SEAMUS HEANEY
295
might involve some attention to the logical, theological and
numerological significances which devolve from the number three,
there being three Persons in the Holy Trinity, three lines in each
stanza of
The Divine Comedy,
three canticles in the whole poem,
thirty-three cantos in each canticle, and a rhyme scheme called
terza
rima.
All this can press upon the mind until Dante is gradually con–
ceived of as some kind of immense scholastic computer, pro–
grammed by Aquinas, and printing out the triadic goods in response
to whatever philosophical, metrical and arithmetical data it has been
fed. Dante, in other words, is often studied as the great example of a
poet whose tongue is governed by an orthodoxy or system, whose
free expressiveness is under the strict control of a universe of rules,
from the rules of meter to the commandments of the church. Now,
enter Mandelstam. Nothing, he implies, could be further from the
truth . The three-edged stanza is formed from within , like a crystal,
not cut on the outside like a stone . The poem is not governed by ex–
ternal conventions and impositions but follows the laws of its own
need. Its composition had all the spontaneity of a chain reaction, of
an event in nature:
We must try to imagine , therefore , how bees might have worked
at this thirteen-thousand faceted form, bees endowed with the
brilliant stereometric instinct, who attracted bees in greater and
greater numbers as they were required . ... Their' cooperation
expands and grows more complicated as they participate in the
process of forming the combs, by means of which space virtually
emerges out of itself.
I
This is extraordinarily alive and persuasive, one felicity in a work of
disconcertingly abundant genius, the greatest paean I know to the
power which poetic imagination wields . Indeed the tongue, which I
have been employing here as a synecdoche for that s;ame power, is
analogous in this context to the conductor's baton as it is reimagined
by Mandelstam. His
hommage
to the baton is too long to quote in full,
but this extract should suffice to show how deeply structured in all
our thinking is this idea of imagination as a shaping spirit that it is
wrong to disobey :
Which comes first, listening or conducting?
If
conducting is no
more than the nudging along of music which rolls forth of its own
accord, then of what use is it when the orchestra is good in itself,
