The Old High Way of Love, Blog #5: Poetry and Politics

The Roman Church’s teaching has it that hope is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and a useful gift it is in helping to tamp down the klaxons of anxiety. Grief, however, both predicated on and redressed by memory, is the gift of the lyric poet.  A lived present moment, passing even as it is lived, is preserved, embraced even, by being “known.” It can’t be known, however, without reference to a lived and subsequently known past, either immediate or at a remove, and this is what memory provides, though it is necessarily infused with a sense of loss. Yeats’s Irish faeries had no need for memory because they were not subject to time. They neither grew nor declined, but were eternally young. Irish civilization, though, like Yeats’s poetry, was consummately lyrical: its grief was to live alongside a faerie world of its own imagining, without being of it except through imagining—which is simply a way of rendering synchronous both the present and the past, turning every moment of the human condition in time into an occasion of grief along with desire.

Yeats never escaped this tragic and painful state, but he tried. Like Herakles through heroic rage, in the Byzantium poems Yeats strove for a clarity that lifted him above grief, a hieratical clarity embodied in “Byzantium” itself by “a moonlit or a starlit dome” that “disdains . . . [a]ll mere complexities, [t]he fury and the mire of human veins.” This “fury and . . . mire” was more like the “passionate intensity” Yeats condemns in “The Second Coming” than like grief. Yeats saw such intensity as the marker of a dawning political age incapable of anything so merely human, so simply lyrical, as grief. The ultimate grief, then, for Yeats, is over the passing away of lyrical Ireland and its replacement by political Ireland, which for him was no Ireland at all.  

Frost came ironically close to Yeats’s rejection of the politicization of culture, and certainly of poetry, when in a letter to Louis Untermeyer he famously insisted that “politics is about the grievance. Poetry is about the grief.” In so doing, but without particularly intending to, he aligned with Yeats’s nostalgia for the folk, the faeries, and “the old high way of love.” This is as much as to say he positioned himself with, and for, the age-old notion that poetry, of all literary forms, should be about neither the particular reader nor the particular writer, but rather about something in the human condition as a whole that is unchanging, recurrent, like the refrain of a song as underwritten by its harmonic resolution. In this tradition, a poem is more like Keats’s urn—an object with its own inner principles that doesn’t so much speak to us, or “out of” us, but about us in a form that often makes it seem a “[c]old pastoral.” However “cold” it might be, though, it nevertheless is us—in the plural—us—as opposed to the particularity of any garden variety grievance. In and of themselves, grievances connect us only to ourselves, which is as much as to say they connect us to nothing permanent. Grief, though, connects us to that in us which is also of the entire race in a way that distills from our “passionate intensity” an experiential vision of essential human truths that do not refer primarily or exclusively to our own historically delimited circumstances.

Because the self grows and matures through a process that requires loss as a reciprocal of gain, the evolution of the ego in time involves a diminishment of self as much as any gain in power, position, control, or the illusion of these. Poetry’s charge is to redress that diminishment, to broaden the self out into itself again, at least within the linguistic confines of a particular poem. As Frost puts it in another letter to Untermeyer: “A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with . . . . It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn’t find it and comes to nothing.” A poem restores what’s lost to time in the form of a modality of memory that is both a mental and a linguistic construct, and is infused with the feeling-construct of its music. To move from a merely personal pang—a lump in the throat—to something that registers with readers, it has to be a thought, a mental and linguistic structure crafted to resonate outward in emotional and intellectual terms that are available in a general sense as mediated by culture. This is the sense in which poems have the potential to usher us out of self-involvement, with its attendant isolation, and into a larger context purged of fretfulness and anxiety—which are, these latter, and for better or worse, the driving energies of political culture.

The feeling-structure of music, as ventured above, is also that of memory. It involves departure and return, perhaps even departure in order to return, the return itself being an affirmation and therefore worth the departure. The musical element of poetry isn’t quite the same as that of a McCartney song or a Mozart hymn, being inherent in its language, not, for all intents and purposes, independent of it. That is, it’s the musicality of language itself, the ways in which syllables, besides containing meaning, sound it. Syllables in this sense are like musical tones as sung, little vowel-sacks, sort of, in which breath, the soul of language, resides, realizing itself in high-, middle-, or low-frequency o’s, i’s, a’s, e’s, and u’s, all of which are variously strident or profound, awed or flickering, throbbing or guttural. And as the mouth delivers these vowels its percussive, moist, vibrating, and throaty features constitute a kind of packaging in that they frame the note-sounds consonantally with, for instance, plosive b’s and p’s, dental t’s and d’s, liquid l’s and r’s, fricative f’s, v’s, and h’s, all of which inhabit the tonalities of expression the way in a popular song’s arrangement percussive and rhythmic elements create the groove and even the color. That is, consonants growl, thump, vibrate, or huff meaningfully, just as our bodies and especially the muscles and physical structures of our mouths, come into play when we express feelings against the resistance of decorum, doubt, morality, honesty, all those necessary social introjects that are there to remind us there are others in the room.

Syntax, too, has its cadences, which Frost called “sentence sounds” and which he identified as the essence of all well-written sentences. Sentence sounds, in Frost’s mind, were not in themselves musical, but the metaphors he deployed to describe the resonances created when they were “struck across” poetic meter were consistently musical, referring specifically to the way we produce notes by acting upon the structures of musical instruments. For instance, in an interview with Robert Penn Warren Frost remarks that when he begins a poem he has “a tune . . . of the blend of . . . meter and rhythm . . . arising from the stress on those. Same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang . . . of one on the other . . .” This, of course, is a reference to the way striking the strings of a guitar or banjo or other stringed instrument produces musical tones. Analogously, a poem strikes sentence sounds (“rhythms” in Frost’s lexicon) across a resisting structure, which is the metrical line. It’s not surprising, then, that in poems like “The Aim Was Song” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same” Frost asserts metaphorically that poetry has a kind of music and that without that music it is little more than prose or, worse, undifferentiated noise.

Unlike pop music, which is structured to pack most of its affirmative punch into the choruses, poetic music is more evenly distributed according to its function of “supporting,” sometimes mimetically, sometimes emotionally, the sense of the words, phrases, and lines, as well as setting an overall tonality. A wonderful example of this function of music is Frost’s own “The Silken Tent,” a single-sentence sonnet celebrating the harmonious strength and grace of a woman whose soul’s ties to the earth and everything around her are so easefully maintained that she’s hardly ever “of the slightest bondage made aware.” The poet’s love, even desire, for this woman, who in her spiritual self-sufficiency doesn’t seem to need anyone, channels itself into a fourteen-line conceit on a silken field tent “[a]t midday when a sunny summer breeze/Has dried the dew and all the ropes relent/So that in guys it gently sways at ease . . .”  On the face of it, the conceit is hardly what we might think of as romantic, but the music of the language so beautifully evokes the tent, the light, and the breeze that we can’t help feeling this woman’s inner as well as outer beauty—that is, her poise, her dignity, and her spiritual clarity, all embodied in the tent’s “central cedar pole/Which is its pinnacle to Heavenward/And indicates the sureness of the soul.”

The scene being all airiness and light, the lines are packed with “s” and “z” sounds, as the ones quoted above demonstrate, along with an unusual number (compared to everyday speech) of high-frequency vowels (long “e” and “a” sounds in particular). At the same time other consonant and vowel sounds lend a sense of her stability. T’s and d’s, and plosives consisting mainly of p’s and b’s, evoke strength and even power, while low frequency vowels (oo’s and long o’s and “aw” sounds) create a sense of reverence and gravity, a feeling almost of sacred space in and around the beautiful tent. By “realizing” content to such a degree, the music of the poem affirms it and in so doing affirms the love that generates both the construct—the conceit of the tent—and the language rendering it.

That the tent functions as a full-blown conceit is worth dwelling on for a moment in light of the poem’s mimetic power. A number of qualities come into play in distinguishing a conceit from the more usual sort of metaphor. For one thing, a conceit is explicit and, for another, often extended. Such is the case in “The Silken Tent.” The image of the tent itself is characterized by such easy extension, both syntactically and conceptually, across the fourteen lines of the sonnet form, that it mimetically realizes the similar extensiveness not only of the tent with its guy-lines, but also of the woman’s soul both out into her world and, within human proportions, just above or over her world. In the manner of Donne, too, for whose poetry the term was brought descriptively into play, a conceit is frequently “other far” from its tenor, often manifesting as a relatively mundane item—Donne’s famous geometric compass for example—which is itself invested with extra-mundane significance by the act of comparison. This, of course, is the inverse of how metaphors in general are thought to work, at least in love poetry. We think of them as investing their tenors with their own rareness by way of augmenting them, as per, for instance, Shakespeare’s “summer’s day” (prior to its being debunked in the next line), or Burns’s “red, red rose.”

In the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries such comparisons—conceits, that is— lent themselves especially, as in Herbert’s verse, to the intellectual and spiritual energies of neo-Platonism. They embodied in particular the gusto with which neo-Platonism sought to resolve the difference-distance between objects of contemplation by finding a common abstract and idealized “form”—something not unlike Keats’s Beauty and Truth—that made for a vital connection between them. In this sense, unity was retrieved out of the appearance of multiplicity, and that act reaffirmed a vital connection between Beauty and Truth.

Memory plays a role in this unification in that the conceit’s vehicle, the more or less mundane object, is remembered either literally or by way of being noticed in the moment, and so is in this sense raised out of oblivion. Frost’s poem, that is, at the same time that it is primarily about a woman of unusual spiritual beauty, is also almost entirely about a tent, in this case a remembered tent, or perhaps more precisely the remembered idea of a tent. The musical effects of the poem, as alluded to above, are entirely in the service of rendering it, as well as the breeze, the field it stands in. In this way, they function, along with the extensive syntax, in affirming mimetically a remembered moment in time inhabited by a beautiful tent.

In short, the imaginative act of bringing back into the present that moment and that object functions as a mimesis for love itself, whose labor is over and over to raise the loved object out of oblivion, either that of time, or that of what might be called paucity of spirit. In this regard it is analogous to song structure as we have been considering it in that its premise is challenged or departed from through the risk of metaphor, in this case the double-risk, as it were, of conceit, and reaffirmed by establishing through mimesis the vital connectedness of vehicle and tenor. Be this as may be, the poem’s music, along with its syntax (its sentence-sounds), is essential to its triumph.