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I have a knocker
from unprotected gardens
I thump on the board
and it prompts me
with the moralist's dry poem
yes-yes
no-no
PARTISAN REVIEW
Herbert's poem ostensibly demands that poetry abandon its
hedonism and fluency, that it become a nun of language and barber
its luxuriant locks down to a stubble of moral and ethical goads.
Ostensibly too, it would depose the tongue because of its cavalier in–
dulgence and send in as governor of the estate of poetry a Malvolio
with a stick.
It
would castigate the entrancements of poetry, sub–
stituting in their stead a roundhead's plainspoken counsel. Yet odd–
ly, without the fluent evocation of bells and gardens and trees and all
those things which it explicitly deplores, the poem could not make
the bleak knocker signify as potently as it does. The poem makes us
feel that we should prefer moral utterance to palliative imagery, but
it does just that, it makes us
feel,
and by means of feeling carries
truth alive into the heart - exactly as the romantics said it should.
We end up persuaded we are against lyric poetry's culpable absorp–
tion in its own process by an entirely successful instance of that very
process in action: here is a lyric about a knocker which claims that
lyric is inadmissible.
All poets who get beyond the first excitements of being blessed
by the achievement of poetic form confront, sooner or later, the
question which Herbert confronts in "A Knocker" and, if they are
lucky, they end up, like Herbert, outstripping it rather than answer–
ing it directly. Some, like Wilfrid Owen, outface it by living a life so
extremely mortgaged to the suffering of others that the tenancy of
the palace of art is paid for a hundredfold. Others, like Yeats, pro–
mulgate and practice such faith in art's absolutely absolved necessity
that they overbear whatever assaults the historical and contingent
might mount upon their certitude. Richard Ellmann's statement of
the Yeatsian case is finally applicable to every serious poetic life:
He wishes to show how brute force may be transmogrified, how
we can sacrifice ourselves . . . to our "imagined" selves which of–
fer far higher standards than anything offered by social conven–
tion.
If
we must suffer, it is better to create the world in which we
