March 2010

In my pondering of the nature of poetic thinking, I have found many clues in ancient poetry—clues not only to how the thinking moved in ancient spells and charms, prayers and curses, tales and tragedies, but also to how poetic thinking works in our own time. Now that I have interrupted my promise of worms with the winged slayers thereof in my last post (birds—which we do not think of as “heroes”), here at last are the worms I had in mind:

In his paper “From Dragon to Worm” (pp. 519-24) in How to Kill a Dragon, Calvert Watkins turns from his analysis of the ancient formula “man kills dragon (or serpent)”—which seems to take every possible form, including inversions and negatives, in a wide variety of ancient poems—to a displacement of the hero’s slaying onto other kinds of beasts. Watkins reiterates that simply putting man-slaying and beast-slaying next to each other is itself “a traditional Indo-European theme, closely associated with the basic formula” of “man kills dragon.” The poetic formula of human slaying, in other words, can be of beasts that are not monsters, as when a man slays an ox or sheep for sacrifice to gods. (And in some other variations the human hero may become the monster.) Slaying is found throughout ancient poetry (and of course all the rest of poetry, too) as one of the actions most characteristic of human beings. Oxen and sheep were among the most frequently sacrificed animals in ancient cultures, whether killed singly or in extravagant numbers (the full range includes one animal or a Greek hecatomb—one hundred oxen; or, at one end, the modest but potent slaying of a cock, as for Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, and at the other, the horse—horse sacrifice being “the principal Indo-European kingship ritual,” p. 265).

In addition to prayers at such sacrifice, and charms against dragons and snake-monsters, there were also charms against worms “as a symbol of disease.” The worm, real or symbolic, as miniature snake, is a monster, too. This monster is within us, though, and somehow it must be defeated within us, even though it cannot even be seen, much less slain by heroic force. The sacrifice of a worthy animal to gods in a plea for aid against calamity, including illness, cannot be undertaken every day. A charm for a healing ceremony must be tried, and in some cultures can suffice.

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The poet Heidy Steidlmayer wrote to me after reading my post on “An interest in what’s (really) old” (Feb. 24). She reminded me of the chapter in Watkins that I mention above. As she put it, making a balletic leap from the worm to words themselves:

Here, the epic struggle of man vs. dragon takes its most interior (and perhaps darkest) turn—how to kill the dragon within us—the wyrm, the worm, the disease and ultimately, the death. And language itself is the “bana” or “slayer” of old, in a battle where words must incant a cure (to kill the dragon within us, but not by killing) and extract from language its promise to bring that which is invidious to the surface so that the worms “will out” as it were (ascending layer by layer – as if by their own accord). (And the worms rise to the surface I imagine, as if the words were a long rain.) It is almost as if the implicit reasoning of these worm charms is that the slaying of such an adversary (death, disease) were impossible without language’s uncanny ability to join “bone to bone, blood to blood, joint to joint” as evinced in another spell to heal serious wounds. Watkins also notes that “the poetic device common to most of these [worm charms] is the (perennially attractive) rhyme ‘red’ : ‘dead’ (roet : toet, roet : doet, etc.).” And I have to wonder—does the pattern and variation of rhyme somehow further this correspondence of bone to bone?

Steidlmayer then quotes the Old Saxon (preserved in a 10^th-century manuscript) charm that Watkins offers as one of his examples:

gang ût, nesso, mit nigon nessiklînon, ut fana
thema marge an that bên, fan theme bêne an
that flêsg, ut fan themo flêsgke an thia
hûd, ût fan thera hûd an thesa strâla

Go out, worm, with nine little worms, from the marrow to the bone, from the bone to the flesh, from the flesh to the skin, from the skin to this arrow.

I am reproducing here the way Watkins presents the charm, in the Old Saxon lines and then in the modern English prose. Now, I know less than nothing about Old Saxon, but I think anyone who is used to reading poetry, and especially anyone who looks at poetry from the remote past, will expect to see a rhythmic line. And it’s easy to see the syntax of the original line that is half-obscured by Watkins’ lineation, which is perhaps from the manuscript. The rhythm of the poem would go something like this, following the steps of the charm itself:

gang ût, nesso, mit nigon nessiklînon,

ut fana thema marge an that bên,

fan theme bêne an that flêsg,

ut fan themo flêsgke an thia hûd,

ût fan thera hûd an thesa strâla.

(Go out, worm, with nine little worms, / from the marrow to the bone, / from the bone to the flesh, / from the flesh to the skin, / from the skin to this arrow.)

It’s a rhythmic ritual chant in breaths of five or four beats.

If the worm would come into view, then the arrow could slay it. Or perhaps the meaning goes another way, too. Several months ago the poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. sent me a copy of her first book manuscript, A Nest of Arrows. It has a kinship with Steidlmayer’s work, in that Gray’s is saturated with images from ancient archeology and poetry, just as Steidlmayer’s work is saturated with ancient word history and forms. And in fact Gray uses this very charm from Watkins for a close adaptation:

To Cure

Deep in your marrow-lair, worm, hear me.

Bore, marrow-worm, through his bone.

Bore through bone into his meat.

Swim through that meat to his cold skin.

Then leap, worm, out of him into

The warm iron tip of my arrow.

*

The metaphorical worm is the deadly miniature of the dragon that appears so often in the human imagination, from ancient myths and legends to present-day films (as when Kadmos founded Thebes; or when St. George killed the dragon; or when Beowulf, long after having already killed the monster Grendel and Grendel’s monster mother, killed and was killed by a dragon; or when St. Martha tamed a dragon; or when the serpent in the Garden of Eden—who since he has not yet lost his legs would be something like a dragon—neither killed the first man nor was killed by him, but instead brought him and the first woman to ruin by persuading them to act in defiance of Jahweh, and then was not killed by Jahweh but transformed into a legless creature and condemned to the eternal enmity of human beings. The variations on the formula HERO-SLAYS-DRAGON are many.

In the spell to defeat illness, Steidlmayer sees that the worm within the human being—worm as image of monsterhood in miniature—might be either physical or mental (spiritual). This suggests in turn that the serpent in Eden represents—especially since it can talk—the insidiousness of monsters within us that draw us away from what we would otherwise consider to be right actions. Churchill’s “Black Dog” of depression, too, was a kind of dragon, just as much as is the insidious crab of cancer.

And this in turn suggests to me that Gray’s poem and Steidlmayer’s sense of the original charm touch subtly on the idea that the demons with which one is sick can of course poison another. Families can truly be poisoned when one monstrous adult dominates by damaging others, and we still use spells (that is, language) to try to defeat those demons within—prayers, intense talk, readings of holy books and therapeutic guides, mottoes and mantras that steady us against others and against what attacks us from within ourselves…

Gray, who has studied shamanism, writes to me that “Arrows are used as offensive weapons against demons and as protection (René Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet)—you shoot them off in the _____ [insert even number here] Directions and the demons flee.” However, she adds, there are some other things that can be done with arrows, in shamanic cultures. “For example, shamans in Sibera [see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism] teach us how to use an arrow to cure in another way: place sick person in tent; tie one end of red silk thread to end of arrow; through open door of yurt, tie other end of red silk thread to birch tree (or branch) in courtyard; have someone hold a horse near the tree. The assumption is that the person is sick because one (or more) of his or her souls has gone on a walkabout. The shaman’s ritual recalls the soul to its rightful owner—the horse will be the first to notice the soul’s return to the branches of the tree (that’s how you tell it’s back). The soul runs from tree branches through thread into arrow-tip and then back into body.”

Or, “you can also place the arrow-tip into foods or other things that the sick person loves. This draws the soul back to the sick person’s body.” And, “after a Tibetan shaman has pulled an illness out of the body with an arrow, he will also open his hand to show a worm or other object to demonstrate what he has “sucked out of the body of the patient” (Oracles and Demons).

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For me, it’s especially important to say that while such cures are thought, by those who practice or depend on them, to depend on gods, spirits, and shamans, the poetry, the poetic practices and effects, of the verbal charms, do not. The poetic elements of charms and spells, prayers and songs, proverbs and traditional phrases, are inherent as opportunities or capacities in language itself, and poetic practice simply makes trained, focused use of them. Even in our contemporary world, this linguistic resource is one, albeit only one, of several aspects of poetic authority, and represents one source of poetic power. But this particular source is, I believe, the primary one, as it is intrinsic to how we human beings use language, how our brains process it and how our minds and hearts attend to it.

As I mentioned in the last post, sometimes I like to take a long view of poetics.  It helps me see most clearly some elements of poetry that arise from the nature of language itself—not only from culture (except in the longest possible time frame) and from the qualities of any particular language.  And this in turn helps me see more clearly the cultural elements in poetry, so I won’t take them for granted as somehow natural or inevitable.

Pondering a poetic element, learning how to notice it, I can then think about how it is used, or not, in the poetry being written now, in the USA or anywhere else where English is the language, or one of the languages, of poetry.  I have learned a little about how to take such a long view by translating poetry in ancient Greek, but all that is required, really, is reading about ancient poetry even if one does not have the language, and reading the same poems in multiple translations and not only questioning those translations but also allowing oneself to be questioned by the poem.

Taking the long view makes me completely dependent on the intervening existence of every bardic performer who memorized huge numbers of lines, episodes, formulas, genealogies, and dependent also on every successive form of the book and of the written word generally—on scribes and monasteries, libraries and archives, librarians and archivists, the individual persons who in private life preserved family papers, on commentators and scholars, editors and philologists, print and electronic media.  So of course I value enormously the conserving impulse through all of recorded human history–not only for its own sake, but also because it testifies simply but eloquently to (among other things) the value poetry has held in the thought and feeling (“minds and hearts”) of people… everywhere.

I somehow feel that if I can do nothing else, then I can be, I should be, in solidarity with all present and future readers and poets, as well as with those in the past; together we create an archive of human possibility—of language, thought, and feeling, of articulations of lived experience–that is a crucial part of the realness of the world.  As Muriel Rukeyser famously said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”  (Well—I think we have to say our world is made of both; there can’t be stories across the universe unless there are, in some other infinitesimally small outposts like our own, other articulate creatures  who have hunted and howled and sung across their planetary equivalent of our grasslands—I’ll come back to grass, below.)

“Poetry as what has been memorably thought,” a good friend summed up, a few mornings ago at breakfast in a nearby diner.  “Yes… True… Thought,” I replied.  But also, I had to add, an utterance that is shaped poetically, and so has the memorability of sound and shape—nothing necessarily fancy—and even more important, is working at thought, or exuberant or despairing with it, in a poetic way.  And I could not resist pulling pen and paper from my pocket to write down one example (it’s not that I have very many in my head) of the most ancient kinds of poetic thinking, of making things memorable (this example is from Calvert Watkins’ book, which I have mentioned in several posts, including the last one).  Like a lucky, river-smoothed, odd-shaped pebble, this is something I wanted to show to my friend, a scholar of linguistics who works with prose—it’s a phrase I keep in a mental pocket: “Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.”

These words are still sung by schoolchildren here and there to some traditional tune or other.  The phrase is a tremendously deliberate arrangement, produced perhaps by some combination of a trained poetic practice and a bit of intuitive fiddling that perfected it after it had first come into consciousness in some less perfect form.  Or it was shaped into its compact perfection by the generations who sang it—no poet required. Or both.  The arrangement of the words is deliberate in a very longstanding way, since the poetic devices that structure this old phrase are still in use in our daily speech and our poems, without our being aware of them.  Watkins says that this tiny “masterpiece of the Indo-European poet’s formulaic verbal art,” even though it may be only a few hundred years old, “could perfectly well have been periodically and continuously re-created on the same model, over the course of the past six or seven thousand years” (p. 47).  And in fact, Watkins cites many very ancient phrases from far-flung cultures that include the word, and thus the cultural importance, of barley—alerting us to the fact that there is an important thought within the pretty words.

Watkins’ book—which I consulted right after breakfast that day to see if I had forgotten anything when showing this pebble to my friend—tells me that I left out only one element of the ones he lists.  (I do hear it, but it must have been too subtle for me to remember in my excitement—yes, little things like this, I find exciting—because I didn’t stop, that morning, to listen quite carefully enough.)  “Peas” and “beans,” Watkins says, are linked to each other phonetically not only by the repeated vowel sound (which I did point out to my friend), but also by the labial stop—the sound we make by first closing our lips then pushing out our breath—that we hear in the p and the b.  (And “barley” produces the third, culminating, labial stop in the phrase, I notice now.)

Also, as Watkins showed me, some time ago, and as I showed my friend that morning, the structuring and emphasizing devices, which so clearly mark the phrase as highly deliberate, include the long o in “oats” and “grow,” creating a pleasing sense of completion, of closing the line as it began (a tiny “ring composition”); that repeated long e in “peas” and “beans” that marks them sonically (a “phonetic figure,” i.e., one of the many types of rhyme, in this case called assonance) as especially well chosen; the repeated b in “beans” and “barley” (ditto, in this case called consonance or alliteration); the repeated s’s in the first three words (consonance again); the placement of the only two-syllable word as the end of the series of four items (following a rule, “Behaghel’s law of increasing members,” that holds that most often in a series of words in such polished utterances the word that is longest is placed last); and most wonderfully, the fact that oats and barley are cereals, whereas peas and beans are legumes, and so the agricultural sense of this nursery-song phrase is that it is like “an Indo-European agricultural prayer, harvest song, or the like.”  That is, the beautiful structure of this sentence or verse is not only the device of its memorability but also the sign of its seriousness and the highly compressed  manner of verbal interplay in which it thinks.

I would add to Watkins’ list two additional poetic elements: the repeated open vowel at the ends of the last two words—another phonetic figure, which in this case gives the end of the utterance yet more persuasive shapeliness; and the strong rhythm of the four beats on “oats,” “beans,” “bar-,” and “grow,” and the lovely syncopation against that rhythm of the emphasis on “peas.”

On-line (thank you, archivists of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries CE—and all others!) a web search finds the song in a nano-second.  One site explains, “Written By: Unknown, Copyright: Unknown”; another tells me it is number 1380 in the Roud Folk Song Index.  The chorus is:

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow,

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow,

Can you or I or anyone know

How oats, peas, beans, and barley grow

The mesmerizing (and, to my inward ear, strangely calming), effect of the great line is so great that it suffices as nearly the whole chorus.

We might wonder why, in contrast, a dull dead metaphor like “at the end of the day” has proved so memorable—uttered constantly by politicians, television news commentators and so-called pundits, and so many others, and why we may even hear ourselves saying it.  It is no beautiful thing, like “oats, peas, beans, and barley grow,” but in fact it has a poor poetic shape that makes it a mentally convenient way of giving emphasis to some ongoing process or other.  But its great appeal lies, I think, in how it uses a few song-gestures for strength precisely because it is so far  from song, so far from the real world of real oats, peas, beans and barley.  Instead, like advertising, it uses a bit of poetic authority in order, ever so slightly, to coerce.  It implies some underlying attitude or other that expects to be correctly in favor or in opposition.  I leave it to you to spot its poetic elements (my friend saw three).

And I think that this phrase must also be an unconscious response to something about our cultural moment—the last few years, anyway, in which this tediously repeated phrase has become an ineradicable meme of public speaking.  Perhaps it is also subtly symbolic (poetry again) as a subtly idealizing (and thus subtly self-justifying) allusion to a time when the end of the day was the end of toiling in farm fields (oats, peas, beans and barley) or leaving the factory, when work had been completed and there would be time for leisure and conversation with friends and family—when the day was not—for most people—the nearly undifferentiated 24 hours of fear-and-fantasy media, work shifts, apprehension, things to do….  I remember a small-town insurance agency calendar from 1947, bought in the 1990s in a second-hand shop of old curios; all the pages of the months were still attached, and the illustration had the title “The End of a Perfect Day.”   It was a color lithograph of an idyllic, small, family farm: as the sun sets in the distance, beyond the tilled fields, a young woman and little girl are standing inside a broad open gate, and the girl is waving, as a young man rides in through it on his simple green tractor.

(And in the New York Times of March 3, in Olivia Judson’s blog on science and biology—this time on grasses and grasslands—she happens to list the grains that  have so influenced the co-evolution of animals and human beings, in this order: “Rice, wheat, rye, oats, maize, millet, barley, sorghum and sugar cane are all grasses.”  I am guessing that Behaghel’s law of increasing members, which I mentioned above, is called such because we follow it without even being aware we are doing so—note that Judson lists the one-syllable names first, then the two-syllable ones, ending that group with the one that has the longest vowel-and-consonant combinations, and then ends the whole sequence with the only three-syllable name, “sugar cane.”

And if we break her prose sentence into lines, we can see the underlying rhythm of speech and perhaps even thought, sometimes, in English:

Rice, wheat, rye, oats, maize,

millet, barley, sorghum and sugar cane

are all grasses.

If I put a comma after “sugar cane” and rearrange the last three words as “all are grasses,” then the iambic rhythm of English is allowed to flower at the last moment, and in fact we have a little poem of three lines—one of five strong beats, the next of five metrical iambic feet, and the last of two.   And there are phonetic figures, including the repeated long a at the ends of lines 1 and 2.  Perhaps, having altered Judson’s careful prose line in only the tiniest way, if we were then to offer it as poetry—the ancient kind that aids memory and yet at the same time speaks of a culture (in this case, ancient human culture in general)—then it might be a useful formula for remembering the grasses that made possible the co-evolution of plains, grazing animals, and human beings, who hunted the animals, domesticated some of them, and domesticated the grasses to yield more nutrition.  Eventually there were towns, festivals, dancing, storehouses filled with barley, sieges, and poems.

Next, with the help of another friend, I will consider worms.  I suppose that was inevitable.

(to be continued)