stop a poem growing at all. A
good instance of that would be the line that turned up in one of Philip Larkin’s composition books after his death: ‘Dead leaves desert in thousands.’ He wrote a poem, called
‘Autumn’, to go around it, but he never published the poem, perhaps because that one strong line made all the others sound weak. Such an example certainly knocks on the head any
assumption that a metaphorical breakthrough is necessarily a source of life. It could be a death blow. The ignition point for attention is not necessarily the ignition point for invention.
•
As it happens, most of Shakespeare’s metaphorical creativity, his Olympian playfulness, is in the poetry of the plays, and not in the poems; and especially not in the sonnets, which tend
to get their most arresting effects from syntactical structure (‘Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’) and in some cases, from start to finish, consist, or seem to consist, of
nothing except argument that can be paraphrased into prose. Yet in English literature the Shakespeare sonnets are at the apex of what I think has to be called the poem, rather than poetry. A
Shakespeare sonnet is the essence and exemplar of the poem as the separable, stand-alone thing. Even when a Shakespeare sonnet is part of a sequence, it is there for itself. It will be said that
the whole corpus of the sonnets is a sequence, and there will always be room for interpreters to say what the story of that sequence is. My own favourite interpretation is that of Auden, whose long
essay about the sonnets first appeared as the introduction to a Signet pocketbook that I once carried with me everywhere. Qualified scholars would nowadays no doubt decry Auden’s opinions on
the subject, let alone mine, but he had two advantages as an interpreter. First, he was gay, and second, he was a great poetic technician.
The first qualification surely helped him to grapple with the multiple sexual orientations of what was going on in the apparently stable creation before his eyes. But powerful as that
qualification was, it was trumped by the second. There was almost nothing Auden couldn’t do in the writing of a poem, and he was thus, in the reading of Shakespeare’s most intricately
wrought achievements, well qualified to assess what Shakespeare was up to at the level of technical performance. During the Second World War, the British and the Americans carefully studied
captured enemy aircraft. The engineers learned a lot by taking them to pieces, but finally the judgements that mattered came from the test pilots. Auden was a test pilot, and we must try to take
the same attitude, measuring the thing as a mechanism by the way it performs. Sonnet 129, for example, the perfectly self-contained poem that begins with the line ‘Th’ expense of spirit
in a waste of shame’, consists almost entirely of syntactical tricks worked to compress and energize plain prose statement. The foreign student would need to be told that the
‘waste’ is a desert and not merely a prodigality of expenditure, but otherwise, apart from the similes about hunting and the poisoned bait, there is nothing metaphorical in the whole
fourteen lines. Anyone who tries to get the poem by heart from moment to moment will find that most of the moments are based on verbal echoes, correspondences, and oppositions (‘to make the
taker mad; / Mad in pursuit’). If one has ever built a sonnet oneself, however unremarkable or clumsy the result, the experience must be a help in assessing the prodigious flexibility of
Shakespeare’s craft within a set form, and thus in broaching the subject of whether a poem’s structure might be not just a source of astonishment in itself, but an example of
metaphorical transformation in which an argument is so cleanly articulated that it transcends the real by modelling the balance of its interior forces, as the surface of a DVD generates halos by
being, apparently, so clean and
good instance of that would be the line that turned up in one of Philip Larkin’s composition books after his death: ‘Dead leaves desert in thousands.’ He wrote a poem, called
‘Autumn’, to go around it, but he never published the poem, perhaps because that one strong line made all the others sound weak. Such an example certainly knocks on the head any
assumption that a metaphorical breakthrough is necessarily a source of life. It could be a death blow. The ignition point for attention is not necessarily the ignition point for invention.
•
As it happens, most of Shakespeare’s metaphorical creativity, his Olympian playfulness, is in the poetry of the plays, and not in the poems; and especially not in the sonnets, which tend
to get their most arresting effects from syntactical structure (‘Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’) and in some cases, from start to finish, consist, or seem to consist, of
nothing except argument that can be paraphrased into prose. Yet in English literature the Shakespeare sonnets are at the apex of what I think has to be called the poem, rather than poetry. A
Shakespeare sonnet is the essence and exemplar of the poem as the separable, stand-alone thing. Even when a Shakespeare sonnet is part of a sequence, it is there for itself. It will be said that
the whole corpus of the sonnets is a sequence, and there will always be room for interpreters to say what the story of that sequence is. My own favourite interpretation is that of Auden, whose long
essay about the sonnets first appeared as the introduction to a Signet pocketbook that I once carried with me everywhere. Qualified scholars would nowadays no doubt decry Auden’s opinions on
the subject, let alone mine, but he had two advantages as an interpreter. First, he was gay, and second, he was a great poetic technician.
The first qualification surely helped him to grapple with the multiple sexual orientations of what was going on in the apparently stable creation before his eyes. But powerful as that
qualification was, it was trumped by the second. There was almost nothing Auden couldn’t do in the writing of a poem, and he was thus, in the reading of Shakespeare’s most intricately
wrought achievements, well qualified to assess what Shakespeare was up to at the level of technical performance. During the Second World War, the British and the Americans carefully studied
captured enemy aircraft. The engineers learned a lot by taking them to pieces, but finally the judgements that mattered came from the test pilots. Auden was a test pilot, and we must try to take
the same attitude, measuring the thing as a mechanism by the way it performs. Sonnet 129, for example, the perfectly self-contained poem that begins with the line ‘Th’ expense of spirit
in a waste of shame’, consists almost entirely of syntactical tricks worked to compress and energize plain prose statement. The foreign student would need to be told that the
‘waste’ is a desert and not merely a prodigality of expenditure, but otherwise, apart from the similes about hunting and the poisoned bait, there is nothing metaphorical in the whole
fourteen lines. Anyone who tries to get the poem by heart from moment to moment will find that most of the moments are based on verbal echoes, correspondences, and oppositions (‘to make the
taker mad; / Mad in pursuit’). If one has ever built a sonnet oneself, however unremarkable or clumsy the result, the experience must be a help in assessing the prodigious flexibility of
Shakespeare’s craft within a set form, and thus in broaching the subject of whether a poem’s structure might be not just a source of astonishment in itself, but an example of
metaphorical transformation in which an argument is so cleanly articulated that it transcends the real by modelling the balance of its interior forces, as the surface of a DVD generates halos by
being, apparently, so clean and
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