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Regi Siriw
The Pure W.
4 neuvilly re
a 77 externa Off Jie af importfamí d
 

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Regi Siriw
THE PURE WATE
International Centre for Eth

\SO l
ardena
R OF POETRY
nic Studies, Colombo

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International Centre for El 2 Kynsey Terrace, Colombo
Copyright O 1999 by International Centre for Ethn
ISBN 955-580-036-7
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd. No.48 B, Bloemendhal Roac Colombo 13.

nic Studies , Sri Lanka.
c Studies

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Prefat
This critical study has had a lo history. It began its life as a n Ludowyk, given under the same auditorium in 1988. In 1990 I rew incorporating some new ideas, o text and developing and expand published as a pamphlet in a very from my typescript; and in that Navasilu and reproduced (though errors) in Nos. 11-12 of the journ
I now return to the study, revised it. In the present ver substantially rewritten and exter strengthening, as I believe, its arg who have acknowledged the intere in the earlier versions will find re

’e
ng and rather complicated lemorial lecture for E.F.C. title at the British Council orked the text of that lecture, mitting parts of the original ing others. It was privately small edition, offset-printed form it was picked up by 1 with some unconscionable al in 1994. nearly a decade after I last sion, the es say has been lded, further clarifying and gument. I hope those readers st and stimulation they found ading this one fruitful too.

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1.
Let me begin with a memory - one years. I was sitting one morning class in English, in that small buil that was known as Sampson's lecturing that day on Wordsworth. the essential quality of Wordswo critic by the name of Ian Jack had than anybody else. "The glass seen "because it is full only of pure w sentence with evident rapture, and an immediate impact on me, and w across the lapse of over half a c across Jack's sentence since; I do or essay it occurs, but I am as si heard them yesterday. "The glass full only of pure water."
Why is that such an excellent recognised - of what Wordswort me remind you of a poem of his tit poem about an old shepherd and t world in the hope that he will mal part, the shepherd asks his son sheepfold he is building, so that its them. But the son goes away, fal has to flee abroad because of a c1 old man endures the blow with as out every day among the hills anc to build the new sheepfold that hi. are the climactic lines:
That many and many a da And never lifted up a sing

that goes back nearly sixty in Lyn Ludowyk's honours ding adjoining Reid Avenue Bungalow. Ludowyk was and he was trying to define rth's best poetry. He said a described that quality better ns empty," Ian Jack had said, ater." Ludowyk quoted that perhaps that is why it made hy it survives in my memory :entury. I have never come n't even know in what book ure of the words as if I had seems empty because it is
representation - as Ludowyk h's best poetry is like? Let led "Michael'. It's a narrative he son he sends out into the ke his way in it. Before they to lay the first stone for a hould be a covenant between ls into dissolute ways, and ime he has committed. The toical strength; he still goes l tends his sheep; he strives s flock needs, but - and here
'tis believed by all y he thither went, le Stone.

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"And never lifted up a sing over, if you read it careless fact. B ut pay attention t Wordsworth has charged th with the utmost fullness of bare austerity of language W expression of emotion in shepherd doesn't display his spite of himself, only in the of the act. This is poetry purged, poetry distilled to i the superficial eye it appear seems empty because it is f
It's a mark of Matthew in his essay on Words wor "Michael' to represent "his t of expression', and said:
There is nothing subtle
of poetic style, strictl expression of the high kind.
In the line from "Michael' character, not, in the first i we apprehend. But the stoi one with the emotional disc his creator. However, to anti be argued by some that the poet's part, an inducement to suffering. It may even b part of the process of revolutionary enthusiastint established social and polit there are crucial distinctio poems of the post-revolutio

e stone.' It's a line you can pass y, as a mere prosaic statement of ) it, and you will realise that ese seven simple, familiar words meaning. Nothing other than this ould have done. There is no overt Wordsworth's line because the feelings either; they come out, in act itself, or rather in the absence from which all excess has been ts transparent essence, So that to s not to be poetry at all. The glass ull only of pure water.
Arnold's sound critical sense that th he picked out this line from rue and most characteristic form
in it, no heightening, no study y so called, at all; yet it is est and most truly expressive
it is, of course, the feelings of a nstance, of the poet himself, that cal endurance of the shepherd is ipline, the expressive restraint, of cipate a possible objection: it may ; shepherd's endurance is, on the to acceptance of and resignation e urged that this submission was ransformation of the former the conservative supporter of the ical order of his later years. But ns to be made between different lary phase: for instance, important
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differences between "Michael' a or the Ruined Cottage' (which, w of The Excursion). In "The Ru tragedy of the lonely wife, the V and pain (her husband has gone returned), is distanced by the con and the resignation it brings:
She sleeps in the calm ear I well remember that those Those weeds, and the high By mist and silent raindrop As once I passed, into my So still an image of tranqui So calm and still, and look Amid the uneasy thoughts That what we feel of sorro From ruin and from chang That passing shows of Bei Appeared an idle dream...
Here human grief and suffering b and 'an idle dream" erased by th nature. There is no such denial ( shepherd does strive to bear his no crying out loud against it; but i the emphasis is on the incomple grief. And the poem closes, afte) that have taken place in the la people, on the unfinished sheep) a surviving memorial to human

nd the verse tale 'Margaret, ith revisions, became Book I ined Cottage', indeed, the ctim of socially created loss away to the wars and never templation of tranquil nature
h, and peace is here.
very plumes, spear-grass on that wall,
is silvered o'er, heart conveyed
lity,
ed so beautiful
which filled my mind,
ow and despair
2, and all the grief
ng leave behind,
ecome merely passing shows' e image of the tranquility of of suffering in "Michael'. The loss with fortitude; there is n the line on which I focussed, teness of the subduing of his the record of all the changes ldscape and the lives of the old - not a passing show' but ove, heartbreak and pain.

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Wordsworth's good poetry output. It's an interesting qu generation of English Roma precipitously in middle age and garrulous banality, Cole) and silence, Blake into the visions in the Prophetic B manager had arranged a dr the second generation that w Keats, blowing up like roc brilliance. But taking that s poems of one decade as all want to ask: Where do we quality of language, in the El
When I was in my last teacher who was passionate For him one of the heights of on the fallen angels, lying pr
Thickas autumnal le
In Vallombrosa.
My teacher used to declaim voice, and the sensation was came up to the university, Ig verbal music was something have indulged in. Dr. Leavis two traditions in English po of Shakespeare, Donne, M

is only a very small part of his estion why the genius of the first ntic poets should have declined so - Wordsworth into empty rhetoric ridge into opium-haunted sterility
smoky obscurity of the private ooks. Almost as if some stageamatic contrast with the fate of as to follow: Byron, Shelley and kets at the zenith of their early mall group of Wordsworth's best
of him that is worth reading, I place that mode of poetry, that nglish tradition? years in school, I was taught by a ly devoted to English literature. English poetry was Milton's lines ostrate in hell:
saves that strew the brooks
these lines in his large, booming undeniably thrilling. But when I athered that this kind of Sonorous rather disreputable for Milton to had spoken, and said there were etry. One was the great tradition Tarvell, Pope, the later Keats,
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Hopkins, Eliot. What they a Shakespearean use of English authentically English use of En element of cultural nationalism verbal density, rich metaphorical the muscular vigour of the rhyt poetry that was so complex tha apart in critical analysis; and til for it was the heyday of practic For Leavis there was also
poetry - the line of Spenser, Mil Tennyson, Swinburne. This for h melody, diffuseness and impreci were decorative rather than orgar department of the Ceylon Unive Leavisian; and I soon learnt to towards Milton and Tennyson. E of asking was: Where in these tw pure water of Wordsworth's best pole from Milton's latinised, hig other hand, it was also far r metaphorical clusters, the de syntactical complexities that W as characteristically Shakespea far worse than weeds.' That was
use of language, and you could
on unravelling its complexities. "And never lifted up a single ston it defied analysis.
I am not endorsing Leavis's ca citing it: in particular, Hopki muscle-bound rather than to speech; and his whole manner way, as remote from living En

l shared, he said, was the which was for Leavis the glish (for there was a strong in his thinking). That meant life, keen sensuous intensity, lms of speech. This was also t it lent itself to being taken hat was regarded as a virtue, ul criticism. a lesser tradition in English ton, the early Keats, Shelley, im was poetry of facile verbal sion of language, images that lic. The climate of the English rsity in my time was strongly be properly condescending But the question I didn't think vo traditions did one place the poetry? It was at the opposite hly wrought language. On the emoved from the intricate nse sensuous imagery, the 2 had been taught to think of rean. "Lilies that fester smell a model of the Shakespearean spend a lot of time and space
But what could you do with '? In its very limpid simplicity
tegorisation of English poets in ns's rhythms seem to me to be possess the natural vigour of of using language is, in its own lish as Milton's.

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It didn't occur to me to ra later in my reading life. I bel them were two remarks of T the course of the same lectu
Of some great poetr pronouncing just what it that has made all the statement which anyon
And here is the other:
Some great poets can things to avoid. They showing us what great p bare it can be.
When I read these two state them profoundly significal prepared for them by Ludo Wordsworth.
But I wasn't yet ready to a clue to a whole new way Eliot's eyes the great mast essentials - the bare bones time of my life I embarked with the rudiments of Italia believe I did begin to see wha up part of the way through power of Dante's language dic I felt for his content. I coul damnation, and the thought Souls in hell (some of whom v
? T.S. Eliot, On Poets and Po
Ibid., p. 155.

ise these questions till very much ieve what set me thinking about .S. Eliot, both of them made in e. Here is one:
y one has difficulty in
is, what infinitesimal touch, difference from a plain
e could make.’
teach others some of the teach us what to avoid by oetry can do without - how
ments of Eliot, I think I found ht because I had already been i wyk's quotation - Ian Jack on
find in these critical observations of looking at English poetry. In 2r of poetry pared down to its of poetry - was Dante. At one on reading The Divine Comedy and the help of a prose crib. I it Eliot was driving at. But I gave the Inferno because the naked n't quite make up for the aversion dn't condone the idea of eternal of Dante gloating over the lost vere his personal enemies) turned
etry, p. 154.

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my stomach. My flirtation with superseded by a love affair wi enduring, and will probably rem was then I discovered a poet who was much more congenial to my who showed, just as much as Da do without, how bare it could supreme Russian poet.
Dare I try to suggest at this is like? It isn't possible really quoting him in his own language some echo of it by offering a p play The Stone Guest, in transla between Don Carlos, a Spanis courtesan. The translation is min
DON CAR
How old are you now, La
LAUR
DON CA You are still young, and w Some five years more, or For six more years they'l With caresses and gifts; They'll entertain you nigl Nightly they'll kill each (
Eliot once remarked that Ezra P( It doesn't seem to me that Dant Chaucer has some of the same Dante, with a broader humanit Quoted from my Two Plays of

Italian, however, was soon h Russian that has proved in so till death do us part. It m Eliot had never read, who emperament than Dante, but hte, 'what great poetry could be'. This was Pushkin, the
point what Pushkin's poetry o achieve this, not without
But perhaps I can bring you assage of dialogue from his tion. This is a conversation h nobleman, and Laura, a e:
RLOS
Tell me, ura?
A:
I'm eighteen.
RLOS
ill continue young
six, perhaps. Around you
cluster, pamper you
with serenades
tly; for your sake
ther on the street.
und's hell was 'forother people'. e's, in this respect, is different. oetic virtues that Eliot found in
r
Aleksandr Pushkin,

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But time will pass, y Your eyelids, wrinkl And in your hair the And all men speak C What will you say th
L
Your talk is strange. A Come here, open the The sky, the warm a Lemon and laurel-Sc Gleams in the dark c The watchmen call, Perhaps, in Paris, in Is grey with clouds, Blows chill. What's Smile I demand it.
There is no single line or ph context, would seem imme Shakespeare's 'lilies that fes 'a bracelet of bright hair abo darkness'; or Hopkins's 'Ot Eliot's "In the juvescence of And in case you think this
Wanting, I can assure youth different. The poetic life ( Carlos's evocation of old ag
In the 1990 text of this stu wrote them, but when it w 'corrected" both Eliot and 1 no standard English worc reminded me of this fact b that's what Eliot wrote.

'our eyes begin to sink, ed, will begin to darken,
silver show its gleam, of you as old - what then? hen?
AURA
Then? Why think of that?
ire these the thoughts you're used to? 2 balcony. So calm ir motionless, the night :ented; the bright moon leep blue. With long-drawn cry "All's well." Oh, far away,
the north, the sky a cold rain falls, and wind that to us? Listen, Carlos, That's it
rase here Which, removed from its 'diately impressive poetry - like ster' or "light thickens'; or Donne's ut the bone'; or Keats's 'embalimed he mind, mind has mountains'; or the year / Came Christ the tger'. may be because my translation is at in this respect the original isn't )f the passage - whether in Don ge or Laura's affirmation of living
dy, I quoted these lines of Eliot as he as reproduced in Navas ilu, somebody me by printing juvenescence'. There's I juvescence (my computer has just y putting a wavy red line under it), hut

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in the present - is wholly absorbe into the context of situation and c or decorative flourishes or superf a strict economy of means, in its purity and its unadorned streng purpose. For me, reading Pushk discovery of certain possibilitie words, "how bare it can be'.
This quality is characteristic of much of the greatest Russian inflected language, with a flexit certain expressive possibilities language with a different structu a poem of Pushkin titled "The Up story round the legendary poison a slave to bring him resin and obediently does so, but after his infection of the tree; the prince and equips his army with them so and death among the neighbourir poem is on the human sacrifice ends of power, so that upas tre identified. The central lines of th
No che loveka che lovek Poslal k ancharu vlastn
Literally: 'man sent man to the Or, as I have rendered it in Engl.
With imperious glance or Sent another to the tree.
But cheloveka chelovek - manimmediate juxtaposition of these an inflected language, sharpl.

d into its dramatic meaning, haracter. There are no lyrical uities: the language observes
lucid simplicity, its austere gth, in serving its dramatic in has been an illuminating s of great poetry - in Eliot's
not only of Pushkin but also
poetry. Russian is a highly ble word order, and it offers that can't be paralleled in a re, such as English. There's as Tree' (Anchar) weaving a -tree and a prince who sends leaves from it. The slave return dies from the deadly steeps arrows in the poison that they might spread terror ng lands. The emphasis in the of the slave for the prince's e and prince are ultimately le poem read in Russian:
ym wZglyadom.
tree with imperious glance." sh Verse:
C an
object and man-subject: the
two words, possible only in | counterposes the natural

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equality of the two men domination and subordinati English translation can't equ Anna Akhmatova was t heir of Pushkin in the twen follow are translated from h poem she composed over prison, and when she waite
The word is exact, because her mind, but dared not wr - her own and that of othe

against the power relations of on with a brevity and force that al.
he Russian poet who was the true tieth century. The four lines that er masterpiece, Requiem, the long five years when her son was in d seventeen months in the prison
Akhmatova could form the poetry in te it down, but had to rely on memory rs - to preserve it.
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queues in Leningrad, together sisters:
* I want to take this opportunity my poem on Akhmatova and the of Insomnia (2)" -- made by R. Lankan Poetry in English, ed Elsewhere in the essay she p describing me as 'a meticulous 'clarity and craft are emphasise therefore, that when she quotes verse form, which is an essentia the wrong division of the lines when one has 'meticulously' sha] to find it ruined by carelessness But now to turn to 'cont Akhmatova: "It is notable that heroism and creative powers is o the context is that I am biased terms of motherhood. Surely, má pregnancy and childbirth in wri Sir Philip Sidney: "Thus, great \ my throes'); and I can assure M tating a piece of creative writ pregnant'. But what is even more of childbirth quite consciously i she wrote Requiem as "a grievil other mothers (Mary at the cruc lot). Perhaps Ms Ranasinha has the greatest poemfs of the centur translations), and she seems to speaks of 'revolutionary times' Stalin's great purges when the p the poet's name wrong. But all the essential fact is there in my have nourished her poem with (husband in the grave, son in 1 had read these lines attentively an anxiety to convict me of She wouldn't have blundered,

fith other mothers, wives and
to reply to a critical comment on creation of Requiem - "To the Muse Ivani Ranasinha in Essays on Sri Neloufer de Mel, pp. 169-170. ays me a graceful compliment, writer', and saying that in my work d as much as content'. It's a pity, from the poem on Akhmatova, the 1 part of the craft, is obliterated by . Perhaps this isn't her fault; but ped a poem's form, it's exasperating
and indifference. ent'. She says of my poem on the metaphor used to convey her ne of childbirth." The implication in towards seeing a woman's role in ale poets have used the metaphor of ting of their poetic creativity (e.g. with child to speak, and helpless in Ms. Ranasinha that when I am gesng, I am accustomed to say, "I'm relevant is that I used the metaphor in the poem on Akhmatova because ng mother sharing the suffering of ifixion becomes the image of their n't read Requiem (though it's one of y and accessible in several English know nothing about it because she hardly appropriate to the period of oem was created -, and even spells his needn't have mattered because: poem, where Akhmatova is said to heart's blood, agony, terror, tears / rison)'; and if only Ms Ranasinha instead of being swept away by )erpetuating female stereotypes,

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I pray not for myself a But for everyone who In the cruel cold, in th Beneath the blind red
Even in the diminished echo o power of those lines, enhanc utterance, does, Ithink, come from the translation to app contained in the seemingly sin is "blind' both because it clo, and because it is representat indifferent to personal suff emblematically and by visua colour of the regime as well original is much stronger becau resources inherent in the Russi on the last line. It reads in Ru stenoyu. Oslepsheyu is not st would be slepoi) but 'gone bli an active process. But the grea and translation is in the text auditory feel of the climactic dense, the English monosyllab bland and weak. What is most used the inflectional case-endi character of the line. She oslepsheistenoi, and it would far as sense went. But in this grammar permits the addition c she takes advantage. What I ge almost a physical sensation of and, therefore, of the powers in the English translation.
It's because Russian has a resources other than thos

alone,
stood with me e July heat, wall.
f a translation, something of the ced by their spare economy of through. It is also possible even rehend the multiple meanings nple and familiar words: the wall ses off the way, denies access, ive of the powers of the state, ering; and it is 'red' literally, l association, since red is the as the colour of blood. But the lse it draws on certain expressive an language. Let me concentrate ssian: pod krasnoyu oslepsheyu rictly "blind' (which in Russian ind', which makes the blindness test difference between original ure of the sounds. Against the : three words, polysyllabic and les of 'blind red wall' must seem striking is that Akhmatova has ings to enhance the polysyllabic could have written krasnoi i have meant the same thing as particular case-ending Russian of an extra syllable, -yu, of which it from the Russian is, therefore, the mass and weight of the wall it embodies, necessarily absent
at its command rich expressive e of metaphor that in the
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poetry of that language what n and prosaic statement may be se1 This is also one reason why E have access to Pushkin or Akhn find them flat, as Flaubert, read him to be, and as a British wr London Review of Books his English translation.
All this makes problemati between 'form' and 'content' ir separation between the phonic meaning: that may have some poets but breaks down when ag stretch of his/her powers. It als translation.' Though I have translation, I am aware that tra second-best, and I commend 1 American Writer Judith Hemsch journal a few poems of Akhmat was so enthralled by them that in order to read her in her own that sixteen years later she proc edition of Akhmatova's poetry volumes, with the Russian text translations by Ms Hemscheme
o I have explored these questi poems, "Desk" by Marina Tsve Language over Linguistics', in May/June 1994.

lay seem on the surface plain suously and emotionally alive. nglish-speaking readers who latova only in translation may ing Pushkin in French, thought iter recently described in the impression of Akhmatova in
: the conventional distinction poetry, which implies also a substance of a poem and its validity in the case of lesser great poet is writing at the full o sets limits to the viability of practised the craft of poetic anslation is often only a poor to others the example of the nemeyer. In 1973 she read in a ova in English translation, and she decided to learn Russian language. The end-result was luced the most comprehensive y that we have, in two large of all the poems and English yer herself on facing pages.
ons in relation to a sequence of taeva, in an essay, "The Excess of The Thatched Patio, Vol. 7 No. 3:

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To return to English poetry af it must be observed that the cri the rise of Anglo-American mo led to the establishment of on poetic greatness. Eliot's early promoting the metaphorica symbolists, Donne and the dramatists and Shakespeare ( the model of the poetic virt Though Eliot in later years we Dante, his own poetry, with discordant images and its rel rather than on the order of ex was in keeping less with his a his recommendation of the syr Thus the combined influence c poetry set the bias of readers a tO COme.
Eliot's innovations in sty have made his poetry obscur character was intensified by h that he saw life, as was said of of books'. Reading him ofte sources that provided the raw poetry. But Eliot had a doctrin and excuse for what was in sensibility - the doctrine (prop metaphysicals) that in a mode difficult'. His practice and thec Pound to create a tradition of common readers: it either baff and Pound, it had been ass'

ter this excursion into Russian, tical trends which accompanied dernism in the twentieth century e kind of poetry as the norm of criticism was directed towards 1 complexity of the French metaphysicals, the Jacobean seen in a particular aspect) as ues he sought to recommend. 2nt on to praise the bareness of its startling juxtapositions of iance on an imaginative logic pository discourse or narrative, admiration for Dante than With mbolists and the metaphysicals. of Eliot's early criticism and his nd critics of poetry for decades
le and form would in any case e and difficult, but its arcane is recondite erudition - the fact Milton, 'through the spectacles n involved tracking down the materials out of which he made e that provided the justification fact a peculiarity of his own Ounded in his early essay on the rn civilisation 'poetry must be ry combined with those of Ezra poetry that was inaccessible to ed or repelled them. Until Eliot lmed that if a poet failed to
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communicate his meaning to a and education, that was a failure in Victorian times Browning w (obscure by Victorian standa comparison with The Waste Lar remarked that he understood onl hear Sordello's story told, and t Sordello's story told' - and, he s after Eliot's establishment of ingredient of modernity in poetry, that kind of sturdy commonsen identified as a philistine.
It was Leavis, in particula: hints Eliot had thrown out, a map in a period extending approxim 'sixties, the basis of a new aca tenets, whether expressed expli valuations, was that metaphori were criteria of great poetry. induced readers to concentrate on whose poetic strength could be f context. Just as Matthew Arnold
' I may be accused of inconsiste Joyce's Ulysses, and even part their difficulty. But I find the co grapple with because his are ric in all its inexhaustible abunda Land, once one has penetrated surface, what presents itself is misogyny and sex-horror.
o "The essentially poetic is certa said, and he defined this qua exploratory creativeness and Shakespeare's poetry". (Anna 208 and 205).
15

eader of normal intelligence on the part of the poet. When rote a poem titled "Sordello' rds, though child's play in ld or The Cantos), Tennyson y the first line, "Who will may he last, "Who would has heard aid, they were both lies. But difficulty as an essential nobody could have articulated sical reaction without being
r, who constructed, from the of English poetry that became, ately from the 'thirties to the demic orthodoxy. One of its citly or implied in particular cal richness and complexity This insistence too often the striking individual phrase elt even when taken out of its
offered a set of 'touchstones'
ncy because I enjoy and admire s of Finnegans Wake, in spite of implexities of Joyce rewarding to hly comic works, celebrating life nce and diversity. In The Waste beneath the impediments of the a compound of class-snobbery,
inly the Shakespearian,' Leavis lity in terms of 'the peculiarly metaphorical concreteness of arenina and Other Essays, pp.

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- brief samples of great poetr be tested - Eliotian and Leavi of Shakespeare and Donne w a similar function. But wi characterised by their rhet elevation, the new touchstc metaphorical density, their se of heterogeneous elements: of grace' can serve as an exc But there's another kind are seemingly unremarkable, different life in the full conte) are other kinds of 'concretel specific states of consciousn metaphorical life. To recall E difficult in poetry to tell 'wha all the difference from a plaii comes from rhythm and textu pointing to in Akhmatova's k blind red wall). But in drama made also by the context of have se en with Pushkin, Shakespeare. This is true of p structures, too, as in the cas "Michael', 'And never lifted u an example from a poet W context. When Leavis made Revaluation, he picked out sc from his destructive criticism intensity that seemed to him what are we to say of the cor
The world was all be Their place of rest an They hand in hand wi Through Eden took th

y against which other lines could sian criticism propagated phrases those poetic quality could serve here Arnold's examples were orical sonority or their moral ones were identifiable by their 2nsuous fullness and their union Shakespeare's 'in her strong toil emplar.
of poetry in which words that when isolated, take on an entirely kt of their poetic utterance. There hess', other ways of embodying 2ss, than those which come from Eliot's remark that it's sometimes. ut infinitesimal touch... has made 1 statement', the difference often ures of sound. This is what I was rasnoyu oslepsheyu stenoyu (the tic poetry the difference is often situation and character, as we and shall see further with poems that are based on narrative e of the line from Wordsworth's p a single stone.' But let me cite ho may be unexpected in this his critical assault on Milton in ome lines from Comus to exempt because they exhibited a sensuous 1 Shakespearean in quality. But lcluding lines of Paradise Lost?
fore them, where to choose d Providence their guide: th wandering steps and slow eir solitary way.
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These lines aren't remarkable for for originality or complexity of n the words are, unusually for Milt if we have to explain why the pass we have to refer not only to the also to the weight of the whole giving meaning to the equipoise and the human sadness of loss.
Leavisian criticism is now d that would have distressed anot Passé, diligentlypeppering his pe colour-coded pencilled underlini newer orthodoxies that have cone a difference to the valuation ( difficulty as a mark of poetic su the heyday of Eliot and Pound the some Anglo-American poets thi esotericism of their work. The ma the generation after Eliot, W.H. American), began with poems th references and highly idiosyncra balanced in another part of his popular forms - ballads, blues an that poetry need not be solemn to poetry as verbal play, his affiliati with Brecht - all these served as :
' There was much speculation a to these copies about what the c blue, meant. One plausible theo the passages that Dr Passé only another those he dictated to hi had cyclostyled and distributed
17

any sensuous immediacy or hetaphor (there is none); and on, simple and ordinary. But age is so profoundly moving, slow, subdued rhythms but 2pic behind this conclusion, between the divine promise
listinctly passé, to an extent her of my old teachers, Dr sonal copies of Scrutiny with ngs.' But I don't see that the to replace the old have made pf surface complexity and periority. It's true that since re has been a reaction among 2mselves to the intellectual jor Anglo-American poet of . Auden (first British, then at were replete with private tic imagery, but these were work by verse that drew on i jazz songs. His recognition be significant, his interest in ons with the later Byron and a counterweight to the Eliot
mong students who had access olour-coding, in red, green and ry was that one colour denoted ised as material for his lectures, s class, and the third those he

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Pound influence. Auden has influence in the Anglo-Ameri But while poetry, at leas practitioners, has grown mor reader, literary criticism, in
representatives, has become Eliot's critical prose. in beautifully lucid; Leavis's, o weighed down by tortuous in it was always a pleasure to Orwell' or Raymond William prose as of their intelligence, their judgments. Today, how criticism that comes out of
His introductions to The O Poet's Tongue as well as * should be read for their reve of his conception of poetry that time shaped partly by the 'thirties, but the former Such things as his later mas Stare', and the sailors' song essential continuity betwe poetry and the later. '' He could, however, especia
sharp, terse and cutting academic construct of an E Fielding to J. B. Priestley, '] to Fielding or any to Mr Pr Orwell, of course, never v adult life not in a senior ci Burma, after which he was then a tramp in London. A g first published in popular I

been the most healthy fertilising can poetry of the last half-century. t in the work of some of its e accessible to the non-specialist the hands of its most influential more forbidding and rebarbative. contrast with his poetry, was n the other hand, was most often volutions and parentheses.' But read Edmund Wilson, George Ls, for the quality as much of their even when one didn't agree with 2ver, when I read the fashionable the western academies (which I
xford Book of Light Verse and The the selections in these anthologies clation of the breadth and catholicity F. Auden's attitude to poetry was at his left-wing political allegiances of idn't change when the latter shifted. terpiece, "The Willow-Wren and the
in The Sea and the Mirror show the en the popular strains in the early
lly in his polemics, be capable of the comment, as when he said of the nglish comic tradition running from life is too short to devote much time estley." vent to a university, and began his ommon-room but as a policeman in for a period a waiter in Paris, and ood deal of his literary criticism was ewspapers and magazines.
18

Page 25
do less and less), I feel that I am through an impenetrable jungle by thorny intert w I ned creep undergrowth. This, then, is an simplicity, clarity and lucidity, b

trying vainly to hack my way of thick tree-trunks overhung ers, with dense, impeding unpropitious time to uphold ut things will change.

Page 26
Twenty years ago I wrote ir
Tolstoy is probably the g prose. He achieved in Pushkin had done in poet the natural genius of the bare purity, laconic po spare and concentrated very different from t Dickensian prodigality phrase.
What I said there about Pushki But since I wrote those word English poetry from Pushkin, eyes.
If you had asked Leavis passage of great Shakespearea you this from Macbeth (he did
If it were done, when ' It were done quickly; i. Could trammel up the ( With his surcease, succ Might be the be-all and But here, upon this ban We'd jump the life to c
Lanka Guardian, 1 Septembe

an essay titled "Tolstoy the
greatest writer of creative his own medium what ry - to bring to perfection Russian language for the wer and wiry energy of expression - something he Shakespearean and and rich exuberance of
n and Tolstoy I would standby. ls, I have begun, returning to to see Shakespeare with new
to give you a representative n poetry, he might have offered lonce analyse it):
tis done, then "twere well f the assassination consequence, and catch :ess: that but this blow
the end-all here, k and shoal of time,
OC.
er 1978.

Page 27
That, in its syntactical complexi its swift imaginative leaps, ha thought of as Shakespearean. E great Shakespeare, like that? too diverse, too various - not ol also in his use of language - to mode. Later in the same play Ma his hands, red with murder:
Will all great Neptune's c Clean from my hand? No The multitudinous seas in Making the green one re.
Consider the third line. If you c you could think it was by Mi incarnadine': it's a sonorous, schoolteacher might have rolle
that follows is very different. Simple, homely, Anglo-Saxon line is inherent in its very s opposition between that line a heart of Macbeth's fantastic vis hand now reddening the vast, n roaring oceans.
It seems to me that at the h life Shakespeare was disco economy and simplicity of lang significance of this developmer Shakespeare's progress, which distrust, on the part of this gr dangers that language carries
7 The last two words must be u
red', 'entirely red', and the spaced.

ies, its crowding of metaphors, s all the qualities that Leavis ut is all Shakespeare, even all I suggest that Shakespeare is ly in his experience of life but be contained within one poetic cbeth contemplates with horror
Icean wash this blood , this my hand will rather
carnadine, d 17
lidn'know where it came from, lton. "The multitudinous seas latinised phrase that my old d on his tongue like "autumnal In Vallombrosa'. But the line "Making the green one red." words. And the power of the implicity and starkness. The nd the preceding one is at the ion - his small familiar human nultitudinous, polysyllabically
sight of his poetic and dramatic vering the power of a bare uage. But to appreciate the full it, we have to go back and trace involves, as I see it, a growing at master of language, of the with it.
lderstood as the equivalent of 'all peaking of the line accordingly

Page 28
If we go to the play of F hero a figure who lives in a w the play, at a time when the re from his grasp, this is how confidence:
I had forgot myself. A Awake, thou sluggard Is not the King's name Arm, arm, my name. A At thy great glory.
There are critics who have call spectators and readers of the
he is a poet, he is a bad one, Confronted by the victorious a self-pitying fantasy of renun
I'll give my jewels for My gorgeous palace fo My gay apparel, for an My figured goblets for My sceptre for a palm
And my large kingdom A little, little grave, ar Or I'll be buried in the Some way of common May hourly trample or For on my heart they t And buried once, why
Comparisons have sometimes Lear. But beneath the superfic the differences are considerab

ichard II, we shall find in the orld of wbrds. In the middle of lity of kingly power is slipping he seeks to restore his self
m I not King?
majesty, thou sleep'st
forty thousand names?
puny subject strikes
led Richard a poet, though most play today would agree that if sentimental and self-regarding. Bolingbroke, he takes refuge in ciation:
a set of beads, }r a hermitage,
almsman's gown, a dish of wood, er's walking-staff, of carved saints,
for a little grave, obscure grave; king's highway,
trade, where subjects' feet their sovereign's head; read now while I live, not upon my head?
been made between Richard and
|al parallels of two fallen kings, e. Loss of power brings Richard
22

Page 29
no social illumination, as it the storm makes him aware fo of "poor naked wretches'.
hermitage is, in contrast, a pi emotional self-indulgence. I speech, in the theatrical work grave' -, in the catch in the th upon my head?" -, language b speaker himself. For Richard life, displacing the realitie Shakespeare's first great vic language. The outcome of Ri and names is to bring him to own identity and becomes a r
No, not that name was But 'tis usurped. Alac That I have worn so in And know not now wil
Richard's case, however, is re of indulgence in the luxuries C attention. The more subtle temptations of language are t I should like to consider the
If it is easy to detect the dramatising and self-indulge spell of the verbal magnifice invested Othello. The ring of in the very first extended spe Senate - even while he is pri soldier who lacks the gift of

loes to Lear. Lear's exposure to r the first time of the sufferings Richard's wish to retire to a ece of playacting, of verbal and the studied antitheses of that ng up of emotion - "a little, little roat of the last phrase - 'why not ecomes a drug, intoxicating the words have acquired a separate s they should mediate. He is tim of the seductive power of chard's fascination with. Words
a condition where he loses his Lameless thing:
I have no name, no title, s given me at the font, k, the heavy day, many winters out hat name to call myself!
latively simple, his weaknesses flanguage too obvious to escape examples of surrender to the ) be found in the great tragedies. cases of Othello and Cleopatra.
spuriousness of Richard's selfnt poetry, it is hard to resist the hce with which Shakespeare has stately, orotund speech is there ech he utters - his address to the testing that he is a plain, blunt loquence:
23

Page 30
Ru And little blessed with th For since these arms of n Till now some nine moon Their dearest action in th And little of this great wi More than pertains to fea
The poetic idiom of this corresp stature, a heroic temper of mind Yet the very self-consciousness he appears to be depreciating it, s his image of himself. It is a nee the situation of a black man in a w has attained high office in the outsider, as Othello discovers at th Desdemona.
Othello's self-regard, then, c which manifests itself openly onl pressure of his personal crisis. Al heroic idiom returns, it betrays himself. As when he dedicates h. the Desdemona he believes to be
Lik Whose icy current and co. Ne'er feels retiring ebb, b To the Propontic and the F Even so my bloody though Shall ne'er look back, ne'e Till that a capable and wic Swallow them up.
He kneels.
24

de am I in my speech, e soft phrase of peace, nine had seven years' pith s wasted, they have used e tented field, orld can I speak ts of broil and battle.
onds to a real grandeur and
and personality in Othello. of his greatness, even while hows an inner need to fortify d that we may connect with hite society, who, though he Venetian state, remains an he time of his elopement with
:onceals an inner insecurity, y later in the play, under the nd when in that situation his a failure in understanding imself to vengeance against
faithless: -
e to the Pontic sea, mpulsive course ut keeps due on Hellespont, hts with violent pace :r ebb to humble love, le revenge

Page 31
In the due reverence I here engage my wo
The magnificence of the lang Othello. It permits him to ch that murder born of jealousy i It is thus that Othello is not m deceived. But what I should mode through which Othello's younger Shakespeare had cr reality of Richard II through Richard's language was for poetic manner that he had ul outgrown. For Othello he crea him - an impressively sonorou Tennysonian - before Milton a achievement of creative intelli a critique of the Miltonic Grau to see what in that style can
and evasion of sincerity. For
as Wilson Knight called it, he verge of death and face to fac I am," he says, but the harm speech belong to a language (
Of one that loved not Of one not easily jealo Perplexed in the extre Like the base Indian, Richer than all his tril Albeit unused to the m Drop tears as fast as Their med'cinable gur

Now, by yond marble heaven, of a sacred vow ds.
uage is a potent intoxication for erish the reassuring conviction s the execution of a sacred duty. erely deceived by Iago but selflike to emphasise is the poetic self-deception is projected. The eated the escapist flights from simple affectations of language. Shakespeare the purgation of a hcritically used earlier but now ates a poetic mode that is new to is idiom akin to the Miltonic and ind Tennyson. It's an astonishing gence, which, as it were, implies nd Style in advance. It allows us lend itself to self-dramatisation that is what 'the Othello music', alps him to sustain, even on the e with his guilt. 'Speak of me as onies and cadences of the last other than that of simple truth:
Then must you speak wisely but too well, bus but, being wrought, me; of one whose hand, threw a pearl away pe; of one whose eyes, elting mood, the Arabian trees
l.
25

Page 32
The musicality of these lines evasive, even as their judgment dies without really knowing him
Even more complex, howev that of Cleopatra - so complex, i reading of the play to provoke ( Antony and Cleopatra as comm passionate energy and intensity, grand illusion. Without arguin; reading, I want to concentrate these is Cleopatra's conversation death:
I dreamt there was an El O, such another sleep, th But such another man
That Cleopatra should speak o dream is significant: it prepares Antony that follow as a cre imagination. Dolabella tries to ye," but she goes on:
His face was as the heav A sun and moon, which k The little O O'th'earth.
Dolabella again attempts to il creature' - but Cleopatra ignores trance or dream:
His legs bestrid the ocea Crested the world. His v As all the tuned spheres, But when he meant to qu
26

is consoling and, therefore, s are self-defensive. Othello self. er, than the case of Othello is indeed, that I fully expect my lissent. For I see the love of anding our admiration by its but ultimately revealed as a g the whole ground for this on two scenes. The first of with Dolabella after Antony's
imperor Antony. (at I might see
f her love-relationship as a us to receive her images of ation of the transforming intervene, "If it might please
'ens, and therein stuck cept their course, and lighted
intervene - "Most sovereign him; she speaks as if out of
n; his reared arm
oice was propertied and that to friends.
ail and shake the orb,

Page 33
He was as rattling thun There was no winter in That grew the more by Were dolphin-like; they The element they lived Walked crowns and crow As plates dropt from hi:
The poetry is characteristic of fertility and profusion of imag the bounty of Antony. But the this excess is idealising, and in an Antony of the imagination th we have seen earlier in the pla 'Cleopatra', and she now turns
Think you there was, or As that I dreamt of?
Dolabella can speak at last, and
Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra's response is to shut commonsensical voice. She cli) that if there had been no such impossible to imagine him:
You lie, up to the hearir But if there be nor ever It's past the size of dre To vie strange forms wi An Antony were nature Condemning shadows q

ler. For his bounty, t, an autumn 'twas, reaping. His delights
showed their back above in. In his livery
nets. Realms and islands were s pocket.
the mature Shakespeare in its ery, as generously lawished as context allows us to see that that sense falsifying, creating at is larger than the real figure y. Dolabella again intervenes, to him with a question:
might be, such a man
his answer is simply, bluntly:
her ears to Dolabella's sober, ngs to her fantasy by asserting Antony, it would have been
g of the gods.
were one such, lming; nature wants stuff th fancy, yet t'imagine 's piece 'gainst fancy, uite.

Page 34
"Nature wants Stuff / To vie S thought is fathered by Cleopatr sustaining myth. The poetry is of Othello. But what it shares glamourising quality that is als
I find something of the sal Cleopatra's suicide. The poetry action: Cleopatra on her thron Iras, as she prepares to meet d
Give me my robe, put c Immortal longings in m
The spectacle is as deliberat Cleopatra as her first parading when 'the barge she sat in, lik on the water'. The parallel is ur "I am again for Cydnus / To
aspiration is part of the induce carrying through the act. Here on the Cydnus, Cleopatra hers spectators she is playing to. Th last speeches of hers is susta and narcissistic feeling for her
The juice of Egypt's gra
Come then, and take th
The stroke of death is
18 For all these reasons I find
critics who have fourtd in the everything sensual and impi Cleopatra of the conclusion a

trange forms with fancy." The a's need, in her desolation, of a in a different mode from that with Othello's is a magnifying, o a means of disguising truth. me quality in the final scene of works together with the stage 2, being robed and crowned by eath in the grand manner:
in my crown, I have
A MY
ely conceived and staged by of herself for Antony's benefit e a burnished throne, / Burned nderlined by Cleopatra herself: meet Mark Antony." But this 'd illusion that supports her in , as contrasted with the scene elf and her maids are the only e potency of the poetry in these ined by her intensely sensual
own body:
Now no more pe shall moist this lip.
e last warmth of my lips.
is a lover's pinch,
t impossible to agree with those last scene a Cleopatra purged of
brfect in her: this is to take the
ther own valuation.

Page 35
Which hurts, and is desi
Dost thou not see my ba That sucks the nurse asl
The Cleopatra of the last scene i of her claim, that is part of hers
I am fire and air; my oth I give to baser life.
And so Cleopatra enters the dar the spell she works on herself, p and the asp the baby at her bre enough to applaud a grand perfo
It is well done, and fittin Descended of so many r
29

red.
by at my breast, leep?
s all too earthly body, in spite upporting illusion:
ner elements
kness, under the influence of ersuaded that death is a lover ast. Charmian survives long
DaCe
!g for a princess oyal kings.

Page 36
As Shakespeare grows more a deception through language,
the deepest feelings sometim at all. To say this is perhap presupposition so widely curr in poetic drama language is easy to fall into when appro through the printed page, an all the more prone in our pal such few opportunities to se discovery Shakespeare make the expressive powers of sil may overlook the character w the stage silence or near-silen There is Antonio in the last
nothing when others who have errors. Antonio's silence gave Sea and the Mirror, where element in the pattern of reco in the opening scene of Kin towards the end of this essay. the role of silence in that ma1 is unfortunately not as well ki
' Against the service render Knights, Traversi et al.) w through his poetry, anc nineteenth-century charac great damage they did in div Leavis, as many people havi

ware of the possibilities of selfhe comes to recognise also that 's don't find expression in words s to run counter to the critical ent in the twentieth centiury that all.' This is an error that it's aching Shakespeare exclusively i one to which we are probably t of the world because we have e the plays performed. But one s in his mature plays is that of ence. When reading a play one ho says nothing or little, but on ice can speak louder than words. scene of The Tempest who says 2 wronged Prospero confess their 2 Auden the structure for his The Antonio remains the intractable nciliation. There is also Cordelia g Lear, which I shall come to But I should like first to point to vellous play, Coriolanus, which own as the other great tragedies.
'd by the school of critics (Leavis, no approached Shakespeare's plays
so countered the excesses of er interpretation, must be set the )rcing Shakespeare from the theatre. testified, actually hated the theatre.
30

Page 37
In Coriolanus Shakespea Othello, is a great soldier, cor a sign of the variety and perer imagination that he creates f very different from what he Coriolanus language is instrun and acting on others. Self-cer until he approaches the end - { and doubts, by any uncertainty the goals of his actions. In K her father for her refusal to f love, says, "I cannot heave Coriolanus knows no such rel feelings are wholly directed to Of him Menenius says (almos
What his breast forges
The polar opposite to him in t the scene where Coriolanus re Volscians, his mother, Volumn but Virgilia stands by, shaken anything but tears. Coriola comprehension:
Would'st thou have lau That weep'st to see m Such eyes the widows And mothers that lack
The reproach to Virgilia, halfCoriolanus's emotional insen

e has a central figure who, like scious of his greatness. But it's nial freshness of Shakespeare's or Coriolanus a kind of poetry puts into Othello's mouth. For hental - a means of commanding tred and single-minded, he is - ntirely untroubled by divisions over the motives, the means or ing Lear, Cordelia, rebuked by latter him with facile words of / My heart into my mouth.' uctance because his desires and wards the external life of action. t inverting Cordelia's words):
His heart's his mouth. , that his tongue must vent.
he play is his wife, Virgilia. In turns from his victory over the lia, is effusive over his triumph; by feelings that are too deep for nus's response is one of in
My gracious silence, haill ghed had I come coffined home,
triumph? Ah, my dear, in Corioles wear,
SOS.
playful though it is, is a sign of itiveness - just as much as his
31

Page 38
unfeeling reference to the berea But at the end of the play, he wh emotion finds himself exposed t Banished from Rome, he has j aim of wreaking vengeance on
them and ravaging their city. Wh have failed to move him from mother, wife and child go to the peace. Virgilia is again nearly sile who assails her son with eloqu And Coriolanus, armoured in his the first time that he is vulneral 'as if a man were author of hil bonds he cannot break. The S masterly achievement in the
Volumnia's long emotional assa eighty lines, Coriolanus speaks the effort to disengage himself him mounts, he withdraws into m Volumnia upbraids him. He tries shame him by going down on t her bitterly ironic conclusion:
This fellow had a Volsci His wife is in Corioles, a Like him by chance. Yet I am hushed until our cit And then I'll speak a litt
But it's Coriolanus who has rea known no gap between impuls unfamiliar emotions that he can surrenders to what he knows to
32

ved women in the enemy city. to has lived in the shallows of o its hitherto unknown deeps. oined the Volscians with the his people by making war on en other embassies from Rome his destructive purpose, his Volscian camp to beg him for ent in this scene; it is Volumnia lent appeals and reproaches. Spride and hate, discovers for ble. Having resolved to stand mself, he yet finds there are :cene is Shakespeare's most use of silence. Throughout ult on him, running to nearly only once - and that briefly, in and leave. As the pressure on (uteness. "Why dost not speak?" to turn away, and the women heir knees. Volumnia reaches
Come, letus go. an to his mother, ind this child
give us our dispatch. y be afire, le.
lly been hushed. He who had e and speech is now torn by 't really articulate. Before he be his doom, there is a pause,

Page 39
a silence, as he struggles with h by the hand, silent, says the directions in the First Folio performance; in this case the d Shakespeare's hand or from his As I have already suggest of his mastery of poetic lang ambivalences - that its richnes their perils. That is why in the consent agreed to be his grea Stripping of language. I am refe It has been noted by several c 1904, that the language of King combines bare simplicity and unparalleled elsewhere in Shake to describe the way in which th the immediacy of personal reali There's a translation by the of six tragedies of Shakespear one. It's a great translation, Such have produced - probably the fi into another language. Yet it is reader who comes to it with a k
what Pasternak has done is to poetic idiom of Pushkin - and brought out, the poet of Sp expression. Over and over again metaphorical density of Shake, be replaced by a naked auster Pasternak even thought that alternated with 'undisguised rhe circumlocutions instead of the
33

is painful dilemma. Holds her text. It's one of those stage that are the record of stage irection must have come from
instruction to the actor. ed, Shakespeare at the height guage is keenly aware of its is and power carry with them play that is today by common test he engages in a radical :rring, of course, to King Lear. ritics, since A.C. Bradley in Lear, at its dramatic heights, expressive power to a degree speare. I should like, however, is fact came home to me with
isation. : Russian poet Boris Pasternak e, among which King Lear is as only a poet of genius could nest rendering of Shakespeare in some ways startling to the (nowledge of the original. For render Shakespeare into the Pushkin is, as I have already are, lucid and economical in in Pasternak's translation the speare's poetry disappears, to ity and simplicity of outline. in Shakespeare great poetry toric, piling up a dozen empty 2 one word on the tip of the

Page 40
author's tongue which in his ha perceive in these strictures ( iconoclastic to English-speakin, bred in the Pushkinian tradi simplicity to the Shakespearea again seem shocking to Shake there are occasions when I find continence of language to the Cleopatra's
aS
I am fire and air; my ot I give to baser life,
Ya vozduh i ogon". Dr Ya ostavlyayu prahu.
I am air and fire. All el I leave to dust.’
20
21
Quoted from Henry Gifford, 150-151. A revealing example of t Shakespeare to any suggestior even in a single line, was ther specialist in Shakespeare to object that "I am air and fire' his published work shows, intelligence, so it shouldn't wasn't claiming my simple par to Shakespeare. In any case, t not for the inversion of 'fire' by considerations of metre a But evidently, he was so de against Shakespeare that he n objection. I must, however, ad reproduce the weight and bo.

ste he did not find'. One may which will seem shockingly g readers) the reaction of a poet ion of brevity and eloquent exuberance. Though this may speareans, I must confess that myself preferring Pasternak's original. As when he renders
her elements
ugoe vsyo
Pasternak: A Critical Study, pp.
he touchiness of devotees of that a translator might excel him, action of an expatriate Sri Lankan his comment. He wrote to me to seemed "flatulent in English'. As his scholar has a sharp critical have escaped his attention that I aphrase of Pasternak to be superior he superiority I was claiming was and 'air' (required in the Russian nd rhythm) but for what follows. 'ply disturbed by my blasphemy lade what was really an irrelevant d that the English paraphrase can't ly of Pasternak's Russian.

Page 41
But what is most relevant here i where Pasternak's cho Sen Shakespeare's own paring away mature writing. As Professor "Where Shakespeare is most di can meet him, with a purity of the perfect equivalent.' The p most frequent is King Lear - Shakespeare's poetry in it - extraordinary example from Pas It's well known that the pat progression through loss and de and luxury, driven out on the nake in the hovel, deprived of reason banished; Edgar outcast; and Glo away of superfluities and pretenc part, in the poetic medium, of til in the opening scene of Lear's te too, is a victim of the illusions asking not for the reality of love - a false coin for which he is will wealth and power. Only Corde fraudulent transaction. To Lear' outdo the ful some protestations
?? Gifford, op. cit., p. 158.
35

that there are several places idiom matches perfectly of language in some of his Henry Gifford has written, ect and luminous, Pasternak 2xpression that seems almost lay where such moments are a pointer to the quality of and I shall offer later one sternak's version. tern of King Lear involves a privation: Lear, losing power 'd heath, tearing off his clothes ; Cordelia disinherited; Kent ucester blinded. The stripping ces of language is the counterhis process. It begins already esting of his daughters. Lear, that language creates. He is but for the show of it in words ling to barter the substance of lia refuses to engage in this Scajoling invitation to her to of her sisters, she answers:

Page 42
LEAR: Nothing? CORDELIA: Nothing.
The laconic simplicity of Co honesty and truth finds its cor Lear's reconciliation with her interval Lear has to experie disorder of madness, in which joint:
Behold yon simpering d. Whose face between he That minces virtue, and To hear of pleasure's na The fitchew nor the soil With a more riotous app Down from the waist th Though women all abov But to the girdle do the Beneath is all the fiend' There's hell, there's dar pit; burning, Scalding, st
23
Nirmala S. Salgado thought Taoist' because of the wate emptiness that contains ple) had long thought King Lean plays. Cordelia's 'nothing' w love; the pattern of 'progres to which I have referred in the naked heath against the non-dominating ethic agai aggressive will of her sister play close to that of Taoism.
whom Arthur Waley wrote a

Nothing, my Lord.
rdelia's answer as the voice of (summation in the later scene of to which we shall come. In the nce the intellectual and moral language itself is thrown out of
aIT16,
:r forks presages snow.
does shake the head
լme,
ed horse goes to 't
etite.
Ley are centaurs,
Շ.
gods inherit,
S.
kness, there is the sulphurous
ench, consumption. Fie, fie!
the first version of this essay 'very :r symbol and the concept of the nitude. This pleased me because I the most Taoist of Shakespeare's /hich expresses the fullness of her sion through loss and deprivation, the body of the text; the setting of court; Cordelia's non-acquisitive, 1st the fierce possessiveness and s - all these make the spirit of the It is also close to William Blake, on n essay titled "Blake the Taoist'. .
36

Page 43
pah, pah! Give me an oun sweeten my imagination
The insane sex-horror and the bizarre vision of a world consum concealed beneath every appe nauseated demand for an ou imagination. But even there th surface, since the sweet scent ( stinking secretion of a cat. The finally guttering into prose, enac consciousness.
It is from this hell and dark reunion with Cordelia. But bef necessary to say something ab has been brought to it by the text of the last decade and a half.' There are two original pub 1608 First Quarto and the versi 1623 First Folio. These two considerably. Until 1986 all mode these two texts, believing that of a single Shakespearean or however, in 1986 established - c the two texts represented two c first produced and as revise Accordingly, the Oxford Shake texts of King Lear. For my prese
* Readers who wish to pursue th
brief account given here are Shakespeare - Shakespeare: Stanley Wells and Gary Tay Companion, by the same edito Warren, The Division of the Lears', appeared in The Thatch
37

ce of civet, good apothecary, There's money for thee.
rage against Womankind, the ned by lust, in which evil lurks arance, culminate in Lear's ince of civet to Sweeten his e foulness remains under the of civet is extracted from the blank verse, breaking up and ts the disintegration of rational
ness that Lear recovers in his ore discussing that scene, it's out the new illumination that tual revolution in Shakespeare
lished texts of King Lear - the on of the play included in the exts differ from each other
•rn editors of the play conflated they were corrupted variants iginal. The Oxford editors, onclusively, to my mind - that listinct versions - the play as d by Shakespeare himself. speare prints not one but two nt purpose, the most important
is subject beyond the inevitably advised to consult The Oxford The Complete Works, edited by lor -, Shakespeare: A Textual rs, and Gary Taylor and Michael Kingdoms. My essay, "The Two ed Patio, Vol. 8: Jan-Dec 1995.

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difference between the two Lear's reunion with Cordelia i In the earlier version (Quartc Lear was probably revealed ( of the Elizabethan stage, 'di: drawing apart of curtains. T Cordelia, Kent, a Doctor a manages the awakening of I with the command, "Louder course, often in Shakespeare and is used with that signific Winter's Tale and The Tem provided for a similar use of the first performances of the
In the revised (Folio) v brought on stage in a chair. T reminds us of his throne, from the first scene by his divisior cut out, so that the audience's on Cordelia as the agent of music. There is nothing to dist in (as we shall see) their simp the actions of the two princ sum up, the changes make for elimination of superfluities, t mental strength of the langua
When Lear wakes, C ceremonial reverence as king
How does my royal lord
It is also possible that since had already been performec revise Lear, he didn't wish t two plays.

versions, as far as the scene of s concerned, lies in their staging. )), at the beginning of the scene or, to use the technical language scovered") asleep in bed by the here are on stage, besides Lear, nd a Gentleman. The Doctor Lear from his restorative sleep the music there!' Music is, of a symbol of restored harmony, :ance in the stage action of The pest. No doubt, Shakespeare music for Lear's awakening in play. ersion there's no bed: Lear is his is effective because the chair n which he started the tragedy in of the kingdom. The Doctor is attention is wholly concentrated Lear's recovery. And there's no ract the audience from the words le, unadorned strength and from ipal characters on stage.' To greater simplicity of staging, an o parallel the economy and ellege of the scene. ordelia addresses him with
and father:
? How fares Your Majesty?
The Winter's Tale and The Tempest i by the time Shakespeare came to o repeat an effect used in the other
38

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For Lear, however, the hierarch no longer have meaning: later ir by kneeling to her. He has died wrong to take me out of the gr are like those of a child groping
world. Earlier in the play, the Fc infantile regression: "...e'er sin thy mothers; for when thou gav's thine own breeches." In his ma suffering of life fixed in the im
Thou must be patient. W Thou know'st, the first t We wawl and cry.
Now in the reconciliation scene
of the child uncertain in a world verse is halting and broken, as reconstituted; yet it follows in the movements of the seeking
And the movement is in the opp mad speeches: here the languag purgation of hatred and pride knowledge. Never before had S Scale and with such intensity po and yet so compelling in its emc
LEAR: Pray, do not mo I am a very foolish fond Fourscore and upward, And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my pe Methinks I should know Yet I am doubtful, for II , What place this is; and
39

es of power, and even of age, the scene he appalls Cordelia and been reborn ("You do me ave'), and his first utterances o make sense of an unfamiliar ol had found in Lear a case of ce thou mad'st thy daughters t them the rod and put'st down .dness Lear too had seen the age of the birth trauma:
'e came crying hither; ime that we smell the air
Lear indeed takes on the voice that is new to him. The blank s if language itself has to be those very tentative rhythms and exploring consciousness. site direction from that of the ge marks the striving towards and towards a humbling selfhakespeare written on such a 2try so austere in its simplicity tional truth:
ck me. old man, not an hour more or less;
rfect mind.
you, and know this man; um mainly ignorant ll the skill I have

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Remembers not these g Where I did lodge last For, as I am a man, Ith To be my child Cordeli; CORDELIA: A
As Lear has abrogated the pa own act of renunciation, has richness, metaphor - all the cor All that remains is the pure, most elemental wellsprings of I am' - what could be seemir Cordelia's line? But it is part o him in the tones of a mother so the parent-child relationshi simplicity, its avoidance of all e. in its very different content, the are the mark of the purity of does all the selfless generosit whole weight of the play, which moment, behind it, the lir Shakespearean poetry. One de language charged with meaning If so, then surely Cordelia's lin After I had originally ma memorial lecture from whic members of the audience rema wouldn't be so powerful but for i And the same thing might be sa lifted up a single stone', whic calling it poetry of the highest a As Granville-Barker has said, " judged apart from the action it triumph of purification of langua
4C

arments; nor I know not night. Do not laugh at me; ink this lady
a.
And so I am, I am.
ssions, so Shakespeare, in his cast off complexity, verbal mmon appurtenances of poetry. pellucid water of the deepest, human utterance. "And so I am, ngly more commonplace than f its strength that she speaks to othing a troubled child, so that p is reversed. And its very motional ostentation (recalling, manner of her first "Nothing"), Cordelia's love. Bearing as it y of her nature, and with the n has been moving towards this he is one of the peaks of finition of poetry is that it is to the utmost possible degree. e is consummate poetry.
de this claim in the Ludowyk n this essay is derived, two ked to me that Cordelia's line its dramatic context. Of course. id of Wordsworth's "And never h didn't prevent Arnold from nd most truly expressive kind'. Dramatic poetry is never to be t implies.' The line remains a ge, which is what the situation,

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and indeed the entire meaning O and that is the secret of the lin
It's in the same scene greatest triumph as a translator Lear and Cordelia is rendered poetry of distilled transparenc six monosyllables, "And so I am outdoes them in brevity and sir just two: Da, ya (Yes, me). repetition is replaced by the ec Da, ya, which would also allow with the appropriately caressil nak surpasses Shakespeare in th in this line.' The last words of ) and the final syllables of ditresponse in Cordelia's Da, ya.
Yet this scene isn't the enc us through the greatest extrem has still to endure the ultimate and senseless death. Bradley nc speech on the verge of death contrast to the dying speech of Othello to the bystanders'. Bu differently from any other of S heroines - not only Hamlet Macbeth, Antony, Cleopatra, Tir
In my two interlocutors' criti kind of poetry which can be taken out of its context - a pref earlier in this essay.
' 'What an outrageous thing
protest. "And yes, me doesn't
4

f the play, require at this point; e's power.’ hat Pasternak a chieves his The whole exchange between with marvellous fidelity into y. But, confronting Cordelia's I, I am,' Pasternak audaciously mplicity by reducing the six to The effect of Shakespeare's hoing vowels in the Russian, the actress to inflect her voice ng intonation. Indeed, Pastere harmony of sound and feeling Lear are ditya moyo Kordeliya, ya and Kordeli-ya have their
l for Lear. In a play that takes lities that life has to offer, he 2 anguish of Cordelia's brutal oted sensitively that Lear's last
presented "an extraordinary Hamlet and the last words of ut I would add that Lear dies hakespeare's tragic heroes and und Othello but also Brutus, non and Coriolanus. All of them
cism, I discern a partiality for the impressive in the single phrase :rence on which I have commented
o say!' I can hear a Bardolator go at all in English."

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are concerned to die fittingly,
warrior, a king, a queen; and th in their self-conscious mainter To Lear alone such considerati is wholly fixed on the body c struggle between despair and
that she could still be alive. Fr.
Howl, howl, howl! -
to his agonised recognition th;
Never, never, never, né
we are left with the sense of th with the furthest limits of huma almost in articulate, reduced to is silence.

with dignity, as befits a hero, a eir last utterances are consonant lance of the stance of greatness. ons are irrelevant. His attention of Cordelia and engaged in the hope, as he clings to the belief om his first animal cry of pain -
at she is gone for ever -
Thou'lt come no more,
2 ver, never -
he inadequacy of words to cope
an suffering. Language becomes near-dumb reiteration. The rest
2

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This monograph is a new and first published by the autho Regi Siriwardena dissents assumptions about poetry tha in the twentieth century. Dr Russian poets, he shows necessarily require met complexity. It can be fou achievements of poetic ex combines clarity, brevity language that to the superfi to be poetic at all
This study is the fruit poetry by the author as tea
poet.
 

extended version of a study nearly ten years ago. In it. from Some of the Critica
have been most influential awing on both English and hat great poetry doesn't aphorical richness and di in some of the highest pression in language that ind luminous simplicity - a reader may appear not
Off a fetime's de Voti On to her critic translator and
senses