Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for You As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurped town, to another due, Labor to admit You, but O, to no end; Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lovèd fain, But am betroth’d unto your enemy. Divorce me, untie or break that knot again; Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. John Donne Can “old” poems, written in a vanished culture, be rescued for a contemporary reader, or will their brilliance be lost? I will fasten my hope here on John Donne’s spectacular fourteenth sonnet of his Holy Sonnets, published posthumously in 1633. But what are we rescuing in such a case? A statement? A fragment of autobiography? A portrait? Yeats, the finest poet of the twentieth century, offers an answer that seems to me the true one: a lyric poem is a simulacrum of a succession of human moods, conducting us through their rapid transitions and self-contradictions. The melody of the poem enters the reader invisibly, as if it were a transfusion. Yeats, an intense absorber of English poetry from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, had to ask himself, for his own instruction, what it was about certain past poems that made them endure. Since the passage of time tends to make prose — essays, sermons, philosophies, manifestos — decay, why should we prize past poems at all? Is a poem published in 1633 as outmoded for us as the theology or the science of its era? Yeats argues that only one trait of human life is universal and recurrent in all human beings: the experiencing of moods over a lifetime. Our general terms for emotions are boring: “I’m depressed,” “I was so glad.” Experiencing a mood, however, is not boring at all: it is enlivening; it tells us that we are alive. (Robert Lowell observed in a letter that “a poem is an event, not the record of an event.”) Yeats dismisses both intellectual culture and natural phenomena as fundamental sources for poetry, claiming instead that only the moods are eternal, always formidably present everywhere and in all times, and recognized by each generation of human beings. The moods are “fire-born,” generated not from the material levels of earth, water, and air, but from a deathless fire, the invisible energy that sustains life. The moods are neither calm nor obedient: to the soul they are “a rout,” an ever-present and uncontrollable throng of disturbing visitors. Here is Yeats’s tiny two-beat poem on that overpowering and rebellious and memorable throng: The Moods Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out; And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; What one in the rout Of the fire-born moods Has fallen away? Answer: not one. Not a single mood, Yeats believes, has ever been lost from the repertory of personal consciousness, whether registered in human beings or reflected in poems. Contemporary readers recognize without effort every mood in Shakespeare’s sonnets: moods of infatuation, love, disgust, dismay, anger, wonder, meditation; moods sublime and shameful, trivial and tragic, coursing surprisingly in and through our own veins. In “Poem,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, on seeing an old painting, “Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!” She had been there before. To Yeats, a lyric poem exists because of the poet’s felt compulsion to trace the contour of the complex, invisible, shifting, alarming, and passionate moods constantly pressing on human beings from infancy on, and continuing (unceasing in variety and unpredictable in evolution) until death. The fierce obligation to animate the human moods on paper through a template of sonic form is an urgent one to poets, but they find the task an almost impossible one, since moods are so distinctly shaded in idiosyncratic fashion. My mood of melancholy may bear a “family resemblance” to yours, but it will manifest itself, linguistically speaking, in a different pacing, an unfamiliar scene, a new minor key, legato in lieu of staccato, syncopated rather than regular — and if its conceptual and melodic expression in language does not become an experience for the reader, the poem has failed as the unique internal energy-transfer it must aim to become. To rescue a lyric poem of the Western past is to feel how deeply we have already encountered its human moods, although this may be the first time we have seen them illustrated in just this shading, at just this pace, with just this degree of unnerving precision. Poets exhibit a set of moods indescribable by any generality. In a poem we watch a blurred interior contour take on a distinct face, which turns out to be our own: “Heavens, I recognize the place!” At that point we can voice the words as if they have been born in us. The poets may be making distinctions that we have never made, but as soon as the words create a dynamic life in us, we are struck by their accuracy. Shakespeare, for instance, will offer a taunting definition of a certain inscrutable form of behavior, and complex though it is, we shiver and recognize the species of persons who toy with the emotions of others while themselves remaining, in a chilling sense, impeccable. Such a definition, in its obliqueness, is far from one we could have composed ourselves, but as we read Sonnet 94, we miserably recognize Shakespeare’s portrait of such seducers — They that have power to hurt but will do none, Who do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow… The pain in the lines transmits a lover’s struggle to express — but in
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence