34
PARTISAN REV IEW
the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each
constituent is not explicitly made. Opacity is not in question; we move
without hesitation or distress from one indeterminacy to the next, not
stopping to ask what precisely the posterity of the desert is or the fruit
of the gourd. But the passage is not mellifluous, nor does it make undue
concessions to the Christian readers it may be supposed mainly to
address. Anglican
eillfiihlullg
is not appealed to. The propriety of the
passage is in the cadence, the distinctive movement of a mind conscious
of itself and conscious, too, of its obligation to the Lady, the Beatrice–
figure, and of the Virgin to be approached indirectly through the Lady
who honours her in meditation.
x.
NOT SURPRISINGLY,
the attribute of El iot's work that Davie regarded as
most reprehensible was its susceptibility to incantation and the "audi–
tory imagination." We avoided quarreling about it only because
I
couldn't think of any arguments that would persuade him. He was
exasperated by this part of the ninth chorus from
The
Rock:
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal
ImpreCIsions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place
of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of
incantation.
Davie thought it a scandal that lines that recognized the evil of verbal
imprecisions and approximations should end by recommending the
beauty of incantation. He hated talk of verbal magic or Pure Poetry. So
he was appalled to find Eliot appearing to take Poe's poetry seriously
and letting it get away with a cult of pure sound.
It
has the effect, Eliot
said in "From Poe to Valery," of "an incantation which, because of its
very crudity, stirs the feelings at a deep and almost primitive level."
Almost primitive, maybe; but "deep" and "because of its very crudity"?
Surely not. Any mind that recognizes the crudity is immune to Poe's
magic. Eliot went on to insist that "in even the most purely incantatory
poem, the dictionary meaning of words cannot be disregarded with
impunity, " but Davie thought the harm was already done .
It
is true that
