A Day With a Poem
IF you want a day that shall combine the practical content of sport with the fine rapture of a love affair, spend it with a poem. Not some one else’spoem, of course
— your own. And it does not have to be intrinsically what the cold world calls a poem, when it is done; anything coming out that general shape and size will suffice for a day of magic. It can turn a hall bedroom into an Arthurian wood, a dingy dressing-gown into a garment of spun gold, a lonely, empty city with the glare of August on its pavements into a shining sea where love and glory will come swimming to meet you at your plunge. It is drug and drink, and no consequences,— except the poem, of course. And that is usually very small.
The first little stirring and nibbling begin while you are moving about your room before breakfast. You have had no premonition that the angel was coming to you that day: you have waked up as usual, taken your glass of water, awaited your turn at the bathtub with no suspicion of hovering wings; then suddenly you find yourself with suspended hairbrush, staring trance-like. You rouse yourself with a shake, for you do not yet believe; but presently you are off again, mouth a little open (or lips parted, if you prefer), the buttonhook dangling from limp fingers. Then you know, for the tiny nibbling has begun. The captious may claim that angels do not nibble; but they never felt a little poem stirring up and down their ribs, hunting the way out, while the glory shone around.
Breakfast is a vague dream in which the right-hand spirit knows naught of the left-hand body with its bacon and coffee, and its pitiful attempts to appear presentminded and as usual, — for to be caught in the first stage of a poem would mean a shame to which the first stage of the toilet bears no faintest comparison. You, the honorable, the truth-loving, will tell black lies rather than admit the fact when the angel of generation has descended.
After breakfast comes the struggle with conscience; for you are, of course, poor, and your regular bread-winning work awaits you. Poetry-making is a luxury to which the modern poor has no right, and that means a serious dilemma for the muse, for the God of Compensations never sets this particular angel nibbling at the prosperous, and it is only the ideas of the denied, of the sad and grubby, that are truly poetical. Still, the struggle is as brief as that of the drunkard after his first glass. In ten minutes the legitimate work on which the grocer or the landlady wait is shoved aside: you are off for a day with a poem.
Having taken the plunge, a period of cold reaction follows. To you is suddenly revealed the bald paltriness of the idea you have been nursing, the hackneyed beat of the metre it,has begun to assume: for a terrible quarter of an hour you See Truly, and know your place in the scale of Things As They Are. Perhaps you throw' it aside and take up duty, perhaps you cling to the memory that you felt just this way in the first attack on your inspired best; in either case the result is the same a quarter of an hour later — you are murmuring, “care — flare — despair,” in a mounting haze of oblivious delight.
After that there are no more cold moments. You twist and shift and beat the air with vour broken lines, and send a golden half hour after a single word, — a majestic hour has to wait upon a line. By the end of the morning you have a sheet that is all gaps and interlines, a magic scroll to which as yet only you and the angel hold the key. Some one knocks to tell you that luncheon is half over: you would hurl a boot at her were it not that this might betray the poet. So your enslaved body goes down and tries to pretend for a few moments, then mutters an excuse and flies back to join its musing spirit.
By mid-afternoon the gaps are bridged, the interlinings interlined for the last time. You write out a clear copy and sit steeping in it, mouthing it, smiling at it. Then you find excuses to take your mind away for a few minutes, that it may come back with the delicious shock of freshness. You and the angel sit with your work between you in a realm of beauty and peace wherein there is not one need, one lack.
Some one calls in the hall, or a piano starts up, or a child clatters home from school. The bubble breaks, letting the angel out. You are tired and rather hungry as you uncover your typewriter, and sit down to cash up the results of the past seven or eight hours. They do not seem to you impressive. You carry them, without shame, to your family or your friend : “Is that thing any good ?” These usually, wnth some kindly tact, help you to the conclusion that it is not. You slip it into a drawer and try not to see your legitimate work, lying with the early morning’s dust still undisturbed.
But you do not feel guilty, down inside. You do not even feel disappointed. You have had your day.