By Katherine

Essay: The Feel of Thinking – Sarah Howe on lyric connections and incisions

Extract

What might it mean for a poet to ‘feel’ his or her ‘thought’? Eliot championed the so-called ‘metaphysical’ poets of the seventeenth century for their efforts ‘to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.’ Such poets are marked out, for Eliot, by their ‘rapid association of thought’, giving rise to a sensibility that can discern connections between such disparate experiences as falling in love, reading Spinoza, the noise of a typewriter and the smell of cooking. Eliot’s penultimate item always reminds me of those lines from Ashbery’s ‘Paradoxes and Oxymorons’: ‘And before you know / It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters’. It’s just like Ashbery to transform the sound of purposive writerly activity into consciousness’s white noise.

In a fascinating essay on Donne and modern cognitive science, AS Byatt argues that Donne does indeed feel his thought, but what he makes his readers feel is less Eliot’s odour of the rose than ‘the peculiar excitement and pleasure of mental activity itself’. She wonderfully dubs Donne a ‘glassy’ poet, since glass is something you can look at and through simultaneously (incidentally the very property of glass that makes it such a choice vehicle for metaphysical conceits). Among the moderns, Byatt attributes similar qualities to Wallace Stevens – think only of the perceptual conundrums of ‘The Glass of Water’: ‘In the metaphysical,’ that poem claims, ‘there are these poles’. For her, what the poems of Donne and Stevens offer is not sensations per se but the ‘process of sensing’, not concepts but the ‘idea of the relations of concepts.’

Can true love be gained by deception?
Will rage never change our perceptions?
Be thoughtful and pray
Be aware of today
Then  you may need  no correction

Can true love bring harm  in its wake?
Can lovers live purely in cake?
There are no general laws
But think and give pause
We are what we love and we hate.

Does hatred exist  before love?
The eagle may kill  the  white dove
The  child uncaressed
Will never be blest
Oh,God, send sweet rain from above

• Stan was leaning over, cleaning the  new bath.When the doorbell rang,he rushed downstairs and opened the  double front door.
  “Will you take this parcel in for the lady next door?” The postman asked wearily.
  “Oh,fine Stan stuttered.He was trying to avoid Annie but here she was,coming down the road of superior semi detached houses suitable for ex-headmasters ,small businessmen,econometricians,surgeons,pie salesmen and  theologians.
  She was wearing perfume, and green sandals from TK Maxx,light khaki tencel cropped combat trousers with a purple silky over-blouse, not to mention her matching raspberry  and cream underwear .Round her neck hung a miniature grandfather clock on a solid gold chain,and she had three  imitation gold and silver watches on each  of her three wrists making a total of 333 watches according to Carnap’s theory of logic and Russell’s terrible handwriting. Stanley didn’t know that she had a mobile phone stuffed into her bra—one advantage for the larger sized woman.In fact she had 4 down there in her raspberry coloured glamour bra,as she had a phobia about their batteries running down all at once
  The more she had the lower the probability of her being without a phone whilst out and about the town and countryside.So she reasoned in her womanly  way. Just then one  phone rang.She rummaged around to the consternation  and turmoil-uation of Stanley and the postman.She plucked out a pale blue phone.
  “Hi,it’s Annie” she murmured.
  “Hi Annie it’s Dave the paramedic with  carpentry skills. You’ve not rung 999 lately so we were wondering if all was well!”
  “Oh,I’m terribly sorry.I’ll try to phone later on.Thanks,Petal.That was Dave,our ex-transvestite converted paramedic”,she informed the men.The postman galloped off on his donkey, his bags full of undelivered males.It’s a tough but interesting life in Knittingham. Would you like a male delivery?Contact Parcel Force without delay.
  Annie went into Stan’s house and demanded a cup of coffee.
  “Won’t it make you put weight on” Stan quipped ironically.
  “Do you think I’m too plump?” she responded anxiously..
  “Too plump for what?” he quipped amiably.
  “To attract men,of course!”
  “No,my angel,you are just perfect”he quacked definitively.”Nor are you an angel,strictly speaking,as I have good reason to know.Thank you,my beloved for services rendered so generously and freely.”
  “Oh,my goodness I must get home to render the fat from the beef and to make some gooseberry jam.” Stanley looked uneasy.
  “I wonder why babies are left under gooseberry bushes?
  The thorns are so big it’s quite dangerous getting them out,or so Mary told me when Lyra was born. She was covered in scratches and wouldn’t come near me for months.”
  “Why don’t you come upstairs to look at our new purple bathroom suite.Since the Royal Wedding it’s the in colour.The gold taps were expensive but they do go well.”
  “My God,let me out.” she bawled,”It reminds me of the Vatican and that’s no place for a lady”,
  “Not even a gay lady?” Stan muttered parsimoniously, as he licked her eyelashes gently.
  “Stop that.I’ve got my Yves St Laurent mascara on.”
  “I prefer the taste of the Chanel,”he disclosed privately in an internal  secret memo.[available on 50 years]
  “Why not lick my neck instead?” she enquired curiously as she tripped over Emile the cat, who had slipped into the bathroom as usual  to see what they were up to,you know what I mean, you catch my drift?
  She fell floppily into the bath and banged her head on the taps.
  “Oh,gosh,better ring 999” Stan said to Emile.
  “Have you got your catphone warehouse mobile on you?”
  “Yes ,it’s in my y-fronts”, the cat amiably miaowed.
  “Hi Dave,this is Emile.Can you come quick.Annie is unconscious and what is worse,she has scratched the new bath.”
  In fact it was Emile who had scratched the bath that morning but since Stan had not noticed he hoped to, callously, pass the blame onto poor  Annie.How cruel can a cat be?  Ask any mouse! Still in the end God made all of us and what a  terrifying and beautiful world it is.