The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [138]
Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
The may be part of the philosopher’s quest for truth, but it is also the beginning of a poem as well as an ending for one. The inevitable recursiveness of poetry, beginning at its end, ending at its beginning, is here gorgeously and economically evoked.
It was a commonplace of formalist literary criticism that poems were inescapably self-referential, that whatever their ostensible topic in the world, they also gestured, in an unmistakable and important way, toward their own shape and structure. The idea was that beginnings and endings mattered, that the poem or work would re-begin itself at the supposed “end.” The poem might be imagined as taking the form of the ouroboros, the snake (or dragon) with its tail in its mouth, the ancient symbol of psychic continuity, or of eternal process, or of redemption, or of self-sufficiency, or of infinity. Its perfection (literally, its “finished-ness”) lay precisely in its capacity to indicate that in its beginning was its end, but also that in its end was its beginning.
We might look at some specific cases, to see how each folds in the material components of writing (or printing). Here are three examples of this poetic capacity, one having to do with rhyme, another with stanza form, and the third with punctuation. The first is from a magnificent short poem by George Herbert that takes poetic invention as its topic:
JORDAN (I)
Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veiled while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
Here we have a poem that purports to rail against poetry as a fiction, against “catching the sense at two removes,” and against poets poetizing (and falsifying) themselves by calling themselves shepherds. The nightingale is a classical source of poetic inspiration, as is the Pierian spring of the Muses. But the witty (and ardent) denouement comes in the apparent abdication of earthly rhyme (“God” and “King” rhyme only in the sense that they are a perfect fit) while at the same time the final line does rhyme with “sing” and “spring,” just as in the previous stanzas, the last line rhymes with lines 1 and 3 (hair / stair / chair; groves/loves/removes). Arguably, the imperfect aural chiming of these last three words sets up the question of rhyme-that-is-not-rhyme, and thus of its obverse, not-rhyme-that-is-rhyme.
It’s characteristic of Herbert to use pairs of last lines as a way of turning the poem upside down and compelling a rereading, as he does, equally famously, in poems like “Love (III)” and “The Collar.” In all these cases, ending, or closure, is a signal to the reader about self-reference, authorship, authority, continuity, and the place of poetry in the world, the mind, the church, and the heart. Closure