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THE FORGED FEATURE
THE FORGED FEATURE
Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty
New and Selected Essays

by
BEN BELITT

It is the forged feature finds me-the rehearsal

of own, of abrupt self, there.

-GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?
-WILLIAM BLAKE

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York
1995
 © Copyright 1995 by FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
All rights reserved.
LC 94-45816
ISBN 0-8232-1603-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 0-8232-1604-7 (paperback)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Belitt, Ben, 1911-

The forged feature : toward a poetics of uncertainty new and
selected essays I Ben Belitt.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8232-1603-9 (hardcover) : $30.00. -ISBN 0-8232-1604-7
(paperback) : $17.95
1. Ben, Belitt, 1911- Aesthetics. 2. Literature, Modern-20th cen-
tury-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. Poetry-Translating. 4.
Poetics. I. Title.
PS3503.E39F67 1995
809--dc20 94-45816
CIP
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgments lX
Foreword Xl

I · The Forged Feature:

Pursuits and Predicaments

A. Pursuits
1. Literature and Belief: Three "Spiritual Exercises" 5
2. Meaning and the Sonal Imagination 21
3. In Search of the American Scene: "Demographic Vistas" 29

B. Predicaments
4. The Enigmatic Predicament: Some Parables of
Kafka and Borges 41
5. The Heraldry of Accommodation: A House for
Mr. Naipaul 66
6. The Depth Factor: Saul Bellow 87
7. Memoir as Myth: The Odysseys ofPablo Neruda 97

C. Translation: Grammars and Consciences

8. The Translator as Nobody in Particular: Faiths and
Fidelities 119
9. Lowell's Imitations: Translation as Personal Mode 128
10. The Vanishing Original: Transvaluations 142
The Laughing Neruda 142
A House of Fourteen Planks 148
The Mourning Neruda 153
The Burning Sarcophagus 162

II · Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty:

Trial Balances

Preface 177
11. Toward a Poetics of Uncertainty 179
Vl CONTENTS

i. "What Porridge Had John Keats?" 179

ii. Between the Dice-Cup and the Urn 181
iii. "The Journey Itself': Coleridge,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud 182
iv. Coleridge-Metaphors of Voyage:
The Serpent and the Path of Sound 185
v. Coleridge and Blake: The Contrariety
Principle 189
vi. Coleridge's Water Spider 190
vii. The Postponements of Wallace Stevens:
What Poetry Does 192
viii. Machado and Blake: The Egg and the
Eye 195
ix. Blake: The Eye and the Lie 197
x. Blake: The Bird and the Airy Way 200
xi. Hopkins's Windhover 203
xii. Blake and the "Holy-Holy-Holy" Sun 205
xiii. The Bell and the Artichoke: Coleridge and
Neruda 208
12. Sight: Second or Sudden-Versions of Witness 211
i. Jean Cocteau: A Dog, a Cab, a House 211
ii. "What They Looked Likest" 213
iii. Keats: Surprise and Excess 215
iv. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place " 218
v. Three Displacements by Light: Sacred and
Profane 219
vi. William Carlos Williams: The Glass Pitcher
and the Nightingales 222
13. Hopkins Observing: "Rehearsals" 229
i. "These Things, These Things Were
Here and but the Beholder Wanting" 229
ii. Hopkins Observing: Looking at High
Waves; Water Coming Through a Lock 232
111. Hopkins Observing: Evaporation,
Precipitation, Crystallization 235
IV. Hopkins Observing: Celestial Mechanics 239
v. Hopkins Observing: The Bafflements
of the Bluebell 244
vi. Hopkins Observing: A Trial Balance 249
 CONTENTS Vll

14. Hopkins Transforming: "It Changed Beautiful

Changes" 258
1. Hopkins Transforming: The Observer as
Celebrant 259
11. Hopkins Transforming: The Observer as
Artificer 263
111. Hopkins Transforming: The Observer as
~~m ~6
iv. Hopkins Transforming: The Observer as
Comforter 273
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due the editors of Salmagundi, Review '74, The

Bennington Review, The Southern Review, Triquarterly, Voyages,
Mundus Artium, Razon y Fabula (Bogota), Parnassus, The South-
west Review, Mundo Nuevo (Paris), and Poets on Poetry for permis-
sion to reprint many of the essays appearing in this volume.
B. B.
 FOREWORD

A word is due the reader regarding the range and purpose of the
essays that follow. My intent has been twofold: to bring together
a representative selection of critical essays bearing on my inter-
ests as poet, critic, teacher, and translator; and to furnish an on-
going review of my concern with the encoding of languages and
the exigencies of their imaginative retrieval. Beginning with a
triad of pieces on (A) the uses of belief, linguistics, and place as
shaping forces in the concretizing of the literary occasion, it
moves on to (B) an examination of the fictive medium in terms
of a number of "predicaments"-"enigmatic," "heraldic," myth-
opoeic (Neruda as "latter-day Homer"), political, taxonomic
(modes of the penetrability and impenetrability of contexts,
depth strategies in the creation and construing of meanings). The
texts are the opportune ones that happen to have come my way
as observer-reporter of twentieth-century prose-parables,
novels, autobiographical memoirs-and cover a broad range of
multinational talents: Kafka, Borges, V. S. Naipaul, Saul Bellow,
Pablo Neruda.
A third section (C) is devoted to the theory and practice of
translation and embraces a personal repertory of risks, choices,
and problematics encountered during my labors as translator of
poetry and prose over the last thirty years or more. The endless
debate over the "liberal" and the "literal," the private and the
public, the "faithful" and the willful modes of mediating between
grammars and consciences in behalf of the "one true translation"
is rehearsed in terms of the texts and controversies that produced
them. A concluding piece attempts a "revaluation" of the Neruda
canon apart from the rigors of translation, as a prolegomenon for
the posthumous appraisal of a master and a palimpsest oflegends
for the reader.
Finally, there is a more recent sequence of four essays occa-
sioned by my growing interest in the uses of the "new physics"
of quantum mechanics and its uncanny relevance to the account-
ability of poetry. Here, my emphasis is on the reading of poetry
rather than the writing or historicity of the textual artifact-the
Xll FOREWORD

lexical use of the multiple way as a mode of engaging the interac-

tion of meanings and things in their shaping of a vision that ac-
knowledges the "uncertainties" of language and reality. Needless
to say, the "forged feature"-Hopkins's phrase-also involves a
revaluation of Gerard Manley Hopkins as "scientific" rather than
priestly worker in the smithy of the senses; but I hope that a pun
on the operative word is also permissible-"forged" in the dou-
ble sense of the crafting and tempering of the steely life of things;
and a counterfeiter's signature of the human venture on the cur-
rency of the cosmos. The touchstones applied deliberately mingle
traditions and individual talents-Keats, Blake, Stevens, Bishop,
Yeats, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, W. C. Williams, Machado, Rilke,
Cocteau, Wordsworth, Coleridge-to intimate the timeless ap-
plicability of the hermeneutics of incertitude.
The result, I would hope, is no mere miscellany of disjunct
pieces to be viewed in isolation as a retrospective chronicle of
Things Past and anomalous occasions. They also comprise a con-
tinuum to be read backward and forward like a palindrome of
persisting preoccupations that embody a single, haunting intu-
ition: that in all transactions involving the reciprocity of land-
scapes and languages there is an element of incertitude that meas-
ures the parameters of human reflection on the phenomenal life
of things.
To this end I have enlisted a variety of nomenclatural ploys to
follow the guises of Uncertainty to their sources in literature and
quantum mechanics: "eidolons," "predicaments," "enigmas,"
"parables," "fictions," "fables," "myths," "translations," "equa-
tions," "postulates," "theories," "laws," "lies." The unexpected
bonding of imaginative discourse with twentieth-century phys-
ics, to which I have devoted the concluding essays, is the cu-
mulative outcome of my continuing search for an iconographic
life that combines the scribal and phenomenal worlds in a precar-
ious equation for "reality." It may well be that the parting gift of
our dwindling millennium for scientist and poet alike is the rid-
dle of an ineffable Remainder.
BEN BELITT
Bennington College
Bennington, Vermont
 I
The Forge d Featur e:
Pursu its and Predic ament s
A. Pursuits
 1
Literature and Belief:
Three "Spiritual Exercises"
I

THOSE WHO HAVE HIS Note-Books to hand will be aware that I

have taken the second half of my title from Gerard Manley Hop-
kins, who had it from Saint Ignatius Loyola, who had it from the
Abbot Gardas de Cisneros. For Hopkins, the novice, preparing
for the Olympiad of his induction into the Society of Jesus, the
Exercises served the calisthenic purpose of grooming the incum-
bent priest for a crisis of commitment that led to the higher mys-
teries of his calling. For my own purposes, the choice of three
devotional texts is neither worshipful nor canonical; what I
would hope to do is suggest the co-existence of a sacred with a
secular subtext for individual talents committed to the creation of
a literature for laymen, and its imaginative encompassment in
language. My concern is not with a City of God, but with a
poetics for men of letters generally.
We can begin with a poor man's version of Pascal's Wager-
that confidence game for pietists of little faith who prefer the
fatalism of the gaming wheel to the prayer wheels of the East.
You may recall its street-smart inelegance, its bow to the baize of
the croupier's table:
He who calls heads and he who calls tails are guilty of the same
mistake; they both are wrong: the right course is not to wager.
"Yes, but we have to wager. You are not a free agent; you are
committed. Which will you have, then?" . . . "Heads: God ex-
ists!" If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose noth-
ing .... Bet he exists!
We can begin our little foray into literature and belief by put-
ting both chips on the gaming table: we can begin by assuming
6 THE FORGED FEATURE

we believe in Bibles. "Bet the Bible exists!" The wager, at the

very least, is eschatologically advantageous. For the Laodicaeans
among us, it provides a kind of spiritual insurance which turns
gambling into a species of cautionary divination. And let us, at
some midpoint between idolatry and condescension, choose
from the artifacts of Christian-Hebraic discourse three texts for
examination without regard for the protocol of worship, in the
spirit of that wager. And, as a third condition, let us be somber.
Here, whatever our stock of operative beliefs, is an avowedly
devotional anthology of belief which has penetrated into every
aspect ofhumane activity in the last 4,000 years ofWestern Euro-
pean history-which is inseparable from our literature, from our
ethics, from our certainties, from our anxieties, and from all the
objects of our violence and tenderness equally: a believer's canon
of private and public worship for those delivered from condi-
tional modes of assumption to absolute commitments that tran-
scend history and touch the very plasm of reality. In applying to
these texts, after all, we apply to 4,000 years of our contem-
poraneity, as well as to the old codices of our Jewishness and our
Christianity. Here are the persuaded, the assured, the convinced,
the obsessed, the inspired-the saints, the heroes, the defaulters
and the "fools" (Saint Paul's word) of belief; and here is the testi-
mony of their eloquence and their dedication. I am proposing
that we forfeit all definition, appeal to the textual witness of their
experience, and move blindly and without baggage into the liter-
ature of their belief.
"To ask with infinite interest," said Kierkegaard, "about a real-
ity which is not one's own, is faith."

II

Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise
him in the heights. Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all
his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of
light. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be
above the heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord: for he
commanded, and they were created. He hath also stablished them
for ever and ever; he hath made a decree which shall not pass.
Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps: fire, and
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 7

hail, snow, and vapours, stormy wind, fulfilling his word: moun-
tains and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: beasts and all cattle;
creeping things, and flying fowl: kings of the earth, and all peo-
ple; princes, and all judges of the earth; both young men, and
maidens; old men, and children: let them praise the name of the
Lord: for his name alone is excellent: his glory is above the earth
and heaven. He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of
all his saints; even of the children of Israel, a people near unto
him. Praise ye the Lord.
-Psalm 148

If the whole duty of the believer is to affirm the object of his

belief, the above passage is certainly an exemplary one. Here,
one feels, is the way all belief ought to sound: jubilant, resolute,
inexhaustible, hyperbolical. The text is, of course, from Psalms,
which in the Greek is a word deriving from psalmos, or a song
sung to the plucking of a stringed instrument; and in the Hebrew
from tehillim, meaning "praises." Apparently, the praiser has ap-
plied himself to his theme-the creativity of his Creator-in
both senses of the word, for the passage is at once songlike and
eulogistic. He begins by praising the universe in terms of its cre-
ative energies-the phenomena of light and warmth like the sun,
moon, and stars; the phenomena of order, like height, matter,
and heaven; the phenomena of power, like the angels-and ex-
horting them in turn to praise. He celebrates all that is unknow-
able to him "above the heavens" and then passes on to a category
of mysteries "from the earth" interpretable to him only in part:
dragons and deeps, fire, hail, snow, wind, and mountains. He
concludes with the theme of God's differentiated creativity-of
the transformations of matter which epitomize the life-process
and serve the needs of man: fruitful trees, cedars, beasts, cattle,
creeping things, flying fowl, human life in its princely and ratio-
nal aspects, childhood, youth, and old age; and, finally, the tribal
history of Israel itself.
The data of the psalm, however, are only a secondary aspect of
its content; what remains primary is the psalmos, or the song-the
affirmation of a productive God, which needs but a single word
to sustain it: Gloria!: "Praise! Praise! Praise!" It is the recurrence of
this word, in all the changing urgencies of its rhythm, which
gives the text its extraordinary mood of elation and certainty.
The psalm, if it is "believable" to outsiders at all, is believable,
8 THE FORGED FEATURE

not because it recommends itself to the intelligence as a statement

of demonstrable doctrine, but because it exists as an immediate
datum of sensibility. The inflection is doxological rather than
logical, infectious rather than reflective. Like Saint Paul, who
was "determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus
Christ and him crucified, " the Psalmist has concentrated all
knowledge into a single commitment: that of giving praise. He
has, in other words, equated reality with adoration. To believe
rightly is to affirm joyously; and he stands ready to say Yes to the
mystery of creation and his own destiny because it is an article of
his belief that the Creator is an aspect of his collective and indi-
vidual destiny and endows it with His divine imprimatur: that
Jehovah "exalteth the horn of his people ... even ... the chil-
dren of Israel."

Here let us digress for a moment. Let us concede with the Psalm-
ist that praise is an inalienable mandate of all genuinely operative
religions. Let us define praise in its broadest devotional sense as
the will or the wish or the need to affirm a numinous entirety of
belief. Let us oppose to the idea of praise the idea of appraisal-
the will or the wish or the need to verify, where a fundamental
skepticism and self-sufficiency are implied. Let us agree that the
praiser represents a mode of liturgical assent, and the appraiser a
mode of provisional corroboration: that one lies within the do-
main of spirit as a non-negotiable absolute, and the other in the
domain of suasion and the usable world; that one worships while
the other questions, one unifies and the other atomizes, one turns
to song and symbol, and the other to dialectic.
Does it follow, however, that praise must always exist in the
believer as an irreducible intensity-that belief must always be
undivided and single-hearted, like the Psalmist's, in order to be
"true"? Can there be such a thing as praiseless belief where human
worth and the viability of an ongoing cosmos are in doubt? If
not, how is praise possible for the modern spirit, in a time of
techniques. methodologies, and sciences which invite the skepti-
cal manipulation of all the categories of thought and matter, and
substitute cunning for awe? How can we ever hope for the joy of
the Psalmist in a world that is knowable and unhaunted, if his
single-mindedness rests upon the haunting of a cosmos and the
celebration of mystery. If Prospera has served as the tutelary spirit
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 9

for the re-haunting of a world plunging toward Renaissance om-

niscience, is not Hamlet the spokesman for joyless, aweless, dis-
tracted, fragmentary, postulating man?
I have of late-but wherefore I know not-lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look
you, this brave, o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fret-
ted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to me than a
foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is
man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and
moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the para-
gon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me: no, nor woman either, though by your
smiling you seem to say so.
-Act II, scene ii

Here, certainly, we have the obverse of the praise-bearing Psalm-

ist and the "hero of faith" -we have, instead, the divided sensi-
bility of the appraiser, whose melancholy and mistrust alienate
him from the universe at the moment of highest consent. Revers-
ing the fable of Balaam, who was sent to curse the tents of Jacob
and remained to bless them, Hamlet, it would seem, invokes the
blessing as though it were a curse. Yet, for the contemporary
mind, is it not also a fact that the blessing is there, in the only
way, perhaps, that we can invoke it? And discounting the melan-
cholia and estrangement of the speaker, are we not right in ask-
ing, after all: But isn't this a kind ofjoy? Isn't Hamlet's place with
the praisers?
I think it is; and the assumption that praise implies a joyfol
vocation, or that joy, in its devotional sense, must be present in
the praiser as a state of manifest sensibility, is a delusion. On the
contrary, praise does not imply an occasion of joy, but a premise of
joy-the belief in joy, or the creation of it out of the demand that
joy be. For the artist, joy may even be imagined into existence;
indeed, one of the profoundest achievements of the Romantic
poets was their rediscovery of the tragic, the "strenuous" charac-
ter of joy, and its affinity with despair, in their search for a prin-
ciple of belief. For Keats, it was "in the very temple of delight"
that "veil' d melancholy" had her "sovran shrine," and only he
10 THE FORGED FEATURE

"whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy's grape against his palate
fine" could enter. All of Michelangelo's sibyls, prophets, mar-
tyrs, warriors, diviners, lean from their niches with their chins
on the flat of their palms and their weight on their forearms and
knucklebones, brooding on the melancholy of a scrutable uni-
verse, as though they awaited a second coming of the Sphinx,
rather than Einstein's equation for energy. Out of joy, also, John
Donne concludes his suite of Holy Sonnets with the cry: "Those
are my best days when I shake with fear," Kierkegaard bases his
psychology of religious experience on a condition of "fear and
trembling," Gerard Manley Hopkins declares that his heart "lo,
lapped strength, stole joy" in the hours of "now done darkness"
when he lay wrestling with his God. It is in the pursuit of joy
that, according to Pascal, man "makes for himself an object of
passion, and excites over it his desire, his anger, his fear, to ob-
tain his imagined end, as children are frightened by the face they
have blackened." And in our own time, Auden has spoken to our
joy with the proposal-certainly as old as Saint Paul-that love
"needs death, death of the grain, our death, I Death of the old
gang."
Similarly, we can account for much of the anguish and the
obdurateness of Job as his sheer insistence upon joy and the will
to praise, in a situation ghoulishly designed to give him no cause
for either. The two themes "Let the day perish wherein I was
born!" and "I know that my Redeemer liveth!" are not two, but
one, and are equally a medium of praise. Only when this is borne
in mind can we account for the existence of one psalm begin-
ning, "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord," and another begin-
ning, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" in a
"book of praises." For further light on this paradox, we can
hardly do better than appeal to the example of Job himself-the
praiseless hero of faith-and to his crucial lamentation in Chapter
19.

III

Know that God hath overthrown me, and hath compassed me

with his net. Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry
aloud but there is no judgment. He hath fenced up my way that
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 11

I cannot pass and he hath set darkness in my paths. He hath

stripped me of my glory and taken the crown from my head. He
hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope
hath he broken like a tree . . . . Have pity upon me, have pity
upon me, 0 ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me .
. . . Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were
printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and
lead in the rock for ever! For I know that my redeemer liveth, and
that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though
after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see
God: whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and
not another, though my reins be consumed within me.
-Job 19:6-10, 21, 23-27

Note that the passage begins in blasphemy and ends in adoration.

Job, in effect, appeals from the wisdom of God to the wisdom of
man, calling the whole world to bear witness to the criminality
of his Creator. God has inexplicably "overthrown" him, "com-
passed" him, "fenced" him, trapped him, "stripped" him, dis-
honored him, "destroyed" him, "broken" him. The tone is one
of outraged betrayal: a loveless despot has struck at the sources of
good will and an anarchy of the spirit is at hand:
I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no
judgment.
Job implies that belief is no longer possible in a world where a
cynical and destructive God has run amok-a malevolent mis-
anthropist against whom there is neither redress nor judgment.
Seemingly, the passage is moving toward a statement of man's
tragic dependency upon man: henceforth, man must make his
love and his belief out of his own pitiableness. Job's abandon-
ment is all mankind's: tenderness, if it is to come at all, must be
found in the circumstance of man's common vulnerability. De-
spair must call helplessly to despair, indignation to indignation,
pity to pity:
Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, 0 ye my friends!

To all intents and purposes, Job is prepared to formalize his posi-

tion for all time "with iron pen and lead forever" as the new
humanism of the future. Yet, precisely at the point when his de-
nunciation of Jehovah has been accomplished without possibility
12 THE FORGiiD FEATURE

of compromise, when hope itself has been "broken like a tree,"

the adoration of Job blazes out in a passage which, for entirety of
belief, is unmatched in the Bible:

I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the

latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms de-
stroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see
for myself, and mine eyes shall behold and not another, though
my reins be consumed with me."

Let us examine the passage more closely. Note, in the first place,
that the outcry completely reverses the logic of the preceding
sentences, which have emphasized only the bewilderment and
demoralization ofJob and implied the unknowability of God. Yet
Job's word in the new context is absolute, unqualified, buoyant:
"I know" -not "I pray that," or "I hope that," "I guess that," "I
believe that," or any of the available synonyms which indicate a
partial awareness on its way to certainty. "Know" carries with it
the full assault of consummated belief: in the grammar of con-
sent, it stands for a commitment graven into the tables of reality
to which nothing can be added or from which nothing can be
taken away. In the same way, the substitution of redeemer for the
earlier God suggests that an irresistible element of doctrine has
forced its way forward, "against all common sense," and trans-
formed chaos into commitment, rebellion into adoration. Where
the context would seem to invite despair-or, at best, a plea to
an unknown God of redemption-God is already addressed in
His role of Redeemer and invested with His properties. Job's
"knowledge" has already achieved the object of prayer by that
"leap of faith" which renders prayer and proof equally unneces-
sary. God and Redeemer have become interchangeable words:
nothing is conceivable in the unspeakable abandonment of Job
except redemption.
Similarly, the force of the word liveth in the new context re-
mains to be noted. Its juxtaposition with know and redeemer is one
of those triumphs of intoxicated certainty which turn belief into a
species of magic; for its effect is to overturn chapters of lamenta-
tion and argument, reverse the direction of the meaning, and
transform the sensibility of the speaker. Where an alternative
word-reigneth, for example-would have produced nothing
more than a pietistic formula of submission:
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 13

I know that my redeemer reigneth

the effect of liveth:
I know that my redeemer liveth

is to personalize the experience of belief itself and enact the ex-

citement of God's nearness. For despite the chapters of complaint
and inquisition, the debates and rebuttals of his "comforters," the
immediate evidence of his own ill usage, the issue for Job has
remained not whether his God was a just one, requiring the fo-
rensic mediation of experts and the skills of midrashic debate, but
whether he was a living God, close at hand, available, and his
own. The word, then, is climactic, as well as poignant: for it
brings to light the psychic truth that underlies the apparent or
polemical truths of Job's endless denunciations. It is the nearness
of a living God which renders further argument idle, in the end,
volatilizes all issues, and proves irrefutable. Job's wrangling and
his logic and his evidence count for nothing. His comforters re-
peat a rubric for preachers and pedants, to no purpose. The phe-
nomenon of life has only to insist on itself as a fait accompli to
which the whole soul of Job bears witness, to supplant them all
with a passionate image of God's manifest availability:
Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh
shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall
behold and not another though my reins be consumed within me.

The living God moves in the body of a malcontent. The premise

of the Book of Job is essentially a comic one, as it was for that
other agonist of self-loss, Dante Alighieri. For though the apos-
tate "from the land of Uz" was capable of every heresy, he was
incapable of disbelief.

IV

If God be for us, who can be against us? ... Who shall separate us
from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecu-
tion, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as
sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than
14 THE FORGilD FEATURE

conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that

neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor
any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-Romans 8:31, 35-39
Here, as in Job, the believer's task is a strenuous one, in that it
calls for affirmation in circumstances that in themselves furnish
no basis for belief: he must reconcile the apparent contradiction
between a calamitous turn of events-tribulation, distress, per-
secution, famine, nakedness, the sword-and the absence of an
intervening God. All evidence points toward the removal of God
from the riotous world of His creation. The hostility of the uni-
verse extends from the very first things-life, angels, princi-
palities, height, depth-to things present, to the very last things:
martyrdom and God's love. The situation is thus an absolute test
of conviction: with no help whatever from the objects of the
material universe, with the circumstance of God's actual removal
from events apparent to all, he must affirm the ridiculous. He
must celebrate the beneficence and the actuality of his God at a
time when he himself is "killed all the day long" and "accounted
as sheep for the slaughter. "
Obviously, the predicament is not a promising one for empiri-
cal demonstration: it cannot be accommodated to the processes
of the laboratory or the inductive fantasies of the geometer. Even
the speaker's passion is, in the long run, a disservice, since it
renders him blind to the manifest absurdity of his position and
denies him the tactical advantages of cunning. It is possible that,
with caution and ingenuity, a case might be made for the satis-
factions which are always present for the man of true faith and
blameless conscience-yet the assertion that "in all these things
we are more than conquerors" is a piece of inflamed bravado for
which there is no evidence whatever. In the same way, the image
of "sheep for the slaughter" is almost cynical in its insensitivity:
it leaves no room for heroic elaboration and equates his martyr-
dom with the mindless butchery of the slaughterhouse.
How, then, are we to account for the thrilling plausibility of
the passage and the optimism of a speaker who must make his
certainty out of nothing at all: out of nonsense, paradox, and
impossibility? For despite all the arguments that good sense can
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 15

furnish to discredit the strategy of the speaker, the fact remains

that he has established exciting contact with his hearers: he has
"made his point" even if his thinking has been preposterous. Not
only does his certitude strike with the immediacy of a physical
sensation-as an impulse to action rather than an idea to hold in
reserve-but it pursues its initiative boldly to the very end, in a
masterstroke of hyperbolical absurdity:

I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor princi-
palities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The crucial word here, of course, is "persuaded"; but surely it

is absurd in a context which has heaped persuasion in the oppo-
site pan of the scale and stressed only the persecution of the be-
liever. Persuaded by whom and by what? We are compelled to
answer that the "persuasion" relates to none of these things: it
refers to nothing whatever in the outside world, but is entirely a
persuasion from within. Unlike the suasion of logic, it is not a
process or a Socratic exercise in elenchus, but an entirety-a state
of awareness, of inwardness, which cannot be altered from lesser
to greater by a more or less fortunate realignment of circum-
stances. It can merely exist-or it can not exist: but if it does
exist, it is the factor underlying all others-the enabling premise
out of which consciousness itself creates its first cause.
Given such a state of awareness in the believer, even his incre-
dulity is put to creative use and made to serve belief instead of
discrediting it. Instead of freeing the skeptical process to deploy
and combine and eliminate inductively, it looks away from the
event and puts the question a second time at a higher level of
intensity: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?" By
this time, however, the question has lost its interrogative charac-
ter entirely-it is no longer a call to speculation, but a mounting
crescendo of conviction: "Shall tribulation, or distress, or per-
secution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?" The
speaker has discovered that his question is literally inconceivable
to thought: to put the question is to impel the certainty; and
gazing directly into his certainty, he turns knowledge into ec-
stasy: "I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life," etc., etc.
16 THE FORGED FEATURE

v
What can we learn about belief in its devotional sense from this
triad of believers? In the first place, that belief is not an append-
age, or an accessory, or an apparatus, like a Diesel engine, which
exists to ensure the satisfactory operation of a second effect out-
side of itself. Though it is famous for moving mountains, it was
not devised with this in mind. Indeed, belief is often not devised
at all. It is not the product, in Job, of a plausible solution to
conflicts and alternatives which present themselves to the intel-
ligence for appraisal and are thereafter fitted to a doctrine. It does
not, in the Psalmist, exist to construct systems with the mathe-
matician's pursuit of one proposition to the next, to the limit of
the exploitability of the logic. It does not, in Saint Paul, submit
to the correctives by which we ordinarily test perception before
bringing it to bear upon reality: evidence, plausibility, experi-
ment. It subserves nothing, confirms nothing, mediates nothing.
It is neither tidy nor homogeneous nor auxiliary. It is not even
very dignified. It does not ask of logic: Am I congruous and
consistent? of experiment: Am I demonstrable? of ethics: Am I
desirable? of history: Am I real-and straightway collapse when
its concongruity or its fantasy have been established.
I do not mean to say that beliefs are not interpretable on occa-
sion in all these terms, or that the believer's passion has not been
made to drive engines, detonate explosives, drag crosses, heap
arguments, write epics, and contemplate values. On the con-
trary, it would be my contention that belief is the enabling gen-
ius of history that accomplishes both the work and the destiny of
the world. There is nothing that belief in its sacred and secular
guises cannot do, even, as with Job, to disavowing itself to re-
appropriate the full force of its passion. Our problem up to this
point, however, has not been to suggest the uses of belief, but
how belief, as a mode of being or an act of imagination, inhabits
its subject and encompasses his reality.
But let us now put the question a second time. This time, let
us engage belief as an activity, as praxis, rather than a condition of
awareness. Let us ask: What can belief do for the sensibility of the
believer? Taking our examples in turn again, we would have to
say that the effect is the same in each case, though it may vary in
the density and pressure of the outer event. Belief discovers the
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 17

point at which will and assent are made one, casts out instinctual
and intellectual fear, and then gives praise. In one case, the event
will warrant the believer's praise and appear inevitable; in an-
other, it will render praise unthinkable; in the third, it will render
it absurd. In every case, however, belief will appropriate its ob-
ject with the entirety of its passion and remove it from the event.
Even where the event offers plausible occasion for praise, as with
the Psalmist, belief will straightway seek out the implausible re-
mainder and convert itself into awe. If the event itself resists
thanksgiving, as with Job, belief will overturn history, suspend
logic, undo doctrine, in order to achieve praise. It will build on
contradiction, in the center of cleavage, imbalance, illogic; it will
be "all things to all men," like Saint Paul; it will turn itself into
imagination and fulfill itself at all costs to the limit of its creative
entirety.
But is not belief then a mixed blessing? What of bias, fanati-
cism, prejudice, the furors of the fundamentalist? Are they not
also modes of belief? How is one to distinguish between the "cre-
ative entirety" of the believer-that yea-saying monolith-and
the monomania of the bigot? Is it not possible that the praiser,
moving away from the event without the correctives of reality,
logic, and consensual appraisal, may end up in fanaticism? Is it
not possible that a belief which suspends thought, overturns his-
tory, and divinizes the ridiculous denies the dignity of the human
condition?
Yes, it is possible. The axiom that must accompany our exam-
ination from the outset is: that beliefs, like radium and x-ray,
disintegrate as well as penetrate. Concepts may lie still-but be-
liefs must keep operative; and, as William James has pointed out,
belief-to which he gave the name of option-has a right to be
called genuine only when it is "forced, living, and momentous."
It is precisely on the word living again that I would like to rest
the distinction that must be drawn between belief and bias, fanat-
icism and worship. It is the crucial word in James, as in Job,
because living implies action which, whatever its inwardness, is
explicitly productive and, in the deepest sense, contem-
poraneous. It is the living option which experiences, transforms,
reimagines; which "beareth all things, believeth all things,
hopeth all things, endureth all things." On the other hand, the
option of the bigot is a dead option. In the "many mansions" of
18 THE FORGED FEATURE

the Father, it is incapable of confronting either its own existence,

or any existence outside itself. It is nerveless, unimpressionable,
stopped.

VI

It is time to ask a final question two ways: What is the impor-

tance of literature for belief? and of belief for literature? Let us
consider the second half of the question first, and return a sim-
ple-minded answer: beliefs are important to literature because
they create the occasion for the practice of literature and minister
to its momentum. They inhabit its subject matter. For example,
it is Milton's belief that the time has come to "justify" the ways
of God to man in terms that will give stature and passion to the
rational genius of his century and hasten a Reformation of the
spirit: he "therefore" proceeds to set down twelve cantos of Para-
dise Lost. "Because" he is a convinced Christian, he chooses from
the many conceivable projects competing for priority the story of
our first parents from the Book of Genesis, and peoples his tale
with the dizzying hierarchies of the Old and the New Testa-
ments. "Because" he is a Puritan, he stresses the redemptive
power of individual labor in the sad finale of his fable and inti-
mates that though Christ mediates and Grace is abundant, man
must sue for it "running." His Eve, one may conjecture, is a
consequence of his many public avowals on the subject of di-
vorce. education, and marriage; and his Satan brings the well-
known Miltonic passion for civil liberty-with the aid of seven-
teenth-century gunpowder-to the throne of Jehovah Himself.
There is, moreover, a whole repertory of inherited "beliefs"
which Milton, as a cultivated European, brought to bear on his
theme from a lifetime of reading in Greek and Latin authors:
ideas, techniques, myths, place-names, allusions, allegiances.
Doubtless, Milton "believed" that poetry was "simple, sensuous
and passionate"; he "believed" in blank verse, free will, landscape
gardening, heroic similes, the Reformation, twelve cantos, the
deposition of kings and the abolition of prelates. And Paradise
Lost is, from one point of view-admittedly a simplistic one-
the result of belief operating on beliefs to induce belief.
However, as we have already noted, the believer's way is often
 LITERATURE AND BELIEF 19

an intractable and disorderly way. How can it be related to litera-

ture in this sense? How can we reconcile the selective processes
of literature with the inspired muddle which the believer is
pleased to invoke as his intuition? Here it is possible to make
capital of all that is actually untidy, divided, and contradictory in
the creative process of the artist and bring it to bear on the expe-
rience of the believer. For the creative act, despite its symmetrical
fa<;ade, not only is characterized by conflicts and ambiguities,
labyrinthine blockages and collapses which open the way to the
inchoate, but exists to provoke them. It is an inalienable function
of the artist, we learn from Keats, to heap doubt upon doubt,
cleavage upon cleavage, to keep them in contradiction, and sur-
vive in the ensuing pandemonium; in this respect, the artist's
way and the believer's way are one. It was to this faculty that
Keats-somewhat misleadingly-gave the name of "Negative
Capability," which he defined as a state in which "a man is capa-
ble of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irri-
table reaching after fact and reason"; and he went on to observe
that it was, above all other things, "this quality which went to
form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which
Shakespeare possessed enormously." For Blake, the equation
could be expressed even more succinctly: "Without Contraries, is
no Progression."
What, then, is the importance of literature for belief? In the
first place, literature offers the believer a medium to which he
can retire with all his doubts and contradictions intact, and bring
them into expressive play. He can come to his art "ready like a
strong man, to run a race"; or he can come to it rocking, retch-
ing, and wrestling. In either case his medium will accept him
without the forfeit of a single anxiety or certainty. Like Praise, of
which it is certainly a form, literature will insist on itself against
all logic and complete its entirety at all costs. If it is important
that two alternatives be kept in contradiction, to the immediate
dismay of the intelligence, literature will keep them at bay while
life rages for solutions. If the artist is beguiled to compromise
with events, while his real misgivings lie sealed away in aban-
doned areas of his sensibility, his art will pursue him there and
wait for an answer. If his mind is seemingly ready with all the
wit of the ages while his consent delays and denies, the resources
of literature are there to disclose his confusions and give the lie to
20 THE FORGED FEATURE

his bravado. In short, it is possible through the medium of litera-

ture for the artist to function with maximum fullness at two
levels of awareness, as the vessel of a double disclosure: the be-
liefs which his will imposes on the appearance of things through
the semiotic fiction of his medium, and the unruly intuitions
which explode out of his psychic life.
For each of these needs, literature has its stock of expressive
materials and precision tools: symbols and images, to build in
darkness and transmit the divided commitment of the writer in
metaphorical guise, unmediated by concession or the entrap-
ments of consistency; drama, to find the moment of "option"
when conflict is "forced, living, and momentous"; fable, to bring
it to rational sequence in time; statement, to ply back and forth
between the abstract and the reifications of the particular; music,
to measure and order; rhetoric, to define, condense, insinuate,
exaggerate, hallucinate, unite, assert, and disturb. Thus, litera-
ture can keep exact pace with the truth of the believer in both its
singleness and its heterogeneity. It can bring belief to order, not
by reducing life, but by exceeding it, so that it contains both the
contradiction which logic rejects and the uncertainties of which
the artist himself may remain unaware-the illumined half of
cognition by whose light the artist brings his language to order,
and the darkened half, in whose shadow the unconscious life
constantly beckons to its encompassing eidolons.
 2
Meaning and the
Sonal Imagination
THERE IS A SPECIAL KIND of acoustics which attaches itself to
meetings of this sort 1 in which the poet presents his credentials to
the uneasy reader: there is an echo-an overpowering echo-of
the past; and what echoes is the whole history of man's assault
upon the Unknown. I do not mean by this the "problem of com-
munication" as such-though that also keeps one's ears ring-
ing-but the extent to which we are ready to confront the un-
known and dispel the convenient and habitual. Somewhat grimly
Eliot has likened the meaning of a poem to the "piece of meat
which the old-fashioned burglar brought to keep the dog quiet."
Coleridge, a great connoisseur in the Unknown, shocked the
positivists of his day with the unnerving contention that "the
immediate object of Poetry is pleasure, not truth."
I should insist, if pressed, that every poem of merit must have
a truth of a sort. But I should like to suggest that there are other
kinds of meaning, other modes of communication, than those
which may be advantageously decanted into prose "truths"; and
that, in many cases, to seek to do so is to misappropriate not
only the poem, but the very intention for which it was written.
A poet is a Voice, and not a Meaning.
Meaning is concerned with a premise of the known; poetry is
concerned with a premise of the unknown-the resolute un-
knowability of the world. All that is known by the poet is provi-
sionally known: the little time and language he appropriates in
the lonely act of turning life into poetry, the steady or unsteady
beating of his own pulses, the felt similitude of things to other
things. The finished poem returns the poet to the Unknown; but
it leaves a poem which may be known in as many guises as there
are readers and critics. There is no assurance that, as in Adam's
dream, the reader will "wake and find it truth." All that can be
22 THE FORGiiD FEATURE

finally known by poet and reader together is the rightness with

which all has been brought to order in the poem. The name by
which we call that order is "meaning." Meaning, in the words of
Cocteau, is a "rappel a l'ordre" -a call to order-a form of silence
in the aftermath of the speaking voice and the spoken thing.
Too often, meaning is reduced to a feat of amateur detection
which assumes that a poem is a kind of murder or a jewel theft,
with a corpse, a hidden weapon, and a blueprint of the plumb-
ing, all of which can be logically deduced by any Englishman
with a large magnifying glass and credentials from Scotland
Yard. Poe is a notable offender in this respect: his "Philosophy of
Composition or How I Wrote The Raven" is a work of science
fiction rather than an account of the imaginative process-the
hoax of an experienced criminal with a perfect plan for tunneling
under Lloyd's of London while the customers are laying bets at
the tables: "It is my design to render it manifest that no one point
in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition-
that the word proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the
precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem." But
poems are not perfect crimes, for all their apparatus of passion,
intention, and obsessive ingenuity in transforming fantasy into
experience and experience into fantasy. Their procedure is also
visceral or vascular or sonal, rather than rational. They move like
snails under a shell, carrying the coiled weight of their language
over a sensitive paraphernalia of sticky horns and protoplasm in
little bursts and thrusts, leaving the glistening accident of their
chemistry behind them. Meaning is the trail of the snail. To talk
about the final "meaning" of such a journey is to invent the ge-
ography of a spherical world after sailing a square one, like Co-
lumbus's, with sheer chaos dropping away from each of the four
edges.
What one can talk about is composition, just as one would have
to talk about the behavior of the ocean, rather than maps and
compasses, to account for Columbus's "discovery" of a New
World. By "composition" I would understand a medium which
supports and sustains the psyche on its way to organic destina-
tions: a matrix of language like a sea, with tides, densities,
depths, pulling at both ships and swimmers with an underwater
gravity of its own. It is in this sense that one must talk about
composition-the co-positioning of words-rather than com-
 MEANING AND THE SONAL IMAGINATION 23

passes, destinations, dictionaries, certainties, in accounting for

the behavior (Hopkins's favorite word!) of poems. For the con-
taining medium of all poetic activity is words. Without words,
nothing; failing the next word, the poem itself fails; finding the
next word, the poem has been moved; voicing the last word, the
poem has been disclosed.
And so the poem moves, banging its nucleoles and its proteins
like an amoeba, extending its skin and then streaming into it,
making aural sense and holding that sense to its function, as
though the ear were not one sense out of five but a kind of brain
with a commitment to continuity as substantive and comprehen-
sible as that which governs the operation of syllogisms and in-
ductive thought. The poem makes noises rather than sense, noises
called words, and the imminence of the next exactly appropriate
word is contained in the texture and momentum of the noises-
not the ideas-that precede it.
At this point-as Eliot said on another occasion-! should like
to stop, short of metaphysics or mysticism. I do not know
whether words create concepts or concepts create words. Only
God knows-and He says that in the Beginning was the Word
and the word was God-which is too circular a ploy to assist our
mystification. Some people closer to God than I can claim to
be-Blake, for one, and then the more denominational prophets
of both the Old and the New Testaments-have associated the
faculty of knowing with hearing. Paradoxically enough, the Vi-
sionary has been a Hearer rather than a Seer. If Saint Paul and
Saint Peter are acceptable witnesses to the disclosure of knowl-
edge, the first thing that generally happens to the Visionary is
that he is blinded by an excess of light, like halation in overex-
posed film. According to one account, Paul remained so for three
years. Joan of Arc heard voices before she saw visions, and un-
derstood neither.
Blake is positively pontifical on the score: "Hear the Voice of
the Bard I Who Present, Past, and Future sees": not "see what I
see," but "Hear what I see." His Piper, whom I take to be an
embodiment of the Poet himself, is a sonal phenomenon many
times over-a "Voice" -before he is a written one.

Piping down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of pleasant glee,
24 THE FORGim FEATURE

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he laughing said to me:

He is notable not because he sits on a cloud-which is a sumptu-

ously visual posture-but because he forces his breath through a
hollow reed, thereafter to be known as a woodwind, and dis-
covers the principle of audible song, and the song demands a
context:

'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'

So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again';
So I piped: he wept to hear.

He is then instructed to serve as his own instrument: to choose a

public occasion and to voice the melody without the aid of the
reed, as the embodiment of a context.

'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,

'Sing thy songs of happy cheer.'
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

He voices the song by making words for it, as though the sonal
imagination, as the source of all meaning, precedes the verbal
one. Only then are the words put "in a book that all may read"; a
pun-reed/read-is allowable here:

'Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book that all may read.'

This is ingeniously accomplished in Blake's poem by sharpening

to a point the very reed that gave the Piper his function and
ushered him into the world as gleoman piping a song about nothing
at all: i.e., by turning the reed into a pen that "stains the water
clear" and preserves the word in scribal form:

So he vanish'd from my sight,

And I pluck'd a hollow reed,
 MEANING AND THE SONAL IMAGINATION 25

And I made a rural pen,

And I stained the water clear.

Finally it is Blake's overmastering irony that the Word has been

preserved in its visual form for the sole purpose of rendering it
audible again, at a later time, by all latecomers to the feast of the
world's knowledge:

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear.

This, I take it, is a parable of the poet's vocation and the myste-
rious pre-eminence of the Sound as the source of the Sense. We
are too likely to forget that words, as a medium of organized
sound, a kind of musique concrete, have an independent existence,
as the color red in the tube or on the canvas exists independently
of the poppy; that they may function merely as incantation, or a
species of hypnotic musicalization; as striking or stupefying
noises; as arrangements for trapping or immobilizing time, like
senatorial filibusters; as units of association or triggers of mem-
ory which have the power to evoke the past as directly as certain
smells or the celebrated cookie of Proust; that the artist in words
is as interested in the pleasure words give as he is in their "truth";
in the mystery of the word as well as its meaning; that it is the
function of words to invite the enigmatic as well as dispel it; that
words are non-representational, and have depths and trajectories
as well as sequences; that they can be filled, half-filled, shallow,
idle, or empty; that, in the words of Coleridge, the poet should
"endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things:
elevating as it were words into things and living things, too."
On the other hand, the fact that poets, who ought to be mak-
ing their own sounds, are already committed to a prepared score
for the weighting and voicing of all the sounds for all the words
they will utter does not seem a promising one for poetry. It sug-
gests that the poet is defeated even before he is started, that the
medium of language itself is constitutionally unimaginative. In-
stead of the eight musical tones and the five ruled lines of musi-
cian's notepaper for the matching of sound to the heart's imme-
diacies, Poetry offers him an apparatus of built-in accents called
Language, with all the labials, sibilants, and plosives already
26 THE FORGIJD FEATURE

blackening the paper ofhis dictionary. To the French he gives the

French language, to the Italians, Italian, to the Urdu, Urdu. The
translator, caught in the crossfire, is the first to learn the sad and
irreversible fact that it is the nature of all language to be chauvin-
istic, patriotic, and adamant-as, let us say, the diatonic scale of
the musician is not. What to do, then, about the total tyranny of
language which compels exact correspondences with a whole
manual of "found sound" if English poets are to write intelligibly
in English, Urdu poets in Urdu, and Omar Khayyim in his na-
tive Persian?
One of the answers, of course, is the far-fetched and aggressive
phenomenon of meter: the jamming of language with the sonal
and accentual program of the poet. Coleridge has traced the origin
of meter to the "balance in the mind effected by that spontaneous
effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion."
More annihilation! I would trace it to the poet's determination to
be heard in his own time-the time, let us say, of iambic pentam-
eter or trochaic trimeters, or whatever system of stresses and si-
lences corresponds to his own heartbeat-rather than a time pre-
fabricated for him by the Dictionary. Hold a poem to your ear
and you will hear a battle of timetables: the metronome of cor-
rect and literate discourse dictated by the language into which
poets are born-and the beat of a prosody which carries with it
the intimate breathing of the poet.
Even if one concedes the poet's license to make new words out
of old, like Joyce, or create noises which never existed before,
like the scientists who teach us how to say nylon, quasar, xerox,
homomenthyl salicytate, the Dictionary will insist that the accent
always fall on the syllable prepared for it by the gods; and that in
the interests of good sense, the poet had better comply. If he
rebels, he is likely to produce a national anthem that reads (or
sings): "And the rocket's red glare I THE bombs bursting in
air," which is not a true rendering of sonal reality, or write foot-
notes, like Yeats, saying that he happens to prefer "my FANatic
heart," to my faNATical, or even my faNATic heart.
Another device of the poet to force his way past all that is
ready-made in language is the phenomenon of inflection. Unfor-
tunately, it is easier to get readers of poetry to agree that it is
there than to capture for non-poets the subtleties and indirections
of its actual behavior. One can begin by saying that inflection is
 MEANING AND THE SONAL IMAGINATION 27

the result of the poet's attitude toward the statement he is mak-

ing-a saturative coloring of the total force of the poet's inten-
tion and the changing urgencies with which it is being uttered,
felt, organized, understood. It measures the pressure under
which a statement is being made and the human intonation of the
context in which it is intended to function: the means by which
the conventional signs and noises of language have touched the
personal life of the poet and taken on his expressive identity. In
this sense, a poem is never totally known until its inflection is
known; and failures of understanding are immediately apparent
as failures or falsifications of inflection. The poems of Hopkins
and Donne are often unreadable unless the inflection, often mon-
aural in their "scoring," has been penetrated from beginning to
end and flawlessly rendered. Inflection is as personal as a finger-
print, and continuous as one's skin; or, to put it a little super-
stitiously, it is the spirit giving life to the letter and holding all
meaning to the drama of the poet's experience.
Finally, there is metaphor. Poetry has often been defined as an art
of metaphor-by which is meant, doubtless, that a poem is essen-
tially a system of emblems, ludic rather than cognitive in character,
a blazon of symbols and sounds with which the poet, like the
Knight in Wordsworth's Prelude, goes forth to encounter reality "as
if conscious of the blazoning [his] shield bore." "As if': that is the
provenance of metaphor. As if the true content of a poem were not
a fact or a fiction, but a state of being. a condition of awareness, a
pleasurable sense of similitude. . . . Like the novelist, the philoso-
pher, or the scientist, the poet may begin with a truth of experience
or an idea about it. But he places emphasis not on unyielding fidel-
ity to the source of the truth in the data of the originating experi-
ence or its termination as an idea, but on the imaginative extension
of the truth beyond the real or the rational, or the knowledgeable,
into the immediate, the symbolic, the analogical, where reason of-
ten surrenders its initiative. Truth is a point of departure rather than
a destination or the itinerary for a journey. To this end he turns all
into metaphor-because he wishes to make magical what was only
actual: to render time-less and place-less the experience which
emerged at a particular time and in a particular place, and was not
"magical" but actual. Only by so doing can he be really free to
complete and intensify the truths of human life in a way that expe-
rience alone cannot do, or the philosophical contemplation of expe-
28 THE FORGED FEATURE

rience. His aim, in short, is one of transformation, rather than ob-

servation or information, and his quest is for an imaginative unit
which can release the largest amount of energy in the most haunt-
ing and renewable form over the broadest perspective of human
destiny: the metaphor.

Somewhere in our time, I suspect, a revolution not Russia's or

China's has literally razed the old boundaries and compelled a
new realignment of all the elements that bring the mind of man
to bear on the arts with which they envision reality. At some
point in our century, if not long before, a nucleating bomb with
the literal power to atomize sensibility, language, and knowledge
as we formerly conceived it has fallen on all the arts alike. Its
charge is compounded in part of all the modes by which we seek
to empower and manipulate the magnet of our universe-our
"knowledge": the startling acceleration in our time of a "science"
of psychology, a "science" of semantics, a "science" of anthro-
pology, a "science" of cybernetics, etc.-and the increasing liter-
acy of the artist regarding such assumptions. In other part, it
reflects the avid empiricism of an era in which paint, stone, lan-
guage, the physics of sound, and the physiology of human per-
ception have all been increasingly bombarded, displaced, opened,
pierced, like the solids of Henry Moore or the planes of Pi-
casso-estranged by the artist to explore new visions of time,
space, logic, number, chance, and the psyche, and the processes
appropriate to it, at the expense of the old meanings.
In short, the persistence of Uncertainty may be an indispen-
sable measure of the enlargement, or the anguish, of the creative
spirit in the presence of contemporary possibility-"as if," says
Eliot, "a magic lantern threw our nerves in patterns on a screen."
It helps us to measure the task of collective enlightenment that
still confronts us, like an enormous metaphor for how the world
might be, if our consciousness could be enlarged to contain it.

NOTE

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a symposium on

"Poetry and Meaning" (Howard Nemerov, Stanley Kunitz, Ben Belitt),
at Skidmore College, April 12, 1973.
 3
In Search of the
American Scene:
"Demographic Vistas"
I hear America singing
-Walt Whitman

AMERICAN POETS SINCE Whitman have reason to wonder what

Whitman heard when he "heard America singing." Presumably,
they were singing on key and in perfect American, and left their
mark on both the language and prosody of the poet and his vi-
sion of a national scene. In the poem named, Whitman, as it
happens, is concerned more with the proletarian diversity of the
singers-carpenters, masons, shoemakers, plowboys-than with
the American matrix of their song. Significantly, he omits the
poets; but elsewhere he singles out "poets to come" with benevo-
lent pugnacity as a "new brood, native, athletic, continental,"
answerable for "the substance of an artist's mood" and the "singing
that belongs to him." He then withdraws, with the tact of a favor-
ite uncle schooled in the self-help of an enlightened psychology:

I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a

casual look upon you, and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.

As a "native" American singer who feels neither "new" nor

"athletic" nor "continental" -and would rather choose the adjec-
tives for himself-! admit to sc,me uneasiness. If "poets of the
Modern" have had to "prove and define," rather than to postu-
late, their claim to the "ensemble" of American song since Leaves
30 THE FORGED FEATURE

of Grass, tt ts due largely to the aggressive cast of Whitman's

evangelism. Countercharges of chauvinism do scant justice to the
depth and perspective of Whitman's genius and blink aside an
incorrigible hunch that America, after all, ought to be there.
"Agents" must have their "scenes," as Kenneth Burke would say;
and though Dante was not preoccupied with the specifically Ital-
ian inflection of his Divine Comedy, or Milton with a premise of
British supremacy in Eden, or Homer with a prosody for mili-
tant Greeks, Italy. England, and Ilium are there, with their gods
and cosmologies.
The "vista" for American poets, then, is a "democratic" one,
but the "politics of vision" has proved more mischievous than
Whitman imagined. It was possible in 1959 for a major American
talent of the 1940s to repudiate the manifest diversity of two dec-
ades-Eliot, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, among
others-as a "diseased" and "academic" art, and proscribe T. E.
Hulme's Speculations (1924) as "the Mein Kampf of modern criti-
cism. " 1 The mischief touched chaos a year later when a slate of
forty-four "new American poets" 2 with "their own tradition,
their own press, and their public" was thrown up like a barricade
between 1945 and the present to ensure the purity of poetry in
our time. Thus it is that the bucket of William Carlos Williams
goes down into the American Dream and the bucket of T. S.
Eliot comes up; and "the abounding, glittering jet" of Yeats's
vision is nowhere in sight. The vista is no longer "democratic"
but oligarchic; and the poets are the orphans of Whitman rather
than his "eleves."
Let us grant, nevertheless, that we would all like to be as
American as Coca-Cola or pumpkin pie. We would like to enlist
among Whitman's "indigenous rhapsodes" "native authors and
literatuses" flooding themselves "with the immediate age as with
vast oceanic tides" -with "spinal, modern, germinal subjects,"
"tonic and alfresco physiology," "rude, rasping, taunting, con-
tradictory tones," "vista, music, half-tints," "a new literature, a
new metaphysics, a new poetry." We would like, in short-the
language is still Whitman's-to negotiate for "the Yankee swap."
Others will claim, as their American due, total access to "the free
channel of ourselves"-Whitman's word-"significant only be-
cause of the Me in the center," and defend their option with
 IN SEARCH OF THE AMERICAN SCENE 31

peyote and lysergic acid. Most plaintively of all, they would like,
in this nineteen-hundred-and-sixty-fourth year of our nee-Faust-
ian era, to have a real, right, disestablished, demoniacal, intu-
itional experience.
Obviously, all these satisfactions are not forthcoming as in-
alienable aspects of the American scene, and must eventually be
appraised in terms of what they displace in the economy of
American letters. In my own case, I prefer to dwell on the poet's
traditional commitment to his conscience and his medium as "the
main thing" rather than bow to the avuncular ultimatums of a
giant. I prefer to dwell, not on a platform for hearty Americans,
nor on an American esthetic emergency, but on the facts of an
imaginative venture as reflected in a first volume of poems pub-
lished in 1938-in itself no monument of contemporary letters,
but symptomatic, I think, of the poet's quest for the American
scene in that decade. I choose a tone of wonder, because I find
myself genuinely curious, dubious, and ungainly in the public
scrutiny of processes and motivations which I have habitually
resolved as poems rather than as tactics for poets or patriots.

Prefaces to first volumes are rare since the hortatory days of the
founding Romantics, but are occasionally infiltrated in the guise
of copyright acknowledgments. My first volume, published in
1938 under the title of The Five-Fold Mesh, carried a prefatory
note which I now read with some puzzlement:

In making this selection of poems written over a period of eight

years, it has been my hope to suggest a discipline of integration,
rather than a series of isolated poetic comments . . . to state a
problem in orientation . . . in an expanding record of change.
What has been sought, in a word, is an effect of sequence-a se-
quence which, beginning with simple responses to the natural
world, moves on to an awareness of the personal identity, and
attempts finally to establish usable relationships between the per-
sonal and contemporary world.

In comparison with Whitman's bristling resolution to "cheer up

slaves and horrify despots," the language seems subdued; indeed,
there were many to remind me that the program had long
served first volumes from the time of the Psalmist to the present,
32 THE FORGED FEATURE

and need hardly be made a matter of public record. The concern

with contemporaneity, however, with poetry as a "discipline of
integration," an "expanding record of change" with "usable rela-
tionships," a "problem in orientation," may help to suggest the
predicament of the poet who, engaging his "scene" for the first
time, discovers that place is not given him ready-made as a datum
of "the American imagination," and that the American identity is
the most elusive chimera of them all.
Rereading the earlier lyrics of The Five-Fold Mesh, I find all the
categories and permutations of Polonius-lyrics tragical, tragical-
comical, tragical-comical-pastoral, tragical-comical-pastoral-histori-
cal-but little that shows the cut and thrust of the American scene.
The tragical-pastoral predominates, in the guise of poems that seek
enigmatically to blend some undivulged personal quarrel with suit-
able staples of landscape: fields cloven and left fallow, foun-
tainheads, March cardinals, primroses, woodbine, laurel, hawks,
berries, violets. The tone is one of stoical and sententious ambi-
guity, with ominous allusions to the m~esty and the ironies of un-
reflective self-denial: "Lay not your shoulder to this rock I The
bridegroom bends to bitter water"; "Never mind, never mind I
The uncloven field, the unheaped rafter"; "No hand in the indig-
nant hour I May move to comfort or to curb: I The strength shall
vanish from the flower I The healing wither in the herb"; and (I
thought climactically): "Now it were valor to unbend the flesh I
Burst the bright harness of dissembling sense, I The fine and five-
fold mesh, I And loose the inward wound to bleed afresh." A sin-
gle example will suggest the outcome of this vague and hermetic
strategy for eluding two landscapes, one inner and the other outer,
and erecting in their place the literary pathos of the Minnesinger:

From Towers of Grass

Long enmity of part and part,
Of strict mind, mutinous under steel,
Has leaned this spear upon my heart
And clapped this armor at my heel-
Some difference, wanting not for fuel
Of trickster blood and warlike bone,
Nursing a sword's point, blue and cruel,
On some primordial whetting-stone.
 IN SEARCH OF THE AMERICAN SCENE 33

Useless to cry the shape of laurel,

The lilac star and June cockade:
Grow strong against this mortal quarrel
And heap a summer palisade-
Seal, seal the green, ephemeral tower
That keeps me hostage here, who know
How I am succored with a flower,
How done to death with snow. 3

The result here is not a scene, or an identity, but a pastoral

compromise. The "place" is nowhere, or inside the compound-
ing defenses of the quatrain or the sonnet, like a maze without a
minotaur; and the hoped-for "record of change" is not yet appar-
ent.
Yet "agent" and "scene," I would contend, are there as shaping
forces in a drama of conscience; and one need not labor the patri-
otic casuistries of Whitman to assume that they are American
rather than Roman or Alexandrian. What bemuses me now, and
was not apparent to me in 1938 as a poet preoccupied with his
craft, is the total absence of place-names-the direct confronta-
tion of geographical fact as a cartographer or a naturalist might
view it-in all but a handful of the poems. Whitman, on the
contrary, creates the American opportunity at once by "Starting
from Paumanok" (the red man's word for Long Island), which
he sees like the mapmaker, from above, as a "fish-shape" island,
and then appropriates the whole of Mannahatta (talking Indian).
He finds nothing antipoetic in a place-name like Brooklyn (talk-
ing Danish)-now a formula of condescension among fastidious
Americans; and he has "endless announcements" for Ontario,
Erie, Huron, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Chicago, and points
east, west, north, and south, which he transforms into a kind of
Pindaric formula for exultation. Similarly, Emily Dickinson, in
her own view of things, was seeing "New Englandly" behind the
hedgerows and sherry glasses of Amherst, and was avidly geo-
graphical; William Carlos Williams sought to "induce his bones
to rise into a scene" of Paterson, New Jersey, whose squalors and
incongruities rival Brooklyn's; Hart Crane waited under the
shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge and toiled toward redemption
in Key West, "drinking Bacardi and talking U.S.A." Robert
34 THE FORGED FEATURE

Frost mended wall north of Boston and hunted witches in New

Hampshire and Vermont; Wallace Stevens looked away from the
marzipan world of Oxidia, "banal suburb," to "An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven."
I do not propose to suggest by this that the American scene is a
kind of gerrymander-a good American word for the unnatural
division of place for political advantage-in which the poet
stakes out his "territory" and sings out his stations like a portable
loudspeaker. Indeed, I assume that the dangers of this point
of view are already apparent to all; that the poet aggressively
committed to the American inflection of his "scene" and his lan-
guage may reveal nothing but the persistence of the colonial
mentality. He may exchange the historical sanity of Whitman's
contention that "the English language befriends the grand Amer-
ican expression" for the idiocy of William Carlos Williams's "We
poets have to talk a language which is not English." In his pro-
grammatic rejection of the feudal, he may invite the platitudes of
the capitalist, and in his rejection of the European, he may en-
trench himself like a troll or a tick in the "folklore" of a region.
The American perspective, then, is not the province (I use the
word narrowly) of the tactical ethnologist, the historian, the pa-
triot, or the visiting Frenchman; but the "poetry of place" does
offer clues to the quality and depth of the poet's engrossment
in the American scene. If we are to talk about creation at all,
we must talk about names, habitations, worlds, uncertainties-
usually those we are born into; and it is significant that Book III
of William Carlos Williams's Paterson bears the epigraph of a citi-
zen of the world who liked to regard himself as "The Last Puri-
tan":

Cities are a second body for the human mind, a second organism,
more rational, permanent, and decorative than the animal organ-
ism of flesh and bone: a work of natural yet moral art, where the
soul sets up her trophies of action and instruments of pleasure.
-George Santayana

I find this combination of geography and "psychology" a promis-

ing one; and I therefore reread with pleasure two poems from The
Five-Fold Mesh which name names and appoint hours, as if for a
duel or an assignation. One, a poem about a charwoman who reg-
 IN SEARCH OF THE AMERICAN SCENE 35

ularly appeared with mop, pail, and goiter in the corridors of 20

Vesey Street, where I worked for some months as editorial assistant
on The Nation, bears the signature of a time and a place as indis-
pensable facts of the imaginative occasion. It is, without seeking to
be so, an "American" poem. Let me cite it in its entirety:

Charwoman

(Lower Manhattan: 6:00P.M.)

Clapping the door to, in the little light,
In the stair-fall's deepening plunge,
I see, in the slate dark, the lumped form, like a sponge,
Striking a rote erasure in the night-

And keep that figure; while a watery arc

Trembles and wanes in wetted tile, as if
It wrote all darkness down in hieroglyph
And spoke vendetta with a watermark.

That shadowy flare shall presently define

A scuffed and hazardous wrist, a ruined jaw
Packed into goiter like a pigeon's craw,
A bitten elbow webbed with a naphtha line;

While light shall lessen, blunting, by brute degrees,

The world's waste scanted to a personal sin,
Till all is darkness where her brush has been
And blinds the blackening marble by her knees,

***
I mark what way the dropping shaft-light went;
It flung the day's drowned faces out, and fell
Hasped like a coffin, down a darkening well:

And poise on the shaftway for my own descent. 4

The other, by far the most ambitious piece in The Five-Fold

Mesh, is in three parts and bears the name of "Battery Park: High
Noon"-again a symptomatic, a.1d perhaps an "American" com-
mitment to punctuality and place. The poem is too long to be
36 THE FORGilD FEATURE

presented in its entirety; but, like "Charwoman," it is bounded

by the geography of lower New York and the schedule of The
Nation magazine: in this case, the lunch hour, when it was possi-
ble on fine afternoons to walk toward the geographical spur of
Whitman's Mannahatta, through the Wall Street crevasses, to the
Old Trinity Churchyard, the Aquarium, the Park which gives
the poem its name, and, finally, the pleasure-boats leaving for
the Statue of Liberty and the brilliant expanse of the harbor. The
opening section should suggest both the style and the psycho-
logical occasion of the poem-which is a curious transposition of
two places, in which, by a trick of vision, an afterimage of my
Virginian childhood was superimposed for a moment on the fact
of my residence in New York City.

Battery Park: High Noon

Suddenly, the old fancy has me!
Suddenly,
Between flint and glitter, the leant leaf,
The formal blueness blooming over slate,
Struck into glass and plate,
The public tulips treading meridian glare
In bronze and whalebone by the statue-bases-
Elude the Battery Square,
Turn, with a southern gesture, in remembered air
And claim a loved identity, like faces . . . . 5

Two matters concern me in each of the two poems named:

one, the startling increase in specificity and power which flows
from the total commitment to "place" -specificity of rhythm,
form, language, and self-knowledge, as well as particulars of the
American scene; and the other, the deepening of the imaginative
occasion by a contradictory shift from the theme of place to the
theme of displacement. In the "Charwoman," for example, the
poet's quarrel with himself, vaguely disposed of in an earlier
poem as "some difference, wanting not for fuel I Of trickster
blood and warlike bone" is given a protagonist-the char-
woman-and explores a cause: the haunting complicity that the
young and the sound may feel in the presence of the maimed and
the aging, the political and moral enigma of "the world's waste
 IN SEARCH OF THE AMERICAN SCENE 37

scanted to a personal sin" for which nothing stands ready to

atone.
I note also that, with the increasing proximities of the scene,
the imaginative particulars of the poem have been brought op-
tically and intellectually into closer range of both the poet and his
reader. The fact of goiter is confronted with pity and terror in
the "ruined jaw I Packed into goiter like a pigeon's craw"; the
occupational marks of the charwoman are clinically incised in a
manner that one critic has called Flemish: by a composite of
highlight and chiaroscuro which focuses painfully on "A bitten
elbow, webbed with a naphtha line," like a cartoon etched in
detergents. Similarly, in "Battery Park" the metropolitan land-
scape and statuary are ironically and substantively seen, as the
Virginia landscapes were not: "The public tulips treading merid-
ian glare I In bronze and whalebone by the statue-bases" are both
actual and submerged. They stand memorially against their mid-
city background of "flint and glitter," "glass and plate," "pigeons
and peanut shells" and reject all pastoral compromise. To the ex-
tent that they do so, the poem, the lighting, and the scene are not
"Flemish," or impressionistic, actually, but "American."
It is this engagement of uncertainty with the actual-to the
point at which, in Hopkins's words, "what you look hard at,
seems to look hard at you" -that I find crucial to the poetry of
place and the criteria of "American" song. With more time, I
might go on to illustrate how in the two collections that have
followed- Wilderness Star (1955) and The Enemy Joy (1964)-the
geographical fact has constantly enlarged itself to toughen my
idiom and refine my sense of "vista" as a poet writing demo-
cratically in "American." I would dwell on the circumstance by
which the theme of place and displacement leads the poet by in-
evitable stages to the timeless themes of reality and appearance,
permanence and change, being and nonbeing, as they led
Whitman: to the myth, as well as the fact,· of departure, and the
possibility that all places are actually one place and all poetries
one poetry, and that one travels, as the dancer moves, in order to
"reach the still point where the dance is."
It is the same point that Whitman sought on the furthest per-
spectives of his art when in "Passage to India" he invoked the
"aged, fierce enigmas" "below the Sanskrit and the Vedas." It
38 THE FORGilD FEATURE

was the vision that was uppermost in my own mind when I con-
cluded a section of "Battery Park" with an exhortation which has
since carried me into many Americas, inner, outer, and continen-
tal, and led to new scenes and displacements:

Bend then to seaward. The element you ask

Rarer than sea is, wantoner than time:
You bear it on you, strangely, like a mask,
And dream the sailing in a pantomime.

The element is blood. Tired voyager, turn:

The reckoning you take is yet to learn.
Somber, at fullest flood, the continents ride
And break their beaches in a sleeper's side.

NOTES

1. Karl Shapiro, "What's the Matter with Poetry?" The New York
Times Book Review, December 13, 1959.
2. The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, ed. Donald M. Allen (New
York: Grove Press, 1960).
3. From Ben Belitt, The Five-Fold Mesh (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1938). "From Towers of Grass" © 1933 by Ben Belitt; reprinted
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
4. From Belitt, Five-Fold Mesh. "Charwoman" © 1938 by Ben Belitt;
reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
5. From Belitt, Five-Fold Mesh. "Battery Park: High Noon" © by
Ben Belitt; reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
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HAFIZ IN LONDON
 PRINTED BY
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 HAFIZ IN LONDON

BY
JUSTIN HUNTLY McCARTHY, M.P.

‫ﺍﻛﺮ ﺑﺰﻟﻒ ﺫﺭﺍﺯ ﺗﻮ ﺩﺳﻦ ﻣﺎ ﻧﺮ ﺳﺪ‬

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[The right of translation is reserved]
 DEDICATION.

Ferangis, at thy feet I lay

These roses from the haunted coast
Of Faristan, whose poets boast
Their Rocknabad and Mosellay;
For I was in Shiraz to-day,
With ancient Hafiz for my host,
Who, like a comfortable ghost,
With Persian roses crowned my stay.
They are thy tribute from the land
Of Khayyam and our Khalifate,
For on their crimson folds of fate
A wizard ciphered with his wand
Words which I dare not here translate,
But you will read and understand.
 CONTENTS.
PAGE
Dedication v
Hafiz in London 1
Memory 6
Eld 11
Long Ago 14
Vanity 19
Kaif 21
You and I 25
Consolation 28
Lotus 31
Philosophy for Others 33
Wisdom 36
Renunciation 38
After Rhamazan 40
Lonely 44
Courage 47
Vine-Visions 49
A Dream 52
Attar of Love 58
Vaulting Ambition 60
A Night-Piece 62
Fallen Angels 65
Praise of Wine 67
Haroun er-Rasheed’s Poet 70
Ghazel 74
The Grave of Omar-i-Khayyam 77
Omar Answers 86
Transcriber’s Note
HAFIZ IN LONDON.
HAFIZ IN LONDON.
Hafiz in London! even so.
For not alone by Rukni’s flow
The ruddy Persian roses grow.

Not only ’neath the cypress groves,

With soul on fire the singer roves,
And tells the laughing stars his loves.

Here in this city—where I brood

Beside the river’s darkling flood,
And feed the fever in my blood

With Eastern fancies quaintly traced

On yellow parchment, half effaced
In verses subtly interlaced—

Men eat and drink, men love and die,

Beneath this leaden London sky,
As eastward where the hoopoos fly,

And through the tranquil evening air

A muezzin from the turret stair
Summons all faithful souls to prayer.

And we who drink the Saki’s wine

Believe its juice no less divine
Than filled, Hafiz, that cup of thine.

Master and most benign of shades,

Before thy gracious phantom fades
To Mosellay’s enchanted glades,

Breathe on my lips, and o’er my brain

Some comfort for thy child, whose pain
Strives as you strove, but strives in vain.

When sundown sets the world on fire

When sundown sets the world on fire,
The music of the Master’s lyre
Deadens the ache of keen desire.

Reading this painted Persian page,

Where, half a lover, half a sage,
You built your heart a golden cage,

My fancy, skimming southern seas,

Wanders at twilight where the breeze
Flutters the dark pomegranate trees.

We all are sultans in our dreams

Of gardens where the sunlight gleams
On fairer flowers and clearer streams;

And thus in dreams I seek my home

Where dim Shiraz, dome after dome,
Smiles on the water’s silver foam;

The dancing girls, with tinkling feet

And many-coloured garments, beat
Their drums adown the twisted street;

And while the revel sways along,

The scented, flower-crowned, laughing throng
Seem part and parcel of thy song.

Hafiz, night’s rebel angels sweep

Across the sun; I pledge you deep,
And smiling, sighing, sink to sleep.
MEMORY.
Sitting silent in the twilight, faces of my former loves
Float about my fancy softly, like a silver flight of doves.

Brighter than the stars of heaven is the shining of their eyes,

Sweeter are their angel voices than the speech of Paradise.

I am old and grey and weary, winter in my blood and brain;

But to-night these haunting phantoms conjure up my youth again.

Lovingly I name them over, all that world of gracious girls,

Almond-eyed and jasmine-bosomed, like a poet stringing pearls.

In my tranquil cypress mazes just outside the sleepy town,

Blooms a tribe of laughing lilies fairer than a kingly crown.

Every lily in the garden wears a woman’s gracious name,

Every lily in the garden set my spirit once aflame;

And amongst that throng of lilies scarcely whiter than his hair,
Hafiz sits and dreams at sunset of the flowers no longer fair;

Of the sweethearts dead and buried whom I worshipped long ago,

When this beard as grey as ashes was as sable as the sloe.

I would weep if I were wiser, but the idle child of song

Leaves reflection to the Mullah, sorrow to the Sufi throng.

Am I wrong to be contented in the sunlight to rehearse

Pleasant tales of love and lovers in my honey-laden verse?

While the vinepress with the life-blood of the purple clusters drips,
I forget how slowly, surely, day by day to darkness slips,

Heedless how beyond the gateway in the field the nations jar,
Hand on throat and hand on sabre in the trampled lanes of war.

Ah! ’tis better on this pleasant river bank to lie reclined,

While the ghosts of old affections fill the harem of my mind.

Think no more of love and lasses, Hafiz; you can scarcely hold
The Koran with trembling fingers. Hafiz, you are growing old.
ELD.
Hafiz, you are growing old;
Hafiz, all the girls abandon
Bards whose blood is getting cold,
Bards whom Time has laid his hand on.
All the merry songs you sung
In the days when you were young,
Are not worth a feather’s weight
To arrest the fist of Fate
When it jogs your shifting sand on.

Hafiz, though a tinge of grey

Shames the locks that once were sable,
Drink and laugh the world away,
Swear that eld’s a housewife’s fable;
Vow that youth is always yours
While the graceful gait allures,
While the perfume haunts the rose,
While a ruddy balsam flows
From the flagon on the table.

Just a word within your ear,

Hafiz: you’re a craven creature
If you waste a single tear
On the thought that every feature
Of the fairest face a maid
Ever showed the sun must fade;
Rather bid your mistress weigh
Youth and beauty’s barren stay,
And a wiser lesson teach her.

Tell her youth was made for love;

Tell her wine was made for drinking;
Tell her that in heaven above
Mahmoud and his saints are winking
At the golden jest of youth;
Tell her wisdom’s wisest truth
Tell her wisdom s wisest truth
Is, be merry while you may,
Cease regretting yesterday,
Or about to-morrow thinking.
LONG AGO.
All my youth’s desires are buried,
Each within its narrow grave;
Long ago their ghosts were ferried
O’er Jaihun’s enchanted wave;
Wild ambitions bright and brave,
Loves that made me serve a slave,
All have slipped away like snow
Long ago.

Stars in which my youth delighted

Vanish from the heavenly band,
And I wander a benighted
Stranger in a stranger land;
There is no one left to stand
By my side or take my hand,
Of the friends I worshipped so
Long ago.

One sweet name of all the number

Haunts the chambers of my brain,
One sweet shape disturbs my slumber,
Loved too well and loved in vain.
Ah, Ferangis! give again
Half the pleasure, all the pain,
That my boyhood used to know
Long ago.

These are dreams: I must remember

That my youthful days are dead,
That the rigours of December
Grizzle e’en a poet’s head.
Gone is gone, and dead is dead,
And no roses bloom as red
As the roses used to blow
Long ago.
Though my eyes pursue the swallow
As he travels towards the sun,
Aged limbs refuse to follow
Where the fancies lightly run.
Hafiz, cease, the game is done,
Life’s fantastic robe is spun;
Fate marked out the way to go
Long ago.

You were passionate, my poet,

In your manhood’s golden dawn;
Seized the seed of life to sow it
On the tulip-tinted lawn;
Now you sit at home and yawn,
Withered, grizzled, bent and drawn,
By the hearth: you scorned its glow
Long ago.

What is left? a sigh, a shudder,

For my past, and for the goal
Where, a boat without a rudder,
Drifts my tempest-troubled soul;
Ah! death’s angel, taking toll,
Shall I find within thy bowl
Better wine than used to flow
Long ago?
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