Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
DENIS DONOGHUE
21
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
"In terms of the prose-sense of this passage," as Davie says, there is no
need for the second" fought":
The word, coming where it does, has the further effect of acting out
through syntax the dwindling and the diminution, the guttering
frustration and waste, which is the arc of feeling here being pre–
sented. The verb, energetic in meaning, and in the active voice, is
held up by the three phrases ("knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving
a cutlass, bitten by flies"), and this postponing of the issue builds
up a tension which the verb would, in the ordinary way, resolve
with all the more vigorous
eclat,
in a powerful reverberation. But
this it cannot do, having been negated from the first by that "nor"
from which it is now so far removed. Hence it has the effect almost
of parody, of a shrill and cracked vehemence.
But if Gerontion is an imagined character, personage, or persona, rather
than
T.
S. Eliot, the syntax of the passage becomes "dramatic" rather
than "subjective" and should escape Davie's interrogation. "Poetic syn–
tax is
dramatic,"
he says, "when its function is to please us by the
fidelity with which it follows the 'form of thought' in some mind other
than the poet's, which the poet imagines."
The second example of syntax-as-music that Davie quotes in
Articu–
late Energy
is the opening passage of "Ash-Wednesday":
Because I do not hope to turn again
Beca use I do not hope
Beca use I do not hope
to
tu rn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?
Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
