{"id":1723,"date":"2016-05-06T10:36:31","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T10:36:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2016-05-06T13:03:19","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T13:03:19","slug":"pounds-the-garden-eliots-preludes-elegant-superficiality-and-human-depth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1723","title":{"rendered":"Pound’s “The Garden”, Eliot’s “Preludes” – elegant superficiality and human depth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve started looking at Pound again after a good many years in which I only read him occasionally and briefly. It all started with rereading Cantos II<\/em> and IV<\/em> in connection with some work on translations of Ovid. I found myself as gripped and excited by them as I was in my twenties. For me now, I think, going back to Pound essentially does mean going back the Cantos<\/em>, and to Cathay<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t always so; I didn\u2019t read the Cantos<\/em> till after I\u2019d graduated and we didn\u2019t \u201cdo\u201d Pound at all at university. I came on him as something of a private discovery, when studying Eliot\u2019s Selected Poems<\/em> for A Level: I picked Pound\u2019s up in a bookshop because Eliot had edited them. At that stage I was particularly haunted by early poems like \u201cNa Audiart\u201d and \u201cPraise of Ysolt\u201d, which I later found barely readable.<\/p>\n

My sense now is that however much Pound perfected the means of expression, there\u2019s a kind of imaginative emptiness about\u00a0much of his work before<\/em> the Cantos. The poems that have bubbled up most often in my mind over the years, poems I feel are anything but empty, are mostly translations or adaptations from the Chinese, like \u201cExile\u2019s Letter\u201d and \u201cThe River-Merchant\u2019s Wife: a Letter\u201d, \u201cLiu Ch\u2019e\u201d and \u201cFan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord\u201d. These have a depth of feeling that matches the fineness of their expression. Against them I\u2019d set \u201cThe Garden\u201d, which I always found extremely beautiful but which I think I also always found imaginatively hollow.<\/p>\n

Here it is. Unfortunately WordPress isn’t letting me indent lines four and twelve as I should:<\/p>\n

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
\nShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
\nAnd she is dying piece-meal
\nof a sort of emotional anemia.<\/p>\n

And round about there is a rabble
\nOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
\nThey shall inherit the earth.
\nIn her is the end of breeding.
\nHer boredom is exquisite and excessive.<\/p>\n

She would like someone to speak to her
\nAnd is almost afraid that I
\nwill commit that indiscretion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That is a real pleasure to say out loud, to murmur to yourself, or simply to sound in your head, feeling the balance of the lines, their buoyancy and tensile strength, the way they simultaneously seem to take their time and to lean forward in anticipation of what\u2019s to come.\u00a0 Beautifully phrased, beautifully constructed in its metrical and rhythmical variety, clinched by a witty, skilfully timed punchline, it\u2019s a triumph of verbal artistry, commanding and completely unforgettable once heard or read. For me, though, it has no imaginative substance, nothing under the words and going beyond them. Yes, there\u2019s a kind of energising joy in inhabiting the poem\u2019s voice, so ringing and so confidently paced, but the woman has no more imaginative presence than the skein of loose silk, nor have the \u201cinfants of the very poor\u201d, whose unkillable sturdiness removes them from the reality of poverty at the time, and nor, crucially, does the observing man, who has no existence beyond the smug theatrical flourishes with which he presents his show.<\/p>\n

How different things are in Eliot\u2019s \u201cPreludes\u201d, which you can find here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There we have a poem saturated in a sense of the ungovernable presence of other lives, human and animal, inhabiting the same space and time as Eliot does, pressing in on him and threatening to overwhelm him. It\u2019s a bleak, sickly, twilit world, for the most part, but everything in it is alive, from the winter evening settling down like an animal, a dog or a cat, in the first line of section I, to the blackened but \u00a0impatient street near the end of section IV.[1]<\/a> Section I was in a poetry anthology we used with Year 7 boys in my earlier years as a teacher and they had no trouble learning it, partly no doubt because of its rhymes and the rhythmical strength of its short, emphatic lines, but also, I\u2019d guess, because of this pervasive attribution of life.<\/p>\n

I talked about ungovernable presence and I think that indicates the crucial difference between this poem and Pound\u2019s \u201cThe Garden\u201d. Unlike Pound, Eliot is imaginatively open to<\/em> lives beyond him. In this poem he responds with intense discomfort (as he does in \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d and other poems) as well as with compassion. The last seven lines of section IV bring this to a climax:<\/p>\n

I am moved by fancies that are curled
\nAround these images, and cling:
\nThe notion of some infinitely gentle
\nInfinitely suffering thing.<\/p>\n

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
\nThe worlds revolve like ancient women
\nGathering fuel in vacant lots.<\/p>\n

Such violently contrasting reactions make us feel the poet\u2019s anguish at not being able to grasp, let alone express, the meaning of what he sees or to stabilise his own reactions to it. This has the effect of making that life seem more real to the reader, making it seem like something that extends to infinity beyond the poem. [2]<\/a><\/p>\n

I think we\u2019re dealing with a fundamental difference of sensibility which you also see very clearly if you set Eliot\u2019s \u201cPortrait of a Lady\u201d beside Pound\u2019s \u201cPortrait d\u2019une Femme\u201d, and again I think Pound shows poorly in the comparison. There\u2019s always going to be something disappointing about writing about people that fails to bring them to life.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> We don\u2019t see<\/em> this dog or cat, we briefly participate in its action<\/em> through the process of saying the line. As you speak it, each phoneme seems a clear, distinct articulation till you reach the dark |l| of \u201csettles\u201d, at which point your own tongue seems to settle against your palate in a way that mimes the turning round on itself of the settling animal. Similarly, in the penultimate line of section I, the way you articulate \u201csteams and stamps\u201d seems to mimic the stamping action of the horse.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Although it\u2019s hard to give any definite propositional content to \u201cthe notion of some infinitely gentle \/ Infinitely suffering thing\u201d the lines have imaginative depth and a really profound emotional resonance because of qualities of articulation that belong to a different poetic order to the elegant superficiality of the Pound. Partly, perhaps, this is a matter of the various faint echoes and associations that curl and cling round Eliot\u2019s words, but I wouldn\u2019t want to be definite about any of them, because part of the point of Eliot\u2019s phrasing is the way it mutes and distances these associations (\u201csome … thing\u201d) at the same time as it summons them up. The really crucial factor is the role played by what Eliot might have called the \u201cauditory imagination\u201d, though nowadays one might call it the phonetic<\/em> imagination because it\u2019s less to do with what the words sound like than with what it feels like to say them. For example, it\u2019s to do with the yearning suspension acted out by the articulation of \u201cinfinitely\u201d, which the metre forces one to dwell on and prolong to fill the space of two iambic feet. Different people may do this in different ways. I do it by\u00a0extending the\u00a0transition between\u00a0the first and second syllables, feeling the friction of the fricative |f| in my mouth. You could of course do it by stressing the third syllable but that would both produce a silly singsong effect and seem out of keeping with the idea of gentleness. I think the richness of the sensation the lines give is also something to do with an elusive chemistry between \u201cinfinitely\u201d on the one hand and \u201cgentle\u201d and \u201csuffering\u201don the other, the first being so emphatic, the second and third so softly yielding.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve started looking at Pound again after a good many years in which I only read him occasionally and briefly. It all started with rereading Cantos II and IV in connection with some work on translations of Ovid. I found myself as gripped and excited by them as I was in my twenties. For me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[111,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1723","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ezra-pound","category-t-s-eliot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1723"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1733,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1723\/revisions\/1733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}