300
PARTISAN REVIEW
Afternoon gilds all the silent wires
Into a burning music of the eyes.
On mirroring paths between those fine-strung fires
The shore, laden with roses, horses, spires,
Wanders in water, imaged above ribbed sand.
Inspiration
The hard work evinced in these examples, which are only a
fraction of the work put into the whole poem, may cause the reader
to wonder whether there is no such thing as inspiration, or whether
it is merely Stephen Spender who is uninspired. The answer is that
everything in poetry is work except inspiration, whether this work
is achieved at one swift stroke, as Mozart wrote his music, or whether
it is a slow process of evolution from stage to stage. Here again,
I
have to qualify the word 'work,' as I qualified the word 'concentra–
tion': the work on a line of poetry may take the form of putting a
version aside for a few days, weeks or years, and then taking it up
again, when it may be found that the line has, in the interval of
time, almost rewritten itself.
Inspiration is the beginning of a poem and
it
is also its final
goal. It is the first idea which drops into the poet's mind and it is
the final idea which he at last achieves in words. In between this
start and this winning post there is the hard race, the sweat and toil.
Paul Valery speaks of the
<une ligne donnee'
of a poem. One line
is given to the poet by God or by nature, the rest he has to discover
for himself.
My own experience of inspiration is certainly that of a line or a
phrase or a word or sometimes something still vague, a dim cloud
of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words.
The peculiarity of the key word or line is that it does not merely
attract, as, say, the word 'braggadocio' attracts. It occurs in what
seems to be an active, male, germinal form as though it were the
centre of a statement requiring a beginning and an end, and as
though it had an impulse in a certain direction. Here are examples:-
A language, of flesh and roses
This phrase (not very satisfactory in itself) brings to my mind a
whole series of experiences and the idea of a poem which I shall per–
haps write some years hence. I was standing
in
the corridor of a
