William Empson by Empson William Gill Roma

Author:Empson, William,Gill, Roma
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134836109
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

That learning, thine Ambassador,

From thine allegeance wee never tempt,

That beauty, paradises flower

For physicke made, from poyson be exempt,

 That wit, borne apt, high good to doe,

 By dwelling lazily

On Natures nothing, be not nothing too,

That our affections kill us not, nor dye,

Heare us, weake ecchoes, O thou eare, and cry.

It is, as Helen Gardner says, ‘a singularly unbitter poem, although it was written at a bitter time’.10 But although it deserves to be better known it has not the power of the Holy Sonnets or the Hymns, which deal with altogether different matters, and which, I think, do not reach across doctrinal barriers as do the no less Christian poems of George Herbert or T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Both Herbert and Eliot—like Blake in a different way—can make us feel with full imaginative power the relations between our littleness and a world of infinite possibilities, so that the ‘all’ is welcoming rather than frightening or oppressive. It is, however, useless to wish that a poet who has given us so much should be other than he is, especially since it is his confrontation of nothingness that results in one of his greatest poems. I refer of course to ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’. A. Alvarez, in a fine analysis of this poem, says, ‘Despite its theme, the piece has been driven continually forward by a curious restless energy. Yet that energy is entirely in the negatives.’11 Which is true; but paradoxically the poem, by the very energy of the account of ‘how it feels to reach absolute zero’ and ‘how it feels to think when you are there’, becomes a kind of affirmation. After all, the poet has made something, alive in all its parts, which itself is a victory over chaos and the sense of nothingness that is its theme.

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