in the long strophes of meditation, the ironic commentary on the vanished heroes was
already there, giving the poem such dramatic tension as it had in the earlier version. The
refrain makes the commentary more explicit, more visibly dramatic and renders quite plain,
as Hart Crane intimated, the subjective character of the imagery throughout. But there was
another reason for it, besides the increased visualization that it imparts to the dramatic
conflict. It "times" the poem better, offers the reader frequent pauses in the
development of the two themes, allows him occasions of assimilation; and on the
whole–this was my hope and intention–the refrain makes the poem seem longer than it is
and thus eases the concentration of imagery –without, I hope, sacrificing a possible
effect of concentration.
IV
I HAVE been asked why I called the poem an ode. I first called it an elegy. It is an
ode only in the sense in which Cowley in the seventeenth century misunderstood the real
structure of the Pindaric ode. Not only are the meter and rhyme without fixed pattern, but
in another feature the poem is even further removed from Pindar than Abraham Cowley was: a
purely subjective meditation would not even in Cowley’s age have been called an ode. I
suppose in so calling it I intended an irony: the scene of the poem is not a public
celebration, it is a lone man by a gate. The dominant rhythm is "mounting, the
dominant meter iambic pentameter varied with six-, four-, and three-stressed lines; but
this was not. planned in advance for variety. I adapted the meter to the effect desired at
the moment. The "Lycidas," but other r models could have served. The rhymes in a
given strophe I tried to adjust to the rhythm and the texture. of feeling and image. For
example, take this passage in the second strophe:
Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!-
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare
Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, fuming like the blind crab.
There is rhymed with year (to many persons, perhaps, only a half-rhyme), and I hoped
the reader would unconsciously assume that he need not expect further use of that sound
for some time. So when the line, "The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare,"
comes a moment later, rhyming with year-there I hoped that the violence of image would be
further reinforced by the repetition of a sound that was no longer expected. I wanted the
shock to be heavy; so I felt that I could not afford to hurry the reader away from it
until he had received it in full. The next two lines carry on the image at a lower
intensity: the rhyme, "Transforms the heaving air," prolongs the moment of
attention upon that passage, while at the same time it ought to begin dissipating the
shock, both by the introduction of a new image and by reduction of the "meaning"
to a pattern of sound, the ere-rhymes. I calculated that the third use of that sound (stare)
would be a surprise, the fourth (air) a monotony. I purposely made the end words of
the third from last and last lines below and crab-delayed rhymes for row and slab, the
last being an internal and half-dissonant rhyme for the sake of bewilderment and
incompleteness, qualities by which the man at the gate is at the moment possessed.
This is elementary but I cannot vouch for its success. As the dramatic situation of the
poem is the tension that I have already described, so the rhythm is an attempt at a series
of "modulations" back and forth between a formal regularity, for the heroic
emotion, and a broken rhythm, with scattering imagery, for the failure of that emotion.
This is "imitative form," which Yvor Winters deems a vice worth castigation. I
have pointed out that the passage, "You know who have waited by the wall,"
presents the heroic theme of "active -faith"; it will be observed that the
rhythm, increasingly after "You who have waited for the angry resolution," is
almost perfectly regular iambic, with only a few initial substitutions and weak endings.
The passage is meant to convey a plenary vision, the actual presence, of the exemplars of
active faith: the man at the ate at that moment is nearer to realizing them than at any
other in the poem; hence the formal rhythm. But the vision breaks down; the wind-leaves
refrain supervenes; and the next passage, "Turn your eyes to the immoderate
past," is the irony of the preceding realization. With the self-conscious historical
sense he turns his eyes into the past. The next passage after this, beginning, "You
hear the shout …" is the failure of the vision in both phases, the pure realization
and the merely historical. He cannot "see" the heroic virtues; there is wind,
rain,and leaves. But there is sound; for a moment he deceives himself with it. It is the
noise of the battles that he has evoked. Then comes the figure of the rising sun of those
battles; he is "lost" in that orient of the thick and fast, and he curses his
own moment, "the setting sun." The "setting sun" I tried to use as a
triple image, for the decline of the heroic age and for the actual scene of late
afternoon, the latter being not only natural desolation but spiritual desolation as well.
Again for a moment he thinks he hears the battle shout, but only for a moment; then the
silence reaches him.
Corresponding to the disintegration of the vision just described there has been a
breaking down of the formal rhythm. The complete breakdown comes with the images of the
mummy" and the "hound bitch." (Hound bitch because the hound is a hunter,
participant of a formal ritual.) The failure of the vision throws the man back upon
himself, but upon himself he cannot bring to bear the force of sustained imagination. He
sees himself in random images (random to him, deliberate with the author) of something
lower than he ought to be: the human image is only that of preserved death; but if he is
alive he is an old hunter dying. The passages about the mummy and the bitch are
deliberately brief–slight rhythmic stretches. (These are the only verses I have written
for which I thought of the movement first, then cast about for the symbols.)
I believe the term modulation denotes in music the uninterrupted shift from one key to
another: I do not know the term for change of rhythm without change of measure. I wish to
describe a similar changes in verse rhythm; it may be convenient to think of it as
modulation of a certain kind. At the end of the passage that I have been discussing the
final words are "Hears the wind only." The phrase closes the first main division
of the poem. I have loosely called the longer passages strophes, and if I were e hardy
enough to impose the classical organization of the lyric ode upon a baroque poem, I should
say that these words bring to an end the Strophe, after which must come the next main
division, or Antistrophe, which was often employed to answer the matte r set forth in the
Strophe or to present it from another point of view. And that is precisely the
significance of the next main division, beginning: "Now that the salt of their blood
. . ." But I wanted this second division of the poem to arise out of the collapse of
the first. It is plain that it would not have suited my purpose to round off the first
section with some sort of formal rhythm; so I ended it with an unfinished line. The next
division must therefore begin by finishing that line, not merely in meter but with an
integral rhythm. I will quote the passage:
The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood. . . .
The caesura, after only, is thus at the middle of the third foot. (I do not give a full
stress to wind, but attribute a "hovering stress" to wind and the first syllable
of only.) The reader expects the foot to be completed by the stress on the next word, Now,
as in a sense it is; but the phrase, "Now that the salt of their blood," is also
the beginning of a new movement; it is two "dactyls" continuing more broadly the
falling rhythm that has prevailed. But with the finishing off of the line with blood, the
mounting rhythm is restored; the whole line from Hears to blood is actually an iambic
pentameter with liberal inversions and substitutions that were expected to create a
counter-rhythm within the line. From the caesura on, the rhythm is new; but it has -or was
expected to have- an organic relation to the preceding rhythm; and it signals the rise of
a new statement of the theme.
I have gone into this passage in detail–I might have chosen another– not because I
think it is successful, but because I labored with it; if it is a failure, or even an
uninteresting success, it ought to offer as much technical instruction to other persons as
it would were it both successful and interesting. But a word more: the broader movement
introduced by the new rhythm. was meant to correspond, as a sort of Antistrophe, to the
earlier formal movement beginning, "You know who have waited by the wall." It is
a new formal movement with new feeling and new imagery. The heroic but precarious illusion
of the earlier movement has broken down into the personal symbols of the mummy and the
hound; the pathetic fallacy of the leaves as charging soldiers and the conventional
"buried Caesar" theme have become rotten leaves and dead bodies wasting in the
earth, to return after long erosion to the sea. In the midst of this naturalism, what
shall the man say? What shall all humanity say in the presence of decay ? The two themes,
then, have been struggling for mastery; the structure of the poem thus exhibits the
development of two formal passages that contrast the two themes. The two formal passages
break down, the first shading into the second ("Now that the salt of their blood the
second one concluding with the figure of the jaguar which is presented in a distracted
rhythm left suspended from a weak ending -the word victim. This figure of the jaguar is
the only explicit rendering of the Narcissus mot if in the poem, but instead -of a youth
gazing into a pool, a predatory beast stares at a jungle stream, and leaps to devour
himself.
The next passage begins:
What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart?
This is Pascal’s war between heart and head, between finesse and geometry. Should the
reader care to think of these lines agathering up of the two themes, now fused, into a
final statement, I should see no objection to calling it the Epode. But upon the meaning
of the lines from here to the end there is no need for further commentary. I have talked
about the structure of the poem, not its quality. One can no more find the quality of
one’s own verse than one can find its value, and to try to find either is like looking
into a glass for the effect that one’s face has upon other persons.
If anybody ever wished to know anything about this poem that he could not interpret for
himself, I suspect that he is still in the dark. I cannot believe that I have illuminated
the difficulties that some readers have found in the style. But then I cannot, have never
been able to, see any difficulties of that order. The poem has been much revised. I still
think there is much to be said for the original barter instead of yield in the second
line, and for Novembers instead of November in line fifteen. The revisions were not
undertaken for the convenience of the reader but for the poem’s own clarity, so that,
word, phrase, line, passage, the poem might at worst come near its best expression.