The Introverted Poem, Blog 4: The Lyric Effect

We live in an empirical world and empiricism requires of us that what we hear, what we see, what we touch in the moment are all that’s there, and, further, that any attempt to impose upon the immediacy of experience something hidden, as meaning is always assumed to be, is doctrinal, from the outside, and therefore a kind of tyranny. There is much to recommend this admonition. The various cults, ideologies, movements and inquisitions down through history have thrived on positing forces at work behind or above what we think of as the material world by way of imposing upon the race any number of tyrannies both psychological and political. Their trafficking has been almost entirely in the realm of anxiety, with its tendency to assume beyond the moment. The literary manifestations of such superstitios have been ritualistic, theatrical, allegorical, all of them predicated on the conflation of likeness with causality. This is literally true of the rituals, especially the earliest of them; it’s literarily true of allegory, in which causality is almost entirely determined by character as morally conceived. That is, characters are morally set. They can’t act except in ways wholly determined by their moral nature, which is codified and often rendered explicit by their names.

If the perception of likeness is understood as an act of memory in which the thing before us is perceived as similar to a remembered thing, allegory as a species of imitatio can be conceived of as an initial confluence of doctrine and memory. In allegory, what we remember is all but conflated with how we remember it. Not all left-handed people, for instance, are evil (sinister) but allegory will attribute evil to left-handedness because the culture does, so that’s what we “remember” of left-handedness. In allegory memory is determined by doctrine insofar as the culture is.

As for the lyric mode, as differentiated from allegory, every lyric has a dramatic element, especially in that it is to some degree a species of soliloquy. There is a voice with its implied sense of character, there is a moment as defined by specific circumstances either hinted at or overtly recounted, and there is almost always the sense of a conflict to be resolved—the tension of plot, but internalized. The resolution within the soliloquy is felt as a resolution in the larger world too, but only momentarily as per what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” A lyric poem does not double-down on itself the way doctrine does, or solipsism, or power in the political sense. The lyric is transitive, aware of its place in time, aware, that is, that time has engendered it and will as Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 60 “transfix” its “flourish” soon enough.

Causality is not as important in the lyric mode as the bringing into covalence thoughts and images both present and remembered. This operation is of the essence of metaphor, which, unlike doctrine or ideology, inhabits time as memory, the way imagination inhabits place, all localized aspects of the world we live in being imagined by us before they are “known” in any empirical way. In this sense experience, being internal, precedes empirical understanding while metaphor experiences time not as an orderly cause-effect progression but as a suspension of effects—effects only—both emerged and emergent. In this sense understanding an image’s metaphorical function is not the same thing as identifying it as in allegory as a “symbol,” since symbols are only windows—we look through them to see the ideas behind them. In metaphor there is no “behind.” Each element of the metaphor inhabits the other. A newly encountered phenomenon is experienced by way of comparison with (not to, as in analogy) a remembered one. The understanding involved takes the form of a very un-empirical synchronicity of experiences: the past lives in the present and the present lives—is imagined—by virtue of a kind of exchange with the past.

When a poem under the pressure of its reader’s inquiries yields the metaphorical nature of the image it presents, it does so the way a rose might open just a little further to give up its perfume. The perfume is entirely of the rose which is, the rose, as much of the perfume’s essence by way of “understanding” as the perfume is of the rose’s essence reciprocally. This is because the lyric “understanding” is neither a verification nor an extrapolation. Although both of those elements of empirical understanding contribute to it, they are subservient to that more primary and more defining cognitive function whereby we are able to see, and for sure, things that aren’t before us. That is, imagination, being quite literally the ability to perceive images that are not present in time to the eye—and, crucially, to believe in them—conjures felt realities, proven in that they are experienced. We wouldn’t be enchanted at all by Frost’s poem if it didn’t put us in that sleigh and have us confront those beautiful woods, employing all its verbal resources, including its music, to effect a suspension of what Keats called our disbelief. In this sense, when we give ourselves over to a poem’s music and imagery, we become the poet’s thralls. The poet’s ‘making’ consists in the poem’s rhythms and sounds, as well as its formal aspects, which are concrete. Concommitantly, it consists in the poem’s mental aspects, its awakening of our imagination, which is very like an act of thaumaturgy.

Not the kind, however, that alienates us from ourselves, as per the Greeks’ notion of a Circe’s magic, or as per all the various medieval casters of spells and enchantments. For one thing, the reader is not acted upon so much as included in the poem’s magic, and, in Keats’s sense, willingly, as in a desired transformation of the reader’s experience of the present moment. The spell, that is, doesn’t work if the reader doesn’t participate actively at every step along the way. The unfolding rose is as much in the reader’s soul as the writer’s and it manifests as the reader’s creation, too. The reader enacts the poem just as much, almost, as the poet has. In Frost’s poem, the woods themselves become woods the reader has known or known of. The silence, the sweeping of the snow, the “downy flake,” are all phenomena the reader has experienced and, to a great degree, as he or she experienced them.  Once the imagination has been toggled on in this way the distance between the present moment and the remembered moment all but vanishes. The effect in even the darkest or saddest poems is restorative. We are restored to a feeling or a complex of feelings we’d assumed lost to the obliterating movement of time, whether because the objects of those feelings are lost or because the feelings and/or the thoughts they generated were proven untrue. The work the poem has done through its music, its imagery, its atmospherics, to restore to us feelings and apperceptions we’d given up for gone has in fact brought us into relationship with an earlier self we’d thought entirely forsaken in our march through time, a march that necessitates giving up as well as accepting. The vital connection between imagination and memory is exactly this restoration, and metaphor, if fully experienced by the reader, takes on a reality and a meaning that position the reader somewhere outside of time.

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Our earliest experiences of the world are very different from later ones precisely in that they are unorganized, less delimited by our systems-related functionality, our competence. Everyone’s born into a cultural context. An important fact about that context is that it is a system structured more or less according to the generation of outputs. New school robots and AI or old school animals aside, the cogs, the widgets, the flywheels, the belts and crank-arms that help generate these outputs are people. The process of die-casting, as it were, any individual soul into the part within the system that it will become involves a narrowing, sometimes a denial, of that soul’s inner and outer experience. Such a narrowing is more or less required by the individual’s development of interrelated “skill sets,” the mastery of which involves the shutting out of unrelated inputs as integrally as it requires a kind of hyper-focus on those that are relevant primarily to the system and not, as it were, to the self.

In this sense it might be said that the child’s initial and undifferentiating experience of the world atrophies over time as his or her ‘competence’ increases. Then one day he or she is a full-fledged and competent adult with very little interest in and very little wonder at, say, an astoundingly beautiful butterfly on a bush outside his or her office complex. As a child wandering, say, with his or her mother or father along that lawn on a lovely spring day, he or she might have been amazed with the butterfly’s beauty. Children, that is, experience the world far more powerfully and integrally than adults. They are startled more readily and more deeply, or struck with wonder, or seized with horror or pity, or thrilled with a story’s or a game’s outcome. Children know experientially the true worth of things, which can only be experienced in the present moment. Because a child has so little sense of that necessary construct we designate as ‘time,’ he or she feels inputs existentially, feels their meaning in a way that doesn’t differentiate between feeling and thought, emotion and logic. A child feels the world unconditionally, especially with regard to time—that is, not in a passing way or, until adults have trained her or him to do so, in an anticipatory way. The younger the child the truer such observations are, so that it might be said a newborn knows only the infinite moment, the mystic’s moment, the poet’s.

In this sense, perhaps, the child’s experience of the world embodies what the Platonists codified logically as the ideal, that aspect of existence that stands outside time with its infinite shadings, its gains and losses, its tyrannical demands on our psychological and physical selves. Because our particular age’s ‘system’ requires material inputs and outputs more or less exclusively and cares little about the aesthetic or the spiritual, it considers the ideal an illusion. On an experiential level as individuals, however, or more aptly as children, we know it is in fact the only reality and that like money itself the system’s legitimacy is the real illusion. As adults, however, we are of the system and can’t just abjure its legitimacy. The simple fact is that it is of us and we of it, it defines us—without as in metaphor embodying us.

This embodying, however, is not without some danger. The remembered self is also, as ventured above, a relatively less functional self and the defining process of becoming older requires, as noted, above all things functionality, “competence.” An adult given to experiencing his or her life as a child might is in our age considered at best “less,” or “non-,” and at worst “dys-” functional—in any case less competent and therefore to be diagnosed and medicated and sometimes consigned to institutional living. The Ireland Yeats championed would have thought of such a person as having been abducted at some point in their life by the sidhe, the eternally young, who had accordingly imbued him or her with an eternal youth that differentiated her or him existentially from others in the village or town. For a “functional” adult, furthermore, too much dalliance with raw experience, even of beauty or truth, is threatening. This is because, as also noted, his or her capacity for raw experience has atrophied. Raw experience, the experience of Truth or Beauty, is, as Emily Dickinson teaches in poem 1263, “[t]oo bright for our infirm Delight,” so “must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind.” The metaphorical relationship Dickinson establishes between Truth and a too dazzling light conveys overwhelming power, in the face of which mere humans are struck blind, itself a metaphor for the loss of functionality. Truth’s light is presented metaphorically in the poem as lightning and humans as children struck with so much awe bordering on terror before it that they must be comforted with “explanation kind.” Thus, insofar as truth might be concerned, the poet admonishes that we “tell it slant.”

This is the slantness of metaphor, its “explanation kind”: it allows us to remain who we are while at the same time experiencing who we’ve been. Imagination is not a form of psychosis but a modality of memory. On the one hand there is a poem’s present—its images and music, its thoughts, its structural aspects, all of which evoke a feeling that is a-temporal and therefore difficult to codify. On the other, and linked to this present, there is a remembered image. Because this image is remembered it is therefore ‘out of the past,’ from an earlier moment in a younger life, when we were closer, as it were, to the eternal present. The linkage brings us experientially into both the present and the past almost as if they were of the same essence. Metaphor, as it opens to our inquiries, returns to us the original experience of the eternal present, the ideal, but it does so “slant.” That is, it leaves us free to experience it or not, or to experience it only to the degree that we feel compelled by the beauties of the poem to inquire into it. Such an experience asks of us not that we deny the transitive present or what we have become over time, not that we be abducted and dysfunctionalized by the sidhe, but that we feel an earlier moment as present in the present, as alive again, alive to us as we presently are.

A poem enacting a death wish moment aligned contrastingly with a vital sense of “miles to go” and “promises to keep” conjugates both terms of the poetic moment against any differentiation. Death takes its ideal meaning as something “devoutly to be wished” precisely because of life’s meaningful obligations, without which the poet would never have come across the woods in the first place. Conversely, life becomes meaningful in the context of its opposite, especially if the promises to be kept are to be kept for the sake of life itself: the speaker’s, someone else’s, the reader’s perhaps.

Or at large in a muddy classroom full of fifth graders.