The White Goddess (99 page)

Must poetry necessarily be original? According to the Apollonian, or Classical, theory it need not be, since the test of a good poet is his ability to express time-proved sentiments in time-honoured forms with greater fluency, charm, sonorousness and learning than his rivals; these, at least, are the qualities that win a man a bardic Chair. Apollonian poetry is essentially court-poetry, written to uphold the authority delegated to poets by the King (regarded as a
Roi
Soleil,
Apollo’s vice-regent) on the understanding that they celebrate and perpetuate his magnificence and terror. They therefore use old-fashioned diction, formal ornament, and regular, sober, well-polished metre, as a means of upholding the dignity of their office; and make frequent eulogistic references to ancestral events and institutions. There is an extraordinary sameness in their eulogies: the Aztecs flattered their patriarchal Inca as ‘a well-fed hawk, always ready for war’ which was a phrase worked to death by the early mediaeval Welsh bards.

A Classical technique such as was perfected by these bards, or by the French poets of the Louis XIV period, or by the English poets of the early eighteenth-century Augustan Age is a sure sign of political stability based on force of arms; and to be original in such an age is to be either a disloyal subject or a vagrant.

The Augustan Age was so called because the poets were celebrating the same renewal of firm central government after the troubles leading to the execution of one king and the banishment of another, as the Latin poets (under orders from Maecenas, Minister of Propaganda and the Arts) had celebrated after Augustus’s triumph at the close of the Roman Civil Wars. The new poetic technique was based partly on contemporary French practice – the ‘Golden Age’ of French literature had just begun – partly on that of the ‘Golden Age’ of Latin. The fashionable ten-or-twelve-syllabled iambic couplet, well-balanced and heavily packed with antithetical wit, was French. The use of ‘poetical periphrasis’ as a formal ornament was Latin: the poet was expected to refer, for instance, to the sea as the
‘briny deep’ or ‘the fishy kingdom’ and to fire as the ‘devouring element’. The original reason for this convention was forgotten; it had grown out of the old religious taboo against direct mention of dangerous, powerful or unlucky things. (This taboo survived until recently in the Cornish tin-mines, where fear of the pixies made the miner refrain from speaking of ‘owls, foxes, hares, cats or rats save in Tinner’s language,’ and in Scotland and North-Eastern England among fishermen who had a similar fear of annoying the pixies by un-periphrastic mention of pigs, cats or priests.) Because the Latin poets also had a poetic diction, with vocabulary and syntax forbidden to prose-writers, which they found useful in helping them to accommodate Latin to the Greek convention of hexameter and elegiac couplet, the English Augustans gradually developed a similar diction which they found useful in resolving awkward metrical problems.

The fanciful use of periphrasis was extended in the period of mid-Victorian Classicism. Lewis Carroll aptly parodied the poets of his time in
Poeta
Fit,
Non
Nascitur
(1860–63).

And the Romantic Revival had brought a highly archaic diction into fashion. It was considered improper to write:

The correct language was:

and if ‘wind’ was used it had to rhyme with ‘mind’ not with ‘sinned’. But Victorian Classicism was tainted with the ideal of progress. The dull, secure Augustan ‘rocking-horse’ alexandrine and heroic couplet had been abandoned since Keats’s attack on them and a poet was encouraged to experiment in a variety of metres and to take his themes from anywhere he pleased. The change marked the instability of the social system: Chartism
threatened, the monarchy was unpopular, and the preserves of the old landed nobility were being daily encroached upon by the captains of industry and the East India Company Nabobs. Originality came to be prized as a virtue: to be original in the mid-Victorian sense implied the ‘mental squint’ which enlarged the field of poetry by weaving poetic spells over such useful but vulgar things as steam-boats, mutton-pies, trade exhibitions and gas lamps. It also implied borrowing themes from Persian, Arabic or Indian literature, and acclimatizing the sapphic, alcaic, rondel and triolet as English metrical forms.

The true poet must always be original, but in a simpler sense: he must address only the Muse – not the King or Chief Bard or the people in general – and tell her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar words. The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman, and if her celebrant makes love to her with the second-hand phrases and ingenious verbal tricks that he uses to flatter her son Apollo she rejects him more decisively even than she rejects the tongue-tied or cowardly bungler. Not that the Muse is ever completely satisfied. Laura Riding has spoken on her behalf in three memorable lines:

A poet cannot continue to be a poet if he feels that he has made a permanent conquest of the Muse, that she is always his for the asking.

The Irish and Welsh distinguished carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious. An Irish poet could compose an
aer,
or satire, which would blight crops, dry up milk, raise blotches on his victim’s face and ruin his character for ever. According to
The
Hearings
of
the
Scholars,
one synonym for satire was
‘Brimón
smetrach’
‚
that is, word-feat-ear-tweaking:

– as he would have been able to do if the poet had tweaked his nose. Nor might he forcibly resist, since the poet was sacrosanct; however, if he was satirized undeservedly, the blotches would rise on the poet’s own face and kill him at once, as happened to the poets who lampooned the blameless Luan and Cacir. Edmund Spenser in his
View
of
the
Present
State
of
Ireland
writes of the Irish poets of his own day:

And Shakespeare mentions their power of ‘rhyming rats to death’, having somewhere heard of the seventh-century Seanchan Torpest, the master-ollave of Ireland who, one day finding that rats had eaten his dinner, uttered the vindictive
aer
:

which killed ten of them on the spot.

In Greece the metres allotted to the satirist were the poetic metres in reverse. Satire can be called left-handed poetry. The Moon travels from left to right, the same way as the Sun, but as she grows older and weaker rises every night a little farther to the left; then, since the rate of plant growth under a waxing moon is greater than under a waning moon, the right hand has always been associated with growth and strength but the left with weakness and decay. Thus the word ‘left’ itself means, in Old Germanic, ‘weak, old, palsied’. Lucky dances by devotees of the Moon were therefore made right-handed or clockwise, to induce prosperity; unlucky ones to cause damage or death were made left-handed, or ‘widdershins’. Similarly, the right-handed fire-wheel, or swastika, was lucky; the left-handed (adopted by the Nazis) unlucky. There are two sides to the worship of the Indian Goddess Kali: her right side as benefactress and universal mother, her left side as fury and ogress. The word ‘sinister’ has come to mean more than left-handed because in Classical augury birds seen on the left hand portended ill-luck.

The word ‘curse’ derives from the Latin
cursus,
‘a running’ – especially circular running as in a chariot race – and is short for
cursus
contra
solem.
Thus Margaret Balfour, accused as a witch in sixteenth-century Scotland, was charged with dancing widdershins nine times around men’s houses, stark naked; and my friend A. K. Smith (late of the I.C.S.) once accidentally saw a naked Indian witch do the very same thing in Southern India as a ceremony of cursing. The Muse-priestesses of Helicon and Pieria, in a sinister mood, must have danced nine times about the object of their curse, or an emblem of it.

Most English poets have occasionally indulged in left-handed satire, Skelton, Donne, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Blake among them; those who have built up their reputation principally on satire, or parody – such as Samuel Butler, Pope, Swift, Calverley – are only grudgingly allowed the title of poet. But there is nothing in the language to match the Irish poets in vindictiveness, except what has been written by the Anglo-Irish. The technique of parody is the same as that employed by Russian witches: they walk quietly behind their victim, exactly mimicking his gait; then when in perfect sympathy with him suddenly stumble and fall, taking care to fall soft while he falls hard. Skilful parody of a poem upsets its dignity, sometimes permanently as in the case of the school-anthology poems parodied
by Lewis Carroll in
Alice
in
Wonderland.

The purpose of satire is to destroy whatever is overblown, faded and dull, and clear the soil for a new sowing. So the Cypriots understood the mystery of the God of the Year by describing him as
amphidexios,
which includes the sense of ‘ambidextrous’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘ambivalent’, and putting a weapon in each of his hands. He is himself and his other self at the same time, king and supplanter, victim and murderer, poet and satirist – and his right hand does not know what his left hand does. In Mesopotamia, as Nergal, he was both the Sower who brought wealth to the fields and the Reaper, the God of the Dead; but elsewhere, in order to simplify the myth, he was represented as twins. This simplification has led, through dualistic theology, to the theory that death, evil, decay and destruction are erroneous concepts which God, the Good, the Right Hand, will one day disprove. Ascetic theologians try to paralyze or lop off the left hand in honour of the right; but poets are aware that each twin must conquer in turn, in an agelong and chivalrous war fought for the favours of the White Goddess, as the heroes Gwyn and Greidawl fought for the favours of Creiddylad, or the heroes Mot and Aleyn for those of Anatha of Ugarit. The war between Good and Evil has been waged in indecent and painful way during the past two millennia because the theologians, not being poets, have forbidden the Goddess to umpire it, and made God impose on the Devil impossible terms of unconditional surrender.