From the Elephant's Back (13 page)

But this is not all; certain small items among the “qualities of the isle” have a Grecian flavour. Both Corcyra and Zante were famous for the “brine-pits” which Caliban mentions; indeed the Venetian salt-pans in the south of Corfu still exist and salt is still extracted from them. Something more than coincidence perhaps prompts the remark of the castaway Antonio:

What impossible matter will he make easy next?
[27]

Sebastian's answer is this:

I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple.
[28]

As a matter of fact Corcyra was presented to a Venetian in 1259, as a dowry; it is an extraordinary enough present even for those times—an island forty miles long and eight broad. Manfred, King of Sicily, became the owner of it by marrying the daughter of Michael II of Epirus.

Something of these matters I have no doubt was talked over and jumbled with other foreign colours in Shakespeare's mind. Just as the gossip of Dowland
[29]
gave him the vague outlines of Elsinore for Hamlet, so the chatter of some Ionian merchant gave him a sea of islands, in which he could choose for himself a site for Prospero.

Thy turfy mountains where live nibbling sheep,

And flat medes thatched with clover, them to keep

Thy banks with pioned and with twilled brims,

Which spungy April at her best betrims

To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broom-groves

Whose shadow the dismissed Bachelor loves,

Being lass-lorn: thy pole-clipped vineyard

And thy sea-marge sterile and rocky-hard
.
[30]

There is another point which has caused a certain amount of contention among the wise.

“
Though woulds't give me
,” says Caliban,

“
Water with berries in't
.”
[31]

The ghost of Fynes Moryson is here invoked to prove that coffee is the suggested drink. But there is a peculiarly national drink which answers the case much better. It is made of cherry jam, of which a spoonful is mixed in cold water. There seems to be no reason to doubt that this was the drink which our anonymous merchant told Shakespeare about. When he came to write
The Tempest
there existed in his mind the flavour of these names and facts; so that Prospero's island is really a mixture of Zante and Corcyra.

Here I would like to explain that I am aware of the symbolic properties of the isle; I am aware that
The Tempest
is really a lucid parable which touches the island of the heart's desire; and that in pressing for a reference to Corfu I am animated only by a most fervent Ionian patriotism. It has not been my intention to drive nails into the coffin of legitimate criticism—the graveyard property of others. But there
do
seem analogies worth mentioning; and they
do
point with tolerable conviction to Corcyra (already celebrated by Homer in the
Odyssey
). There remains one conjecture more which will perhaps serve to drive home my argument.

The most famous of the patron saints among the Seven Islands is St. Spiridian. A synoptic history of his life, covering the period of his early adventures, would make exciting reading. Born a Cypriot in the third century or thereabouts, he was destined to become Corcyrean by posthumous adoption. Dead, buried, forgotten, the body of the good bishop of Tremythous in Cyprus (for such was he) was only rediscovered a hundred and one years after his death. From the grave exhaled a powerful scent of spices, which drew attention to the saint. The body, once recovered, began to perform miracles no less miraculous than its subsequent adventures and travels. From Constantinople through Macedonia he travelled, always under the protection of well-wishing believers; he arrived in Corcyra about the year 1456. His adoption was spontaneous—by the consent of both parties; for subsequent history shows the saint to have been a stout miracle worker against the Turks, who were at the time ravaging the coasts of the island. I will not give a detailed account of the argosies he sank, nor the number of times he saved the island from famine by side-tracking convoys of food bound for other ports and impelling their captains to put into Corfu harbour. It is sufficient to say that sailors have always been the children of St. Spiridian; their safety has always depended, and still depends, on his spiritual seamanship. In honour of him children are named Spiro (which is fairly near to Prospero). I defy anyone to travel for a day in Greece, among the islands, without encountering several Spiros. In the Ionian you will scarcely ever see a ship without its little eikon of the saint; it will generally depict him coaxing a storm, a mildly Byzantine and benevolent figure in a cloud. Any such eikon could be used to illustrate
The Tempest
. The likeness between the good saint and Prospero is fairly close. I like to think that in St. Spiridian we have here the original wonder-worker, saint, good man, whom Prospero so much resembles. Those who had travelled in the Ionian (and I hope I have made it clear that many a Londoner of the day did so) could not help hearing of the wonder-working saint; it is even possible that some forsook St. George, whose saving graces are lacking in the spectacular and generous; in favour of this little Ionian saint, whose mummified body is still carried round the Esplanade during festivals, lolling upright in his red sedan-chair. That Prospero, the courtly necromancer of the isle, should be second cousin by conversation, as it were, is not such a frivolous idea as it might seem. His powers over the creatures of the island are no stronger (and no less strong) than the power which St. Spiridian exercises over the hearts and minds of the Corcyreans. There is a certain poetic justice about these matters. The concerns of a saint and a poet in this case converge upon a point of virtue and benevolence; for
The Tempest
is the most lucidly Taoist of the plays, and the most fitting ending to the great wild cycle of comedies and tragedies. It is pleasant to think that these islands became entangled with the dream of the old English poet; influencing him, as they had influenced Homer so many years before. And then: the renunciation of Prospero! Concealed behind this fantasy surely there is a clear statement of the artistic problem—the problem which finds expression in Faust, in the Abbey Theleme of Rabelais
[32]
(which is only another Prospero's isle): the problem, I make so bold as to say, which the great artist shares with the saint. Here is the pure statement of the case—for all who have ears to hear.
[33]
Prospero's last words are a beatitude.

By now my charms are all o'erthrown,

And what strength I have's mine own,

Which is most faint: now 'tis true

I must be here confined by you

Or sent to Naples: Let me not

Since I have my Dukedome got,

And pardoned the deceiver, dwell

In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands

With the help of your good hands:

Gentle breath of yours, my sails

Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please: Now I want

Spirits to enforce, Arts to enchant:

And my ending is despair,

Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults

Mercy itself and frees all faults.
[34]

The magician's renunciation of his power is one of the most profound things in Shakespeare; he puts himself at the mercy of the elements which he has learned so painfully how to control. Perhaps Prospero in these lines shows that he had discovered the paradox in things; he had discovered that he who comes down to earth finds himself nearest to heaven.

It is a lesson which all magicians must learn sooner or later: whether they be saints or poets.

SOURCES

Ortho-Epia Gallica
by John Eliot, 1593

Instruction for Forreine Travel
by J. Howell, 1642

Travel-Diary of Fynes Moryson
, 1617

Coryat's Crudities
by Tom Coryat, 1611

William Webbe, Hys Travels
, 1604

Painful Peregrinations, etc.
, by William Lithgow, 1614

A Synoptic History of Corfu, with an account of a Famous Patron Saint
by Dr. Theodore Stephanides, Corfu, 1938

Ideas About Poems

1942

1. Neither poet nor public is really interested in the poem itself but in aspects of it.

2. The poet is interested in the Personal aspect: the poem as an aspect of himself.

3. The public is interested in the Vicarious aspect; that is to say “the universal application,” which is an illusion that grows round a poem once the logical meaning is clear and the syntax ceases to puzzle.

4. This is why good poems get written despite bad poets and why bad publics often choose right.

MEANWHILE.

the poem itself is there all the time. The sum of these aspects, it is quite different to what the poet and the public imagine it to be. Like a child or a climate it is quite outside us and our theories don't affect it in any way. Just as climate must be endured and children kept amused, the poem as a Fact must be dressed up sometimes and sent to the Zoo—to get rid of it. It is part of the ritual of endurance merely. That is the only explanation for
Personal Landscape
now.
[1]
People say that writing Poetry is one of the only non-Gadarene occupations left—but this is only another theory or aspect. Poems are Facts, and if they don't speak for themselves it's because they were born without tongues.

Ideas About Poems II

1942

The schizophrene, the cyclothyme,

Pass from the droll to the sublime.

Coming of epileptoid stock

They tell the time without a clock.

NONSENSE IS NEVER JUST NONSENSE;
it is more like good sense with all the logic removed. At its highest point poetry makes use of nonsense in order to indicate a level of experience beyond the causality principle. You don't quicken or laugh at nonsense because it is complete non-sense; but because you detect its resemblance to sense.

Logic, syntax, is a causal instrument, inadequate for the task of describing the whole of reality. Poems don't describe, but they are sounding-boards which enable the alert consciousness to pick up the reverberations of the extra-causal reality for itself.

Poems are negatives; hold them up to a clean surface of daylight and you get an apprehension of grace. The words carry in them complete submerged poems; as you read your memory goes down like the loud pedal of a piano, and all tribal, personal, associations begin to reverberate. Poems are blueprints. They are not buildings but they enable you to build for yourself. Serious nonsense and funny nonsense are of the same order: both overreach causality and open a dimension independent of logic but quite real. Shakespear and Lear are twins who do not dress alike. Serious nonsense and comical nonsense have a common origin, and an uncommon expression.

Nothing is lost, sweet self

Nothing is ever lost.

The spoken word

Is not exhausted but can be heard.

Music that stains the silence remains,

O! echo is everywhere the unbeckonable bird!
[1]

The Heraldic Universe

1942

Logic tries to describe the world; but it is never found adequate for the task. Logic is not really an instrument: merely a method.

Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.

Poetry by an associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others:

Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns, and where the relations between ideas are sympathetic and mysterious—affective—rather than causal, objective, substitutional.
[1]

I call this The Heraldic Universe,
[2]
because in Heraldry the object is used in an emotive and affective sense—statically to body forth or utter: not as a victim of description.

The Heraldic Universe is that territory of experience in which the symbol exists—as opposed to the emblem or badge, which are the children of algebra and substitution.

It is not a “state of mind” but a continuous self-subsisting plane of reality towards which the spiritual self of man is trying to reach out through various media: artists like antennae boring into the unknown through music or paint or words, suddenly strike this Universe where for every object in the known world there exists an ideogram.
[3]

Since words are inadequate they can only render all this negatively—by an oblique method.

“Art” then is only the smoked glass through which we can look at the dangerous sun.
[4]

Hellene and Philhellene

1949

THE INFLUENCE OF HELLAS
upon our own literature is a theme of sufficient interest today to tempt the skill of the essayist bold enough to face its implications fully; bold enough moreover to assess that influence in the terms of the new literature which the modern Greek is attempting so obstinately to forge from the popular tongue. “Hellas” is written rather than “Greece” in order first of all to point the difference between the Philhellene of yesterday and the Philhellene of today—for up to almost the present generation the passionate bias of the English writer and scholar has been towards the classical world. In a sense Greece has represented to him, in terms of landscape and climate, the flowering of an education. Those unmanageable verbs, those murderous moods and tenses, the quicksand of Attic syntax—they all seemed to fall into place to justify themselves against the Greek landscape. But the classical bias has had its defects no less than its virtues. It has tended to blindfold the traveller to the reality of contemporary Greece.
[1]
Wrapped like a mummy in his classical associations, he has been tempted to dismiss the Greeks of today with contempt. This attitude of neglect has remained a constant almost since the time when William Lithgow
[2]
visited Greece in the course of his painful but often amusing peregrinations. It is difficult perhaps to say exactly why and exactly when it changed.