By Prof. P. S. SASTRI,
M.A., M.Litt., Ph.D.
(
Stephen
Spender represents a unique enadeavour to harmonise his social views with his innate individualism in
order that he may realise a greater and a more
refined individuality. The struggle he undertook in this direction has
necessarily made him a notable reflective poet of the last few decades. Such an
introspective attitude does not merely make him project on the mental screen
his own past. He delineates those objects which he does not seem to like. He is
repelled and yet fascinated by objects like time, fear, inhibition, weakness,
war, and death. This ambivalent attitude is evident both in his thought and in
the form of his poems. The poetic form he has adopted is a faithful mirror of
the effort of thought he feels. A process of disintegration characterised
by the slowness and deliberation of the rhythm grips the form; and it
necessitates a great attention to the placing of the words; not on their accents
or rhymes. The words are charged with imagination and his poems have thus come
to breathe more of an emotional atmosphere. Their intellectual appeal comes
only next to this. Accordingly, Mr. Spender interprets himself in the light of
others, and interprets others in the light of himself.
Thus in the poem “The Uncertain Chaos”, he suggestively advocates the
anarchist’s escape from himself into love. The same subject is handled in a
more sustained manner in “Darkness and Light”.
Spender’s
first volume, “Poems” (1933), is a record of a series of lyric situations. They
embody certain personal situations which suggest the need for a change in the
social and political relations. This effect is realised
by an absence of symbolization, by a love of quietness and simplicity and by an
emphasis on the facts of life. This emphasis tells him that only his body is
real though “wolves are free to oppress and gnaw”. Only the rose laid on his
breast by his friend is real; and only “these few lines written from home, are real”
(P. 12). In a number of the “New Verse” in 1937, Spender wrote: “I was always
interested in politics...I think he (Auden)
disapproved of my politics, just as, at that time, he disapproved of
my writing prose or going to concerts to hear classical music.” This is not a
simple and plain interest in politics, but a conscious effort at reconciling
communism and individualism in poetry. Political theory here becomes a myth. It
is made to live in and through the imaginative patterns and emotional rhythms as
something that flows like blood in the body. Spender, therefore, is
obliged to insist on certain values of reality which his theoretical
intellect has given him. And he thus sets forth to embody the disintegration of
the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois aesthetics. This twofold disintegration is
represented in a subtle and complicated manner, with the result that
the atmosphere of his poems is one of struggle.
In
his first volume of poems there are the beautiful lines addressing the young
men:
“Oh
young men, oh young comrades,
It
is too late now to stay in those houses
Your
fathers built where they built you to build to breed
Money on money. It is too late
To
make or even to count what has been made.” (P.44)
Here we have the
expression of a forceful and passionate propaganda which gives up a pure
theoretic endeavour by rendering the idea more
concrete or sensuous. Thus we read:
Which began with your body and your fiery soul;
The
hairs on your head, the muscles extending
In ranges with their lakes across your limbs.
Count
your eyes as jewels and your valued sex,
Then
count the Sun and the innumerable coined light
Sparkling
on waves and spangling under trees.” (Ibid)
Then he proceeds to
express the constructive aspect of this exhortation:
“It
is too late to stay in great houses where the ghosts are prisoned
Those
ladies like flies perfect in amber,
Those
financiers like fossils of bone in coal.
Oh,
Comrades, step beautifully from the solid wall,
Advance
to rebuild and sleep with friend on hill,
.Advance
to rebel and remember what you have,
No
ghost ever had, immured in his hall.” (Ibid)
This is a stirring call of one who himself was deeply moved by the idea of a social dynamism. It is a call addressed primarily to the poet himself. And without being deluded by the convictions of others over matters mundane and supramundane, he wants us to feel the pulse of human life in us and around us. Of course such an approach is bound to lead us nowhere in the long run. Yet it is undeniable that there is a profuse outflow of energy and will at the heart of some of Spender’s poems. Consider the lines:
“It
is too late for rare accumulation,
For
family pride, for beauty’s filtered dusts;
I
say, stamping the words with emphasis,
Drink
from here energy and only energy,
As
from the electric charge of a battery,
To
will this Time’s change.” (Ibid P. 68)
Energy
and will have to work in unison to realise that which
life demands. And life, for Spender, has little to do with money or even with
the supra-terrestrial values. Yet the cult of will and energy is a relic of the
Promethean spark that continues to guide and regulate human life. However,
Spender cannot speak only of will and energy ignoring the senses, a legacy of
British thought and outlook for many centuries. He turns to the senses:
“Eye,
gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker
of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear
that suspends on a chord
The
spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses.” (P. 68)
But this does not lead
us to a sensuousness with which we are all familiar elsewhere in literature.
Here we are asked to leave our gardens, feasts, suns, and heavens. Instead we
have to watch the world in its turmoil, and no spirit can seek rest here. Nor
shall any suffer hunger. And the goal is to realise
that “Man shall be Man”. This is the ‘programme’ outlined by Spender, and it is
one that brings life to the exploited. Man, says Spender, stands in need of
liberation from the internal and from the external as well. This liberation is
not a simple breaking away of the economic and social orders; nor is it a
rebelling against the age-old human ideas. Spender’s emotional experience
carries him away from his prosaic convictions. Under the grip of imagination he
reveals his inmost mental make-up as that of a Liberal. He cannot forget
humanity and the human or individual values. The ‘programme’ of this poem
embodies his humanitarian pacifism.
Tradition
and revolution have something fundamentally in common; and Spender attempts at unravelling the similitude in a poem wherein Day Lewis saw
“a successful attempt to re-establish communion with the past, a minor miracle
of healing. And it takes the form of ancestor worship”, This
is the poem that begins with the lines:
“I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns Endless and singing.” (P. 45)
That
which is “drawn from ageless springs” is the precious thing and it is not to be
forgotten. It is this that enables “the flowering of the
spirit” which makes an eternal “demand for love”, And
the essence of tradition is summed up in the lives “of those who fought for
life and who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre”. At the same time Spender realises the futility of a mere backward look; and in the
poem called “The Funeral” we hear that the scholars that mourn “the decline of
a culture” are merely those “who dream of the ghosts of Greek boys” (P. 52),
Time is the great factor to be reckoned with, for Time which is solitary “is
like a rocket” that bursts “from mist”, though “Time will leave us” (P, 66).
“Time’s progress will forget us even here” for our bodies will be “rejected
like the beetle’s shard” (P. 67). Time’s flag is too great and it is as
crushing as the vastness of Space, for already “we are forgotten on
those stellar shores” (P. 67).
With
thoughts like these Spender is bound to be a little depressing though not dull.
Yet he has something to compensate for the loss he sustains. He might tell us
that
“The
outward figure of delight
Creates
no warm and sanguine image
Answering my language.” (P. 60)
But
he has confidence in a principle which has been the dominant one in the life
and thought of many an anarchist. This principle appears in lines like these:
“Observing
rose, gold, eyes, an admired landscape,
My
senses record the act of wishing
Wishing
to be
Rose, gold, landscape or another.
I
claim fulfillment in the fact of loving.” (P. 21)
The same thought again
creeps into the beautiful lines:
“Let
the elements that fall make me of finer mixture
Not
struck from sorrow, but vast joys, and learning laughter.” (P. 63)
To
these sanguine flights Spender employs all the manifold activities of modern
life as the starting points. Imagery from contemporary industrial life has been
rendered natural and poetical in the delightful little poem, “The Express”. The
last three lines give a graphic account of the Express, an account surcharged
with the poet’s own deep convictions:
“like a comet through flame she moves entranced
Wrapt in her music no
bird-song, no, nor bough
Breaking
with honey buds, shall ever equal.” (P.
54)
This
daring thought is not a mere conceit. It expresses the deepest conviction of
Spender. It is a thought that records the beauty and the melody of a purely
industrial product, a product that has evoked contemptuous outbursts from
others. Unlike those pacifists who reject the industrial civilisation, Spender
accepts it only to shift our emphasis on that which the other anarchists do
accept. Hence it is that in “The Landscape near an Aerodrome” (P. 55-56), he
can speak of the “charted currents of the air”, of chimneys looking “like lank
black fingers or figures frightening and mad”, of “squat buildings” appearing
“like women’s faces shattered by grief”.
The
long poem, “
“The
Still Centre” ([939) is another collection of Spender’s poems where the poet
consciously resists all attempts, as he states in the Preface, “to dwarf the
experience of the individual….For this reason, in my most recent poems, I have
deliberately turned back to a kind of writing which is more personal, and I
have included within my subjects weakness and fantasy and illusion”. Most of
the poems here refer to the Spanish Civil War, and the outlook represented
therein is thus explained by Spender himself: “As I have decidedly supported
one side–the Republican–in that conflict (Spanish Civil War), perhaps I should
explain why I do not strike a more heroic note. My reason is that a poet can
only write about what is true to his own
experience….Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which
something felt is true.” It is therefore evident that Spender could not avoid a
defeatist outlook which hovers round his Spanish poems. He cannot have hatred
and animosity, with the result that he cannot express his indignation or love
as much as one might wish.
The
lyrical effusion here has expressed itself in many delightfully effective
poems. One such poem is on “An Elementary School Class-Room in a Slum”:
“All
of their time and space are foggy slum
So
blot their maps with slums as big as doom.
Unless,
governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
This
map becomes their window and these windows
That open on their lives like
crouching tombs
Break, O break open, till they break
the town
And
show the children to the fields and all their world
Azure
on their sands, to let their tongues
Run
naked into books, the white and green leaves open
The history theirs whose language is the sun.”
The influence of
Rousseau’s ideas on childhood and of the thoughts and expressions of the
individualists are traceable in this poem which abounds in free rhythm and
thought.
In
all his utterances on death, we catch a glimpse of Spender’s attitude to life.
In “Thoughts During an Air Raid”, we read:
“The
essential is
That
all the I’s
should remain separate
Propped
up under flowers, and no one suffer
For his neighbour.”
Spender here as elsewhere
adopts not a community point of view, but an individual one in looking at the
war. Thus he speaks of two armies at night:
“a common suffering.
Whitens
the air with breath and makes both one
As though these enemies slept in each other’s arms.”
This
is a reaction against the new-fangled apotheosis of the society as against the
treatment of man as a man, as an individual. Spender is alive to the grandeur
and majesty of man as man, and to the insignificance of man in modern society.
So in the Spanish War, he could say:
“I
gather all my life and pour
Out its love and comfort here.
To
populate his loneliness,
And
to bring his ghost release,
My
love and pity shall not cease
For a lifetime at least.”
The
poem entitled “The Human Situation” is a valuable document concerning Spender’s
idea of the individual. He enumerates his foes and fears. But there is a
genuine pride of self behind every syllable:
“And
if this I were destroyed,
The
image shattered,
My
perceived, rent world would fly
In
an explosion of final judgment
To
the ends of the sky,
The colour in the iris of the
eye.”
Then he proceeds to a
willing and rational acceptance of the self:
“Here
I am forced on my knees,
On
to my real and own and only being
As into the fortress of my final weakness.”
This
is the logical outcome of all anarchist doctrines inasmuch as they have to
stress the individualist outlook and emphasise the
human values which are unalterable. These values affect human life profoundly.
When an individual becomes aware of these values, he turns inward, becomes a
pacifist, and believes in the divinity of love which arouses the dynamic
personality into action. The poem “Ultima Ratio Regum” is thus an emphatic expression of Spender’s dynamic
personality; and he takes refuge in a pacifism which is based on the individual
values:
“The
guns spell money’s ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hill side.
But
the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was
too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He
was a better target for a kiss…..
Consider
his life which was valueless
In
terms of employment, hotel ledgers, new files.
Consider.
One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask.
Was so much expenditure justified
On
the death of one so young and so silly
Lying
under the olive trees, O world, O death?”