The Language of Poetry and Inspiration

It is of facts I sing; though some may say
It’s fiction that mortals can see divine beings.
There is a god in us : he awakens us to inspiration
And an impulse to respond to his being.
To me, in particular, it is given to see the gods
Because I am a poet and because I sing of sacred things.

FASTI VI, 3-8

So the Roman poet Ovid. Poets have often claimed divine inspiration for their art, or that it is particularly suited to the expression of divinely inspired thoughts. Why should this be so? Why, that is, should language forced into a pattern that is, usually, different to natural speech, be a better vehicle for inspiration than the way of speaking we are all blessed with?

The answers to this question have been various. Emily Dickinson for, instance, suggested that indirect or elliptical expression was the only way to get close to saying what needed to be said. So her “say it slant” was a way at hinting at that which could not be said directly, offering a glimpse of a reality that can only be seen at all by avoiding the eyes from looking straight at it.

One way to come at things in this indirect way is to tell stories. Which is not necessarily poetry. But stories, like poems, don’t have to be ‘true’. The question ‘Did it really happen?’ is not one that we think it appropriate to ask of them. But Ovid’s “Some may say its fiction” when he tells us that he has spoken with a god suggests that not everyone will believe him outside of the limited context of ther story he is telling. We do, of course, need to believe fictions when we are reading or listening to a story. But we might, afterwards, say that it is not ‘reality’. By which we would mean something rather different from the ‘reality’ which Emily Dickinson seeks, elusively, to convey. Something very different from the ‘reality’ of which T. S. Eliot says we cannot bear very much.

But still, we say, outside of the story there is a familiar life that we know and recognise. Such lives come into stories, supply contexts for fictional events, whether these are reflections of ordinary life, parables, myths or narratives that take us down byeways that do not lead from any of the highways that run in our familiar world. So in spite of the fact that human beings live much of their lives in the mind, live as might be said, mythologically, many would object to Ovid’s claim that he sings of ‘facts’. Language, they might say, has to be rooted in referents to the world as it is, whatever else it is capable of.

Which, though it may not be obvious, brings us back to poetry. There have been periods when poetic diction has been far from that of ordinary speech, but these have not been the periods in which significant religious verse has been written. Poetry has much more often remained close to plain speech – or rather a highly-charged version of it – and is often all the more evocative and resonant when it does so. And yet, gestures to that deeper reality, to otherness, to the shady recesses of the grove in which Ovid sat and heard the words of a goddess, often reveal themselves in a compact phrase, a sudden change of cadence, in the words that come together to combine a certain tone, a rhythm, an image, to turn the hint at otherness into a view of somewhere or something the reality of which is undeniable.

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That day I went into the grove

It was the imperceptible turn from the path

That caught me unawares,

The rustle of leaves that taught me

Of another world in the held breath

Before a footfall
That never found its footing.

Bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)

Bluebells after rain - have you ever tasted that experience? In a greening woodland where the floor is a thick carpet of blue is a place to be at this time of year. It's like you've stumbled across some archetype of the nascent summer emerging from Spring. Something which defines a particular moment in the year in all its enchanting sensuousness. And then rain ... clearing to sunshine. At that moment while the wood is still wet, then is the time to step inside and be touched by something that you never quite register as a reproducable experience, that you can never quite define. It has a hint of faerie about it, liminal as if touching another realm through a border that is porous but, still, cannot be crossed. So although this 'other' world is here all about you, a verifiable part of the natural world, it remains 'other'. Is this the reason for the folklore tradition that anyone who wanders into a ring of bluebells will fall under fairy enchantment?

That is one way of writing about bluebells. Another is to explore their nomenclature. Many books still give the botanical name as Endymion non-scriptus which already opens up a treasure house of allusion. Endymion in Greek myth was beloved of the Moon goddess Selene who ensured that he could remain in his state of youthful beauty providing he remained asleep.

The part of the scientific name ‘non-scripta’ means ‘not written [upon]', and distinguishes this species from the ancestor of cultivated hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) which in Greek mythology grew from the blood of Hyacinthus as he died. The God Apollo wrote ‘AI AI’, which means ‘alas’ on the petals of this flower as a lament. These marks are supposed to appear on several different species which might refer to the flower in question, but it is the bluebell that has it enshrined in its botanical name. Here is Ovid:


As God Apollo spoke his prophecies,
The blood that filled the grasses at his feet
Turned to brighter dye than Tyrian purple.
And from its lips there came a lily flower.
And yet, unlike the silver-white of lilies,
Its colour was a tinted, pinkish blue.
Nor was this miracle enough for Phoebus;
He wrote the words 'Ai, Ai' across its petals,
The sign of his own grief, his signature.

(from Metamorphoses Book X)

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More on bluebells here:

http://www.botanicalkeys.co.uk/flora/content/species.asp?510

Ted Hughes' Ovid

Ask anyone what they think was the most significant work published by Ted Hughes at the end of his life and the answer will probably be Birthday Letters, poems detailing his response to the suicide of his wife Sylvia Plath but held back until just before his death in 1998. But ask me and I’d say his Tales From Ovid published in 1997. The blurb on the back of my copy, which I’ve recently been re-reading, claims that “it is as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person”. My Latin isn’t good enough to fully judge the accuracy of that judgement of the quality of the translations, as literal translations, but they certainly present Ovid’s stories in a fluent, pithy and highly readable form. They work perfectly as verse, as narratives and as versions of these tales from the Ancient World recycled by Ovid in the Rome of Augustus and recycled since by, among others, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Given the importance of Ovid to Shakespeare and the importance of Shakespeare to Hughes (see his Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being) it is appropriate that he should have tackled this final task and given us his own versions at the end of his life.

The American classicist Bernard Knox has questioned the precise accuracy of these translations but it could be argued that Hughes did what Ovid himself did, picking up, as Hughes puts it in his introduction, “the current of human passion … where it combusts and levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural”. This enactment of metamorphoses, the transference of human experience from one plane to another, as much as the bodily transformation that represents this in the tales, is captured superbly by Hughes. In the range of stories from the amusing to the horrific, Hughes’ language remains pliable and direct with no sense of artifice or of the language getting in the way of the experience which is all too common in translations. Just listen to this on human frailty and passion:

Like a great tree that sways,
All but cut through by the axe,
Uncertain which way to fall,
Waiting for the axe’s deciding blow,
Myrrha,
Bewildered by the opposite onslaughts
Of her lust and her conscience,
Swayed and waited to fall.
Either way, she saw only death.
Her lust, consummated, had to be death;
Denied, had to be death.

(Myrrha, who desires only her own father)

Or this on the metamorphic process:

No weapon was to hand – only water.

So she scooped up a handful and dashed it
Into his astonished eyes, as she shouted:
‘Now if you can, tell how you saw me naked.’

That was all she said, but as she said it
Out of his forehead burst a rack of antlers.
His neck lengthened, narrowed, and his ears

Folded to whiskery points, his hands were hooves,
His arms long slender legs. His hunter’s tunic
Slid from his dappled hide. With all this

The goddess
Poured a shocking stream of panic terror
Through his heart like blood.

( Actaeon after discovering Diana bathing)

If Hughes sometimes uses vocabulary that is peculiarily modern, it is deployed to magnificent effect. Here finally, is Apollo:

In his left hand the lyre
Was a model, in magical code,
Of the earth and the heavens –
Ivory of narwhal and elephant,
Diamonds from the interiors of stars.
In his right hand he held
The plectrum that could touch
Every wavelength in the Universe
Singly or simultaneously.
Even his posture
Was like a tone – like a tuning fork,
Vibrant, alerting the whole earth,
Bringing heaven down to listen.