The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

I began writing poetry myself because one Sunday afternoon in March 192,2,, a friend suggested that I should: the thought had never occurred to me. I scarcely knew any poems—The English Hymnal, the Psalms, Struvrwelpeter and the mnemonic rhymes in Kennedy's Shorter Latin Primer are about all I remember—and I took little interest in what is called Imaginative Literature. Most of my reading had been related to a private world of Sacred Objects. Aside from a few stories like George Macdonald's The Princess and the Goblin and Jules Verne's The Child of the Cavern, the sub­jects of which touched upon my obsessions, my favorite books bore such tides as Underground Life, Machinery for Metal­liferous Mines, head and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor, and my conscious purpose in reading them had been to gain information about my sacred objects. At the time, therefore, the suggestion that I write poetry seemed like a revelation from heaven for which nothing in my past could account.

Looking back, however, I now realize that I had read the technological prose of my favorite books in a peculiar way. A word like pyrites, for example, was for me, not simply an indicative sign; it was the Proper Name of a Sacred Being, so that, when I heard an aunt pronounce it pirrits, I was shocked. Her pronunciation was more than wrong, it was ugly. Ignorance was impiety.

It was Edward Lear, I believe,* who said that the true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat, and we are told in the first chapter of Genesis that the Lord brought to un- fallen Adam all the creatures that he might name them and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof, which is to say, its Proper Name. Here Adam plays the role of the Proto-poet, not tike Proto-prosewriter. A Proper Name must not only refer, it must refer aptly and this aptness must be publicly recognizable. It is curious to observe, for instance, that when a person has been christened

* I was wrong: it was Samuel Butler.

inaptly, he and his friends instinctively call him by some other name. Like a line of poetry, a Proper Name is untrans­latable. Language is prosaic to the degree that "It does not matter what particular word is associated with an idea, provided the association once made is permanent." Language is poetic to the degree that it does matter.

The power of verse [writes Valery] is derived from an indefinable harmony between what it says and what it is. Indefinable is essential to the definition. The harmony ought not to be definable; when it can be defined it is imitative harmony and that is not good. The impossibility of defining the relation, together with the impossibility of denying it, constitutes the essence of the poetic line.

The poet is someone, says Mallarme, who "de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total," and the most poetical of all scholastic disciplines is, surely, Philology, the study of lan­guage in abstraction from its uses, so that words become, as it were, little lyrics about themselves.

Since Proper Names in the grammatical sense refer to unique objects, we cannot judge their aptness without per­sonal acquaintance with what they name. To know whether Old Foss was an apt name for Lear's cat, we should have had to have known them both. A line of poetry like

A drop of water in the breaking gulf

is a name for an experience we all know so that we can judge its aptness, and it names, as a Proper Name cannot, re­lations and actions as well as things. But Shakespeare and Lear are both using language in the same way and, I believe, for the same motive, but into that I shall go later. My present point is that, if my friend's suggestion met with such an unexpected response, the reason may have been that, without knowing it, I had been enjoying the poetic use of language for a long time.