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.

-*-

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.

Simile and Real Presences

Her shirt was o' the grass-green silk

I suggested last time, a poet writing about a remote God needs to use metaphor to make that God present, but that simile was a more appropriate device for the presentation of what is perceived of as naturally present. In the medieval Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen, Olwen is said to have hair yellower than the flowers of the broom and cheeks redder than the reddest foxgloves. The description continues with further superlatives based on comparisons to specific natural things; “Whiter were her palms and her fingers than the shoots of the marsh trefoil from amidst the fine gravel of a welling spring….”.

Notice that metaphor is not needed here. The urge is not to make present what is other, but to suggest intensity or an amplification of what is already present or immanent in nature. Consider too that, in the same tale, what are clearly mythological deposits are represented matter-of-factly as naturally occurring: each of the ‘oldest animals’ has a tale to tell of his or her great antiquity, they are superlatively old and part of the natural structure of things. So, too, Mabon, Son of Modron, the great boar Trwyth and the giant Ysbadadden whose eyelids have to be raised up by forks. If it might be objected that these are folktale elements and can’t be compared to the presentation of a religious quest, we can look farther back in literary history.

In the Aeneid, Virgil says of Aeneas: “I fared out upon the high seas, an exile with my comrades and my son, with the little Gods of our home and great Gods of our race.” Venus (his mother) appears at key moments to tell him what he needs to know like any other woman but with a special aura that distinguishes her. Arriving at the future site of Rome, the God Tiber speaks to him from beneath reedy hair, a natural emanation of the place. Figurative language is largely absent from the presentation of the gods whether in general terms or when describing personal confrontations with them. It is often difficult to know how literally we are expected to take the manifestation but the experience of the gods is never the result of the forcing of the imaginative process via metaphor.

In Homer the gods come and go from the battlefield at Troy just as the heroes who fight their battles there. Is Poseidon the sea or a representation of the sea? Homer does not seem interested in the question and we could take it either way. Odysseus experiences Athene in the guise of Mentor : “Then Athene, daughter of Zeus, drew near them in the likeness of Mentor, in fashion and in voice” in which guise she had previously appeared to Telemachus. She also appears as a swallow sitting on a roof beam or communicates in any number of ways but, as Roberto Calasso puts it in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “[Odysseus] knows he need not be waiting for the dazzling splendour of epiphany. Athenê may be a beggar or an old friend. She is the protecting presence.”

These gods are present in nature rather than supernatural. Even the Otherworld is a place that can be visited and from which visitations can occur. Not only is the figurative language of metaphor not needed to realise them, neither is the device of allegory anywhere apparent. These beings stand for themselves rather than another plane of existence or representation. In a polytheistic world-view the gods are each manifest in their own right, not as aspects of one God or Goddess. They don’t depend on notions of allegorical transference or on metaphor as the only way of speaking adequately about them. Their superlative qualities may therefore be described by simile. They are like this but exceed even the best of that. The ‘worshipper’ does not look to enter another plane of being or a supernatural realm to catch a glimpse of them, though they might have their existence in parallel or time-shifted dimensions. Faery, though it exists alongside or at some oblique angle to our own life, is not a different dimension entirely to our own reality. Thomas of Ercildoune is carried off there by a lady on a white horse in the ‘Ballad of True Thomas’. Such stories are many. The ‘Spirit World’ is immanent in the material world and infuses its daily life.

[next time I want to talk about metonymy]