in the rhythms of Wordsworth's poet as a man speaking to men. Each of the three roots of melopoeia is derived—or so I will argue —from a different use of language and is characterized by a different rhythmical organization. The melopoeia of po-

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etry again raises these roots to higher powers, but principally it combines them into more complex forms of organization. The communal chants of primitive poetry show the early stages of this process, and they also present particularly interesting demonstrations of some of the powers of rhythmical language. More complex combinations are heard in the poetry of John Skelton, and the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt bring us to the fully developed music of English lyric poetry. There we come to an ending, except for a short coda. The further development of the powers of phanopoeia and melopoeia into logopoeia, or the lexis of poetry, soon reaches beyond the recognizable roots of lyric, and beyond the limits of this book. One more point to be made by way of introduction concerns the use of "primitive" forms of poetry. The phrase "primitive poetry" is used here only as a convenient and general term; many of the texts do in fact come from what are usually called "primitive" (or "preliterate," or "preindustrial," or "nontechnological") societies, but others are from "folk" cultures, and still others from different stages of the "popular" literature of our own culture. There are dangers, of course, in using many of these texts at all, for they take us quickly beyond the more familiar paths of literary criticism into foreign and remote areas of language and culture. There we must find guides as best we can and depend on their specialized knowledges of those regions. Throughout, however, "primitive" does not mean "primal." We know that the languages of primitive societies are not in any way "younger" in time or "simpler" in form than other languages; similarly, it cannot be assumed that "primitive poetry" represents anything but complex and highly developed uses of those languages. It has often developed the roots of poetry differently than our own traditions have, however, and that is one reason it interests us. Our search is not for primal sources but for basic structures of poetic language, whether they are found in a Bantu riddle or a poem by Donne, in a Cherokee charm or a song by Shake-

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speare. If the poetics of one leads us in some suggestive way to the poetics of the other, we will have discovered something about the language of poetry without involving ourselves in either genetic or psychological assumptions. It should be admitted, finally, that the primitive poetry in this book is not regarded simply as a means to a literary critic's obscure (or familiar) ends. Although we remain strangers to much that is in these texts, they are often striking poems in themselves which cannot fail to move and delight even outsiders. One thing, at least, quickly becomes clear at the outset. The language of primitive poetry is neither the "natural" speech of Wordsworth's impassioned poet nor the unreflective literalness that Coleridge anticipated; it is far more complex, and far more interesting, than either of these. First, then, let us begin with those elements of language so little appreciated by Wordsworth, the hieroglyphics and enigmas which lie near the roots of the power of phanopoeia in lyric poetry.

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ADAM'S FIRST JOB in the Garden, the story goes, was to find names for the creatures of his world. An unsurpassed Master of Riddles brought to him the beasts of the field and every fowl of the air to see how he would name them — ready, we can imagine, to confront him with the tiger soon after the lamb. It was part of Adam's education, a teaching based on the theory that to find the name of something it is necessary to know it, and to know something it is necessary to see it with clarity. With clear eyesight and a clear mind and a clear language there is no trouble: Adam at that time had all three, and the names he found for the birds and beasts were, the story continues, the right names. In that world there were none of the obstacles and sidetracks lying between perception and cognition that so trouble and enliven our own struggles with namings. All our languages, post-Eden and post-Babel as they are, still seem to carry memories of that old dream, teasing us from time to time with hints of the lost clarity and unbroken connections of Adam's vision. The Greek verb οΐ8α means "I know," but it is the verb for "see," cognate with Latin videre, and the form is not the simple present but a present perfect: an aspect of the verb that implies completed action, something that has been done thoroughly, whose effects can continue into the present. "I know" is "I have seen." The cognate in Old English is (ic) wdt, from the infinitive witan (the ancestor of Pope's word "wit"). It too means "I know," yet again it is not a present form but, in this case, a preterite, and behind the meaning "I know" again stands the older perfective meaning "I have seen." In a different way another English word, the archaic but once rich word

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"ken," could also hint at seeing and knowing as a single process. When Keats used it as a noun in his famous sonnet about discovery— Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken —the word's meanings encompassed both range of vision and range of understanding. It distinguished for Keats the kind of seeing done by a true discoverer from that of men who merely look with casual curiosity or with wild surmise. (Anyone can stumble onto something new; a true discoverer perceives the significance of his discovery, knows that there is a new order in the world or in the heavens: not only are there maps of the new to be made, but all the old maps must be changed.) To name is to have known, and to know is to have seen. Such, at any rate, is the fundamental premise that seems to run through all forms of phanopoeia, as if this power were continually engaged in the attempt to make real that lost clarity of vision for the language of poetry. The riddle, as a basic form of phanopoeia, derives from this same process of seeing, knowing, and naming. Although riddles are now just a game and even to folklorists a minor form of folk literature, traces of an older seriousness surround the riddles posed to Sophocles' Oedipus and Shakespeare's Pericles, for whom it was find the answer or lose your life. Poets, moreover, will still struggle with their namings as if their necks depended on it, and solve their puzzles with the same satisfaction of watching the Sphinx die of shame. Then, it may seem to the rest of us, they become sphinx-like in turn, masters in an old tradition who hide their meanings in obscure riddles and puzzling images. But the riddle is still a naming and a teaching, and in folklore or in poetic imagery the puzzle is meant ultimately to reveal rather than to conceal. For many anonymous masters on this planet the riddle remains a vital poetic form, a way of charging language

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with meaning. If at one time it was felt that riddles were unknown to certain cultures, the extensive comparative work done by folklorists now shows that riddles occur in the oral traditions of all cultures and that riddle-making is a universal activity of the human mind, something we would expect if the riddle is truly a root of lyric poetry.1 The riddle's sense of discovery, as well as its connection with poetic imagery, is easy to see in a Bantu riddle which asks for the name of "that which digs about in the deserted village" (the heart, which always turns to think of the past).2 This riddle, however, is almost a lyric poem already, with a literary sentiment that goes beyond most folk riddles. The oldest riddles we have are from ancient Babylon, preserved in what was apparently a schoolbook (on a clay tablet, of course) which gives some riddles in Sumerian along with Assyrian translations. In spite of their great age they are more characteristic than the Bantu riddle of what is collected today from oral tradition: You went and took the enemy's property; the enemy came and took your property. Who becomes pregnant without conceiving, who becomes fat without eating? The schoolbook does not give the answers to the riddles, and we hesitate over them puzzled, as the schoolboy must have done long ago, until he saw: a shuttle passing to and fro, and a rain cloud.3 The most important scholarly work on riddles has been done by Archer Taylor, whose English Riddles from Oral Tradition is a comparative collection drawing on hundreds of regional and national collections of riddles from all over the world. For Taylor, the structure of a riddle is based first of all on a description of one thing in terms of another thing: the familiar "Humpty Dumpty" riddle, for example, describes an egg in terms of a man. Such a riddle is essentially a comparison, and this fundamental characteristic of

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riddles is reflected in Taylor's method of classification which groups the riddles according to whether the object (the "answer") is compared, say, to a person, to several persons, to animals, to several animals, to plants, to things, or to a generalized living creature. We can see such a comparison in a Vogul riddle which compares a group of fence posts, each with a cap of snow, to a group of peasant women: "Back of the village sit those who have donned white kerchiefs" (ER, p. 9). There is a clear image in this riddle, a strong sense of picture, and focusing on the structure of comparison rather than on just the answer shows that the riddle also contains all the essentials of a metaphor. It is a metaphor with one term concealed. This characteristic of riddles has been noticed often, and Aristotle commented in the Rhetoric that good riddles can provide us with good metaphors (Rhet. iii.2.i405b4-6). It can be seen as well in a Yakut riddle from Asia which compares a rainbow to a piece of multicolored silk hanging in the field: In the field a piece of silk in five colors is becoming pale, Neither you nor I can grasp it.4 The metaphorical comparison is slightly more complex in a lovely riddle from Sweden: "Father's scythe is hanging across mother's Sunday skirt" (the crescent moon).5 The scythe is compared to the moon, the skirt is compared to the sky, and the relationship of the scythe and the skirt is compared to the relationship of the moon and the sky. This is the fullest form of a metaphor, and a lyric poet finding this might also see further relationships, drawing them into a poem involving husband and wife, times to work and times to rest, meanings of evening and home, or many other possibilities latent in the initial discovery of the riddle. Another class of riddles is based not on a single metaphorical comparison but on a series of comparisons which enumerate the attributes of the hidden object. The sense of

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discovery is still at work, however, as the enumeration draws a circle of word pictures around the object. In some riddles of this kind a central image is found that unifies the individual comparisons; in others the individual comparisons are not at all related to each other. In a Dutch riddle for the human face, a series of comparisons leads to the central image of a street scene: "Two lanterns, two dirty allies, two files of soldiers, and a red huckster" (ER, p. 454; "allies" must certainly be "alleys"). A strange riddle from Ireland draws instead the central image of a melancholy countryside: "Two fences of stone, two pools of water, two human graves, and two [small] bunches of rushes" (teeth, eyes, nostrils, eyebrows).6 Other riddles of this class, lacking any particularly strong sense of a central image, simply present a series of comparisons which point from their different directions in toward the object, or answer, at the center. A riddle from Iceland goes: "Who is the swift one that found me on the road? Neither the sun nor any other light shines on him. I have often seen him running alongside ships at sea. He needs no clothing or food, is visible to all but tangible by none" (shadow; ER, p. 662). Although the shadow is compared to a person, a generalized "he," the enumeration of comparisons does not build any particular central image that might bind his attributes together. The riddles we have considered up to now are based primarily on image and metaphor; they are dominated, we might say, by a strong sense of picture. There are, however, many riddles which involve almost no sense of picture and which are instead based on a mental puzzle, a paradox. Aristotle was also aware of this "contradictive" characteristic of riddles (Poet. 22.1458326-27), and folklorists refer to it as the "block element." The riddle "What grows smaller the more you add to it?" (a hole) carries only the vaguest sense of a picture and is structured primarily on a sense of paradox. A riddle, we remember, is a question that stops (or "blocks") us until the puzzle becomes clear and we find the answer. Purely "contradictive" riddles are also an ac-

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cepted part of riddling tradition, and many of them are based on some kind of verbal paradox such as the word-play logic of this riddle from Oxfordshire: "What God has never seen, the king seldom sees, and we see every day" (an equal; ER, p. 680). At the bottom of many apparent paradoxes is often a pun, as in the riddle known throughout the United States, Canada, and the West Indies "Black and white and red all over" (a newspaper; ER, p. 624). A pun will usually limit a riddle to a particular language, of course, and the following riddles were all collected from the children of the British Isles: What runs but never walks? (a river) What goes out without putting its coat on? (a fire) What turns without moving? (milk)7 But there are many other ways for a paradox to arise in riddles. The Serbian riddle "A fire burns in the middle of the sea" (a lamp, or samovar) is based on a paradox arising from what appears to be a contradiction of the laws of nature (ER, p. 595). Riddles, then, can work from either of two basic elements, the metaphorical presentation of an image or "picture" or the presentation of an intellectual paradox in which the sense of picture is slight or non-existent. The most familiar riddles, however, and those which are most interesting from our point of view, are those that combine both elements, fusing picture and thought. In riddles of this kind the implied metaphor or comparison is used to create the paradox, as in the Yakut riddle which first compares the rainbow to a piece of silk and then goes on to say that no one can grasp that piece of silk. The Serbian riddle for a lamp also contains a paradoxical image, a fire burning in water, and there is another one in the Irish riddle: A little lady sweeping the path Without a wisp [and] without a small bush. (the wind; IR, p. 35)

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A riddle for the moon shining on the water, also from Ireland, works in a similar way: "A white mare in the lake and she does not wet her foot" (IR, p. 14). The picture is given, and then the paradox; the complete riddle is a fusion of the two. Different developments of this sense of the pictorial and the paradoxical can be seen in two forms of a riddle comparing snow to a bird: A milkwhite gull through the air flies down, And never a tree but he lights thereon. In this form the riddle is based mainly on the metaphorical comparison, and the puzzle of a bird that lands on every tree is only slightly developed. A fuller form of what is probably the same riddle, however, shows in addition to the basic image a much more complicated sense of paradox: White bird featherless Flew from Paradise, Perched upon the castle wall; Up came Lord John landless, Took it up handless, And rorte away horseless To the King's white hall. (ER, p. 123) In this version the imagery and the paradox are woven together through every line. The snow is a bird without feathers who flies from a land beyond flight, and the sun is a lord without land who can lift the bird without hands and ride away without a horse. The second version seems to represent a fuller fusion of image and puzzle, but only because it is more explicit. The process can be seen again in a similar riddle collected in the southern United States: She washed her hands in water Which neither fell nor run; She dried her hands on a towel Which was neither woven nor spun. (dew and sun; ER, p. 463)

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Here again imagery and paradox, the visual patterns and the intellectual patterns, work together to make us see. We have, then, riddles in the form of a metaphorical image juxtaposing two objects or actions, riddles in the form of a simple verbal paradox, and riddles in a fuller form that combines elements of image and paradox into a unity.8 I do not mean to suggest that the fuller form is a "truer" riddle than the simpler forms, for we also find in oral tradition enigmatic questions and puzzles without either element. But the fuller form shows us two important elements of poetry fused at the very roots of poetic language. If the riddle is in fact the root of phanopoeia in the language of lyric poetry, then this power involves more than just "a casting of images upon the visual imagination." The riddle asks a question: What is the name of water that neither falls nor runs? What is the name of a towel that was neither woven nor spun? In the process of finding the name, of reading the unknown in terms of the known, paradoxes arise because the unknown never completely fits into the known. The riddle is more than simply substituting one name for another. To name is to have known, and to know is to have seen—yet the sense of paradox is present even in the initial act of seeing and is never completely resolved. It is here, it seems, that the riddle as a root form of poetic imagery becomes most interesting to us, for the process of resolving the paradoxes implicit in the imagery becomes a way of knowing. This is true even in the riddles based on a simple comparison: in thinking of the moon and the sky in terms of father's scythe and mother's Sunday skirt, meanings of the scythe and the skirt, of father and mother, and even of the moon and the sky have expanded for us. In having seen, we have created a space for fuller knowing. What Aristotle said of metaphor applies as well to the riddle: it engenders thought by teaching us something (Rhet. iii.io.i4iobio-i5). One thing that the riddle-root itself teaches us, then, is that poetic imagery in general is more than just "picture."

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The comparison of a man to a tree is a common riddle that has also become a traditional poetic image. A Canadian riddle develops this comparison in both its pictorial and its paradoxical senses: In spring I am gay, In handsome array; In summer more clothing I wear; When colder it grows, I fling off my clothes; And in winter quite naked appear. (a tree; ER, p. 215) We can watch a poet, one well versed in paradox, opening a poem with this same basic comparison, but without explicitly working out the paradoxes held in the image: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang. (Sonnet 73) Yet the paradoxes are there. Time of year compares very well with time of life, cold with age, and the state of the tree with the state of the man, but none quite fits completely. The tree will come back green in the spring, but the man will not; like a fallen church or sacked monastery, his ruin is final. Unless, that is, (and here the image turns again) the spring resurrection in nature implies or promises a similar rebirth in man. This poem, I will suggest, cuts off that possibility, yet it is there in the space created by the image, a space for fuller definitions of the name "man." Turning from the folk riddle itself to the riddle-root in poetic imagery, we first see two ways in which this root directly enters the language of complex poetry. Both ways lead to minor forms, as far as the history of poetry is concerned, but both forms offer important glimpses into the

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poet's language. The first form is simply the literary riddle, a more or less direct imitation of the folk riddle by a literate, educated writer. Galileo, Cervantes, Swift, and Heine were all attracted enough by riddles to write their own literary imitations. Literary riddles are, in their way, counterparts of literary imitations of folk ballads, and like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" they usually carry unmistakable signs of sophisticated authorship which clearly set them apart from folk riddles. One such sign, seen frequently in literary riddles of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, is the presence of an abstract theme or idea as one component (usually the hidden component) of the riddle. Folk riddles ask us to find concrete objects as answers; Tatwine, an eighth-century archbishop of Canterbury, wrote Latin riddles with answers such as philosophy, the four ways of interpreting a text, and the prepositions that govern two cases. Scaliger, the Renaissance critic, wrote riddles on the themes of God, necessity, nature, fate, and hope (LR, pp. 62, 74). Even when a writer adopts an image from a folk riddle his consciously literary style tends to open out the riddle into a longer, more elaborate, and more involved form. Archer Taylor notes that the literary riddle often sacrifices the unity of a single comparison in favor of a wealth of details, frequently drawing together entirely different conceptions of the hidden object (LR, p. 3). This medieval Arabic riddle is a good example of the literary riddle, and it demonstrates the embarras de richesses that Taylor feels is characteristic of the form in general: What is that sea which is not of water, which increases and diminishes during the night, and in which one can neither leap nor drown; Which contains something in the shape of a serpent, a serpent having no hole to which to retreat and having a mouth in which, O my friend, there is a thing

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That one sees—there is no mistake about it—whether one is near or far, that hides itself daily in very truth to reappear anew, That vanishes during the day, but spreads on human faces the light of dawn as soon as night looks upon it, That watches like a lover whom love compels and kills on hills and at the bottom of valleys? ( L R , pp. 20-21) The answer is "a lamp," and we may recall for comparison the simplicity of the Serbian folk riddle for a lamp: "A fire burns in the middle of the sea." For another example, we can compare an Irish folk riddle for the rainbow, "A bridge on the lake without stick [and] without stone" (IR, p. 41), with a treatment of the same image by Schiller: Von Perlen baut sich eine Briicke Hoch iiber einen grauen See, Sie baut sich auf im Augenblicke, Und schwindelnd steigt sie in die Hoh'. A bridge forms from pearls High over a gray sea, It rises up in a moment, And dizzily soars aloft. ("Parabeln und Ratsel") Schiller was more interested than the Arabic writer in catching the simplicity of a folk riddle, and in fact this first stanza has also been found in oral tradition in Sweden.9 But he elaborated on the paradoxical characteristics of the bridge for two more stanzas—the tallest ship can sail under it, it cannot bear any load, it cannot be approached, it comes and goes—and later composed another stanza explaining the answer ("sie heiBt der Regenbogen"). There is no reason, however, for holding up the folk riddle as the goal of the literary riddle, and both the Arabic riddle and Schiller's riddle become something quite at-

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tractively different. In western Europe the earliest literary riddles in a vernacular language are the Old English riddles in the Exeter Book which, while they show their literary descent from medieval Latin riddles, also give us fine passages of their own dealing with such favorite Anglo-Saxon themes as the winter sea, arms and armor, mead, John Barleycorn, and the harp. The Anglo-Saxon sense of transience is nicely caught in the Old English riddle of a moth who eats words: the bookworm who swallows the noble songs, histories, and wise writings of men but is itself no wiser for it.10 Although the literary riddle has always been a relatively minor form, the very existence of the form, with its invitation to involved elaborations of image and paradox, speaks for the strong attraction that the riddle-root holds for poets. The riddle can also be seen making its initial steps into complex poetry through the kenning, a form which involves condensation rather than elaboration. This form too is seen at its best in the literature of the Middle Ages, and in particular in the language of Old Norse and Old English poetry. The kenning tightens the elements of a riddle into a figure of traditional formulaic diction: it presents a riddle in miniature. The word itself is cognate with Keats's "ken," and the Old Norse verb kenna holds all our meanings of seeing, knowing, naming, and teaching. The kenning, in short, is a name for an object based on a way of knowing it. In his edition of Beowulf Fr. Klaeber used the designation "kenning" in a general sense for those compounds which refer to an object by some form of poetic periphrasis, such as helmberend ("helmet-bearer") for "warrior" or beadoleoma ("battle-light") for "sword."11 Recently, however, scholars have found it necessary to make further distinctions, which in practice meant returning to the definitions already made by Snorri Sturluson in his medieval treatise on poetics SkAldskaparmdl. Here we find that a figure referring to an object in terms of something that it is

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belongs to the class of kend heiti. The helmberend, for example, and the use of hadstapa ("heath-stepper," Beow. 1368) for "stag," are kend heiti. A warrior is a helmet-wearer, and a stag is something that steps (more or less) along the heath. The kenning proper, on the other hand, refers to an object in terms of something that it is not. A sword is not a light, but it can be seen flashing in battle the way a torch flashes in the night, thus a beadoleoma. The distinctions are clear in theory, though, as we might expect, the practical boundaries are not sharp. A. G. Brodeur classes swanrad ("swan-road" or "riding-place of the swan," Beow. 200)—for the sea—as a kent heiti, and C. L. Wrenn states that it is a kenning.12 The distinction between kennings and kend heiti becomes more than an exercise in classification when we look at kennings with an eye for their riddle roots. "Who wears a helmet?" is not much of a riddle for "warrior," but "What is the light that flashes in battle?" could begin a fine riddle for a bright sword. Like a riddle, it sees the sword as something else, and also like a riddle it suggests a miniature puzzle to be solved. As Brodeur points out, the kent heiti is a familiar allusion and is not meant to puzzle the listener, but a kenning, on the other hand, "pleases only as a riddle pleases; it also contains an allusion or a comparison, but requires the listener to ferret out its secret through the exercise of his own ingenuity" (The Art of Beowulf, p. 249). Similar riddle puzzles are incipient in the kennings in Beowulf which see the sun as heofones gim ("heaven's gem," v. 2072) or rodores candel ("the sky's candle," v. 1572), the body as a banhus ("bone-house," v. 3147), and in the kenning in Judith which sees an arrow as a hildencedre ("battleadder," v. 222). In each of these kennings, as in a riddle, an image generates a puzzle, a way of seeing that leads to a way of knowing. The arrow bites its victim with the deadly sting of a poisonous snake, and the concealment of one of these terms could produce either a riddle or a kenning. On this basis it might even be possible to suggest a resolution

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of the conflict above by pointing out that there are many folk riddles that compare the sea to a path or a road (ER, pp. 78-79), and that by analogy swanrad does indeed seem to be a true kenning. The literary riddle and the kenning can be seen as early stages of the riddle-root's progress into the language of complex poetry. It may be more interesting from our point of view to observe the riddle as it appears in fully developed lyric poetry. Once the eye is aware of riddle roots it can spot them lying beneath many of the metaphors, images, paradoxes, and word plays of sophisticated and complex lyric poets. This is not meant to imply any historical assertion that knowledge of riddles "influenced" a poet's imagery, or any biological assertion that the poet grew an image from a particular riddle. It does suggest, however, that the riddle is the root of the lyric element in the sense that both the riddle maker and the lyric poet developed their respective expressions through the same associations of picture and thought, the same process of seeing, knowing, naming. Shakespeare may not have heard any of the riddles occurring from Ireland to Mongolia that compare the sky to a cloth, yet his "morn in russet mantle clad" shows a mind making the same associations as the Swedish riddler who saw the evening sky as mother's Sunday skirt, or an Arabic riddler who saw the night sky as "A cloak with countless buttons, it cannot be folded or carried about" (ER, p. 520). Wordsworth's dancing daffodils spring from the same roots that produced many riddles comparing plants to dancers, as in this riddle from Maryland: Out in the garden I have a green spot, And twenty-four ladies dancing on that; Some in green gowns, And some in blue caps. You are a good scholar, If you riddle me that. (flax; E R , p. 348)

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A Lincolnshire riddle which compares the sun to a ubiquitous person who seems to be engaged in a troublesome invasion of privacy: Round and round the house And in my lady's chamber (ER, p. 71) shows some similarity to the opening conceit of Donne's "Sunne Rising": Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why dost thou thus, Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us? Donne may have known the riddle (a version of it was recorded in his days), but it seems far more likely that he was seeing the same thing and naming it anew in his lines. At times a poet will stay so close to a riddle root that his poem turns back into a literary riddle. A medieval lyric from The Harley MS., known as "The Man in the Moon," opens with the image of a man who, because of his unique situation, simultaneously "stands and strides"—a good riddle, involving both picture and paradox. A Wyatt poem develops from the initial image of a lady's gift a series of riddle paradoxes: A ladye gave me a gyfte she had not And I receyvid her guifte I toke not. She gave it me willinglye, and yet she wold not, And I receyvid it, albeit I coulde not. If she geve it me, I force not; And, yf she take it agayne, she cares not. Conster what this is and tell not, Ffor I am fast sworne, I maye not. There are folk parallels to this riddle, but perhaps the closest analogue is a North Carolina literary riddle from an early nineteenth-century almanac:

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To her lover a lady said, "Give me, I pray, What you have not, nor can have, but might give away!" Let each hereafter his dullness repent, The fool did not know 'twas a kiss that she meant.13 In the Wyatt poem a mental puzzle begins in a paradoxical image, generating a riddle-poem that seems to look both back to the medieval literary riddles and forward to the intricate images and verbal paradoxes of Elizabethan sonnets and metaphysical lyrics. The seventeenth-century metaphysical style of poetry is particularly interesting for the ways it involves the riddle radical in greater complexities of imagery and paradox. When Samuel Johnson expressed in the "Life of Cowley" his well-known reservations concerning the metaphysical poets, he said that their ingenious form of wit depended on "a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike." This shows a good feeling for riddles, though his next comment —"The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together"—misses the importance of the riddle or the metaphysical image as a discovery, a seeing into something in a manner that leads to a valid way of knowing. A traditional image found in many riddles discovers resemblances between the eyes and projectiles of various kinds, as in the Bantu riddle "The stones, the far-throwers" (Cole-Beuchat, p. 143) or in the Albanian riddle "Two arrows with black wings reach wherever they wish" (ER, p. 607). Crashaw worked with this same way of knowing something about the eyes: Eyes, that bestow Full quivers on loves Bow; Yet pay lesse Arrowes then they owe. ("Wishes. To his (supposed) Mistress") Although Crashaw complicates the comparison by adding the conventional emblem of Love and his arrows, the basic

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discovery of the riddle is there, as it was in many other Renaissance and Baroque love poems. John Dryden's opinion of love poetry in the metaphysical style is also well known, particularly with reference to John Donne. Donne's offenses seem to lie at least partly in his own realization of how close his conceits are to riddles. He seems to have caught himself in the middle of a typical example in "Loves infinitenesse," recognizing that for him a poem about love is a poem about riddles: Loves riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stayes at home, and thou with losing savest it. His conceits often show tightly woven paradoxes arising from visual scenes, and we can see in them a complication of elements found in the riddle. Riddles that compare the human face to a landscape or a street scene become in "The good-morrow" a comparison of the face to a world: My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares, And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest, Where can we finde two better hemispheares Without sharpe North, without declining West? This is of course a long way from a folk riddle, and Donne has doubled the puzzle by adding what is actually another riddle root: the eyes that can hold a world. ("Two little holes that refuse to be filled; there enter people, oxen, goats and other things," goes a Bantu riddle for the eyes— Cole-Beuchat, p. 141.) Yet the basic riddle pattern can be recognized: a comparison is made that discovers "occult resemblances" between two different things, paradoxes arise where the two overlapping meanings do not quite fit, and in that space Donne learns new meanings of his love, naming it a world "Without sharpe North, without declining West." Even more complex is the discovery in Donne's "Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse." It concerns not love but

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death, and the vision of the entire poem grows out of a riddle root established in the second stanza: Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne That this is my South-west discoverie Per fretum febris, by these streights to die. . . . A resemblance is discovered between the speaker's body, flat on the bed, and a flat map. The doctors, with the riddle of human sickness before them, read the body-map and see the sickness lead through the south-west straits into the unknown regions of death. But then the riddle turns back on itself, and in the next stanza the speaker, who as the map is part of the riddle, makes the final discovery himself. Having seen from maps that the extreme west touches the east, he knows that his death will touch the resurrection. The entire poem, in fact, is based on the theme of finding a fuller knowledge through the structure of the body/map riddle. Donne of course raises the riddle radical to higher powers, but that is what we expect a complex poet to do with roots. Modern poets, as they explore beneath the rational and logical forms of discursive language into the deeper structures of poetic language, often rediscover or re-create along the way this fundamental radical of lyric. Like many other modern poems, Robert Creeley's "My Love" is almost a literary riddle, with the answer given in the title: It falleth like a stick. It lieth like air. It is wonderment and bewilderment, to test true. It is no thing, but of two, equal: as the mind turns to it, it doubleth, as one alone.

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Where it is, there is everywhere, separate, yet few—as dew to night is. There is no mistaking this for anything but a modern poem, but at the same time it reaches back—quite consciously, I think—to explorations of love's riddles similar to those made four centuries earlier by Wyatt. And the explorations made by Donne are recalled in another poem, "Song," in which Creeley develops darkly insoluble premonitions from this opening riddle: What I took in my hand grew in weight. You must understand it was not obscene. Night comes. We sleep. Then if you know what say it. Don't pretend. This time there is no answer given. In the last version of her poem "Snow," Emily Dickinson used an image we have already seen in riddles, the snow/ bird: It scatters like the Birds— Condenses like a Flock— (Poems, No. 311) Dylan Thomas reaches beneath the prose logic of similes in his poem "Because the Pleasure-Bird Whistles" to give us a playful turn on the same basic structure in the image of a snowstorm as "a wind that plucked a goose." Emily Dickinson's poetry has already been fruitfully studied as a development of riddle forms by Dolores Dyer Lucas in Emily Dickinson and Riddle (DeKalb, 111.: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969), and a similar study of the riddles at the

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roots of Thomas' poetry would also find much to say. The face /landscape comparison of the riddles appears once again in Thomas' "Where Once the Waters of Your Face," a poem that sees the dry bed of a sea-channel as the face of a lost love: Where once the waters of your face Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows. . . . The "heron / Priested shore" of his "Poem in October" and the "prayer wheeling moon" of "In Country Sleep" are other tight images that verge on the riddle or the kenning. The first could easily be turned back into a riddle asking "Who are the priests bowing on the shore . . . ?" and if prayer wheels had been a part of Germanic religion "heaven's prayer wheel" might easily have become a kenning in Beowulf. Again, Thomas is a poet who makes more than riddles, and these roots are only parts of his complex lyric poems, yet it is basically the same eye that sees snow-kerchiefs on the fence posts, rainbow bridges in the air, and star buttons in the cloak of the sky that sees, when looking at a flock of birds rising above a hillside: a black cap of jackDaws Sir John's just hill dons. ("Over Sir John's Hill") If the riddle is, as I suggested, a naming, it is a form of naming that calls upon a particular power of the language of poetry. It is a naming that creates a space rather than reduces it. Even at the roots phanopoeia is more than just a sense of the pictorial in poetry. The riddle's peculiar vision leads to complex and paradoxical ways of knowing something, ways that good poets will not allow to be resolved simply. The developed complexities of Shakespeare and Donne, or of Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Creeley, are not likely to be found in all levels of poetry, but the root forms of these complexities often will be. An image that occurs in many riddles sees a candle as a man. A common form of the riddle is:

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Little Nancy Etticoat In a white petticoat And a red nose; The longer she stands, The shorter she grows.

(ER, p. 222)

The riddle is built on both picture and paradox, and the answer, "a white candle," creates a simple juxtaposition in the mind: candle/man (well, woman). A more complicated riddle from Spain makes the same juxtaposition, but the burning of the candle, a simple contradictive element in the first riddle, is now seen in terms of a man's life: "I was created on the mountain and I came to my end at the altar" (a candle). (Archer Taylor's explication of this riddle. "The reference to the mountain signifies the bees making wax out of doors. . . . Ί came to my end at the altar' signifies the burning of the candle, and at the same time aptly describes the end that any mortal might expect"— ER, p. 429.) It is not far at all, radically, from these riddles to a simple lyric like Cavafy's "Candles": Days to come stand in front of us like a row of burning candles— golden, warm, and vivid candles. Days past fall behind us, a gloomy line of burnt-out candles; the nearest are still smoking, cold, melted, and bent. I don't want to look at them: their shape saddens me, and it saddens me to remember their original light. I look ahead at my burning candles. I don't want to turn, don't want to see, terrified, how quickly that dark line gets longer, how quickly one more dead candle joins another.14 Cavafy's image begins by comparing candles to days, but he

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very quickly comes upon the basic form that compares a burning candle to a man's life. We have already looked at the tree/man image in the opening quatrain of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. The last quatrain of the same poem brings in a riddle root very like the burning candle; it sees the life of man as a dying fire: In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. The image here is more explicit about its own paradoxical character than Cavafy's candle image as Shakespeare sees the fire being quenched by the ashes of its fuel. It completes an important progression in the poem, moreover, by leading up to a deeper knowing concerning a man's life: unlike the autumn of the first quatrain or the fading twilight of the second quatrain, the dying fire of this last quatrain is an irreversible process. The fire will not come back, and neither, the speaker has learned, will the aging man. Other poets have developed this same root into their own ways of knowing. Wallace Stevens saw the candle not as an image of the life of man but as an image of the brief life of man's imagination in "Valley Candle," and Dylan Thomas in "Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines" riddled the mystery of life's genesis with his image of "a candle in the thighs." Perhaps the richest development of this root appears not in a lyric poem at all, but as the "flaming minister" that lights Othello's way to murder Desdemona: "Put out the light, and then put out the light." What is there seen and known and named creates a space too large to enter into now, but we can observe how the humble riddle repays our interest by leading us through the center of poetry.

III. EMBLEM

POETS exploring the strongly visual power of phanopoeia

in the language of poetry periodically experiment with introducing an actual picture into a verbal context as an effectively direct way of casting images upon the visual imagination. The most sustained development of such an experiment came in the emblem books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emblem books very literally forced sculpture or painting into words by presenting the phanopoeic sense of picture through an actual engraving or woodcut. Words and picture worked together, with the picture, in effect, part of the language of the emblem. The full form of the riddle, we saw, is essentially a metaphor with one element concealed; similarly, it is possible to see the emblem as a metaphor existing in a dual medium. Even without the presence of an actual picture, however, the emblem method is a special case of phanopoeia, a particular way by which this power of poetic language moves from seeing to knowing. The metaphorical images of folk riddles tend to bring together concrete elements such as snow and a bird, the rainbow and a bridge, or the teeth and two stone fences. Riddles linking a concrete object and an abstract concept betray themselves as literary compositions: their roots are in the inkhorn (to use their own habit of mixing metaphors) rather than in oral tradition. This linking of the concrete and the abstract, however, is the method in which the emblem excels, and there is no difficulty at all in finding good emblems on subjects such as God, necessity, hope, or love. The classical tradition had taught that art mediates between history and philosophy by uniting the example and

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the precept. Like Sidney, the emblematists respected and followed this view of art, and, again like Sidney, they conceived of the union of example and precept as serving a moral purpose. The emblem, like the riddle and the kenning, is a teaching. Just as the paradoxes that arise from bringing together concrete images in the riddle ultimately teach us something, so is the linking of a concrete picture with a moral meaning in the emblem meant to teach us something. The sense of paradoxical thought at the roots of phanopoeia in the riddle becomes manifest in the emblem as a more explicit and more self-conscious didacticism. The method is one that has been out of fashion for a while in serious literature, but it is one with a long history, and a taste for it reaches from at least as far back as the Bible up through the Alexandrian period and the Middle Ages to the actual emblem books of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The flourishing emblem-book tradition reached England from the Continent in about the middle of the sixteenth century, though there was a deep interest in English letters for emblems, imprese, and heraldic devices long before that. The first major emblem book in English was Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes, published by Plantin in Leyden in 1586.1 In an age of vigorous and fruitful plagiarism, Whitney made free use of plates from Continental emblematists, particularly Alciati, that were available from Plantin, but his verses were in English. The culmination of the tradition in England came with the emblem books of Francis Quarles, whose Emblems, Divine and Moral (1635) was the most popular of the English emblem books.2 The emblematists were erudite and somewhat pedantic Renaissance men, and they displayed these qualities liberally in their books, yet the books themselves were popular literature. They appealed to a much wider audience than did the metaphysical poetry of the same period, and though they often started with the same visual image the emblems rarely

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attempted the complexities of phanopoeia reached by Herbert or Donne.3 The emblem, like the riddle, takes many forms, but it is possible to see a basic theory growing out of the many experiments. The emblem book as it was developed in England usually consisted of three elements: the plate itself, which gave the pictorial element in an engraving or woodcut; the printed verses, which explored the themes presented in the plate; and the "moral" or motto, which was a line or two in the style of, and often an actual quotation from, a traditional epigram, literary proverb, or moralistic sententia. In addition to these three elements there were usually added on before or after the verses two or three short Biblical quotations or homiletic lines from Fathers of the Church such as Augustine or Ambrose, but these additions were incidental to the basic structure. The picture was not meant to be simply an illustration for the verses. It was less a "natural" or representational image than an older, more stylized form of visual representation based on the symbolic language of iconology. Similarly, the verses were not simply a verbal description of the picture: they were not, in the best examples, what Jean Hagstrum has defined as "iconic" poetry—poetry that, like Homer's passage on the shield of Achilles or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," is based on a real or imaginary work of graphic art.4 Both the picture and the verses were meant to work in their own unique ways toward completing the emblem as a whole. The third element, the motto, was kept separate from the verses, and the emblematists felt that it should also be in a foreign language (Greek and Latin were particularly favored). There were many emblem books in which these distinctions were not kept or even attempted, books in which the picture was no more than an illustration for the verses or the verses simply a point-by-point interpretation of the picture. In the most interesting examples of the emblem method, however, the

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three-part form was respected: the plate gave the visual image, the verses explored in their own way some of the conceptual meanings of the image, and the motto pointed the way toward some general resolution of the visual and the verbal expressions. The emblem writers recognized that their method involved a linking of picture and thought, of the sensuous and the intellectual. These writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were fascinated by the Egyptian hieroglyphic in much the same way that the poets of the twentieth century have been fascinated by the Chinese ideogram, though there seems to have been no Ezra Pound among the emblematists who put forth a theory of poetry and meaning based on character-writing. There was, nevertheless, a feeling that the emblem derived from the hieroglyphic in the sense that the picture held contained within itself a meaning that was to be "read." Geoffrey Whitney, in the sixteenth century, felt that the emblem was like the decorative devices used since classical times to show forth some meaning. He defined the emblem in a literal sense (from the Greek verb ΐμβάλλεσθαι) as a work of inlay, a decorative ornament set in or on a surface: "properlie ment by suche figures, or workes, as are wroughte in plate, or in stones in the pavementes, or on the waules, or suche like, for the adorning of the place: havinge some wittie devise expressed with cunning woorkemanship, somethinge obscure to be perceived at the first, whereby, when with further consideration it is understood, it maie the greater delighte the behoulder" ("To the Read er," A Choice of Emblemes). Beginning with the visual element, Whitney sees the picture as involving meanings which, like riddles, are at first "somethinge obscure." When the obscurity is solved, the picture is still there before us, not left behind but enriched. In the seventeenth century Francis Quarles defined the emblem with more emphasis on the meaning behind the picture, but he too held to the fusion of image and thought in the emblem:

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AN EMBLEM is but a silent parable: let not the tender eye check, to see the allusion to our blessed SAVIOUR figured in these types. In holy scripture he is sometimes called a sower, sometimes a fisher, sometimes a physician; and why not presented so, as well to the eye as to the ear? Before the knowledge of letters, GOD was known by Hieroglyphics. And indeed what are the heavens, the earth, nay, every creature, but Hieroglyphics and Emblems of his glory? ("To the Reader," Emblems)

The fusion of picture and thought, of the concrete and the abstract, or (emphasizing the moral meanings) of example and precept: this is the heart of the emblem method. In her study English Emblem Books, Rosemary Freeman writes that two distinct ancestors, one pictorial and one intellectual, contributed to this fusion. The hieroglyphic stands behind the pictorial elements of the emblem; the moralistic and sententious elements can be traced back to the rhetorical concerns of the epigram: In all contemporary criticism, emblems are connected, explicitly or implicitly, with two main interests, interest in decoration and interest in rhetoric. From the very beginning it had been uncertain whether the form derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics or from the Greek anthology, whether, that is, its pictorial or its rhetorical side was of prime importance. This doubt resulted in a dual classification: emblems were associated by some critics, notably Abraham Fraunce, with insignia, arms, symbols and hieroglyphics, and by others, for instance by John Hoskins in his Directions for Speech and Style with allegories, similitudes, fables and poets' tales. The dichotomy is of course false, for the whole essence of the emblem method is that in it picture and word are intimately combined; but the two sides do none the less exist, though they exist in conjunction and not independently of one another. . . . (pp. 85-86)

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The two sides exist, we might add, in the ancestors themselves, in the Renaissance understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics as images used by Egyptian priests to foreshadow divine ideas, and in the origin of the epigram as verses engraved on a work of art such as a statue, monument, or funerary stele.5 The dual nature of the emblem, moreover, with hieroglyphic on the one hand and rhetoric or verbal wit on the other, can be seen as corresponding to the union of image and verbal puzzle in the riddle. The whole principle of emblem writing, Miss Freeman says, is "the equating of pictorial detail with moral ideas" (p. 60). The riddle's tight paradoxes become in the emblem didactic parables, with the paradoxes partly resolved on a general level by the motto, and the process of seeing and knowing becomes the special case of linking the concrete with the abstract. Two emblems from Whitney will serve as examples of this principle. In the first, he used one of the most popular plates of emblem literature, a picture of a human figure whose one arm is winged and raised toward the sky and whose other arm is pulled down by a weight.6 His picture presents a man standing on a hilltop, striving to reach the glorious skies above him. The man is looking upward, one foot raised and one foot on the ground; his winged left arm is reaching up, but his right arm is tied to a heavy stone which pulls it downward. Above him in the distant clouds birds fly freely. The verses develop the theme of a similar condition in all those soaring spirits who, wishing for excellence, fame, or high estate, are held down by the restraints and cares of poverty: I shewe theire state, whose witte, and learninge, ofte Excell, and woulde to highe estate aspire: But povertie, with heavie clogge of care, Still pulles them downe, when they ascending are. The motto is a general statement of the same theme: Paupertatem summis ingeniis obesse ne provehantur ("Poverty

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hinders the highest genius from gaining promotion"—p. 152). The theme of the verses is simple and pragmatic, but the emblem as a whole, through the linking of the man who wants to fly with the man of learning held down by the gravity of human exigencies, takes a cliche and opens it out to a wider contemplation of the conflicts between desire and necessity. The second emblem from Whitney involves its image with a meaning even more explicitly. The picture shows a tree laden with nuts, and men breaking the branches of the tree as they beat down the nuts with heavy sticks. In the verses the tree itself speaks, developing the paradox that its good fortune in bringing forth desirable fruits has lead directly to its bad fortune: Thus everie yeare, when I doe yeelde increase, My proper fruicte, my ruine doth procure: If fruictlesse I, then had I growen in peace, Oh barrennes, of all most happie, sure Which wordes with griefe, did AGRIPPINA grone, And mothers more, whose children made them mone. Again the motto is a statement of the general concept toward which the picture and the verses work: In fcecunditatem, sibi ipsi damnosam ("On fruitfulness injurious to its own self"—p. 174). Starting with the image of the flailed tree, the emblem develops in the verses some of the meanings of this image (as well as adding the further image of a mother whose children brought her tragedy), and then in the motto gives a general, sententious statement that summarizes the movement from example to precept. The emblem of one winged arm and one weighted arm, showing the conflict of desire and necessity, and the emblem of the fruitful tree being damaged for its fruit, showing how good fortune can cause bad fortune, are forms of metaphor met at the level of popular literature. Here they are embodied in the dual medium of the emblem book. At the

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same time the joining of the concrete and the abstract in the emblem is a special case of metaphor. There is an emblem in Quarles in which the picture shows a shipwrecked girl struggling through the waters to shore. The verses develop the theme of the soul alienated from God (Bk. hi, Emb. xi, pp. 133-35). The emblem is basically a metaphorical comparison juxtaposing two elements: one element, the more concrete one, exists in the visual medium; the other element, a more abstract one, exists in the verbal medium. The third element, the motto, is essentially an act of literary criticism directed toward the metaphor: it is supplied by a reference to Psalms 69:15 ("Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me") and suggests a general area in which the two elements of the metaphor come together. Both the visual and the verbal elements of the metaphor are necessary, for the emblem depends on the relationship set up between them, on seeing a fusion of two terms which yields the metaphorical comparison "a shipwrecked girl is like an alienated soul." By concealing the second term we could produce a riddle—though not a very good one, for this joining of the concrete and the abstract is the special domain of the emblem method. Although the emblem method is seen most clearly in the dual medium of the emblem books, imagery that joins a concrete picture to an abstract concept is of course an old and familiar way of seeing, knowing, and naming. Set an emblem in motion and what do you get? The journey of a Piers Ploughman, a quest by a Red Crosse Knight, a pilgrim's progress. Although the emblem books were not full allegories in the sense of being sustained narrative tales, the emblem writers inevitably found themselves writing miniature allegories, for allegory is a larger form based on the same kind of involvement of picture and meaning. The shipwreck emblem in Quarles includes verses of assemblyline allegory of this nature:

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The world's a sea; my flesh a ship that's mann'd With lab'ring thoughts, and steer'd by reason's hand: My heart's the seaman's card, whereby she sails; My loose affections are the greater sails: The top-sail is my fancy; and the gusts, That fill these wanton sheets, are worldly lusts. Pray'r is the cable, at whose end appears The anchor hope, ne'er slipp'd but in our fears: My will's th' unconstant pilot, that commands The stagg'ring keel; my sins are like the sands. . . . The ship allegory has old roots in medieval literature, and it is still with us in political rhetoric and in sermon literature as the ship of state and the ship of life. (Ishmael in Moby-Dick had an eager taste for emblems and allegory, and as he waited in Father Mapple's chapel for the sermon to begin he read the emblem of the prow-shaped pulpit: "Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.") Rosemary Freeman shows that John Bunyan, experienced preacher that he was, would often turn his allegorical images into riddles with the intention of producing more strongly a sense of questioning thought in his readers. The Pilgrim's Progress asks questions such as "Why doth the Fire Fasten upon the Candle-wick?" "Why doth the Pelican pierce her own Breast with her Bill?" or "What may one learn by hearing the Cock to Crow?" These questions are all pietistic emblems posing as riddles. "All, presented slightly differently," Miss Freeman comments, "could constitute emblems. The intellectual stimulus that such riddles, and the emblems among them, could provide is evident from the frequency and length with which they are employed in The Pilgrim's Progress" (English Emblem Books, p. 221). They are of course literary riddles, and the "intellectual stimulus" they provide is that particular form of phanopoeia mastered by the emblem method. Yet it con-

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tinues to be a reading of the unknown in terms of the known: in having seen the concrete picture (shipwrecked girl) we come to know something about the abstract concept (alienated soul). We have, so to speak, found a name for the condition of alienation and have created a space for fuller knowing about that condition. Allegory, Marxist critics say in attacking it, is a "dehistoricized" form, a concept that brings us to a power of phanopoeia we have as yet considered only implicitly. In addition to the concern for imagery and a sense of thought, and also as a result of this concern, phanopoeia can be seen forcing poetry into a "spatial" consciousness, one in which the time elements of poetry—movement, sequence, progression—are frozen or obliterated. Introducing a sense of the pictorial into a verbal medium, Jean Hagstrum writes, "necessarily involves the reduction of motion to stasis or something suggesting such a reduction. It need not eliminate motion entirely, but the motion allowed to remain must be viewed against the basic motionlessness of the arrangement" (The Sister Arts, p. xxii). We can see in the emblem books how the time elements of poetry are held static, how the temporal connections between the constituent parts of the emblem are evaporated, and how there is in general a sense of caught time which later reappears in modern poetry as the "timeless moment" of the Image. This takes us somewhat beyond the fundamental structures of the language of lyric into the larger question of spatial and temporal form in literature in general, but any discussion of phanopoeia is constantly flirting with this old critical problem, and the emblem in particular openly invites it. The strong tendency of some poetry toward visual imagery and spatial pattern has always generated discussions relating poetry to the visual arts of painting and sculpture, arts in which temporal form usually has no place. Aristotle appears to have discouraged this relationship by limiting

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opsis to the representations presented by the actors and the stage settings; he commented that of the six elements of tragedy, this one is least connected with the art of poetry {Poet. 6.i45obi6-2o). Other classical critics, however, linked poetry and the visual arts in ways which later prompted many serious inquiries into the relationships between these arts. The usual starting points for these discussions are two: a phrase, attributed by Plutarch to Simonides of Ceos, that painting is silent poetry and poetry is a speaking painting,7 and a phrase from Horace's "Art of Poetry": ut pictura poesis (Ars poetica 361). They are only slight hints, particularly the latter in which Horace, discussing flaws in poetry, says only that "poetry is like painting" in that some poems appear at their best when viewed from a distance, while other poems are most pleasing when they are examined closely. But implications of these phrases expanded far beyond their original contexts as they were carried through Renaissance criticism. The famous Horatian phrase is part of the actual titles of many emblem books, and the phrase from Simonides obviously stands behind Quarles' definition of the emblem as "a silent parable." Even after the decline of emblem books a concern for poetry as a speaking picture is seen reflected in the many richly detailed landscapes and framed "prospect views" of eighteenth-century poetry.8 Poetry faces certain limits, however, in trying to bring a sense of the pictorial and the idea of space into language, and the best-known discussion of these limits is Lessing's Laocoon (1766), his attempt to separate the arts of poetry and painting or sculpture once and for all. For Lessing, poetry was essentially a temporal art, like music, and painting and sculpture were essentially spatial arts. He saw any attempt to mix a temporal art and a spatial art as a confusion of basic principles that inevitably led to a second-rate product. A poetic image, he pointed out, is not a material picture but a creation in language, and language is a medium that imitates action, not space. It is this view of language that is the central hypothesis underlying Lessing's conclu-

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sions: "If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry,—the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time,—and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side, or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other, in time."9 The "convenient relation" between the medium of imitation and the object of imitation is the vulnerable heel of Lessing's hypothesis. It clearly derives from the classical doctrine of art as mimesis, but an overly literal and reductive view of that doctrine; the language of poetry (and the language of painting as well) is probably more independent and also more complex than Lessing assumed. (Similar assumptions had led earlier to the "unities" of time and place as rules for the art of drama, and the year before Laocoon was published Samuel Johnson had still found it necessary to explain in his Preface to Shakespeare that mimetic art should not be confused with verisimilitude: "Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.") Leo Spitzer writing on medieval lyrics, G. Wilson Knight on Shakespeare, Jean Hagstrum on neoclassical poetry, and Joseph Frank on modern poetry and fiction all testify that Lessing's argument contradicts an important dimension of literary experience.10 It may not be accurate in every case to call that dimension "spatial form," but the term does apply quite literally to the emblem method. Lessing's concepts of spatial and temporal form probably are more useful adapted to our coordinates for analysis than as absolute distinctions between the arts. Poetry, it seems to me, lies finally not on either axis but somewhere between the two, yet it is obvious that certain modes of poetic language will approach much closer to one axis than the other. The emblem emphasizes visual imagery and spatial form,

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an emphasis that remains a strong power of the emblem method even without the presence of an actual picture. Yet, although the emblem method derives primarily from phanopoeia, we can see Lessing's time elements of poetry existing within the spatial form. Even the pictures in the emblem books could themselves incorporate the temporal dimension within their spatial frames. An artist who wished to make a picture based on a narrative, and who also wished to make his picture conform to Lessing's version of the unity of time, would have to choose a single dramatic moment from the narrative and limit his representation to that one moment in time. An emblem artist, however, had available to him older resources in the language of visual representation. In Whitney's Choice of Emblemes we see an emblem on the theme of "man is a wolf to man" (p. 144). The picture is based on the story of Arion, and it shows both Arion being thrown overboard by treacherous mariners who covet his gold and Arion riding safely away on the back of the rescuing dolphin—a kinder friend to man, the verses explain, than are his fellow men. As Rosemary Freeman points out, the unity of time was not a matter of concern for this artist or for the emblem artists in general: "The emblem writers had no such rule of consistency; often several events which could not by any chance have subsisted together in one time are found side by side within the single frame of an emblem from Wither or Whitney. The encroachments of the painter upon the domain of the poet occur everywhere in the emblem books. Whitney's Arion, for example, is cast into the waves and is seen simultaneously riding away upon the dolphin in another corner of the picture" (English Emblem Books, p. 12). The emblematist was dealing with a story, a narrative, and therefore with time. Unlike the artist concerned with the limitations of spatial form, however, the "encroachments of the painter upon the domain of the poet" allowed him to introduce events from separate times into his picture and gave him a way to present the meaning of an entire narra-

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tive within a pictorial form. The sequential events of the narrative are presented simultaneously in the spatial pattern, and time, rather than flowing, is held frozen in the picture. Arion falling into the waves and then riding away on the dolphin can just as easily be seen in the reverse sequence, or in no sequence at all, since both events are simultaneously present to the viewer. Presented in this way, both events work as elements of the meaning of the picture and of the complete emblem: spatial pattern becomes conceptual pattern as the meaning is understood outside of the sequence of the Arion story. In the Arion emblem, the picture itself catches time in a simultaneous spatial pattern. On a different level, the emblem as a whole—picture, verses, and motto—also works toward catching time in the spatial and conceptual patterns of the visual imagination. The emblem method's involvement with spatial and temporal form is seen perhaps at its best in Francis Quarles' Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, his second emblem book. Shorter than other emblem books, it has a unity of conception that most of the other books did not attempt. The book consists of fifteen emblems built on an image we have already met, the comparison of a burning candle to the life of man. Each picture centers on the state of the candle, and the verses take up meanings involved in the basic metaphor. The picture of the first emblem, for example, shows a tall, unlit candle, its base set in an urn and its wick reaching up into dark clouds. The motto is Sine Lumine inane ("Without light, it is useless"). The candle sits in a darkened landscape, with a dark city in the background and clouds obscuring the sky (Hier. i, pp. 245-47). The next emblem shows the hand of God reaching from the clouds to give light to the candle, now set in a spring landscape beside a flowing river (Hier. 11, pp. 248-50). Succeeding emblems show the winds endangering the new flame, a physician causing the flame to burn too quickly by trimming it, and an angel with a shield guarding the flame from the winds.

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The sixth emblem is particularly interesting. Death, pictured as a skeleton, holds an arrow and a candle snuffer. He is about to extinguish the flame, but Time, represented as the bearded man with an hourglass, restrains Death's arm. The verses are a debate between Death and Time. Death is the prince of darkness who hates the flame and wants to extinguish it immediately, but Time tells him that he must wait for the appointed hour: "What need'st thou snatch at noon, what will be thine at night?" The motto, Tempus erit ("There shall be a time"), and the line from Ecclesiastes heading the verses, "To every thing there is an appointed time," express the same meaning at a more general level. The picture, by showing Time holding back Death, shows that the hour has not come, but the verses stress the certainty that it will come, and back in the picture we see a sundial on which the shadow, we know, is moving steadily forward (Hier. vi, pp. 260-62). The handling of time in this emblem and in the other emblems of Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man makes this small book an unusual achievement in emblem literature. Throughout the book time is treated both thematically, as part of the moral meaning, and technically, as part of the emblem method. In each emblem Quarles respected his dual medium: the picture freezes time by presenting different elements in a nonsequential pattern in the manner of Whitney's Arion, whereas the verses emphasize time, especially the passing of time and the transience of human life. The last seven emblems in the book deal with the seven ages of the life of man as the candle in the pictures burns down through seven stages marked off on its side. In the picture for the first stage, the infancy of a man's life, the candle stands in pre-dawn darkness; a baby-basket lies on the ground beside it and behind it stand trees in early bud. The verses develop the idea that the first ten years of life are a virtual loss, not really life at all: "we rather breathe than live" (Hier. ix, pp. 269-71). In the next emblem, the candle stands in a spring landscape just beginning to blos-

EMBLEM som, and the sun—which in the verses becomes the "light of reason"—is just appearing. In the fields behind the candle a young boy is being thrown from a vigorous horse, which in the verses becomes two things. It is first the "proud-neck'd steed" of life which the impetuous youth, disdaining his tutor, wants to command by himself, but by the end of the verses it has become a reminder that time itself is running away, carrying youth into age: "Time's headstrong horse / Will post away" (Hier. x, pp. 272-74). The flame becomes brighter as the candle burns down into maturity, and other elements in the pictures, such as the trees, the flowers, the seasons, and the time of day, change accordingly. Different cycles—the life of man, the burning of a candle, the turning seasons, the life of a tree, the rise and fall of cities—are superimposed in the pictures in a way that obliterates linear, historical time and points instead to a conceptual state. In the fourth age of a man's life the flame is brightest of all and the motto reads Ut Sol ardore virili ("As the sun with manly ardor"). An oak tree is bearing acorns, generating the next cycle in its strength, while a lyre rests against a laurel tree, suggesting that this is the age in which poets bear their richest fruits. It is a day of fullness, but again the verses emphasize transience and passing time: The post Of swift-foot time Hath now at length begun The kalends of our middle stage: The number'd steps that we have gone, do show The number of those steps we are to go: The buds and blossoms of our age Are blown, decay'd, and gone, And all our prime Is lost: And what we boast too much, we have least cause to boast. (Hier. XII, pp. 278-80)

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(In this emblem, we see, the poet has encroached upon the domain of the painter and given us a shaped poem, balanced until the last line and its premonitions of time running out.) In the sixth stage, traditionally called post-maturity or senescence, the shortened candle stands with dimming flame in an autumn landscape. A tree's fruits lie rotting on the ground while Death, again pictured as a skeleton, shakes down the leaves. The verses begin in the manner of Gray's Elegy with people returning home from their labors as the day grows old, and they then go on to describe a season of "cold autumnal dews" and the ills that passing time will bring to a man in this age: falling hair, care, envy, spite (Hier. xiv, pp. 284-86). In the last stage, senility, the candle is a dim stub almost completely burned down into its urn. The landscape is probably late November: there is a dead tree stump in the foreground, a group of ruined buildings in the middle-ground, and the sun setting behind the hills. In no pictorial ground, but standing on either side of the candle, are a kingfisher and the astrological sign of cold, melancholy Saturn, the governor of old age. The same sign is the alchemical symbol for lead, and the emblem's motto is Plumbeus in Terrain ("Like lead, into the earth he falls"). The verses follow such examples of rise and decline as the sun, the candle, a man, and a castle which was once great and strong enough to protect its builders from enemies but now lies in ruins protecting no one (Hier. xv, pp. 287-89). In each emblem, then, time is very much present, but its basic nature of sequence is changed by the emblem method. Time is always moving from past to future in the verses, but in the pictures the sequence is broken as elements are presented in simultaneous spatial pattern. The effect of the emblem as a whole is one of further spatialization, but something much fuller than simply a reduction of motion to stasis. The verses and the picture together create a metaphorical relationship that lifts the emblem out of time into

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a conceptual space that contains both the visual images of the picture and the moving time of the verses. Here the verses and the picture meet in the motto, a mot that mediates between them by naming on a general, conceptual level meanings arising from the basic metaphor that compares the candle to the changing life of man. The emblem method turns out to be a more complex form than Lessing imagined either for painting or for poetry, for temporal form exists in the emblems, but it is always within the spatial pattern set up by image and concept. It was in this sense of caught time, worked out in the emblem books, that the richest possibilities of ut pictura poesis ultimately lay. The sense of an image or picture, the sense of intellectual patterning, and the sense of time caught in space form a complex which lies at the roots of lyric poetry. We have called that complex phanopoeia and we have seen in the emblem tradition a somewhat fuller development of those elements which were found in root form in the riddle. The ways in which this complex works in more sophisticated forms of lyric poetry are the subjects of the following two chapters, but we might note here that the emblem, like the riddle, often turns up in such poetry in its simple form, a case of the root showing above ground. The imagery of much Renaissance and Baroque poetry frequently shows the emblematic union of a concrete picture and an abstract concept, and many of the complex images of Spenser, Sidney, Jonson, and Shakespeare have plainer sisters in the emblem books. A picture of a torch turned upside down and the motto Qui me alit me extinguit ("Who nourishes me, extinguishes me") appears in Whitney's Choice of Emblemes as an emblem for love (p. 183), and so it is used in Shakespeare's Pericles as the device presented by the Fourth Knight (11.ii.32-35). (The similar image in Sonnet 73, however, the dying fire "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by," is less an emblem than a way of knowing that belongs to the riddle root.) Crashaw's penitent

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weeper, whose eyes are two fountains, two "compendious oceans" of tears, used to be regarded as an infamous example of Baroque extravagance, but the same image had appeared earlier with no fuss in Quarles' Emblems as an actual picture of a woman sitting before a fountain with rivers of tears flowing from her eyes: O! that mine Eyes, like Fountains, would begin To stream with Tears proportion'd to my Sin.11 George Herbert especially tended toward emblematic expression in his poetry, and, just as poets write literary riddles with the answer given in the title, many poems in The Temple—"The Church-floore," "The Windows," "The Collar," "The Pulley," "Artillerie"—may be read as emblems with the title taking the place of the picture.12 John Donne's conceits are generally more complex, with more of a sense of paradox and involved thought, than the moralizing images of the emblem books, yet the wreath of hair in "The Funerall" begins, at least, as an emblem for the spinal cord of the spirit. The compasses in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," one of his most famous images, serve as an emblem for constancy. The same emblem, as Rosemary Freeman has shown, appears in George Wither's Collection of Emblemes (1635), also as an emblem for constancy; moreover, the same emblem had been used as a device by the Plantin press, and books published by Plantin, including Whitney's sixteenth-century Choice of Emblemes, had long carried the compass emblem and the motto Lahore et Constantia on their title pages (English Emblem Books, pp. 146-47). After the seventeenth century there was a general turning away in English poetry from the emblem's way of seeing, with its iconographic designs created primarily to be "read" for their meanings, toward more naturalistic and humanistic forms of imagery. Real landscapes and real human figures underlie the pictorial tableaux and allegorical personifications of eighteenth-century poetry, and, though the em-

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blematic image never completely dies out, by the time of the Romantics there are few firm compasses of constancy left in the language of poetry. Instead of the grim skeleton of Death with its long scythe we have Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper," a Highland girl cutting grain in a "Vale profound" and singing "As if her song could have no ending" of "old, unhappy, far-off things, / And battles long ago" or of "Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, / That has been, and may be again." Instead of an autumn landscape dominated by a candle burning down into an urn, with Death shaking the leaves from a tree and with emblematic hourglasses, sundials, ruins, or kingfishers scattered about, we learn about the passing of time in Keats by seeing a natural autumn landscape with human laborers at the end of a harvest and English swallows gathering to depart. But there is of course Blake, whose engraved plates joining visual picture and poetic text can be seen as taking the emblem method, after a long period during which it had declined into mere book illustration, to a final development of its powers. Blake aimed, as one commentator writes, at overcoming through the methods of his art the dualistic view of a world separated into space and time: "his poetry exists to invalidate the idea of objective time, his painting to invalidate the idea of objective space. To state this positively, his poetry affirms the power of the human imagination to create and organize time in its own image, and his painting affirms the centrality of the human body as the structural principle of space." 13 The powers of Blake's imagination reached far beyond those of the emblem writers, and ordering space according to the Human Form Divine was not the emblematists' way of seeing. Yet the fusion of a dual medium into one complete art and the transformation of space and time through that art into a more complex conceptual space marked out in the human imagination had been tried before, and perhaps briefly accomplished i n the small emblem book H i e r o g l y p h i c s of t h e L i f e of M a n .

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A CENTRAL CONCERN of modern poetry and poetics has been to re-explore and redefine the ideas of ut pictura poesis. The effects of phanopoeia in the language of poetry—the sense of an image or picture, the sense of intellectual patterning, and the sense of time caught in space—dominate some of the most interesting poetry of the modern period, and the kinds of things that we have seen happening in basic forms of phanopoeia, the riddle and the emblem, are seen again in the more complex forms of modern poetry. They are, in fact, often formulated as imperatives for that poetry. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are two modern poets who particularly claim our attention here. They continue to be perhaps the most influential voices of modern poetry, and the subjects of active and controversial literary criticism, but they are important to us because they are poets who worked close to the roots. In poem after poem, and again in the critical essays, personal accounts, and provisional manifestos which make up a poet's thoughts on his art, both Pound and Williams show a deep preoccupation with the powers of phanopoeia and with what those powers can do in poetry. In addition, Pound does us a further service by directing us toward Japanese and Chinese poetry as carefully refined, and particularly illuminating, uses of those powers. The forms of phanopoeia in modern poetry involve us to some extent in a poetics of the visual imagination, an area in which there has already been much critical discussion and almost too much of nomenclature and categories, but our own concerns remain simple, limited as they have been all along to seeing and identifying the roots of lyric. The visual emphasis of phanopoeia has been a part of

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modern poetry from its beginnings. For the poetry that we are presently interested in those beginnings are in London in the period 1908-1914, in the new movement that soon came to be called "Imagism." T. E. Hulme was an early member of that movement, and he thought it heralded a new form of classicism in poetry. He anticipated a dry, hard, severely finite form of verse in which the poet would be the counterpart of the new "classical" artist in painting and sculpture—an artist in language carefully working to "get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind." Tlie "great aim" of such poetry, he said, "is accurate, precise and definite description," and its visually precise language "always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process."1 Ezra Pound set forth three principles for the new poet to follow, the first of which was: "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." Pound's famous demonstration of that new poetry was the short poem which, he has already told us, began with a vision of faces in a metro station and the "sudden emotion" he experienced on seeing them: In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.2 Phrases such as "direct treatment of the 'thing' " and "the exact curve of what he sees" emphasize a poetic language based on clear, precise seeing, a power of phanopoeia; for if this power in the language of poetry is associated with the assumption that to know is to have seen, then clear knowing requires first of all that the eye see clearly. But just what is seen, and what is known, in a poem such as "In a Station of the Metro"? Although Hulme called for "accurate, precise and definite description," the poem obviously does not give an accurate description of the scene in the metro station, and the image of petals on a wet,

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black bough must have been seen somewhere else entirely. Pound, in another well-known dictum, said that such a poem does not "describe" anything; it presents. The entire "Metro" poem, in fact, is an example of what he defined as an "Image"—"that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." The language he found to express his experience, Pound said, was a language of "pattern," and rather than a verbal description of the single scene the poem presents a juxtaposition of two images, the faces in a crowd and petals on a bough. What is seen by the poet, and presented by the poem, is not a painter's "view" but a structure of overlapping forms, and it is toward that structure that the visual precision is directed. "The 'one image poem,' " Pound wrote concerning this same poem, "is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another." As for what is known in this poem: "In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective."3 The complete structure, the seen complex of faces and petals, transforms itself and darts inward, and the language of the poem attempts to catch both the precision of that seeing and the sudden emotion of that knowing. Now all this, we notice, is a good account of what happens in a riddle. The full structure of the riddle is also a "complex" in which two objects or actions are seen juxtaposed, and in which, since the two elements are not identical, paradoxes and puzzles arise where one element does not fit the other. In attempting to resolve the paradoxes implicit in the imagery, meanings of both elements expand for us and the riddle becomes a way of knowing. Pound's poem, like a riddle, is not simply a pictorial description but a discovery, a way of seeing that leads to a new way of knowing. The emblem, though a special case of phanopoeia, also follows the same principles: the complete emblem is not simply the visual picture but a juxtaposition of picture, verses, and motto, with the picture only one element of a

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three-part structure. The emblematic juxtaposition of a concrete picture and a moral meaning is not a riddle's or a modern poem's way of seeing and knowing, but we have seen that it too involves complexities of phanopoeia that cannot be resolved simply. The two lines of "In a Station of the Metro" took him more than a year (on and off) to compose, Pound said, and when he finally found a way to write the poem it was with the help of a form from Japanese poetry, the haiku. The model that he used for what he called the "hokku-like sentence" of his finished poem was a haiku attributed to Moritake (1472-1549): A fallen flower Returning to the branch? It was a butterfly.4 For us as well this Japanese poem and others like it are good models for understanding the forms of phanopoeia in the language of modern poetry. As Earl Miner has shown, these short poems from Japan strongly influenced modern poetic theory and practice, first by teaching the early Imagist poets to value a concise style, precise imagery, and the avoidance of didactic moralizing in their poems, and then by demonstrating clearly an important structural principle of poetry, the "form of super-position" which Pound borrowed from haiku and continued to use as a basic method in his own work long after "In a Station of the Metro."5 Hugh Kenner has discussed fully how important these insights have been for Pound's poetry and for modern poetry in general—particularly the realization that certain poetic modes of statement work through structures of juxtaposition, and that "juxtaposed objects render one another intelligible without conceptual interposition."6 Of course French Symbolist poetry and classical Greek lyrics were also strong influences for the Imagists, but haiku seem to show the phanopoeic structures of juxtaposition at their clearest. Since Pound has pointed to haiku as the roots of his own

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form, we will look briefly at a few of these Japanese poems to see what he and other modern poets have seen there. As we discuss the phanopoeic structures in haiku and in modern poems, the reader is asked to tolerate sympathetically the melodrama of the capitalized "Image," which is used to distinguish this verbal "complex" from the usual literary sense of "image," the "single image" or verbal description of a sense impression.7 The Imagist poets read Japanese haiku first in French and then in English translations. We know now that haiku are not "Imagist" poems and that in general these early views of Japanese poetry were somewhat limited. Along with clear, precise imagery, haiku use a full range of ways to charge language with meaning, including versification, diction, literary allusion, ambiguity, and word play. The poetry, moreover, is deeply associated with Eastern philosophical and poetic traditions. But it is the concreteness of the imagery, and the bare structure of the Image, that come across in translations. What those translations show is that a sharply focused Image can stand at the center of a poem, and it can stand there without further explanation or commentary: the Image identifies itself. The coming of night is frequently seen in poetry as a way of knowing about endings, especially when thoughts of man's mortality give a sober coloring to the clouds that gather round the setting sun. A poem by Issa (1763-1827) does not need to tell us that we are seeing something quite different from this as it juxtaposes two visual images, and two contrasting movements, in a moment shortly after the sun has set: The spring day closes, Lingering Where there is water. (Haiku, 11, 38) Seen clearly here is the light that remains high in the sky reflecting in pools of water which stand out against the darker landscape after sunset. What is known is something

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about spring—something involving pools of water left by spring rains and the light lingering in those pools, reflecting from a sky where that light is staying with us a little longer each spring evening. If the day closes, and its waning brings thoughts of endings, this small poem also sees a larger, and contrary, movement—the waxing season of spring—that lingers. The phanopoeic sense of picture is strong in this poetry, but it is not picture poetry. A poem by Taigi (1709-1772) presents, without any visual images, a "super-position" made up of the senses of touch and hearing— Morning cold; The voices of travellers Leaving the inn. (Haiku, iv, viii) —and which nevertheless sees a moment of morning clarity, a fresh start, and perhaps also a cold touch of loneliness and a feeling of being left behind. In a poem by Shoha (?-i77i) the coming of spring is presented through two juxtaposed actions— Spring begins Quietly, From the stork's one pace. (Haiku, 11, 32) —and the brief moment in which one action is seen against another contains a world. Although the stork has traditional associations in Japanese poetry with longevity and the New Year, which began in spring, the Western reader of this English translation probably would not see them. He does however see the stork as it could be seen, let us say, by any farmer or fisherman who throughout the winter had come out each morning and looked on the empty brown grasses of the river shallows. But this morning the stork is back, fishing with slow, deliberate steps in the shallow

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water, and the precisely focused poem somehow manages to contain the immense movement of one season into another season within the microcosm of one quiet pace. The visual clarity of phanopoeia is there in haiku, but picture is not enough. This poetry is not description, and the things it presents are not snapshots of picturesque scenes. As in the riddle, the power of phanopoeia is in these poems directed primarily toward seeing—through the juxtaposition of objects, images, ideas, or anything else—some fundamental structure of overlapping forms. Each poem, moreover, sees and presents more than just one thing set on top of another thing; each poem is a "complex" that contains not one but several levels of juxtaposition. Moritake's haiku juxtaposes a blossom and a butterfly, a falling motion and a rising motion, a dying and a resurrection. Issa's poem juxtaposes the gathering darkness and a gathering of light, a waning day and a waxing season, a closing and a lingering. Taigi brings together a sound of voices and a feeling of cold, the touch of fresh hope and the touch of sad loneliness, a leaving and a remaining. Shoha brings together the small, quiet movement of the stork's one pace and the huge, quiet movement of the world turning toward spring. Pound's "Metro" poem is, we see now, rather than a simple juxtaposition of two things, a similar complex which also involves further levels of juxtaposition. The poem sees faces in a subway crowd set against petals on a wet, black bough, and this composition, Hugh Kenner has suggested, brings with it a rich set of other juxtapositions: the world of machines and the world of growing nature, ghostly apparitions in a dark underworld and life in wet, spring daylight, Persephone and Odysseus and Orpheus on earth and in Hades.8 The same principles are seen at work in other early poems written by Pound as he experimented with the structure of the Image, the "intellectual and emotional complex" presented in an instant of time:

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Pagani's, November 8 Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very beautiful Normande cocotte The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant. Two people, the two components of the poem's Image, intersect in the eyes. Although they appear to be very different types of people, the juxtaposition brought about by their eyes discovers further intersections. With sudden surprise we see that however impulsive and openly carefree the eyes of the Normande cocotte may appear to be, they are subtle, discerning, and disciplined; at the same time, we see that the educated and analytical museum assistant has an impulsive eagerness and love daily renewed for the old prints and drawings in the British Museum. Another Image poem by Pound is "Alba": As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily-of-the-valley She lay beside me in the dawn. The Image of this poem is not simply the description of the leaves, and not the remembered view of the woman at dawn, but again the points where the two come together and cross. They are brought together first of all by the grammar of a simile, "As cool as," which makes explicit a crossing at "cool." Other crossings are made, however, not by grammar but by the structure of the Image. There is a visual crossing in "pale," the pale wet leaves and the woman seen in the colorless dawn light. She was cool and pale like fresh new leaves, or perhaps she was "pallid, chill, and drear" like Madeline's waking vision of Porphyro in the colorless moonlight of "The Eve of St. Agnes"—both possibilities are contained in the Image. Other juxtapositions in the complex presented by this poem come from the courtly love situation implied by the title which, like the titles of Robert Creeley's riddle poems and George Herbert's emblematic poems, is here an integral part of the struc-

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ture. The light that revealed the woman to the eyes of her lover was the dawn light that also signaled that they must separate. Although the love was probably adulterous, the image of the woman is seen together with the image of the fresh leaves, and perhaps the white flowers as well, of lily of the valley. The lines describe only coolness, but the Image presents far richer meanings. As one more example of what phanopoeia's power of seeing illuminates in short Image poems, we have the slightly more involved structure of William Carlos Williams' "El Hombre": It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!9 The visual sense of precisely seen imagery is strong in Williams' poetry, as it is in the haiku and the short poems by Pound, but what is primarily seen in "El Hombre" is again a structure, a juxtaposition of images, actions, and ideas. A star is seen against a sunrise, but the Image of the poem also contains the juxtapositions of something ancient and something new, and of a giving and a not-giving. The sunrise gives light and a new day; the star gives nothing toward that light, but it gives the speaker something that the sunrise cannot give. For a moment, perhaps, the poem seems to contradict its own statement, for the "strange courage" is given to the speaker, we see, not by the image of the star only but by the complex of an ancient star in a new sunrise. But then we see that there is a further level of juxtaposition in the poem as well, one which includes as part of the Image the speaker himself seen as someone who seems to accept what the star is giving and to reject what the sunrise continues to give nevertheless. Among such paradoxes we can turn to ask what is known through this way of seeing. The visual precision in haiku

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and in the short Image poems by Pound and Williams obviously does not consist in nailing down the intellectual and emotional possibilities of the complex. There is something like an uncertainty principle at work here: the more precise the poetic Image, the less we can limit with prose definitions the meanings and emotions involved in it. We said that the riddle ultimately reveals rather than conceals, that through its paradoxes and puzzling contradictions it opens a space for fuller knowing about the things it sees. Similarly, the meanings and emotions of an Image poem are paradoxical ways of knowing held in the structure of the Image. The Pound poems are simple examples, yet like the riddle they open up spaces for fuller knowing— about metro riders underground and petals in the wet light, about a Normande cocotte and a British Museum assistant, about the pale, fresh leaves of lily of the valley and a mistress seen at dawn. Williams' "El Hombre" works in the same way to open up spaces about the sunrise, "el hombre" the star, and "el hombre" the man. The Image discovers, but does not describe, these things. It is a seen structure that, as Pound said, darts inward, a constellation that brings to the reader vision, apprehension, thought. The Image that generates this process must of course be "significant," capable of becoming a sign to the hombre who sees it. Once again haiku clearly show basic forms of this power of phanopoeia and are good models for how it works in modern Image poems: Lying with arms and legs outstretched, How cool,— How lonely! (Issa; Haiku, iv, xxv) A bed on which one can stretch out and be cool is also a cool bed in which one can be lonely. Issa's Image of lying cool and lying lonely sees a paradox which darts inward, a matrix of vision and thought: something about freedom is known. A poem by Buson adds a haiku version to the candle/man root seen earlier in the riddles and emblems:

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Lighting one candle With another candle; An evening of spring.

{Haiku, ii, 55)

In English translation this haiku is in every way a poem of the Image, discovering meaning through an Image which juxtaposes a spring evening with the passing on of the light. There is actually a double juxtaposition here, for we see again a waning day and a waxing season, and set against this we see a candle that has been burning and a fresh candle being lit. At a point of complex intersections is the action of passing on the light, and though the poem does not say that this moment is a way of knowing about the life of man, those ideas are among the meanings that are seen in the space created by this Image. Lying comfortably alone in bed or lighting one candle from another candle is a fairly insignificant act until it is caught and seen in a certain poetic structure. In both poems that structure involves some sense of contradiction and paradox, and these are signs of their riddle roots: a riddle is not simply the "answer" but the process, a way of seeing that creates a space for fuller knowing. Among the historical and philosophical roots of haiku we find the Zen kdan, an extreme form of riddle developed as a teaching device by Zen masters sometime about the eleventh century and later applied systematically in the Rinzai school of Zen by Hakuin (1685-1768). "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Hakuin asked his disciples, and writers on Zen tell us that this sort of question will remain trivial or obscure until it transforms itself, darting inward and teaching the disciple a new way of seeing. A process similar to this seems to be demanded by those haiku whose Images at first seem meaningless or baffling to us—and then suddenly do not. In modern Image poetry this mode of thought is again a sign of phanopoeia and the riddle root. From the Image must come the insight, and explanations of it are

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difficult, for the structure of the Image acts as its own language. Modern poets who have attempted to explain how the language of their poetry works tend to insist on the "anti-intellectual" nature of the Image, and to stress that modern poetry is concerned only with the precisely seen Image and not with ideas: "The image is not an idea" (Pound); "No ideas / but in things" (Williams). But "idea," the pedant will not resist saying, is the Greek second aorist infinitive ISdv ("to see"), and to know is to have seen. The Image is anti-intellectual only when the capacities of the intellect are limited to the logic and syntax of descriptive statements. The insights presented by a riddle, a haiku, or an Image poem are no less a language of ideas, a language structured by its own logic and syntax. "Images in verse," Hulme wrote, "are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language" (Speculations, p. 135), and for Pound the Image was "the word beyond formulated language" (Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 88). Hart Crane wanted the entire poem to be a new word added to the reader's language of thought: "It is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward."10 Such a word, it is clear, is an "idea": something seen and known and named in the poem. "When we name it, life exists," Williams wrote. "The only means [the artist] has to give value to life is to recognise it with the imagination and name it; this is so. To repeat and repeat the thing without naming it is only to dull the sense and results in frustration."11 Thus, in our last example from Japanese haiku, the poet Ryota sees a moment seen often before, but names it anew in the structure of the poem: They spoke no word. The visitor, the host, And the white chrysanthemum. (Haiku, i, 192)

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The configuration in Ryota's Image of a flower which is silent and two people who choose not to speak names a complex of perceptions, experiences, and emotions. It is an "idea," a way of seeing that has darted inward, or, as Hart Crane said, a word "never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward." The Image, like the riddle, the kenning, and the emblem, is thus also a teaching, an active principle that remains with us. After all the helpful work of the New Criticism, Image poems are not, finally, self-contained heterocosms but are utile as well as dolce. True naming is not arbitrary, not a giving of names but the discovery of names, as Ryota sees the significance of one silent moment, knows it, and by naming it with his poem causes it to exist for us centuries after the moment of a guest, a host, and a white chrysanthemum has flickered away. The discovery of names through the paradoxical structures of riddles, and the naming of complex spaces of human experience in the structures of Images, remain forms of phanopoeia, a power of the visual imagination. The same power organizes the structures of emblems, and involves those structures in concepts of ut pictura poesis. The introduction of a strongly pictorial power into a verbal medium seems necessarily to involve, as Jean Hagstrum said, "the reduction of motion to stasis or something suggesting such a reduction." We saw in the emblem books, however, that even poetry which not only seems to be but is sculpture or painting forcing itself into words need not be a still-life, a nature morte. The sense of the kinetic is not lost in the emblem method, but caught and held in the spatial and conceptual patterns of the visual imagination. The temporal dimensions of poetry—movement, progression, change—are still there, but seen in phanopoeic pattern. We next examine two further aspects of this way of organizing the language of poetry, and both show that the

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Image also incorporates time and action by transforming them into complex forms of phanopoeia. The first is the poem of the "moving Image," which concentrates on introducing a sense of the kinetic into the basic Image structure itself. The second, closely related to the emblem method of Quarles' Hieroglyphics, emphasizes the sense of time and action caught in the "timeless moment" of the Image. "The defect of earlier imagist propaganda," Pound, the chief early propagandist, wrote some twenty years later, "was not in misstatement but in incomplete statement. The diluters took the handiest and easiest meaning, and thought only of the STATIONARY image. If you can't think of imagism or phanopoeia as including the moving image, you will have to make a really needless division of fixed image and praxis or action."12 The fine points of the various statements by poets on the "moving Image"—and on what Pound also called the "Vortex," and Charles Olson later called the "space-tensions" and "field" of the poem— belong to literary history. In general, those statements emphasize dynamic forces in the Image; the Image continues to be a spatial conception, but seen as a spatial pattern of energies and movements that is in some way analogous to the "vortex" of fluid mechanics or to an electromagnetic "field." As soon as objects (or images, or actions, or ideas) are placed side by side a relationship has been created, and forces are set up among the juxtaposed elements. We see throughout modern poetry that one basic assumption of the "moving Image" is that the juxtaposition of various elements in the structure of the Image generates forces in just this way. Pound's short Image poems are again primary forms, juxtapositions which set up tensions and energies between petals in wet sunlight and human faces out of the sun, between a very beautiful French woman and a very learned British Museum assistant, between dawn light that allows a lover to see his mistress and dawn light that sends her back to her husband.

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The energy of relations, however, is not necessarily motion, at least not in poetry or in painting and sculpture. In Pound's "Return" we see a somewhat different way of catching time and action within a phanopoeic form: See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe," Inviolable. Gods of the wing d shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air! Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men! "It exists primarily in and for itself," Hugh Kenner wrote of this poem, "a lovely object, a fragment of Greek frieze, the peripeteia of impalpable huntsmen too firmly-drawn to be wraiths in a dream. . . The poem is not, however, a description of a work of art, and not a simple interpretation of ut pictura poesis. There is a rhetoric: a visual imperative ("See . . ."), a speaker and audience implied, and thus a dramatic situation implied as well. Furthermore, images from the past occur in the poem ("These were . . ."), giving, at first, the illusion of narration. Yet beneath

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these are the basic principles of the Image, with the dramatic situation and the illusion of narration caught up in the forms of phanopoeia. The Image is created, as we now expect, through a set of juxtapositions, a structure of images, actions, and states of experience seen together. The turning back (Pound is using the word "return" primarily, though not exclusively, with this old meaning) of the troubled hunters is seen against the hesitation and reversal of the snow, "souls of blood" against "pallid the leash-men," and an earlier state of confident inviolability (" 'Wing'd-withAwe,' " "Gods of the winged shoe") against the present state of uncertainty and fear ("the slow feet, / The trouble in the pace and the uncertain / Wavering!"). The images from the past are brought into the pattern of the present and the initial impression of narration is dissolved into that pattern; the final effect is in fact one of dynamic stasis. Except for the vaguely classical associations of the rhythms and diction, Pound gives no provenance for this poem, but cuts it free from geography and history. Who these figures are and what they have seen are never identified, and we are left with a structure, a "return," or turning back, from inviolability into defeat. Peripeteia, as Kenner uses the word, is movement caught at the still point of a turn. In "The Return" the movement from confident advance to troubled retreat is defined by the structure at that still point, a particular structure of a particular kind of unexpected change. An Image in which the structure defines a peripeteia, then, is a further form of the "moving Image," and a further way in which phanopoeia catches up time and action. Without that structure the poem would be only a description of a work of art, and, like the scene Keats saw on the Grecian urn, a cold pastoral, a moment frozen out of time into eternity. Phanopoeia can of course do that as well. Curiously, the image of the snow caught in a turn of the wind is a key element of what makes this poem something different. As another peripeteia seen behind the turning back of the hunters, it tells us something about the hesitating, murmuring way they turn back, and something

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about the nature of whatever force it was that has turned them back. A third version of the "moving Image" is seen in two poems by William Carlos Williams. The first poem, in fact, is an explicit lesson on the form of Image that characterizes Williams' poetry, as well as a lesson on introducing a sense of the kinetic into that form: To a Solitary Disciple Rather notice, mon cher, that the moon is tilted above the point of the steeple than that its color is shell-pink. Rather observe that it is early morning than that the sky is smooth as a turquoise. Rather grasp how the dark converging lines of the steeple meet at the pinnacle— perceive how its little ornament tries to stop them— See how it fails! See how the converging lines of the hexagonal spire escape upward— receding, dividing! —sepals that guard and contain the flower!

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Observe how motionless the eaten moon lies in the protecting lines. It is true: in the light colors of morning brown-stone and slate shine orange and dark blue. But observe the oppressive weight of the squat edifice! Observe the jasmine lightness of the moon. (Collected Earlier Poems, pp. 167-68) In this poem William Carlos Williams gives us both a poetics of the Image and a demonstration of that poetics. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a physics of the Image, for it is concerned less with the juxtaposed elements in the Image than with the alignment of forces generated by that juxtaposition. The "solitary disciple" (this is not going to be a popular way of writing poetry) is told first of all to practice an increasing clarity of vision: "notice," then "observe," then "grasp." The objective, however, is not precise description of the moon, the church steeple, or the sky, but a perception of relationships. What is to be seen is not the color of the moon but its position "tilted above / the point of the steeple," not the turquoise smoothness of the sky but the time of day seen in that sky, not the fact that we have a church steeple with a cross on top but the forces of the lines of the steeple as they break through the obstructing mass of the "little ornament." For now, at least, we are no more interested in thoughts about the soaring or obstructing characteristics of the Christian

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religion than we are in the secondary qualities of color and surface in the objects we are observing. Rather, see the basic qualities of the Image: "notice" "observe" "grasp"

> POSITION » TIME » FORCE/MOTION

( x >y> z ) (0

(F=ma)

Along the way the poet shows, perhaps for the disciple's benefit, that he can do the image of precise description, if he wants to, and do it very well: It is true: in the light colors of morning brown-stone and slate shine orange and dark blue. Also, his perception of the relationship of the moon and the steeple has incidentally brought him a metaphor, an additional juxtaposition in his Image: the moon lies in the projected lines of the steeple like a flower in its sepals. He will use this—another poet searched a long time for the image of petals on a wet, black bough—but this poet finds these less interesting than the basics of position, time, and force. Although we have time to observe the moon lying motionless in the protecting lines of the steeple, forces are still in motion and the Image does not remain at rest. We have observed the time: since the moon is still up in the early morning, it is in its waning phase, having been "eaten" night by night. At this point in the poem we might expect it to set, to fall through the protecting lines to the horizon. But it does not; they hold. Then in the last stanza the poet shows the disciple that in addition to spatial position and time another fundamental aspect of nature, gravity, is also seen in the Image, and he finishes the Image by setting it in motion. The "squat edifice" (a church, but, like the

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cross, that is not important here) pushes down in this stanza with "oppressive weight." There is however a contrary force in the "jasmine lightness" of the moon. The phrase is drawn in part from the flower/moon image noticed earlier, but "jasmine" is also a scent, the perfume as well as the flower, and the Image is completed as the moon begins to move away in an unexpected direction, evaporating into the sky as the morning grows brighter around it. ("Poetry," Pound once wrote, "is in some odd way concerned with the specific gravity of things, with their nature.")14 In this poem Williams teaches his lone disciple first how to resolve appearances into structured forces and then how to let the resolution of those forces set the Image in motion. Although they do it in different ways, Pound and Williams both introduce a sense of the kinetic into the structure of the Image. It is the structure that is essential: for both poets it is seeing the forces in the structure of the Image that leads to seeing the movements those forces define. This is the lesson of "To a Solitary Disciple," and the lesson is applied in "Spring Strains": In a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds crowded erect with desire against the sky tense blue-grey twigs slenderly anchoring them down, drawing them in— two blue-grey birds chasing a third struggle in circles, angles, swift convergings to a point that bursts instantly! Vibrant bowing limbs pull downward, sucking in the sky that bulges from behind, plastering itself against them in packed rifts, rock blue and dirty orange! Early buds are straining skyward toward the "rock blue /

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and dirty orange" clouds of a New Jersey spring. But there is a root-force pulling downward, anchoring the buds through the twigs, holding the birds in swift orbits about the tree, and through the bowing limbs sucking down the cloudy sky itself. The circling orbits and the downward pull through all the elements of the tree are the basis of the Image here, not the painterly blue-grey of the buds or the blues and oranges of the sky. Against the actions of this downward root-force is set a contrary force: But— (Hold hard, rigid jointed trees!) the blinding and red-edged sun-blur— creeping energy, concentrated counterforce—welds sky, buds, trees, rivets them in one puckering hold! Sticks through! Pulls the whole counter-pulling mass upward, to the right locks even the opaque, not yet defined ground in a terrific drag that is loosening the very tap-roots! As we move through this section the poem becomes almost too explicit in discussing its own structure. The "creeping energy, concentrated / counterforce" grows stronger and stronger as the spring sun breaks through the clouds. The light is a visible manifestation of the force spreading over the sky and landscape and pulling against the root-force of the first section. The resolution of these forces comes in the last stanza, not in any interpretive statement about the irresistible strength of the waxing spring sun but in the movement of the Image: On a tissue-thin monotone of blue-grey buds two blue-grey birds, chasing a third, at full cry! Now they are flung outward and up—disappearing suddenly! (Collected Earlier Poems, p. 159)

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The eye returns to the first section of the poem, but the contained forces have suddenly become exploding forces. The circling orbits of the birds are broken and they are thrown outward and upward, flung out of the poem. The movement is powerful and violent compared to the subtle, unexpected way the moon began to move out of "To a Solitary Disciple," but the principles of the "moving Image," we see, are the same in both poems. It is interesting to notice that in general the Image of Williams appears more frankly mimetic than does Pound's. That is, in the Williams poems the Image structure is seen in nature itself, whereas Pound's poems seem to bring together in the Image elements that were not seen together in nature. But there is really no essential difference; Pound's poems see things that should be seen together, and Williams' poems see an Image in things that are together. Both poets present structures of the visual imagination—neither a description of nature nor an imaginary nature, but a seeing into nature. A work of the imagination, Williams wrote, is "not 'like' anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth—at least one small part of them" (Spring & All, p. 53). In "To a Solitary Disciple" and in "Spring Strains" Williams does not describe natural motion so much as he sets the Image in motion—though it would probably be more accurate to say of both poets, since it is done through the forms of phanopoeia, that they set the motion in Image. The second aspect of incorporating time and action in the structure of the Image is less a different method from the first than a difference of emphasis. The "timeless moment" is an effect attendant on the "moving Image," and it emphasizes that time, as well as movement, is set in Image. It is the effect Coleridge had in mind when he spoke of poetic imagery "reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant," an effect he felt in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis "when, with more than the power of the paint-

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er, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness" (Biog. Lit., n, 16, 18). It seems to be that "precise instant," in Pound's phrase, in which the Image transforms itself by darting inward. We can distinguish two ways, it seems to me, in which poetry of the Image works toward that sense of timelessness. The first way, well described by Coleridge as reducing succession to an instant, is a kind of differential calculus in the language of poetry through which all the meaning of a wide arc of time is caught in the instantaneous Image. This is the way of Shoha's haiku which catches all the movement of the world's turning into spring within the moment of the stork's one pace, the way of Buson's "candle" haiku which catches another large meaning of spring within the moment of passing on the light, and the way of Ryota's poem which catches the long development of a guest-host relationship in that silent moment of the white chrysanthemum. It is also the way of Pound's sudden discovery in "Pagani's, November 8," the way of the peripeteia in "The Return," and, at a further stage of complexity, the way of Williams in "Bird": Bird with outstretched wings poised inviolate unreaching yet reaching your image this November planes to a stop miraculously fixed in my arresting eyes15 The poem is both an Image poem and a commentary on a poetics of the Image; it is also, we soon notice, a riddle poem full of paradoxes and syntactical puns. The subject of the poem is the timeless moment of the Image, or more precisely, the action of the timeless moment of the Image,

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or even more precisely, seeing the action of the timeless moment of the Image. Most of the poem is a description of how the whole process takes place. Two words, however —"this November"—provide the necessary juxtapositions which transform the poem from a simple, though precise, description of an experience into a poem of the Image. It is not much, but exactly enough. In a bad month for birds, when many of them have already left town, a bird in November—which means November trees, with a November sky behind them—stands poised, caught and balanced at a point just before motion. This November—not another November; yet the word remembers and acknowledges that there have been and will be other Novembers. But for the instant the bird is poised "inviolate"; not touched; unreaching. Yet reaching, for it is November. Those spaces of time, this November and other Novembers, are both excluded from and included in the still, tense instant of the Image. The speaker sees then: the bird's image "planes / to a stop"; he also sees: "this November / planes / to a stop"; and he finally sees: "your image this November / planes / to a stop"—action and time, set in complex Image, "miraculously [no, it's just the ol' power of phanopoeia] fixed." The other way to a sense of timelessness in poetry of the Image involves a much more explicit use of time past and time future. It is the spatialization of time which I suggested was one of the significant developments of phanopoeia in the emblem books. I n Quarles' Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man the verses emphasizing the passage of time were seen to be part of a larger pattern in which time, rather than flowing, was caught up in spatial form. The transformation of time into picture and space is seen in the Image as well. The whole idea of the Image is visual structure, which implies simultaneity and spatial pattern. If the inherent tendency of phanopoeia to reduce motion to stasis is often a danger for the language of poetry, the ways in which the Image can contain time within space, can circum-

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scribe movement, flow, and energy, are also particular beauties of this poetic power. The literal, pictorial sense of "space" is important to this power of the Image, though finally less important than what happens in the spaces of the visual imagination. Even in the emblem books, where there is literal, pictorial space in the plates, what was most interesting and revealing to us was the transformation of visual space into the "ideas" of conceptual space. In Quarles' Hieroglyphics, and again in the poems of William Carlos Williams, the forms of phanopoeia were particularly rich because they were handled both thematically and technically, with the poetics of the poem a way of expressing what the poem is about. We look next at three poems which do the same thing with the sense of time caught in space. The first two are translations of Chinese poems, through which we approach a poem by Yeats and our final example of the powers of phanopoeia in the language of poetry. In this translation of "A Brief but Happy Meeting with My Brother-in-Law" by Li Yi (d. 827), we see long periods of time caught in an essentially spatial picture: After these ten torn wearisome years We have met again. We were both so changed That hearing first your surname, I thought you a stranger— Then hearing your given name, I remembered your young face. . . . All that has happened with the tides We have told and told till the evening bell. . . . Tomorrow you journey to Yo-chou, Leaving autumn between us, peak after peak. 16 The visual transformation, the conversion of time (and time of year) into spatial pattern, is primary here, though the further transformation of visual space into conceptual space is also present, and important, in the poem. The narrative of the momentary meeting and recognition first disappears into time—into the closing day, the cycles of the

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tides and seasons, and the long "wearisome years." In the last line, however, where autumn is seen stretched across peak after peak, time disappears in turn into the matrix of space and picture. Time swept up into the picture of distant peaks becomes a necessary part of the recognition in the poem, and of the significance of Li Yi's brief meeting with his relative. This sort of transformation is easily done, but it is a basic method by which the power of phanopoeia catches time in space. The process is made more complex by the method of Li Shang-yin (813-858) in "The Inlaid Harp": I wonder why my inlaid harp has fifty strings, Each with its flower-like fret an interval of youth. . . . The sage Chuang-tzu is day-dreaming, bewitched by butterflies, The spring-heart of Emperor Wang is crying in a cuckoo, Mermen weep their pearly tears down a moon-green sea, Blue fields are breathing their jade to the sun . . . And a moment that ought to have lasted for ever Has come and gone before I knew. Whatever biographical occasions Chinese commentators have seen in this poem, in English translation the subject of the poem is nothing other than the timeless moment of the Image. The poet first of all transforms time into space in the manner of Li Yi by seeing the fifty years of his life extending across the fifty-stringed "harp" (se), each string with its movable tuning-bridge becoming "an interval of youth." Beyond this, however, are the important allusions which lie at the heart of the poem's method. The Taoist sage Chuang-tzu once dreamed that he was a butterfly, and then he awoke as a man again. His lines on this experience usually hover in the background when butterflies appear in Chinese and Japanese poetry: Am I a man who dreamed of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming myself to be a man?

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The next allusion refers to the legendary Emperor Wang of Shu, who died of shame after a love affair with his prime minister's wife; his spirit entered a cuckoo, where it continued to cry out longingly in the spring song of the bird. There are various interpretations of the next line in the Chinese, but this translation associates it with a legend that the tears of mermen (or mermaids) become pearls. Finally, the "Blue fields" are the jade fields of Indigo Mountain, which are said to give off their colors under the sun's heat in a mist like evaporating dew.17 The importance of these allusions lies in what they do to time, in the way they set up intersections of the temporal with the timeless. The allusions reach back not to the linear time of history but to the timelessness of myth and fable, to archaic models which can be integrated into the present moment and lift that moment out of the linear flow of historical time into timelessness. There is a state of mind, a space in the imagination, in which "It has happened before, and it is happening again" is seen transformed into simply "It is happening"—not again, but still. In Li Shangyin's poem each allusion recalls a metamorphosis, a transformation from one state to another, just as the speaker in the poem is momentarily transformed from one state of consciousness to another. His experience, then, is caught in timeless models of transformation. In the ordinary time of human experience the moment "that ought to have lasted for ever" is soon gone, yet, by integration with the allusions, the poetry has fixed that moment so that it does last forever, lifted from the present into mythic timelessness. As Charles Olson said of Melville, the Chinese poet has reached "back through time until he got history pushed back so far he turned time into space." 18 To say that the moment has been "spatialized" may not be quite accurate, at least not in the simpler visual sense of Li Yi's poem. What has happened, however, here as in the emblem books, is that a process that begins with visual space has moved finally inward to open conceptual spaces in the imagination.

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The inlaid harp is a convenient emblem of this process. First seen as a spatial image of the speaker's years, it is also the agent that begins the transformation of his vision, and after the vision is broken it remains before him as a visual reminder of a certain way of seeing. The wind-harp of the Romantic poets was also an emblem for the transforming power of the imagination: it sang the random moods of nature's winds, and when the winds died the song died as well. Li Shang-yin's harp, however, is something quite different. It is not even played; instead, it is seen—an elaborately wrought Chinese instrument seen as the poem's powers of transforming a brief vision into the timeless space of art. Yeats was interested in all this, as we see in a final complication of the roots of phanopoeia: The Magi Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering side by side, And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied, The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. The poem begins, as the Chinese poem does, with a sudden vision, a momentary transformation of the speaker's normal way of seeing. Also as in the Chinese poem, the timelessness of mythic models is integrated into the present moment of the sudden vision. Li Shang-yin's timeless moment which visits him and then departs is set in a perspective of legends of other transformations; each one comes unsought, and each one brings with it, it seems, a touch of melancholy. Yeats, however, who very much sought his epiphanic moments, sees his vision set not against timeless models of unsought metamorphoses but against the model of a sacred

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quest. The vision is seen in the blue spaces of the sky, but the transformation into timelessness, the poet knows, happens inwardly, "in the mind's eye," in spaces created in the imagination. In those spaces the moment—and the quest of the Magi—happens "Now as at all times": like the opening formula of Old Testament narratives, "In those days, at this time," it is a formula that suggests the ever-present nature of mythic acts. For Yeats, however, eternity often had a leak in the bottom, and in "The Magi" he has been more complex than Li Shang-yin by juxtaposing the temporal with the timeless within the mythic model itself. The "mythic model," that is, is itself an Image, and it is an Image that contains time and action. In the second line of the poem the Magi appear in "stiff, painted clothes," stylized figures as if from a Byzantine icon. The stylization and the Byzantine associations, along with the "helms of silver," are Yeats's way of reaching into the timelessness of sacred art. But set against this is the image of the Magi "With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones." These stones come not from an eternal Byzantium of gold and silver artifice but from a real city in which time is constantly eroding the present into the past. The two images, the Byzantine figures and the rain-beaten stones, intersect in an Image which includes both trance and transience. The mythic model itself is not quite able to hold time caught in space, and thus it is a good model for the vision of a poet who was always uncertain about his ability to hold time in the artifices of the imagination. In "The Magi" the quest is ever-present but it is also ever-unsatisfied and ever-transforming. Looking back, the goal of the quest is the "bestial floor" of Christ's manger; looking ahead, it is likely to be the lair of some rough beast that has slouched into Bethlehem to be born. Both are seen at once, I think, and both Yeats and Li Shang-yin apprehend in these poems Eliot's sense that "all time is eternally present." Yeats, however, though he caught time past and time future in the blue depth of his vision, also

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saw in that vision the fragility and vulnerability built into such ways of seeing. In both Yeats and Li Shang-yin time and action caught and held in the spaces of the imagination is a much fuller process than simply stopping time and reducing motion to stasis. Lessing wrote that the single moment is the domain of the painter, whereas in poetry the individual moment is lost in the effect of the continuous whole (Laocoon, p. 21). Here, however, is a power in poetry that tries to hold on to the individual moment. "When we name it, life exists" —in a space created in the imagination. Yeats and Li Shang-yin named their momentary experiences by integrating into them timeless models, and by thus naming them made them exist. Providing models for temporal human experience is a function that myth has always served, and the power of phanopoeia in the language of poetry gives us a technical explanation, rather than the more common metaphysical or sociological explanations, for the attraction of modern poets to myths, especially to myths of metamorphosis. Such a distinction, however, ultimately does not satisfy, for we also recognize the truth of Sister M. Bernetta Quinn's explanation of attempts on the part of poets such as Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and even Williams to catch the transience of historical moments in the net of mythic metamorphoses: metamorphosis, she writes, is "one resolution of the question of transience, since in the cyclic character of the universe, 'All things doo chaunge. But nothing sure dooth perish.' (Golding's Ovid.) Ezra Pound, particularly, has stressed this apparent immortality which the absolute confers upon beauty, drawn forth time and time again in fresh media. Such a thesis is perhaps as close as writers like Pound come to the supernatural, this insistence upon perfection waiting and longing to break through the fa9ade of the quotidian." 19 I have suggested two ways by which the Image works toward a sense of timelessness and a space for fuller knowing: the differential calculus of haiku, Pound's short Image

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poems, and Williams' "Bird," and the (may Blake forgive us) integral calculus of Yeats and Li Shang-yin. Both ways finally involve metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is a juxtaposition of two forms of the same thing; man into beast or man into god still carries, in the old myths, his human identity into the new form. We began with Moritake's Image of a falling blossom and a rising butterfly and with Pound's Image of subway riders and petals. These short poems can be seen as Images that catch metamorphosis at a crucial point. Earl Miner has written of Moritake's poem that in a sense the poet did see the fallen blossom return to the bough: "He has witnessed one of nature's metamorphoses; the flowers fell, and arose, so to speak, in a new incarnation. Beauty of one kind passes by changing into beauty of another form."20 And Hugh Kenner, on the "timeless moment" which Pound labored for more than a year to catch in an Image: "The brevity of Imagist notation seized phenomena just on the point of mutating, as in the most famous example an apparition of faces turns into petals. Misrepresented as a poetic of stasis, it had been a poetic of darting change . . ." (The Pound Era, p. 367). It was Wallace Stevens who, in The Necessary Angel, was unsure whether to call this power in the poet's language metaphor or metamorphosis. Poetry, one poet has written recently, "can make-thingspresent by naming them."21 I take this in two senses. One sense has to do with the "calling" of names, and the calling of things or of powers in things from there to here or from here to there. This sort of naming is the subject of chapter six. In the other sense, naming makes things present by bringing time and action into the present tense of the Image, and that has been the subject of this chapter. It is seen in the energies of Pound's precise juxtapositions, in Williams' resolution of forces into motion, in time caught through the differential calculus of the instantaneous Image and through the integral calculus of myth and metamor-

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phosis. Naming in this sense is first of all a seeing, but a seeing that is done with more than the eye. If we say instead, as Pound does, that it is done with "the visual imagination" we begin to recognize, or to acknowledge, that seeing is a creative and not a passive act. It is not simply recording impressions, but creating and structuring complex spaces in the imagination. The kind of seeing we are interested in is a way of knowing. In the riddle, the emblem, and the Image, the power to catch and hold time and action in the spaces of the imagination is essential to the act of naming, for time, process, and movement are essential characteristics of most things worth knowing. Phanopoeia's way of seeing them, of knowing them, and of naming them in a poem is to contain them in the active patterns of spatial and conceptual form. Naming is of course an act of language, and phanopoeia a way of charging language with meaning. For phanopoeia, names are the consequences of things, but not the thing itself; the poet's language intervenes. The riddle, in folklore and in sophisticated poetry, is a naming, a seeing of the unknown ("aging man") in terms of the known ("autumn tree"). But it is not an equation: the unknown does not completely fit into the known, and rather than simply substituting one word for another the poet finds a naming that opens a space in which "autumn tree," "aging man," the attractions of the similarities and the tensions of the differences, are all part of a further definition of the name "man." The emblematists tried to present those spaces of the imagination with the visual spaces of their engraved plates and woodcuts, but in the end the plates became only one component of the language of the emblem method. In Quarles' Hieroglyphics the emblem method is a threepart juxtaposition of the visual plate, the verses, and the motto. Again a space is created in which the unknown ("life of man") is seen in terms of the known ("burning candle"), a space that contains the movements and paradoxes of both the "fit" and the "non-fit." In the Image as

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well a complex and dynamic structure of images, emotions, paradoxes, forces, and movements is seen and known and named. For convenience we may at times designate that space with a familiar word ("spring," "loneliness," "freedom," "friendship," "courage," "defeat," "rebirth"), but when we do so we have a name emptied of the active power of naming. Phanopoeia, then, is a power in language for accurate naming, and the poet's job is to make present to the reader's imagination all the visual precisions, the paradoxical structures, and the complex, "caught-time" spaces that an accurate naming must include. Hoc opus, hie labor est. Perhaps it has been that labor which has led poets to dream of finding what they now must make: a language that reveals rather than conceals the right names for things, a language that is itself charged from the roots up with the powers of phanopoeia.

V. IDEOGRAM

Here I lay a spot of red paint down on my canvas. Next I choose a green which I dot near it. The red is immediately changed, and so is the green. In contrast to the green the red has taken fire, and the green now glows inwardly like an emerald. The reaction is mutual. . . . —Ernest Fenollosa, "The Logic of Art" (1906)

IN JULY OF 1878 Ernest Fenollosa, a young New Englander from Salem, sailed from America to take up a teaching position in Japan. Born in 1853, the year Perry had pried open Japanese ports for American trade, Fenollosa had studied philosophy at Harvard (Class of '74), had remained there for two years following his graduation as a resident fellow in philosophy, had then drifted into divinity school for a while, and had just spent the previous year studying painting and drawing. Japan in 1878 was modernizing itself along Western lines, and Fenollosa was offered the first chair of philosophy at the new Tokyo University. He did teach Western philosophy when he arrived in Japan, but he also discovered there an artistic tradition so rich and, he felt, so superior to the Western art of the nineteenth century that he turned his abilities to the study and preservation of traditional Japanese art. During later extended stays in Japan Fenollosa became interested in translating Japanese and Chinese literature, and in the midst of many other projects he began to make notes on the Japanese No plays and on Chinese poetry and poetics. He died suddenly on a visit to London in 1908, however, and that work was never finished.1

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From the many manuscripts and notes that Fenollosa left, his widow, Mary Fenollosa, completed his major work, the two-volume Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, which was published in London in 1912. A year later she turned over to Ezra Pound her husband's manuscripts on Oriental poetry and drama. Working from these manuscripts, Pound turned the translations of Chinese poetry into Cathay (1915), and the translations of Japanese No drama into 'Noh'—or, Accomplishment (1916). After some difficulty in finding a publisher, he placed Fenollosa's speculations on poetics in The Little Review in 1919, and a year later he included them in his book Instigations of Ezra Pound. They appeared under the title Fenollosa had given them as a set of lecture notes, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. For Pound, Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written character was a revelation; it seemed to confirm and to justify his theories of the poetic Image, and it also led him to the "ideogrammic method" of The Cantos. For us, Fenollosa's essay is the culmination and conclusion of our discussion of phanopoeia in the language of lyric poetry. Fenollosa saw preserved in the Chinese character all the powers of phanopoeia that we have been seeking out. The character has a visual basis. It works with juxtapositions that unite seeing and knowing at the rock-bottom level of the word. It encompasses time and action, forces and movements, within an essentially spatial form. It is a naming. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry is one of the high points of modern poetics, though this opinion is far from unanimous. When the aim of the essay is misunderstood it can appear to be a fanciful and incompetent work on Chinese linguistics. When the aim of the essay is understood it can still generate suspicion or worse in literary critics. Since the dust of controversy is still settling, I propose that we step carefully up to this small book, first by examining briefly what the ideogram is and how it works in the Chinese written language. Then we will look at

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what it meant to Pound, for it has been his views that have most, strongly influenced the composition of modern poems and exercised the discussions of modern poetics. Pound, however, is not our main concern, and we will finally take up Fenollosa's essay itself. We begin, then, with the ideogram in Chinese, and some general observations which, though they need many qualifications and exceptions, seem to be more or less true. The first qualification is that they are more true of the literary language of classical Chinese poetry than of the colloquial Chinese languages spoken today.2 A basic fact of the Chinese written character, and one that immediately engages our ideas of phanopoeia, is that unlike the fundamentally phonetic alphabets of Western languages the character represents a meaning rather than a sound. Classical Chinese is a dead language, the sounds of which can be reconstructed only through elaborate linguistic techniques, yet Chinese poetry from that period can still be read, even without any idea of its sound. It did sound, of course, and it possessed a fully developed system of versification built on the music of tone, syllable-count, and rhyme. But while the sounds of spoken Chinese changed with the passing centuries, and much of the original music of the poetry was lost, the meaning associated with a written character remained relatively constant. This is an advantage of character-writing that remains in Chinese up to the present day: although a man from Peking would have considerable difficulty in speaking to a man from Canton, they could "read" each other perfectly. Their spoken words for the concept of loyalty, for example, might be entirely different, but they would both represent it in writing with the same character. Every Chinese character, in theory at least, presents a meaning visually rather than phonetically, and, still speaking generally, one character represents one word. Speaking more strictly, a character corresponds to a syllable, and compounds—two-syllable words represented by two characters—do occur. But the language of the classical po-

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etry is generally monosyllabic, with a five-character line representing a line of five monosyllabic words. Thus it is the visual form of the Chinese character that is important, rather than the sound of the word represented by the character. Visual form, however, is not the same thing as "picture," for Chinese characters are not pictograms resembling the objects and concepts they represent. While this may be true historically of the most basic words in the written language, which began as a type of hiero glyphic picture-writing, it is not, Bernhard Karlgren observed, a technique that could have taken the language very far (The Chinese Language, p. 10). This became a particularly troublesome point between Sinologists and Pound, who, because he was mainly interested in the ideogram, could give the impression that he thought every character was an ideogram and every ideogram was made up of a combination of pictorial elements. Traditional Chinese etymology is more precise, giving six principles, the "Six Scripts," which underlie the structure of the characters. Four of the principles have to do with the formation of characters, and it is to these we look to understand how a character presents a meaning. The first principle of character formation was "Imitating the Form," the creation of simple pictograms which at first were attempts to picture a meaning. Thus one of the modern characters for "man" a is a stylization of an early picture of a man walking on his two legs, and it is still possible to see in the modern character for "tree" *- a tree trunk with its spreading branches. The second principle, "Pointing at the Thing," created simple ideograms to represent abstract concepts. A line across the top of the "tree" character gave the character for "tree-top" , which then took on the meanings of "tip" or "end," applied to anything. Putting the line at the bottom of the "tree" character, pointing to the root of the tree, produced the character for "basis," "origin," or "source" φ. . The third principle, "Understanding the Meaning," combined two or more sim-

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pie characters into a new character, a composite ideogram, to make a new meaning. Placing the character for "pig" under the character for "roof" produced the character for "house," "home," "family" . It was this method of character formation that most excited Pound, for its juxtaposition of two concrete images to create a new meaning seemed to him to be the essence of the Image. The composite ideogram was still too limited for a complete written language, however, and a majority of the characters in Chinese are derived from a fourth principle, "Harmonizing the Sound," or the creation of a composite phonogram. This method was a step toward phonetic representation of the language, for it took a character which had some relationship with the meaning of the new word and combined it with the character for a word which at that time sounded the same as the new word. The component related to the meaning is usually called the signific, or radical, and the component related to the sound is called the phonetic. Thus the character for "to beat" combined the radical for "hand" with the phonetic taken from the character for "mouth" ο , both "to beat" and "mouth" being pronounced *k'u at the time of the forma tion of the character. The resulting compound showed that the new word involved something done with the hand, while it sounded like *k'u, the word for "mouth." This method, Karlgren wrote, was well suited to the Chinese language, which, being so largely monosyllabic, contained many homophones: By combining already existing graphs in pairs, one of which functioned as phonetic and the other as signific, new signs could be devised practically without limit. There was a framework, a stock of simple graphs, which, combined in pairs according to this principle, could easily and quickly denote any other word which in itself would be difficult to depict. In rapid sequence hundreds and thousands of such half-

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ideographic, half-phonetic compounds were created, and in fact nine tenths of all Chinese characters are constructed according to this principle. (p. 13) Since it is difficult to spend a day, much less years, in contact with Chinese characters without realizing that a large number of the characters contain a phonetic element, it is simply not reasonable to suppose that either Pound or Fenollosa was unaware of the composite phonogram. Yet the presence of what was originally a phonetic sign in many characters clearly means that those characters cannot be traced back to a juxtaposition of two images; they go back to the combining of an image and a sound.3 Before we take up Pound's and Fenollosa's ways of seeing the Chinese character, however, we must look briefly at how the characters are joined to present the larger meanings of a phrase, a sentence, or a line of poetry. When Pound, following Fenollosa's notes, turned to Chinese poetry he found a poetic language which seemed to embody his principles of juxtaposition far more fundamentally than the English, Proven9al, Latin, Greek, or other Western languages with which he had been working. James Liu shows that a line from a poem by Wei Chuang (836?910), which would have to be expressed in English as "Like frost or frozen snow her white wrists shine," stands in the Chinese as a five-character line which, translated literally, reads simply "Bright wrist frozen frost snow" (The Art of Chinese Poetry, p. 31). The basically monosyllabic nature of literary Chinese excludes inflections that would designate the tense of verbs or the number and case of nouns. Also, connective verbs and personal pronouns are often dropped. As a result, the grammar of a line is implicitly contained in word-order patterns or in function words, not explicitly mapped with declensions and conjunctions. Hsieh Wen Tung is clearer about all this: the absence of tenses, of personal pronouns and connectives, is relative, and such relative absence does not

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imply a lack of grammar. Chinese is an uninflected language and its grammar contextual rather than explicit. The word being an integral character rather than an alphabetical group, it cannot carry suffixes or prefixes to indicate its mutations in function. In English red as an adjective and as a noun remains the same, but as a verb it is to redden; as gerund and present participle reddening, as past participle reddened; in Chinese hung would have to stand for them all. Its function would be determined by its position in the sentence, its significance defined by the context. Similarly, tenses would have to be indicated by particles before the verb or at the end of the sentence; or, as more generally, and in poetry especially, by the use of adverbs of time.4 Chinese critics are not above giving us some speculations of their own about the nature of their written language as a medium for poetry. The lack of precise indications of verb tense, Hsieh Wen Tung suggests, poses no obstacle to lyric poetry, for exact time relationships are not so important in lyric as they might be in narrative or dramatic poetry: "For the purposes of exposition—or of non-narrative and non-dramatic poetry—distinctions between the past, present and future kept in any way will suffice. Where they are not needed the tense-inflections are better absent, for their absence helps to the view of things sub specie aeternitatis" (p. 414). James Liu speculates that the ambiguity of number in nouns is also an asset that helps poetry to concentrate on the universal, as in the line: "The moonrise surprises the mountain bird (or birds)." In poetry, one bird will do as well as several. The classical poetry also avoided the use of personal pronouns, and Liu writes that leaving out the "I" of the speaker allows the poet not to intrude his own personality upon the scene, for the missing subject can be readily identified with anyone, whether the reader or some imaginary

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person. Consequently, Chinese poetry often has an impersonal and universal quality, compared with which much Western poetry appears egocentric and earthbound. Where Wordsworth wrote "I wandered lonely as a cloud," a Chinese poet would probably have written simply "Wander as cloud." The former records a personal experience bound in space and time; the latter presents a state of being with universal applications. (pp. 40-41) We can be grateful for the insights these comments give us into the workings of language in Chinese poetry without subscribing to the general views of poetry implicit in them. They help us to see what the nature of a written line of Chinese poetry is, whether or not that line is, or should be, timeless, impersonal, or universal. James Liu's study of Chinese poetry is helpful once more by giving us two translations of a lyric by Ma Chih-yuan (ca. 1270-1330), a literal translation and a verse translation. The original is a five-line poem with three six-character lines, a four-character line, and a final six-character line. With the addition of some inflections, a literal characterby-character crib of the poem runs like this: Withered vines old trees twilight crows Little bridge flowing water people's house Ancient road west wind lean horse Evening sun west set Broken-bowel man at heaven end The verse translation is: Withered vines, aged trees, twilight crows. Beneath the little bridge by the cottage the river flows. On the ancient road and lean horse the west wind blows. The evening sun westward goes, As a broken-hearted man stands at heaven's close. (PP· 32-33)

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To be fair about it, the verse translation was committed to preserving the rhyme scheme of the original. A reader looking for the roots of lyric would object not to this but to the way the verse translation binds the energies of the images into the syntax of prose interpretation, a limitation which the images heartily resist. The literal translation, in contrast, presents terse, concrete juxtapositions. In it are patterns of overlapping forms; tensions, movements, and time caught in a structure; and a complex naming of sorrow. Pound, then, saw Chinese poetry coming over into English as a juxtaposition of visually presented words standing without much of the logical predication that works as connective tissue in English poetry. He was less interested in universality than in a poetic language that could present a "direct treatment of the thing"— cock man

crow trace

thatch wood

inn bridge

moon frost

—or "objects in their purest form uncontaminated by intellect or subjectivity," as Wai-Iim Yip, who translates these lines, puts it (Ezra Pound's Cathay, p. 25). The lines involve an early-morning journey, the low moon still visible in the sky, footprints in the frost covering a wooden bridge —and they come into English as a juxtaposition of ten nouns precisely seen and set together. Phrases, as well as individual words, appear to be set one against the other in what Yip calls "syntactically uncommitted resemblance": floating cloud (s) wanderer ('s) thought (mood) setting sun old friend ('s) feeling (p. 21) The floating clouds are set beside the thoughts in a wanderer's mind, the setting sun beside feelings toward an old friend. Pound kept as close as he could to these roots and translated Li Po's lines:

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Mind like a floating wide cloud, Sunset like the parting of old acquaintances. (Personae, p. 137) (The "like" was a concession which, ever since "In a Station of the Metro," was optional.) There is no doubt that Pound's view of these things was rather different from that of Chinese readers accustomed to the patterns of their language. He saw a language that was alive with Images, and if Chinese poets had "attained the known maximum of phanopoeia" (and he was sure they had), this was "due perhaps to the nature of their written ideograph" (Literary Essays, p. 27). We have lightly scanned the characteristics of the Chinese written language which stand behind the critical vocabularies of Pound and Fenollosa because it is sometimes difficult to distinguish in their writings between those things offered as facts of the Chinese language and those offered only as analogies of their theories of poetry. This is a particular problem in reading Pound, whose enthusiasm for an idea led him at times to certain extravagant claims. His emphasis on the pictorial element of Chinese characters is one example: The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures AS pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be the picture of a sound, or to be a written sign recalling a sound, but it is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures. Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of

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Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, "Of course, you can see it's a horse" (or a wing or what ever). (ABC of Reading, p. 7) It is possible that Gaudier-Brzeska could do this—he was looking, Hugh Kenner tells us, at the unsquared characters in Morrison's Dictionary (The Pound Era, pp. 250-51)— but because of the phonetic element in most Chinese characters it is only barely possible, and then only with a very small percentage of characters. But the basis of Pound's statement holds: a Chinese character represents a meaning rather than a sound. The rest of the statement seems to be true only of Pound's ideogram. If Pound first saw his ideas of the Image emerging through the juxtapositions in Japanese haiku, his encounter with Chinese allowed him to take this technique in two different directions. His concept of the ideogram took it down to the level of the word itself, and his "ideogrammic method" expanded the technique to where it could structure an entire work. The first direction, as his statement above suggests, led him to treat certain individual Chinese characters as juxtapositions of discrete elements which create a new meaning through the relationships of the elements. Thus in his appendix to Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese written character Pound suggested that the character for "truth," or "sincerity" >f£ , creates its meaning through the juxtaposition of the abbreviated character for "man" •i and the character for "word" § , while the "word" radical is itself created from the radical for "mouth" σ with something (two words and a flame, guessed Fenollosa) emerging. 5 He saw the concept of sincerity, that is, expressed in Chinese writing by the visual presentation of a man standing by his word. This way of reading a Chinese character has become known as the "split-character heresy." If it were applied to all characters it would of course go seriously wrong by treating every character as a composite ideogram and neg-

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lecting the great number of what were originally composite phonograms in the written language. Even in the case of composite ideograms it can be argued that these are no more than dead metaphors in the language, that a native speaker reading the Chinese character for "sincerity" no more sees a man standing by his word than an English speaker sees "of one growth," the original metaphor in the English word. But clearly there is room for both sides to maneuver here. It depends first of all on who is doing the seeing, and distinctions should be made between a poet and a speed-reader. James Liu, no admirer of Pound's handling of Chinese, nevertheless concedes that the radical of even a composite phonogram may in some cases retain some of its power, as in the character for "loyalty," which contains the "heart" radical (The Art of Chinese Poetry, p. 15). Calling attention to the roots buried in the etymologies of certain Chinese characters is only doing what poets and teachers have always done: enriching, expanding, deepening, and renewing the meanings of key words rather than letting them slide by as abstract mental counters. Imagine some Saxon seeing a common flower, certain species of which close their white rays over the golden disk in the center when the sun sets. Having seen, he knew something about the flower, and having known, he named it: dages eage ("the eye of day"). Centuries later the language of the Saxon was a dead language, incomprehensible to speakers of English, yet there was enough of a hint left in the name of the flower for poets to rediscover the power of that knowing, that naming: The longe day I shoop me for t'abide For nothing elles, and I shal nat lye, But for to Ioke upon the dayesie, That wel by reson men it calle may The "dayesye," or elles the "ye of day," The emperice and flour of floures alle.

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Whan that the sonne out of the south gan weste, And that this flour gan close and goon to reste For derknesse of the nyght, the which she dredde, Hom to myn hous ful swiftly I me spedde. . . . More centuries later, the sounds of the language had changed beyond the point where this hint could be recognized in the name, but along comes William Carlos Williams, prompted by the poet Chaucer to recover again that old naming: The dayseye hugging the earth in August, ha! Spring is gone down in purple. . . . (Collected Earlier Poems, p. 208) The second poet needed the first to teach him to see the day's eye in "daisy," for the written word in English represents the sound of the spoken word, and the spoken word has left its roots behind. Similarly, the written word "sincerity" represents a sound, and the English-speaker who does not delve back into Latin and reconstructed Indo-European has no hint of the roots of the word.6 The visual form of the Chinese written character for "sincerity," however, continues to present to every reader who cares to see them the radicals "man" and "word" in a certain relationship, the root vision of sincerity as a man standing by his word. Such implications of meaning carried by the written character alone, regardless of how the word is pronounced, are impossible in alphabetic writing. Pound's view of the ideogram, finally, is a heresy only if it is taken into the wrong church. He did not attempt to apply it to his Cathay translations, where he was following Fenollosa's careful crib. When he later began to use Chinese characters in The Cantos and in his Confucius translations, they were presented, even when the characters were simply dynastic names, as bold, complex forms emblematically set beside verses which involved and explored their enigmatic meanings. Pound's ideogram applies to poetics, to phanopoeia in the language of poetry, rather than to the particu-

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Iar discipline of Chinese poetry. It is, on a reduced scale, a juxtaposition of concrete elements just as Moritake's haiku and Pound's "The Return" juxtapose their images to create the phanopoeic structure of the poem, and it is nothing particularly new to poetics. Even when the radicals are not considered to be pictures of their meanings—and it was obvious to Pound that they often have no pictographic hint left—their combination in a composite ideogram can be seen as presenting a new, more complex meaning with the Image's sense of hard, clear particulars. "Sincerity" is presented not as an abstraction but as a structure of the visual (but not necessarily pictographic) elements "man" and "word" in a certain relationship. It is presented through the power of phanopoeia—a seen juxtaposition of visual elements, the generation of thought and meaning from that relationship, the containing of that relationship within a spatial form—and it gives the reader a single, new word. The other direction these principles take, Pound's "ideogrammic method," is the same process on a larger scale. Hugh Kenner has discussed it fully in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, and it can be treated briefly here. The ideogram, operating on the level of the word, deals with the juxtaposition of elements within a single character. It appeared to Pound that in Chinese poetry the same principles operate on larger units as well, taking complete words or phrases and setting them beside one another without linking them through the explicit connections of grammatical prose. The lines of Ma Chih-yuan and Li Po, which do come over into literal English translation in just this way, are good examples of what Pound saw in Fenollosa's literal translations of Chinese poetry. It is a very short step from this to the juxtaposition of clearly seen objects, images, or feelings in the mind discussed in our previous chapter. This is the essence of the "ideogrammic method," though it can be further expanded to the juxtaposition of even larger units, of different historical consciousnesses, for example, as we find in The Cantos.

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Pound's presentation of the ideogrammic method in the

ABC of Reading begins:

In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction. Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a "colour." If you ask him what a colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum. And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depth, and beyond his depth. Pound conceived of the ideogrammic method as opposed to this way of thinking. It is a more "poetic" but no less rigorous mode of thinking based on the principles, by now familiar, of the juxtaposition of concrete images without conceptual interpretation: But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint? He puts (or his ancestors put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE

CHERRY

IRON RUST

FLAMINGO

The Chinese "word" or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (PP· 5-9)

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This is a somewhat garbled version of the material in Fenollosa's essay that is apparently Pound's source (CWC, p. 26). Fenollosa discussed how European logic moves from the concrete ("cherry") to the abstract ("redness"), but he did not say that Chinese, contemporary or ancestral, think as Pound says they do. Pound has again made something new, something that may not be true of Chinese thought but is a basic truth in poetic theory. (The primary Chinese character for "red" is itself a radical, though not a common one; rather than roses or flamingos its visual form suggests a relationship with the more common "fire" radical—but this is getting caught in Pound's own game.) The ideogrammic method only brings to the surface a way of seeing that most readers of poetry already recognize. We can say the same things while remaining on more familiar ground, for the many "patterns of imagery" that have been discovered in all forms of literature are structures that work by means of the ideogrammic method. In addition to images, however, Pound's use of the method showed that larger units—particular voices out of Chinese or American history, mythological actions out of Homer or Ovid— would also function as elements of a particular pattern.7 It is a method basic to phanopoeia's way of seeing, and to recognize it is not to deny that the complete poem, English or Chinese, may organize its language through conventional prose syntax as well. Keats's ode "To Autumn" is a well-known example of a poem that does both. On one level, the "prose level" (as it is usually called), each of the three stanzas in the poem is a description. The first stanza describes the landscape of autumn with its loaded vines, bent apple trees, swollen gourds, plump hazel shells, and abundance of late flowers surrounded by bees; in the next stanza the activities of autumn are seen in the winnower, the reaper, the gleaner, and the cider-maker; in the final stanza the music of autumn is described in the sounds of the gnats, the bleatings of "fullgrown lambs," and the songs of crickets, robins, and swallows. This, the poem tells us, is how autumn appears to the

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speaker. Yet as the reader moves through the poem from one stanza to the next he realizes that beneath this descriptive surface some kind of progression is taking place as well. The ripening into fruitfulness, almost overloaded fruitfulness, in the first stanza slows down in the second stanza into a sleepy exhaustion of both the land and man: the "careless" winnower resting on the granary floor, the reaper sleeping in the fields, the gleaner carrying her full basket homeward, and the patient cider-maker sitting and watching for hours the "last oozings" of the harvest. The last stanza brings the reader to endings, to stubbled fields, sunset, and swallows gathering to depart. He has not merely seen a description of autumn, he has moved with autumn through its changes. The poem, then, is also about time, about the transition from autumn to winter, though these things are not "said" by the speaker. What is less clear in Pound's formulation of the ideogrammic method is that it involves the power of phanopoeia to catch time in spatial form. Time passes in Keats's autumn landscape, but phanopoeia also has the power to "make-things-present" by transforming the poem's progression of imagery into patterns of imagery, catching up and holding time and action as "red" could be caught and named in the simultaneous pattern of rose/cherry/iron rust/flamingo. The movement from mellow fruitfulness to empty fields has been superimposed upon another progression in the poem from morning mists through the harvest day to sunset, similar to the manner in which different cycles of maturity and decline are superimposed in the emblems of Quarles' Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man. And when the reader of "To Autumn" reaches the sunset, the stubbled fields, and the gathering swallows of the last stanza he must still see the morning mists and maturing fruitfulness of the first stanza and the exhausting harvest day of the second; otherwise he will be left with an autumn of endings only and not with the full naming of autumn that Keats gives. Time is caught in the pattern of a spatial

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form, in the ideogrammic method which is one of the poem's ways of knowing about autumn. We have already seen other uses of this method. The three quatrains of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 progress not through time but through images of diminishing scale which focus down from an autumn to a twilight to a dying fire, from the scale of a year to that of a day to the last hour or so of glowing embers. Blake's "Tyger," on the other hand, moves up through a widening pattern. The images of the blacksmith and his forge are set over the heart and brain of the Tyger; then this complex is set beside the images of the capitulating stars; the new complex is set beside the creation of the Lamb of Innocence, and all placed beneath the mysteriously smiling creator. In "The Inlaid Harp" Li Shang-yin set his vision of his transformed harp strings in a perspective of mythic patterns of metamorphosis, and Yeats in "The Magi" placed his momentary vision in the mythic pattern of a sacred quest worn down by time; the spatial form of both poems, I suggested, is that of an integrated curve. In all these poems the spatial pattern exists beneath, or above, or outside, the formal articulations of the prose meanings (though sometimes the pattern will break into these articulations and take control, leaving the incomplete, drunken sentence of Keats's first stanza or the fragmented interrogatives of Blake's poem). Within the patterns, phanopoeia is at work creating spaces for fuller knowing. In "To Autumn" temporal progression is caught in spatial pattern; a certain movement of time, a certain curve of natural cycles, is named. In Shakespeare's sonnet a dwindling down and a focusing down are caught in spatial pattern: the movements of a man's aging are named. In "The Tyger" hierarchical movement is caught in spatial pattern: creation is named. When we turn from Pound to Fenollosa we encounter a writer who was both more precise and more speculative about his vision of Chinese writing and what it contributes

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to poetic theory. The precisions in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry come from a working knowledge of Chinese, but the speculations finally derive from nothing more exotic than Emerson. The structure of this essay is tight and coherent, and its views can easily be distorted by being lifted out of context. Fenollosa did, for example, point several times to the pictographic hints in many Chinese characters, but not for the purpose of implying that the Chinese written language is picture-writing. Like Pound, Fenollosa was particularly interested in the structure of the composite ideogram. In the text of his essay and again in the appendix (which Pound gathered from Fenollosa's rough notes and added to the book in 1936) we see the suggestion that the character for "spring" is made up of the "sun" character placed beneath a character representing the bursting forth of plants, and that a character for "male" can be seen as a combination of "rice-field" and "struggle" (CM7C1 pp. 10, 38-39). In showing this, however, Fenollosa was not proposing a "split-character heresy" but was offering possible analogies of his central topic, which is action. Fenollosa's views emphasized possibilities in poetic language that are somewhat different from what Pound later made of them. On both the level of the individual word and the level of the sentence or line of poetry Fenollosa was concerned with the active forces and movements carried by language. All languages, he felt, have actions at their roots. Every part of speech—a noun, an adjective, even a preposition—has an active verbal basis. Similarly, all sentences are at root transitive sentences, expressing the transference of forces from subject to object. Behind his theory stands a basically Emersonian assumption that language is "natural" rather than arbitrary, that it reflects basic structures and processes in nature. It was not a new view of language, but Fenollosa added to it the particular possibilities of visual, spatial form that he discovered in the Chinese written language. He saw both the individual ideo-

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gram and the ideogrammic sentence as containing within their visual forms fundamental actions and processes of the mind and of nature. Considering the individual word, Fenollosa suggested that even in its pictographic beginnings the Chinese written language represents pictures not of things but of actions. "A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exist in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions, cross-sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things, and so the Chinese conception tends to represent them" (p. 10). We have already seen how in Chinese the same word can function as either a noun or a verb. "Noun" and "verb," Fenollosa felt, are later categorizations which divide a more basic reality that includes both. Phanopoeia's power of seeing is in Fenollosa focused not simply on objects but on a more complex entity involving both objects and actions. He argued that the etymology of any language, if it is pushed back far enough, would reveal this active basis of the language. "In all languages, Chinese included, a noun is originally 'that which does something,' that which performs the verbal action. Thus the moon comes from the root ma, and means, 'the measurer.' The sun means that which begets" (p. 19; he is of course referring to the English words here). Since there are no negatives in nature, positive force being required to annihilate, this is reflected in language, and Fenollosa suggested that the English word "not," akin to the Sanskrit na, may have come from an Indo-European root η a ("to be lost, to perish"). Copulative verbs are truncated active verbs: " 'Is' comes from the Aryan root as, to breathe. 'Be' is from bhu, to grow" (p. 15). It is tempting to dismiss Fenollosa's etymologies, in Chinese as well as English, as incidental to his theory, a left-over subservience to the nineteenth-century's view of language and its excitement over the discovery of Sanskrit. But they are not. Accurate

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and inaccurate, they are serious attempts to plunge to what would now be called "deep structures" in language. Like spatial and temporal form in literature, the separation of nouns and verbs in grammar corresponds to an older science's view of nature; Fenollosa's "things in motion, motion in things" closes this separation, allowing the language of poetics to catch up with the language of science. It might seem paradoxical that Pound took his highly visual ideas of the ideogram and the ideogrammic method from a treatise on poetic language in which the central topic is action. Yet there is no paradox in this, and no simple misreading of Fenollosa's words. As we saw in his Image poems, Pound, unlike Williams, does not explicitly trace the forces set up by his juxtapositions. He focuses on the clearly seen images rather than the energies of their relations, yet those energies are importantly there. In Fenollosa, the juxtaposition of elements within the composite ideogram is the naming of an action. The nouns "spring" and "male" are seen through their ideograms as actions: the energy of the sun pushing up the growing plants is a naming of spring; active struggle with the rice-field is a naming of "male." As in the composite ideogram for "home," the pig under the roof, these characters are compounds of discrete elements actively involved in a certain relationship. "In this process of compounding," Fenollosa wrote, "two things added together do not produce a third thing but suggest some fundamental relation between them" (p. 10). The original compounding process that still continues to present the concept of sincerity as a man standing by his word led Fenollosa to afBrm that the formation of such characters derives from the same roots that produce the metaphors of poetry. Every language, he felt, moved from the simple imitation of natural processes to more complex thought by means of metaphor, "the use of material images to suggest immaterial relations" (p. 22). In Chinese, traces of this archaic process are still recorded in the written characters. What was originally seen in those archaic meta-

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phors, moreover, were actions. Once more Fenollosa appeals to the imitation of nature: since in nature forces and relationships are "more real" than objects, a metaphor is an imitation of an action: The whole delicate substance of speech is built upon substrata of metaphor. Abstract terms, pressed by etymology, reveal their ancient roots still embedded in direct action. But the primitive metaphors do not spring from arbitrary subjective processes. They are possible only because they follow objective lines of relations in nature herself. Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate. (p. 22) The fundamental roots of language lie in metaphor, and poetry can retrace these roots. "Metaphor, the revealer of nature, is the very substance of poetry. The known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth" (p. 23). But since a metaphor is built on seeing an action, and is a mimesis in language of an active relationship in nature, poetry is also built on the imitation of natural actions, processes, relationships. Metaphor, the "chief device" of poetry, Fenollosa goes on to say, "is at once the substance of nature and of language. Poetry only does consciously what the primitive races did unconsciously. The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance" (p. 23). At this point it should be clear that Fenollosa was saying what many others have said independently: Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction (1928) is another important statement of the same idea, but it runs back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries in the theories of Emerson, Max Miiller, and Vico. According to this view all languages were to a significant degree built up from metaphor, and for FenolIosa the most vital activity of the poet lies in rediscovering this ancient language. It was a more "poetic" language than our present marketplace tongues, and at the same time it

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more accurately reflected truths about nature. The Chinese language has been left some distance behind as Fenollosa enters a more speculative realm in which Chinese is only a source of analogies for his theory of an ideal poetic language. He sees nature—and language, the reliable image of nature—as alive and active with forces and relationships, things being only the limits of action. The ideal poet, using the ideal poetic language, effortlessly recreates these forces and relationships. The real poet, using a real language, does what he can: "The more concretely and vividly we express the interactions of things the better the poetry. We need in poetry thousands of active words, each doing its utmost to show forth the motive and vital forces" (p. 28). For the real poet, a written character offers unique possibilities, and in these lies the importance of the Chinese character to Fenollosa's theory of poetic language. Unlike words represented phonetically, some Chinese characters carry their etymologies, their metaphorical roots, visibly. Fenollosa gave one tantalizing example of the possibilities of character-writing when he suggested that a poet could repeat visual forms just as he is accustomed to repeating sounds in rhyme. It is, in fact, the same principle: "Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refined harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones." The harmonies of rhyme make us conscious of word-sounds we usually ignore. Similarly, in the simple, and scarcely poetic, Chinese line "The sun rises in the east," the visual forms of the characters contain exciting possibilities for phanopoeia-rhymes: B Sun Fenollosa interprets the line:

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The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in which a single dominant overtone colors every plane of meaning. . . . The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb "rise," we have further homology; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign(PP· 32-33) If we discuss only "harmony," we have uncontroversial ornamentation, the characters acting to the eye as rhymes do to the ear. But rhyme in poetry has a way of moving beyond ornamentation, a way of discovering significant connections between the meanings of the rhyming words. Similarly here: Fenollosa's entire discussion has implied the far more interesting, if heretical, possibility that the visual overtones are not merely ornamental but do something with the meanings of the words. If not in Chinese then in his ideal poetic language poets can catch up the "motive and vital forces" of metaphorical relationships. In this short Chinese line, the "sun" radical is already part of the visual characters for "rise" and "east," reflecting, Fenollosa would say, an active part for the sun in the original metaphorical definitions of the meanings of "rise" and "east." Each character, then, contains within its deep archaic roots the action of the whole sentence—a resonance any poet would welcome. When Fenollosa looked from the individual word to the larger unit of the sentence, he found that his basic assumption—language imitates the active forces and relationships in nature—applied here as well. The form of the sentence, he wrote, is mimetic of natural processes, and because of this the basic form is that of the transitive sentence. This form derives from the fact that natural phenomena are basically successive operations, the transference of force from agent

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to object. Therefore language and thought, which follow nature, are successive also. An apparently intransitive sentence is actually a truncated representation of a transitive action: "He runs (a race)." "The sky reddens (itself)." "We breathe (air)." Similarly, there are no sentences that merely describe states rather than acts: "Who can doubt that when we say 'The wall shines,' we mean that it actively reflects light to our eye?" (pp. 13-14). Once again, however, Fenollosa's theory gives us action within a visual form. Chinese writing, through the involvement of its visual characters, can reflect these operations of nature in a way that the arbitrary signs of phonetic writing cannot: "Chinese notation is something much more than arbitrary symbols. It is based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature." A man sees a horse:

^

Man

SL

Sees

.·%

Horse

In the Chinese notation, Fenollosa said, characters can be selected that will follow natural suggestion: "First stands the man on his two legs. Second, his eye moves through space: a bold figure represented by running legs under an eye, a modified picture of an eye, a modified picture of running legs, but unforgettable once you have seen it. Third stands the horse on his four legs" (p. 8). As in "The sun rises in the east," the characters in this sentence rhyme visually, each character containing some indication of "legs." More important, however, is the way the characters vividly present the action of the seeing as it drives through the sentence from the subject ("man") to the object ("horse"). The sequential operations of nature, Fenollosa is saying, can be imitated either by sound-sequences or by imagesequences, and the sentence "Man sees horse" presents an action whether it is spoken or read. If it is read in his character-notation, however, it presents the action again, to the eye, with the temporal nature of the action caught in the

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spatial juxtaposition of visual characters. In this short sentence we see once again, then, a "progression of images" which, under another aspect, becomes pattern. We began our investigations with the assumption that the roots of lyric are in language, and that phanopoeia is one power that charges these roots. Theories of phanopoeia in poetry, however, generally tend to shuttle back and forth between two conceptions of this power. One conception emphasizes creation, while the other conception involves perception and cognition. The first sees phanopoeia as primarily poiesis, a "making" that arises from the poet's doodling among the visual and structural possibilities in language. The second sees this radical power as primarily mimesis, an "imitation" or presentation in language of something that has been seen and known. The two conceptions go together, of course, and the poem, as Aristotle knew, is both mimesis and poiesis. It is, in Williams' words, "not 'like' anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth—at least one small part of them." In Fenollosa both conceptions of phanopoeia, creation and perception, are clearly accounted for. "My subject is poetry, not language," he wrote, "yet the roots of poetry are in language" (CWC, p. 6). And the roots of language? His fundamental position is that the roots of language lie in the world and how we see it. Fenollosa's vision of language is expressed entirely in terms of the complex power of phanopoeia, and he traces that power back to find it rooted in nature. The poem is a poiesis, a creation out of language, but at a deeper level it is even more a mimesis. That is why clear seeing is necessarily the first step toward charging language with phanopoeia. The power does not simply mirror nature, however, for there are transformations involved as seeing becomes knowing, and again as knowing becomes naming. Fenollosa's idea of language is finally this: the processes and structures of nature are the roots of language, but only the roots; from these

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roots language developed its own complex structures; finally, language arranges nature by structuring our seeing of it. In a poet's hands, this is not simply an imaginary structuring of nature by an arbitrary language but a rediscovery of nature through the natural roots still buried in language. Language can structure the world as well as it does because the world once structured language. These archaic structures in language, Fenollosa said, are structures of metaphor. The archaic metaphors through which language was built up were modeled on the observed world, and they are "at once the substance of nature and of language." And again: This is more than analogy, it is identity of structure. Nature furnishes her own clues. Had the world not been full of homologies, sympathies, and identities, thought would have been starved and language chained (p. 22) to the obvious. Our ancestors built the accumulations of metaphor into structures of language and into systems of thought. Languages today are thin and cold because we think less and less into them. (p. 24) A poet's "makings" consist of "feeling back along the ancient lines of advance." Sincerity is rediscovered as a man standing by his word, and the daisy is seen again as the eye of day. Although Fenollosa would have objected to this, we can see now that those ancient lines of advance stem not from Archaic Chinese or from languages of "the primitive races" but from a vision of Adam's namings in the Garden. A seventeenth-century version of this vision of language comes in Book vm of Paradise Lost when Adam tells Raphael of the effortless gift of naming he possessed upon first awaking in Eden: . . . to speak I tri'd, and forthwith spake, My Tongue obey'd and readily could name

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What e're I saw. Thou Sun, said I, fair Light, And thou enlight'n'd Earth, so fresh and gay. . . . And when God brought to him every beast of the field and every fowl of the air: I nam'd them, as they pass'd, and understood Thir Nature, with such knowledge God endu'd My sudden apprehension. . . . In Milton's view it was the Fall, in Fenollosa's view simply the thinning effects of time, that broke these immediately apprehended correspondences between nature and language, between seeing and knowing and naming. Poets now must struggle with language to recover something of those correspondences. Fenollosa's Edenic model of the development of language through metaphor, and the subsequent decline in understanding this language, has long since been discarded. It remains, however, a valuable model of the power of phanopoeia in poetry, the seeing and knowing and naming that an individual poet follows as he structures his poetry with the riddles, emblems, Images, and ideograms we have been finding at the roots of lyric. Metaphor is one more manifestation of this power. Language, as Fenollosa saw it, still carries Eden in its roots, and our doodles in language release these roots. Metaphor is "the revealer of nature" in which, as in the riddle and the emblem, "the known interprets the obscure." It continues to be a naming, a rediscovery and a re-cognition of both language and nature. Fenollosa's view of metaphor brings to a conclusion our discussion of phanopoeia. The discussion has ranged considerably beyond Pound's initial definition of phanopoeia as "a casting of images upon the visual imagination," but it has followed directions that he pointed out and has not intentionally perverted them. Metaphor is a design, or configuration—a "figure" of speech—and only minor transformations are needed to see that it is simply the most familiar of the structures in poetic language that derive from the

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power of phanopoeia. At the roots, there are no essential differences between metaphor and the "hieroglyphics and enigmas" which to Wordsworth were later corruptions of the earliest poets' language of natural excitement. The riddle can be seen as a metaphor with one term concealed, and solving the riddle is a seeing into something that leads to a way of knowing. The ideograms which Fenollosa saw reflecting the metaphorical bases of language stand very close to the riddle, and Hugh Kenner has commented on the relationship of the kenning, a form of the riddle, to the ideogram (he does not, however, distinguish kenning and kent heiti)·. "Pound, it may be recalled, discovered Chinese after translating Anglo-Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon scholar's term for just such a vivid figure is 'kenning': the particulars by which the person or object in question is known. 'Whaleroad,' 'soul-bearer,' are both ideogram and metaphor" (The Poetry of Ezra Pound, p. 89). The emblem can be seen as a metaphor existing in a dual medium; at the same time, the emblem method is the special use of metaphor that brings together a concrete image and an abstract concept.8 The Image, a juxtaposition of elements without explicit connections, is a metaphor stripped of (or more often lying beneath) interpretive grammatical links. When we consider language only, we see from the metaphor, the riddle, the emblem, and the ideogram (the ideogram of poetics, that is) that the skeletal form of all structures of phanopoeia is just this simple juxtaposition of elements: candle/man But simple juxtaposition does not remain simple. Parts of the juxtaposition will fit, giving us the "picture" in a riddle, and parts will not fit, giving us the "puzzle." We came to see that the "non-fit" is as essential as the "fit"; from both, spaces for fuller knowing are created. At a price, a selected dimension of these spaces can be made explicit and definite, laid out as a simile or in discursive prose explaining how,

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in the world of common sense, a man is in some respects like a candle. In any form, however, we seek to validate these juxtapositions by referring them back to the world of experience. Thus not just any juxtaposition will do. If a metaphor, then we ask for the significant metaphor, one which engenders thought, as Aristotle said, by teaching us to see something about the worlds of nature and of ourselves. Aristotle's comments on metaphor in the Poetics and the Rhetoric make these connections between metaphor as a structure of language and metaphor as something that teaches us to see. He describes four structures of metaphor, the first three of which are what we now call synecdoche and metonymy. The fourth form, which is the fullest, most complex (and therefore to Aristotle the most pleasing) form of metaphor, is that built on a structure of natural proportion, a:b: :c:d.9 The riddles, emblems, and Images that juxtapose "candle" and "man" derive from seeing the proportional relationship: candle:flame::man: life A test metaphor which for some reason is a favorite among literary critics is "the ship plows the waves." In Aristotle's terms, it is an expression of the proportion: ship:waves: :plow:earth We can doodle with this structure. Substituting terms according to the laws governing proportional relationships merely opens the metaphor out to the analogies, earth: waves: : plow: ship, or ship: plow: :waves: earth. But another law of proportions is that the product of the means equals the product of the extremes. Applying this to our proportional relationship (and silently passing over the question of just what exactly a word-product is), we have: earth-ship = waves-plow The operation, of questionable rigor, has turned up a ken-

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ning for "plow" ("earth-ship") and another for "ship" ("waves-plow"). ("What plows and plows, but no furrow remains?" asks a Danish riddle for "ship"—ER, p. 79.) The same operation performed on the proportion, candle: flame: :man:life, gives us "candle's life" for "flame" and "man's flame" for "life," already conventional kennings in our language. Sailing onward while the wind holds, we may try this operation on a more complex example: Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep? The basic proportion takes the form, baby: nurse: :asp: Cleopatra, and the operation performed above gives: Cleopatra-baby=asp-nurse It is not difficult to see "Cleopatra's baby" as a kenning (or riddle) for "asp," and "asp-nurse" as a kenning for "Cleopatra." Moreover, though they first fall out as kennings, the same structures may just as easily be seen as root forms of Images, ideograms, or, in the case of the relatively abstract "life," emblems—all forms of the basic power of phanopoeia. Our manipulations with language have held up to this point, but in each case there is something left over. "That sucks the nurse asleep" shows that there is an action involved in this relationship, one that does not figure in the schematic proportion if we think of it only as a static relationship of four "things." A commentary on Aristotle's view of metaphor by Louis Mackey points this out again with respect to another Shakespearean example: In the simile, As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport, the grammatical form seems to state a logical "basis of comparison." But this basis—"They kill us for their

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sport"—does not define the analogy, flies:boys: :we: gods. Rather, it complicates it, and this is the power and the appeal of the simile: the relationship of flies to wanton boys receives an ominous theological qualification, and the relationship of man to God is debased by the suggestion of puerile caprice.10 The complication of "They kill us for their sport," which seems in some way to be even more basic to the metaphor than the concrete nouns set in proportion, is moreover an action, or as Fenollosa would say, "things in motion, motion in things." Aristotle's proportional relationship is not simply a grouping of quantities or "things," but a schematic expression of active relationships that have been seen. And what, after all, does our "equals" sign mean in our own operations above? "Earth-ship" does not equal "wavesplow," but certain equivalencies can be seen in the actions of plowing and sailing.11 "Candle's life" does not equal "man's flame"; it is in the actions, burning and living, that we see important overlaps. And even in the actions there is not complete equality, but "non-fit" as well as "fit." The "block element" of the Danish riddle, "but no furrow remains," explicitly opens a space for the differences as well as the similarities between plowing and sailing. In the simile from King Lear, the "ominous theological qualification" and the "suggestion of puerile caprice" occupy these spaces. In Cleopatra's metaphor, "Cleopatra's baby" does not equal "asp-nurse," but the partial overlapping of the actions directs our eye to surprising equivalencies in lifegiving and death-giving while maintaining the wide and fundamental differences between the two actions. It is necessary to see in Aristotle's proportion, then, a structure containing actions. All this of course is exactly Fenollosa's view of metaphor and of the ideogram. He saw in metaphor a structure containing actions, and the Chinese ideogram as a visual representation of that structure. The ideogram, like the Image,

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is not a picture, not a snapshot. "The untruth of a painting or a photograph," he wrote, "is that, in spite of its concreteness, i t drops the element of natural succession" ( C W C , p. 9). As we have traced it, phanopoeia is a complex of three related powers: the visual power, the power of active intellectual patterning, and the power of catching up time and action in spatial form. Fenollosa's perspective on metaphor, from which "things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points, of actions," brings out this third power of phanopoeia, the circumscribing spatial pattern. Naming—not simply "names" but the act of naming—is a structuring of language that must include the active processes that have been seen and known. Time and action are caught in space, but looked at more closely, from within the form, simultaneous spatial pattern is seen as temporal progression. (There is nothing new about this: Boethius, and thus Dante and Chaucer, understood it perfectly some time ago.) It is therefore characteristic of phanopoeia that it does not bring us to a conclusion but circles us back to another beginning.

VI. CHARM

WE BEGIN again by turning to melopoeia and to the root

forms of the music of lyric as they are heard in primitive literatures. We might first recall how Pound and Valery described their struggles to find language for poems. Pound told us that the initiating impulse of his best-known Image poem was a moment of complex perception, the "sudden emotion" of seeing a pattern of beautiful faces in a metro station. The language he found for the poem presents that sudden emotion through the vision of the faces and petals on a wet, black bough seen together. It is a language of pattern, language organized by the power of phanopoeia, or, as Pound would say, language which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words. It is, in short, a language of the visual imagination. Valery, on the other hand, experienced a complex of rhythms set up in his mind's ear by a walk through Paris. The mental rhythms were based in a physical action, though Valery also speaks of them as a "grace" descended upon his head. On that occasion the rhythms were too purely musical to go into poetry, but the experience allowed him to see that such rhythms often did initiate the processes of poetic composition for him. We can see how the language of such poetry would be language strongly organized by the power of melopoeia, language which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech. We also note here, for future reflection, that Valery called the rhythms a "magic," and he spoke of their bringing a "sense of strangeness" he found almost unbearable. Valery's observations of the initiating processes of poetry in his own mind suggest that the sources of the melopoeia of

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poetry lie in the music of pure, physical rhythm. Northrop Frye, however, has suggested another source for the music of lyric poetry in particular. The distinctive music of lyric, he feels, grows out of language itself. It begins in a subconscious babbling among the sounds of words, and out of the associative possibilities in the sounds of words arises a controlling rhythm—"an oracular, meditative, irregular, unpredictable, and essentially discontinuous rhythm, emerging from the coincidences of the sound-pattern" (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 271). Along its musical axis, then, the language of lyric is primarily organized by an irregular rhythm of sound-echoes, and this rhythm is the primary rhythm of lyric even when it is used in combination with a continuous metrical pattern or the rhetorical rhythms of speech. A major concern of modern lyric poetry, Frye notes, has been to liberate this distinctive rhythm: "The aim of 'free' verse is not simply revolt against metre and epos conventions, but the articulation of an independent rhythm equally distinct from metre and from prose. If we do not recognize this third rhythm, we shall have no answer for the naive objection that when poetry loses regular metre it becomes prose" (p. 272). We have already seen that Frye identifies the radical form of this distinctive music (or melos) as charm. Valery, then, heard the musical roots of poetry in the wordless rhythms of music itself. Frye suggests that the musical roots of lyric lie instead in the irregular rhythms growing out of the sounds of words. Pound, when he described melopoeia as poetry "wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning," did not speculate on the sources of those musical properties. He did, however, distinguish three kinds of melopoeia: " (x) that made to be sung to a tune; (2) that made to be intoned or sung to a sort of chant; and (3) that made to be spoken; and the art of joining words in each of these kinds is different, and cannot be clearly understood until the

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reader knows that there are three different objectives." 1 Since the objective of each form of melopoeia is different, Pound says, the art of organizing language in each form is different. One form aims at song, one at a kind of chantverse, and the third seems to aim at the goal of Wordsworth's poet, "a selection of the language really spoken by men," or poetry primarily organized by the rhythms of speech. Gathering these suggestions together, we will begin our discussion with the assumption that there are three roots of the melopoeia of lyric poetry: (i) song, words sung to the rhythm and melody of music; (2) charm, magic incantation carried on the singsong voice of a magician at work; (3) speech, the music we probably are most accustomed to hearing in poetry, and in good prose as well. (Pound's "chantverse," I believe, is not a radical form, though close to one; this is discussed in the following chapter.) As powers that organize the language of lyric, the three forms of melopoeia will be referred to as song-melos, charm-melos, and speechmelos. The first two derive from the roots of song and charm in the language of poetry. The third derives from the music of the spoken language, which is a root as well, and poets will say that it is the only source of their language when they think their audience can no longer hear the buried music of the first two roots. In Aristotle, μέλος means song, and also the music to which the words of a song are set. This, like the word "lyric" itself —originally referring to the poet's lyre—would seem to direct our search for the roots of this power back to the union of poetry and song, and especially to primitive cultures, in which poetry is seldom found separate from music and song. But along with the Greek word there is the Latin word carmen, attracting English critics from Sidney onwards by its closeness to the word "charm." It is more than coincidence: carmen generally means song or poem, but in older Latin texts it also means a magic formula, an incantation. Here is another root of lyric melopoeia, and it does

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seem to be a way of organizing language that is distinct from the way of song. When we go back to primitive literatures we find that song and charm are two different things. First of all, they aim at different effects: in primitive societies songs can be sung simply for pleasure, but charms are intended to perform a quite different function. Also, songs are open to the society, meant for everyone, but charms are closed, secret, and hidden. The vocabulary of the songs is drawn from the ordinary spoken language of the society, but the words of a charm are likely to involve a special language. Most importantly, the rhythms of the two forms differ, along the lines of our distinctions. Songs are organized by the external rhythms of music, and in primitive societies this usually includes the rhythms of dancing, drumming, and even acting. The rhythm of charms, on the other hand, grows out of the internal rhythms of the words themselves. We heard both rhythms recalled in Blake's "Tyger," the song-rhythm of nursery rhymes and game-songs, and the charm-rhythm developed by the assonances, alliterations, rhymes, and word-repetitions in the language of the poem. Like other kinds of rhythm, the irregular rhythm of the words in a charm is a function of repetition—"coincidences of the sound-pattern." Repetition is an essentially musical procedure, and in poetry it is the basic structural principle of melopoeia. It stands in the same relation to melopoeia as spatial juxtaposition does to phanopoeia. The skeletal form of the riddles, emblems, Images, ideograms, and metaphors of phanopoeia, we saw, is a simple juxtaposition of two or more elements: candle/man. It is a spatial structure of the visual imagination, as repetition is a temporal structure of what we have called the aural imagination. Valery sensed a common ground somewhere beneath both structures, and, as the ideogram shows, transformations are possible. With the ideogram, spatial form can be seen as a transformation of temporal form, and temporal form as a transformation of spatial form. Phrases such as "the rhythm

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of images" or "the pattern of rhythms" are slippery but useful attempts by critics to deal with these transformations, and "the coincidences of the sound-pattern" is another such phrase. The idea of rhythmical pattern has interesting implications in the charms, but we will defer these until we have listened to some of the actual sound-patterns of charms and have seen how they are intended to work. The repetition of sounds in the language, and the rhythms that grow out of the recurring sounds, are striking and consistent characteristics of the melopoeia of primitive charms. Although such rhythms are heard throughout primitive poetry in general, and are the source of what is often called its incantatory quality, they seem to organize and to dominate charm-language most of all and are heard at their strongest there, as in the repetitions of words and of apparently meaningless syllables in an Eskimo charm for good weather: nuyuamingi nuyuamingi nuyuamingi nuyuaming atang ai yanga ye yi ya ye yi yanga yanga yanga nuyuamingi nuyuamingi nuyuamingi nuyuaming atang ai yang Clouds, Clouds, Clouds, Clouds,

clouds, clouds down below, clouds, clouds down below. 2

Many primitive charms simply repeat a few words or a single line over and over as often as is necessary for the charm to work its effect. Such is the following children's charm from the aborigines of South Australia. It consists of four words which set up, through their interlocking sound-repetitions, the necessary incantatory pattern to charm a falling star—to the children an evil spirit—back to where it belongs:

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Kandanga daruarungu manangga gilbanga star: falling: at night time: you [star] go back. 3 We might think of Blake's "Tyger" again, and hear in it now a similar exorcism, a frightened child's voice trying to charm away the bright terror in the forests of the night. The rhythms of charming, in both the Australian charm and the Blake poem, are carried by thick coincidences of the soundpattern, insistently repeated vowel and consonant sounds. In looking at transcriptions of primitive texts, however, we must be cautious against generalizing too much about the use of sound in primitive poetry, for this requires a trained field worker's knowledge of the native language. Although many primitive texts appear to make conscious use of rhyme, for example, the anthropologist John Greenway has stated that conscious rhyme is almost never found in primitive literature: "Where rhyme occurs among preliterate peoples, it appears to be either a contribution of the recorder . . . or is induced by the form of the language. Polynesians insulated one consonant from another with vowels, which produced what some scholars think is deliberate rhyme." Greenway gives as an example a Hawaiian mythological song, ostensibly a rhyming poem. "But," he goes on, "there are two things that disqualify this as rhyme: first, when properly pronounced, only two of the couplets rhyme; second, all the other words in the song end in vowels, and if these words were arranged in random fashion, they would rhyme as well as in the meaningful syntax. Some Australian languages produce this automatic rhyme also; the Aranda tongue ends nearly all its words with '-a,' so that an Aranda song can hardly avoid rhyme." 4 The warning is necessary, but Greenway's mention of the "automatic rhyme" in some native languages will set the serious student of babble to further speculations. It is an oldfashioned and discredited procedure to draw parallels between the early development of language in children and

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the structures of fully developed languages, primitive or otherwise, which have a long history behind them. Yet it is still interesting to note how a child's babbling of repeated sounds (mama, papa, bowwow) leads, with the encouraging reactions of mama and papa and perhaps bowwow, to meaningful words, and then to notice the large number of words in certain languages that appear to be formed on the same pattern. A glance at texts in the Melanesian languages of the southwestern Pacific islands turns up words in Dobuan such as lulu ("to sing"), kenokeno ("to lie down"), bwegabwegai ("to shed, to break out of"), ladiladi ("sweet sounding"), and bwebweso (the home of the dead). In the Trobriand Islands, natives talk about their yam-gardens using everyday words such as pwaypwaya ("earth, soil for planting"), munumunu ("weed"), Iala ("to flower"), puripuri ("the bursting forth of fruits"), bwabwa'u ("black," the color of ripe yams), ginigini ("to carve"), and ula'ula ("first-fruit offerings"). Some of these words, moreover, are conscious reduplicative forms, words formed by syllable-doubling or word-doubling such as that used in Greek for the formation of the perfect aspect of verbs, in other languages to indicate plurality in nouns or the superlative degree of adjectives, and in Dobuan to signify temporal continuity. 5 The suggestion is that soundrepetition is a vital root in the development of language itself. Greenway is concerned about whether or not rhyme is present in primitive texts as a conscious artistic element; we can wonder if in some cases the echoing babble of soundrepetitions took place not at the formation of the individual charm but at the formation of the language. It is melopoeia's counterpart to Fenollosa's theory that the roots of poetry lie in the structures of language. The coincidences of the sound-pattern are there in primitive charms, though it is not clear why they are there. If full end-rhyme is rare, the internal soundings of consonance, assonance, alliteration, and word-repetition are common. To take a few more examples, we can hear some of these patterns in an Eskimo charm collected by Knud Rasmussen:

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Magic words to be said in the morning when rising. nuna-maso nunarshuaq-maso uwsha makua taiklap inukshua silarshop avershue patqarai qakerai. Land earth-root Great land earth-root Here is these Song-texts' master The world's pillars They pale, They turn white. 6 The transcription of the native text is a rough approximation, but it is worth trying aloud. To learn about rhythm and rhyme, Pound wrote, "Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g. Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence" (Literary Essays, p. 5). A long fertility charm collected by Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands illustrates many of the rhythms of sound-associations, both in the irregular echoing of vowels and consonants and in the more regular repetition of words and phrases. This charm is the central element of a magic ritual that inaugurates a new planting season with the clearing of the land for the next year's yam-gardens. It opens with a blessing-word which Malinowski says is "especially directed towards the depth of the earth; it also implies firmness and permanence of the crops and conveys

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the idea of going down and rising again." It is delivered in the melodious singsong characteristic of charms: Vatuvi, vatuvi, Vatuvi, vatuvi, Vitumaga, i-maga. Vatuvi, vatuvi, Vatuvi, vatuvi, Vitulola, i-lola. Show the way, show the way, Show the way, show the way, Show the way groundwards, into the deep ground. Show the way, show the way, Show the way, show the way, Show the way firmly, show the way to the firm moorings. Next follows a series of names calling on ancestors, from the more distant ancestral spirits down to the magician's own grandfather and father: Tubu-gu Polu, tubu-gu Koleko, tubu-gu Takikila, tubu-gu Mulabwoyta, tubu-gu Kwayudila, tubu-gu Katupwala, tubu-gu Bugwabwaga, tubu-gu Purayasi, tubu-gu Numakala; bilumava'u biloma-m, tabu-gu Mwakenuwa, tama-gu Yowana. O O O O

grandfathers grandfathers grandfathers grandfathers

of of of of

the the the the

name name name name

of of of of

Polu, Koleko, Takikila, Mulabwoyta,

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O grandfathers of the name of O grandfathers of the name of O grandfathers of the name of O grandfathers of the name of O grandfathers of the name of and thou, new spirit, my grandfather Mwakenuwa, and thou my father Yowana.

Kwayudila, Katupwala, Bugwabwaga, Purayasi, Numakala;

The next section is directed at the land that will be cultivated, and that, the charm says, will be fertile and swell with ripe yams: I-gebile lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-tokaye lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-takubila lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-gibage'u lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-kabwabu lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-gibukwayu'u lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-gibakayaulo lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-tawaga lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-kabina'i lopou-la ulo buyagu; i-kabinaygwadi lopou-la ulo buyagu; a-tabe'u! The belly of my garden leavens, The belly of my garden rises, The belly of my garden reclines, The belly of my garden grows to the size of a bush-hen's nest, The belly of my garden grows like an ant-hill; The belly of my garden rises and is bowed down, The belly of my garden rises like the iron-wood palm, The belly of my garden lies down, The belly of my garden swells, The belly of my garden swells as with a child. I sweep away!

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The charm continues with a long list of pests and blights which are swept away, blown away, driven away—exorcised from the yam-garden (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, i, 96-98; 11, 255-65)·

The rhythms of garden-magic are not foreign to English poetry, and an example of these rhythms can be heard in a charm familiar to students of English literature. The Old English charm for unfruitful land, or land under an evil spell, sets up a strong incantatory rhythm through soundpatterns of repeated words, alliteration, assonance, and homoeoteleuton: Erce, Erce, Erce, eor/?an modor, geunne pe se alwalda, ece drihten, aecera wexendra and wridendra, eacniendra and elniendra, sceafta hehra, scirra waestma, and /?aera bradan berewaestma, and /jaera hwitan hwastewaestma, and ealra eor/>an waestma.7 Erce, Erce, Erce, mother of land, may the all-ruler, the eternal lord, grant you fields growing and flourishing, increasing and growing strong, shafts of high blades, bright harvests, and the broad barley-harvests, and the white wheat-harvests, and all the harvests of the land. This is a fairly "late" version of a charm, and the rhythm is almost too strong here. Although the rhythm is not what any Old English scholar would call regular, the sound-patterns of the words have been influenced by the traditional versification of Old English epos, and the charm itself has received an overlay of Christian prayer. Beneath these, however, the Old English charms, far more than the Old

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English riddles, still retain their older and deeper roots, and still carry the strange, irregular music of the language of primitive charms. Behind incantation stands enchantment. The basis of any charm is something that we might neglect but that its original users would never forget, its magic. Charms are meant to make things happen, to cause action. There is no "chance" in primitive cosmologies, anthropologists tell us: wind and rain, fertility of the land, success in trading, human love, sickness and healing, or the arrival of death are always caused, by something or (more often) by someone. Charm magic tries to control these events by manipulation of the hidden forces in nature. The Trobriand garden-charm encourages yam-growth and drives away pests and blights; the Old English charm for infertile land, in addition to the growth-producing section given above, goes on to ward off malignant spells of witchcraft or sorcery. To exercise these powers, every charm uses more than just words. By basic laws of magic, a charm must also use an action to get an action. The action may simply consist of facing in the right direction while the charm is being said, or it may be an elaborate ritual connected in some "sympathetic" or "contagious" way with the purpose of the charm. The English charm must be accompanied by an involved set of primitive rituals and Christian prayers to be effective. For plowed land, the magic action requires unknown seed taken from beggars (who are given a double portion in return), incense, fennel, holy soap, and holy salt to be placed in a hole bored in the beam of the plow. The charm is spoken over the plow, and the first furrow is made. Under this first furrow is then laid a loaf made of meal of every kind and kneaded with milk and holy water. When the Trobriand charm is first used in the seasonal cycle of garden-magic, it is spoken by the magician over the axes that

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will be used for clearing the land on the next morning. The axes lie on mats in his hut, and on each axe is a mixture of magic herbs the magician has collected. Over the axes another mat is laid, forming what Malinowski calls a "voice-trap" into which the charm is then spoken. Finally a banana leaf is wrapped and tied around the cutting edge of each axe blade to enclose the magic herbs and the spellcarrying breath of the magician, powers that will be carried to the garden site in the morning. This sort of thing may seem to take us somewhat afield from the language of lyric poetry, yet the magic actions of a charm are a necessary component of the whole and cannot be neglected. The point is that charms are first and foremost concerned with power, with the use of magic words and magic actions to cause crops to grow, game to come, or another's spells to be defeated. And since the magic of a charm is its basic purpose, this purpose influences the language of charms, the structures of the words. In certain ways, I believe, it must even be a source of these structures. It is the sense of sacred formality, the necessity for the compelling, incantatory quality, that produces the rich webs of sound in charms. At the roots, the words of a charm are themselves magic actions. Aldous Huxley recognized this when he argued that magic spells have to be poetry and the magicians who make them poets: "The thing is psychologically inevitable. If words had not first moved him, how could man have come to believe that they would move things? And is it likely that he would set out to move things by means of incantations which left him unmoved? But words which move are poetry. Magicians, I repeat, are always poets."8 Two widely separated examples may suggest this important sense of words which move. The irregular rhythms of sound-associations are evident in both charms, but we can hear them now as part of the larger context of magical power. A magician-poet among the Semang of the Malay

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Peninsula made a short love-charm intended to pull the beloved irresistibly to the lover. For the ritual action to be performed, a small, rare plant called chinduai must first be found. It is pulled up, a little oil is dropped on it, and then oil from the plant is smeared on the lover's forehead and breast. Then the charm is spoken: En-en Bonn, Ta ta' noi, Nai ka-bleb, Chuang boi, Chepoi dooi Tug-tug loi. Look, look, comrade! As this oil drips, Alone by yourself Approach towards me, [And] yearn towards me [As this] oil spreads upwards.9 The magic controls both the application of the oil and the incantation, the ritual action and the words of this charm, bending them to the right shape for sending forth their power. A very different charm is a Cherokee formula for killing an enemy. The curse is a form of charm that lies behind the literary forms of invective, flyting, and satire.10 But if the literary forms have become "just words," the magic of a curse proposes much more. The ritual action of this Cherokee charm begins with the sorcerer secretly obtaining some of the victim's spittle. He puts it into a tube with a joint of a poisonous plant, seven earthworms beaten into a paste, and splinters from a tree that has been struck by lightning. The tube is then buried in the forest at the base of a tree, again one that has been struck and infused with the power of lightning:

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Didalatli'ti Sgd

Nagwa tsudantagi tegiiyatawailateliga. Iyusti ( ) tsilastii'li. Iyusti ( ) ditsadaita. Tsuwatsila elawini tsidahistaniga. Tsudantagi elawini tsidahistaniga. Niiya giinage guyutlutaniga. A'nuwagi gunage guyutlutaniga. Sutaliiga giinage degiiyaniigaliitaniga, tsiinanugaisti nigesuna. Usuhiyi nunahi witetsataniiusi gunesa giinage asahalagi. Tsutiineliga. Elawati asahalagi aduniga. Usinuliyu Usuhiyi gultsate digiinagestayi, elawati giinage tidahisti wa'yaniigalutsiga. Gunesa giinage sutaliiga giinage gayiitlutaniga. Tsudantagi uskalutsiga. Sa'kani aduniga. Usiihita atanisseti, ayalatsisesti tsudantagi, tsiinanugaisti nigesuna. Sge! To Destroy Life Listen! Now I have come to step over your soul. You are of the (wolf) clan. Your name is (A'yiiini). Your spittle I have put at rest under the earth. Your soul I have put at rest under the earth. I have come to cover you over with the black rock. I have come to cover you over with the black cloth. I have come to cover you with the black slabs, never to reappear. Toward the black coffin of the upland in the Darkening Land your paths shall stretch out.

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So shall it be for you. The clay of the upland has come [to cover you. (?)] Instantly the black clay has lodged there where it is at rest at the black houses in the Darkening Land. With the black coffin and with the black slabs I have come to cover you. Now your soul has faded away. It has become blue. When darkness comes your spirit shall grow less and dwindle away, never to reappear. Listen!11 (The blanks in the opening lines are for the name and clan of the victim.) Like other Indian tribes, the Cherokees have a color symbolism associated with the cardinal directions. Black is associated with the west and signifies death—it is naturally the dominant color in this charm. Blue is associated with the north and signifies defeat or trouble, and it is often used in their charms to mean an uneasiness of mind, a sorrow, or disappointment. When, near the end, this charm says that the victim's soul "has become blue," it indicates that his soul is already beginning to be aware of the effects of the charm, is already feeling in itself the weakening and the shrinking that will continue until it dwindles away ("The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," pp. 242, 390-92). A look at the Cherokee text reveals that the repetitions of sound and of word are there—some of them, perhaps, induced by the form of the language, but they are nevertheless there. I think that it is much more likely they are there because the magic requires that they be there. In order to get the power to kill an enemy, the Cherokee sorcerer had to find words which move, and in doing so found the strange beauty of this charm. Even when it leaves the world of primitive magic, poetry will often retain that archaic sense of casting a spell, of magical compulsion, that comes to it from charm. If they recognize it, poets tend to respect this old voice when

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they come upon it, even in the face of much more reasonable demands made by the poem. Poe is famous for valuing this sense, even for forcing it, and his famous lines from "The City in the Sea," with their rich coincidences of sound, are a good charm: Whose wreathed friezes intertwine The viol, the violet, and the vine. Some readers, however, have not been moved. The first edition of the poem had exotic "Babylon-like" walls, Whose entablatures intertwine The mask—the viol—and the vine, a version that Poe dropped when the incantatory voice surfaced. Paul Fussell, among other good critics, prefers the clearer sense of the first version: "But for Poe music must take precedence over even symbolism and semantic meaning, and he revises the passage until it stands as the very locus classicus of sweetness overtaking sense." Roy Harvey Pearce has taken a similar critical stance against certain poems of William Carlos Williams, poems in which, he complains, "the incantatory overrides logic, structure, and the disposition of meaning."12 The appearance of that archaic voice in poetry is difficult to describe and impossible to defend against demands for "sense." Paul Valery, ever concerned with the rhythms of melopoeia, was convinced of its importance, yet his statements can hardly be called arguments: It must not be forgotten that for centuries poetry was used for purposes of enchantment. Those who took part in these strange operations had to believe in the power of the word, and far more in the efficacy of its sound than in its significance. Magic formulas are often without meaning; but it was never thought that their power depended on their intellectual content. Let us listen to lines like these:

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Mere des souvenirs, maitresse des mattresses . . . or Sois sage, ό ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. . . . These words work on us (or at least on some of us) without telling us very much. They tell us, perhaps, that they have nothing to tell us; that, by the very means which usually tell us something, they are exercising a quite different function. (The Art of Poetry, pp. 74-75) In charms, Valery understood, the power of the words lies far more in their sounds than in their literal significance. It is a language of deep roots. The ethnologists who collect primitive charms face a particularly difficult problem when they try to determine the meaning, the "sense" made by the words in a charm. In collecting Eskimo charms, Diamond Jenness and Knud Rasmussen both noted striking differences between the language of the charms and the language of ordinary speech, and Rasmussen suggested that the charms employed a special language of the shamans, sometimes with ancient words that had fallen into disuse. W. W. Skeat, son of the great philologist, said that he spent many hours trying to discover the exact meaning of the Semang love-charm; the language was not the ordinary Semang dialect but belonged, he felt, to a more archaic dialect. James Mooney also believed that the special language of the Cherokee charms he had uncovered was archaic and came from the nearly extinct Eastern, or "Lower Cherokee," dialect, and a later collector thought that, in addition to a level of archaic words, there were influences from the Western, or "Upper Cherokee," dialect. (The ordinary spoken language of the tribe is the Central, or "Middle Cherokee," dialect.) R. F. Fortune, reporting on Dobuan charms, pointed out simply, "The words of Dobuan magic are not words of ordinary speech. They form a secret esoteric language, a language of power." Bronislaw

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Malinowski discussed at length the special languge of the Trobriand charms. One example is the word vatuvi, the key word opening the garden-charm above, and a form never found in ordinary speech.13 Old English scholars have been similarly troubled by the meanings of the word Erce which opens the charm for infertile land, and they usually gloss it either as the lost name of a Germanic fertility goddess or else as "meaningless incantation." The language of the charms is not entirely, or even nearly all, a special language, but it does contain many mysterious elements which ethnologists trace to special "magic names" for things, to words that may be from distant or archaic dialects, to obscure mythological references or topographical allusions, and to strange usages of syntax, morphology, and phonology. Native informants have their own explanations of this language, and when pressed by an ethnologist for exact translations they will usually slide by, as the Cherokees do, by saying that "this was the way it was said by the people who lived a long time ago" (The Swimmer Manuscript, p. 163). The charms, as they know, are fixed, traditional texts that have been handed down from a long time ago through a line of trained magicians, the ultimate source being, perhaps, a mythological power or culture hero. Magic words are believed by the Trobriand Islanders to be something that came into existence at the very beginning of things, coeval with the other powers of the world, and that is why they work on those powers. Magic language is primeval language, and naturally it is different from the language of ordinary speech; it is "true speech," distinct from "the way of talk" (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 11, 216-18, 222-23). To produce an effect, the charms must use, along with ritual actions, words capable of acting, words felt to be themselves actions, and something important is missed if we explain these obscure and mysterious elements of "true speech" as survivals of archaic dialects or as simply "meaningless incantation." Although both explanations are in 151

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many cases true, their truth does not go deep enough. The language that has been selected for magic use, a language of strange, irregular rhythms and rich nets of sound-pattern, was felt to be, as R. F. Fortune said, a special language of power. Malinowski called this element in charm language the "coefficient of weirdness": If the main principle of magical belief is that words exercise power in virtue of their primeval mysterious connexion with some aspect of reality, then obviously we must not expect the words of Trobriand magic to act in virtue of their ordinary colloquial meaning. A spell is believed to be a primeval text which somehow came into being side by side with animals and plants, with winds and waves, with human disease, human courage and human frailty. Why should such words be as the words of common speech? They are not uttered to carry ordinary information from man to man, or to give advice or an order. The natives might naturally expect all such words to be very mysterious and far removed from ordinary speech. And so they are to a large extent, but by no means completely. Much of the vocabulary, grammar, and prosody of the language of the charms, he goes on to say, "falls into line with the deeply ingrained belief that magical speech must be cast in another mould, because it is derived from other sources and produces different effects from ordinary speech" (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, n, 218). Vatuvi, for example, in form neither noun nor verb, is a special inaugurative word "launched freely into the substances to be charmed, the herbs, the axes, the torches and diggingsticks. It has got no context of direct connexion with any specific thing or agency. It has to be taken as a verbal missile of magical power—a conception very much in harmony with the repetitive character of its utterance, whereby it is rubbed into the substance" (11, 248). Another such verbal missile, we can believe, was the inaugurative Old Eng-

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lish word Erce, directed into the mixture of seeds, incense, fennel, holy soap, and holy salt in the plow. It belonged to the language of magic power—meaningless to us, perhaps, but then it was not meant for us. In the search for words which move, then, the language of magic sought out what became the melopoeia of charms, a special language of webs of sound and irregular rhythms different from the language used to communicate ordinary meanings. But it is not "meaningless" language—how could it be? The language is different from ordinary speech because, as Malinowski says, it is derived from other sources and produces different effects. Nor is it simply a question of archaic vocabulary and syntax, the sort of thing we would call poetic diction. The special language of the charms represents a much deeper encroachment of melopoeia into the area of logopoeia or lexis; it is derived not from old meanings but from old powers of sound and rhythm flowing into and shaping the language—a difference not of diction but of basic structure. The language of the charms is a language of power, and that power comes primarily not from lexical meanings, archaic or colloquial, but from other meanings hidden deep in the sounds and rhythms. But here we must pause to protect our flank, for when the charm radical appears too openly in the language poets use, in Poe's language for example, literary critics can become very skeptical. To suggest that incantatory sound and rhythm are in some cases meant to override the logical meanings in a lyric poem is in some quarters asking for trouble. We are nevertheless not in any essential disagreement with critics such as I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, or W. K. Wimsatt, who are concerned with the complexities of semantic and analogical meanings in a poem, who feel that sound and rhythm are important only as they contribute to and complicate these prior meanings, and who, moreover, are devastatingly adept at demonstrating how a similar sound-pattern has quite different effects when it is placed

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in different semantic contexts—thus proving that soundpatterns have no "poetic" functions on their own. There is no disagreement so long as it is recognized that these demonstrations are not talking about roots. Their method begins with the finished product, the meanings a poem has developed through word and image, and then works backward to the sound-patterns of the poem. When it gets down to sound and rhythm, it is concerned not with melopoeia but with a kind of onomatopoeia, an imitation in sound of lexical meaning. It is a method that is oriented toward phanopoeia, and it considers (and ultimately disqualifies) sound as a possible element in the juxtaposition of two meanings.14 Melopoeia by itself can make no claim for clear lexical meaning. If, as Eliot suggested, "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," clearly what such poetry communicates before it is understood is not an understandable meaning. The rhythm of the charm root exercises, in Valery's words, a quite different function. As he often does, Pound gives the impression of having thought about and settled all this for himself some time ago. Discussing phanopoeia and melopoeia as they affect both prose and poetry, he wrote: In Phanopoeia we find the greatest drive toward utter precision of word; this art [prose] exists almost exclusively by it. In melopoeia we find a contrary current, a force tending often to lull, or to distract the reader from the exact sense of the language. It is poetry on the borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe. (Literary Essays, p. 26) Both ways of charging language are of course sources of good poetry. Phanopoeia in poetry drives toward precision of image and thought, the clear, precise seeing and knowing that is needed for a good riddle or a good Image poem.

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Melopoeia, on the other hand, is a force that leads poetry away from precisions of word and meaning, but that may be, as Pound said, a bridge to a non-verbal consciousness. The words of a charm are not derived from seeing and knowing but from the actions of the sound-patterns, and they are concerned not with vision but with power. The primary interest of the charm for us is as a subter ranean root feeding the growth of more complex forms of lyric, but we also find, as we did with the riddles, that from time to time poets are attracted into conscious literary imitations of the primitive form. These are of interest to criticism because they give us a poet's view of an important root of his art, and, further, because with some poets even a conscious imitation manifests the power of the old roots. Shakespeare's imitation of a charm in Macbeth has been successful enough: ι Witch. Round about the cauldron go; In the poison'd entrails throw. Toad that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one Swelt'red venom sleeping got Boil thou first i' th' charmed pot. All. Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. The first part gives the directions for the magic actions, and the second part, with the thick, internal repetitions of sound, gives the magic words. Shakespeare probably had in mind the spells, found throughout the witchcraft-lore of the period, for invoking the powers of darkness, and in the play his charm imitates their effects as well as their words: the ritual actions are performed, the words are spoken, and Macbeth appears—drawn onto the scene for more dark equivocations that will spur his vaulting ambition. For most people, however, Ariel's lovely charm in The Tempest casts more of a spell:

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Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Burden. Ding-dong. Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong bell. The witches' charm has the obvious rhythms of charm, but the sound-patterns in Ariel's charm—the assonances, alliterations, rhymes, and the subtle movements as one vowelsound or consonant-sound changes to another—generate deeper, far more elusive rhythms and a magic that is truly something rich and strange. Productions of The Tempest usually set this charm to the music of Elizabethan song, adding an outside rhythm and melody to the words, but the words themselves have the irregular, internal rhythms of a much older music. And again it is as a charm that it works in the play: Ferdinand, close to despair over his father's apparent drowning, is drawn by this charm to Miranda, even though he does not understand its words of transformation and rebirth. Pound also wrote a literary imitation of a charm, a "chant for the transmutation of metals" called "The Alchemist," which uses names hinting of old, mysterious, Greek and Romance origins to help generate the charmed sound-patterns. Two sections of it: Sail of Claustra, Aelis, Azalais, As you move among the bright trees; As your voices, under the larches of Paradise Make a clear sound, Sail of Claustra, Aelis, Azalais, Raimona, Tibors, Berangere, 'Neath the dark gleam of the sky;

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Under night, the peacock-throated, Bring the saffron-coloured shell, Bring the red gold of the maple, Bring the light of the birch tree in autumn Mirals, Cembelins, Audiarda, Remember this fire. Midonz, with the gold of the sun, the leaf of the poplar, by the light of the amber, Midonz, daughter of the sun, shaft of the tree, silver of the leaf, light of the yellow of the amber, Midonz, gift of the God, gift of the light, gift of the amber of the sun, Give light to the metal. (.Personae, p. 75) The poem shows, I believe, that Pound understood the charm. He understood the irregular rhythms generated by word-repetitions and rich vowel-patterns, and he understood the kind of magic that would be necessary to give light to the dark metal, to transform raw elements into gold or into poetry. The archaic music of charms surfaces again throughout The Cantos, and we hear it in the TamuzAdonis ritual of Canto XLVII, where fragments of old language from Bion's lament for Adonis become a charm for fertility and healing (Τυ Διώνα, Kat Molpai / Kat Motpai" Άδοην); in Canto LXXIX, where in the language of a Eu ropean folk charm the lynx of Dionysos is called up by Pound as a protection-charm in the Pisan cage ("O Lynx keep watch on my fire"); and as late as the fragmentary rite of Canto CXII: . . . owl, and wagtail and huo3-hu2, the fire-fox Amrta, that is nectar white wind, white dew

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Here from the beginning, we have been here from the beginning From her breath were the goddesses 2 La 2 mun 3 mi 2 If we did not perform Ndaw J bpo nothing is solid without 2Muan xbpo no reality. . . . Except for the Sanskrit Amrta ("the nectar conferring immortality"), the special language here is the Tibeto-Burman language of the Na-khi tribesmen of southwest China, and it comes from a ceremony of purification and fertility. The rest of the short Canto CXII adds two Chinese ideograms, two Latin names for sacred plants used in the Na-khi ceremony, and two pictographs from the sacred texts of the Na-khi.15 The result is a literary charm that attempts to recreate a special language and rite of power. Like the charms of Trobriand garden-magic, Pound's charm calls on the power of sounding words and the power of ritual actions as realities which, like wind and dew, "have been here / from the beginning." Pound's literary charms recover a further element of power in the charm radical, the magic of names. All three charms from The Cantos use names as a source of sound and of power, and the rich-sounding names in "The Alchemist" are all names of women, some thirty-five in all in the complete poem, taken from the old literatures of southern Europe. The magic of names is an old root in poetry that derives from the charm and its concern with power. Primitive cultures, and the anthropologists who study them, must pay careful attention to the use or avoidance of names by members of a society, and this general feeling for the power, and the danger, of names appears particularly in the language of the society's charms. In the charms, naming can include the formal repetition of ordi-

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nary names for things which are being approached in a non-ordinary way, the use of special "magic names" which hold power over things, and the calling of secret, holy names of powerful, though often vaguely realized, mythological figures or forces. The weather-charm from the Copper Eskimos depends on the repeated naming of the clouds for much of its power ("Clouds, clouds. . ."), as the Australian charm for a falling star drives away the evil spirit by naming it ("star: falling: at night time"). The charm-voice that emerges from one of the depths of "The Tyger" begins similarly with the naming of the bright terror ("Tyger Tyger, burning bright"). The section of the Trobriand garden-charm naming the long line of magician-ancestors both invokes their power and establishes their presence in the ceremony; "the list of ancestors affirms the magician's charter," Malinowski writes, "while at the same time the names of those who had so much to do with fertility in the past possess a fertilising influence" (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, n, 259). On the malefic side of the charms is the necessity of the name and the clan of the victim in the Cherokee curse "To Destroy Life." The reality of names and the power residing in them often persists into literate cultures, sometimes with strange results (how many names have been incised into trees and school desks as love charms attempting to establish the presence of the beloved?). When the Old English charm was directed into pasture land rather than plowed land, it required four sods taken before dawn from four sides of the enchanted field: the sods were blessed in various ways which mixed the old Ciermanic magic with the newer magic of Christianity and then returned to the field. But as each sod was replaced, fertility was further encouraged by burying under the sod a small cross of aspen wood with the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John inscribed on the ends. And again there is another side of this power: Robert C. Elliott reminds us of the curse tablets (defxiones) of the Greeks and Romans, metal tablets buried in the earth or

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thrown into the sea, some with elaborate curses written on them, others bearing down with them only the name of the enemy with a nail driven through it (The Power of Satire, pp. 287-88). In Dobuan magic the secret names of mythological forces are important elements in charms for fertility, for love, and for killing an enemy. The charms in general draw on three necessary powers—magic words, magic ritual, and magic naming—and though particular charms may emphasize one power and omit another, all three are felt to be fundamental to charm-magic. As in other charms, moreover, these powers in Dobuan charms are directed at two primary effects, which the sorcerers call egoyainina ("the naming and hurling away of evil") and ebwainina ("the naming and superimposing of good"—Sorcerers of Dobu, pp. 95, 129, 227). Evil (blights and pests in the gardens, a rival in love, an enemy in sorcery) is named to hurl it away, and good (growth of the yams, the beauty of the beloved, deadly powers and their effects on the enemy) is named to bring it here. If in riddles names are the consequences of things—to name is to have known, and to know is to have seen—then in the charms things are a consequence of names, called forth by powers residing in names "from the beginning." Control of those powers depends not 011 clear vision but on obscure, esoteric knowledge, traditional or personal, which no amount of vision alone can uncover. There are riddles in the charm root, not the riddles defined by folklorists as "true riddles" but questions that are ultimately meant to deceive, enigmatic puzzles which only someone in possession of the secret knowledge can unravel. Folk literature is full of situations, often perilous ones, in which the power of this kind of naming survives. A "neck riddle" is a question asked by a condemned person which cannot be answered without the secret knowledge he alone possesses, and it gives him the power to save his life. In the folktale "Rumpelstiltskin" a mother is able to save her baby from

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a dwarf only after she secretly obtains the dwarf's name, and in the ballad "Riddles Wisely Expounded" (Child No. ic) a girl drives away the Devil by naming him: As sune as she the fiend did name, He flew awa in a blazing flame. We arrive, finally, at the second sense in which poetry can make things present by naming them. At the roots of phanopoeia, naming is a structure of vision and knowledge, and phanopoeia's way of making things present is to bring time and process into the present tense of the Image. At the roots of melopoeia, naming is a power directed at causing effects, bringing things from there to here or hurling them from here to there. The counterpart to the feeling of phanopoeia in our double sense of the Greek verb olSa is the double sense in the English verb "call," which means both "to name" and "to summon." The yams in their gardens, the Dobuans say, "grow big for our calling on them" (Sorcerers of Dobu, p. 107). Poetry is of course art and not magic, but when the charm root strongly informs the words of a lyric poem it commands a kind of attention quite different from the intellectual precision that a generation of critics trained on the metaphysical poets has learned to use. Ferdinand felt the charm-powers in Ariel's song without "figuring" it out. The two kinds of naming in poetry correspond to two different ways of charging the language of poems with meaning, and they appear to derive from very different roots. Both roots of lyric, we have agreed, lie in language, but in language itself lie even deeper sources, ways of seeing and powers of action.

VII. CHANT

THE MELOPOEIA of charms, as Huxley, Valery, and the Trobriand Islanders have pointed out to us, uses the irregular internal rhythms of the sounds in magic words for purposes of magic action. Although no definite rules or firm categories apply for long among the richly complex forms of primitive poetry, beneath the complexities we can hear and distinguish another rhythm in the melopoeia of this poetry, a fundamentally different rhythm directed at a different kind of action. It is the root of our first kind of melopoeia, in which the external rhythms of music organize and direct the words of a song. A regular rather than an irregular rhythm, it is based on pure, physical pulsation, the kind of time-pattern that made Valery wish for a musician's gifts. We can experience rhythm without language, and can easily imagine rhythm that is in fact prior to language. If the street he was climbing had been less steep, Valery could have danced, for human art expresses such rhythms first with dance and drum. And when such rhythms, essentially independent of language, enter language, we have song. In societies primitive or non-primitive, song is an art in which the words are strongly controlled by rhythms derived from music and dance. Primitive songs sung primarily for pleasure and entertainment seem mainly to use the ordinary language of everyday speech, but the language is always subservient to the musical rhythm. In contrast to the language of charms, we find in the songs of many cultures words and syllables that are truly "nonsense" sounds, or rather sounds which make only rhythmical sense. They are not magic words directed at magic actions, but rhythmical actions—sounds used as

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time-makers, as part of the rhythmical pulse. Song-melos is a fundamentally heavier and more regular rhythm than charm-melos, and the charm's sound-repetitions of alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and repeated words tend to be more consistently patterned when they appear in song, often used to support larger units of repetition such as the verse-line or groups of lines in catalogues and refrains. Underlying and controlling all these repetitions of sound we can hear the pure beat of a dance rhythm. Some of these rhythmical characteristics are heard in a song from the Eskimos of the Coppermine River. The song is about the hunter's bow; I quote only the first stanza in the native language, and the collector's literal translation of the entire song: Verse i.

pigiava nakigikpakpa picikcagyuk nakigikpakpa ai ya Refrain. pigiava i yai ya i ai yai yai ya pigiava i ai yai yai yai yai Connective, i yai i yai

He constantly The big bow, He constantly He constantly i yai i yai.

bends it, he constantly sends it straight, he constantly sends it straight. bends it, i yai ya i ai yai yai ya, bends it, i ai yai yai yai yai,

Subject-matter for words [theme for a song] as he really seeks well, The big bow, he constantly sends it straight. He constantly bends it, i yai ya i ai yai yai ya, He constantly bends it, i ai yai yai yai yai, i yai i yai. He constantly bends it as he walks along, In summer as he walks along. He constantly bends it, i yai ya i ai yai yai ya, He constantly bends it, i ai yai yai yai yai, i yai i yai.

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Big birds it is evidently easy to secure, As he carries his pack, walking along. He constantly bends it, i yai ya i ai yai yai ya, He constantly bends it, i ai yai yai yai yai. (Songs of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 459-60) The song is actually danced and the dance rhythm is primary, the repeated sounds, repeated words, and repeated phrases all functioning as elements of that rhythm. And as in many dance songs, the rhythm in this song overrides language to the point of producing a large proportion of "meaningless" elements. The repeated i yai syllables are not magic words but, like our own culture's "too-ra-la" or "do-wop do-wah," rhythmical units, signs of the domination of language by music. A dance song such as the Eskimo song is both a communal performance and a communal participation, and it is in this social context that we find a deeper basis for the rhythms of song-melos. Charms are generally not meant to be shared by a community. Rasmussen noted that Eskimo charms are usually performed in solitude, perhaps in the early morning before anyone else has walked on the floor, or outside in a remote place where there are no footprints of other men. The words of a charm are a closely guarded secret, the property of their owner; he may sell the charm, but its magic then goes with the new owner (The Netsilik Eskimos, p. 278). The suspicious Dobuans also guard their charms carefully, R. F. Fortune wrote, and any eavesdropper is regarded as a potential thief (Sorcerers of Dobu, p. 96). The nearby Trobriand Islanders appear to be more open about their charms, but this is because of their rigid respect for each other's property: one simply does not trespass on another's magic (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, ii, 224-25). Cherokee sorcerers were freer with their charms for good hunting, love, or curing than with malevolent charms for hurting or killing, which they would not reveal to an uninitiated person at any price. Even in the case of

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charms for causing good, however, they worried that the magic became weaker the more it was diffused (The Swimmer Manuscript, pp. 147-48). But alongside such privately owned and closely guarded charms are found charms that have moved into a more public area. Certain healing charms may be the property of secret societies, and this is a step closer to a communal context. The Trobriand garden-charms are the property of matrilineal kinship-groups, but their effect is a matter of concern for the whole community, and Malinowski tells us that the charms are overheard by most members of the community as the magician works for their benefit. For some Eskimo charms against blizzards, which threaten the entire community with famine, every member of the tribe is gathered to chant under the leadership of a shaman (Songs of the Copper Eskimos, p. 14). In a case such as this, the charm is likely to take on some of the rhythm of communal dance and song. The rhythm of a song such as the Eskimo dance song is a communal rhythm, for the communal context of the song influences the rhythm in several ways. Since the song is meant to be danced by the members of the community, it demands a regular rhythm even if that rhythm has to be stretched over nonsense syllables. Communal participation also creates the regular refrain: the main verses are sung by a leader, but all the dancers sing the refrain. Beyond these direct influences are other communal associations, forces which in Copper Eskimo society focus on the dance hall as the center of social life and social action. The closed, internal rhythms and the special language of charms are meant for secret power, but the dance rhythms of primitive song are a public power which joins together the members of a society. Both are forms of action, one sacred and the other secular. We find in primitive poetry, then, two distinguishable, but not always clearly separated, roots of melopoeia: the

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rhythms of charm-melos based in magic action and the rhythms of song-melos based in social action. They are found combined in a more complex form of literature which we may call—only for the purposes of distinction, and only in a very provisional mood—chant. It is poetry organized by both the internal rhythms of language and the external rhythms of music. Many chants are in fact danced, but even when they are not they retain a strong dancerhythm, often reinforced by accompanying drums, rattles, tapping-sticks, or foot-stamps. The charm root is also present in the sound-associations of words, in many elements from a special language outside the language of everyday speech, and in the basis of sacred action—but here delivered as the voice of the society and acting for the benefit of the community. The fullest realization of the communal context of chant is probably best represented by the impressive mythological chants associated with rituals that re-enact a tribal charter and reaffirm a communal identity. Such a chant comes from the Night Chant of the Navahos, a great healing ceremonial which gathers the entire community together. In this ceremonial, songs, dances, rites, and prayers are combined in one long ritual performed over a succession of nine nights and ten days for curing a diseased or injured member of the community. On the morning of the fourth day the shaman and the patient sit together in the medicine lodge and chant this prayer, the patient repeating the words line by line after the shaman: Tse'gihi Hayolkal behogan Nahotsoi behogan K6sdilyil behogan 5 Niltsabaka behogan A'dilyil behogan Niltsabaad behogan Taditdin behogan Aniltani behogan

CHANT

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

Kosdilyil dadinlá Kósdilyil biké dzeétin Atsinitlís yíke dasizíni Hastsébaka Nigél islá' Nadíhila' Siké saádilil Sitsát saádilil Sitsís saáditlil Síni saáditlil Sine saaditlil Tádisdzin naalál sáhadilel Naalíl sahanéinla' Sitsádze tahíndinla' Nizágo nastlín Hozógo nadedisdál Hozógo sitáha dinokél Hoz6go tsidisál Sitáha honezkázigo nasádo Dosatéhigo nasádo Dosohodilnígo nasádo Saná' nislíngo nasádo Daalkída kitégo nasádo Hozógo k6sdilyil senahotlédo nasádo Hoz6go nasádo Hozógo sedahwiltíndo nasádo Hozogo nanise senahotledo nasado Hozogo taditdin keheetingo nasado Hozogo nasado Tase alkidzi ahonilgo nasado Sitsidze hozodo Sikede hozodo Siyade hozodo Sikide hozodo Sina taaltso hozodo Hozo nahastlin Hoz6 nahastlin 167

CHANT

5

io

15

20

25

30

35

Tse'gihi. House made of the dawn. House made of evening light. House made of the dark cloud. House made of male rain. House made of dark mist. House made of female rain. House made of pollen. House made of grasshoppers. Dark cloud is at the door. The trail out of it is dark cloud. The zigzag lightning stands high up on it. Male deity! Your offering I make. I have prepared a smoke for you. Restore my feet for me. Restore my legs for me. Restore my body for me. Restore my mind for me. Restore my voice for me. This very day take out your spell for me. Your spell remove for me. You have taken it away for me. Far off it has gone. Happily I recover. Happily my interior becomes cool. Happily I go forth. My interior feeling cool, may I walk. No longer sore, may I walk. Impervious to pain, may I walk. With lively feelings may I walk. As it used to be long ago, may I walk. Happily may I walk. Happily with abundant dark clouds, may I walk Happily with abundant showers, may I walk. Happily with abundant plants, may I walk. Happily on a trail of pollen, may I walk.

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40

45

Happily may I walk. Being as it used to be long ago, may I walk. May it be happy [or beautiful] before me. May it be beautiful behind me. May it be beautiful below me. May it be beautiful above me. May it be beautiful all around me. In beauty it is finished. In beauty it is finished. 1

Charm-melos and song-melos come together in the rhythms of this prayer. The words of a prayer operate in the context of religion in a manner analogous to the verbal actions of a charm in the context of magic, and the sound-patterns we expect to hear in a charm occur here as well. There is the word-repetition of behogdn ("house made of . . .") in what we might call the invocation (vv. 1-15), and the same device is used with other words throughout the prayer. In the section that beseeches the god to remove sickness or disease (vv. 16-22) a sound-pattern is built up through the incantation of repeated s sounds (Sike . . . Sitsdt . . . Sitsis . . . Sini. . . Sine), and at the end of the prayer this pattern also recurs (vv. 40-44). As charms are accompanied by ritual actions, this prayer is accompanied by the application of pollen to parts of the patient's body and by the sacrifice of sacred bundles to the gods. From our point of view, however, the prayer is more chant than charm. The sound-repetitions and word-repetitions are part of more regular patterns that form the verseline into a single rhythmical unit repeated not rigidly but regularly, most obviously in the repetition of each line by the patient and in the several striking catalogues. The steady regularity of the patterns of repeated sounds, words, and lines is a clue to the underlying dance rhythm of the chant. The prayer is not danced and not sung, but the rhythms of Navaho dance-song, which follow the steady beat of rattle and basket-drum, are still strongly felt. Forms

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of the same prayer are addressed to different gods throughout the entire ceremonial of the Night Chant, and on the ninth day it is chanted publicly with dancers actually present, keeping up a restrained but constant dance-rhythm with their feet and bodies. 2 Although such signs of song-melos are evident in the prayer itself, its power of social action becomes apparent only when it is considered in its communal context. Washington Matthews, who studied and recorded the Night Chant ceremonial, observed that it is a great social event for the Navahos, a time for the people to gather together to socialize, feast, gamble, and race horses, but also to act as witnesses to the dances and rituals. The ceremonial itself is primarily concerned with curing a particular individual of disease or injury, but its prayers also invoke the gods for happiness, abundant rains, good crops, and other blessings for the community as a whole. In traditional societies religion is a central element of communal identity, and in the course of the Night Chant nearly all the important gods and spirits of the Navahos are mentioned in its myths, songs, and prayers, depicted in its sand-paintings, or represented by its masqueraders (The Night Chant, pp. 3-4). The central myth of the Night Chant relates the journey of The Visionary, a man who traveled with the gods, learned the ceremonial from them, and brought back its powers of healing and fertility to the Navaho people. Through the rituals of the ceremonial, the shaman and the patient— with the tribe as witness—symbolically re-enact the myth of the journey, and the cure, it has been suggested, is effected by submerging the patient in the primal sources of tribal identity embodied in this basic myth. 3 The formula at the end of the prayer of the fourth day, and all the other prayers like it, is Hozo nahastlin: it means, according to Matthews, "It is done in beauty" or "It is finished happily" and is analogous to the Christian "amen" (The Night Chant, p. 296). In both formulas we hear communal recognition and assent to the words of the prayer.

CHANT

The dance rhythm and the powers of social action at the roots of mythological chants are seen again in an Aranda chant collected in Central Australia by T.G.H. Strehlow. Sections of the chant are at times danced, and at those times it is, like the Navaho chant, part of a full ritual drama. The dances re-enact the awakening and the bloody journey of Ankotarinja, the dingo (Australian wild dog)-ancestor of a totemic group. The origin myth associated with the chant and the rituals tells how Ankotarinja, after lying asleep for long ages in a hollow in the earth, slowly came to consciousness and arose from the soft soil. He covered himself with red down and sniffed the four winds, finding in the west wind the warm scent of tjilpa (native cat)-men. The scent angered him: he rushed through an underground journey and emerged in the west, where dog-like he tracked down the men and devoured them. Full to bursting, he lay down and fell asleep. There came upon the scene of the massacre another man, an avenger from the west who decapitated the sleeping Ankotarinja and released the swallowed men. But a totem-ancestor can never completely die, and the head of Ankotarinja rolled back through the underground passage to seek the hollow from which it first emerged, and there it finally came to rest. The myth embodies the communal consciousness of the totemic group, and in the chant it is fused with the dance rhythm. In the ritual that re-enacts the myth, a central actor performs the actions of the dog-ancestor, furiously scratching the earth on all fours; the old men of the group chant the verses and keep up a steady rhythm by beating the ground with firebrands or boomerangs while the rest of the men perform a shuffling dance around him. Groups of lines are repeated over and over while the actor is being prepared and while he performs the ritual. The language of the chant is an extremely artificial language, completely dominated by external patterns of rhythm. The words of everyday language are broken up into syllables and rearranged according to formal, traditional patterns of versifi-

CHANT cation. Speech r h y t h m gives way to chant rhythm, yielding a special chant language characterized by strong patterns of repetition in sound, word, and verse-line: 1.

Nómabaué

2.

N6mabué

rérlanopai

N 6 m a y a t í n tyélanopái rélanopái

N 6 m a a l b á tínyanopái 3.

Nómabaué

rérlanopai

N 6 m a t n y e n y á lbélanopai 4.

Nómaarkwé

rkárlanopái

Nómatnyenyá 5.

Nómakanté

lbélanopai

kántanopái

Nómatnyenyá

lbélanopai

6. T n í m a r u b ú r u b á láitnibé Tnímawurúbingá 7.

láitnibe

T n í m a n a t á n tyálitnibé T n í m a w u r u b i n g á láitnibe

8. R a t ú w a t e l á lurbmáturatú Ralílertyalá lurbmáturatu 9. Watúwatelá l u m b á t n u w a t n ú Walílertyelá l u m b á t n u w a t n é 10.

L i m a n o w 6 bintyintilé L i m a l d u l é ratyintilé

11. L i m a n g k u l é ralintilé Limaldule 12.

ratyintile

Maramínyutikéle Naramínyutikéle, Nikwantálbantítyaló, Mikwantálbantítyaló

13.

Marangkálurkngulyelé Mikwantélbantityaló

14.

Warábityábityáu, Walyutulbélo 172

CHANT

15. 16. 17. 18.

Ntimankote namarire nalintibe Ntimaatya ralintibe Ntimatyibu larintibe Ntimaatya ralintibe Ntimangkule ralintibe Ntimanuwo bintyintibe Nomaarkwe rkarlanopai Nomatnyenya lbelanopai

(Since the words are broken up and rearranged according to the verse patterns, the medial break is only a caesura, not a new word.) The translation, Strehlow says, is necessarily a free one that attempts to catch some of the shades of meaning in the original. Most of the words in the first five lines, for example, mean generally "are red" or "gleam red," yet they are all derived from different roots and carry different implications in the Aranda language: 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Red is the down which is covering me; Red I am as though I was burning in a fire. Red I am as though I was burning in a fire, Bright red gleams the ochre with which I have rubbed my body. Red I am as though I was burning in a fire, Red, too, is the hollow in which I am lying. Red I am like the heart of a flame of fire, Red, too, is the hollow in which I am lying. The red tjurunga is resting upon my head, Red, too, is the hollow in which I am lying. Like a whirlwind it is towering to the sky, Like a pillar of red sand it is towering to the sky.

The tnatantja is towering to the sky, Like a pillar of red sand it is towering to the sky. 8. A mass of red pebbles covers the plains, Little white sand-rills cover the plains.

CHANT

9.

Lines of red pebbles streak the plains, Lines of white sand-rills streak the plains.

10.

An underground pathway lies open before me, Leading straight west, it lies open before me.

11.

A cavernous pathway lies open before me, Leading straight west, it lies open before me.

12.

He is sucking his beard into his mouth in anger, Like a dog he follows the trail by scent.

13.

He hurries on swiftly, like a keen dog; Like a dog he follows the trail by scent.

14.

Irresistible and foaming with rage,— Like a whirlwind he rakes them together.

15.

Out yonder, not far from me, lies Ankota; The underground hollow is gaping open before me.

16.

A straight track is gaping open before me, An underground hollow is gaping open before me.

17.

A cavernous pathway is gaping open before me, An underground pathway is gaping open before me.

18.

Red I am, like the heart of a flame of fire, Red, too, is the hollow in which I am resting.

(The tnatantja mentioned in the chant is a towering, living pole of great power conceived of as having risen from the totemic ground "ever from the beginning" and represented in the ceremonies by a tall, decorated wooden pole. Tjurunga refers generally to sacred stone or wooden objects infused with the power and fertility of the totemic ancestor, and in this chant refers specifically to the tnatantja. Ankota is the name of the totemic ground where Ankotarinja first emerged and where his head finally came to rest.) 4 The rhythmical structures, patterns of versification, and special forms of language in this and other Aranda chants are complex and sophisticated, but the fundamental principle of rhythmical organization is a steady and regular musical measure. The chants, Strehlow writes, "owe most of

CHANT

their poetic form and interesting structure to the hammerbeats of the rhythms that ring through their couplets" (Songs of Central Australia, p. 18). We can probably get no closer than this Australian chant to the roots of the chant rhythm, and we can sense, though never prove, that the basis of that rhythm lies in the communal context, that it is a public power directed at social action. There are clear reasons why a communal chant or dance must be based on regular patterns of repetition, but, like the basis of the irregular charm-rhythm in magic, more interesting reasons lie deeper. The fact that a chant, particularly a mythological chant, needs to be expressed in a regular rhythm, in a public rather than a private and secretive rhythm, comes from the purpose of the chant and the reason it came into existence. The Aranda chant grew out of the shared knowledge of a totemic group, a knowledge which the chant in turn recreates for the group. The entire ritual—the chant, the myth, the dance, the drama—is an explanation of the origins of the totemic ancestor, and therefore of the group itself. The re-creation of this knowledge, then, is also a reaffirmation of the group's existence. The goal of the chant is an ambitious one: through the dance, through the social action of the ritual, through the shared knowledge of communal origins, it attempts to create and maintain a rhythm uniting individuals into a community. Rhythm, perhaps, can function in this manner only in a traditional society, or in those brief communities that form when individuals momentarily share a common knowledge, identity, and goal. Work songs, though rare in primitive societies, are common in folk cultures, and they necessarily show the same strong rhythmic movement and regular patterns of repetition. The game-songs of children and the songs and chants of football games or protest marches are further instances—trivial examples, it may seem, when compared to the Navaho and Australian chants, but nevertheless rediscoveries of an old and powerful root of poetry.

CHANT

The melopoeia of poetry is usually approached through carefully defined and largely self-contained systems of prosody. At the roots, however, melopoeia is inseparable from much broader areas of human experience. Our subject is the rhythm of chants, but that rhythm directly involves us in speculations about myth and time, language and action, as deeper foundations of the music of poetry. In place of phanopoeia's sense of pattern, of time caught in space, we hear in the chants a steady beat carrying the poetry forward through time a n d action. Quarles' H i e r o glyphics of the Life of Man presented a method of phanopoeia that catches up the themes of time and process in picture and spatial form. The Navaho chant and the Aranda chant, on the other hand, present a poetry in which one of the roots of melopoeia, the underlying dance rhythm, is fused with the theme of a journey and its strong sense of movement. In the Navaho chant the dance rhythm is joined to The Visionary's archetypal journey to the gods for curative powers, in the Aranda chant to the furious, rushing journey of the ancestor Ankotarinja. Again, this is not simply onomatopoeia but two very different forms of expression working together. Yet the two forms of expression, rhythm and theme, both derive from fundamental bases in communal action. Behind the rhythm is the communal action of dance, and behind the themes are communal myths which emphasize movement. The ethnologist Margot Astrov has suggested that the theme of traveling in Navaho myths is an important aspect of the social and cultural context from which the chants were formed. The creation myth of the Navahos, she writes, is a myth conceived primarily in terms of motion, an "emergence" of the people which they call hijinai ("moving upward"), and it is a myth of continual movement and transformation up through the Five Worlds. The myths associated with the healing ceremonials (Astrov mentions the Night Chant and the Mountain Chant in particular) are journey-myths in which a hero travels to find medicine and

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knowledge to bring back for the benefit of the people. But the myths give much more emphasis to the traveling than to the goal finally attained. The hero's journeys with all their dangers make up the bulk of these narratives, and the geography through which he passes is carefully described and precisely named. He receives his power, it becomes clear, not only from the medicine finally granted him by the gods he seeks but also from traveling itself. A key formula in the Mountain Chant and the Night Chant is sa'a nardi (Matthews' sdan nagai), translated by various collectors as "in old age wandering," "restoration to youth," or "the person who travels far and wide." It expresses, Astrov says, "all that seems most desirable, most perfect, most sacred to the Navaho": It is in accord with Navaho belief that a person whose very business it is to move becomes the symbol of the most sacred, the most powerful. It is the Traveler, after all, who meets the gods; it is the Traveler who, in suffering and ecstasy, finds the redeeming herb; it is the Traveler who, in venturing upon unknown trails, absorbs all those healing powers that are believed to dwell in things simply because they have been encountered in places unfamiliar and far distant. It seems logical, therefore, that the patient is made, ritual-symbolically, the traveler who reenacts the journeys of the first patient-traveler.5 The Navaho healing chants, we see, organize myth and ritual through a rhythm that carries the patient along the path of the original hero. The patient makes the journey again, yet at the same time he is the original Traveler on the original journey. Our first speculation, then, concerns time and mythological action in the chants, and it is not limited to the Navahos. The mythological chants of the Navaho and the Aranda primarily express movement and action through

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time, but myth, we know, can do strange things with time. On a particular day and in a particular social context, a member of the society participates in a particular rhythm, a chant. Mythological action, however, can and is in fact meant to give the chant the power of transforming these events of the immediate context into something beyond the ordinary time of human experience. The native Australians call it "The Dreaming," their version of the mythic timelessness which we approached through phanopoeia in Li Shang-yin's "Inlaid Harp" and Yeats's "Magi." R. M. Berndt, in discussing the sacred Kunapipi songs of north-eastern Arnhem Land, reports, "It is said that they are the actual songs sung by the Ancestral Beings in the 'Dreaming' era, that their rhythm and content stretch unbrokenly through the ages and on interminably into the future. Aborigines say: 'These songs are the echo of those first sung by the Wauwalak and the Kunapipi people; the spirit of the echo goes on through timeless space, and when we sing, we take up the echo and make sound.' "e In mythological chants, social action is fused with the sacred as curing and power are attained by contact with the primal roots of the tribe. It requires, and enforces, participation in the fullest sense of the word. The participant is a patient or an initiate — it will not act on us—and the rest of the community or totemic group are with him as witnesses. Through the chant they join a continuing rhythm and community, both of which "stretch unbrokenly through the ages and on interminably into the future." "Now as at all times," Yeats said; sa'α nardi, the Navahos say. Myth approached through phanopoeia catches the transient moment of vision in time less models, but approached through melopoeia it joins the rhythms of time and human experience to continuing rhythms of eternity. A second speculation involves the roots of melopoeia with the nature of language itself. Mythological chants represent a special use of language which acts to cause a particular effect. The language of garden-magic also acts to cause a

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particular effect, and it appears to have been this use of language in the Trobriand Islands that led Bronislaw Malinowski to formulate a general theory of language based in action. An important theory in the history of anthropology, Malinowski's view of language also contributes to our present concerns. The fundamental nature of language, Malinowski felt, is not to imitate thought but to act, to produce an effect. Language does not represent mental concepts but is a physical action and process: "The fact is that the main function of language is not to express thought, not to duplicate mental processes, but rather to play an active pragmatic part in human behaviour" (Coral Gardens and Their Magic, π, η). The basic function of the language of everyday speech, in our own culture as well as in pre-literate cultures, is to "connect work and correlate manual and bodily movements. Words are part of action and they are equivalents to actions." In their different realm, the words of the special language of magic are also actions, and charms are not, to the people who use them, pieces of literature. A charm is rather "a verbal act by which a specific force is let loose—an act which in native belief exercises the most powerful influence on the course of nature and on human behaviour" (π, 9). The meaning of an ordinary sentence or of a magic charm, then, lies far less in any mental con cepts attached to the words than in their function and effect. Meaning cannot be defined in a dictionary or an ethnologist's glossary, but only within what Malinowski called the "context of situation" and the "context of culture." When a word is used it is always used within these contexts, and when a word is not being used it simply does not exist: "The speech of a pre-literate community brings home to us in an unavoidably cogent manner that language exists only in actual use within the context of real utterance" (11, vii). Although these few fragments do not do justice to Malinowski's complete presentation of his theory of language, they demonstrate clearly that we are dealing

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with a theory that views the roots of language as essentially, and in fact exclusively, pragmatic. We seem to be in the business of recovering abandoned theories of language for the service of poetics. In doing so, we are in a sense still following Wordsworth. But ordinary speech, "the language really spoken by men" in everyday conversation, is only one source of the poet's language, and the kinds of language envisioned by a Fenollosa or a Malinowski can be realized in the language of poetry. Fenollosa the art historian projected a general theory of language in terms of phanopoeia and the visual ideogram; seeing and knowing and naming have left deep roots in language, and these roots, he felt, can be rediscovered and reactivated by a poet's careful use of his language. Malinowski the anthropologist of magic projected a pragmatic theory of language, and his theory suggests to us a poetics based on the possibilities in language for magic action and social action. They are roots carried in language primarily in terms of melopoeia, and we have found in our discussion of the rhythms of charms and chants that the roots of melopoeia are deeply connected with ideas of action. The charm rhythm is an internal rhythm arising from the necessity for words which move, and the more complex chant rhythm joins this movement with the stronger, external movements of music and dance to effect social action. These uses of language have also left roots for poets to recover, roots which bring with them not vision but power. From Fenollosa, then, we derive a poetics of "deep mimesis," and from Malinowski a poetics of "deep praxis." The Greek words themselves may remind us that both uses of language were concerns of Plato—mimesis, which he disparaged, and praxis, which he feared—and that together Fenollosa and Malinowski finally describe the language poets have always known. Another form of chant, particularly powerful in expressing a sense of movement and social action, is the prophecy.

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The dance rhythms and strong, repetitive catalogues of all chants are heard in prophecies, but they are often pushed to a kind of speed limit by the prophecy's feeling of pressure and urgency. Elements of the charm rhythm also appear here, but prophecy is deeply involved in a communal context, and the rhythm of prophecy is mainly the communal rhythm of chant rather than the more individual rhythm of charm. Although a prophecy may often have its source in an individual dream or vision, the individual who travels in vision brings back a report for the benefit of the community, and the vision is quickly assimilated to the communal expression of chant. As part of this communal orientation, prophecy associates itself very easily with public lament, and the two forms are often found blended into one. In the 1890's James Mooney was able to collect from several American Indian tribes the songs of the Ghost Dance. As a messianic movement the Ghost Dance tended naturally toward prophecies of the better world coming to the Indian, and as a nativistic movement it included just as naturally laments for the impoverished present and the loss of former days—days when things were better, before the coming of the white men. The Ghost Dance functioned as a healing ceremony for entire communities, and the songs are deeply rooted in the communal consciousness. The rhythms are communal rhythms: drums and rattles were not used, but with the exception of the invocation the songs were still danced, and Mooney noted that their rhythms were all "adapted to the simple measure of the dance step."7 Along with the dance rhythms are the regular patterns of repetition. Most Ghost Dance songs repeated each line, the song as a whole was repeated over and over while the dance progressed, and the "songs" are, in effect, long chants. The journey motif is here dramatically combined with the dance rhythm, for one of the functions of the dance was to induce a dancer into a trance during which his body fell to the ground and he traveled in vision

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to the spirit world. Most of the songs were composed by dancers as reports of what they saw in their visions. One of the conditions for a messianic movement is that a community find itself in an intolerable state, one usually involving, among other things, poverty, humiliation, and a sense of helplessness. An Arapaho song from the Ghost Dance is primarily a lament describing the Indians' feeling of wretchedness. It is a pathetic song, and Mooney noted that sometimes tears would roll down the dancers' cheeks as they shared the knowledge of their misery: Aniqu nechawunani, Aniqu nechawiinani; Awawa biqanakayena, Awawa biqanakayena; Iyahuh nibithiti, Iyahiih nibithiti. Father, have pity on me, Father, have pity on me; I am crying for thirst, I am crying for thirst; All is gone—I have nothing to eat, All is gone—I have nothing to eat.

(P· 977) The world to come, the spirit world visited by the dancers in their trances, was also the world that had once been. All the Ghost Dance songs recall the age before the coming of the white men as the model for the age which is to come, and the songs often dwell on details of this former age. A hunter leaving for a hunt calls for his bow rather than a rifle; a woman meets old friends from her childhood and together they play a game which has long since passed out of use; a dreamer sees the women in the spirit world preparing pemmican, formerly a favorite food of the prairie tribes:

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Nataniiya chebinh— Natanuya chebinh, Nachichaban, Nachichdban. The pemmican that I The pemmican that I They are still making They are still making

am using— am using, it, it.

(p. 991)

Although this is a dance song, there is an undeniable charm quality in the clusters of na and ch sounds. There is, moreover, a sense of magic—but a communal sense, lying in the importance of the Indians' rediscovery of this one small sign of their communal identity. "They are still making it" is the prophecy, the promise that this identity will become strong once again. Pemmican was dried and pounded buffalo meat, and one of the most significant prophecies of the Ghost Dance was the return of the great buffalo herds. The buffalo had been the basis of the Plains Indian economy, and it occupied a central position in their traditions and rituals. The return of the buffalo not only promised the Indians a return to power, but it also signified the return of an element woven deeply into their tribal consciousness. The following Sioux song is such a prophecy. Through the messages brought to the tribe by the sacred birds, the eagle and the crow, it sees in the returning buffalo the return of the community itself: Maka sit0maniyan ukiye, Oyate ukiye, oyate ukiye, Wanbali oyate wan hoshihi-ye lo, Ate heye lo, ate heye lo, Maka 0wanchaya ukiye. Pte kin ukiye, pte kin ukiye, Kanghi oyate wan hoshihi-ye lo, Ate heye lo, ate h£ye lo.

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The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The father says so, the father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming. The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The Crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so. (p. 1072) This song catches the rushing movement, the feeling of events sweeping down on us, for which prophecy is especially suitable. It is the melopoeic sense of movement and propulsion heard in the Aranda chant as well, and something quite different from the patterned sense of thought found, for example, in the emblem. Many of the Ghost Dance prophecies express this strong sense of movement, and in this striking Paiute song it is foreshortened by acceleration to the point of apocalypse: Wumbindoman, Wumbindoman, Wumbindoman, Wumbindoman. Nuvdrip noyowana, Nuvdrip noy0wana, Nuvdrip noyowana, Nuvarip noyowana. The whirlwind! The whirlwindl The whirlwind! The whirlwind! The snowy earth comes gliding, the snowy earth comes gliding; The snowy earth comes gliding, the snowy earth comes gliding. (p. 1054) Like other forms of melopoeia, prophecy is based on oral expression, but it can nevertheless appear in a highly literate civilization, as the examples of Jeremiah and Isaiah show. A final example of prophecy comes from the Mayas of the Yucatan, a literate civilization but one that appears also to have retained a strong sense of communal identity. Prophecy occupied an important place in Maya literature, and probably the greatest Maya prophet that we will ever

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know of was the last, Chilam Balam, who lived at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. When the Spanish arrived shortly after, their missionaries destroyed the sacred books of the Mayas, which were recorded in hieroglyphic writing, and taught the Indians to write using a European script adapted to the Mayan language. It is in this form that the prophecies of Chilam Balam have reached us. Knowledge of the hieroglyphic writing began to die, but a few of the Chilam Balam books, secretly copied and recopied in the new alphabetic writing in the villages of the Yucatan, managed to survive the bookburnings of the missionaries and to reach the twentieth century. The following prophecy is not, therefore, from a primitive culture but from a literate civilization, yet the central elements of primitive chant are still very much in use. The actual dancing of chant is gone, but a steady rhythm persists in the strong repetitions of Tu kin ("on that day") which beat at the beginnings of eleven lines in a row, and in the catalogue of coming disasters. Here prophecy is also lament, and the two are tied to the sense of community. The approaching doom is not for just one man but for whole generations of a society. The strong sense of rushing events seen in the last two Ghost Dance songs is here as well: the people are told to seize the day, to eat and drink while they still have bread and water, for a day is fast rushing upon them when these necessary elements of life, and with them the life of the civilization as a whole, will be lost: Uien, uien, a man uah; Uken, uken, a man haa; Tu kin, puz Ium pach, Tu kin, tzuch Ium ich, Tu kin, naclah muyal, Tu kin, naclah uitz, Tu kin, chuc Ium dziic, Tu kin, hubulhub,

CHANT

Tu kin, codz yol chelem, Tu kin, edzeledz, Tu kin, ox dzalab u nak yaxche, Tu kin, ox chuilab xotem, Tu kin, pan tzintzin Yetel banhob yalan che yalan haban. Eat, eat, thou hast bread; Drink, drink, thou hast water; On that day, dust possesses the earth, On that day, a blight is on the face of the earth, On that day, a cloud rises, On that day, a mountain rises, On that day, a strong man seizes the land, On that day, things fall to ruin, On that day, the tender leaf is destroyed, On that day, the dying eyes are closed, On that day, three signs are on the tree, On that day, three generations hang there, On that day, the battle flag is raised, And they [i.e., the people] are scattered afar in the forests.8 Like the Ghost Dance songs, Chilam Balam's prophecies originated in an individual trance, but they expressed in the rhythms of the communal voice matters which concerned the entire society. This prophecy, apparently from the first or second decade of the sixteenth century, probably referred to the return from the east of Quetzalcoatl, known to the Mayas as Kukulcan. It was the Spanish, however, who were already in the West Indies, and whose landings in the Yucatan in 1527 brought the prophecy dramatic confirmation. Primitive chant, like other basic forms, sometimes appears whole and untransformed in the midst of the most sophisticated poetic traditions. Although the association with dance has been left behind, the communal basis still

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exists in such forms as temple-chanting and church litanies, and some poets have used these forms as roots in their own poetry. In general, however, the attempts of literate poets in a modern civilization—Vachel Lindsay, for example— to catch the communal rhythm have produced little that could be mistaken for serious poetry. Such attempts are conscious literary imitations, and their rhythms do not grow out of a basis in community. T. S. Eliot reached toward this rhythm in experiments with music-hall rhythms, suggesting, perhaps, that for us the expression of a communal rhythm is better fitted to drama than to lyric poetry. There are of course exceptions to prove the rule, and the Whitman of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and "Song of Myself" comes to mind. But Whitman's chant rhythm often loses motion as its dance falters or stops. We would most expect to hear this rhythm, with its repetitions and catalogues and its rushing, prophetic voice, in his lament for Lincoln, a poem which attempted to speak for a nation. But we often find instead static lines and catalogues which, rather than pushing forward, circle back to fill in the details of a picture: Now while I sat in the day and look'd forth, In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests. . . . ("When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd") In modern poetry the communal rhythm has become even fainter, and modern poets tend toward a language that emphasizes other things: the Image rather than a rushing rhythm; the precision of careful thought rather than repetition, catalogue, or incantation; autonomy and impersonality rather than the participation mystique of the communal voice. The root is still present, however, and every now and then a modern poem will surprise us with a sudden emergence of that basic, communal voice. Whatever reserva-

CHANT tions literary critics may now have about Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," there are people who are not likely to forget that strong sense of identification felt when in the mid-1950's the poem first burst out of San Francisco. It had the rushing rhythms, the strong repetitions and catalogues; it was part of a movement of poetry meant to be chanted aloud in readings that sometimes became violently, if not mystically, participatory; it spoke with a communal voice and was both a prophecy and a lament for that community: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz. . . .9 Ginsberg is still at it, of course, now accompanying his chants with the rhythms of small iron rings and fingercymbals. The influence is probably from the mantramchanting of India, yet the result is not far from the Australian using his tapping-sticks or the Navaho his basket-drum to propel the rhythms of their great mythological chants. Somewhat different examples of the chant rhythm are the later poems of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). They are involved enough in the context of social action to have been used against him in January, 1968, as evidence in a trial.10 It is easy to pick out their poetic roots: they are public curses and prophecies and calls to action built on the melopoeia of a pulsing, rushing beat, repetition and catalogue, and, most importantly in this case, the communal rhythms of a "street voice" that can bring his audiences to their feet in recognition and identity. Generally, however,

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chant remains more important as a root than as an actual poetic form. The aural imagination which could once find delight in the repetitive rhythms of a catalogue has declined, as has the strong sense of community which could be called up and reinforced by communal namings—genealogies, lists of gods, ancestors, or tribal heroes, and catalogues of familiar place-names. The communal participation of a tribal dance usually exists only as an historical explanation and not as a formal cause of this rhythm, and the necessary condition of a communal identity is fading fast even where it does exist. Ethnologists are hard-pressed to find the old men in an Australian or Navaho tribe who still remember the complete chants, and even the "streetvoice" rhythms of Baraka may not last long as his community fragments and turns from an oral culture to a print culture. Yet the roots remain carried in the language, capable of feeding and transforming the work of individual poets who, pushing for movement in their poems, suddenly hear the repetitions and movements of that dance-beat.

VIII. RHYTHM

IN THE Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth stated boldly that there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language of good prose. Yet he took some pains to justify one inessential difference, the use of metrical language in poetry. In the context of the Preface, with its emphasis on the language really spoken by men, his defense of meter is a strange one, for all the benefits he sees arising from the use of meter in poetry depend on a recognition of its artificiality. If the poet is accurately describing the great and universal passions of men, the activities of men, and the world in which men live, meter can add "charm" to those descriptions; if the feelings of the poet become too strong and are in danger of being carried beyond their proper bounds, the presence of regular meter will temper and restrain those feelings "by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and necessarily connected with the passion"; if, on the other hand, the poet's language is inadequate for the occasion and is unable to reach the heights that the passion demands, the meter will help by bringing traditional associations to the particular subject, feelings which the reader "has been accustomed to connect with metre in general" and cheerful or melancholy feelings "which he has been accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre." The general principle at work here is, as Wordsworth clearly saw, "the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality." The language of poetry, he said, closely resembles, yet widely differs from, the language of real life, and this "similitude in dissimilitude" is the basis of the pleasure we feel in a poet's skillful

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use of metrical language. Wordsworth had already reached a profound level of discussion here—one involving not only the basis of meter but the basis of all mimetic art and of much that is significant in human experience generally— when he turned aside, deciding that it lay beyond the limits of a simple preface. There are in general two interesting versions of the roots of poetic meter. One approach, the one taken by Wordsworth and by many before him, traces meter back to the rhythms of speech. The best modern presentation of this view has been made by John Thompson in The Founding of English Metre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). Using the researches of linguists into the nature of the spoken language, Thompson writes that meter is an abstract model of certain essential features in the language of everyday speech. In English, those essential features are the phonemic qualities of segmental phonemes (vowels and consonants), stress, pitch, and juncture. English meter is a patterned imitation that emphasizes one of these features, stress, in particular, though finally it is a model of the ways in which all these elements work in the spoken language: Metre is made by abstracting from speech one of these essential features and ordering this into a pattern. The pattern is an imitation of the patterns that the feature makes in speech, a sort of formalizing of these patterns. Actually the metrical pattern represents not only the one feature it is based on but all the essential features of the language. And in organizing these into its abstract patterns, metre follows the principles of our language with the utmost precision. Perhaps it has always been apparent that the elements of metre are drawn from the language. Gascoigne observed this . . . and the scholar Paul Verrier, writing on English metre, said that both poetry and song derive their rhythms and their melody from the language. (p. 11)

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For Thompson, the patterns of traditional foot-prosody (iambic, trochaic, etc.) are a good basis for the notation of English meter. However confused the ancestry of these patterns may be, they are a working system that poets have known and used, and they have come to represent actual patterns of stress in the spoken language. The other version of the roots of poetic meter traces them back to the rhythms of song rather than speech. Since Wordsworth's poet is a man speaking, not singing, to men, this view does not come up in the Preface. It is, however, another old and long-respected theory, and it too continues to flourish. M. W. Croll, who saw meter as poetry's heritage from song, represents one example of this approach. The roots of meter, he felt, lie in those external rhythms that have always been used to form language to the measures of music: The rhythmic form of verse is the same in its essential principles as that of the music of song, from which it is, in fact, derived in the first instance. In some kinds of verse, it is true, the form is much more remote from that of song than in others. For example, our English blank verse and the French Alexandrine line have been made, more or less deliberately, as unlike song as verse can ever be; and indeed all verse meant to be used in long poems or to be spoken in anything like the level of tone of prose discourse must have been treated in the same way. Still, the changes that have been introduced into our "spoken" verse, as we may call it, have not affected the fundamental principles of rhythm which it derives from song; they are merely additional procedures which restrict the operation of these principles within certain limits, without changing them in any way or adding new ones to them. Meanwhile a great deal of poetry continues and will always continue to be made as much like song as possible. Dancing and

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music are the arts of rhythm; they have nothing to learn about their own business from poetry; poetry, on the other hand, has derived all it knows about rhythm from them. The best way to approach the study of the rhythm of verse, therefore, is by way of the form of song.1 Poetic meter is seen here as fundamentally musical "measure," and it is best notated by time signatures, bar lines, notes which indicate syllable duration, and rests. Both versions of poetic meter recognize that a metrical pattern does not tell us the whole story of the rhythm in a line of poetry. In fact, the most valued effects of meter in poetry occur not when the language corresponds with docile regularity to the metrical pattern, but on those occasions when rhythms in the language challenge and conflict with that regular pattern. In Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, or Keats the meter is most interesting to us when there is some interplay between the pattern and other rhythms in the language. This effect was called counterpoint by Hopkins; critics using traditional metrics often call it simply tension, and critics who tend toward a "musical" system of meter prefer the more specific syncopation. Although Hopkins was more subtle, or more elusive, in his discussion of "counterpoint," it is usually described as the combined effect of the regular metrical pattern and the variable rhythms of speech—a resultant, we might say, of the force of the meter and the forces of the normal movements in the spoken language. In Groll's "musical" system it occurs whenever the rhythms of speech cause a stress to fall either before or after the time of the musical beat. For Thompson, the metrical pattern is a mimesis of the essential features of the spoken language, and the tension between this pattern and the natural speech-rhythms in a line of poetry gives us a situation in which the language is being set against an abstract model of itself. As in Wordsworth's "similitude

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in dissimilitude," the differences as well as the correspondences between the actual language and the model language give rise to the unique pleasures of metrical poetry. The pleasures are real, and the art of combining rhythms is an important technique in the use of poetic language, but the listener to poetry may feel at times that such descriptions of that art seem to be strangely intellectualized responses to the rhythms he hears. Rhythm in poetry (or in any art) is the organization of movement, and poetic meter is a measure of that organization. But meter—the "measure"—can take on a life and a form of its own distinct from the language it is measuring. Thus Wordsworth could speak of meter tempering the language of a poem, or of meter bringing associations with certain feelings into the language of a poem. In the case of tension, or syncopation, the listener must hear a combination of actual rhythms in the poem with an abstract model of those rhythms. The art of combining rhythms is here made somewhat cerebral by the fact that meter does not exist—that is, it is not physically present—in the poetry whenever its pattern is broken. That pattern, moreover, is broken often in any poetry that is rhythmically interesting. At such times when meter disappears from the language of the poem it must be supplied by the listener, whose memory of its past existence and anticipation of its future existence hold up in his mind a ghostly, patterned backdrop against which the actual rhythms of the language perform their contrary dance. Our concern is with the roots of rhythm in language, and from this point of view meter is a late and artistically sophisticated concept—"an exercise in abstraction" by both the poet and the listener.2 The melopoeia of song, charm, and speech are not intellectualized concepts but old forces in language directed at the ear, or rather at the body as a whole as a perceptor of rhythm. They are physical forces that our bodies feel, and they are concerned with power and action. Whether meter is itself an abstraction of songmelos or of speech-melos (I believe both versions to be true,

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as well as a few others), its presence in poetry is the result not of any direct imperatives for magical or social action but of the conscious imposition of a conceptual pattern upon language. Its effects in poetry have been rich and subtle, but what might be forgotten is that the roots themselves are still present in language—rhythmical forces which are themselves capable of rich and varied combinations. Every poet, however skillful his use of meter, still seems to feel these forces actively working beneath his metrical pattern, directing his rhythms into different and often unexpected kinds of syncopations. The melopoeia of song and the melopoeia of speech are of course two of these radical forces. New books of poems appear each year with the word "songs" on their title pages, recalling the lyre and the lute of the Greek Melic poets and the medieval troubadours as emblems of the lyric grace to be heard within. Similarly, each generation of poets reaffirms the spoken language as a source of the rhythms of poetry. For Dryden it was the witty conversation of the Restoration court, for Williams it was "the American idiom" of a decaying industrial town, but in each case the source is considered to be the language really spoken by men. The third root—less well recognized, perhaps, but no less fundamental—lies in the mysterious actions of the closed, internal rhythms of language, the echoing reflections of sound we have called charm-melos. It is the irregular rhythm of special, hidden powers in language, quite distinct from the commerce of everyday speech and equally distinct from the more regular rhythms of music and song. It can appear anywhere, in Dryden or in Williams as well as in verses by Poe, songs by Shakespeare, cantos by Pound, or lyrics by Blake. All three roots are basic organizations of movement in language, actual rhythms capable of actual, not intellectual, syncopations. We have already heard some of this in the chants. When a poem takes on the rhythmical qualities of a chant, we recognize the emergence of an old rhythm that seems to be

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almost a fundamental root in itself. Song-melos dominates: the primary rhythm in the chants is the forward push of the dance beat, a regular, controlling rhythm that is originally external to, and probably prior to, the language. But we saw that the chant rhythm as a whole is a combined form, an early and important complication of rhythms that bends both speech-melos and charm-melos to the more regular rhythms of music and dance. In the Australian chant, speech rhythm gives way completely to dance rhythm; in the Navaho prayer, the charm rhythm is taken over by the external dance-beat without being entirely lost. The steady musical beat in the chants gives a regular motion to the language of speech and the language of charm, carrying them forward on a continuous rhythm through time and action. The chant rhythm, we speculated further, is a basic use of language that both reflects and directs social action toward communal goals, a force that seems never to be far away when this rhythm enters poetry. In the Eskimo dance song, in the Navaho and Australian chants, in the prophecies of the Ghost Dance and of the Maya poet Chilam Balam, and in the poems of Ginsberg and Baraka, there is rhythmically and thematically a strong sense of movement and action, a communal rhythm enforcing communal participation and communal identity. The rhythm of Blake's "Tyger" can be familiarly graphed in terms of a formal meter, but we also hear in it the questioning rhythms of speech-melos and the sound-echoes of charmmelos caught up and carried along on the steady beats of a children's song. And in such songs the deeper powers of this old rhythm persist: watch your daughters jumping rope to a skip-rope rhyme and you will see a social ritual, a dance. The rhythmical situation in a lyric poem, then, is somewhat more complex than just the syncopation of metrical pattern and speech rhythm. There are also present other rhythms derived from other uses of language—old, compelling forces whose purpose was to move. Modern poetry

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has generally worked toward releasing those rhythms by first dropping the conventional metrical patterns. But even in poetry with a recognizable meter (the trochaic pattern of Blake's poem, of the witches' charm in Macbeth, and of Ariel's song in The Tempest, for example) deeper lyric rhythms are also active. The distinctive rhythm of lyric, I suggest, is actually a complex interplay of rhythms in language, a syncopation that crosses the rhythms of speechmelos, charm-melos, and song-melos. The modern poets who break the metrical patterns to explore other rhythms are working not to invent something new but to recover something old in the poet's language. When Sidney composed his Astrophel and Stella sonnets in 1580 and 1581, he established, John Thompson has shown, a standard for metrical poetry in English that lasted three hundred years (The Founding of English Metre, pp. 139-56). It was a standard marked by Sidney's consummately skillful and artistic use of metrical tension, the interplay between the abstract metrical pattern and the rhythms of speech. After Sidney we have the magnificent tradition of the English pentameter line that runs up through Tennyson and that the finest poets of the language have made their instrument. Before Sidney, however, stretches an even longer tradition of English poetry, including a century of poetry in early modern English. The sixteenth century was a period of both dazzling and dull experimentation with the rhythms of poetry, and a period which produced, in the end, somewhat better than the usual proportions of fruit to chaff. But the tradition of English poetry it inherited was not a continuous metrical tradition. Chaucer had used the iambic pentameter line (or, perhaps more precisely, the five-stress, basically decasyllabic, line) with skillful flexibility, but, because of unusually rapid changes in the pronunciation and grammatical forms of the language during the intervening century, the poets of the sixteenth century could not hear it. They heard in-

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stead a master of older, rougher rhythms, and in 1575 Gascoigne could write in his treatise on English meter that our father Chaucer hath used the same libertie in feete and measures that the Latinists do use: and who so ever do peruse and well consider his workes, he shall finde that although his lines are not alwayes of one selfe same number of Syllables, yet beyng redde by one that hath understanding, the longest verse and that which hath most Syllables in it, will fall (to the eare) correspondent unto that whiche hath fewest sillables in it: and like wise that whiche hath in it fewest syllables, shalbe founde yet to consist of woordes that have suche naturall sounde, as may seeme equall in length to a verse which hath many moe sillables of lighter accentes. And surely I can lament that wee are fallen into suche a playne and simple manner of wryting, that there is none other foote used but one. . . .3 Gascoigne heard in the poetry of Chaucer the quantitative meters of the Ancients, but he also heard faintly behind this an older rhythm, a song-melos built on musical measure. And although he may have lamented that the poets of 1575 were using no other "foote" but the iambic, he was also the ablest champion of this "new" regular pattern in English poetry which Sidney was shortly to use so well. In the first half of the century the situation was somewhat different. The iambic pattern was there in the poetry, already in association with familiar verse forms such as the rhyme-royal stanza and the newly rediscovered sonnet. But some poets worked with equal vigor in using other, and often deeper, rhythms in the language of poetry, and without the overlay of the iambic pattern we can perhaps hear more clearly in this earlier poetry the root rhythms of songmelos, charm-melos, and speech-melos. Two early-Tudor poets in particular, Skelton and Wyatt, call for our attention. Somewhat more than a generation apart, they reveal

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to us, in their very different ways, full ranges of these deeper rhythms. Their poems were written primarily for listeners rather than readers, sophisticated listeners in the English court who could hear, recognize, and take delight in the shifting complexities of rhythmical language. Some poems of both poets were actually set to music and sung, but more important to our inquiry is the music in their language, and their art of combining rhythms. At the beginning of the century John Skelton was already at work. In his lifetime he was awarded laureate degrees by the universities of Oxford, Louvain, and Cambridge, he was tutor to the young prince who become England's Henry VIII, he was rector of a parish church in the small Norfolk town of Diss, and he finally held the title of orator regius in the court of his former pupil. Most of this he tells us freely in his poetry, and displays as well the wide and curious knowledge of an educated cleric living in England at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. The many subjects central and obscure that were tucked away in the trivium and quadrivium (or "trivials" and "quatrivials," as Skelton calls them) figure prominently in a poetry teeming with rhetorical devices, frequent quotation and original verses in Latin, Biblical references and parables, and constant allusion to classical literature, fable, and bestiary-lore. The poetry also reveals his thorough knowledge of both the principles and practice of music. Skelton died in 1529, but he earned one further title two centuries later when Alexander Pope dubbed him "beastly Skelton," a title that has stuck as firmly as all the others of which the old poet was so proud. Pope had more objections to Skelton than simply to the rhythms of his poetry—there were the problems which certain of Skelton's poems, "consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Scurrilous Language," presented to neoclassical ideas of decorum—but a poet whose genius lay in metrical regularity and the balanced subtleties of iambic

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pentameter couplets could not have helped feeling uncomfortable about a poetic rhythm that probably was, to Pope's ears, altogether too appropriate and fitting for such subject-matter.4 But it is that music, the rushing, raggedy rhythm of what has become known as "Skeltonic" verse, that at the very beginnings of poetry in modern English sounds out important roots in the poet's language. Not all Skelton's poems were written in Skeltonic verse, but we can hear it clearly in these lines from his best-known poem, "Phyllyp Sparowe," in which the young Jane Scrope interrupts her solemn requiem for a pet sparrow to hurl maledictions at Gib, the bird-eating cat: O cat of carlyshe kynde, The fynde was in thy mynde Whan thou my byrde untwynde! I wold thou haddest ben blynde! The leopardes savage, The lyons in theyr rage, Myght catche thee in theyr pawes, And gnawe thee in theyr jawes! The serpentes of Lybany Myght stynge thee venymously! The dragones with their tonges Might poyson thy lyver and longes! The mantycors of the montaynes Myght fede them on thy braynes! Of Inde the gredy grypes Myght tere out all thy trypes! Of Arcady the beares Might plucke awaye thyne eares! The wylde wolfe Lycaon Byte asondre thy backe bone! Of Ethna the brennynge hyll, That day and night brenneth styl, Set in thy tayle a blase,

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That all the world may gase And wonder upon thee, From Occyan the greate se Unto the lies of Orchady, From Tyllbery fery To the playne of Salysbery! So trayterously my byrde to kyll That never ought thee evyll wyll!5 carlyshe kynde = churlish nature grypes = griffins brennynge; brenneth = burning; burns

By Tudor times the final -e was generally not pronounced, and the final -es not given syllabic value. Knowing this, someone who listened for a familiar accentual-syllabic meter in these lines could at first convince himself that he hears an iambic line of six syllables. But that impression would not last long, for if he listened honestly he would soon lose any iambic pattern, coming upon lines that can only be described as a scramble to get in syllables before the heavy fall of the next stress ("So trayterously my byrde to kyll"), or lines that are "sprung" with two heavy stresses on adjacent syllables ("The wylde wolfe Lycaon"). He would have to conclude, finally, that there is no system of footprosody evident, not even a consistent number of syllables in each line. It is instead the push of the stress rhythm that is master here, organizing the lines by the beating of strongly stressed syllables without any counting of the weaker syllables in between. And if he went further, our listener would find in general that the melopoeia of this kind of poetry is based on series of short, fast lines in an accentual rhythm of two, three, or sometimes four stresses to a line. From a poet with Skelton's interest in music we might have expected poetry that was close to song. This is just what we get, but it is song of a more primitive and fundamental kind than our usual understanding of that form. We do not get a rhythmically free piece whose primary in-

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terest is melodic, but a strongly accented language that is influenced far more by the basic rhythmical structure of music than by melody. It is language in which the heavily stressed lines recall the steady beat of the dance and the drum, language that is in some distant way kin to the heavily rhythmical language of primitive song and communal chant. This will not be pushed too far: there is a chant rhythm in Skeltonic verse, but there are also important ways in which it is not like a chant. Other forces combine with the chant rhythm to produce a more irregular, and more personal, rhythm. A further distinction must first be made with respect to this verse, the distinction, often overlooked, between accentual rhythm and accentual meter. Regular accentual meter may derive from the dance-song and the chant, but in English poetry it gives us not lyric but epos. There is an accentual rhythm in the Skeltonics, but not an accentual meter. The rhythm of Skelton's lines can often be heard as roughly isochronous, and in this sense they may suggest accentual meter—they have in fact often been read as such. But there is no fixed number of beats in the Skeltonic line, no patterned relationship of alliteration and stress, and no consistent relation (such as a medial caesura) between stress and pause—no system of "measure," in other words, that is applied line after line. We can hear that Skelton's lines have been influenced by the steady dance-rhythms of song-melos, but they are, finally, a more subtle and more complex rhythm that goes its own way. One reason for this is the presence of another radical power in the language, the echoing sound-patterns of charmmelos which can complicate any tendency toward a simple, steady beat. Charm-melos is not in itself a dominant rhythm in Skelton's poetry, and sometimes, as in the chant, repetitions in the sounds of words are joined with the accentual rhythm of song-melos solely for the purpose of emphasizing and strengthening that rhythm:

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He He He He He

cryeth and he creketh, pryeth and he peketh, chydes and he chatters, prates and he patters, clytters and he clatters. . . . ("Colyn Cloute," vv. 19-23)

The devices of charm-melos—the alliterations, rhymes, and word-repetitions—are here completely in the service of the accentual rhythm, used to strengthen that rhythm but not to complicate it. The regularity of these lines is not typical of Skelton, and they do in fact come close to the accentual meters of Old English poetry, an effect that is even stronger when Skelton uses his alliteration to bind two short lines into a single long line of four stresses: Some a salt, and some a spone, Some theyr hose, some theyr shone. . . . ("The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," vv. 247-48) salt spone shone

= salt-cellar = spoon = shoes

Even these passages, however, add a complication to the older accentual music of English poetry. Old English poetry used rhyme only rarely. Skelton, however, consistently joined strong rhyme to an accentual rhythm, and his long runs on a single end-rhyme contribute powerfully to the distinctive rhythm of his Skeltonics. He could use his alliterations and rhymes, as he does above, to strengthen and push along the basic accentual rhythm within a line and to beat out the line-endings as they rush past. But linked sounds generate their own rhythms, too, and Skelton was just as capable at using alliteration and rhyme to cross his basic rhythm, to complicate its regularity:

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For age is a page For the courte full unmete, For age cannat rage, Nor basse her swete swete: But whan age seeth that rage Dothe aswage and refrayne, Than wyll age have a corage To come to court agayne. But Helas, sage overage So madly decayes, That age for dottage Is reconed now adayes: Thus age (a graunt domage) Is nothynge set by, And rage in arerage Dothe rynne lamentably. ("Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" w. 31-46) basse = kiss corage = desire, inclination graunt domage = grand dommage set by = valued, regarded arerage — over-age rynne - run

The thick internal rhymes, crossed end-rhymes, assonances, alliterations, and word-repetitions in this passage are also not typical of Skelton's use of charm-melos, but the other extreme from the regularity of the passages above. Between these extremes are the uses of repetitions in the sound-pattern heard in the passage from "Phyllyp Sparowe," where they often emphasize the accentual rhythm, and in fact help to generate that rhythm, but never become completely regular and never become completely submerged in the sweeping movement of the song-melos. Sometimes faintly and sometimes more clearly, the crossing reflections of sounds always present the possibility of another rhythm, one tend-

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ing toward the thickly echoing patterns of charm-melos, and with it the possibility of tension, or syncopation, against the steady beating of the accentual rhythm. Although Skelton's charm-melos occurs within the dominating song-melos of his lines, and is combined with that rhythm in his Skeltonics, it derives from a very different use of language. The words that Jane Scrope aims at the cat are a curse, a form known well by the makers of primitive charms. The accentual rhythm that organizes the movement of those words is, however, something different from the private and secretive rhythms of primitive charm. We heard how a charm, when it moves into a more public area, takes on some of the rhythms of communal dance and song. So here: Jane Scrope's curse occurs within the context of a communal ceremony, a mock mass for the soul of her departed sparrow, and her curse on the cat is delivered in the more regular, and more public, rhythms of the Skeltonics. "Phyllyp Sparowe" is one of the poet's earliest uses of Skeltonics. The power of Jane Scrope's curse, moreover, may be somewhat undercut for us by the feeling that the poet is being gently ironic with the cursing young gentlewoman. A later and more extended example of a curse in Skeltonics, one with a more serious purpose, is "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" Skelton's own invective thrown at his archenemy in the court of Henry VIII, the powerful and dangerous Cardinal Wolsey: He is set so hye In his ierarchy Of frantycke frenesy And folysshe fantasy, That in the Chambre of Starres All maters there he marres; Clappyng his rod on the borde, No man dare speke a worde, For he hathe all the sayenge, Without any renayenge;

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He rolleth in his recordes, He sayth, How saye ye, my lordes? Is nat my reason good? Good evyn, good Robyn Hood! Some say yes, and some Syt styll as they were dom: Thus thwartyng over thom, He ruleth all the roste With braggynge and with host; Adew, Philosophia, Adew, Theologia! Welcome, dame Simonia, With dame Castrimergia, To drynke and for to eate Swete ypocras and swete meate! To kepe his flesshe chast, In Lent for a repast, He eateth capons stewed, Fesaunt and partriche mewed, Hennes, checkynges, and pygges; He foynes and he frygges, Spareth neither mayde ne wyfe: This is a postels lyfe! (vv. 181-99, 210-23) the Chambre of Starres = The Star Chamber renayenge = contradicting thwartyng over thom = overthwarting them, perversely controlling them Simonia = Simony Castrimergia = Gluttony ypocras — wine flavored with spices and sugar mewed ~ cooped up checkynges = chickens a postels lyfe — an apostle's life

This is more than simply a primitive curse, now: it has become flyting and full literary satire. Along with this change

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has again come a change in the rhythms of a curse. The accentual song-melos of the Skeltonics is less regular than that of the earlier "Phyllyp Sparowe," but it is still the dominating rhythm. The alliterations, rhymes, and word-repetitions join and strengthen that rhythm, though at the same time they are still pulling against it in places, crossing and complicating it. The closed, internal rhythms of the curse had to change here, we might say, because here again the curse has gone public and taken on the more regular, and more communal, rhythms of the chant. The powers of this language are now directed not at magic action but at social action, at the naming and hurling away of evil through public means—outlawry, excommunication, or, in this case, impeachment. There is another change as well: a sorcerer's curse knows neither right nor wrong, only power, but this public curse adds the sense of a public morality that has been violated and outraged. The poem calls for social justice and social judgment. Like an Old Testament prophecy it aims at the cleansing of the society, and like the Night Chant it aims at the healing of the body politic. Roughly seven years after the composition of "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" there did come to court the events that culminated in the fall of Wolsey. The old powers, we said earlier, persist, and a Skelton scholar provides us with this historical footnote: The more one studies the Articles of Impeachment brought against Wolsey a few months after Skelton's death, the closer similarities one notices between this document and Why Come Ye Not to Court? These forty-four articles finally presented to the King by Sir Thomas More (the Lord Chancellor) and the leading peers of the realm were drawn up from earlier lists of charges kept by some of the petitioners. In the light of these striking similarities, it seems to me very likely that the old laureate's pointed invective was highly influential in bringing about this final culmination of his

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arch-foe's fortunes in November, 1529, a few months after his own death. Thus Skelton not only predicted Wolsey's fall: he apparently helped to bring it about.6 If Skelton was interested in the old powers of language, and it seems obvious that he was, he had like every other poet to search deeply into language for the rhythms appropriate to these powers. This too is decorum. We listen next for the third root of poetic melopoeia, the music of the spoken language, and hear it clearly in the rugged rhythms of Skeltonic verse. Once attempts to discover some kind of regular meter in the Skeltonics had been abandoned, it became clear that Skelton's distinctive verse derived much of its character from the rhythms of spoken English. Skeltonics "have the natural ease of speech rhythm," wrote W. H. Auden in 1935, and modern critics have followed- his lead. "Skelton developed this metre neither from Latin hymn nor from French nor Italian short-line, but from the native rhythm into which English speech readily falls" (Ian A. Gordon); "Skelton is English particularly in his use of our ordinary speech rhythms," and the mainspring of his Skeltonics "is the accentual rhythm of ordinary English speech" (Philip Henderson); "Skeltonic verse in the last analysis is based ineluctably upon the natural rhythms of English speech" (Nan Cooke Carpenter).7 The word "natural" appears often in such explanations: the accentual rhythm of the Skeltonics is a natural rhythm for English poetry, it is felt, because of the naturally accentual quality of spoken English. Although there is a good basis for this assumption, we also recognize that Skeltonic rhythm is a long way from the rhythm of natural speech. Not even the vigorous people of England's ebullient sixteenth century could have spoken with quite the same rhythms that Jane Scrope uses against Gib the cat or that Skelton himself uses against Wolsey. The speech-melos of Skelton's powerfully vernacular, colloquial, vulgar voice is heard throughout his poetry, and it is an important power

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in his Skeltonics, but it is not, I would say, the sole basis of their rhythms. Rather it is another power, one power among three, and it is syncopated against the rhythms of song-melos and the rhythms of charm-melos. Like the latter, it often crosses the primary accentual rhythm, introducing irregularity and complicating any tendency toward a steady, chanting song-melos. We can admire Skelton's ear for speech when, in a poem not primarily in Skeltonics, he catches the rhythm of how people talk and gossip at court: For ye said, that he said, that I said, wote ye what? ("Against Venemous Tongues") But when he combines the rhythms of speech with the other rhythms of his full Skeltonics we hear something more remarkable: Than thyder came dronken Ales; And she was full of tales, Of tydynges in Wales, And of sainct James in Gales, And of the Portyngales; Wyth, Lo, gossyp, I wys, Thus and thus it is, There hath ben great war Betwene Temple Bar And the Crosse in Chepe, And there came an hepe Of mylstones in a route: She speketh thus in her snout, Snevelyng in her nose, As thoughe she had the pose; Lo, here is an olde typpet, And ye wyll gyve me a syppet Of your stale ale, God sende you good sale!

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And as she was drynkynge, She fyll in a wynkynge Wyth a barlyhood, She pyst where she stood; Than began she to wepe, And forthwyth fell on slepe. ("The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," vv. 351-75) Gales = Galicia Portyngales — Portuguese I wys = truly, certainly route = disorderly crowd pose = a rheum in the head fyll = fell barlyhood = drunken fit

The rambling, gossiping voice of drunken Alice repeating her wild Tumorsr and the voice of a narrator keeping a safe distance while he observes this apparition in an alehouse, are both caught in these lines, not in any way recorded directly but used as part of a rhythm more complex than that of speech alone. There is, moreover, another level of the spoken language organizing the movements of Skelton's poetry. Although many readers have heard in Skelton the ordinary rhythms of English speech, we will see that it was Wyatt who explored more deeply the rhythms of pure speech-melos, the individual rhythms of a man speaking. Skelton, on the other hand, was attracted to the more patterned vernacular voice of the proverb, the proverbial phrase, and the proverbial comparison. The proverbial voice is particularly heard in his political poetry, the poetry most immediately concerned with social action, communal goals, and national values. Although there are also proverbial lines in Wyatt, it is in Skelton that we hear this voice used to direct old powers into both the rhythms and goals of his poetry. In the passage from "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" there are three proverbs adapted to the attack on Wolsey. While Wolsey

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rules the roast (v. 198) in the Star Chamber, the poet says, all matters there he mars (v. 186). There is nevertheless no disagreement from the nobles in the Council concerning his judgments, only a murmured "Good even, good Robin Hood" (v. 194). "To rule the roast" (or later "the roost") is still a proverbial saying in English (Tilley R144); behind Skelton's second proverbial phrase stands the traditional formula "To make or mar" (Tilley M48), and perhaps also "111 counsel mars all" (Tilley C692); the third proverb (Tilley E188) became, with this poet's help, a traditional expression for civility extorted by fear, as the proverb collections put it.8 Some of the proverbs in Skelton's poetry seem to have been framed on popular models by the poet himself; others had been in the language a long time. When we hear in the same poem that Wolsey bears the king on hand (v. 449), or that the efforts of the English troops in the north at resisting the Scots were not worth a fly (v. 145), we hear two proverbial phrases that had been used by Chaucer. The poet's feeling that he must speak out, to catch that catch may (v. 48) whether the court pay attention or not, expresses the poem's moral mission with a proverb that had also been used by moral Gower. And when the poet hesitates to speak out for dread the red hat take pepper in the nose (vv. 380-81), he means, as Langland would have known, for fear that Cardinal Wolsey become furious, wrinkling his nose in anger. It was a necessary caution: might makes right and Wolsey had the power to make everything he did "right"—as right as a ram's horn (v. 87), says Skelton with proverbial irony. The Cardinal had, moreover, insinuated himself into the center of power, the throne, and it is a wyly mouse That can bylde his dwellinge house Within the cattes eare. (vv. 753-55) Both proverbs had been heard before in Lydgate.

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Other proverbs used by Skelton in this poem entered English from the large international stock of medieval Latin proverbs, many of them derived from some Biblical or classical phrase that had struck the popular imagination. The Bible has provided popular speech with many proverbs, such as the golden rule of the gospels: "Do as you would be done to" (Tilley D395). In political contexts this proverb is usually applied in terms of a mutual scratching of backs, and English politics under Wolsey were apparently viewed by the people with the same proverbial skepticism. The poet was reflecting popular opinion when he attacked Lord Dacres, the Warden of the West Marches and a man on good terms with Wolsey, for arranging a humiliating truce with the Scots instead of fighting them: For the Scottes and he To well they do agre, With, do thou for me, And I shall do for thee. (vv. 274-77) The "little scroll" presented to John in Revelation 10:9-10 was both prophetic and edible, and he found both aspects of it sweet in the mouth and sour in the stomach. Many popular proverbs are based on a similar balancing of the sweet and the sour (Tilley S1038). But Wolsey, the poem says, made no such distinctions: anyone daring to present some matter before the Cardinal, be it sour or be it sweet (v. 419), was risking a sentence to Fleet prison or the Tower. Classical sources such as Horace and Juvenal supplied other proverbs for this poem, either directly or through the medieval and early Renaissance collections of apt phrases from classical authors. Erasmus' Adagia, an immensely popular collection of Greek and Latin sayings, first appeared in 1500 and probably gave the poet this insight into how Wolsey, in spite of his well-catalogued faults, could have managed to gain such autocratic power in England:

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But have ye nat harde this, How an one eyed man is Well syghted when He is amonge blynde men? (w. 529-S2) "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" was written in late 1522 and early 1523, when England had once again become involved in a Continental war. The popular resentment against Wolsey's increasingly heavy taxation to support these foreign adventures allowed Skelton to speak for the people in the voice of the people. The poet was attacking not simply Wolsey but the bad effects of a bad ruler on the life of a nation. The heavy taxation, Skelton says, has "wrung us on the males" ("purses," v. 75). The workers, artisans, and merchants of England have been forced to pay and pay more for Wolsey's insatiable thirst for money, a thirst that would dry up the streams of nine kings' realms (vv. 954-55) and that is turning England into a waste land. The good reason and skill which should control government policy have been left to roast a stone (v. 109), to labor in vain against the reckless wasting and spending that have left England nearly destitute: Our talwod is all brent, Our fagottes are all spent, We may bio we at the cole.

(vv. 79-81)

Opportunities have been let slip by, and "There went the hare away" (v. 117). Once the war with France began, Scotland attacked England from the north, and the poet saw the blight spreading out from the Lord Chancellor weakening the defense of English soil: the English forces, he says, have their hearts in their hose (v. 286), and the Scots make fools of them, make them peel straws (v. 262). To add insult to injury, Wolsey has with hypocritical righteousness closed the Southwark brothel known by the

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sign of "The Cardinal's Hat," driving out the girls and customers with the insulting proverbial phrase "Wyll ye bere no coles?" (v. 240). This from a man whose scorn for the commandments of his own religion, Skelton later points out, would make the devil sweat (v. 1085). The poem, then, was not simply a personal attack but a public action. Wolsey's dangerously erratic power—he would as soon smite his friend as his foe (vv. 579-80)— was a threat to the entire nation, and his power over the young king an usurpation of the right and the natural. Skelton even suggested that Wolsey used sorcery over the king (a traditional charge directed at powerful ministers), and he prayed that God would open the king's eyes, would grant him the grace to know the falcon from the crow, the wolf from the lamb (vv. 772-73), and to know that the grey goose was no swan (v. 886). But since another venerable proverb told him that God helps those who help themselves, he did more than pray, and in his poem we hear the old tutor's contributions to more immediate action.9 The popular wisdom of the proverb was one instrument in that action, and the speech patterns of the proverb fit easily into the rhythms of Skeltonic verse. Rhythm, we noted earlier, is the organization of movement, and the proverb is a step already taken by the popular idiom toward the rhythmical organization of language. It is a rhythmical unit based on speech. Among native English proverbs, or foreign proverbs that have been adapted to English speech, we find many that have been further organized into more formal patterns of rhythm. Although the proverb is too short for sustained song-melos, many proverbs show a rudimentary accentual rhythm of the sort called "dipodic." Some have gone further yet and have taken on the additional rhythmical organization of sound-repetitions, with alliterations ("To rule the roast," "Sweet meat will have sour sauce"), rhymes ("Let them that be cold blow at the coal," "Their thrift waxes thin that spend more than they win"), and word-repetitions ("Catch that catch may," "Will

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will have will though will woe win"). The folk poetry of these proverbs could be adapted, often with little or no change, to the rhythms of the Skeltonics. In "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" Skelton used the communal voice of this popular idiom to pour contempt on what he and the people saw as an unfit man recklessly controlling the country, to point out and to protest such a ruler's many violations of the common good, and to warn of the dangers— political, economic, and moral—that befall a land when a man who rules neither by virtue of nobility nor by popular assent gathers all the power into his ambitious hands. Although four centuries have swept away the events that occasioned this very political poem, it has deep roots. Its purpose was, and is, to move, and its instruments are the whole battery of rhythms in language that have always been directed at action. By the middle of the sixteenth century the iambic pentameter pattern had become solidly established as the standard basis for the music of English poetry, and by the end of the century Skelton was being parodied. The new music first had to be learned, and for a while we hear English poets following the unstress-stress pattern and counting their syllables with the dogged regularity of music students with their metronomes. As the new pattern gradually became instinctive it was used with increasing skill and flexibility; at the same time, it appears, the feeling grew that there was something embarrassing and uncomfortably unsophisticated, something of the country hayseed and rustic buffoonery, in the older music of Skelton's poetry. In the iambic pentameter context of Robert Greene's play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589), we hear the old rhythms mocked in several of the speeches of Miles, Friar Bacon's poor-scholar. Miles is a bungler and a clown who usually speaks in prose, but when he is caught in a drunken brawl by a constable or when he must address nobility he breaks out into verse that parodies Skelton's rhythms and constant

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Latinizing. Here he sets the table for Bacon's royal dinnerguests: Salvete, omnes reges, that govern your greges, In Saxony and Spain, in England and in Almain; For all this frolic rable must I cover thee, table, With trenchers, salt, and cloth, and then look for your broth. In an age that valued regular meter the rough native music of Skelton's poetry—the accentual rhythms of his songmelos, his charm-melos drawn from the sounds of English words, his speech-melos of the English proverbial voice— were out of fashion and had become simply doggerel. This was a recurring response to Skelton's poetry up through the nineteenth century, but it is a response we are now in a good position to challenge. We have been listening to rhythmic roots in the language of a poet working just before the establishment of the iambic pattern in English. Skelton's poetry, though not oral poetry in terms of its composition, was unequivocally poetry that was meant to be heard, and what his contemporaries must have heard in listening to these poems was not in any way simple poetry, not doggerel, but poetry built on the shifting combinations of various radical rhythms. Doggerel is verse without these complexities of rhythmical organization, and in Skelton's complexity, in the different levels of rhythms going on simultaneously, we hear far more than we hear in the simple rhythms of "light" verse such as limericks or Yukon poetry. For the later sixteenth century, and for several centuries afterward, doggerel meant irregular verse. For us doggerel is more often verse that is too regular, an obvious thought carried by an obvious rhythm. There is perfect iambic pentameter doggerel as well as mock-Skeltonic doggerel. It is, we might say, poetry that has lost its roots and is left with only a single, mechanical pattern for its rhythmical base. To this one monotonously regular principle are sacri-

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ficed any of the complicating effects of melopoeia. The rhythms of speech and the cross-rhythms of alliterations and rhymes are, along with meaning itself, made to fit a ready-made pattern. Skelton's heavy, accentual rhythms, his "filler" rhymes, and his closeness to the rhythms of popular poetry do lead him at times close to doggerel, but a good poet can safely flirt with rhythms that poets with less control should avoid. In Skelton's best passages we hear the syncopation of rhythms derived from song and dance, from charm, and from speech. The accentual rhythm and rushing movement of song-melos dominate, but charm-melos and speech-melos are there to add their complications. It is his art of combining rhythms that first of all saves Skelton from doggerel. When Robert Greene describes in neatly end-stopped iambic pentameter lines a royal drinking party and a royal infatuation, the excitement and energy of the event is rhythmically carried by the substitution of three initial trochees for iambs: After the Prince got to the keeper's lodge And had been jocund in the house a while, Tossing of ale and milk in country cans, Whether it was the country's sweet content, Or else the bonny damsel fill'd us drink, That seem'd so stately in her stammel red, Or that a qualm did cross his stomach then, But straight he fell into his passions.

(Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay)

When Skelton describes a drinking bout, one taking place on a very different level of society, we can hear another kind of control at work as he consciously and deliberately comes close to doggerel verse but once again escapes: But to make up my tale, She breweth noppy ale, And maketh therof port sale

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To travellars, to tynkers, To sweters, to swynkers, And all good ale drynkers, That wyll nothynge spare, But drynke tyll they stare And brynge themselfe bare, With, Now away the mare, And let us sley care, As wyse as an hare! ("The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," vv. 101-12) noppy = nappy port sale — public sale sweters = sweaters swynkers = laborers sley = slay

It was probably this poem more than any other that prompted Pope's "beastly Skelton." The swinging accentual rhythm and the conspicuous rhymes and alliterations do suggest an intentional use of doggerel and popular verse for this rollicking account of midday drinkers in Elinour Rumming's ale house. Yet even here the rhythms are not that simple. The rushing movement of Skelton's song-melos again dominates, with the alliterations and rhymes used to emphasize its basic two-beat rhythm. But they cross that rhythm, too, echoing back and forth with the energy of drunken games and generating rhythms of their own even while they are pushing forward and strengthening the beat. And through the pounding stress-rhythm also wind the rhythms of speech: we hear the narrator's voice commenting on the scene even while it is trying to keep up with the confused bustle, the voices of the crowding customers greeting and toasting each other in shouting euphoria, and the popular voice of the three proverbial sayings ending the passage. Each voice brings with it a distinctive rhythmic movement of its own at the same time it fits into the wildly dancing rhythm of the poem's Skeltonics.

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This leads us, finally, to one further quality that distinguishes the poetry of Skelton and its curious rhythms from doggerel verse. Doggerel forces language and meaning down under a rhythmical cliche, but melopoeia charges the words of a poem, as Pound said, "over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning." Pound was not concerned here with onomatopoeic rhythm, for rhythm has no lexical meaning to add to the "plain meaning" of the words. He was concerned with rhythm as an action in language, and we have heard in Skelton's poetry language directed and informed by such rhythmical actions. Because the accentual song-melos dominates Skelton's rhythms, what we hear most is language charged with the social actions of the chant rhythm, and correspondingly little of the secretive, magical actions of the charm rhythm. A passage from a requiem mass attended by all the birds in the bestiaries calls down upon their common enemy the just punishments of vivid disasters, and the words are directed by the old rhythmical actions of communal chant and public curse. A poem about women drinking together moves with the fast-paced rhythms of ale-house conviviality, the words charged with the social rhythms of a communal celebration. A political poem attacking an unhealthy influence in the nation calls with the song-melos of dance and drum for social action, again transforms the private charm-melos of a curse into a public power, and with the patterned speech-melos of proverbial sayings adds to the poet's personal indictment the voice of popular judgment. Literary history has decided that Skelton is a minor poet, and the close attention that we have given to the radical rhythms in some of his poetry might seem to be a case of over-subtle analysis employed on essentially crude material. Although the analysis itself should suggest that any such judgments miss the complexities of one of our most vigorous poets, there are further reasons why Skelton is especially

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valuable for hearing the melopoeia of English poetry. He composed his poems when poetry was still meant to be heard more than seen, a fundamental premise of poetry that the spread of printing was soon to change; he was a poet who knew music and who had a musician's ear for combining rhythms; he worked with rhythms in the English language at a time just before the iambic metrical pattern became the standard music for English poetry. He is most valuable to us, finally, because he reveals the roots of his rhythms and allows us to separate in analysis things that actually happen together in the language of poetry. For the roots come together in poetry, generating rhythms that cross and interfere with each other, reinforcing or dampening each other as they do. Song-melos, as we have used the term, is derived from the pure rhythm of a regular, physical pulse, and it is theoretically prior to language. When it enters language, however, and eventually leaves the drum and the dance behind, it must use features in the language itself to mark the beat. It does this in English poetry by sounding out a stressed syllable at regular intervals, but this physical push behind a syllable also brings out the sound-quality of the syllable so that it echoes back and forth across the poem, connects with similar sounds, and generates the rhythms and sound-patterns of charm-melos. Conversely, the rhymes, alliterations, and other sound-repetitions of charm-melos set up rhythms that can be regularly patterned in such a way that they strengthen or in fact generate the regular pulsations of song-melos. The rhythms of the spoken language, furthermore, can also be arranged so that they generate a rudimentary song-melos or a simple pattern of charm-melos, as we heard in the "dipodic" rhythms and basic rhymes of some proverbs. Yet, though these rhythms do happen together, and set up many levels of mutual reactions as they do, our basic assumption as we listen to them is that they are at root different rhythms derived from different uses of language. In Skelton we can still hear uses of language that go back to the rhythms of

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the communal chant, the rhythms of a primitive curse, and the rhythms of the vox populi, roots which become more difficult to trace in poets who weave their rhythmical strands more finely. Centuries later Gerard Manley Hopkins felt his way back to the same roots that charge the language of Skelton's poetry. Hopkins was another poet seriously interested in music, and he insisted again and again that his poetry must be heard aloud rather than silently read. His "sprung rhythm" is a counterpoint, as in Skelton, of our three radical rhythms, though the final result is quite different from the music of the Skeltonics. In his comments on sprung rhythm Hopkins concentrated on its song-melos, the accentual rhythm that moves poems like "The Windhover," "Hurrahing in Harvest," and "Carrion Comfort" with a heavily rushing tempo. He saw the relationship of accentual rhythm in poetry to the regular rhythmical beat in music, and he devised notations for scoring the movements of that rhythm in his poems. As a musician, he came close to thinking of his poetic rhythm in terms of isochronous measures, each measure beginning with a strongly stressed syllable and lasting until the next strong stress; he also tried in most sprung-rhythm poems to keep a fixed number of stresses, and therefore of measures, in each line. Yet he never quite committed himself to the complete subordination of language to music. In sprung rhythm, he wrote, "the feet are assumed to be equally long or strong and their seeming inequality is made up by pause or stressing," and his qualifications (which I have italicized) move rhythm from the metronome to something more irregular and more complex. When we listen to the poems we in fact never quite hear a regular and continuous musical measure—and we certainly do not hear, some enthusiastic comments by both Hopkins and his critics to the contrary, the regular accentual meters of Old English epos.10 As in the Skeltonics, the sprung rhythm of Hopkins' poems is an accentual rhythm but not accentual meter. Once again there are other

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rhythms which also organize the movements of the language and which challenge, cross, and complicate what would be by itself too rigid a rhythm for lyric poetry. Hopkins writes in his "Author's Preface" that sprung rhythm "is the rhythm of all but the most monotonously regular music, so that in the words of choruses and refrains and in songs written closely to music it arises." He also mentions the rhythm of nursery rhymes, poetry in which the words are not sung to a melody but are nevertheless made to follow a music we all know, the steady rhythm of a bouncing knee. But at the same time he says that sprung rhythm is also "the rhythm of common speech," and it appears as well in "weather saws," or proverbial speech. In a letter to Robert Bridges he spells out the combined nature of sprung rhythriK Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all? Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm's self—and naturalness of expression. . . .11 (Only poets, it seems, can get away with equating the rhythms of speech with the rhythms of written prose as we have seen both Hopkins and Wordsworth do.) Sprung rhythm, then, is a combination of at least two radical rhythms, rhythms which at first seem opposite and incompatible—speech-melos ("the native and natural rhythm of speech")—and the strongly marked beat of song-melos ("rhythm's self"). Of the third root of poetic melopoeia Hopkins appears to say nothing, but it is written large throughout his poetry in the alliterations, assonances, internal rhymes, and wordrepetitions that echo back and forth across the beating rhythms of his song-melos and the rhetorical rhythms of

RHYTHM his speech-melos. Like Skelton, he can use the sound-repetitions of charm-melos either to mark and strengthen the pushing movement of his accentual rhythm or to cross that rhythm—creating a rhythmical ambiguity by alliterating on an unstressed syllable, for example, or creating thick patterns of sound which slow down the forward movement of the accentual beat. Thus in the opening lines of "The Windhover": I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there . . . Marshall McLuhan hears patterns of assonance and alliteration which, rather than emphasizing the forward movement of the beat, are held in a poised "hovering"—analogous, he goes on to suggest (and here we part company for a while), to the suspended movement of the precisely etched falcon. 12 Far more than Skelton, Hopkins uses the sound-echoes in words to generate the irregular rhythms of charm-melos. We heard most of all in Skelton the social actions of the chant rhythm, and correspondingly little of the secretive, magical actions of the charm rhythm. In Hopkins the thicker sound-patterns of charm-melos generate a more irregular and discontinuous rhythm, and we hear more of the private rhythms of "verbal missiles," more of the personal voice directed toward magic action. Geoffrey Hartman has remarked on the "vocative" style of Hopkins' poetry; it is, like a prayer, like a charm, a "calling." 13 Since sprung rhythm combines all three roots of melopoeia, why would Hopkins say, as he did say in the "Author's Preface," that it cannot be counterpointed? It was a conclusion that followed from his initial definitions. In his comments on rhythm he first had to make the large distinction, as we did at the beginning of this chapter, between

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poetry that uses a regular metrical pattern ("running rhythm," as he called it) and poetry that does not use regular meter ("sprung rhythm"). He then defined "counterpoint" as "the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm" upon the basic metrical pattern so that "two rhythms are in some manner running at once." In the quantitative meters of Latin poetry or in the accentualsyllabic meters of English poetry counterpoint arises whenever a "new rhythm" (he did not limit it, as most critics now do, to speech rhythm only) is set up against the established meter of the poem. Since sprung rhythm does not have a continuous metrical pattern, by definition it cannot be counterpointed. One does not win this kind of argument with a Jesuit, and we will now abandon the term—still confident, however, that we hear in sprung rhythm the combined rhythms of song-melos, charm-melos, and speechmelos in some manner running at once, as the garrulous parson of Diss showed us they could. While Skelton was working on "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" a much younger poet was spending his first year at court, beginning the turbulent career of a courtier and diplomat in the service of Henry VIII. The poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt shows that another generation of poetry had arrived at court as well, one freshly inspired by the conventions of French, Petrarchan, and Chaucerian poetry of courtly love. George Puttenham, looking back from his Elizabethan vantage point, called these poets "a new company of courtly makers" and wrote that "they greatly pollished our rude 8c homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had bene before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and stile."14 The rhythms of metrically regular poetry had also arrived with this new generation, and the verse of Surrey, Wyatt's younger contemporary, for the most part conspicuously follows the iambic pattern. The rhythms of Wyatt's poems, however, often do not; there is by metrical standards a

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"roughness" to them that was long regarded as the somewhat fumbling attempts of a poet in a transition zone trying to find his way toward the smooth regularity later accomplished by Surrey. One of the developments of modern criticism has been a revaluation of that roughness in the rhythms of Wyatt's poetry. There are enough metrically regular lines to show that he could write smoothly patterned iambics whenever he wanted to, and enough other rhythms in his poetry to show that he saw no reason to limit the language of poetry to one rhythmical principle. We can recognize in these other rhythms our three radical powers of melopoeia, powers which run deep in Wyatt's poetry and are often much stronger forces in organizing the movement of his language than an abstract pattern of meter. One of them is the radical rhythm of speech-melos, the rhythm of the speaking voice. The fundamental unit of speech-melos is the spoken phrase, and a study by D. W. Harding has demonstrated that in Wyatt a line of poetry will often be made up of from one to three, and occasionally more, of these basic rhythmical units—separated, as in speech, by a brief pause. Thus much of Wyatt's poetry, Harding shows, is "pausing verse" rather than the continuously flowing verse of metrical poetry. When there is some continuity and flow of rhythm over the natural pause separating two speech units, it is because the poet has formed a bridge between the two by making certain words belong to both the preceding and the following phrasal units.15 These suggestions are developed by Raymond Southall in The Courtly Maker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964), his fine study of Wyatt. Southall also draws attention to the "phrasal rhythms" of Wyatt's poetry, and he hears in this basic unit of speech-melos the primary root of Wyatt's rhythms. "English speech rhythms are phrasal," he writes, "and consequently Wyatt's 'English verse' tends to fall into phrasal units separated by pauses . . ." (p. 126). The ryth-

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mical basis of this poetry is thus not the metrical line with its measured number of syllables and feet but the pausing rhythms of spoken phrases. "Because the effect of phrasal verse is created by the use of heavy internal pauses, the line dissolves into two or more rhythmical units and it is these and not the conception of a verse line which governs the construction of the verse" (p. 134). Southall's most important contribution to the study of Wyatt's rhythms lies in showing that the phrasal rhythms are not accidental effects but the poet's carefully varied repetitions of the basic units of speech-melos. Thus when Wyatt translates a sonnet by Petrarch from Italian into English, he also translates Petrarch's rhythms into the rhythms of English speech: I fynde no peace and all my warr is done; I fere and hope I burne and freise like yse; I fley above the wynde yet can I not arrise; And noght I have and all the worold I seson. That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison And holdeth me not, yet can I scape no wise. . . .16 Although the poem opens regularly enough, it quickly shifts out of the iambic pentameter pattern into something else. Southall shows that the rhythmical structure of all these lines, even the most regular metrically, is based on phrasal variations. Each of the first three lines begins with a variation of a single phrasal unit: I fynde no peace . . . I fere and hope . . . I fley above the wynde . . . and the fourth and sixth lines open with similar variations: And noght I have . . . And holdeth me not . . . Completing the first line is another phrasal unit which occurs again, with slight variation, completing the fourth line:

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. . . and all my warr is done . . . and all the worold I seson A similar variation on a single rhythmical unit is heard in the third and sixth lines: . . . yet can I not arrise . . . yet can I scape no wise (The Courtly Maker, pp. 129-30) The charm-melos arising from alliteration, rhyme, or word-repetition is a rhythmical element of language not ordinarily heard in everyday speech, though, as we saw, it becomes a force in proverbial speech. Skelton used charmmelos most often to mark and emphasize the accentual rhythm of his song-melos, less often (though more interestingly) to cross that rhythm. Southall shows that Wyatt used charm-melos to mark and emphasize the phrasal structures of his speech-melos, as in: Yn depe dispaire and dedlye payne, Boteles for bote, crying to crave, To crave yn vayne. In the two long lines, the alliteration first marks the phrasal units, two in each line; it can then either bind the two units together, as it does in the first line, or hold them apart, as it does in the second line. The internal rhymes of the following lines: Ffarewell, the rayn of crueltie! Though that with pain my libertie Dere have I boght, yet shall surete Conduyt my thoght of Joyes nede. so emphatically mark the phrasal rhythms that they can be heard as the end-rhymes of single-unit lines rhyming ababcbcd: ffarewell the rayn of crueltie though that with pain

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my libertie dere have I boght yet shall surete conduyt my thoght of Joyes nede. The punctuation of the poem is modern, and the long-line verse form may be the result of a scribal convention of coupling short lines. The phrasal rhythm, additionally marked by the rhymes, probably brings us closest to what Wyatt and his listeners heard (The Courtly Maker, pp. 134-47)· These critical discoveries of the speech-melos in Wyatt's poems are important steps toward hearing the music of his poetry, but we are here to add our usual complications. Speech-melos alone gives us "pausing verse," music made up of discrete units of rhythm based on the spoken phrase. Harding mentioned in passing that the phrasal units can be bridged by making a word or two belong to both the preceding and the following phrase, and Southall has shown that the devices of charm-melos, after performing the primary function of marking a phrasal unit, can then also bind, or hold apart, two phrases. But the rhythmical situation in a Wyatt poem can be something a good deal richer than this—a richness, once again, that is produced by the art of combining radically different rhythms. It is time to listen to a complete poem: Processe of tyme worketh such wounder That water which is of kynd so soft Doeth perse the marbell stone a sonder By litle droppes falling from aloft. And yet an hert that sems so tender Receveth no dropp of the stilling teres, That alway still cause me to render The vain plaint that sowndes not in her eres.

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So cruel, alas, is nowght alyve, So fiers, so frowerd, so owte of fframe, But some way, some tyme, may so contryve By mens the wild to tempre and tame. And I that alwaies have sought and seke Eche place, eche tyme for some lucky daye This fiers Tigre lesse I fynde her meke And more denyd the lenger I pray. The Iyon in his raging furour Forberis that sueth mekenes for his boote: And thou, Alas, in extreme dolour The hert so low thou tredist under thy foote. Eche fiers thing Io! how thou doest excede And hides it under so humble a face, And yet the humble to helpe at nede Nought helpeth tyme, humblenes, nor place. There is enough regularity of syllable-count and stresscount here to lead us to suspect, at least at first, the presence of a regular meter. But it is very elusive, never occurring in two consecutive lines, and it is easily lost as deeper rhythms emerge from the language. Again a strong rhythmical force arises from the speech-melos, the phrasal rhythms of Wyatt's lines. In the first quatrain, there is first a line of two distinct phrases: Processe of tyme

worketh such wounder

and next a line of three phrasal units: That water

which is of kynd

so soft.

Then follows a line in which two phrases, "Doeth perse the marbell" and "stone a sonder," are "bridged" by the words "marbell stone," which form a phrasal unit of their own. The result is a continuous rather than a pausing line: Doeth perse the marbell stone a sonder.

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The final line of the quatrain returns to the poem's dominant structure, two phrases separated by a pause: By litle droppes

falling from aloft.

If we listen for charm-melos that is used to mark the phrasal structures, examples crop up everywhere. There is the alliteration of: worketh such wounder so soit stone a sonder to iempre and iame the fuller consonance of: falling from aloft the word-repetition of: Eche place

eche tyme

and the virtuoso line in the third quatrain which uses wordrepetition and alliteration both to mark the individual phrases and to bind them: So /iers

so frowerd

so owte of fframe

In each case, however, the sound-repetitions that mark phrasal units are simultaneously part of other structures of rhythm, internal reflections of sound which echo through entire quatrains and through the poem as a whole. These are not the varied phrase-rhythms of speech-melos but the nets of sound cast by the radically different rhythmical powers of charm-melos. The speech-melos phrase "worketh such wounder" is also part of: worketh . . . wounder . . . water. The phrase "falling from aloft" is crossed by the rhythm of: ZitZe . . . faZZing . . . aZoft and the phrases "so soft" and "stone a sonder" both belong

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to a larger charm rhythm that echoes through every line of the first quatrain: Procewe . . . such . . . so 50ft . . . perse . . . stone a sonder . . . droppes. There is a wonderful strangeness in Wyatt's music as these charm rhythms cross the phrasal rhythms of speech, and it happens in every stanza. To notice just one more example, we hear in the third quatrain the speech-melos of the phrase "to tempre and tame," and we also hear the charm-melos of: iyme . . . coniryve . . . iempre . . . iame. From this the poet moves to more complex effects and to even stranger music. We have already noticed the line "So fiers, so frowerd, so owte of fframe" in the third quatrain. It is a line which has just echoed "So cruel" from the previous line. Wyatt then varies the "so" to "some" for two phrases, places it in a different rhythmical position, and in the next line we hear "So fiers, so frowerd, so owte of fframe" boldly transformed to: But some way

some tyme

may so contryve.

Word-repetitions and variations of this sort occur in other quatrains as well, as in the "stilling . . . still" of the second quatrain and the "so humble . . . the humble . . . humblenes" progression of the last. Perhaps the most striking example is the opening phrase of the last quatrain. The phrase has reached back through the previous two stanzas to "Eche place, eche tyme" and "This fiers Tigre" in the fourth quatrain and to "The hert so low" in the last line of the fifth. Words are repeated in their original positions, as far as syllable-counting goes, but with a very different rhythmical effect: Eche fiers thing lo! These are only a few examples. There is much more of

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the rhythms of charm-melos in this poem and there could be no end to listening, so rich is Wyatt's art. But the essential point has been made: charm-melos, rather than simply marking the phrasal structures of the music of speech, is abundantly generating its own music as well, its own crossrhythms that syncopate against the "pausing verse" of speech-melos. When E.M.W. Tillyard listened to Wyatt's poem "Processe of tyme" he heard yet another kind of melopoeia— not the phrasal rhythms of speech-melos, and not the soundechoes of charm-melos, but the musical rhythms of songmelos. He remarked, "Gutta cavat lapidem·, the sentiment is not startlingly original: but the rhythm—what a strange mixture of The Vision of Piers the Plowman and Irish MelodiesV'17 His comment implies two conceptions of songmelos in poetry, and although the accentual rhythms of Langland and the melody-oriented songs of Moore represent, I believe, two developments from one source, they are different enough to make Wyatt's mixing of them within one poem sound with an unexpected music. We heard in the communal rhythms of the dance-song, the mythological chant, and the prophecy a common chant rhythm in which language is primarily organized by the steady beat of the dance and the drum. This seems to be the root which lies beneath a wide variety of accentual rhythms in English poetry, ranging from firmly measured accentual meter to the very irregular and complexly varied accentual rhythm that Tillyard heard in Wyatt's poem. With varying degrees of strength accentual rhythm organizes the movement of epic song in Beowulf, of elegiac lament in the Old English lyric, of quest-narrative in Langland, of pounding invective in Skelton, of praise-poem in Hopkins. The stronger it is, the more regular its organization, and at one end of the spectrum it displays a tendency toward regular, continuous movement and stichic form. Even the irregular sprung rhythm in the sonnets of Hopkins seems to exert this pres-

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sure against the confines of the sonnet form (one of them, Hopkins said, became "the longest sonnet ever made").18 Toward the other end of the spectrum, beyond the irregular accentual rhythms of Skelton and the more irregular accentual rhythms of Hopkins, are the much freer rhythms and stanzaic forms of lyric song—the second rhythm that Tillyard heard in Wyatt's poem, and heard often enough in other poems to place Wyatt in the tradition of the Middle English lyric. There is some, though not much, of the Skeltonic song-melos in the poetry of Wyatt, as there is some lyric song in the poetry of Skelton, but the two poets are generally taken to represent different conceptions of the song-melos of poetry. We have listened up to now for the musical roots of lyric poetry in primitive charm and communal chant, and in the invective and satire of Skelton, rather than in lyric song. Perhaps this has seemed a bit perverse. A more common and usually more appealing conception of the roots of lyric poetry would locate them in the graceful measures of lyric song rather than in the language of charm and chant, and in personal expressions of love or loneliness rather than in the actions of magic curse or mythic ceremony. Wyatt especially has always called up this more Apollonian image of the lyric poet. He is traditionally associated with lyric song, and in a few poems—including two of his best-known pieces, "My lute, awake!" and "Blame not my lute"—he casts himself in the role of a courtier singing love songs to the music of his lute. Probably he did sing love songs to the music of his lute; few courtiers in those days, it would seem, could avoid it. Yet it is Wyatt's poetry that brings us finally to make a fundamental distinction between the rhythms of lyric poetry and lyric song. The song-melos of his poetry, and Tillyard's comment on it, especially forces this distinction upon us. At the same time it forces us to examine in particular the familiar assumption that at root a lyric poem is, or should be, a lyric song. Song-melos is the most purely

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musical power of melopoeia in poetry, but it is, finally, melopoeia, an action in language, and not music itself. The accentual meters of Beowulf were perhaps still measured by the strum of the harp, but they are also measured by language which has taken on the regular musical beat, made it a part of the melopoeia of the poem, and complicated it with the actions of other radical rhythms in language. In the accentual rhythms of Skelton's poetry the musical beat has been incorporated completely into language—we cannot imagine Skelton with a harp—and its tendency toward a steady rhythm even more deeply complicated by the actions of charm-melos and speech-melos. The rhythms of Wyatt's "Processe of tyme" may suggest, as they did to Tillyard, the rhythms of Langland and the rhythms of Moore, and these in turn may recall the roots of song-melos in actual song, tribal or courtly. But although the musical form of song gives us a name for a rhythm in language, a particular kind of verbal action, what we expect to hear in Wyatt is the work of a poet, the sophisticated use of the rhythms of language, not music. Unless, of course, Wyatt wrote songs. Melopoeia is, finally, a function of language in which the rhythmical organization is developed internally—that is, by the language itself. But most Western song is a form in which the rhythms of music dominate and control the rhythms of language, with the musical beats and measures guiding—from the outside, as it were—the rhythmical organization of the words. This obvious distinction has often been pointed out, but also often ignored. The situation may have been different in the Greek lyric, and again in the Prove^al troubadour lyric, where the melodic line of the music followed the patterns of poetic meters and the words measured out the length of the musical notes. The Elizabethan song-poet Campion experimented with re-establishing this primary position of language in song, but in most song as we know it there is a subservience of words to music. This seems to be true of even the most successful lyric song,

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where we are likely to feel that there is a reciprocal relationship between the rhythms of language and the rhythms of music, and where verbal and musical pitch, quantity, stress, speed, and even sense can seem at times to be uniquely at one. Such a song (usually art song rather than popular song or folksong) has also its own kind of syncopations between the rhythms of language and the rhythms of music, which can emphasize the presence of language as an important component of the whole. But the two meet in the territory of music, and whenever there is any conflict in which one or the other must give way, the language will be bent to the movements of the musical rhythm. Under these conditions, then, words written to be sung will depend heavily on the music, and without that music an entire dimension will be missing. The rhythm of such a song-text standing alone, we find, often appears to be too simple and too regular, for the main effects of rhythmical expressiveness, variation, and complication are supplied by the music. Now this is just the explanation that has often been given for the plain, conventional rhythms—as well as the stylized and often trite imagery and diction, and the hackneyed "sentiment"—of many of Wyatt's slighter lyric poems, which seem to require the inspiration of music to bring them alive. Yet it is not at all clear that these lyrics or any others by Wyatt were meant to be songs: the poet himself never tells us, and the historical records are too meager for any definite conclusions. This has posed some interesting problems for literary criticism. The problems are of particular concern to Wyatt scholars, but they also have general implications for our concern with the songmelos of poetry, and for the distinction we must finally make between lyric poetry and lyric song. If many of the poems we have by Wyatt were in fact meant for song, a literary critic can have little to say that is valid about their rhythms. He sees the text, perhaps senses that an important dimension is missing, but cannot hear it. Some of the possibilities that have been suggested for

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Wyatt illuminate these general points. They all approach his lyrics, at least some of them, as songs. The most interesting situation to study would be that of someone who was skilled in both the art of poetry and the art of music, who conceived words and music together and carefully tried to integrate the rhythms of one with the rhythms of the other. To find this, however, we probably have to look elsewhere, back to the motz el son of the troubadour lyrics or forward to the "ayres" of Thomas Campion. There appears to be no evidence that Wyatt was skilled enough in musical composition to compose music for his lyrics, or that the lute of his poems was much more than the conventional furniture of the courtly lyric. (It is in fact Skelton rather than Wyatt who shows in his poetry the greater knowledge of musical theory and the greater interest in musical practice.) 10 Wyatt was certainly not skilled enough for the composition of art song, which at that time was polyphonic part-song; the only courtly maker who appears to have at least approached the necessary level of skill for this kind of composition was Henry VIII. A professional musician could, however, have taken poems by Wyatt and set them to music, as, for example, Berlioz set to music poems by Gautier. A version of an early lyric attributed to Wyatt ("A Robyn") survives with a setting by the court musician William Cornish. 20 In a case such as this the poet has already done his work in his own medium and has made the poem's melopoeia, we must assume, complete in itself. Set as a song, some of the rhythmical organization inevitably will be taken over by the music, but it is the composer's problem, and not the poet's, to decide how to meld the words to music and how much the musical rhythms will respect the rhythms of language. There are at least two more possibilities. With even a slight knowledge of music Wyatt could easily have written lyrics to fit the music of some already existing song, either part-song or some popular tune. The practice is a familiar one in folksong, and many early-Tudor lyrics were also

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written in this way. A Wyatt poem in the Devonshire MS ("Now all of chaunge") has written above it the words "lerne but to syng yt," and a shorter version of the same poem in another manuscript has the note "To Smithe of Camden," suggesting that it was meant to be sung to the music of a popular song of that name.21 If Wyatt did write this poem, or others, to follow the tune of a particular song, then such poems do of course require the musical dimension with which they were first conceived. The rhythmical organization of the words came primarily from the external musical structure and not from the melopoeia of language. Finally, it has been suggested that Wyatt wrote some of his poems not with any particular music in mind but with the general intention that the poems could later be set to music by a composer. If this was the case, Wyatt was still thinking of song, and the external principles of music would have governed, at least in part, the composition of the poems. For a poet working in this way there are certain limitations that the intention of musical form is likely to impose on his language. The lines could vary in length, for the music could speed them up or draw them out into equal times, but they would probably be end-stopped in order to correspond to the musical phrases, and longer lines would have a caesura where a musical cadence would fall. The poem would probably follow a consistent stanza-form, for one tune would be sung to all the stanzas, with the final cadence coming at the end of each stanza. The stanzas would also have a certain rhythmical uniformity, corresponding lines in each stanza tending to follow the same rhythmical pattern. The poet would probably avoid any complex internal syncopations arising from a strong and independent speech-melos, and he would also avoid rough sounding and tongue-twisting clusters of consonants or other intricate patterns of charm-melos. These, along with subtleties of imagery and idea, are effects in the language of poetry that music cannot accommodate.22 In every case a general conclusion seems to be that good

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songs do not require, and in fact may not permit, brilliant poetry. Even when a poem is later set to music, some of the verbal melopoeia is necessarily sacrificed to the demands of musical organization. A musician's setting can make a poem something beautifully new, but that is not the same thing as maintaining that the ideal form of lyric poetry is song. Yet there remain those poems of Wyatt which continue to suggest, or request, an unheard music. For a final look at these, and in the absence of any firm evidence from Wyatt's time, we may follow the interesting experiment of Winifred Maynard, a British scholar who tried to work backward by fitting the poems to music for songs in "Henry VIII's MS.," a court song-book of the period. Wyatt probably would have known the contents of this book, and if some of his poems were written to already existing music there was a good chance that the music would be found here. Many poems by Wyatt and his contemporaries follow song forms, such as the carol, and Miss Maynard found that about fifty of Wyatt's lyrics could be sung to music in the song-book. Some lyrics, in fact, could be sung to two or three musical settings, and some settings fit more than one poem. Poems such as "Processe of tyme" and the well-known "They fle from me that sometyme did me seke"—poems, we would say, with complex syncopations of song-melos, charm-melos, and speech-melos—resisted musical settings, and she concluded that they were rather definitely not meant to be songs. Several short-line lyrics, on the other hand, were enhanced by musical settings, for, she reported, "The faults often incident to short measures, stiltedness, jerkiness, or jauntiness, are overcome in the singing, the melodic phrases lending dignity and fluency." One poem especially fit a piece of music so well that it convinced her not only that it was meant for singing but that she had found the particular music for which it was written. The music belonged to "Taunder naken," one of the best-known

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melodies of the period, and these are Wyatt's words, which seemed to have been made for that music: Wythe servyng styll This have I wonne, Ffor my good wyll To be undonne. And ffor redres Of all my payne Disdaynffulnes I have agayne. And ffor Reward Of all my smart Lo thus unhard I must departe. Wherefore all ye That after shall By fortune be, As I am, thrall, Exempell take What I have wonne, Thus for her sake To be undone.23 Miss Maynard's sensitive reaction to her discovery is also worth noting: "this is a conclusion to which I have felt some resistance, as no doubt others will do. For the lyric is one that has overcome the drawbacks of the form unassisted, and has a rare perfection of its own."24 Each line of "Wythe servyng styll" moves with a slow, steady song-melos, almost indistinguishable, because of the exact number of syllables in each line, from the later ideal of a perfectly regular meter. If this lyric is a song, the plain and regular rhythm is intentional, for it is only part of more complex movements of variation and syncopation that

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would emerge in conjunction with the music. The very regular stanza-form also suggests song, stanza-form in general being a heritage to poetry from music. The speech-melos in the poem is very regularly patterned as well, and Raymond Southall points to this poem as one in which the verse-structure and the phrasal rhythms of speech correspond perfectly, each line being identical with one phrasal unit (The Courtly Maker, p. 135). The sound-echoes of charm-melos also tend to follow this regularity—as in the alliteration of the first line—though there is some variation here. The quiet repetition of "for" in each stanza (as part of "fortune" in the fourth stanza), for example, and the strangely drawn-out rhyme of "wonne" with both syllables of "undonne" in the first and last stanzas, introduce some of the peculiar effects of charm-melos. But in general this power follows rather than crosses the steady movements of the other rhythms. When compared to the rhythms of "Processe of tyme," there is here much less of a syncopation of song-melos, charm-melos, and speech-melos, and much more of a congruence of the three radical rhythms. There is enough subdued melopoeia in the language of this lyric to make any appeal to Wyatt's lute unnecessary, but we can also imagine hearing it as a lovely lyric song. The intricate cross-rhythms in "Processe of tyme," on the other hand, belong to language alone. Even though that poem also follows song-form stanzas (with a regular meter, it becomes the "long measure" of English hymns), a lute would at best sound trivial and superfluous. More likely, the lute would be ruthlessly reductive of the verbal melopoeia of the poem, and most listeners, I think, would feel the price paid for a musical setting too high. Music just forcing itself into articulate speech, wrote Pound, is melopoeia, and in distinguishing three kinds of melopoeia (words made "to be sung to a tune," words made "to be intoned or sung to a sort of chant," and words made "to be spoken") he pointed us toward three roots, each with

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a different objective, in the language of lyric. In Pound's suggestions lie our own roots, though, like Marvell's "vegetable love," the subject seems slowly to spread vaster than empires. In this chapter we have listened to some of the melopoeia of poetic language, to the verbal music of songmelos, charm-melos, and speech-melos. We have approached the music of poetry as the art of combining rhythms, for rhythm is the fundamental power that music forces into articulate speech. Incorporating into language the old rhythms of dance, song, chant, charm, and speech, poetry becomes an art complete in itself and leaves behind the basket-drum or tapping-sticks, the lyre or the lute. Wyatt may have written songs, but we are sure that he wrote poems, and it is these that we are finally most interested in. When Valery realized that the rhythms which came to him during his walk through Paris were too purely musical to go into poetry, he made a sophisticated critical decision firmly based on a poet's knowledge of his craft. Music has developed its own arts of rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration, and these are no longer part of the poet's art. He is concerned instead with developing and using the music of language—with song-melos and the organizing power of a regular, steady beat, with charm-melos and the power of irregular, secret rhythms, with speech-melos and the music of the spoken phrase. Skelton, Hopkins, and Wyatt are only three examples of how rich this art of language can be and how complex the combinations of radical rhythmical powers can become. In very different ways, each of these poets was interested enough in the old rhythms of song-melos, charm-melos, and speech-melos to leave tracks for us to follow. As we do follow them in their crossings and divergings we find that poetry is not a simple pattern, that its organizing powers of rhythm are not derived from song only, from speech only, or from incantation only, but from all the deep rhythms in language. These rhythms have roots in action, in magic action and

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in social action, that a poet can recover and use—this too is a part of his craft. At root, they are directed not at vision but at power, and they enter the language of poetry primarily as melopoeia, as different rhythms derived from different uses of language. Skelton brought out the communal rhythms of song-melos for political and social ends, and Hopkins recovered in the more irregular rhythms of his charm-patterns the roots of sacred action. We hear the rhythms of radical powers in the poetry of Wyatt as well, but we also seem to hear something new. It is the voice of the poet as an individual maker, the voice of someone standing above the archaic functions of language and concerned primarily with his art. Wyatt wrote love poems, and a love poem is at root a charm aimed at casting a spell and pulling the beloved irresistibly toward the lover. But the Petrarchan stance in Wyatt's poems is that of the complaint, an artifice of isolating distance rather than an action of magical compulsion. The song-melos of his poems has roots in social action and communal participation, in the songs and dances of courtly society and in the social conventions of that society. In the best poems of Wyatt, however, we also feel the strong presence of an individual poet working alone, concentrating the deep powers of language inward and back into the poem. It is probably not a new presence in English poetry, but it seems to be Wyatt who first makes us irreversibly conscious of it. We may hear in the roots of his rhythms the sorcerer's voice using language to charm, the communal voice chanting or singing for the society, and the personal voice of a man speaking to men. But we also hear the voice of a maker speaking to his own art— to the craft and sullen art which the age of Wyatt had not yet named lyric poetry.

IX. FIRST AND LAST NAMES

"THE SOUND must seem an echo to the sense," Pope said in

the Essay on Criticism, and he immediately produced brilliant examples of how a master poet makes this so. The roots of melopoeia in charm, dance-song, and chant show that this is a later view of the music of poetry, for at the roots melopoeia is concerned far less with the "sense" of words than with deep and once-powerful actions in language. Yet it is clear that Pope points to something that happens in the language of poetry, that sophisticated poets take the care to make happen and that readers of poetry have learned to admire. To say that sound echoes sense in a poem is to say that the poet has involved melopoeia with lexis, or logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words"), the central ground from which poets create and the area where literary critics feel most at home. There melopoeia and phanopoeia come together in language; power and vision meet in the word. Although that area lies beyond the boundaries of this study, we may stand at this terminus and catch some glimpse of where its paths lead. By "sense" Pope meant lexical and syntactical meaning, the "plain sense" of a word, a phrase, or a sentence. The techniques by which poets involve melopoeia with this kind of meaning are many, and the artistry of some poets reaches much farther than simply echoing the sense of the words. All three kinds of melopoeia—song-melos, charm-melos, speech-melos—can echo meaning in a poem, but occasionally they also act to set up other levels of meaning which deeply validate or ironically qualify what the words are saying. The form of melopoeia most immediately related to plain meaning is speech-melos. As melopoeia only, it gives

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a poet like Wyatt a unit of rhythm for organizing the movement of his words. But certain combinations of rhythm and meaning are so closely identified in speech that a phrase or sentence often can be understood even though verb or noun endings, prepositions, and in some cases all the words spoken were not clearly heard: a rhythm the voice always uses to carry the words and syntax of that particular phrase or sentence is recognized. Poets use these expected combinations and also play with them, sometimes aiming the rhythm of a phrase or sentence toward one meaning and then turning the words ironically about and sending them off in a different direction. Furthest removed from the meaning of words is the music of song-melos, "rhythm's self." But that rhythm too will often follow lexical and syntactical meaning by emphasizing and throwing into the foreground the key words (nouns, adjectives, finite verbs) of a phrase or sentence, as it usually does in Old English poetry, Skelton, and Hopkins. The radical independence of this rhythm is heard, however, whenever a poet sets the movement of its basic unit, the verse-line, against the movements of speech or syntax. He may choose to stress a relatively unimportant word for the sake of some particular effect to be gained by contradicting the rhythm of speech. Or he may use the rhythm of songmelos to foreground a configuration (or "collocation") of stressed words in a line, sometimes even reaching across a firm grammatical break to bring together in one rhythmical unit words that establish a new constellation of meaning which deepens or contrasts with the prose sense of the line. The music of charm-melos uses repeated sounds in language to generate rhythmical units. But sounds echoing from one word to another in a pair of rhymes, a series of alliterations, or complex patterns of sound-repetitions winding through an entire lyric poem call together the words themselves, and since most poets are no longer primitive sorcerers the lexical meanings of the words follow close behind. A famous example of this kind of involvement of

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sound and meaning is the "dust-lust" rhyme in Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," where the recurring sound links two words that suddenly express with terse irony the meaning of the whole couplet and with terrifying speed the desperate vision of the complete poem. Melopoeia, then, can at times do more than echo the sense of the words. In the hands of sophisticated and complex poets it is also used to bring about juxtapositions of meanings. If there is a root of all this, it seems to be the lowly pun. Every art form knows puns—there are visual puns in painting and sculpture, rhythmical, harmonic, and melodic puns in music—but they seem to belong to language most of all and to pervade literary art most deeply. We find over and over in the language of poetry lexical puns, syntactical puns, and the sophisticated form of punning that juxtaposes two dictions (and what is primarily what Pound meant by logopoeia). The simplest and most basic form of punning is the lexical pun, two meanings brought together in one sound. It is the lowest form of wit ("to know"), perhaps, when it yields nothing but a bad joke and the listener's groan, but when it discovers that two things, two different concepts, or two widely separate experiences bearing the same name also share deeper affinities, it is a metaphor that unites melopoeia and phanopoeia in a single word. The most significant puns may be as much the result of haphazard coincidences in language as the puns of bad jokes, but some poets, following their intuitions to the onoma in paronomasia, make puns that reflect not chance but a deep order in the roots of language and a vision of archaic namings surpassing in audacity anything Fenollosa dreamed. A good view of a poet's mind struggling toward this sense of order in language comes not in primitive poetry but in the determined punning of a highly literate and slightly crazed poem written in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Agno while he was confined in an asylum, and only about a third

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survives. From these fragments it appears that Smart com posed the poem with an antiphonal structure in mind, so that in performance a verse beginning with "Let" ("Let Elizur rejoice with the Partridge, who is a prisoner of state and is proud of his keepers") would be answered by a verse beginning with "For" ("For I am not without authority in my jeopardy, which I derive inevitably from the glory of the name of the Lord").1 Smart's intention, stated in his opening lines, was to bring together in the poem the whole of creation to praise, bless, and rejoice in the glory of God: "Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together" (A 3). Jubilate Agno is a poem gone mad among names. Smart ransacked the Bible, classical writings, travel books, current periodicals, and his own curious mind for Biblical names, English family names, place names, and the names of common and obscure animals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects, flowers, and gems that he could bring into his poem. And often the names led him through underground passages of sound to perceive hidden relationships in the divine order he was praising. Greek and Latin, "the consecrated languages spoken by the Lord on earth" (Bi 6), are frequently the basis of his puns, as the relationships he found in the following lines show: Let Atad bless with Eleos, the nightly Memorialist ΐλ.€ησον κνριΐ· (Bi 32) Let Euodias rejoice with Myrcus —There is a perfumed fish I will offer him for a sweet savour to the Lord. (Bi 276) Let Noah rejoice with Hibris who is from a wild boar and a tame sow. (Bi 116) Atad, a figure mentioned briefly in the Old Testament (Gen. 50:10-11), blesses with Eleos, the name of a kind of owl in Aristotle's History of Animals. But the name of the owl leads Smart to the kyrie eleison and the owl becomes

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a "nightly Memorialist" praising and glorifying God. Euodias, a name that appears only once in the King James translation of Paul's epistle to the Philippians (Phil. 4:2), rejoices with Myrcus ("myrus," a lamprey, suggests the editor Stead), and the first name suggests to Smart a "perfumed fish" as an appropriate offering to the Lord. The associations in the third example reach further. Stead suggests that Smart was using the Greek hubris as the equivalent of the Latin hibrida ("hybrid," a mongrel), a term applied in Pliny's Natural History to the mating of domestic with wild hogs. Since Noah is here one of the daughters of Zelophehad who presented Moses and later Joshua with an early claim for women's rights (Num. 26:33, 27:1-7, 36:1-11; Josh. 17:3-4), perhaps her association with hubris reflects Smart's severe views on the role of women ("For I pray God for a reformation amongst the women and the restoration of the veil"—Bi 103). The response to this line, in which Smart remembers the neighbor of a friend, shows outrageously that English family names and English place names also share in his punning order of language: "For I bless God for the immortal soul of Mr Pigg of DOWNHAM in NORFOLK." Punning is a form of charm-melos in which the repeated sounds or repeated words are telescoped into identity. We see that in Smart's literate and educated mind, however, the sound-associations in words led directly to associations of meaning, and rather than the verbal missiles of charms we find in Jubilate Agno melopoeia which uses sound to bring about seeing. As far-fetched and whimsical as most of Smart's puns are, they are nevertheless attempts to use charm-melos to juxtapose different meanings. His puns lead to many more dead ends than to juxtapositions worth keeping, yet we can recognize in them the beginnings of what becomes in other poets the purposeful use of melopoeia as a power of lexis. The basis for this in Jubilate Agno is interesting, for it seems to lie in Smart's belief that all creation had been named in a way that reflected a divine

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order, and the poem is a record of a search for names that still reveal this hidden internal design uniting all creation.2 It is, finally, a religious rather than a magical sense of the word: "For all good words are from GOD, and all others are cant" (Bi 85). He trusted, probably too much, that any relationship between the sounds of words was not just fortuitous, and if this belief finally betrayed his poem it is yet a view of language by which other poets, trusting less, discover more. In the poetry of Hopkins are the fruits of processes left unfinished in Smart. The search for relationships that reveal the hidden internal order of creation was for Hopkins a search for "inscape," signs of the continuing activity of divine ordering. Such signs—a fortuitous similarity in the sounds of words, a random formation of clouds—may have the appearance of chance, but they may also be clues suggesting an underlying design. "All the world is full of inscape," he wrote, "and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose: looking out of my window I caught it in the random clods and broken heaps of snow made by the cast of a broom." Casting sound-echoes and puns in language is thus for Hopkins not simply a game of chance, but divination.3 In the poem "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves" he finds through the sound-associations of charmmelos, and in particular through puns and near-puns, darkly prophetic meanings: Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, . . . stupendous Evening strains to be time's vast, I womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, I her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earlstars, I stars principal, overbend us, Fire-featuring heaven. For earth I her being has unbound; her dapple is at end, as-

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tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; I self in self steeped and pashed—qiiite Disremembering, dismembering I all now. . . . Through the sounds of language Hopkins sees that "Earnest" is connected to "earthless," "equal" to "attuneable," and that "womb-of-all" leads through "home-of-all" to "hearse-of-all." Evening's "fond yellow hornlight," an image of the sunset as a lantern ("lanthorn"), connects through a pun with the winding of a huntsman's horn, and the result is a line in which both light and sound fall through the evening to the west—which itself quickly becomes the "Waste." The "earliest stars" are "earlstars," and in fact "stars principal," celestial princes reigning over the dissolution of day. "Disremembering," a dialect word for "forgetting," joins to "dismembering," and the juxtaposition made by the pun discovers another meaning of the poem: forgetting is a dismembering of the dappled experience of life, and like the coming night it carries the threat of black oblivion. The pun lurking in the title suggests that the poem is both a dark spell and a reading of the language of nightfall. But most of all it is an oracle, a particularly fitting form for Hopkins' multi-layered use of language. How much, we may ask, does the concurrence of sound in a pun discover a juxtaposition of meanings for a poet, and how much does the poet labor to find one word that contains and balances two meanings in a metaphor he has been seeing all along? It seems clear that the interlingual word games of Smart and the greater artistry of Hopkins both begin in melopoeia, in the sounds of words, and then lead to new meanings and new ways of seeing. In other poets, where the roots are buried more deeply, the question is more difficult to answer, and finally not very important. When in Romeo and Juliet the mortally wounded Mercutio says with a last flash of wit that by tomorrow he will be "a grave man," we suspect, because he is Mercutio, that a single sound, a single word, has suddenly doubled for

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him and led him to his grim joke. But when Hamlet, dressed in clothes of "nighted colour" and with the "clouds" of his father's death hanging over him, says to King Claudius, "I am too much in the sun," we may feel that the prince, or the poet, has arranged the scene so that two meanings will converge upon that one word. The repeated sounds of charms condense into one word in a pun, but so do the paradoxical images of many riddles ("What turns without moving?"). A pun can thus appear either under the aspect of melopoeia or under the aspect of phanopoeia, and in poetry it brings both ways of charging language into lexis, the word. John Donne's "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward" is a poem of complexly developed imagery. The speaker in the poem is riding westward but he finds that his soul "bends toward the East" and the scene of the Crucifixion. The poem presents this paradoxical image held in a pun: There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, And by that setting endlesse day beget. Dylan Thomas' poem "In the White Giant's Thigh" is to a large extent generated and organized by the melopoeia of sound-associations. The speaker in the poem is thinking of, and calling on, dead women buried in the unconsecrated ground of a hill named "The White Giant's Thigh," women who "lie longing still / To labour and love though they lay down long ago." The charm-magic of language makes them more and more present to him, until the yearning women Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade. The grains of the dust of the dead, the grain as regenerative seed, and the sexual "love for ever meridian" of the women's groins are all present in the poet's word.4 Donne seems to begin with phanopoeia, with an image and puzzle about death and life, and to come to the central paradox of a God made man. Thomas seems to begin with the echoing

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sounds of charm-melos and to arrive at the older religious paradox of the dead winter seed and the quick spring blossom. They meet in a pun. Donne and Thomas meet in another way as well, for both poems follow the structure of "poetry of meditation" as Louis Martz has defined it.5 If Hopkins' oracle is one form of poetry particularly suited to the play of language through various kinds of punning, perhaps the richest development of all the powers in the poet's language is the poetry of religious paradox. This includes not only poetry such as Donne's, which explores the mysteries of the Christian incarnation, but also poetry from Wyatt to Thomas that meditates on the paradoxes and mysteries of human love, birth and death, and imagination. Here riddle and charm, phanopoeia and melopoeia, seeing and action, come together in the word, in the central area of verbal art. T. S. Eliot, in one of his meditative descents into the profound paradoxes of time and consciousness, religion and poetry, reaches rock bottom and finds, among other roots, a pun: After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world. ("Burnt Norton") He is at dead center. The light is "still"—motionless—there. But then he realizes that it is also "still"—even yet—there, turning it from a dead center to an eternal center which focuses light and motion, vision and action, in a word. And there at that "still" point, the poet says, "the dance is."

NOTES

IN transcriptions of primitive poetry I have attempted to standardize and to simplify the various phonetic systems of the collectors, and in both poetry and prose texts from Renaissance English I have normalized the printing of u, v, and j. CHAPTER I 1. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, ed. Thomas Sadler (London: Macmillan, 1869), 1, 385-86. Robinson had published an article on Blake in a German periodical the year before, and "The Tyger" was one of five Blake lyrics that accompanied the article in German translation; it seems probable that it would have been one of the poems he read to Wordsworth. Wordsworth, however, may already have known the poem: F. W. Bateson notes that "The Tyger" was entered into Wordsworth's Commonplace Book in or about 1804, though the handwriting may be Dorothy Wordsworth's; see Bateson, Wordsworth: A Re-Interpretation, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans-Green, 1956), p. 133; and Morton D. Paley, "Tyger of Wrath," PMLA , 81 (1966), 540, n. 1. 2. My collection of readings of "The Tyger" includes interpretations suggested by Hazard Adams, William Blake: A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1963), pp. 57-74; Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 137-39; S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1965); David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 194-97; Stanley Gardner, Infinity on the Anvil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), pp. 123-31; Paley, "Tyger of Wrath," pp. 540-51; Robert E. Simmons, "Urizen: The Symmetry of Fear," in Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. David V. Erdman and John E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 166. The scheme of the interpretations was suggested by the Second Essay of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). 3. The children's verses in this paragraph are the versions in

NOTES The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951); "Bobby Shafto" is a nursery song, and "Cobbler, cobbler" a game-song. Alicia Ostriker discusses the nursery-rhyme rhythms of Blake's lyrics, and the sound-effects of "The Tyger" in particular, in Vision and Verse in William Blake (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), PP- 43-54. 86-88. 4. "Excerpts from a Critical Sketch: A Draft of XXX Cantos by Ezra Pound," Selected Essays (New York: Random House, »954). P- 109· 5. The Art of Poetry, tr. Denise Folliot, The Collected Works of Paul Valery, 7 (New York: Pantheon, 1958), pp. 111-13. 6. "Vorticism," in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, by Ezra Pound (1916; rpt. New York: New Directions, i960), pp. 86-88. 7. "The Later Yeats," in Literary Essays, by Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), p. 380. 8. "How to Read," Literary Essays, pp. 25-27. 9. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), 11, 220-21. K. K. Ruthven suggests that Coleridge may be the source of Pound's distinctions in A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae (1926) (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 11, 154. 10. F. R. Leavis, Education and the University (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), pp. 114-15. CHAPTER II 1. Archer Taylor, English Riddles from Oral Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1951), p. 3; subsequently cited as ER. 2. P-D. Cole-Beuchat, "Riddles in Bantu," African Studies, 16 (1957), 146.

3. Archer Taylor, The Literary Riddle before 1600 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1948), pp. 12-13; subsequently cited as LR. 4. Archer Taylor, "An Annotated Collection of Mongolian Riddles," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, NS 44 (1954). 35 6 · 5. Fr. Str0m, Svenska Folkgator (Stockholm, 1937), p. 210; quoted in English translation in Reidar Th. Christiansen, "Myth, Metaphor, and Simile," in Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958), p. 48. 6. Vernam Hull and Archer Taylor, A Collection of Irish Riddles, Folklore Studies, 6 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1955), p. 40; subsequently cited as IR.

NOTES 7. Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 78. 8. A more inclusive definition of the riddle, from the folklorists' point of view, is given in Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes, "Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle," JAF, 76 (1963), 111-18. 9. Str0m, Svenska Folkgator, p. 214; cited in Christiansen, p. 45, n. 18. 10. See John F. Adams, "The Anglo-Saxon Riddle as Lyric Mode," Criticism, 7 (1965), 335-48, for an excellent discussion of this and other Old English riddles. 11. 3rd ed. (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1950), pp. lxiii-lxiv; all citations from Beowulf in my text are from this edition. I give the kennings in the nominative singular form, even though the specific line reference may have a different form. 12. Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, The Art of Beowulf (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1959), p. 37; C. L. Wrenn, A Study of Old English Literature (London: Harrap, 1967), p. 48. For the distinction between kennings and kend heiti see Brodeur, pp. 17-19, 247-53· 13. The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, gen. ed. Newman Ivey White, 1 (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), 305. 14. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, ed. George Savidis (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, »975). P- >5CHAPTER III 1. Whitney's "Choice of Emblemes," ed. Henry Green (London: Lovell Reeve, 1866); all subsequent citations from Whitney are taken from this facsimile reprint of the 1586 edition. 2. Emblems, Divine and Moral: Together with Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (London: printed for Alexr. Hogg, 1778); the short Hieroglyphics (1638) is Quarles' second emblem book, and from 1639 on it was usually bound with the Emblems; all citations from both books are from this edition. 3. For studies of the Continental emblem tradition see Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed., Sussidi Eruditi, 16 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964); and Robert J. Clements, Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem Books, Temi e Testi, 6 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, i960); for the emblem book in England see Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).

NOTES

4. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 17-29. I am disagreeing with Hagstrum's view of the emblem books (pp. 94-98) in order to emphasize the complementary rather than subservient possibilities of the verses. 5. The emblematists' understanding of the Egyptian hieroglyphic appears to have been drawn mainly from Hieroglyphica, a Greek manuscript ascribed to a supposedly ancient Egyptian author called Horapollo (Horus Apollo); see The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, tr. George Boas, Bollingen Series, 23 (New York: Pantheon, 1950); Praz, p. 23; and Freeman, pp. 40-41. 6. For the emblem of one winged and one weighted arm see Praz, pp. 35-39, 146, 202; and Clements, pp. 25, 164. 7. Plutarch, Moralia 346^3473; see also i7f-i8a, 58b, and cf. 748a. 8. The first half of Jean Hagstrum's The Sister Arts gives a careful study of the ut pictura poesis tradition from the classical period to the eighteenth century; the second half of the book examines literary pictorialism in English neoclassical poetry and includes a chapter on the poetry of James Thomson, who is particularly associated with eighteenth-century pictorialism. Two studies by Ralph Cohen, however, show that in Thomson the idea of ut pictura poesis and the use of "prospect views" reach far beyond the mere description of a visual scene: see The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's The Seasons and the Language of Criticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1964), and The Unfolding of the Seasons (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1970). 9. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), tr. Ellen Frothingham (1873; rPt- New York: Noonday, 1961), p. 91. 10. Leo Spitzer, "Explication de Texte Applied to Three Great Middle English Poems," in Essays on English and American Literature, by Leo Spitzer, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 201-05; G. Wilson Knight, "On the Principles of Shakespeare Interpretation," in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy, 4th ed. (London: Methuen, 1954), pp. 1-16; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, pp. 151-62; Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 3-62. 11. Richard Crashaw, "The Weeper," The Poems English, Latin and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), pp. 308-14; Quarles, Emblems, Bk. 111, Emb. vm, pp. 124-26.

NOTES 12. For the emblem in literature generally see Praz, pp. 204for Herbert and the emblem tradition see Freeman, pp. 14872; Hagstrum, pp. 98-100; and Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952). 13. W.J.T. Mitchell, "Blake's Composite Art," in Blake's Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. Erdman and Grant, p. 69. 31;

CHAPTER IV 1. "Romanticism and Classicism," in Speculations, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1924), pp. 132-34. 2. The three principles of the Imagist manifesto appeared in an article titled "Imagisme," signed by F. S. Flint but written by Pound, in Poetry, 1 (1913), 199. "In· a Station of the Metro" is quoted from Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 109; all lyrics by Pound are quoted from this edition. 3. Pound's famous definition of the Image appeared in "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste," Poetry, 1 (1913), 200; this article and the article "Imagisme" are reprinted with minor changes in Pound's Literary Essays, pp. 3-7. Pound's discussion of his poem "In a Station of the Metro" is in his essay "Vorticism," first published in Fortnightly Review, NS 96 (1914), 461-71, and later included in his Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; rpt. New York: New Directions, i960), pp. 81-94. Pound emphasized the "objective" nature of the Image, which he opposed to the "subjective" (or Symbolist) Image. The distinction, however helpful it may be as practical advice for poets, seems to me reductive for literary criticism. The kind of seeing we are discussing is a relational process that happens on many levels; it is not linear, and it cannot be described by a "subjectiveobjective" diagram. Similarly, the "structure" of the Image and the "spatial form" of Image poetry are terms used to talk about what happens in the relational process of reading a poem, about the juxtaposition of different realms; they refer to ways of seeing and not to the art of architecture. 4. I use the translation of Moritake's haiku in Haiku, tr. R. H. Blyth, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1949-52), 1, 11; all translations of haiku appearing in this chapter are from this edition. 5. The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 97-155. 6. The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), pp. 96, 39. 7. The distinction is at times made, but never consistently maintained, in Pound's writings. It is used and discussed fully by Stan-

NOTES ley Κ. Coffman in lmagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1951); I do not, however, follow Coffman's interpretation of phanopoeia, which he limits (as Pound often seems to do) to the "single image," the verbal description of a sense impression. 8. The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Cali fornia Press, 1 9 7 1 ) , pp. 1 8 4 - 8 7 . 9. The Collected Earlier Poems (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 1 4 0 . 10. "General Aims and Theories" ( 1 9 2 5 ) , in Philip Horton, Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet (New York: Viking, 1 957)> PP- 3 2 6 - 2 7 . 11. Spring & All ( 1 9 2 3 ; rpt. West Newbury, Mass.: Frontier Press, 1 9 7 0 ) , p. 4 3 . 12. ABC of Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1 9 3 4 ) , p. 3 8 . 13. The Poetry of Ezra Pound, p. 1 2 4 ; Kenner returned himself to study the equally precise "rhythmic definition" in this poem in The Pound Era, pp. 1 8 9 - 9 1 . 14. "The Book of the Month," The Poetry Review, 1 ( 1 9 1 2 ) , 133· 15. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 6 2 ) , p. 4 1 . 16. The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, tr. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu (New York: Knopf, 1 9 2 9 ) , p. 8 8 . 17. The various interpretations the poem has been given are discussed in James J. Y. Liu, The Poetry of Li Shang-yin: NinthCentury Baroque Chinese Poet (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 44-46, 51-57, 207-11; the translation is from The Jade Mountain, p. 7 8 . 18. Call Me Ishmael (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1 9 4 7 ) , p. 14; for myth and "transhistorical repetitions" see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, tr. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series, 4 6 (New York: Pantheon, 1 9 5 4 ) . 19. The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry ( 1 9 5 5 ; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1966), pp. 3-4. 20. "Pound, Haiku and the Image," The Hudson Review , 9 (»956). 571_7a21. Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Technicians of the Sacred (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1 9 6 9 ) , p. 3 8 5 . CHAPTER V 1. Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture, Yale Publications in American Studies, 8 (New

NOTES Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1 9 6 3 ) , is the standard critical biography of Fenollosa; the passage from Fenollosa's "The Logic of Art" is quoted from Chisolm, p. 2 0 2 . 2. The following discussion of the Chinese written character is drawn mainly from Bernhard Karlgren, The Chinese Language (New York: Ronald Press, 1949); the chapters on Chinese lan guage in James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 196a), pp. 3-60; and Wai-Iim Yip, Ezra Pound's Cathay (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1 9 6 9 ) . 3. This is the orthodox view. In many cases, however, several characters would have been available to serve equally well as the phonetic component of a composite phonogram, and Hugh Gordon Porteus gives one example in which the original lexicographer appears to have ignored the obvious choice for a phonetic in favor of a rarer character that also contributed some meaning to the new compound: "Ezra Pound and His Chinese Character: A Radical Examination," in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1 9 5 0 ) , p. 2 1 1 . 4. "English Translations of Chinese Poetry," The Criterion, 1 I (>938). 4>4· 5. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (1936; rpt. San Francisco: City Lights, 1964), pp. 40-43; subsequently cited as C WC. The essay as it appeared in Instigations of Ezra Pound (1920) did not include the appendix; for other editions see Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: Hart-Davis, 1969). Pound and Fenollosa were mistaken about the character for "word," but imaginatively close; according to Karlgren (p. 26) the character is probably the result of a phonetic loan: in Archaic Chinese it originally meant "large flute" (*ngian) and pictured a mouth blowing a trumpet-like flute, and it was borrowed for "to speak" (also *ngiUn). 6. As if to prove the point, the etymology of the English word "sincerity" has never been completely clear; it seems to go back through Latin sincerus ("clean, pure, sound, whole") to IndoEuropean *sm-kero- ("of one growing"), from the roots *sem("one") and *ker- ("to grow"). 7. Thus Pound could say that in the best Νό drama an entire play is "gathered about" one unifying Image (Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 94). Earl Miner has shown this principle at work in The Cantos, where many diverse elements will center on some unifying Image; he specifically discusses three such large-unit ideograms: the heavenly visitor to earth, the sacred beauty of light, and the Confucian "middle way" (Pound's "unwobbling pivot")—The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature, pp. 1 3 9 K2. See also note 8 below.

NOTES 8. Similarly, Pound's "ideogrammic method," through which "rose," "cherry," "iron rust," and "flamingo" are brought together to define "red," is paralleled by the "diagrammatic emblem" in which a number of emblematic images are brought together to represent a single idea (see Freeman, English Emblem Books, pp. 77-78) and by the "enumerative riddles" in which a series of comparisons, all related to different attributes of a hidden object, also built up some central unifying image such as a Dutch street scene or an Irish landscape (see chapter two above). 9. Poet. 2i.i457b6-3o; Rhet. iii.io.i4iobg6-i4iiai. 10. "Aristotle and Feidelson on Metaphor: Toward a Reconciliation of Ancient and Modern," Arion, 4 (1965), 274; Mackey is here summarizing the Symbolist approach to metaphor presented by Charles Feidelson, Jr., in Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), and at the same time giving his own important qualifications of Feidelson's approach. Neither Mackey nor Feidelson should be held responsible for my own doodles with Aristotle's proportional structure. 11. Hugh Kenner in The Poetry of Ezra Pound,, pp. 87, 204, and Donald Davie in Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955), p. 41, both discuss Fenollosa's view of metaphor in conjunction with Aristotle's proportion, and both use this sample metaphor to show that a metaphor involves actions. CHAPTER VI 1. Literary Essays, p. 28; Pound seems to be using the distinctions made by the Irish poet Thomas MacDonagh in his book Thomas Campion and the Art of English Poetry (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1913). MacDonagh wrote that there are three distinct ways of organizing language in verse: song-verse, chant-verse, and speech-verse. Chant-verse, the rhythm of bardic narratives, no longer exists as a separate form, MacDonagh felt, and modern chant-verse (Yeats) he saw as a combination of song-verse and speech-verse. 2. Helen H. Roberts and D. Jenness, Songs of the Copper Eskimos, Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition 1913-18, 14 (Ottawa: F. A. Acland, 1925), p. 494. 3. W. E. Harney and A. P. Elkin, Songs of the Songmen (Melbourne: F. W. Chesire, 1949), p. 15. 4. Literature among the Primitives (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1964), pp. 122-23. 5. The Dobuan and Trobriand words are taken randomly from

NOTES texts in R. F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific, rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); and in Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands, 2 vols. (New York: American Book Co., 1 9 3 5 ) . 6. Knud Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, tr. W. E. Calvert, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1 9 2 1 - 2 4 , 8 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1 9 3 1 ) , p. 2 8 3 . 7. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, ed. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, 6 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1 9 4 2 ) , pp. 117-18. 8 . Texts and Pretexts (New York: Harper, 1 9 3 3 ) , p. 2 2 8 . 9. Walter William Skeat and Charles Otto Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula (1906; rpt. London: Frank Cass, 1 9 6 6 ) , 11, 2 3 2 - 3 3 .

10. For primitive curse and literary satire see Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, i 9 6 0 ) . 11. James Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, Seventh Annual Report 1885-86 (Washington, D.C.: GPO1 1891), p. 391; the "rough breathing" mark ' indicates an aspirated consonant. 12. Paul Fussell, "The Persistent Itchings of Poe and Whitman," The Southern Review, NS 3 (1967), 245; Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1 9 6 1 ) , p. 3 4 3 . 13. Roberts and Jenness, p. 1 5 ; Rasmussen, p. 2 7 8 ; Skeat and Blagden, 11, 232-33; Mooney, "The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees," p. 3 4 3 , and in Mooney, The Swimmer Manuscript: Cherokee Sacred Formulas and Medicinal Prescriptions, ed. Frans M. Olbrechts, U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 9 9 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1 9 3 2 ) , pp. 1 6 0 - 6 5 ; Fortune, p. 1 3 0 ; Malinowski, 11, 2 1 9 . 14. "Onomatopoeia is a coincidence of two meanings or strands of meaning, one 'natural' or extralexical, the other conventional lexical signification; concord or conformity of this sort between sound and meaning is an impossibility. The concord is of natural, or at least prelexical or paralexical, suggestion of the sound with its conventional reference."—Craig La Drifere, "Structure, Sound, and Meaning," in Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays 1956, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1 9 5 7 ) , p. 103, η. i. 15. The Na-khi ceremony was known to Pound from Joseph F. Rock, "The 2Muan !bpo Ceremony, or the Sacrifice to Heaven as

NOTES Practiced by the 1Na-2Idii," Monumenta Serica: Journal of Oriental Studies of the Catholic University of Peking, 13 (1948), 1160; I am grateful to George Kearns for pointing this out.

CHAPTER VII 1. Washington Matthews, "Navaho Myths, Prayers, and Songs, with Texts and Translations," ed. Pliny Earle Goddard 1 University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, 5 (1907), 54-57. In this text, the mark ' indicates that the preceding vowel is aspirated. Tse'gihi is the name of a canyon in which ruined cliff-dwellings stand, the home of the major rain god. 2. "While the prayer is being said, the dancers keep up a constant motion, bending and straightening the left knee and swaying the head from side to side"; Washington Matthews, The Night Chant, a Navaho Ceremony, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 6 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1902), p. 143. 3. Margot Astrov, "The Power of the Word," in The Winged Serpent: An Anthology of American Indian Prose and Poetry, ed. Margot Astrov (New York: John Day, 1946), p. 25. 4. The text of the chant is from T.G.H. Strehlow, "Ankotarinja, an Aranda Myth," Oceania, 4 (1933), 187-200, the only complete version of the chant he has thus far published. Sections of the chant are discussed by Strehlow in his Songs of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971), and these are marked with a musical notation that shows an even greater regularity of rhythm than is apparent in the text alone. For tnatantja and tjurunga see Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne Univ. Press, 1947). 5. "The Concept of Motion as the Psychological Leitmotif of Navaho Life and Literature," JAF, 63 (1950), 45-56. 6. Kunapipi: A Study of an Australian Aboriginal Religious Cult (Melbourne: F. W. Chesire, 1951), pp. 85-86; T.G.H. Strehlow has objected to the "sentimentality" and "suggestion of mysticism" in the common translation "The Dreaming" or "The Dream Time" for Aranda altyiranga (commonly alcheringa), which he says is more accurately translated as "out of all eternity," "from all eternity," or "ever from the beginning" (Songs of Central Australia, pp. 614-15, 694). 7. "The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890," U. S. Bureau of Ethnology, Fourteenth Annual Report 1892-93 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1896), pp. 920-21; the following Ghost Dance songs are all from this work.

NOTES 8. Daniel G. Brinton, The Maya Chronicles, Library of Aboriginal American Literature, ι (Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton, 1882), pp. 126-67; for information on the Books of Chilam BaIam see Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam 0/ Chumayel (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1933), and "The Maya Katun Prophecies of the Books of Chilam Balam, Series I," Contributions to American Anthropology and History, Vol. 12, No. 57, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication 606 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, i960), 1-60. 9. "Howl" and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956), P- 9· 10. Baraka was accused of participation in the Newark riots, and the poems used in the trial had appeared in Evergreen Review, 9 (December 1967), 48-49. CHAPTER VIII 1. "The Rhythm of English Verse," in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm, by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), p. 367. 2. The phrase comes from W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction," in Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism, by W. K. Wimsatt (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. j 08-45. 3. "Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English," The Posies, ed. John W. Cunliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1907), pp. 467-68. 4. Authors, like Coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote, And beastly Skelton Heads of Houses quote. ("Imitations of Horace, Epistle 11.1," w. 35-38) Pope's note to the last line further identified Skelton as "Poet Laureat to Hen. 8. a Volume of whose Verses has been lately reprinted, consisting almost wholly of Ribaldry, Obscenity, and Scurrilous Language." 5. Vv. 282-95, 307-23; I have as usual normalized the printing of u, and v, and in quotations from Skelton also expanded the to thee. 6. Nan Cooke Carpenter, John Skelton, Twayne's English Authors Series, 61 (New York: Twayne, 1967), p. 102. 7. W. H. Auden, "John Skelton," in The Great Tudors, ed. Katharine Garvin (New York: Dutton, 1935), p. 63; Ian A. Gordon, John Skelton: Poet Laureate (Melbourne: Melbourne

NOTES Univ. Press, 1943), p. 195; Philip Henderson, ed. The Complete Poems of John Skelton, Laureate, rev. ed. (London: Dent, 1948), p. v; Carpenter, p. 114. 8. Nearly all the proverbs used by Skelton in "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" will be found, in some form, in Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1 9 5 0 ) ; and Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases: From English Writings Mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968). Also useful are G. L. Apperson, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary (London: Dent, 1 9 2 9 ) ; and The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, 3rd ed. rev. by F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), which identify the few stray proverbs not in Tilley or Whiting. See also Archer Taylor's study The Proverb: And an Index to The Proverb (1931; rpt. Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, and Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1 9 6 2 ) ; and Bartlett Jere Whiting, Proverbs in the Earlier English Drama (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1938). The proverb is a complicated form, and folklorists have not yet decided exactly what that form is, or whether proverbs should be defined by form or by content. Archer Taylor in The Proverb distinguishes three general classes of proverbial speech: the proverb, which is usually a complete sentence and which is fixed in form ("Let them that be cold blow at the coal"), the proverbial phrase, which is not a complete sentence and which varies in form according to how it is used in speech ("To rule the roast"), and the proverbial comparison, which is an explicit simile ("As right as a ram's horn"). These are the most familiar distinctions, but Taylor himself says, "The definition of a proverb is too difficult to repay the undertaking," and he suggests that we "be content with recognizing that a proverb is a saying current among the folk" (p. 3). I am concerned here only with the proverb as a "saying" used in speech, as a form of speech rhythm, though folk proverbs often have close connections with riddles, and literary proverbs often appear as mottoes in emblems. Proverbs, Taylor writes, are based on "a natural speech rhythm" (pp. 88-89). They "conform to the general rhythm of the language in which they have been taken down," and when proverbs are borrowed from a foreign language they gradually adapt to the speech rhythms of the new language (p. 136). 9. Robert S. Kinsman has discussed the proverbial voice and political satire in two other works by Skelton in "The Voices of Dissonance: Pattern in Skelton's Colyn Cloute," Huntington Li-

NOTES brary Quarterly, 26 (1963), 291-313; and in "Skelton's Magnyfycence: The Strategy of the 'Olde Sayde Sawe,' " Studies in Philology, 63 (1966), 99-125. 10. Hopkins' comments on sprung rhythm are taken from his "Author's Preface," in Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner and Ν. H. MacKenzie, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 474 8 . Harold Whitehall's seminal article "Sprung Rhythm," Kenyon Review, 6 (1944), 333-54, argued that Hopkins did use isochronous measures, but Whitehall was arguing from a "musical" theory of meter; see Elisabeth Schneider, "Sprung Rhythm," PMLA, 80 (1965), 237-52, for another good discussion and more accurate distinctions concerning Hopkins' rhythms. 11. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), p. 46. 12. "The Analogical Mirrors," Kenyon Review, 6 (1944), 327-28.

13. "Hopkins Revisited," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 238. 14. "The Arteof English Poesie" (1589), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), n, 62-63.

15. "The Rhythmical Intention in Wyatt's Poetry," Scrutiny, Η (!946 ). 9 0 "1 ° 2 16. I quote Wyatt's poems from the edition of Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1969); most of the pointing, however, was added by the editors, and Southall, who uses the MSS, argues that this editorial pointing obscures the phrasal rhythms of Wyatt's poems by imposing on them a later conception of the verse-line. 17. The Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), p. 42. 18. Poems, p. 284. 19. See John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 121, 132-35, 141. 20. John Stevens suggests that Wyatt and Cornish may have reworked separately an earlier popular song (Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, pp. 110-11). 21. Muir, ed. Poems, p. 427. 22. This approach to Renaissance lyric is developed by Bruce Pattison in Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (London: Methuen, 1948); Stevens, however, disagrees, and he points

NOTES out that the court composers of this period were skilled enough to set any text to music, however complex the language (Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, p. 107). 23. The poem, like many others, can only be "attributed to" Wyatt. 24. "The Lyrics of Wyatt: Poems or Songs?" Review of English Studies, NS 16 (1965), 1-13, 245-57. CHAPTER IX 1. Frag. Bi, V. I; quotations are from the edition of W. H. Bond, ed. Jubilate Agno (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), which established the poem's antiphonal structure; the many obscure names in the poem are tracked down in the earlier edition of William Force Stead, ed. Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam (New York: Holt, 1939). 2. See Francis D. Adams, "Wordplay in the D Fragment of Jubilate Agno," Philological Quarterly, 48 (1969), 90-91. 3. The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 230; for the "game" of divining inscape through word-play see David Sonstroem, "Making Earnest of Game: G. M. Hopkins and Nonsense Poetry," Modern Language Quarterly, 28 (1967), 192-206. 4. Ralph N. Maud, "Obsolete and Dialect Words as Serious Puns in Dylan Thomas," English Studies, 41 (i960), 28-30, suggests that Thomas was also using a Northern dialect meaning of "grain" as any characteristic division or separation: the fork of a stream, the branching limbs of a tree, or the human form at the "groin." 5. The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954)·

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Translations of Ma Chih-yuan from The Art of Chinese Poetry by James J, Y. Liu, © 1962 by James J. Y. Liu, reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press and James J. Y. Liu. Lines from "Howl" from "Howl" and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, copyright © 1956, 1959 by Allen Ginsberg, reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. Quotations from The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry by Ernest Fenollosa, copyright © 1936 by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. Translations of haiku from Haiku by R. H. Blyth, copyright © 1949, 1950, 1952 by R. H. Blyth, reprinted by permission of The Hokuseido Press; haiku by Moritake and Ryota also from Silent Flowers, © 1967 by Hallmark Cards, Inc., and Hokuseido Press, reprinted by permission of Hallmark Cards, Inc. Lines from "Burnt Norton" from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "The Magi" from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, copyright 1916 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1944 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and of Μ. B. Yeats, Miss Anne Yeats, and The Macmillan Company of London and Basingstoke. "Alba," "In a Station of the Metro," "Pagani's, November 8," "The Return," and lines from "The Alchemist," "Taking Leave of a Friend" from Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, copyright 1926 by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and of Faber and Faber, Ltd. Lines from "Canto XLVII," "Canto LXXIX," "Canto CXII" from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright 1937, 1940, © 1962

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by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and of Faber and Faber, Ltd. "El Hombre," "Spring Strains," "To a Solitary Disciple," and lines from "Daisy" from The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams, copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. "Bird" from Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Lines from "In the White Giant's Thigh," "Over Sir John's Hill," "Where Once the Waters of Your Face" from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp., copyright 1952, 1953 by Dylan Thomas, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and of J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., and the Trustees for the Copyrights of the late Dylan Thomas. Quotations from Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir by Ezra Pound, All Rights Reserved, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Quotations from The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, copyright 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and of Faber and Faber, Ltd. "Candles" from Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy, translation © 1975 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Quotations from Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye, copyright © 1957 by Princeton University Press, and quotations from Ezra Pound's Cathay by Wai-Iim Yip, copyright © 1969 by Princeton University Press, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. "A Brief but Happy Meeting with My Brother-in-Law" by Li Yi, "The Inlaid Harp" by Li Shang-yin from The Jade Mountain: A Chinese Anthology, translated by Witter Bynner from the texts of Kiang Kang-Hu, copyright 1929, renewed 1957 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. "My Love" (copyright © 1959 Robert Creeley) and "Song" (copyright © 1962 Robert Creeley) are reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons from For Love by Robert Creeley.

INDEX

action, 251 language as, 178-80, 243 magic action, 166, 175, 180, 195, 219, 241-42; in Hopkins, 223

and melopoeia, 194 metaphor as, 260 rhythm as, 219 social action, 166, 170, 171, 175-80, 188, 195, 196; in Skelton, 207, 210, 214-15, 219, 223, 241-42 Adams, Francis D., 266 Adams, Hazard, 253 Adams, John F., 255 Alciati, Andrea, 48 allegory, 56; and emblem, 54-55 Ambros, St., 49 Apperson, G. L., 264 Aristotle, 22, 125, 246; on lexis, 17; on melos, 17, 135; on metaphor, 32, 129, 130-31, 260; on opsis, 17, 57; on riddle, 28, 29 Astrov, Margot, 176-77, 262 Auden, W. H., 208, 263 Augustine, St., 49 aural imagination, 10, 18, 136, 189; in Blake, 9; Pound on, 15; Valiry on, 11, 14 "babble," 134, 139; Frye on, 18, 19 Baillie, Joanna, 5 Baraka, Imamu Amiri, 188, 189, 196, 263 Barfield, Owen, 121

Bateson, F. W., 253 Beardsley, Monroe C., 263 Beowulf, 44, 232, 234, 255; kennings in, 36-38; monsters in, 7 Berlioz, Hector, 236 Berndt, R. M., 178 Bible, 7, 25, 48, 49, 54, 61, 184, 207, 246-47; and proverbs, 212 Bion, 155 Blagden, Charles Otto, 261 Blake, William, 97, 195, 253; and emblem, 66; Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 6; "The Tyger," 4-10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 117, 136, 138, 159, 196, 197 "block element" (in riddle), 29, 131 Bloom, Harold, 253 Boethius, 132 Bond, W. H., 266 Bridges, Robert, 222 Brinton, Daniel G., 263 Brodeur, A. G., 37, 255 Bunyan, John, 54, 55 Buson, 76-77, 89 Byron, Lord, 5 Campion, Thomas, 234, 236 Carpenter, Nan Cooke, 207-08, 263 Cavafy, C. P., 45-46, 255 Cervantes, 34 chants, Australian, 171-75, 176, 177, 188, 196, 262; Ghost Dance, 181-84, 196, 262; Maya, 184-86;

INDEX chants (cont.) Navaho, 166-70, 171, 175, 17677, 188, 196, 207, 262 charm-melos, 135, 137-44, 145, 1 53"57- 165-66, 194-95, 197, 220, 241; in chant, 166, 169, 181, 183, 196; in Hopkins, 222-23, 224, 248-49; and meaning, 14955, 243, 244-45, 247; in proverbs, 214-15; in Skelton, 202-05, 207, 209, 216, 217, 219, 227, 234; in Smart, 247; in Wyatt, 227-28, 230-32, 238, 240, 242 charms, Australian, 137-38, 159; Cherokee, 23, 146-48, 150, 16465; Dobuan, 160, 161, 164; Eskimo, 137, 140, 150, 159, 164; Old English, i43-44. 151. 152= 53, 159; Semang, 145-46, 150; Trobriand, 140-43, 144-45, 150, 151, 152, 153, 158, 159, 164, 165 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 111-12, 132, 197-98, 211, 224 Chilam Balam, 185-86, 196, 263 Chinese written language, 101-08, 110-11, 112 Chisolm, Lawrence W „ 258-59 Christiansen, Reider T h . , 254, 255 Chuang-tzu, 92 Clements, Robert J., 255, 256 Coffman, Stanley K.., 257-58 Cohen, Ralph, 256 Cole-Beuchat, P-D., 254 Coleridge, S. T., 16, 24, 88-89, 254; "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 34; on Wordsworth, 4 "collocations," 244 "communal rhythm," 164, 165, 176-78, 181, 185, 186-87, 188-89, 196, 232, 242; in Skelton, 205, 207, 214-15 Cornish, William, 236, 265 Crane, Hart, 78, 79 270

Crashaw, Richard, 40-41, 64-65, 256 Creeley, Robert, 42-43, 44, 74 Croll, M. W., 192-93, 263 "counterpoint" (in meter), 19394, 221, 223-24 curse, 146-48, 159-60, 233, 261; in Skelton, 205-06, 219, 221 Dacres, Lord, 212 Damon, S. Foster, 253 dance-song, 22, 202, 232, 242, 243; Eskimo, 163-64, 165, 196 Dante, 7, 132 Davie, Donald, 260 Dickinson, Emily, 43, 44 doggerel, 216-19 Donne, John, 23; and emblem, 49, 65; and meter, 193; and pun, 250-51; and riddle, 39, 41-42, 43, 44 "doodle," Frye on, 18-19 Dryden, John, 195 Dundes, Alan, 255 Eliade, Mircea, 258 Eliot, T . S., 95, 96, 154, 187, 251 Elkin, A. P., 260 Elliott, Robert C., 159-60, 261 emblem, "diagrammatic emblem," 260; form of, 49-52; and literary riddle, 54, 55-56; in poetry, 64-66 Emerson, R. W., 118, 121 epigram, 49, 51-52 Erasmus, 212 Erdman, David V., 253 Feidelson, Charles, Jr., 260 FenoIIosa, Ernest, 22, 100, 113, 245, 259; The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 101-02, 105, 109, n o , 115, 117-28, 131, 259; Epochs oj

INDEX Chinese and Japanese Art, 101; on metaphor, 120-27, 131-32; language as mimesis, 119-27, 180; and "spatial form," 118-19, 120, 124-25, 131-32; on "visual rhyme," 122-23, 124 Fenollosa, Mary, ιοί Flint, F. S., 257 Fortune, R. F., 150, 152, 164, 261 Frank, Joseph, 58, 256 Fraunce, Abraham, 51 Freeman, Rosemary, 51-52, 55, 59, 65. 255. 256· 257. 260 Frye, Northrop, 253; on "babble" and "doodle," 18-19; on charm, ig, 21-22, 134; on melos, opsis, lexis, 17-20, 21-22; on riddle, 19, 22 Fussell, Paul, 149, 261 Galileo, 34 game-song, 8, 9, 136, 254 Gardner, Stanley, 253 Gascoigne, George, 191, 198 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 109-10 Gautier, Th^ophile, 236 Georges, Robert A., 255 Ghost Dance, 181-84, 262 Ginsberg, Allen, 188, 196 Gordon, Ian A., 208, 263 Gower, John, 211 Greene, Robert, 215-16, 217 Greenway, John, 138, 139 Hagstrum, Jean, 49, 56, 58, 79, 256- 257 haiku, 257; naming, 78-79; paradox, 76-78; and Pound, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 89, 97, 110; "timeless moment," 89, 96; visual definition, 70-73, 75 Hakuin, 77 Harding, D. W., 225, 228 Harley MS. 2253, 39

Harney, W. E., 260 Hartman, Geoffrey, 223 Heine, Heinrich, 34 Henderson, Philip, 208, 263 Henry VIII, 199, 205, 224, 236 "Henry VIII's MS.," 238 Herbert, George, 49, 74; and emblem, 65, 257 hieroglyphics, 103, 109, 185, 256; and emblem, 50-52; Frye on, 19; Wordsworth on, 3, 10, 24 Homer, 49, 115 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 232-33, 241, 242, 244, 265; "inscape," 248, 266; "Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves," 248-49, 251; "sprung rhythm," 221-24, 232-33, 265 Horace, 57, 212 Horapollo, 256 Hoskins, John, 51 Hsieh Wen Tung, 105-06 Hull, Vernam, 254 Hulme, T. E., 68, 78 Huxley, Aldous, 145, 162 hymn, 9, 240 "iconic poetry," 49 Image, and "image," 71; naming, 78-79; paradox in, 75-76, 77, 79; Pound on, 69, 76, 78, 80, 257; "spatial form," 79-99; structure of, 69-70, 73-75 Imagism, 14, 68, 70-71, 257 Issa, 71-72, 73, 76 Jenness, Diamond, 150, 260, 261 Johnson, Samuel, 40, 41, 58 Jonson, Ben, 64 Judith, 37 Juvenal, 212 Karlgren, Bernhard, 103, 104-05, 259 Kearns, George, 262

INDEX Keats, John, 36, 193; " T h e Eve of St. Agnes," 74; "La Belle Dame sans Merci," 34; "Ode on a Grecian Urn," 49, 82; "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," 26; " T o Autumn," 66, 115-17 Kenner, Hugh, 70, 73, 81, 82, 97, 110, 113, 128, 258, 260 kenning, 22, 36-38, 48, 79, 128, 129-30, 255 kent heiti, 37, 128, 255 Kinsman, Robert S., 264 Klaeber, Fr., 36 Knight, G. Wilson, 58, 256

kōan, 77

Mackey, Louis, 130-31, 260 magic, 144-53,158-59;Fryeon, 19; Huxley on, 145; Vatéry on, 12, 133, 149-50, 162 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 140-41, 145. i5 0 -5i. i 5 2 ' 159' l 6 4 . 165, 261; on language, 179-80 Martz, Louis, 251 Marvell, Andrew, 241, 245 Matthews, Washington, 170, 262 Maud, Ralph N „ 266 Maynard, Winifred, 238-39 McLuhan, Marshall, 223 melos, in Aristotle, 17, 135; in Frye, 18-20, 21-22. See also charm-melos, song-melos, speech-melos Melville, Herman, 7, 55, 93 metamorphosis, 93-97 metaphor, 4, 38, 260; Aristotle on, 32, 129, 130-31; "dead metaphors," 111-12; and emblem, 47, 53-54, 63-64; Fenollosa on, 12027, 131-32; and phanopoeia, 128-32; and pun, 245, 249; and riddle, 28-29, 30-33, 44-45; in " T h e Tyger," 9-10; Wordsworth on, 3 meter, 134, 190-98, 201, 215-16,

La Drifére, Craig, 261 Laforgue, Jules, 16 Langland, William, 54, 211, 232, 234 Leavis, F. R., 17, 254 Lessing, G. E., 57-58, 59, 64, 96, 256 lexis, 23, 153, 243, 247, 251; in Aristotle, 17; in Frye, 18, 20, 21 Li Po, 108-09, 113 Li Shang-yin, 92-94, 95, 96, 97, 117, 178 224-25; accentual meter, 202, Li Yi, 91-92, 93 221, 232; in narrative poetry, Lindsay, Vachel, 187 21; in Skelton, 208; in " T h e literary chants, 186-89 Tyger," 7, ig6; Wordsworth on, literary charms, 155-58 3, 190-91, 193-94; in Wyatt, literary riddles, 22, 34-36, 47; and 225-26, 229, 239-40 emblem, 54, 55-56 Milton, John, 126-27, 193 Little Review, The, 101 Liu, James J. Y., 105, 106-07, 111,mimesis, 22, 125, 180; Frye on, 18; language as, 119-27, 180; 258, 259 Lessing on, 58; meter as, 191, logopoeia, 15-18, 20-21, 243, 245 193; in Pound and Williams, 88 Lucas, Dolores Dyer, 43 Miner, Earl, 70, 97, 259 Lydgate, John, 211 Mitchell, W.J.T., 66, 257 Mooney, James, 150, 181, 182, 261 Ma Chih-yuan, 107-08, 113 Moore, T o m , 232, 234 MacDonagh, Thomas, 260 272

INDEX Moritake, 70, 73, 97, 113, 257 "moving Image," 80-88 Muir, Kenneth, 265 Muller, Max, 121 myth, and phanopoeia, 93-97, 117, 178; and melopoeia, 170, 171, 175-78 Na-khi, 158, 261-62 naming, in Donne, 39, 41; and chant, 189; and charm, 158-61; and emblem, 54, 56, 64; Fenollosa on, 120, 125-27; in haiku, 78-79; and ideogram, 101; and Image, 78-79; and kenning, 36; and logopoeia, 245-48; and melopoeia, 97; in Milton, 12627; and phanopoeia, 25-26, 38, 96, 97-99, 108, 111-12, 116-17, 132; and riddle, 32, 44, 160-61; in Shakespeare, 33, 117; Williams on, 78 No drama, 100, 101, 259 nursery rhymes, 8, 9, 136, 254 Olson, Charles, 80, 93 onomatopoeia, 154, 176, 219, 261 Opie, Iona and Peter, 254, 255 opsis, in Aristotle, 17, 56-57; in Frye, 18-20, 21-22 Ostriker, Alicia, 254 Ovid, 96, 115 Paley, Morton D., 253 paradox, 10, 38; in Donne, 41-42; and emblem, 48, 52, 98; and haiku, 76-78; and Image, 69-70, 75-76. 77, 79, 99; in literary riddles, 35, 36, 39; and pun, 250-51; and riddle, 29-30, 31, 32. 33. 45; i n Wyatt, 39-40 Pattison, Bruce, 265 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 149, 261 peripeteia, 81-83, 89 273

Perry, Matthew C., 100 Petrarch, Francesco, 224, 226, 242 Plantin press, 48, 65 Pliny, 247 Plutarch, 57, 256 Poe, Edgar Allan, 149, 153, 195 poetic diction, 4, 36, 153 "poetry of meditation," 10, 251 Pope, Alexander, 17, 26, 243; on Skelton, 199-200, 218, 263 Porteus, Hugh Gordon, 259 Pound, Ezra, 22, 50, 67, 75, 86, 88, 96, 97, 98, 117, 254, 259, 260, 261; "Alba," 74-75, 76, 80; " T h e Alchemist," 156-57, 158; Cathay, 101, 112; Cantos, 14, 21, 22, 101, 112, 113, 157-58, 195; on Chinese poetry, 16, 67, 105, 108, 109; Confucius, 112; and haiku, 70, 73, 75, 76, 78, 89, 97, 110; on ideogram, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108-13, 118, 120; "ideogrammic method," 101, 110, 113-16, 120, 260; on Image, 68-69, 7s> 8 ° . 8 9; "In a Station of the Metro," 11, 13-14, 19, 68-69, 7°. 73. 76, 80, 85, 97, 109, 133, 257; 'Noh'—or, Accomplishment, 101; on logopoeia, 15-18, 20-21, 243, 245; on melopoeia, 15-18, 21, 134-35, 140, 154-55. 219. 240-41; "Pagani's, November 8," 74, 76, 80, 89; on phanopoeia, 1518, 21, 32, 127, 133, 154, 258; " T h e Return," 81-83, 89, 113 praxis, 22, 80, 179-80. See also action prayer, 8-9, 143, 169, 223 Praz, Mario, 255, 256, 257 Propertius, Sextus, 16 prophecy, 180-86, 232 proverb, 210-16, 218, 219, 222, 264

INDEX pun, 18; and logopoeia, 245-51; and riddle, 30, 250; in Thomas, 250-51, 266 Puttenham, George, 224 Quarles, Francis, 48, 54, 55, 57, 65. 255. 256: on emblem, 50-51; Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, 60-64, 80, 90, 91, 98, 116, 176 Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta, 96 Ransom, John Crowe, 153 Rasmussen, Knud, 139, 150, 164, 2Θ1 rhyme, and "babble," 18; in Chinese poetry, 102; and mean ing, 244-45; in primitive poetry, 138-39; in Skelton, 203-04, 217, 218; in "The Tyger," 8; "visual rhyme," 122-23, 124; in Wyatt, 227-28, 240 Richards, I. A., 153 riddle, "enumerative riddle," 2829, 260; Frye on, 19, 22; "neck riddle," 160-61; and metaphor, 28-29, 30-33, 44-45; and paradox, 29-30, 31, 32, 33, 45; Taylor on, 27-28 riddles, Albanjan, 40; Arabic, 38; Bantu, 23, 27, 40, 41; Danish, 130, 131; Dutch, 29; English, 30. 31- 33. 38· 39. 45; Icelandic, 29; Irish, 2g, 30, 31, 35; Serbian, 30, 35; Spanish, 45; Sumerian, 27; Swedish, 28, 35, 38; Vogul, 28; Yakut, 28, 30 Roberts, Helen H., 260, 261 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 4-5, 253 Rock, Joseph F., 261 Rothenberg, Jerome, 258 Roys, Ralph L., 263 Ruthven, K. K., 254 Ryota, 78-79, 89

Scaliger, J. C., 34 Schiller, J.C.F. von, 35 Schneider, Elisabeth, 265 Scott, Sir Walter, 5 Shakespeare, William, 23-24, 44, 1 93, 195; Antony and Cleopatra, 130, 131; Hamlet, 38, 250; King Lear, 130-31; Macbeth, 155, 156, 197; Othello, 46; Pericles, 26, 64; Romeo and Juliet, 249-50; The Tempest, 155-56, 161, 197; "Sonnet 73," 33, 46, 64, 98, 117; Venus and Adonis, 88 Shoha, 72-73, 89 Sidney, Sir Philip, 48, 64, 135, 197, 198 Simmons, Robert E., 253 Simonides of Ceos, 57 Skeat, W. W., 150, 261 Skelton, John, 23, 198, 199-221, 223, 227, 232, 233, 234, 236, 241, 242, 244, 263; "Phyllyp Sparowe," 200-01, 204, 205, 207, 219; Skeltonics, 200-03, 205, 207, 208-09, 214-15, 218, 221, 233; "The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng," 203, 209-10, 21718, 219; "Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?" 204, 205-07, 210-15, 219, 224 Smart, Christopher, 245-48, 249, 266 song, 8, 136, 233-40, 241. See also song-melos song-melos, 135, 162-65, 194-95, 197, 198, 220, 241; in chant, 166, 169-75, *8i, 184, 185, 196; in Hopkins, 221-22, 224; and meaning, 243, 244; meter as, 192-93; in proverbs, 214; in Skelton, 201-02, 204, 205, 207, 2og, 216, 217, 218, 219, 227, 234; in Wyatt, 232-40, 242 Sonstroem, David, 266

INDEX Sophocles, 26 Southall, Raymond, 225-28, 240, 265 "spatial form," 56-58, 67, 136-37, 176, 257; and emblem, 59-64; and ideogtam, 101, 113, 118-19, 120, 124-25, 131-32; and "ideogrammic method," 116-17; and Image, 79-99; and Blake, 9, 10, 66, 117 "special language," in chant, 172, 173; in charm, 150-55, 158 speech, language of, 3, 4, 24, 19091; rhythms of, 8, 22, 134, 135, 193. '95. !97. 208, 210, 214, 218, 224, 226, 231, 241, 264. See also speech-melos speech-melos, 135, 194-95. »97· 220, 241; in chant, 196; in Hopkins, 222-23, 224; an^ meaning, 243-44; in Skelton, 208-15, 216, 217, 219, 234; in Wyatt, 225-28, 229-31, 238, 240, 242 Spenser, Edmund, 54, 64 Spitzer, Leo, 58, 256

Tatwine, Archbishop of Canterbury, 34 Taylor, Archer, 45, 254, 264; on literary riddles, 34; on riddle, 27-28 "temporal form," 56-58, 120, 13637, 176-77; and emblem, 59-64; and "spatial form," 132 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 197 tension, in meter, 193-94, 197; in Skelton, 205 Thomas, Dylan, 43-44, 46, 250-51, 266 Thompson, John, 191-92, 193, 197 Thomson, James, 256 Thomson, Patricia, 265 Tilley, M. P., 264 Tillyard, E.M.W., 232, 233, 234 "timeless moment," 56, 88-98 Tuve, Rosemond, 257 "unity of place," 58 "unity of time," 58, 59 ut pictura poesis, 57, 67, 79, 81, 256

"sprung rhythm," 221-24, 232-33, 265 Stead, William Force, 247, 266

Vatery, Paul, on rhythm, 11-13,

Stevens, John, 265-66

133. '49-5°. 1M' Verrier, Paul, 191 Vico, G., 121

Stevens, Wallace, 46, 97 Strehlow, T.G.H., 171, 173, 174-75, 262 Str0m, Fr., 254, 255 Sturluson, Snorri, 36-37 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 224, 225 Swift, Jonathan, 34 syncopation, in meter, 193-94,

14, 18, 133, 134, 241; on magic, l6 «

Virgil, 99 visual imagination, 18, 47, 60, 67, 79, 88, 98, 127, 133, 136; in Blake, 9-10; Pound on, 11, 14, 15. »9. 32 Wei Chuang, 105

196-97; in Skelton, 205, 209,

Whitehall, Harold, 265

217; in song, 235; in Wyatt,

Whiting, B. J., 264 Whitman, Walt, 187

232, 238, 240 Taigi, 72, 73

Whitney, Geoffrey, 48, 52-53, 5960, 65, 255; on emblem, 50

INDEX Williams, William Carlos, 22, 67, 91, 96, 97, 120, 149, 195; "Bird," 89-90, 97; "Daisy," 112; "El Hombre," 75, 76; on Image, 78; on mimesis, 88, 125; Paterson, 21; on roots of poetry, 10, 14, 16, 18, 20; "Spring Strains," 86-88; "To a Solitary Disciple," 83-86, 88 Wimsatt, W. K., 153, 263 "wit," 17, 25, 245; and emblem, 52 Wither, George, 59, 65 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 205, 207, 208, 210-15 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 253 Wordsworth, William, on Blake, 4-5, 253; "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud," 38, 107; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 3-4, 7, 10, 22,

24, 128, 135, 180, 190-91, 19394; The Prelude, 10-11; "The Solitary Reaper," 66 Wrenn, C. L., 37, 255 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 23, 198, 210, 224-42, 244, 251, 265, 266; "Ffarewell, the rayn of crueltie!" 227-28; "I fynde no peace," 226-27; "Processe of tyme," 228-32, 234, 238, 240; and riddle, 39-40, 43; "Wythe servyng styll/' 239-40 Yeats, W. B., 22, 91, 96; "The Magi," 94-96, 97, 117. 178 Yip Wai-lim, 108, 259 Zen, 77

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Welsh, Andrew, 1937Roots of lyric. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Folk poetry—History and criticism. 3. Lyric poetry—History and criticism. PNH26.W45 8og.i'4 77-72141 ISBN 0-691-06345-1

2. Poetics. I. Title.