SYMBOLISTS' AIM IN POETRY

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22391, 11 April 1936, Page 4 (Supplement)

SYMBOLISTS' AIM IN POETRY

Ambitions of the Moderns

By EDITH M. BUCHANAN

rpHE MODERN POET, or any poet, is obscure to the general reader because a poet is a creator or maker. This implies that something original is made. Where, then, does the poet find his patterns'! A Dutch scientist, a member of the Royal Society in the reign of Charles 11., wrote to the society Baying that he had discovered in the lens of a bee's eye a pattern of a honey-comb cell. That vision left the bee no alternative; his life was conditioned. Does the poet, as Plato suggested long ago, have access to a metaphysical world of ideas or patterns? Is he inspired? Does he see visions limited and determined ? The greatest of modern French poets, Paul Valery, calls that metaphysical world of patterns "the magma of the Universe." He tells us that in the world's usual plodding progress toward knowledge and wisdom, a great poet is sent at times who is worth, say, ten thousand years; that he leaps those boundaries of time and space. Such a poet may reveal his secret by means of a statue or a picture or an obstruse calculation of delicate equipoise or a theme of music. Assembling of Sensations The same poet reminds us that in Nature there are noises only; that the ear of the individual is the Aeolian harp whose strings give forth to us those notes round as raindrops that the nightingale pours into the air. On the other hand, the musician hears the music of the storm, of fountains, of the movement of the heavenly bodies, and interprets such hidden beauty to our dull ears. The symbolist poet in his turn tries to interpret to us a "psychological experience" which to his delicate sensibility has been an assembling of sensations, of colour, perfume, sound, light, darkness, abysmal depth, height, interfused melodiously as notes melt into chords and resolve themselves into a musical phrase. This fluidity or interfusion is called by the modern poet "musicalisation." The beautiful and familiar rites of religious ceremony were used freely by'j Baudelaire, equally with the symbols from occultism or black magic to express "psychological experiences" of profane love. But in spite of this desire for freedom of soul at all costs he was | prisoned in the "plastic," he could not | rid himself of it. // Beauty and Truth I

The sea, the sky, the horizon where both mingle, their interchangeableness, their mutability, the awfulness of the abyss, the serenity of the blue dome, the mirrored reflections of the heavenly bodies, the might of the ocean, the infinitude of the sky—all have been seized in the mind of man, comprehended, made his own. From them ho li«g learnt something of Beauty or is it Truth? What a magma of patterns are there in Protean form! What an infinite number of symbols! When the forerunner of French symbolist poets, Arthur Rimbaud, wrote "Le bateau ivre" in his early youth, he had never been to sea, but had read Jules Verne's "A Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and the images, the vision of" Jules Verne, first spoke to him of tho freedom of the infinite, gave him wings to transcend the limitations of time and space. He sought inevitably a roaming life on sea and land, which, though conditioned by material privations, was transmuted unto such " psychological experiences " as "Illuminations" and "Saison en Such a freeing of soul from body is experienced by the Buddhist priest as a religious exercise; the reward of patient seeking after abstract "good," as the saints had their visions of a new heaven and a new earth, patterns from the magma of the L T niverse.

. . . : ~. Verbal Alchemy But the esoteric nature of poetry is not peculiar to this era. Rhythm, the vital principle of' art, restricts its language. Verbal alchemy owes something to magic; and the patterns that are B een of poets are not plastic but are fugitive and nebulous, and do not lend themselves to be caught and changed into words that would effectually give them substance. For all words, even abstract words (dead metaphors though some may be) owe their birth to some material object, such as the wing of a bird, let us say, or a wave of the sea. But the simplest words are numbers. The notes of music are numbers. When Orpheus played his lyre the stones took their places in the structure of the temple. The symbolic relation between music and architecture is evident, lhe rhythmic proportion, the harmony of a temple's structure, is as clearly defined as the notes of a chord. It can be reduced to numbers; the same law governs both. •• And that famous spiral _ staircase built by Leonardo da Vinci was, m structure, a faithful reproduction of the interior of a shell. The growth of the shell was governed by that same law, that universal law that governs tho nature of the atom, the number of its electrons.

Immeasurable Genius I ■ The immeasurable genius of Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his life in tho study of law of the universe, attracted the symbolist and lover ol numbers, Paul Valery, who became a recluse for some years to devote his time to tho study of Leonardo's unpublished notes, which included mathematical winged flights into the infinite, without the help of his abortive flying machine. Leonardo's dreams of flying were mingled with dreams of the fusion of the'arts, which were the dreams, too, of Wagner and of Nietzsche, the iorprunners and contemporaries of Paul Valery. They were exponents of tho theory that music, being non-plastic, was the consummate means of expressing sensations. Its fluidity suffers absorption. Man's soul can plunge into it as into the sea. Could language become as fluid as that? Only by the creative power of words; an assembling of sensations; which, being ethereal, are contained in /* transparent bubble-like time-space, a psychological experience," not limited Py. plastic forma.