The Columbia History of British Poetry (65 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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the sophisticated idiom of the new intellectual world, and, at its most remarkable moments, spoke even with heroic and vatic accent.
Of the forms and devices of Dryden's and Pope's poetry, the heroic couplet is the most characteristic. Virtually everything they wrote, they wrote in coupletsincluding in Dryden's case, many plays. The versatility of their handling of this instrument revealed in it a capacity for suppleness hardly to be guessed at from the apparent rigidities of the form itself. These are not merely a matter of the inevitable rhymealthough it is important to note that in their practice, Dryden and Pope for the most part emphasize the rhymes and insist upon strong pauses at the line's end. At their best, they do so without loss of fluid movement and without blunting dramatic and discursive energy.
Of all the devices that distinguish poetry from discursive writing, likeness of sound has perhaps the least to do with thought itself; yet as Dryden and Pope manage it, the rhyming couplet will emphasize grammar and syntax, and through grammar and syntax it will suggest the operations of thought. It is a fine instrument for displaying discrimination, as Dryden does here in assessing his Achitophel: "Yet, Fame deserv'd, no Enemy can grudge; / The Statesman we abhor, but praise the Judge." It works brilliantly in defining the paradoxes of human character; again, Dryden's Zimri: "So over Violent, or over Civil, / That every man, with him, was God or Devil." And for the elegant brutality of realistic assessment, the couplet is unsurpassed:
See how the World its Veterans rewards!
A Youth of Frolicks, an old Age of Cards,
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without Lovers, old without a Friend,
A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot,
Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!
The preceding passage, taken from Pope's
Epistle to a Lady
(once again, a poem he thought of as a "moral essay"), describes the behavior of middle-aged unmarried women, and explains how they came to their condition. What is striking in this satire of social and moral failure is the almost entire absence of figurative languageof image, of metaphor, of simile. Submerged in "Veteran" is a metaphor, perhaps, suggesting combat as well as age, and this suggestion tells us something about the "World" within which these women movethe social existence that, when vitiated, is a warfare upon earth, dealing out rewards
 
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and punishment with relentless attention to what Freud would call the reality principle. Yet that reality principle is itself contemplated within this passage not through image or metaphor, but entirely through the medium of grammar, of syntax.
Here syntactical parallels and oppositions have obviously discursive force, from which they develop their emotional energy and moral point. We are forced to think of "Passion" in terms of its consequent "Prize," this moral-logical parallelism encompasses the similar set that links "Fop" and "Sot." In these ''cause and effect" parallels drawn between youth and age, between frolic and cards, between behavior meriting ridicule and the living body overwhelmed in oblivion, the unforgiving logic of social and moral ruin is revealed.
The strong force of the recognitions emerging from these parallels is certainly an effect of poetry, but the poetry here is virtually devoid of characteristics we might call "poetic." Now this spareness, this pretense that grammar and syntax outlined by rhyme can do the work of image and metaphor, is itself a gesture of the poet's in the direction of the critical preferences and habits of the Enlightenment. In the major philosophical documents of the timecertainly in Hobbes's and in Locke'show language constructs (and threatens) meaning is a central topic. Almost always associated with this inquiry, we find a disdain for the abuses of jargonish, imprecise, and fanciful writing. To be modern is to prefer
things
over
words
, to scorn the professional and "gothick" jargon of the scholastic philosophers, and to excoriate the eloquence of the rhetoricians and the poets"this vicious abundance of
Phrase
, this trick of
Metaphor
, this volubility of
Tongue
, which makes so great a noise in the World . . . this beautiful deceipt," as Thomas Sprat puts it in his
History of the Royal Society
.
Fully imagined and eloquently expressed writing was understood to be the product of what the philosophers called "wit" (and what the Romantic poets and theorists came to call "imagination"), but the spare writing that was true to thought, was made by the faculty of "judgment." For the critical philosopher of language, wit joined the unjoinable and made metaphorsunicorns; judgment analyzed and took apart these lovely but cognitively useless constructionsgiving us back goats and horses.
To write poetry in a modern way, then, was to declare oneself not entirely uncomfortable with the philosopher's suspicion of sound and of wit; and it was to set oneself the task of making sounds the critical intel-
 
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ligence could comfortably hear, discovering the illusions by which poetry could pretend to be discourseand still be poetry. To succeed at this task was not quite trickeryor if it was, it was the trickery in which the poet and his work became sociable to their age. A large element in the original genius of both Dryden and Pope was precisely their invention of this modern, this sociable, this discursive, and still, this
imaginative
voice. For wit in all its energy pervades their writing. In the very passages surrounding that explosion of grammar narrating the doomed transformation of society girls into solitary women, Pope says what he wants to say in powerfully figurative language of the most obvious kind; in fact, it is the figurative language that prepares us for the discursive. Here are the lines that just precede the passage cited above:
As Hags hold
Sabbaths
, less for joy than spight,
So these, their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the Places where their Honour died.
These doomed women may be the object of discursive admonitions, but they are also, subtly, the stuff of poetry and imagination, and in this ambiguity the figurative language suggests unexpected sympathies with the victims of the discourse.
Writing as a moralist, Pope may assert a link between the idea of the witch and the idea of the old maid, the idea of the witches' sabbath and the idea of the society ballbut at the same time, and in metaphor of unusual complexity, he is entirely true to the distinction between the ugliness of the hag and the gliding loveliness of the "the ghosts of beauty." That the "ghosts of beauty" are still alive, that simply to be present in society in their situation is to haunt itthese notions drive the metaphor toward a complexity of feeling and thought no less than what we might find in moments of great intensity in Shakespeare or Donne.
This play of wit against discourse within the heroic couplet is more generally evident in the decisions Dryden and Pope made about the larger forms they would work in. Most notably, under the cover of the satirical sophistication of the mock-heroic poemand within the feigned conversational judiciousness of the verse satire and epistlethey were able to acknowledge the urbane modernity of Enlightenment culture, and in behalf of that modernity, to debunk the grand myth-making, the extended narratives, the heroic posturing of the great epic poem.
 
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But the great epic poemits classical models and even more awesomely, Milton's almost contemporary achievement in
Paradise Lost
was for Dryden and Pope, as it was for the age in general, still an object of veneration, the sign of the powers of the imagination working in their highest union with the powers of the judgment. So that as Dryden and Pope deploy the urbane ironies of the mock-heroic, the epistle, and the satire, their joking does not quite undo the mythic, the grand, and the heroic; nor, conversely, do they simply diminish the urbane and skeptical with reference to the earlier and larger world of the imaginative and mythmaking mind. Instead, in the new urbanity of their making, the heroic world of the mind is itself reclaimed for the modern age, in a modern form. It is, perhaps, a ghostly and oblique presence in its modern and ironic version. But as such it gives structure to the world of modern experience, it makes it observable, it makes it intelligible, and it opens it to evaluation.
Indeed, the newer versions of heroic style imagined and invented by Dryden and Pope and made conformable by them to the authentic tastes of a knowing and judicious age are emblems for poetry itself in such an age. In it the presence of the heroic and the poetic may be likened to the presence of the sylphs in
The Rape of the Lock
. These sylphs are the small gods ruling over the beau monde, whose gorgeous and shallow lives it is in part the poem's discursive task to laugh at. Just about as much of the divine as the world of fashion can contain, the sylphs are, of course, precisely Nothing. And yet, were it not for them, nothing at all of pleasure and delight could be seen, felt, or tasted.
Loose to the Wind their airy Garment flew,
Thin, glitt'ring Textures of the filmy Dew;
Dipt in the richest Tincture of the Skies,
Where Light disports in ever-mingling Dies,
While ev'ry Beam new transient Colours flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their Wings.
These etherial, these entirely insubstantial, entirely fictive beings, are yet the agents of the senses: around the outlines of their transparent forms, the light gathers and is shaped, and by the waving of their wings, colors are made visible, mingled, incessantly transformed, and the sky comes alive in disport.
But if we owe to these airy sylphs whatever it is we come to see of our familiar world in its most charmed moments, it is also true that the

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