Reserve Text: from William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral. Norfolk, Conn: New Directions, 1960 (first published 1930)

Marvell's Garden
The Ideal Simplicity Approached by Resolving Contradictions

THE chief point of the poem is to contrast and reconcile conscious and unconscious states, intuitive and intellectual modes of apprehension; and yet that distinction is never made, perhaps could not have been made; his thought is implied by his metaphors. There is something very Far-Eastern about this; I was set to work on the poem by Dr. Richards' recent discussion of a philosophical argument in Mencius. The Oxford edition notes bring out a crucial double meaning (so that this at least is not my own fancy) in the most analytical statement of the poem, about the Mind--

Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

'Either "reducing the whole material world to nothing material, i.e. to a green thought," or " considering the material world as of no value compared to a green thought "' ; either contemplating everything or shutting everything out. This combines the idea of the conscious mind, including everything because understanding it, and that of the unconscious animal nature, including everything because in harmony with it. Evidently the object of such a fundamental contradiction (seen in the etymology: turning all ad nihil, to nothing, and to a thought) is to deny its reality; the point is not that these two are essentially different but that they must cease to be different so far as either is to be known. So far as he has achieved his state of ecstasy he combines them, he is ' neither conscious nor not conscious,' like the seventh

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Buddhist state of enlightenment. This gives its point, I think, to the other ambiguity, clear from the context, as to whether the all considered was made in the mind of the author or the Creator; to so peculiarly ` creative' a knower there is little difference between the two. Here as usual with `profound ' remarks the strength of the thing is to combine unusually intellectual with unusually primitive ideas; thought about the conditions of knowledge with a magical idea that the adept controls the external world by thought.

The vehemence of the couplet, and this hint of physical power in thought itself (in the same way as the next line gives it colour), may hint at an idea that one would like to feel was present, as otherwise it is the only main idea about Nature that the poem leaves out; that of the Hymn to David and The Ancient Mariner, the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it. This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong , one would think, among the moun tain climbers an often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David, though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line

Praise above all, for praise prevails.

David is a case of Orpheus-like behaviour because his music. iestiained the madness of Saul.

His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
And sense and soul detained;

By divining-intuiting-the harmony behind the universe

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lie ` makes it divine,' rather as to discover a law of nature is to ` give nature laws,' and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces of nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.

Strong the gier eagle on his sail

Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges, as he goes.

But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer,
And far beneath the tide.

The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words arc packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world. The Mariner makes a more conscious and direct use of the theine, but in some degree runs away from it at the end. The reason it was a magical crime for a sailor to kill the albatross is that it both occurs among terrible scenes of Nature and symbolises man's power to extract life from them, so ought doubly to be delighted in. So long as the Mariner is horrified by the creatures of the calm he is their slave ; he is set fret to act, in the supreme verses of the poem, as soon as he delights in them. The final moral is

He prayeth best, that loveth best
All things both great and small.

But that copybook maxim is fine only if you can hold

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it firmly together with such verses as this, which Coleridge later omitted

The very deeps did rot; oh Christ
That such a thing could be;

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

And it was these creatures, as he insisted in the margin by giving the same name to both, that the Mariner blessed unaware when he discovered their beauty. This is what Coleridge meant by alternately saying that the poem has too much of the moral and too little; knowing what the conventional phrases of modern Christianity ought to mean he thought lie could shift to a conventional moral that needs to be based upon the real one.

Byron's nature-poetry gives more obvious examples of the theine ; he likes to compare a storm on the Jura or what not to a woman whom, we are to feel, only Byron could dominate. Poe was startled and liberated by it into a symbol of his own achievement; the sailor in The Maelstrom is so horrified as to be frozen, through a trick of neurosis, into idle curiosity, and this becomes a scientific interest in the portent which shows him the way to escape from it.

Nature when terrible is no theme of Marvell's, and he .gets this note of triumph rather from using nature when peaceful to control the world of man.

How safe, methinks, and strong, behind
'These Trees have I cncamp'd my Mind;
Where Beauty, aiming at the Heart,
Bends in sonic Tree its useless Dart.
And where the World no certain Shot
Can make, or ine it toucheth not.

But I on it securely play,

And gaul its Horsemen all the Day.

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The masculine energy of the last couplet is balanced immediately by an acceptance of Nature more masochist than passive, in which he becomes Christ with both the nails and the thorns. (Appleton House, lxxvi.)

Bind the ye Woodbines in your'rwines,
Curle me about ye gadding Vines,
And Oh so close your Circles lace,
That I may never leave this Place
But, lest your Fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your Silken Bondage break,
Do you, O Brambles, chain me too,
And courteous Briars nail me through.

He does not deify himself more actively, and in any case the theme of the Garden is a repose.

How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, or Oke, or Bayes ;
And their uncessant Labours see
Crown'd from some single Herb or Tree.
Whose short and narrow verged Shade
Does prudently their Toyles upbraid;
While all Flow'rs and all Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.

This first verse comes nearest to stating what seems the essential distinction, with that between powers inherent and powers worked out in practice, being a general and feeling one could be; in this ideal case, so the wit of the thing claims, the power to have been a general is already satisfied in the garden. ` Unemployment' is too painful and normal even in the fullest life for such a theme to be trivial. But self-knowledge is possible in such a state so far as the unruly impulses are digested, ordered, made transparent, not by their being known, at the time, as unruly. Consciousness no longer makes an important

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distinction; the impulses, since they must be balanced already, neither need it to put them right nor are put wrong by the way it forces across their boundaries. They let themselves be known because they are not altered by being known, because their principle of indeterminacy no longer acts. This idea is important for all the versions of pastoral, for the pastoral figure is always ready to be the critic; he not only includes everything but may in some unexpected way know it.

Another range of his knowledge might be mentioned here. I am not sure what arrangement of flower-beds is described in the last verse, but it seems clear that the sun goes through the ` zodiac' of flowers in one day, and that the bees too, in going from one bed to another, reminding us of the labours of the first verse, pass all summer in a day. They compute their time as well as we in that though their lives are shorter they too contract all experience into it, and this makes the poet watch over large periods of time as well as space. So far he becomes Nature, he becomes permanent. It is a graceful finale to the all-in-one theme, but not, I think, very important; the crisis of the poem is in the middle.

Once you accept the Oxford edition's note you may as well apply it to the whole verse.

Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;

The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Dots streight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other Seas,
Annihilating . . .

From Pleasure less. Either `from the lessening of pleasure = we are quiet in the country, but our dullness

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gives a sober and self-knowing happiness, more intellectual than that of the over-stimulated pleasures of the town ' or ` made less by this pleasure'-'The pleasures of the country give a repose and intellectual release which make me less intellectual, make my mind less worrying and introspective.' This is the same puzzle as to the consciousness of the thought; the ambiguity gives two meanings to pleasure, corresponding to his Puritan ambivalence about it, and to the opposition between pleasure and happiness. Happiness, again, names a conscious state, and yet involves the idea of things falling right, happening so, no being ordered by an anxiety of the conscious reason. (So that as a rule it is a weak word; it is by seeming to look at it hard and bring out its implications that the verse here makes it act as a strong one.)

The same doubt gives all their grandeur to the next lines. The sea if calm reflects everything near it; the mind as knower is a conscious mirror. Somewhere in the sea are sea-lions and -horses and everything else, though they are different from land ones; the unconsciousness is unplumbed and pathless, and there is no instinct so strange among the beasts that it lacks its fantastic echo in the mind. In the first version thoughts are shadows, in the second (like the green thought) they are as solid as what they image; and yet they still correspond to something in the outer world, so that the

poet's intuition is comparable to pure knowledge. This metaphor may reflect back so that withdraws means the tide going down; the mind is less now, but will return, and it is now that one can see the rock-pools. On the Freudian view of an Ocean, withdraws would make this repose in Nature a return to the womb; anyway it may mean either `withdraws into self-contemplation or

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` withdraws altogether, into its mysterious processes of digestion.' Streight may mean ` packed together,' in the microcosm, or ` at once'; the beasts see their reflection perhaps the root idea of the metaphor) as soon as ey look for it; the calm of Nature gives the poet an immediate self-knowledge. But we have already had two entrancingly witty verses about the sublimation of sexual desire into a taste for Nature (I should not say that this theme was the main emotional drive behind the poem, but it takes up a large part of its overt thought), and the kinds look for their resemblance, in practice, out of a desire for creation; in the mind, at this fertile time for the poet, they can find it 'at once,' being `packed together.' The transition from the beast and its reflection to the two pairing beasts implies a transition from the correspondences of thought with fact to those of thought with thought, to find which is to be creative; there is necessarily here a suggestion of rising from one 'level' of thought to another; and in the next couplet not only does the mind transcend the world it mirrors, but a sea, to which it is parallel, transcends both land and sea too, which implies self-consciousness and all the antinomies of philosophy. Whether or not you give transcendent the technical sense ` predicable of all categories' makes no great difference; in including everything in itself the mind includes as a detail itselfand all its inclusions. And it is true that the sea reflects the other worlds of the stars; Donne's metaphor of the globe is in the background. Yet even here the double meaning is not lost; all land-beasts have their sea-beasts, but the sea also has the kraken ; in the depths as well as
the transcendence of the mind are things stranger

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Miss M. C. Bradbrook has pointed out to me that the next verse, while less triumphant, gives the process a more firmly religious interpretation.

Here at the Fountains sliding foot,
Or by some Fruit-trees mossy root,
Casting the Bodies Vest aside,

My Soul into the boughs does glide;
There like a Bird it sits, and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver Wings;
And, till prepar'd for longer flight,
Waves in its Plumes the various Light.

The bird is the dove of the Holy Spirit and carries a suggestion of the rainbow of the covenant. By becoming inherent in everything he becomes a soul not pantheist but clearly above and apart from the world even while still living in it. Yet the paradoxes are still firmly maintained here, and the soul is as solid as the green thought. The next verse returns naturally and still with exultation to the jokes in favour of solitude against women.

Green takes on great weight here, as Miss Sackville West pointed out, because it has been a pet word of Marvell's before. To list the uses before the satires may seem an affectation of pedantry, but shows how often the word was used; and they are pleasant things to look up. -In the Oxford text: pages 12,1. 21; 117,1. 18; 25,1. I I ; 27, 1. 4 ; 38J. 3 ; 45, 1. 3 ; 46, 1. 25; 48, 1. 18; 49, 1. 48; 70, 1. 376; 71, 1. 390; 74, 1. 510; 1122, 1. 2. Less rich uses : 15, 1. 18 ; 2 x, 1. 44; 30,1. 55; 42, 1. 14; 69, 1. 339; 74, 11. 484, 496; 78, 1. 628; 85, 1. 82; 89, 1. 94; 108, 1. x96. It is connected here with grass, buds, children, an as yet virginal prospect of sexuality, and the peasant stock from which the great families emerge. The

'unfathomable' grass makes the soil fertile and shows it to be so; it is the humble, permanent, undeveloped nature which sustains everything, and to which everything must return. No doubt D. H. Lawrence was right when he spoke up for Leaves of Grass against Whitman and said they felt themselves to be very aristocratic, but that too is eminently a pastoral fancy. Children are connected with this both as buds, and because of their contact with Nature (as in Wordsworth), and unique fitness for Heaven (as in the Gospels).

The tawny mowers enter next.
Who seem like Israelites to be,
Walking on foot through a green sea.

connects greenness with oceans and gives it a magical security;

And in the greenness of the grass
Did see my hopes as in a glass

connects greenness with mirrors and the partial knowledge of the inind. The complex of ideas he concentrates into this passage, in fact, had been worked out already, and in a context that shows how firmly these ideas about Nature were connected with direct pastoral. The poem indeed comes immcdiately after a pastoral series about the mower of grass.

I am the Mower Damon, known
Through all the Meadows I have mown;
On me the Mom her dew distills
Before her darling Daffodils.

In these meadows he feels he has left his mark on a great territory, if not on everything, and as a typical figure he has mown all the meadows of the world; in either case

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Nature gives him regal and tragical honours, and I suppose he is not only the ruler but the executioner of the daffodils-the Clown as Death.

Only for him no Cure is found,
Whom Juliana's Eyes do wound.
'Tis death alone that this must do
For Death thou art a Mower too.

He provides indeed more conscious and comic mixtures of heroic and pastoral

every Mower's wholesome heat
Smelled like an Alexander's sweat.

It is his grand attack on gardens which introduces both the connection through wit between the love of woman and of nature, which is handled so firmly in the Garden

No white nor red was ever seen
So am'rous as this lovely green

-as if the belief that the fruitful attitude to Nature is the passive one

His (the gardener's) green Seraglio has its Eunuchs too ;
Lest any Tyrant him outdo.

And in the Cherry lie dues Nature vex,
To procreate without a Sex.

'Tis all enforced; the Fountain and the Grot ;
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot ;
Where willing Nature does to all dispence

A wild and fragrant Innocence

And Fauns and Faryes do the Meadows till,
More by their presence than their skill.

It is Marvell himself who tills the Garden by these magical and contemplative powers.

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Grass indeed comes to be taken for granted as the symbol of pastoral humility

Unhappy Birds! what does it boot
To build below the Grasses' Root;
When Lowness is unsafe as Hight,
And Chance o'crtakes what scapeth Spight

it is a humility of Nature from which she is still higher than man, so that the grasshoppers preach to him from their pinnacles

And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable Grass,
Where men like Grashoppers appear,
But Grashoppers arc Gyants there;
They, in there squcking Laugh, contemn
Us as we walk more low than them
And, from the Precipices tall

Of the green spire's, to us do call.

It seems also to be an obscure merit of grass that it produces ` hay,' which was the name of a country dance, so that the humility is gaiety.

With this the golden fleece I shear
Of all these Closes ev'ry Year,

And though in Wool more poor than they,
Yet i am richer far in Hay.

To nineteenth-century taste the only really poetical verse of the poem is the central fifth of the nine ; I have been discussing the sixth, whose dramatic position is an illustration of its very penetrating theory. The first four are a crescendo of wit, on the themes ' success or failure is not important, only the repose that follows the exercise of one's powers ' and ' women, I am pleased to say, are no longer interesting to me, because nature is more

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beautiful.' One effect of the wit is to admit, and so make charming, the impertinence of the second of these, which indeed the first puts in its place; it is only for a time, and after effort among human beings, that he can enjoy solitude. The value of these moments made it fitting to pretend they were eternal; and yet the lightness of his expression of their sense of power is more intelligent, and so more convincing, than Wordsworth's solemnity on the same theme, because it does not forget the opposing forces.

When we have run our Passions hear,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The Gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a Tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,

Only that she might Laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed.

The energy and delight of the conceit has been sharpened or keyed up here till it seems to burst and transform itself ; it solves in the next verse into the style of Keats. So his observation of the garden might mount to an ecstasy which disregarded it; he seems in this next verse to imitate the process he has described, to enjoy in a receptive state the exhilaration which an exercise of wit has achieved. But striking as the change of style is, it is unfair to empty the verse of thought and treat it as random description; what happens is chat he steps back from overt classical conceits to a rich and intuitive
use of Christian imagery. When people treat it as the one good ` bit ' of the poem, one does not know whether they have recognised that the Alpha and Omega of the verse are the Apple and the Fall.

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What wondrous Life in this I lead!
Ripe Apples drop about my head;
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine;
The Nectaren, and curious Peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on Melons, as I piss,
Insnar'd with Flow 'rs, I fall on Grass.

Melon, again, is the Greek for apple; `all flesh is grass,' and its own .flowers here are the snakes in it that stopped Eurydice. Mere grapes are at once the primitive and the innocent wine; the nectar of Eden, and yet the blood of sacrifice. Curious could mean ` rich and strange ' (nature), ` improved by care' (art) or ` inquisitive' (feeling towards me, since nature is a mirror, as I do towards her). All these eatable beauties give themselves so as to lose themselves, like a lover, with a forceful generosity; like a lover they ensnare him. It is the triumph of the attempt to impose a sexual interest upon nature; there need be no more Puritanism in this use of sacrificial ideas than is already inherent in the praise of solitude; and it is because his repose in the orchard hints at such a variety of emotions that he is
contemplating all that's made. Sensibility here repeats what wit said in the verse before; he tosses into the fantastic treasure-chest of the poem's thought all the pathos and dignity that Milton was to feel in his more celebrated Garden; and it is while this is going on, we are told in the next verse, that the mind performs its ambiguous and memorable withdrawal. For each of the three central verses he gives a twist to the screw of the microscope and is living in another world.

I must go back to the annihilating lines, whose method is less uncommon. Similar ideas and tricks of language

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are used in Donne's Exstasie, where various puns impose on us the idea that an adequate success in love is a kind of knowledge which transcends the barriers of the ordinary kind. There is again some doubt how far the author knew what he was doing.

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can, . . .
So must pure louers' soules descend. .

To the modern reader this is a pun on the senses ` subtle material essence ' (e.g. ` spirits of salt') and ` non-material unit of life ' ; it seems used with as much 'wit' as the other puns, to trick us into feeling that soul and body may be interfused. The Oxford edition notes make clear that to Donne this was neither a pun nor a sophistry; ` The spirits ... are the thin and active part of the blood, and are of a kind of middle nature, between soul and body' (Sermons) ; one view of them was that there was a hierarchy of more and more spiritual ones.

It is curious how the change in the word leaves the poetry unaffected; by Swift's time the two senses were an absurd accident from which one could get ironies against materialism. No doubt in some important senses Donne was right, but however supported by Cambridge Platonism it is a genuine primitive use of the word. Whereas he would certainly have known there was a pun on ` sense ' even if he took it for granted. ` Our bodies why do we forbeare -, ' . . .

We owe them thankes, because they thus,
Did us, to us, at first convey,

Yielded their forces, sense, to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.

The antithesis for allay makes it mean ` alloy,' a less

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valuable substance put into their gold to strengthen it for practical use; allay could mean' keeping the spiritual pleasure from being too great, more than our strength could bear,' which goes with `alloy,' then, behind that, ` relief to the pain of desire,' which makes the flesh less unimportant. This is reinforced by the special meaning of sense (`the wanton stings and motions of the s'). That rich word confuses the pleasure and the knowledge given by the senses (Donne wants to imply they are mutually dependent) and suggests that soul and body are in a healthy intuitive relation--' plenty of sense.' The use of sense for sensibleness became stronger later in the century, but it is already clearly an element in the word-for example in saying ` there is no sense' in a statement when it has meaning but is not sensible. 'We could not know each other at all without sensations, therefore cannot know each other fully without sensuality, nor would it be sensible to try to do so.'

The poem uses the word again later, and there the sexual meaning is clear.

So must pure louers soules descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then. . . .

Affections are ` loves,' ` weaknesses,' and in the philosophical sense ` physical effects.' Apprehend means 'know' and by derivation ` clutch,' and reach would go with either, which gives sense a sort of bridge between its meanings.

It is possible that Donne means to throw in a pun on ` know,' as in' Adam knew his wife.'

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Wee then, who are this new sou1c, know,
Of what we are compos'd, and made,
For, the Atomies of which we grow,

Are soules, which no change can invadc.

Know is isolated by the comma (`know each other'), and of may then take a step towards ` by means of.' Then, with Donne's usual leap in pretending to give a reason, he makes each soul entirely immaterial; ` the intellectual knowledge has, for us, all the advantages of the physical one, even granted that they are distinguishable.' If he did this it would have to be done consciously
and wilfully.

One should not of course take such poetry as only a clever game. This truth-seeking idea seems fundamental to the European convention of love-poetry; love is always idealised as a source of knowledge not only of the other party but of oneself and of the world.

This Exstasie doth unperplex because it makes the disparate impulses of the human creature not merely open to the prying of the mind but prepared for its intrusion. It is along these lines, I think, that D. H. Lawrence's hatred of the whole conception might be answered, or rather that he answered it himself. On the other hand, I think Donne felt quite casual about these particular tricks; the juggle with sense has the same graceful impudence as his frankly absurd arguments. M. Legouis may be right in saying that he set out merely to dramatise the process of seduction; it is only clear that he found the argument fascinating and believed that it had some truth in some cases. He did not think it so false as to depend on his puns, even where he recognised them; he may well have understood what the

puns themselves depend upon. They insist on relics of primitive thought in civilised language, and thereby force the language to break down its later distinctions and return to ideas natural to the human mind. Dr. Richards' account of romantic nature poetry in Coleridge on Imagination is a very good example; the personalised Nature is treated both as external to man and as created by an instinct of the mind, and by tricks of language these are made to seem the same. But if they were simply called the same we would not so easily be satisfied by the tricks. What we feel is that though the arc essentially unlike they are practically unlike in different degrees at different times; a supreme condition can therefore be imagined, though not attained, in which they are essentially like. (To put it like this is no doubt to evade a philosophic issue.) A hint of the supreme condition is thus found in the actual one (this makes the actual one include everything in itself), but this apparently exalted claim is essentially joined to humility; it is effective only through the admission that it is only a hint. Something of the tone of pastoral is therefore inherent in the claim; the fault of the Wordsworthian
method seems to be that it does not show this.

I shall add here a pun from As You Like It, which shows how the same issue may be raised by a casual joke. The pun in its context makes a contradiction, and this is felt to show an intuitive grasp of some of the puzzles of the context. Fortunately there rs no doubt that a pun is meant because the text insists upon it; the N.E.D. shows that the modern spellings, though used loosely, already made the distinction. Apart from facsimiles no edition that i have seen has yet printed the text. The point of the two spellings is to show that the

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senses are at work; it is none the less fair to take the senses the other way round. (This is from the Folio; there is no Quarto.)

CLOWN.. . . truly, I would the Gods hadde made thee poericaf.
AUDREY. I do not know what Poetical is: is it honest in word
and deed: is it a true thutg

CLOWN. No crulic : for the truest poctric is the most faining,
and Louers are given to Poctric : and what they sweare in Poetrie,
may be said as Louers, they do feigne.

AUDREY. Do you wish then that the Gods had made me
Poetical t

CLOWN. I do truly: for thou swear'st to me thou arc honest
Now if thou wert a Poet, I might hauc some hope thou didst
feigne.

` A material fool" is the pleased judgment of the listening Jaques ; he feels that there is a complete copy of the human world among fools, as of beasts among sea-beasts. This indeed is one of the assumptions of pastoral, that you can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people. The jokes are mainly carried on by puns on ` honest '--chastity in women, truth in speech, simplicity in clowns, and the hearty sense ` generous because free from hypocrisy'; my point is the pun on ` fain ' (desiring) and ` feign ' (pretend; in lovers pretend honest desire). The doubt of the poet's honesty is referred to the broader doubt of his self-knowledge, just as honest itself shifts from ` truth-telling ' to ` sincere in his own mind.' The pun itself is common, though I think it is only here, where it enriches the thought so much, that Shakespeare spelt it out for the reader.

EGEUS. Thou hast by moonelight at her window sang
With faining voice, verses of faining love,

And stolne the impression of her fantasie.

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He feigns true love because he would fain possess her; the word love itself may be used of a desire not permanent or generous; Egeus would call that a feigning love even if Nature deceives both of them, and the man thinks himself sincere. The easy but capacious mind of Spenser takes this for granted (F.Q., V. xii. 36; Hymn to Love, 20); nobody pretends without purpose, so it is a useful trick of language. Touchstone's use of it about poetry is more searching.

The root of the joke is that a physical desire drives the human creature to a spiritual one. The best poetry is the most genuuiely passionate (fain) but there may be two pretences (feign), that the desire felt for this woman is spiritual and that any woman is the object of so spiritual a desire. 'To write poetry is not the quickest way to satisfy desire; there must be some other impulse behind the convention of love-poetry; something feigned in the choice of topic; some other thing of which they arefain.' As for the distinction between their roles as poets and lovers, both senses may apply to them in both, also to swearing, since ` go to hell ' is spontaneous, not meant, not meant to deceive, and a sort of feigning in whichyou are fain of what you feign. For that matter they are wooing the reader even if they are not trying to seduce a mistress; the process at its simplest involves desire
and detachment, nature and sophistication; levels mysteriously inter-related which a sane man separates only for a joke. Touchstone's pretence of acidity allows of a real plea for his own case because it implies that the most refined desires are inherent in the plainest, and would be false if they weren't; be shows a staircase by giving the two lowest steps, lust and cheating. In the Marvell and Donne examples it is the top of a staircase

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that is in question, but the same method is used to define it. Two ideas are united which in normal use are contradictory, and our machinery of interpretation so acts that we feel there is a series of senses in which they could be more and more truly combined. This is clearest in what Mr. James Smith defined as metaphysical conceits, those that genuinely sum up a metaphysical problem. The top and next steps in the Aristotelian staircase about form and matter, for example, would be pure form and the material, already form, which it informs. Donne is using this when he calls each lover's soul the body of the other's; the fact that we do not believe that the lovers are in this condition does not keep us from a feeling of belief in the conceit, because we believe in the staircase which it defines; the lovers appear as conscious of the staircase and higher up on it than most. Nor for that matter do we believe that the clown is at the bottom of his staircase; his understanding of it acts as a proof that he isn't.

A good case of a poem with some doubt about the staircase it requires is provided by Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle; it depends on the same ideas as Donne's First Anniversary, but gets very different feelings out of them. The entire flatness of the use of the convention makes it seem first an engagingly simpleminded piece of' idealism ' and then, since the union of the birds is likely after all to be of a simple kind, an expression of cultivated and good-humoured sensuality; this does not by any means destroy the pathetic dignity of the close. There is a suggestion that the author finds the convention fascinating but absurd, which he shows mainly by his sound-effects. This seems to me intentional, very delightful, and not a thing that Chapman (who has been suggested

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As the author) could possibly have done. It is clear here that once you cease to impose a staircase the thing shifts from heroic to mock-pastoral. Some such idea needs to be added to Mr. James Smith's account (perhaps he would call it obvious) because otherwise there seems no way of putting in a judgment of value; on his account a metaphysical conceit is essentially a vivid statement of a puzzle, and in practice it is more.

I should say that this process is at work in much poetry that does not seem ambiguous at all, and shall pursue the question into Homer as the fountainhead of simplicity. This may also throw some light on the obscure connection between heroic and pastoral; the fact seems to be that both rely on a ` complex in simple' formula.

One idea essential to a primitive epic style is that the good is not separable (anyway at first level judgments) from a life of straightforward worldly success in which you keep certain rules; the plain satisfactions are good in themselves and make great the men who enjoy them. From this comes the ` sense of glory' and of controlling nature by delight in it. It is absurd to call this a ` premoralistic' view, since the rules may demand great sacrifices and it is shameful not to keep them; there is merely a naive view of the nature of good. (Both a limitation of the things that are good and a partial failure to separate the idea of good from the idea of those things.) The naive view is so often more true than the sophisticated ones that this comes in later ages to take on an air of massive grandeur; it gives a feeling of freedom from humbug which is undoubtedly noble, and the Homeric heroes support this by the far from savage trait of questioning the beliefs they still die for. Stock epithets about `the good wine or ` the well-built

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gates' imply 'so one always rightly feels'; such a thing essentially has virtue in it, is a piece of virtue; a later reader feels this to be symbolic, a process of packing all the sorts of good into a simple one. Material things are taken as part of a moral admiration, and to a later reader (with less pride, for example, in the fact that his culture uses iron) this seems an inspiriting moral paradox like those of pastoral-` to one who knows how to live the ideal is easily reached.' It is assumed that Ajax is still enormously grand when he cooks his dinner; the later reader feels he must really be very grand not to lose his dignity,- whereas at the time it was a thing of some splendour to have so much dinner to cook or such implements to do it with. This comes to have the same effect as a pretence of pastoral humility in the author. Also the heroic individual has an enormous effect on everything in sight, gods and men, and yet finds everything of manageable dimensions; the later reader feels that this belongs to a village society rather than a large-town one. Certainly the heroes are not grand merely
because they are brave; they can run away like other people, and say so more frankly. Indeed a great part of their dignity comes from the naive freshness with which they can jump from one level of argument to another, and this leaves room for the effects I am considering.

Thus the puzzles become more obvious later, but this is not to say they were not used at the start. The heroes are given a directly moral grandeur by the perpetual clashes between free-will and necessity, symbolised by their relations with the gods, out of which they construct their speeches; they fight on when certain of failure and kill each other with the apology that they too are

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fated, and such fore-knowledge as they have makes them half divine. It is very curious that what is supposed to be another branch of the same race, when it arrived in India, had none of this interest in the problems of free-will; the dignity of the heroes in the Mahabarata is based on puzzles about the One and the Many. Nor did it develop later; the Buddha was once actually faced with the problem of freewill raised so starkly by his system, and brushed it aside on grounds of morality; I understand that all Buddhist theologians have ignored the issue. Whereas all new ideas in Europe, Christianity and the sciences in turn, have been taken as new problems about necessity and free-will. Thus the reason why the Homeric but where one expects ` and ' has so much poetic force is that it implies some argument, such as all the characters are happy with, and the argument would lead you to other levels of thought. (This acts as a feeling that the two things put together are vividly different in themselves.) ` He spoke, and held still his hand upon the silvery hilt, and thrust back the great sword into the scabbard, nor did he disobey the order of Minerva ; but she had gone to Olympus, to the mansions of aegis-bearing Jove, amongst the other deities.' But makes her already indifferent; the puzzle about how far men are free and how far the gods are only forces in their minds is thrust upon your attention. Also there is a strong feeling in the epic that the heroes are too great to kill each other for detested Helen and the unnecessary recovery of corpses (` Nor do I fear so much about the dead body of Patroclus, which will quickly satiate the dogs and birds of the Trojans, as much as I fear for my own head, lest it suffer anything, and for thine ') and yet that only this would display their

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greatness; a rich contradiction on which to build a hierarchy of value. I began by saying that such writing was based on a naive idea of the nature of good, but in fact other ideas of good are implicit in it; Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida is often taken as a sort of parody of the Iliad, but there is little in it that Homer did not imply. What becomes strange to a more sophisticated society is the order in which the ideas can be built up; in such a society everybody has been told soine refined ideas about good (or what not) and wants them put in at once; to take a simple thing and imply a hierarchy in it can then only be done in a strange world like that of Milton's Adam or a convention like that of pastoral. To say this is to echo what many of Homer's critics, including Milton himself, have said about the peculiar advantage he got from his date, and I am only trying to show that it fits in with my theory.

I have not been able to say what machinery erects a staircase on a contradiction, but then the only essential for the poet is to give die reader a chance to build an interesting one; there are continual opportunities in the most normal uses of language. Any statement of identity between terms already defined (`God is love ') is a contradiction because you already know they are not identical; you have to ignore senses that would be unimportant (' the first cause was a creative impulse ') and there are likely to be degrees in which the two may be called identical which lead to different important senses. That the process is not simple is obvious when you turn them round; `love is God' would be quite different. `Might is Right' and ` Right is Might' were felt to be clear and opposite statements of ethical theory, and it is not clear how this was possible. It is

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no good to read them as 'if a man has might, then he has right,' etc. ; a supporter of this opinion would say that is man has no might he has no right, and the two sentences are still identical. The same applies to the similar interpretations `Might is a member of the class Right,' etc. ; it would be the only member of its class. I think these are at work; the analogy of the second word to an adjective in this version shows how the first is felt to be the more solid and unchangeable. But the second word is in fact belittled rather than made inclusive. Yet you cannot read them simply as substitutions; `always say might instead of night; there is no reason for not making a full use of power' and `never calculate chances; to be in the right is the only thing to be considered.' These are present and seem to control the senses from the back, but the subdued word is still there and is not negated. Right in the first is some sort of justification and might in the second some sort of hope or claim. ' A great and crowded nation has the right to expand'; ' because we have right on our side we are certain to win.' A vague sense that ' is ' has other uses than the expression of identity makes us ready to find meanings in such sentences; this may well have been the historical reason why it was too convenient to be simplified. But the principle of language that makes the two different is simply a traffic rule; the two words are felt to cover some of the same ground and in some cases of conflict the first has the right of way.

It might I think also be argued that any contradiction implies a regress, though not one definite one. To say that it is always an example of the supreme process of seeing the Many as One is to ignore the differences in the feelings aroused by different examples; but there

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may always be a less ambitious process at work that uses similar machinery. The pretence that two words are identical acts as a hint that they have been fitted into some system, in which each key word is dependent on the others, like the parts of an organism; admittedly the words are not the same but they have been ` unified.' One characteristic of an organism is that you can only change it (as a whole and without killing it) by a process like edging up a chimney in rock-climbing; one element must be changed to the small extent that the elasticity of the system allows and then the others must be changed to fit it. So to find your way into the interpretation seems essenti,lly a process of shifting the words again and again. This at least describes the sense of richness (readiness for argument not pursued) in such language and the fact that one ambiguity, even though obtained in several parallel words, is not enough for it.

That this talk about a hierarchy of ` levels ' is vague I can cheerfully admit ;the idea is generally vague in the authors who use it, and none the less powerful for being left in a suggestive form. But the three central verses of the Marvell poem are at least a definite example; in the course of suggesting various interlocking hierarchies (knowing that you know that you know, reconciling the remaining unconscious with the increasing consciousness, uniting in various degrees perception and creation, .the one and the many), it does in fact rise through a hierarchy of three sharply contrasted styles and with them give a more and more inclusive account of the mind's relation to Nature. Only a metaphysical poet with so perfect a sense of form and so complete a control over the tricks of the style, at the end of its development, could actually dramatise these hints as he gave them.