296
PARTISAN REVIEW
when it performs impeccably in itself? ... This baton is far
from being an external, administrative accessory or a distinctive
symphonic police which could be done away with within an ideal
state . It is no less than a dancing chemical formula which in–
tegrates reactions perceptible to the ear. I beg of you not to
regard it merely as a supplementary mute instrument, invented
for greater visibility and to provide additional pleasure. In a cer–
tain sense this invulnerable baton contains within itself all the
elements in the orchestra.
As ever, Mandelstam writes jubilantly and persuasively. Far from
being perceived as the mouthpiece of an orthodoxy, Dante becomes
for him the epitome of chemical suddenness, free biological play, a
hive of bees, a hurry of pigeon flights, a flying machine whose func–
tion is to keep releasing other self-reproducing flying machines,
even, in one manic extended simile, the figure of a Chinese fugitive
escaping by leaping from junk to junk across a river crammed with
junks, all moving in opposite directions. Dante is thus recanonized
as the sponsor of impulse and instinct - not an allegory-framer up to
his old didactic tricks in the middle of the journey, but a lyric wood–
cutter singing in the dark wood of the larynx. Mandelstam brings
Dante back from the pantheon to the palate, subverts the age-old
impression that his work was written on official paper, and locates
his authority not in his cultural representativeness, his religious
vision or his sternly unremitting morality, but rather in his status as
an exemplar of the purely creative, intimate, experimental act of
poetry itself.
All the same, as I warm to this theme, a voice from another
part of me speaks in rebuke. "Govern your tongue," it says, compel–
ling me to remember that my title can also imply a
denial
of the
tongue's autonomy and permission. In this reading, "the govern–
ment of the tongue" is full of monastic and ascetic strictness. One
remembers Hopkins's "Habit of Perfection," with its command to the
eyes to be "shelled," the ears to attend to silence and the tongue to
know its place:
Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders corne
Which only makes you eloquent.
