Oh, plot developments. Plot developments, how badly we need you and yet how much we flee from your clanking boxcars. I don't want to ride that train. I just want to sit and sing to myself. I want everything to be all right.
What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn't that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnerability-and I get to hold them? That's simply insane. Inconceivable.
12
SOMETIMES I'LL SPEND an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
Swinburne didn't have that problem with email. Swinburne was remarkably prolific. In fact, he glutted the world with verse. He died in 1909, which is really the crucial year in the war between rhyme and unrhyme. Rhyme won each engagement before then. 1909 was the year, as we know, that Marinetti published his Futurist manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. Futurism became all the thing in London, among the sophisticates. A little splinter group of tough-talking converts began meeting. They called themselves the Secession Club. Some of them wrote for a certain magazine, The New Age, whose editor was a man named Alfred Orage. Orage believed that rhyme and meter were the ruff collars and doublet jackets of poetry-mere fashions, superfluities. In the Secession Club there was a man named Flint and a man named Hulme and a man named Storer. And a man named Ezra Pound.
Swinburne was the greatest rhymer who ever lived, and Futurism was the breaking open and desecrating and graffitiing of Swinburne's tomb.
How much do you know about Swinburne? Probably not that much. Tiny little guy. Nervous. Brilliant. Red hair. Loved babies, loved peering into perambulators. Wrote some exceptionally mawkish verse about babies. Deaf for the last twenty years of his life, and still writing poetry in the silence. Nobody had much to say about him when I was in college. He was like Vachel Lindsay, out of fashion. Browning? Sure. Meredith? Sure. Hardy? Sure. Dickinson? Sure. But Swinburne was not part of the big sweep.
And even now-take a look at this book. I'll block off the title so you have to guess what it is. Familiar design, I daresay. The little dude at the chalkboard? Yes, it's Poetry for Dummies. And it isn't a bad book. Do you know how hard it is to write a book like this? It's so hard. It's a terrible struggle; you fight with the Balrog through flame and waste and worry and incontinence and tedium. The Balrog of too-much-to-say. I've always liked the dummies books. I've got Photoshop for Dummies, and I learned a lot from it. The dummies' day may be passing, though. Too much yellow all over Barnes & Noble.
But now let's try something. Let's look up Algernon Charles Swinburne in the index of Poetry for Dummies, shall we? I've already done this so I know what's going to happen. But let's try it.
See that? Swinburne's not in the index. Algernon Charles Swinburne has been left out of Poetry for Dummies. And that's what I mean. Swinburne, the nineteenth century's King of Pain, the greatest rhymer in the history of human literature, has been lost to casual view. Without Swinburne, Lorenz Hart and Gershwin and Dorothy Field and the Great American Songbook would not sound the way they sound. And modernism would not have had the thrilling negative energy it had. You can't understand what all those early modern Futurist poets were in revolt against if you don't know about him. Swinburne says:
If you were queen of pleasure
And I were king of pain
Doesn't that give you a strange shudder? "If you were queen of pleasure (rest), and I were king of pain (rest),"
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.
Pretty good, eh? What is it? It's a four-beat line-three beats and a rest. Good with an inevitable step-slide of goodness to it.
Swinburne loved the old playwrights, where everyone ends up sprawled in a bloody heap. Once when he was drunk at the British Museum, he had some sort of seizure and cut his head and had to be carried out unconscious and bleeding by the guards. He had a decent shot at the poet laureateship, since he was far and away the most gifted living poet, but he didn't make it. Tennyson died and he, Swinburne, was quietly not chosen. Tennyson was morbid and strange, but Queen Victoria had been able to straighten his collar. And Tennyson had obliged by flipping on all the spigots and filling tankards with blank verse about King Arthur and the Round Table. But Swinburne couldn't be cleaned up. His collar couldn't be straightened. He was too strange, too sexually unaligned. One of his poems had to be printed with asterisks in place of half a stanza. All about "large loins."
What he could do was rhyme better than anybody. Deaf? Didn't matter. He heard what he needed to hear. Not only did he rhyme, he danced new dance steps while he rhymed. He mixed rhythms in a way nobody had done before. He was good at a certain kind of crooning, singing pulse, with the rhymes coming poom, pom, ching, chong. Nobody else came close to him in this. His sound was everywhere. It was trance music. It went around and around in your brain.
A land that is lonelier than ruin,
A sea that is stranger than death
Far fields that a rose never blew in,
Wan waste where the winds lack breath
Try writing your own couplets or rondeaus or what-you-wills after you've spent a day reading Swinburne. It's not easy. Louise Bogan was swimming in Swinburne's music when she began. Archibald MacLeish said in a letter that he'd gotten Swinburne in his head and couldn't get rid of him. Sara Teas-dale said Swinburne had invented a new kind of melody. John Masefield said he was possessed by Swinburne and by Swinburne's teacher, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Even Ezra Pound started off by writing Swinburne imitations-till he turned on him. A. E. Housman said that Swinburne's rhyming facility was unparalleled: "He seemed to have ransacked all the treasuries of the language and melted down the whole plunder into a new and gorgeous amalgam." You can hear Swinburne muttering behind the curtain in Dylan Thomas-"Altarwise by Owl Light" is a drunken version of Swinburne.
And Swinburne's big problem was that he wrote way, way, way too much. Any selection from his poetry is just a hint of the fluently tumbled profusion. Every song, every poem that he wrote was fully five times as long as it should have been. The rhymes and chimes kept coming. Internal, external. That's why he's so important to the twentieth century. Swinburne was like the application of too much fertilizer to a very green lawn.
THAT HAPPENED to one of my neighbors, Alan. Alan lives on the far side of Nan. His lawn glowed-it was a perfect malachite green. No weeds, uniform blade density, always mowed to the right height. He thought a lot about it. He tolerated my lawn, but I suspect that it made him unhappy. My lawn has weedy areas, pussy clover, dandelions. Roz told me that's what it's called, pussy clover. She knows the names of many plants. I let some of it grow tall because I like it. But Alan wanted his grass pure.
About five summers ago, Alan applied some kind of special very expensive fertilizer. He thought: This is going to take my lawn to the next level of lushness. But it must have been a bad bag, because a week after he applied it you could see big brownish yellow patches where something had gone wrong. The patches spread. They merged. Alan's lawn died. For two years after he applied it, the turf glinted like gold Brillo pads. There was no green left in it, and when you walked on its edge, it made a crunching sound of death. I don't think even the earthworms were alive underneath.