POETRY AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

By J. C. HILL.

ONE of our students at Chester Training College, a boy of nineteen, fell in what appeared to be an epileptic fit and was taken to bed. A prefect was detailed to look after him. When the student recovered he was quiet but obviously distressed, and asked the prefect what was the best way to occupy one's mind when one was worried. The prefect was a musician, and said that he usually composed at the pianoforte, or tried to write poetry. The sick student tried all day to write a poem, but only produced a few lines on the back of an envelope. The prefect saw the poem and considered it doggerel.

During the night, the prefect was awakened by the sick student reciting poetry with dramatic gestures. He was sitting up in bed, sometimes addressing the stars, and by his fixed gaze was apparently asleep. The prefect listened for a time and suddenly realized that the poetry was original. He got out a pencil and paper and tried to note some of it. Several fragments were noted, of which the following two are fair specimens:

The prefect had sympathised with the student in one of his halfconscious lamentations, and had been told of a love affair with which the student's people were interfering. This fact threw considerable light on the fragments quoted above.

A few nights later the student was found going down the dormitory stairs reciting poetry, and obviously sleep-walking. He was taken to his own home, and we heard no more of him until next term.

During the vacation he had written in a note-book several remarkable

poems, one of the earliest being the following:

O Heart o' mine, heart o' mine, didst hear that sigh?

O Joy of life, joy of life, didst hear that cry?

From bloodless lips 'tis surging

From longing heart love purging
Of one once true

Who once was you

Heart o' mine.

O Lips o' mine, lips o' mine, didst feel my kiss?

O Breath of life, breath of life, retain that bliss

Or heart cease beating.

Stop memory fleeting

Of lips so red

That are e'en dead

For me, Lips o' mine.

I asked the student if he had read much poetry. He had read little. The only poems which had interested him had been poems of action. He had regarded poetry as "soft stuff." The above poem was produced without any effort, and was written down, exactly as it stands, in a few minutes. He was not quite clear in his own mind what it was all about.

The following poem was the result of a deliberate effort to write a poem on "Spring." He had shown some of his poems to friends at home who had said the poems were very good but that he should try to write "something more cheerful."

Laugh you winds, Spring is here,

And sparkling sunbeams, winter drear

Are chasing away.

See a-waving in the breeze

The boughs of joyous trees

All budding with the green.

Hark to the birds a-chirping in the mead
As with little lively eyes they seek a feed
While warbling a sunny lay.

There lambs are gambolling, frisking gaily
Taunting, watching mothers féely

A-cropping grass new-green.

Folk from the city dancing come

Wearied by the eternal hum

Of traffic's droning day.

Children leap and will abandon scream

For winter's past, and winter's dream

At last, at longéd last is seen.

In this production, in which his best efforts were put forth, the obscure symbolism is absent, and the poem is entirely lacking in "inspiration."

The next poem in his book was the following:

Die, ah die-sweet rarity,

Too rare for me.

I cannot hold thee

And thou must cold be

Now and for eternity.

Mad I was to wildly hope

To be thy home.

Through darkness to the dome

Of Life I'll weakly roam

Or for light in death numb'dly grope.

Here we return to the true poetic quality. This poem was also composed and written in a few minutes without any effort. The student said he understood the poem when he wrote it, but that now he did not know what it meant. "Sweet rarity" puzzled him, but affected him emotionally so that he wanted to write more whenever he saw or heard the words.

The following extract is from a long poem which was written down as the words came, no thought being given to the construction, rhyme or meaning, and no corrections being made.

Blares the trumpet, twangs the taut string,

Chaotic melody a-dinning.

Swirl the bodies, swinging, singing

Faster, holding, drunken, spinning:

Sweeps the strings and wine is red
Life is laughter and God is dead.
Living, living, taking giving,
Mistress, man and maid.

Glories, stories, leaping, telling,
Diaphanously limbs arrayed,
Moon is waning, gleam is fading,
Fiddle wailing ends its scaling;
Minds a-faltering, sense invading
Melts the host in dawn a-paling
Music's day is done.

I asked the student to try to describe in prose what it was all about. He could not. I made an attempt at a prose translation. He said it set his "teeth on edge." "Do you understand it?" "Yes, I see it all." "As mental pictures?" "Yes." "Do you see all your poems as mental pictures?" "Yes." I turned to the poem beginning "Die, ah die, sweet rarity" and pointing to "Sweet rarity” said "What do you see now?"

"Oh! you've brought it all back to me," he exclaimed; "its Eileen" (his sweetheart). Later he was not so sure it was.

About three weeks later he brought his manuscript book to show me some further efforts. My attention was taken by the following remarkable poem:

SOMEWHERE.

Through the curling shadows of sombre eve
Looms a misty crater of things forgot,

A saw-like edge of fading red,
And fumy vapours swelling heave,
A scented stench of rebellious rot
Lifting slowly from memories dead.
Crawling round the ragged steep
Are grinning wraiths of passions lost:
Probing down midst the gruesome mass
Are forked eyes that sentinel keep.
Embittered souls see hopes embossed
Then fading in murk hopes wanly pass.

I asked the student if he could explain what it meant. He said he was describing a succession of visual images in words which came quite spontaneously. "But what is it all about?" He did not know. He had shown it to Eileen who said she "hated it." It gave her "a creepy feeling."

I asked for a copy of the poem. It reminded me of the visual imagery of the Rev. George Henslow which Galton quotes in Inquiries into Human Faculty (Everyman Edition, pp. 115-118). No one with any psychoanalytic experience could study these descriptions with the accompanying diagrams and avoid coming to the conclusion that the symbolism was sexual, although the idea that the visions had any general meaning does not seem to have occurred to Galton.

Some time later the student asked me why I had asked for a copy of the poem. I said it interested me.

"Do you think it has anything to do with sex?" "I don't know; do you?" "I'm sure of it," he said. 'What makes you sure of it?" "Well, it's obvious, and the conditions under which I wrote it make me quite sure. I hate to think I am so much dominated by sex."

The student was unable, however, to interpret the symbolism for me, nor would he accept as satisfactory any interpretation I offered. Apparently it was as impossible for him to express the meaning in prose as it would be to express the pathetic line, "I am an old man, a very old man" by, say, “Man, aged 70.”

The student showed the poem to seven men friends at College. Six of them liked it. None of them knew why. The student who did not like it was a special friend of the poet's, and the poet had referred to him some weeks previously as a strange fellow who had never had any interest in girls.

The Editor of the College Magazine (a Cambridge Graduate in Literature) had selected this poem for publication in the College Magazine. I asked him why he liked it. He said the symbolism was so weird. I asked the poet if he ever dreamed. He did, sometimes. "What do you dream about?" (With some hesitation) "I had a terrible dream at the beginning of my illness at College. I have worried over it a great deal: I dreamed I had murdered my father. Battered his head in with a hammer." I explained that that was nothing to worry about, and said I would explain to to him soon. "What else do you dream about?" "I saw a gallows. People were being hanged." (Pause.) "Who were the people?" "Relatives, I think." "Tell me about them." "My mother

was one.'

It was not desirable to probe too far into his private affairs, and I explained the Oedipus Complex to him and told him several cases from my own experience. He seemed to be greatly relieved and much happier. I also showed him the two fragments quoted above ("Come rack and pain..." and "Why do they live?..."). He had no recollection of having composed them, although in some way they seemed familiar to him.

Later, the student showed me a sentimental poem he had written on "The Candle" which was burning in his room one night when he could not sleep (I regret that this poem has been lost). He explained that he was "sometimes bursting to express" himself and "could not find a suitable subject to write about." I recalled that Robert Burns had written poems "To a Mountain Daisy" and "To a Mouse," and I realized on re-reading these poems that the same mechanism ("Projection") had been at work in Burns' case. Robert Graves expresses this point very well in his book On English Poetry:

A particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more the subject of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was the cause of the late European War (p. 43).

Some of the changes in the student's manuscript book are interesting: