From the Elephant's Back by Lawrence Durrell Read Free Book Online Page B

right.
    MEANWHILE.
    the poem itself is there all the time. The sum of these aspects, it is quite different to what the poet and the public imagine it to be. Like a child or a climate it is quite outside us and our theories don’t affect it in any way. Just as climate must be endured and children kept amused, the poem as a Fact must be dressed up sometimes and sent to the Zoo—to get rid of it. It is part of the ritual of endurance merely. That is the only explanation for Personal Landscape now. [1] People say that writing Poetry is one of the only non-Gadarene occupations left—but this is only another theory or aspect. Poems are Facts, and if they don’t speak for themselves it’s because they were born without tongues.

Ideas About Poems II
    1942
    The schizophrene, the cyclothyme,
    Pass from the droll to the sublime.
    Coming of epileptoid stock
    They tell the time without a clock.
    NONSENSE IS NEVER JUST NONSENSE; it is more like good sense with all the logic removed. At its highest point poetry makes use of nonsense in order to indicate a level of experience beyond the causality principle. You don’t quicken or laugh at nonsense because it is complete non-sense; but because you detect its resemblance to sense.
    Logic, syntax, is a causal instrument, inadequate for the task of describing the whole of reality. Poems don’t describe, but they are sounding-boards which enable the alert consciousness to pick up the reverberations of the extra-causal reality for itself.
    Poems are negatives; hold them up to a clean surface of daylight and you get an apprehension of grace. The words carry in them complete submerged poems; as you read your memory goes down like the loud pedal of a piano, and all tribal, personal, associations begin to reverberate. Poems are blueprints. They are not buildings but they enable you to build for yourself. Serious nonsense and funny nonsense are of the same order: both overreach causality and open a dimension independent of logic but quite real. Shakespear and Lear are twins who do not dress alike. Serious nonsense and comical nonsense have a common origin, and an uncommon expression.
    Nothing is lost, sweet self
    Nothing is ever lost.
    The spoken word
    Is not exhausted but can be heard.
    Music that stains the silence remains,
    O! echo is everywhere the unbeckonable bird! [1]

A Cavafy Find
    1956
    AN INTERESTING DISCOVERY of three hitherto unknown poems by the Alexandrian poet C.P. Cavafy has recently been discussed in the pages of Cyprus Letters by the scholar A. Indianos. [1] These poems were unearthed from an old scrapbook in the possession of the Countess Chariclea Jerome Valieri, who lives in Cyprus, and who is the daughter of Cavafy’s brother, Aristides. [2] They are the earliest known work of the Alexandrian master, and while they are not equal to the work of his maturity, they show, despite the conventional lyrical form in which they are written, touches of the true Cavafian irony and actuality: the way, for instance, in which he discusses emotions in terms of simple humble objects “the cheap cretonne dress” and the “cheap bracelets on her arms.” The word “cheap” he always uses with emotion to offset the values these shopworn objects, bodies, ears, hands, eyes, etc., represent in the eyes of the lover who invests them with his own feelings. Indeed all the grandeur of Cavafy lies in this patient, loving, miserly way of looking at objects [3] and events—reinfecting memory time and time again with the passionate actuality of something that has disturbed him—so that the resulting vibration in words become significant and powerful, and the poem as a whole comes over. Lovers of his verse will be interested in these early examples. Even though, perhaps, in their English versions, they lose something of their natural strength.
    MY FRIENDS, WHEN I WAS IN LOVE [4]
    My friends, when I was in love,
    It was many years ago
    I did not