Angels and Insects (41 page)

He had changed it. He had felt the first reading gave a wrong impression. He believed his trance
did
mean that he was whirled up and rapt into the Great Soul, of which perhaps both Arthur and himself were a part. They had talked together of the reasons why Dante’s
Inferno
was so much more compelling than the
Paradiso
, and had decided that it was to do with the inescapably sensuous nature of language, of words, which were breath, and tongue, and teeth, and the motions of this warm scribe my hand over the white paper, leaving its black trail. He
wanted
Arthur to be like the Beatrice of Dante’s Paradise. He imagined Arthur saying,

And quickly, quickly, the life of the poem itself slipped into the truth of qualification.

But it was not Beatrice, but the doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, whose intertwined souls in their glimmering hellish flame
had roused such pity, such sensuous pleasure, in generations of Dante’s readers.

The life of his poem was in the ease of the white cows and the field in the dark arms of the trees. He was proud of the good phrase ‘matter-moulded forms of speech’—that said in a nutshell what he wanted to say about the stubborn body of language, and so of his poem, Arthur’s poems. Now
‘mould’
was a good word, it made you think. It made you think of the body of this death, of clay, of things mouldering away. It was art, it was decay. Not only cunning casts in clay, he had written in his moments of doubt about the magnetic tics of the fleshly brain, though elsewhere he had added to his idea of ‘what
is
’ a pair of potter’s hands:

Mould, mouldering. God livening the clay, God, or whatever it was, breaking it all down again.

That was a wonderful line, he thought, the terror of that eye seeing simultaneously the mould from which the green tree was moulded which contained the seeds of its own mouldering; there was in a few words the terror of mortality and meaningless eternity. ‘And lo, thy deepest lays are dumb / Before the mouldering of a yew … Whose fibres net the dreamless head, / Whose roots are wrapt about the bones.’ He had made some delightfully poignant images of his own poetic cries of grief as things natural as birdsong, the trill
shaped in the feathered throat, ‘short swallow-flights of song that dip / Their wings in tears and skim away.’ ‘I do but sing because I must, / and pipe but as the linnets sing.’ One step away, the song of the creatures, from the despair of an infant crying in the night, and with no language but a cry.

He made yet another stab at the buttons, moving his beard out of his own way, where hairs were caught in his blunt fingers, in the white bone of the button. The spirit does but mean the breath. It was a long time since he had been moved to go over all that in his head like that, fighting old battles, suffering old pains. O last regret, regret can die. Regret was like himself, it stiffened and ached, it responded less quickly to stimuli; Arthur was gone so far away, and his regret and himself were moving towards Arthur, or towards annihilation,
pari passu
, less fluent than they had been, more sullen when they heard the call. That wasn’t the whole truth, the truth was that both he and Arthur had seeped into his poem, had become parts of its fabric, a matter-moulded kind of
half-life
he sometimes thought it was, something not independent, but not part of each, not a handclasp, but a kind of vigorous parasite, like mistletoe on dying oaks with its milky berries and its mysterious evergreen leaves. He had had all sorts of worries and wicked thoughts about his poem. Perhaps he was using it to keep alive a memory and a love it would have been stronger and more manly to let lie. Perhaps he was in some wrong way
using
his beloved to subserve his own gain, his own fame, or more subtly, making something fantastically beautiful out of the horror of Arthur’s dissolution, which it would have been wiser, more honest, to stare at in dumb and truthful uncomprehending pain, until its hurtful brightness either faded like a fire eaten away, or caused him to drop his own eyes. You could not make a man into a poem, neither the singer nor the sung, neither the rippling throat nor the still corpse.

And yet, and yet, and yet, if there was one thing he knew, it was that his poem was beautiful and alive and true, like an angel.
If the air was full of the ghostly voices of his ancestors, his poem let them sing out again, Dante and Theocritus, Milton and the lost Keats, whose language was their afterlife. He saw it as a spinning circular cage in which he was a trapped bird, a cage like a globe, rimmed with the bright lines of the horizons of dawn and dusk. He saw it as a kind of world, a heavy globe, spinning onwards in space, studded with everything there was, mountains and dust, tides and trees, flies and grubs and dragons in slime, swallows and larks and carrier-birds, raven-glossed darkness and summer air, men and cows and infants and violets, all held together with threads of living language like strong cables of silk, or light. The world was a terrible lump of which his poem was a shining simulacrum. The world burst and slid and expanded into shapelessness of which his poem was a formally delightful image.

He was afraid—terribly afraid—of the temptations of overvaluing Art. Art was what came to him easily and furiously; he knew
the temptation to work wildly without a conscience or an aim, singing away like the Nightingale. His friend Trench had told him in Cambridge with Apostolic seriousness and humorous rallying both together, Tennyson, we cannot live in Art!’ He had written The Palace of Art’ for Trench and Hallam, in which he had described his own Soul, for whom he had built a lordly pleasure-house, a high tower on a high crag, where she could sit proudly,

saying,

But his fantasied soul had been cast down from her tower into a nightmare world, and he himself had told Trench fervently, The god-like life is with man and for man’, and sent him his allegory with a dedicating poem saying,

There it came again, the clay and the mould and the moulding. You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was. As a young boy he had been struck by one of his father’s books which told how Gabriel and the angels compassionated the earth’s distress at her fear of being involved in man’s offence. The angels had kneaded the clay into human form in forty
days. That was one of the sources of his interest in mould and moulding. There were others, of course. Watching his father preside grimly, trumpet-tongued and not always uninflamed by brandy, at burials in Bag Enderby and Somersby. The clay on the walls of the graves, sliced by the sextons’ shovels, wet with rain. (He himself had added the tears of the angels.) Now there was Darwin, grubbing away at the life of the earthworm, throwing up mould and humus all over the place. Of the earth, earthy, humankind. But also, all the same, the round of green, the orb of flame, existed. Arthur had liked the Nightingale in his poem on the
Arabian Nights
, ‘Apart from place, withholding time’ in its singing. And the Nightingale had found its defiant voice in his poem for Arthur. It was there in opposition not only to the birds drawn down by the charming serpent, but to the nicely innocent, ‘I pipe but as the linnet sings,’ or the idea of language and song as a sad narcotic, dulling pain.

The Nightingale was the secret voice of the Art Trench had told him he could not live in. Now he was old, he was somehow more tempted to live in it again, as the child had lived in the
Arabian Nights
. Sometimes he saw dearest Emily and dutiful Hallam and his thousands of admirers and sycophants and people
asking for things
as shadows racing on a hillside, and heard the voices of the invisible as the only reality.

The glory of the sum of things’ was a good phrase. He had written rhetorically—a
Shakespearian
touch—to Arthur of his

But he had made his poem beautiful with Arthur’s death, and was afraid that that very beauty was something inhuman, animal and abstract at once, matter-moulded and shadowy.

A long thought, along accustomed tracks, can pass in a flash, as though the images and conjunctions and hurtful memories and brightnesses of which it is made up are wound into a tight ball, not strung out on thread like a necklace, and are then rolled at speed all at once, through the tunnels of the brain. He had still not manipulated the button into the hole, and now gave up trying and approached the mirror with his candle, though he knew mirror-images of buttonholes could be as confusing as feeling them out. The flame, in front of the black pool of glass, bellied and flared, white and murky yellow in an unexpected draught, and he saw a dark smear of smoke running backwards over his shoulder. He put the candlestick down on the dressing-table and saw himself like a bearded demon, his eyes glittering under bushy brows, his yellow teeth bared between tendrils of hair. He saw his own skull shaping his soft flesh and its covering of stretched wrinkled skin. He saw the huge bone-pits inside which his eyes were dark reflecting brilliants—wet jellies, he said to himself, pitying his thinning lashes, studying the caverns of his nostrils. He saw his invisible breath curl out of his mouth, and disturb the candle-flame, send wavering loops into its stream of smoke. It came in uncontrolled flickerings and jets, the little light. The spirit does but mean the breath.

This decaying, handsome face peers at me. He touched its cheek. Icy. The body of this death. He said to it, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson.’ Neither of them, the looker inside his warm motion, the ghostly cold starer, were what everyone thought of as Alfred Tennyson. ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ he said, and then faster, more nervously, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ unmaking both of them with every naming of this nothing, this incoherent and terribly brief concatenation of nerves and mind. Pitying his white throat, the skin as innocent as a baby’s below the shirtline, he finally did up the button, with peg-fingers that no longer belonged to him. The whole room, all space, was turning vertiginously round him. He fended off himself with a movement of his arms, flattening the flame with the sleeves of his nightshirt, making a stink of singed cloth and wax-fall. He staggered across to his bed and fell awkwardly into it, aware that he was not losing consciousness but was losing himself. His feather mattress shifted and billowed under his bones, his brain-box sank into the feathers of his pillow that shifted and sighed. He was a sack of bones borne up on a sack of plucked plumes. He was light as air, he was light and air. The voices sang and sang. He had been afraid, sickly afraid of this loss of coherence in youth, had suffered fit after fit of falling-sickness. First the too-bright aura, then the dizzying fall and the howling, like the Soul in the Palace of Art. He had written a poem,
The Mystic
, in 1830. He remembered, line by line: