MR ROUSHAN’S STOMACH

Evening Star, Issue 21642, 10 February 1934, Page 2

MR ROUSHAN’S STOMACH

[Written by Panache for the * Evening Star.’] Although ‘ A Shropshire Lac’ and ‘ Last Poems,’ in green cloth or mulberry leather, are the most companionable of pocket volumes, making scarcely a ridge under a pillow and weighing no more in a rucksack than two dried apricots, the author remains aloof. We gather that he loves the English countryside and that he likes beer, but he does not write confessions nor use up much space in ‘ Who’s Who.’ We imagine a retiring professor, classical and fastidious, a noble stoic with a bracing pessimism. He leaves the impression of being one of those Englishmen who always keep their form, and, although he is growing old, we could never picture him like J. Alfred Prufrock, with the bottoms of his trousers rolled. So remote had I imagined A. E. Housman that I was shocked on reading ‘ The Name and Nature of Poetry,’ the Leslie Stephen lecture delivered by him last year in Cambridge, to find him talking familiarly to the audience about his stomach. Not’ his broad brow, nor his palate, but bis stomach. For Housman believes that the fount of poetry is physical rather than intellectual. He tells how, some years ago, a request came from America that he would define poetry. He replied that he could no more define it than a terrier can define a rat, but he thought they both recognised the object by the symptoms it provoked in them. He gives examples of the symptoms by which he recognises poetry. First, he quotes the words used by Eliphaz the Temanite to describe his sensations when the spirit passed before his face; “ The hair of my flesh stood up.” So Housman dares not let a line of poetry stray into his mind while he is shaving, lest his razor cease to act. Another symptom of the presence of poetry is a constriction of the throat and a rush of water to the eyes, while to describe the third the critic borrows' the phrase which Keats used of Fanny Brawne: “Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation, Housman adds, is" the pit of the stomach.

It seems that the poets, unsportingly, are hitting below the belt, and the viscera are coming into their own again. Sir Philip Sidney never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas without his heart being moved more than with a trumpet. Whether he located his sensation above the diaphragm from conviction or from a sense of what is becoming in a court poet we cannot tell. That the heart is not the only traditional seat of the emotions he would know from those Old Testament heroes who record that their bowels moved within them. When Wordsworth snvs that the meanest flower that blows gives him thoughts that do lie too deep for tears, he also may have been making a polite indirect allusion to his stomach.

The objection to the physical test of poetry is that it is a material test. It is easy to visualise a laboratory in which a man’s, susceptibility to poetry will be measured accurately. “ Lycidas ” will be administered, and the acceleration of the heart beats recorded. It would be fun, of course, when it came to detecting the cultural snobs, watching them writhe under the arrows of hundreds of lines from the juvenile Wordsworth, seeing their eyes water at the name of a poet, not at his poetry. There would be saliva tests in this laboratory, and ‘ Endymion ’ would be taken like a bismuth meal. One difficulty about the pit of the stomach as the seat of poetic appreciation is the extreme delicacy of the organ. Xo one can bear constant and acute abdominal stimulation. Hearts are different, having greater elasticity, and being fashioned so that spears may go through them. But prolonged stimulation of the pit of the stomach ends in misery and a milk diet. It would be necessary to leave high poetry and spend a few weeks on doggerel until the nerves were quietened. But the old familiar lines, fortunately, no longer pierce like spears. The first time we heard them, perhaps they did, but now the multitudinous seas incarnadined roar always in our ears and lap gently at our sides. Honey dew and barges burning on the water and Argive nightingales, having gone through us once like spears, are now assimilated and have become part of us. The poetry of Blake provoked in Housmau “ unreasonable excitement in some region deeper than the mind,” and probably the tribute that Housman himself would most appreciate would be a sensation in the stomach of his reader. Vet, when I read “ the chestnut casts his flambeaux ” my excitement does not reach the pit of the stomach. By the time 1 come to . The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail any excitement that has escaped the eyes and throat is concentrated in the muscles under the chin, keeping the head erect. “ The half-moon westers low, my love,” has not reached the stomach. There are other organs in the wav, and the heart catches at the line as it sinks. Though ‘ Eight O’Clock ’ may be expected to send a shiver down the spine, most of Housman’s poetry belongs to the class that brings a lump to the throat and a rush of water to the eye. And, as Hou.sman asked of Milton’s ‘ Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more,” what in the world is there to cry about? It is natural that few voices can remain steady to the end of We’ll to the woods no more, The laurels all are cut, but why weep at He hove the Cross to heaven and sank The pole-star underground. ‘ A Shropshire Lad ’ and ‘ Lust Poems,’ besides provoking physical symptoms, tease the mind. Housmau, in his revolt from intellectual verse, praises poetry that is pure, unadulterated by meaning. He finds the mean-

ing of some of Blake a poor foolish disappointing thing in comparison with the verses themselves. It is generally admitted that good poetry can communicate without being understood, but is poetry any the less poetry because it has a meaning? Are the eye and the spine and the stomach the only judges? .Must we confine our admiration of Air A. K. Housman to his stomach, and forgot his scrupulous, detached, ironical mind?.