I.A.Richard's poems

  Topic: I.A. Richard’s poems.

 SUBJECT: Paper no.7 Literary Theory & Criticism: The 20th Western & Indian Poetics – 2:

 ROLL NUMBER: 32

Study: M.A SEM: 2

GUIDED By: D.P.Barad

 Department of English, Maharaja krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

Topic: I.A. Richard’s poems.

Introduction:

                                             

                                              The possibilities of misunderstanding being fourfold, we shall have to keep an eye open, too, upon those underground or overhead cross-connections by which a mistake in one function may lead to errate behaviour in another. We cannot reasonably expect diagnosis here to be simpler than it is with a troublesome wireless set, or to take an even closer parallel, than it is in a psychological clinic. Simple cases do occur, but they are rare. To take aberrations in apprehending, Sense first: those who misread ‘A COOL, GREEN HOUSE’ in poem two, the victims of ‘THE KING OF ALL OUR HEARTS TO-DAY’ in poem IX, the rain-maker and the writer who took poem v to be ‘quite an ingenious way of saying that the artist has made a cast of a beautiful woman’, are almost the simplest examples we shall find of unqualified, immediate misunderstanding of the sense. Even these, however, are not perfectly simple. Grudges felt on other grounds against the poem, misunderstandings of its feeling and tone, certainly helped to their mistakes, just as the stock emotive power of ‘King’ was the strong contributing factor, mastering for all historical probabilities and every indication through style.

                                             

                                              There is one difference however. All will agree that while delicate intellectual operations are in progress brass bands should be silent. But the band more often than not is an essential part of the poetry. It can, However, be silenced, if we wish, white we disentagle and master the sense, and afterwards its co-operation will no longer confuse us. A practical ‘moral’ emerges from this which deserves more prominence than it usually receives. It is that most poetry needs several readings – in which its can be grasped. Readers who claim to dispense with this preliminary study, who think that all good poetry should come home to them in entirety at a first reading, hardly realise how clever they must be.

                                              But  there is a subtler point and a fine distinction  to be noted. We  have allowed above that a good poet –to express feeling, to adjust tone and to further his other aims may play all manner  of  tricks with his sense. He may dissolve  its coherence altogether, if he sees fit. He does so, of course at his peril; his other aims must be really worth while, and he must win a certain renunciation from the reader; but the liberty is certainly his, and no close reader will doubt or deny it. This liberty is the careless reader’s excuse and the bad poet’s opportunity. An obscure notion is engedered in the reader that syntax is somehow less significant is poetry than in prose, and that a kind of guess-work- likely enough to be christened ‘intuition’ –is the proper mode of apprehending what a poet may have to say. The modicum of truth in the notion makes this danger very hard to deal with. In most poetry the sense is as important as anything else; it is quite as subtle, and as dependent on the syntax, as in prose ; it is the poet’s chief instrument to other aims when it is not itself his aim. His control of our thoughts is ordinarily his chief means to the control of our feelings, and in the immense majority of instances we miss nearly everything of value if we misread his sense.

                                                But to say this- and here is the distinction we have to note- is not to say that we can wrench the sense free from the poem, screw it down in a prose paraphrase, and the feelings this doctrine excites in us, as the burden of the poem. These twin dangers-careless, ‘intutive’ reading and prosaic, ‘over-literal’ reading-are the Symplegades, the ‘justling rocks’, between which too many ventures into poetry are wrecked.

                                              Samples of both disasters are frequent enough in the protocols, through Poem I, for example, gave little chance to the ‘intuitive’, the difference there betweena ‘poetic’ and a ‘prosaic’ reading being hardly marked enough to appear. Poem V, on the other hand, only allowed intuitive readings. However, the effect of a prosaic reading is clear; in intuition has all its own way, and the effect of its incursions is as striking as the triumph of the opposite tedency.

                                              Still keeping to the reader’s traffic with sense as little complicated as may perhaps be expected of unfamiliar words, the absence of the necessary intellectual contexts, defective scholarship, in short, as a source of error. Possibly through my choice of poems and perhaps through the advanced educaional standing of the protocol-writers, this obstacle to understanding did not much appear. Far more serious were certain misconceptions as to how the sense of words in poetry is to be taken. Obstacles to understanding, these much less combated by teachers and much more troublesome than any mere deciency of  information. For, after all, dictinaries and encyclopedias stand ready to fill up most gaps in our  knowledge, but an inability to seize the poetical sens`e of words is not so easily remedied.

                                                Some further instances of these misconceptions will make their nature plainer. Compare the chemistry with the ‘literalism’.   Not many metaphors will survive for readers who make such a deadly demand for scientific precision as do these. Less acute manifestations of the same attitude to language  appear frequently elsewhere, and the prevalence of this literalism, under present-day conditions of education, is greater than the cultivated reader will imagine. How are we to explain- to those who see nothing in poetical language but a tissue of ridicolous exaggerations, childish ‘fancies’ ignorant conceits and absurd symbolations-in what way its sense is to be read.

                                              The general problem of all responses made to indirect influences may here be considered. A reader’s liking for this passage might often be affected by his acquaintance with Swinburne’s descriptions and sea-metaphors. ‘Who fished the murex up?’ is a pertient question. The point constantly recurs when we are estimating the enthusiasm of  readers  whose knowledge of poetry is not wide. Have they, or have they not, undergone the original influence. It would be interesting to compare, by means of such a passage as this, a group of  readers before and after they had first spent an evening over songs of the Springtides, or Atalanta in Calydon.

                                              A study of  his ‘The practical criticism, A Study of  Literary Judgement reveals that I.A.Richards is a Staunch advocate of a close textual and verbal study and analysis os a work of all while preparing this book the author had three things in mind. “I have set three aims before me on constructing this book,” he says,” First, to introduce a new kind of documentation to those who are interested in the contemporary state of culture whether as critics, philosophers, as teachers, as psychologists, or merely as curious persons. Secondly , to provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry, and why thwy should like or dislike it. Thirdly, to prepare the way for educational methods more efficient  than those we use now in developing discrimination and the power to understand what we hear and read.”

                                              Detective Scholarship is a third source of important thing in poetry. The reader may fall to understand the sense of  many points because he is ignorant of the sense of many a word used by the poet. The words may be new difficult, unfamiliar  to him. Or he may luck the necessary intellectual context. Words used by a poet, besides having a literal meaning, may also have acquired additional richness  and value from their having been used by other poets and writers  in different contexts, and this associative value and significance would be lost upon a reader unfamiliar with this literate context of words.

                                              Besides  this, a far more serious  cause of misunderstanding is the failure to realise that the poetic use of words is different from their use in prose. Literal sense of words can be easily understood with the help of dictionary, “BUT AN INABILITY TO SEIZE THE POETICAL SENSE OF WORDS IN NOT SO EASILY REMEDIED.” For  example :

“Solemn and gray, the immense  clouds of even

Pass on their towering unperturbed way

Through the vast whitness of the rain-swept heaven.

The moving pageants of the waming day.

Heavy with dreams, desires, prognostications.

Brooding with sullen and Titanic crests.

They surge, whose mantles’ wise imaginations.

Trail where Earth’s mute and langurous body rests.

While below the Hawthrons smile, like milk splashed down.

From Noop’s blue pitcher over mead and hill

The arrased distance is so dim with flowers.

It seems itself some coloured cloud made still.

O how the clouds this dying daylight crown.

With the tremendous triumph of fall towers.”

                                              These Complaints rest upon an assumption about language that would be fatal to poetry. All these things are happen in a poem if there is any good reason for their happening or anything vantage is gained from their happening.

·       A cloud cannot have ‘desires.’

·       A mantle cannot have ‘imaginations.’

·       ‘Imaginations’ cannot ‘trail.’

·       ‘Milk’ does not ‘smile.’

·       ‘Dim with flowers’ is rather weak, for flowers are bright things.

·       ‘Tall towers’ do not ‘triumph’ so far as I know, As how I never saw one doing it! Might be an interesting sight!.’

                                     Poet use a figurative language , and this use of poetic figures poses a number of difficult and interesting problems, merely by expounding metaphors and hyperbeles by supplying the suppress as if ‘s’, is like ‘s’ etc…. poetry cannot be turn in to Togreatry respectable prose. A proper understanding of poetry can be posible only when the demand for accuracy and precision is combined with a recognotion of the iberties which are proper for a poet, and the power and value of figurative language.

                                     This power and value of figurative  language, as well as problems and difficulties of figurative language in general, can be better appreciated by a study of a few concrete examples. In the following passage in which the poet celebrates the eightieth birthday of George Meredith consider the hyperbole of the sea-harp.

“A  health a ringing  health, into  the king.

Of all our hearts today; But what proud song.

Should follow on the thought, nor do him wrong?

Unless the sea were have teach mirthful string.

And dawn the lonely listener, glad and grave.

With colours of the sea-shell and the were

In brightening eye and cheek. There is none to sing!

Drink to him, as men upon an Alpine peak

Brim one immoral cup of crimson wine,

And into it drop one pure cold cruse of snow,

Then hold is up, too rapturously to speak.

And drink- to the mountains, line on glittering line,

Surging away in to the sun-set glow.”

                                     The passage has been variously commented upon as follows:

1.    The only concrete simile in the health is the liakening of the sea to a harp- surely a little extravagan.

2.    The imagery is bad . The sea may sound like an organ but it never had the scription of a harp.

3.    One woman is if the poet has correctly compared the sea convienced in the cription the harp.

4.    A far fetched  metaphor in which the sea is pictured as a harp and each  string, besides being mirthful, is made up of the lightening of spring  nights for some unknown reason Dawn listen to the music of his incredible instrument.

5.    The first definite clue to the poem’s true character is the word ‘woven’. Since strings are spun or twisted,’woven’ must have been brought in for its higher potency in releasing vague emotion. From that point onwards the poet was obviously overwhelmed with recolled phrases and piffered epithets.

6.    Common sense suggests that if the Dawn were present the lightening of spring nights would be inevitably absent.

7.    Since Dawn does not come in to being till the end of night, the strings and the listener could not exist contemporaneously.”

                                     There is no doubt that these comments rightly stress a number of inconsistencies and incoherences in the passage. They point to at least four logical flaws in the passage. But such readings are a failure to understand the beauty, value and significance of figurative language.

                                     The comments examined above show a well-balanced literalism, for they are all objections to a poem in which the poet had been guilty of many liberties and inconsistencies in his imagine but at other times, this rationality and literalism is carried to an extreme and even legitimate poetic images are subjected to rational and literal tests and condemned accordingly. Take for example, it following poem:

“ Climb cloud, and pencil all the blie

With your miraculous stockade;

The earth will have her joy of you

And limn your beauty till it fade.

Puzzle the cattle at the gras.

And paint your pleasure on their flanks;

Shoot, as the ripe cornfield you pass,

A shudder down those golden ranks

On wall and Windows slant your hand

And sidle up the golden stair;

Cherish each flower in all the land

With soft encroachments of cool air,

Lay your long fingers on the sea

And shake your shadow at the sun,

Darkly reminding him that he

Relieve you when your work  is done,

Rally your wizardries, and wake

A noonday panic cold and rude,

Till ‘neath the ferns the drowsy snake

Is conscious of his solitude.

Then as your sorcery declines

Elaborate your pomp the more,

S shall your gorgeous new designs

Crown your beneficence before.

Your silver hinges now revolve.

Your snowy citadels unfold,

And, lest their pride too soon dissolve,

Buckle them with a belt of gold,

O sprawling domes. O tottering towers,

O frail steel tissues of the sun-

What ! have ye numbered all your hours

And is your empire all fordone?”

                                              Presumably could oblige by climbing pentiling etc. The whole ‘poem’ is a choice example of ugliness of  Domantic animism. If the mind had changed would the poet have got angry? Puzzle the cattle did anyone ever see cattle puzzled by a cloud. This must have been written in study by one who might have done better by the country to learn that clouds are blown by the wind, and do not climb and puzzle cattle and school shudders, lay long fingers and perform similar human actions at command of prigs.

Conclusion:

                                              Probably expected some different feeling to be expressed. Who also quarrels with the opening metaphor seems to miss the descriptive sense of the poem for some other reason. In view of the effect of ‘ miraculous stockade’ no less than of ‘limn’,puzzle’,’paint’,’shoot’ and ‘sidle’ upon other readers, one is tempted  to suspedt some incapacity of visual memory. Or perhaps he was one of those who supposed that a cloud rather than its shadow was being described.’pencil’ ,if we take it to mean ‘ produce  the effects of penciling’ hardly mixes  the metaphor in any serious fashion. Its suggestion both of the hard, clear  outline of the cloud’s edge and of the shadowy variations in the lighting of its inner recesses, is not in the least cancelled by climb’ or by the sky-scraper hoist of  ‘miraculous to meet the many objections to the sounds in these words with the remark that they reflect the astonishment that a realization of the height of some cclouds does evoke ? ‘Miraculous stockade’ seems, at least, to have clear advantages over ‘ the tremendous triumph of tall towers’ in point of economy  and  vividness. ‘puzzlw’ has accuracy also on its side against these cavilers. Anyone who watches the restless shift of cattle as the shadow suddenly darkness their world for them will endorse the poet’s observation. But if the cows never noticed any change of light the word would still be justified through its evocative effect upon men. Similarly with ‘paint’ and ‘shoot’ ; they work as a rapid and fresh notation of not very unfamiliar effects, and there is no reason to suppose that those readers for whom they are successful are in any awy damaging or relawing their sensibility.

                                               With this we come back to the point at which we left poem IX. We can sum up this discussion of some instances of  figurative language as follows: All respectable poetry invites close reading. It encourages attention to its literal  sense up to the point, to be detected by the reader’s discretion, at which liberty can serve the aim of the poem better than fidelity to fact or strict coherence among fictions. It asks the reader to remember that its aims are varied and not always what he unreflectingly expects. He has to refrain from applying his own external standards. The chemist must not require that the poet write like a chemist, nor the moralist, nor the man of affairs, nor the logician, nor the professor,  that he write as they would.’The whole trouble of literalism is that the reader forgets that the aim of the poem comes first, and is the sole justification of its means.  We may quarrel, frequently we must, with the aim of the poem, but we have first to ascertain what it is. we cannot legitimately judge its means by external standards. Which may have no do, or, if we like, in becoming what in the end it has become.