Bertolt Brecht
The following are a few comments on a poem by a wirter of above average talent, in which it seems to me that a fine subject has been ruined by disregard of the rules of logic. Another way of putting this would be to say that the poet’s emotional involvement was not sufficiently deep and consistent for some thorough, compelling logic to bring his poem into equilibrium. The poem in question is Fritz Brugel’s ‘Whispering Song’, published in Das Wart, 1936, no. 1.
1
We are not seen, we are not known
we wear no badges.
The enemy’s cunning does not burn us,
he cannot reach us.
2
We are not caught, we are not heard,
we do not live in the light.
The enemy’s hatred does not destroy us
the network of silent cells.
3
We go on spinning our threads,
the net grows ever tighter,
from town to town, from place to place
despite hangmen, prisons, judges.
4. We are like breath, air and wind,
the enemy cannot catch us.
He stares until his eyes are blind
and only feels that we are maturing.
5
Those who today in the greyness of the twilight
are digging the narrow paths:
they have nothing, they have nothing,
they will have everything.
The image of ‘burning’ is not a happy one. The reader can choose if the enemy’s cunning leads to our being burned, or consists in our being burned. A brief check shows the first alternative to be unacceptable. It would be possible to speak of cunning if the enemy were to succeed in burning us despite the fact that we are invisible and wear no badges; if not, it is we who are cunning. If the poet meant to say ‘even the enemy’s cunning’, then the ‘even’ should not have been omitted. There is nothing cunning about burning us, or if there is the poem does not go into it. A particularly sensitive reader would find something disturbing in the near-juxtaposition of ‘The enemy’s cunning does not burn us’ and ‘We do not live in the light’. But even the least sensitive must reject ‘We do not live in the light’ as an explanation ‘why we are not heard’. In the case of such identically constructed lines as ‘The enemy’s cunning does not burn us’ and ‘The enemy’s hatred does not destroy us’ it is essential that the second line should show a more marked progression than that from cunning to hatred. What is really bad, however, is the fact that after ‘does not destroy us’ and, worse still, ‘does not burn us’, whose effect is prolonged because of its vividness and its similar position in stanza 1, a sudden accusative should be hitched on, viz. ‘the network of silent cells’. It turns the accusative ‘us’ in ‘destroy us’ into a sudden dative. Nor is the silence of the cells happy, since ‘we do not live in the light’ remains the over-all explanation of the whole stanza. ‘Drak’ cells would have been better, though not all that beautiful maybe.
The spinning of the net in stanza 3 likewise contains disturbing elements. After a certain amount of thought it becomes clear that ‘the net grows ever tighter’ is an interpolation (and ought accordingly to be between brackets). Read naively, the net grows tighter from town to town. (In which case, ‘from place to place’ can and should be dispensed with). A point of detail: the ‘ever’ in line 2 here is banal. I say ‘here’ advisedly, because the over-all tone is not naive enough, nor is the sentenced place in a setting whose refinement would give it a special quality of simplicity.
‘And only feels that we are maturing’ is the most unfortunate line in the entire poem. ‘Maturing’ is an utterly flimsy psychological expression, and it has banal repercussions on the spinning of the net. The whisperers acquire biological characteristics of the most nebulous kind; presumably maturing ‘politically’ is what is meant. But this is something that is never developed in the poem. And what is going to happen once we have matured? Will the enemy then see us? If so, why? How do breath, air and wind mature?
The last stanza completely abandons the net-spinning image and goes over to that of digging narrow paths. There is no preparation for the (repeated) ‘they have nothing’; ‘nothing’/’everything’ has little to do with the digging of narrow paths. As for the shifts of imagery (burning, nets with threads and cells, breath, air and wind, maturing, twilight, path-digging), legitimate as it is for the poet to indulge in this he has absolutely got to cut each individual image off, and must not let them blend into one another. In a short poem like this it is impermissible to keep a particular image going (‘we do not live in the light’ and ‘in the greyness of the twilight’) while at the same time swapping one subsidiary image for another (net-spinning for path-digging). And the maturing of the net-spinners interferes with the thickening of the net.
The last stanza completely abandons the net-spinning image and goes over to that of digging narrow paths. There is no preparation for the (repeated) ‘they have nothing’; ‘nothing’/’everything’ has little to do with the digging of narrow paths. As for the shifts of imagery (burning, nets with threads and cells, breath, air and wind, maturing, twilight, path-digging), legitimate as it is for the poet to indulge in this he has absolutely got to cut each individual image off, and must not let them blend into one another. In a short poem like this it is impermissible to keep a particular image going (‘we do not live in the light’ and ‘in the greyness of the twilight’) while at the same time swapping one subsidiary image for another (net-spinning for path-digging). And the maturing of the net-spinners interferes with the thickening of the net.
Over-fluent shifting of images might be termed ‘stream of imagery’ on the analogy of ‘stream of consciousness’. The images in question are mainly of the most superficial kind. It is a process whereby certain of the poet’s associations go itno his verse unfiltered. The burning in 1 is no doubt derived from the burning of the books. The maturing of stanza 4 rests, as I have said, on some kind of maturing ‘politically’. The expression ‘A network of silent cells’ involves bulldozing an optical image into acoustic one (neither nets nor cells can talk).
At first reading the poem is attractive but has no force. It doesn’t greatly matter whether one says that it lacks force because its logic is shaky, or that its logic is shaky because it lacks force.
On Picking Poems to Pieces
In so far as he appreciates poetry, the layman normally takes strong exception to what is known as picking poems to pieces: applying cold logic to those delicate, bloom-like structures and plucking words and images from them. Against this it must be said that even flowers don’t fade when one cuts into them. Poems, when they are capable of life at all, are quite remarkably so and can stand the most drastic surgery. A bad verse by no means utterly destroys a poem, anymore than a good one utterly redeems it. Spotting bad verses is the obverse side of the faculty without which there can be no such thing as a genuine ability to appreciate poems, namely that of spotting the good ones. Sometimes a poem calls for a very little work, sometimes for a lot. The layman who maintains that poems are unapproachable forgets that though the poet may be inviting him to share his own insubstantial moods, such as they are, their formulation in a poem is job of work, and the poem itself something fleeting that has been held fast, in other words something comparatively material and massive. Anybody who maintains that the poem is unapproachable really has no chance of approaching it. Half the pleasure is to apply standards. Pick a rose to pieces, and every petal is lovely.
Poetry in Context
I skimmed a small volume of Wordsworth’s poems in Arnold’s edition. Came on ‘She was a phantom of delight’ and reflected on this now remote work and on the dangers involve in laying down the law. Even such labels as ‘petty-bourgeois idyll’ are hazardous. There are indeed some petty-bourgeois tendencies which are directed towards the perpetuation and consolidation of the petty-bourgeoisie as a class, but within the petty-bourgeoisie there are also other kinds of tendencies that conflict with those. The individual pretty-bourgeois currently patrolling the English countryside equipped with a shotgun and a Molotov cocktail (as used against tanks in the Spanish Civil War, so a general assured us on the radio), has up to a point legitimate enough grounds for blaiming his Wordsworth; yet it is just in dehumanized situations like these that
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament
helps to conjure up other situations less unworthy of the human race. Certainly ours is a time when the poem no longer serves ‘to haunt, to startle, to waylay’. Art is an autonomous sphere, though by no means an autarchic one. A few points: possible criterion for the work of art: does it enrich the individual’s capacity for experience? (An individual, perhaps, who goes ahead and is overtaken by the masses moving in a predictable direction.)
It may enrich the capacity for expression, which is not the same as the capacity for experience but more like a capacity for communicating. (Perhaps the questions is to what extent the How is linked to What, and the What bound up with specific classes.)
Poetry is never mere expression. The absorption of a poem is an operation of the same order as seeing and hearing, i.e. something a great deal less passive. Writing poetry has to be viewed as a human activity, a social function of a wholly contradictory and alterable kind, conditioned by history and in turn conditioning it. It is the difference between ‘mirroring’ and ‘holding up a mirror’.
-- Brecht, Bertolt. Bertolt Brecht: Poems 1913-1956. eds Willet, John and Ralph Manheim. USA: Mathuen Inc. 1979. pp 477-483
