MAKING OF A POEM
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train passing through the Black Country. I saw a landscape of pits
and pitheads, artificial mountains, jagged yellow wounds in the
earth, everything transformed as though by the toil of an enormous
animal or giant tearing up the earth in search of prey or treasure.
Oddly enough, a stranger next to me in the corridor echoed my
inmost thought. He said: "Everything there is man-made." At this
moment the line flashed into my head
A language of flesh and roses.
The sequence of my thought was as follows: the industrial landscape
which seems by now a routine and act of God which enslaves both
employers and workers who serve and profit by it, is actually the ex–
pression of man's will. Men willed it to be so, and the pitheads,
slag-heaps and the ghastly disregard of anything but the pursuit of
wealth, are a symbol of modern man's mind. In other words, the
world which we create-the world of slums and telegrams and news–
papers-is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.
Although this is so, it is obviously a language which has got outside
our control. It is a confused language, an irresponsible senile gibber–
ish. This thought greatly distressed me, and I started thinking that
if the phenomena created by humanity are really like words in a
language, what kind of language do we really aspire to? All this
sequence of thought flashed into my mind with the answer which
came before the question:
A language of flesh and roses.
I hope this example will give the reader some idea of what I
mean by inspiration. Now the line, which I shall not repeat again, is
a way of thinking imaginatively.
If
the line embodies some of the
ideas which I have related above, these ideas must be further made
clear in other lines. That is the terrifying challenge of poetry. Can I
think out the logic of images? How easy it is to explain here the poem
that I would have liked to write! How difficult it would be to write it.
For writing it would imply living my way through the imaged experi–
ence of all these ideas, which here are mere abstractions, and such an
effort of imaginative experience requires a lifetime of patience and
watching.
Here is an example of a cloudy form of thought germinated by
the word
cross,
which is the key word of the poem which exists form–
lessly in my mind. Recently my wife had a son. On the first day that
I visited her after the boy's birth, I went by bus to the hospital. Passing
through the streets on the top of the bus, they all seemed very clean,
and the thought occurred to me that everything was prepared for our
