22
PARTISAN REVIEW
Because
I
do not think
Because
I
know
I
shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because
I
cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
Davie hadn't much to say about that passage, except to mark how elab–
orately the lines are interwoven by end-rhymes and by similarities of
grammar and syntax. Syntax works like rhyme
to
establish a further
relation of likeness. For once, Davie isn't explicit, but he seems to think
that an interweaving as pronounced as this is like music because it keeps
all the relations within the passage, it doesn't let any force of reference
escape from the lines to a world outside. He didn't make anything of the
displacement of attention, in the poem, from nouns to conjunctions–
"because," "although"; from main to subordinate clauses; the post–
ponement of main verbs-"strive to strive"; the proliferation of present
participles-"twisting," "turning," "drivelling," "restoring"; or the
motif of "between" in the fourth part.
Davie's brief comment wasn't much help to me in reading "Ash–
Wednesday," and as
I
was a young man seeking all the help
I
could get,
I
looked abroad and found it in
I.
A. Richards,
F
R. Leavis, and Eliot
himself. Kenner's
The Invisible Poet
had not yet been published.
v.
RI CHA RDS MUCH ADMIRED "Ash-Wednesday" and thought it "better
poetry than even the best sections of
The Waste Land."
His reason for
this high valuation was that "Ash-Wednesday" shows "still less 'dread
of the unknown depths'" than
The Waste Land
does. Richards had in
mind, and quoted, the passage in
Lord Jim
about the wisdom of sub–
mitting oneself to the sea, the destructive element.
In
Coleridge
011
Imag–
ination
he has two pages on "Ash-Wednesday," mainly concerned with
the process of reading the poem and avoiding the distraction of settling
for a conceptual meaning. He didn't believe that the meaning of a poem
was a statement to be formulated at the end or in addition to the expe–
rience of reading it. The meaning and the experience are one and the
same. Richards urged on the reader "a receptive submission, which will
perhaps be
reflected
in conjectures but into which inferences among
these conjectures do not enter." His attitude was much the same as
Eliot's, in the Preface to his translation of St.-John Perse's
Anabase:
there
