Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery—
I saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory
In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.
L
MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY
ONE goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, but poetry is never the same again.
I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to Early Work.
But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their “shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social problems were referred for discussion.
Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full implications of the remark, that but for this dummy, Harold, he would never have become a poet.
Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but a mimesis or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the pages of the Field, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different handwriting.
The difficulty of remaining loyal, which I mention elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and vice versa; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.
In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly hostile to each other.