26
PARTISAN REVIEW
I believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most
nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure. I think
that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical
analogies: the result might be an effect of artificiality; but I know
that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first
as a particular rhythm before it reaches expression in words, and
that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image; and I
do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself. The use
of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as
to
music. There are
possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development
of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibili–
ties of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements
of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal
arrangement of subject-marcer. It is in the concert room, rather
than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may be quick–
ened. More than this I cannot say.
It
is well documented that many of Eliot's poems began as hardly more
than a fragment of rhythm, perhaps not as fully present as a Wagnerian
leitmotif, which he felt impelled to enact if only in a few arbitrary
words. Several of these fragments would stay in that condition for
months, perhaps years, but gradually a few new words would suggest
themselves as companions for the words in place. More gradually still,
a structure would suggest itself in which some if not all of the fragments
would cohere: not a jigsaw puzzle but a work of gaps and transitions,
articulations and silences, repetitions, reconsiderations. The movement
of the poem would not aspire
to
a conclusion, as at the end of a play,
but to the resolution of tensions, alert to further tensions always in the
vicinity. In "Ash-Wednesday" a difficult sincerity is achieved by grace of
musical relations, dissonances and harmonies.
But the music is not the kind that waits to be fulfilled, as a libretto
waits on the composer. In "Thinking in Verse" Eliot distinguished two
kinds of "music" in verse:
One is that of the lyrics of Shakespeare or Campion, which
demand
the kindred music of the lute or other instrument; a few songs of
Shelley's, such as "Music, when soft voices die," and many songs
of Burns and Heine make the same demand.... Donne's is the sec–
ond kind of musical verse: the verse which suggests music, but
which, so to speak, contains in itself all its possible music; for if set
to music, the pla y of ideas could not be followed . His poems are
poems to be read aloud,
not
sung.
