Love for the Ordinary Death as Source of the Poetic Imagination
Concerning poetry, Aristotle speaks of it as a mimesis of action of the interrelation of things, which serves as a catharsis of pity and fear, which exist in everyone’s soul but the everyday situation of the world keeps these strong emotions – and the correct orientation for these strong emotions – in check. What the everyday situation covers up, Wordsworth would say, as seen in his “Ode to Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” is man’s organic sensibility of the unity of being, such that the only person who feels this loss of unity is the poet, who recalls a glimpse of unity in “blessed moods” after recalling an experience from the everyday world which show traces of the hidden unity. Coleridge calls the primary imagination a submission to reality, and it is this hidden reality, covered up by the everyday situation of the world, to which the poet submits. This submission is the Keatsian negative capability, which is the submission to the mystery of things, and empathy for, as Maritain puts it, the “primordial darkness” which is the root of the poetic imagination, sensory experience, and intellect. The source of the poetic imagination, which is also the source of poetic knowledge since at this fundamental level all are one, is submission to – one must say love for -- the dark and beautiful mystery that is death, especially death in ordinary things. As Aristotle says, the reality of things is not in a separate transcendent realm but in things themselves, in the everyday world, a world that changes, moves, and dies. What the poet must do is to love the mortality of the thing, which points, paradoxically, to a mystery that is immortal, while struggle with the everyday situation of the world which tries to cover up the beauty of death with education, general -- and hypocritical -- convention, scientific reason, and emotional neutrality as seen in D,H. Lawrence’s “Snake,” Seamus Heaney’s “Punishment,” Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.”
In Lawrence’s “Snake” one sees the action of a man, conflicted in his reactions to a snake, and giving in to his petty education. One can see the action of the poem in four parts: In the first part, one sees the man encountering the snake, drinking at his water trough. The man waits, sees the snake as a “Someone,” not as a thing, and at first thinks of the snake as harmless, since it drinks “as cattle do.” But there is a power to this snake that is not harmless, as the man realizes that the snake comes “from the burning bowels of the earth,” i.e., the snake is golden in color. Says his rational mind “And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.” The conventional reaction of education in rational man – based in fear of the unknown -- is to destroy any harbingers of death, like the snake. But in the second part of the poem, the man’s imaginative, empathetic reaction admits “But must I confess how I liked him.” The conventional side calls this reaction “cowardice” and “perversity” but the imaginative side calls his reaction in this part as “humility, to feel so honoured,” even as the rational voices – the reproach of the everyday world – clamour for the man to kill the snake, destroy what would kill him. By the third part, the snake is departing, and the willful, rational side of the man can only think of the snake’s passage as “that dreadful hole” – again, his education, based in fear of the unknown, conjures up images of burial plots and being buried in a “horrid black hole.” His “horror” is palpable and willful; the same horror that originally commanded him to kill the snake for fear of the man’s death now commands him to prevent the snake’s passage into “the dark door of the secret earth”, i.e., the to prevent the snake from accepting a kind of death. Once he acts upon this command from his education – he throws a log at the parting snake -- he immediately regrets his willfulness, which begins part four: “I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.” His education has detached him from a great unity, just like the Ancient Mariner detached himself from a great unity when he killed the albatross. The man realizes that he has rejected a symbol from the Death realm which is unlike what his education has taught him; it is not static but, paradoxically, active and alive, as seen in the snake as “one of the lords / Of life.” The man must “expiate” his sin of “pettiness,” which is a sin against the source of the poetic imagination.
In Heaney’s “Punishment” one sees the action of a man, conflicted in his reactions to the body of a punished adulteress, and giving in to his people’s conventional view of her. The man, “the artful voyeur” at first “feel[s]” her punishment but quickly moves from feeling to seeing -- “I can see her drowned / body” – as he addresses an unknown audience. Then he addresses the dead girl, calling her “My poor scapegoat, / I almost love you”; the present tense in this phrase indicates that he might love her as she is, but the body of convention has kept him “dumb” in his – and her sisters’ -- hypocrisy of condemning her. He who once submitted to her love, even in death, for “her noose [is] a ring / to store / the memories of love,” “would connive / in civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge.” Even in his acceptance of the convention, he feels its hypocrisy of justice when it is only a whitewash for blood revenge, a howl for the other’s blood as sacrifice. But unlike the man in “Snake,” this voice will not expiate his sin of betraying love for convention.
In Eberhart’s “The Groundhog” one sees the action of a man as he reacts to the body of a groundhog. One can see the action of the poem in four parts: In the first part, his reaction to the dead groundhog is a sensuous experience which leads to a spiritual knowledge: “my senses shook, / And mind outshot our naked frailty” (4), “Half loathing, half with a strange love” (11), “kept my reverence for knowledge / …/ Praying for joy in the sight of decay.” (24) This image of death with life in it, this groundhog roiling with maggots, makes the man submit to its naked reality, creating a paradoxical knowledge, which is poetic knowledge, in the form of prayer, which is the poem. But in the second part, when a year has passed and only “the bony sodden hulk remained” (28), the man has lost his poetic knowledge to “intellectual chains” in which “I lost both love and loathing” (30-31). In the third part, another year has passed, only the bones of the groundhog remain, which the man declares are “Beautiful as architecture” (38) – a static kind beauty, not the living, grotesque beauty of the freshly dead groundhog and its companion maggots; his reaction is akin to the Socratic mathematician, pondering the static forms, “like a geometer” (39), but what is lacking is the sensual. In part four, three years have passed, and the man, old now – perhaps in spirit if not in body, hence his “withered heart” – thinks of worldly and spiritual grandeur, but is missing is the sensory, personal realm which forms the matrix for the bittersweet awareness of the living soul in a dying body.
Finally, in Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” one sees the action of a voice as she reacts to the miraculous appearance of a rook, or crow, cleaning its feathers. This poem most of all best illustrates the submission of the poet to the mystery within ordinary things, which change and die, a mystery of which the poet becomes aware in what Maritain called “flashes of reality” upon what Wordsworth called the poet’s “organic sensibility.” The voice’s senses alight on a black rook, cleaning its feathers, and she “do[es] not expect a miracle”, that is she does not expect “a celestial burning t[aking]/ Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then “even though she “desire[s]” it. But this desire, which is akin to the Romantics’ desire for unity of being, prepares the voice such that when such miracles do happen without expectation, she submits and accepts as a gift, “bestowing largesse, honor, / One might say love.” The rook arranging its feathers “shine / As to seize my senses, haul / My eyelids up, and grant / A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality.” The everyday situation dulls the senses such that there is always a danger that the voice may fall into what Maritain called “deafness.” The voice sees “radiance miracles” within the ordinary crow – it is important that this bird is a crow, the traditional harbinger of death. But the miracle is a gift which is “spasmodic,” that gift of primary imagination upon the sensory experience, and the voice cannot will it to occur; she must, like the man in “Snake,” wait.
Thus, the source of the poetic imagination, which is also the source of poetic knowledge since at the fundamental level of the soul all powers are one, is submission to, or love for, the dark and beautiful mystery that is death – potential and actual -- within ordinary things. The danger for the poet consists of his or her struggle with the everyday situation of the world which tries to cover up the beauty of this hidden reality, while he or she remains submissively open, i.e., love, the mortality of the thing, which points, paradoxically, to a mystery that is immortal. This poetic openness is, essentially, the love of incarnate things, and, as seen in the above poems, one cannot love the spirit of the thing without loving its dying body.
© 25 October 2000 Rufel F. Ramos