THE ART OF POETRY.
I.
Many people have said to me, "I wish I could write poems. I often try, but——" They mean, I gather, that the impulse, the creative itch, is in them, but they don't know how to satisfy it. My own position is that I know how to write poetry, but I can't be bothered. I have not got the itch. The least I can do, however, is to try to help those who have.
A mistake commonly committed by novices is to make up their minds what it is they are going to say before they begin. This is superfluous effort, tending to cramp the style. It is permissible, if not essential, to select a subject—say, MUD—but any detailed argument or plan which may restrict the free development of metre and rhyme (if any) is to be discouraged.
With that understanding, let us now write a poem about MUD.
I should begin in this sort of way:—
Mud, mud,
Nothing but mud,
O my God!
It will be seen at once that we are not going to have much rhyme in this poem; or if we do we shall very soon be compelled to strike a sinister note, because almost the only rhymes to mud are blood and flood; while, as the authors of our hymns have discovered, there are very few satisfactory rhymes to God. They shamefully evaded the difficulty by using words like road, but in first-class poetry one cannot do that. On the whole, therefore, this poem had better be vers libre. That will take much less time and be more dramatic, without plunging us into a flood of blood or anything drastic like that. We now go on with a little descriptive business:—
Into the sunset, swallowing up the sun,
Crawling, creeping,
The naked flats——
Now there ought to be a verb. That is the worst of vers libre; one gets carried away by beautiful phrases and is brought up suddenly by a complete absence of verbs. However at a pinch one can do without a verb; that is the best of vers libre:—
Amber and gold,
Deep-stained in mystery
And the colours of mystery,
Inapprehensible,
Golden like wet-gold,
Amber like a woman of Arabia
That has in her breast
The forsaken treasures of old Time,
Love and Destruction,
Oblivion and Decay,
And bully-beef tins,
Tin upon tin,
Old boots, and bottles that hold no more
Their richness in them.
And I——
We might do a good deal more of this descriptive business, bringing in something about dead bodies, mud of course being full of dead bodies. But we had better get on. We strike now the personal note:—
And I,
I too am no more than a bottle,
An empty bottle,
Heaving helpless on the mud of life,
Without a label and without a cork,
Empty I am, yet no man troubles
To return me.
And why?
Because there is not sixpence on me.
Bah!
The sun goes down in the West
(Or is it the East?)
But I remain here,
Drifting empty under the night,
Drifting——
When one is well away with this part of the poem it is almost impossible to stop. When you are writing in metre you come eventually to the eighth line of the last verse and you have to stop; but in vers libre you have no assistance of that kind. This particular poem is being written for instructional purposes in a journal of limited capacity, so it will probably have to stop fairly soon; but in practice it would go on for a long time yet. In any case, however, it would end in the same way, like this:—
Mud, mud,
Nothing but mud,
O, my God!
That reasserts, you see, in a striking manner, the original motif, and somehow expresses in a few words the poignant melancholy of the whole poem. Another advantage in finishing a long poem, such as this would be, in the same way as you began it is that it makes it clear to the reader that he is still reading the same poem. Sometimes, and especially in vers libre of an emotional and digressive character, the reader has a hideous fear that he has turned over two pages and got into another poem altogether. This little trick reassures him; and if you are writing vers libre you must not lose any legitimate opportunity of reassuring the reader.
To treat the same theme in metre and rhyme will be a much more difficult matter. The great thing will be to avoid getting mud at the end of a line, for the reasons already given. We had better have long ten-syllable lines, and we had better have four of them in each verse. Gray wrote an elegy in that metre which has given general satisfaction. We will begin:—
As I came down through Chintonbury Hole
The tide rolled out from Wurzel to the sea.
In a serious poem of this kind it is essential to establish a locality atmosphere at once; therefore one mentions a few places by name to show that one has been there. If the reader has been there too he will like the poem, and if he hasn't no harm is done. The only thing is that locally Chintonbury is probably pronounced Chun'bury, in which case it will not scan. One cannot be too careful about that sort of thing. However, as an illustration Chintonbury will serve.
It is now necessary to show somehow in this verse that the poem is about mud; it is also necessary to organise a rhyme for 'Hole' and a rhyme for 'sea,' and of the two this is the more important. I shall do it like this:—
And like the unclothéd levels of my soul
The yellow mud lay mourning nakedly.
There is a good deal to be said against these two lines. For one thing I am not sure that the mud ought to be yellow; it will remind people of Covent Garden Tube Station, and no one wants to be reminded of that. However, it does suggest the inexpressible biliousness of the theme.
I think "levels" is a little weak. It is a good poetical word and doesn't mean anything in particular; but we have too many words of that kind in this verse. "Deserts" would do, except that deserts and mud don't go very well together. However, that sort of point must be left to the individual writer.
At first sight the student may think that "nakedly" is not a good rhyme for "sea." Nor is it. If you do that kind of thing in comic poetry no editor will give you money. But in serious poetry it is quite legitimate; in fact it is rather encouraged. That is why serious poetry is so much easier than comic poetry. In my next lecture I shall deal with comic poetry.
I don't think I shall finish this poem now. The fact is, I am not feeling so inspired as I was. It is very hot. Besides, I have got hay-fever and keep on sneezing. Constant sneezing knocks all the inspiration out of a man. At the same time a tendency to hay-fever is a sign of intellect and culture, and all the great poets were martyrs to it. That is why none of them grew very lyrical about hay. Corn excited them a good deal, and even straw, but hay hardly ever.
So the student must finish this poem as best he can, and I shall be glad to consider and criticise what he does, though I may say at once that there will be no prize. It ought to go on for another eight verses or so, though that is not essential in these days, for if it simply won't go on it can just stop in the middle. Only then it must be headed "Mud: A Fragment."
And in any case, in the bottom left-hand corner, the student must write: Chintonbury, May 28th, 1920.
A. P. H.
