i
hag belonging to the lower world, like Hecate and the witches in
Macbeth. Graves would say that the eloquence and power of the
Campion poem I just read you was the result of the fact that it
evokes this white goddess in one of her most frequent aspects:
the sinister witch in hell gloating over the murdered bodies of
her lovers. By saying it's the only story worth telling in literature,
Graves means that the great types of stories., such as comedies
and tragedies, start out as episodes from it. Comedies derive
from the phase in which god and goddess are happy wedded
lovers; tragedies from the phase in which the lover is cast off and
killed while the white goddess renews her youth and waits for
another round of victims.
I think myself that Graves's story is a central one in literature,
but that it fits inside a still bigger and better known one. To explain what it is I have to take you back, for the last time, I hope,
to the desert island and the three levels of the mind.
You start, I said, by looking at the world with your intellect
and your emotions. Occasionally you have a feeling of identity
with your surroundings—'I like this'—but more often you feel
self-conscious and cut off from them, I mentioned Robinson
Crusoe opening his journal and ledger: all he had to put into
his ledger were the tilings against and in favour of his situation,
and perhaps now we can see why he thought it was important
to record them. If you were developing an imagination in your
new world that belonged to that world, you'd start off something
like this: I feel separated and cut off from the world around me,
but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I
hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go
away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often,
of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or
the Hesperides, or a happy island kingdom in the Atlantic, how
that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it
back again. I said earlier that this isfa feeling of lost identity,
and that poetry, by using the language of identification, which is
metaphor, tries to lead our imaginations back to it] Anyway,
that's what a lot of poets say they're trying to do. Here's Blake:
The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative; it is an attempt
to restore what the ancients called the Golden Age.
20
THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION
Here's Wordsworth:
Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main—why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was? ...
I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation.
Here's D. H. Lawrence:
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find
the Hesperides.
And here's Yeats, in his poem Sailing to Byzantium, which has
given me the title I have given to this talk, The Singing School':
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the
framework of all literature. Inside it comes the story of the hero
with a thousand faces, as one critic calls him, whose adventures,
death, disappearance and marriage or resurrection are the focal
points of what later become romance and tragedy and satire and
comedy in fiction, and the emotional moods that take their place
in such forms as the lyric, which normally doesn't tell a story.
We notice that modern writers speak of these visions of sacred
golden cities and happy gardens very rarely, though when they
do they clearly mean what they say. They spend a good deal
more of their time on the misery, frustration or absurdity of
human existence. In other words,[literature not only leads us
toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state
from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away
The Singing School
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