Poet versus Abstract Noun: An Agon

Abstract

statements are combined with illustrative particularities, and second, that it contains patterning factors that do not pertain to or impinge upon the logic and syntax of the particular authoritative statement it makes (389). We can summarize this by saying that the This content downloaded from 157.55.39.219 on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:05:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 782 NEW LITERARY HISTORY poem contains images, and has form. This is of course obvious, and Booth, being a sensitive critic, realizes that he then needs to show some of the subtle, complex, even hidden of imagery and of form? which he does, supplementing his account of meter and rhyme scheme (the most obvious patterning factor) with patterns established by the relationship of the meanings of the words?meanings that are irrelevant to the sentences they appear in, but pertain to the general topic. This introduces a fertile and ingenious exploration of irrelevant meanings that surely enter . . . into a reader's understanding of the and never touch . . . his consciousness even to the extent that rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration do, culminating in the undercurrent of frivolous sexual suggestiveness (391). As we all know, there are not many complex words18 that do not hide a sexual meaning somewhere among their meanings, so it is not difficult for Booth to point out the sexually suggestive elements while insisting that the poem is not elaborate dirty joke masquerading as a grand statement of grand (392). This is ingenious but unconvincing: it comes close to praising the poem for what it does not mean. To disinter excluded possible meanings of the words of a poem is merely to observe that it is written with ordinary words, including complex words with many possible meanings; and finding an elaborate dirty joke as a possible interpretation of a grand statement of principle is exactly what it is often easy to do in the case of bombast. The situation seems to be as follows. Booth knows that this is a great poem, and knows it would be easy to describe it in terms that would also apply to bombast. He offers two relevant replies?that it handles sonnet form well (obvious), that it illustrates abstractions with images (obvious, but then explored with some subtlety)?and one ultimately irrelevant reply, that the words it uses are so rich in meaning that they could be taken in quite other ways to construct a counterpoem of bombast. Booth's is the most scrupulous discussion I know of this sonnet, and the one that bears nearest upon the argument of this essay; but we can learn something further by placing it next to J. W. Lever's, which offers two points of particular interest. First, Lever points out that the opening lines recall the words of the service: If any of you know cause or just impediment why these persons should not be joined together.19 This links the abstractions marriage and impediments, and indi rectly as well, to a particular situation, by casting the speaker as the bystander at a wedding who does not wish to object. A possible identification of the speaker is floated before us, and for a moment the poem is behaving as if it came from a play. The second, and more interesting, element in Lever's discussion can be approached by way of Wilson Knight, who writes: His was to him the inmost centre and This content downloaded from 157.55.39.219 on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:05:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms POET VERSUS ABSTRACT NOUN 783 furthest aim of all things, its value lying beyond human assessment, and then quotes is the star to every wandering bark.20 Lever, in contrast, writes love is not abstracted from the life it transcends (EL 265). There may not be a great difference between the way Wilson Knight and Lever read the poem, but the difference between their descriptions of it is crucial. A poem which shifts us from particularities to a generalization is praised by one for leaving the particulars behind, by the other for keeping in contact with them. This would mean (it is obvious that I regard Lever's formulation as preferable) that there is an analogy between the way in which abstract concepts are meaningful insofar as they derive from or influence experience, and the poetic strategies that retain verbal contact with particulars. Or, to put it in Collingwood's terminology, emotion must be expressed, not generalized about. There is no ringing conclusion to this essay. How could there be? It would have to use abstractions.