“Yet these are all the same stuff, really,
The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,
Of busy imagination’s new-coined money—
And if you watch the blind
Phototropisms of my fluttering mind,
Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise
With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully
Its bale-fire eyes,
Or whether childishly
I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace
To play with toys until those horrors leave me,
Yet note, whichever way I find release,
By fight or flight,
By being wild or tame,
The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”
LI
THE PIG BABY
“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in “Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams.
When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result is poetry—or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one another.
LII
APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS
IN my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.
But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception of the typical poet:—