And the asp jumped over the chimney sweeper!

A Chimney Sweeper (Odezia atrata)

That time of year is approaching again…the time of public readings of verse four of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’. I shall be listening carefully for who says ‘grow-not old’, who ‘grow not-old’, and who indeed ‘not grow old’ (see my posts of 17 February 2016 and 13 April 2016). I am deeply grateful that no-one has asked me to read it aloud myself, as I would find it impossible to drop my voice enough to smother the ‘not’ for the canonical reading of ‘grow not old’ as an inverted negative.

I have come to the conclusion that ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ is a botched line. In 1914 when the poem was written, ‘grow’ was surely as affirmative a word as it is now. Putting it in the metrically stressed position makes it, well, grow even more affirmatively (Marvell: ‘My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow’). But Binyon has left it nowhere to grow to, because the point of his line is to not grow (old). You are being asked to articulate a negative statement when the negator is in a feeble metrical position immediately after a viscerally positive word in the stronger metrical position. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many people re-invert Binyon’s negative so that it says what they ‘know’ it means and is metrically stressed: ‘They shall not grow old.’ I think I would either have to do that myself, or carry through the rising power of ‘grow’ in my preferred reading ‘They shall grow: not-old’, where ‘not-old’ is the affirmative state of their being transfigured out of time.

But I fully accept that syntactically the ‘not’ goes with the verb; it attaches limply back to ‘grow’, not strongly forward to ‘old’, despite the fact that metrically (iambically) it does belong with ‘old’. To be more precise, qualifying the verb as an inverted negative is the historical syntax; it is what Binyon thought and wrote in 1914, whereas today ‘not’ overwhelmingly precedes the word it negates. I would put my money on scholars saying, therefore, that we have to accept the historical syntax and read the words ‘in period’ as ‘grow-not’, e.g. perhaps Professor Michael Alexander, author of the excellent essay on Binyon and ‘For the Fallen’ in Trinity College Oxford Report 2013-14, p. 69-72, at http://www.trinity.ox.ac.uk/old-members/publications/ .

There are two drawbacks to this approach, in my view. First, because the inverted negative has practically disappeared from English syntax it is difficult to speak it with any confidence or authenticity (and it was surely verging on an archaic poeticism even when Binyon wrote it). Second, poems are not preserved in historical amber, they live only in the present, as a personal reading or public performance. We want a reading to be a meaningful linguistic event on several levels and personally I think the more natural, modern reading ‘they shall grow not-old’ enhances Binyon’s rather dry and under-performing line.

Although several people agreed with me by email when I last addressed this matter, I accept that for many my ‘reading’ of Binyon’s half-line will appear strained and esoteric. There is a lot of strained interpretation of poetry around, and I’m the first to criticise it. For instance, the accepted grammatical analysis these days of Wilfred Owen’s line ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin’ seems to be that ‘devil’s’ has as its understood object ‘face’, ‘sick’ is an adjective meaning ‘had enough of’, and the whole phrase means ‘like the face of a devil who is sick of sinning so much’. But anyone with native English in 2016 is bound to read the phrase as though ‘sick’ is a noun meaning ‘vomit’ and this ‘sick’ naturally consists ‘of’ sin, since a devil is full of the stuff. I find this reading far less esoteric, more concrete, more vivid, more powerful, more disgusting; moreover a century ago ‘sick’ did have the colloquial meaning of ‘vomit’ that it has now.

Similarly, we are asked by scholars today to accept that ‘chimney-sweepers’ in Shakespeare’s couplet ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ refers to dandelion clocks, i.e. the seed heads left when golden dandelion flowers have died off, because this was a Worcestershire meaning playing on the resemblance of the seed heads to chimney brushes (‘sweepers’). Such a reading is a bit of a wrench after a lifetime of visualising chimney-sweepers as soot-covered men at the opposite end of the social and chromatic scale from ‘golden lads and girls’, and one wonders how many of Shakespeare’s audience saw them as dandelion heads!

In September of this year the results of a Japanese study were published which established that cows are more likely to give birth during a full moon. It was then seriously suggested in the media that the nursery-rhyme line ‘And the cow jumped over the moon’ referred to the (presumably heavily pregnant) cow jumping because (‘over the fact that’) there was a full moon. This struck me as a typical cerebrist reading: ‘over’ in the sense of ‘about’ is totally abstract, whereas children and everyone else with an imagination know that the cow literally jumped over the moon, just as the gassed soldier’s face was like vomit, not like the abstruse idea of the face of a devil who had had enough of sinning…

Poets can, however, be so focussed on their own particular reading that they forget more obvious ones. In his fine poem ‘Looking Back’, Henry Vaughan perpetrated the line ‘How brave a prospect is a bright back-side!’. He normally knew perfectly well that ‘back-side’ meant ‘arse’ even then (c. 1650), but his thought was so focussed on the childhood side of his life he was looking back upon, that he even placed ‘back-side’ in a metrical position where one could not clarify his meaning by stressing it on ‘back’. He botched this.

As a young man, Joseph Brodsky was extremely taken by the poetry of John Donne; and so was I. When I (22) met Brodsky (30) in Leningrad in 1970, he read me inter alia his translation of Donne’s ‘The Apparition’. It is a great version and he read it with wonderful concentrated passion. But when he got to Donne’s lines ‘And then poor Aspen wretch, neglected thou/Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie’, I gulped. ‘Poor Aspen wretch’ was rendered as ‘o bednyi Aspid moi’ which means ‘O poor Asp of mine’ — i.e. Brodsky had taken ‘Aspen’ to be an adjective from the serpent ‘asp’. Because at the word ‘Aspen’ I could see an aspen tree that I knew very well which trembled in a breeze as the ‘poor wretch’ might, and its leaves were whitish underneath, like quicksilver, I had always read ‘Aspen’ as a noun…

Brodsky’s interpretation was pretty challenging. But I couldn’t bring myself to raise the subject with him. His version as a whole, and his performance of it, were far more important. Can there be a ‘right’ reading of Binyon’s line, a ‘right’ parsing of Owen’s ‘devil’s sick of sin’, a ‘right’ image of Donne’s ‘poor Aspen wretch’? I don’t subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty reader’s charter, that a word ‘means just what I choose it to mean’, but words change through time in so many ways and both the poet’s apprehension and his/her reader’s apprehension are always unique to them as individuals. ‘Nothing is less than/particular’ (R.F. Langley, ‘Experiment with a Hand Lens’).