Chapter XXVIII · The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry
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CHAPTER XXVIII The Allusiveness of Modern Poetry
Tehee! Tehee! O sweet delight! He tickles this age who can Call Tullia’s ape a marmosyte, And Leda’s goose a swan! Anon.
We have distinguished between impulses which are involved at all stages of development, their course and fate naturally varying with the stage, and those which do not go off at all except in developed minds. The responses of the non-mathematical and the mathematical mind to a formula illustrate the difference. It is the use of responses not available without special experience, which more than anything else narrows the range of the artist’s communication and creates the gulf between expert and popular taste.
In the second chorus of Hellas in the middle of the second stanza the rhythm, tune, and handling, though not the metre, become suddenly uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of movement belong to the fifth and following lines:
A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim Which the orient planet animates with light. Hell, sin, and slavery, came, Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.
And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the first stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:
The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set: While, blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon, The Cross leads generations on.
So fleet, so faint, so fair, The Powers of Earth and Air Fled from the folding-star of Bethlehem. Apollo, Pan and Love, And even Olympian Jove, Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
In a manner more familiar perhaps in music than in poetry Shelley is echoing another poem, borrowing, as it were, Milton’s voice though not his words, making in fact a musical quotation, a poetical allusion of an exquisite felicity.
But by so doing he is necessarily restricting the number of the readers who will fully appreciate him.
Such allusions are a normal and regular part of the resources of all poets who belong to the literary tradition, that is to say, of the vast majority of poets in modern times. They are not often so unobtrusive and the place which they are given in the structure of the poem varies. Sometimes, as in this instance, a failure on the part of the reader has no important consequences. One familiar with the Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity will respond more fully and with a deeper sense of the situation; but a reader unfamiliar with it is not deprived of any major part of the poem. In other cases the loss is more serious. Another instance from Shelley will illustrate this, and it is interesting for its own sake. The Shape which guides the Chariot in the Triumph of Life is described and identified for the reader in a large degree through another Miltonic quotation or allusion:
A Shape So sate within, as one whom years deform, Beneath a dusky hood and double cape, Crouching within the shadow of a tomb, And o’er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape Was bent.
Shelley, it is known, crystallised much of his philosophy in the sentence: ‘Death is the veil which those who live call life’, and the reference† here to the guardian of Hell Gate,
What seem’d his head The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on,
is not accidental or unimportant for the understanding of the poem.
Some care is needed in considering the problem of allusions. There may be worthy and unworthy motives behind their employment ad their enjoyment. There are some to whom a familiarity with literature occasions a sense of superiority over others which is trivial and mean. The pleasure of recognition, proportional as it is to the difficulty or unobtrusiveness of the allusion is a thing of slight value, not to be confused with literary or poetic values. It is perfectly possible for a reader, familiar with the Nativity Hymn, for example, to receive all that Shelley intended without ever noticing the allusion, without, that is to say, any recognition. But the erudite often forget that this happens. To turn the capacity of recognising recondite references into a shibboleth by which culture may be estimated is a perversion to which scholarly persons are too much addicted. The point is worth mentioning, since this snobbishness, percolating down (or, if the metaphor be preferred, by repercussion) is responsible for much insincerity and timidity, for wrong attitudes of many kinds towards literature, for irritation and oppression developing into distaste and neglect of poetry. Allusion is a trap for the writer almost as effective as for the academic critic. It invites insincerity. It may encourage and disguise laziness. When it becomes a habit it is a disease. But these dangers form no ground for denying to allusion, and the similar resources of which it is typical, a fit and justifiable place in poetry.