Sympathy and Compassion

2009-10-16 17:38:31 　　来自: 乙you
Yvor Winters的评论   

　　- Notes on Organic Poetry and At the San Francisco Airport by Yvor Winters
　　
　　In “Some Notes on Organic Poetry”, Levertov defines organic poetry as “a method of apperception”, i.e. a form of everything that a poet feels, discovers and reveals. Taking a closer look into his definition, I find the following detailed procedures a poet goes through when he composes such a poem.
　　
　　1) Perception and apperception. This is the phase when the poet encounters a certain scene, an occasion or an experience. Such encounter may seem insignificant to others but it stimulates sufficient interest and emotion in the poet; it can be either natural or social – since what is social is essentially natural, too. As Coleridge’s famous notion of the two kinds of imagination, the primary imagination, which is God’s creation, catalyses the poet’s secondary imagination, which is his observation and creative and representative capacity.
　　
　　2) Connection. It is a connection between the sight or occasion that inspires the poet and his personal history, his social, economical or educational background, and even, as Levertov mentions, “what he has been dreaming […] working in him”. This is when the experience actually becomes intrinsic rather that what s/he sees or hears. The combination or connection as such coincides with Emerson’s notion that “the universe is the externization of the soul”(Leitch, 728) because the poet thereby transforms what he senses (externally) to what he feels (internally).
　　
　　3) Contemplation. This is the very stage that makes a poet a poet, and it generates, as Levertov states, “words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect”. Contemplation, or as in a deeper and more continuous way, meditation, enables the poet to gain his talent to see the whole picture, to relate his personal feelings to the mechanism of the whole universe. This is also the decisive point when the poet seemingly acquires more knowledge of the world we live in, which is actually our illusion since he probes deeper into their feelings when we simply content ourselves with the superficial. After this stage, the first words of the poem, though possibly fluid forerunners, would finally come to the poet.
　　
　　Let us take “At the San Francisco Airport” by Yvor Winters as an example and discuss how it treats the sense of organic coherence. The poem has a melancholy tone, depicting the sight of a terminal at the San Francisco Airport and the feelings of the poet, a father, when he is sending his daughter off. He is struggling to stop his emotions from overwhelming him because he is apprehensive to let his daughter go.
　　
　　Technically, this is a very structured poem – five stanzas with ABABA rhyme, and eight syllables each – which coincides with the father’s efforts to keep his emotions in order and not showing exactly what he feels inside. As for an organic poetry, firstly, the poet himself sits as the airport and sees the sight in front of him: the lights, the huge metal airplanes glittering in the dark and deep night. His daughter is sleeping beside him, looking “small, contained and fragile”. After that, the sight of everything, or the perception, makes him ponder his own life experiences and the daughter’s journey without him, probably for the first time in her and his life: she is going to experience a lot of new things and learn from them, which process the father has already gone through in his life. He does not want to let her go, fearing the possible dangers or just changes she might meet, yet knowing that he has to. This is when he relates, or connects his personal history with the situation he is in, making his external senses internal feelings and emotions. Then, his contemplation warms his own intellect, i.e. his observation and creative talent, and his feelings become overwhelming and even universal, so intense that the words of the poem come to him. The ambiguous words he chose reveals his inner struggle and the need he feels to use metaphors that actually bares most intensity and an unlimited scope of hidden meaning. What’s more, the pairs of contrast words in the poem, such as “hard” and “fragile”, “bright” and “night”, “the frighten brain” and “passion”, manifests the dilemma the poet finds himself in between the paternal love for his daughter and the fear of seeing her leaving. The whole process Winters goes through, from seeing the sights at the San Francisco Airport, feeling the dilemma because of his personal experience, contemplating the situation to finally writes the poem down with the right words – it is like a logic flow of behaviors, or as Levertov puts it, “a sequence or constellation of perceptions”. The poem is also a process of “inscape to denote the intrinsic form”, which is a word invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
　　
　　People complain about how noisy a capitalist society can be, with its political propaganda, advertisement campaigns and instant messengers that connects people more and more closely yet unprecedentedly further away from one another. Everything seems to be so loud and they all prevent us from thinking clearly. Our minds, quieted by the mechanics of the society we live in, long for something universal that reveals the depths of us: sympathy, compassion, love and fear. That is when poetry comes in place. Poets create works that are so intense and they connect the individuality of their readers and arouse the common emotions we sometimes simply forget to have. Sympathy per se actually is the feeling we have for somebody that we relate ourselves with; we may not be fathers or daughters, but we ultimately are the same with Winters and his daughter because we all have departed from one phase of life to another, and we all have been the one who sees the person we love depart.
　　
　　This is why poets write in the first place: poetry is the language of greatest intensity. Its form might be limited and it may be comparatively short in length, yet it leaves unlimited space and time for its readers to read and to relate. Organic poetry, like the one by Yvor Winter, is even more intensive since the poet shows his own coherent emotions in the poem and we as readers follow the poet’s flow of ideas and contemplation, put all of us in the same place as the poet and ultimately as everyone around us and all we feel is sympathy and compassion for the world as a whole.
　　
　　
　　
　　Reference
　　
　　Denise Levertov, “A Theory of Organic Poetry”. 1965.
　　
　　Leitch, Vincent, et al., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.