The Mouth of Hell

Why read the classics? The typical answer to that question is almost always couched in terms of “enlarging the mind”. So, for instance, when John Henry Newman, in his Idea of a University, argues for the importance of the liberal arts, he has no practical, utilitarian motive in his sights. Rather, such an enterprise seeks to enhance the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.

But how, exactly, does this work? How might reading Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, enlarge the mind? One answer, at least, concerns the way in which a certain idea resonates in the reader’s mind and leads to some extension or elaboration such that the original idea becomes, as it were, a seed bed wherein new growth occurs. But in each mind, the idea is elaborated in different ways, dependent, we might suppose, upon the particular background and experiences of that receiving mind and its powers of imagination. And these new growths, if we may call them that, do expand the mind, taking it into new, unexplored territory. At the same time, they heighten our appreciation when we again come upon our original, received idea, for now we see its immense procreative force. And so, in proposing this process, I am not at all suggesting some sort of evolution of poetic power, for the power has always been latent in the original idea. Indeed, many would say that the poetry of Homer has never been surpassed. Thus, the imagined “evolution” may well be a process of recovery, and not of expansion, for we are always confronted with problems of translation and of the meaning of words.

I propose, in this essay, to take one such idea (actually a compound of ideas) and to see how it has worked upon the imagination of poets and, by inference, their readers, over the course of two and a half millennia. I have chosen that scene, at the end of Book 10 and the beginning of Book 11, in the Odyssey, where the entrance to the Underworld is described, first by Circe, then by Odysseus himself. I could have chosen a dozen others—the Lotus Eaters, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, the Cyclopes, and so on. Each of these, like a small crystal suspended in a supersaturated solution, has that property of growing itself in the medium of the human imagination, to reflect meaning from a thousand facets.

And so, here is Circe, giving directions (I am using the prose translation by E.V. Rieu in Penguin Classics):

Set up your mast, spread the white sail and sit down in the ship. The North wind will blow her on her way; and when she has brought you across the river of Ocean, you will come to a wild coast and Persephone’s Grove, where the tall poplars grow, and the willows that so quickly shed their seeds. Beach your boat there by Ocean’s swirling streams and go on into Hades Kingdom of Decay. There, at a rocky pinnacle, the River of Flaming Fire and the River of Lamentation, which is a branch of the waters of the Styx, meet and pour their thundering streams into Acheron.

Now, Odysseus takes up the description of the place:

So she [the ship] reached the furthest parts of the deep-flowing River of Ocean where the Cimmerians live, wrapped in mist and fog. The bright Sun cannot look down on them with his rays, either when he climbs the starry heavens or when he turns back from heaven to earth again. Dreadful night spreads her mantle over that unhappy people.

In this description, we have not yet reached the Underworld, but stand at the threshold. The physical features that Homer gives us are these: the place is wooded and perpetually dark by virtue of impenetrable mists and fogs, and has, running through it, ominously-named rivers. The Cimmerians who live at its fringe—presumably not part of the populace of the Underworld—are “unhappy people”. We know, too, from a short description later, that it is a place which inspires fear and dread in any living mortal that happens upon it. That is the extent of the description given us by Homer. The first passage gives us some general geography, but the second sets the atmosphere of the place. It is, to be sure, not quite the imagined Christian vision of the portal of Hell that we see in later poets but, nonetheless, a frightful place, a place of despair and anguish, from which no ordinary mortal could return.

Upon first inspection, the description we have is meagre enough and we would be justified in thinking that it serves as no more than a sort of backdrop for the action. And yet, down through the succeeding centuries it has played upon the human imagination in extraordinary ways, infusing a vast body of literature and holding a powerful spell over us. The prodigious feat of Homer was to give to the world not only a work of unsurpassed beauty in itself, but a sort of brood-chamber for the human imagination. Let us now look at some of those developments.

Virgil’s debt to Homer is so obvious as to preclude any further comment, but what raises him from being a mere plagiarist to a literary genius is precisely his ability to take an idea from Homer and allow it to grow in his imagination. For Virgil, the approach to the Underworld in the Aeneid is thickly forested. The Sibyl begins the description in Book VI (the Fitzgerald translation, Penguin Classics):

The way downward is easy from Avernus

Black Dis’s door stands open night and day,

But to retrace your step to heaven’s air,

There is trouble, there is toil …

                                          … All midway

Are forests, then Cocytus, thick and black,

Winds through the gloom …

Later, the narrator takes up the description of the mouth to the Underworld:

The cavern was profound, wide-mouthed and huge,

Rough underfoot, defended by dark pool

And gloomy forest. Overhead flying things

Could never safely take their way, such deathly

Exhalations rose from the black gorge

Into the dome of heaven …

The first thing to note here is how Virgil achieves his general atmosphere of darkness. Whereas Homer uses mists and fogs, Virgil uses trees. This heightens the effect—one which Dr Johnson, in an unrelated instance, was to call “inspissated gloom”. Mists and fogs, in our human experience, are ephemeral things, eventually burned away by the sun’s rays. A gloomy forest, on the other hand, persists. Trees feature prominently in the Aeneid and Virgil is a master at using them to conjure up an atmosphere. Here is the scene in the forecourt of Hell:

In the courtyard, a shadowy, giant elm

Spreads ancient boughs, her ancient arms where dreams,

False dreams, the old tale goes, beneath each leaf

Cling and are numberless …

Later in this essay, I will return to that particular description and make what is perhaps a rather large and unsubstantiated claim of its influence on a much later poet.

Let us now move on some thirteen centuries to Dante and his depiction of the entrance to the Underworld in the Inferno. Here, of course, there is no need for us to tease out the relationship between Dante and Virgil, for in the Inferno “the gracious Mantuan” is his guide on the journey. Even so, Dante profoundly changes the Virgilian image of the Underworld. We are now in the Christian era, and all that we experience in the Inferno is reflected through the lens of Christian theology. The very opening in Canto 1 signals this change (the Ciardi translation, Mentor Classics):

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray

From the straight road and woke to find myself

alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was, I never saw so drear,

so rank, so arduous a wilderness!

Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

The landscape at Hell’s mouth is now primarily a moral landscape. The dark forests are forests of sin, the rivers pouring into Acheron, here the boundary of Hell, places of torment and punishment. The mode of punishment for each soul is a reflection of the nature of its earthly transgressions. Dante reserves the vestibule of Hell for those souls who are neither good nor bad, and are, for this very reason, especially loathsome and pathetic. Obviously, they cannot enter Heaven but neither are they fit for Hell because the inhabitants there, seeing them, might “glory over them” and therefore gain some pleasure. The Styx is a marsh where anger is punished, Phlegethon a river of blood punishing those guilty of violence against others, and Cocytus a frozen lake holding fast the hard and frozen hearts of traitors.

Here we see new elements arising, an important one being the changed nature of the four rivers. There is evidence to suppose that this change, in its turn, was to influence other poets. Let me adduce just one example from the Border Ballads which probably dates from roughly the same era as Dante. Here is Thomas the Rhymer, fallen under the spell of the Elfin Queen and taken away to a shadow world for seven years: It is neither heaven nor hell, but a sort of third alternative—a parallel but dangerous world somewhere:

O they rade on, and farther on—
The steed gaed swifter than the wind—
Untill they reached a desart wide,
And living land was left behind …

O they rade on, and farther on,
And they waded thro rivers aboon the knee,
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.

It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae stern light,
And they waded thro red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth
Rins thro’ the springs o’ that countrie.

Many of the elements of Homer’s nekyia are here—the desolate landscape, the all-pervasive darkness, the River of Ocean somewhere at hand—but now, the vision of Phlegethon is akin to Dante’s, not Homer’s. And we note how the punishment of violence in Dante is brought to an even higher pitch here: “For a’ the blude that’s shed on earth / Rins thro’ the springs o’ that countrie.” The vision now carries another new element—the epiphytic nature of the “faerie”, which is wholly dependent upon human suffering. Here too, we can see a remnant of those wraiths in Homer’s Underworld hovering about the trench of blood. It is a long way from here to those effete fairies of the Victorian age, whose gossamer wings and tinsel wands are merely pre-school entertainment. Once the Christian religion had been driven out of post-Enlightenment society, so too was the true nature of the faerie lost, for in some strange way, the latter depended on the former. And the loss was palpable—Kingsley’s Water Babies could not palliate The City of Dreadful Night.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the ideas in Thomas the Rhymer developed independently and owe nothing to Homer, Virgil or Dante. In biology, the development of similar ranges of species on isolated continents or islands is a matter of common observation and we might expect a similar phenomenon in the development of human ideas in widely separated human cultures. Whatever the case, the particular depiction of the faerie in Thomas the Rhymer and similar ballads has certainly influenced later poets. The most famous example is Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci. Of course, a whole book could be written about the strange depiction of the faerie in Thomas the Rhymer, about the equally strange prohibition of human speech in faerie territory (compare Odysseus, who is told to speak only with Tiresias), and many other novel ideas which seem to be an amalgam of Christian and earlier pagan beliefs.

For my next example, I have chosen Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, published at the end of the sixteenth century. Like Dante, the influence of both Homer and Virgil is evident in his work, as is the influence of Arthurian legend. There are many references to the Underworld in Spenser. In Canto 5 of the first Book, for instance, we get images of hell that clearly draw on both Virgil and Homer, but I would like to go back to Canto 1, when the “Gentle Knight” and the “louely Ladie” are forced to take cover from a storm and enter a dark wood. If no direct portal to Black Dis, this wood is, at least, home to a nasty dragon—a very peculiar, Catholic dragon, which spews out religious tracts rather than fire! Here is the description of the “dark woods”, from Canto 1, Verse 7:

Whose loftie trees yclad with sommers pride,

Did spred so broad, that heauens light did hide,

Not perceable with power of any starre …

This is Virgil’s gloomy forest, now acting as an impenetrable barrier to all light. If further proof were needed of Spenser’s debt to Virgil here, we have it within ten lines, when we are given a catalogue of trees, just as in Virgil when, at the portal to the Underworld, Aeneas and his men cut down pines, ilex, ash, oak and cypresses for the funeral pyre of Misenus.

But notice that, with Spenser’s “loftie trees”, it is not just sunlight that is blocked out, but starlight as well. And we are never too sure just what Spenser means by “power of any starre” (or, indeed, exactly what “perceable” means). It seems to be much more than just the lights of the heavens, and is strongly suggestive of correspondences—the idea, popular in Spenser’s time, that the stars had significant influences not just on human lives (as in today’s popular astrology) but upon the world of plants and animals as well. If this is the case, then Spenser’s dark woods are doubly dangerous, for things beneath that green canopy are bereft of all beneficent heavenly influences, not just light—they are “unpieceable”.

It would seem natural enough to proceed from Spenser to Milton’s Paradise Lost, since here the subject matter of the great poem is directly concerned with Lucifer and the infernal realm. Moreover, Milton acknowledges the influence of the ancient authors but tells us that he intends “to soar / Above the Aonian Mount”. However, I would prefer to move to a less obvious connection, and one which brings us forward into the Romantic era.

And so, this leads me to my final example of the transmission of an idea and its magnification or transmogrification via the human imagination. John Keats wrote his unfinished poem Hyperion in 1819 when he was twenty-four years old. When I think of my own pitiable imaginative reach at the same age, I stand astonished at the sheer power of Keats’s imagination, and cannot but think that he drew heavily upon past works to first ignite those powers. In his depiction of the fallen Saturn, huge yet helpless, how much does Keats remind us of those depleted heroes in Homer’s gloomy Underworld?

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,

Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung about his head …

Later in this poem, Keats gives us an extraordinary image of a goddess speaking words of comfort to the fallen Titan. To assume mere human speech would, of course, not fit the image of a goddess, so Keats must find some way to get over this impasse. His achievement here is one of the greatest feats of imaginative power in all of the poetic literature known to me:

As when, upon a tranced summer-night,

Those green-rob’d senators of mighty woods,

Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,

Save from one gradual solitary gust

Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,

As if the ebbing air had but one wave;

So came these words and went …

We are to imagine her voice as a tiny eddy, momentarily rippling the still air and barely disturbing that process of “conversation” (for want of a better description) between the dreaming oak trees and the stars. It is an image of immense, but silent power almost entirely beyond human apprehension—we see but a tiny ripple of it. Recall, now, Virgil’s giant elm tree, in the courtyard of the Underworld, which

Spreads ancient boughs, her ancient arms where dreams

False dreams, the old tale goes, beneath each leaf

Cling and are numberless …

Here, perhaps, is the raw material for Keats’s vision. Unlike Spenser’s trees, whose dense foliage blots out all light, the giant oaks of Keats, like most ancient trees, have massive limbs and relatively few leaves. Their leaves are light robes, not thick cloaks. This allows the starlight to filter down and “charm” the massy branches.

For the remainder of this essay, I wish to return to the examples I have used and examine them from a different angle. Thus far, we have been dealing simply with the subject matter involved in the transmission of certain ideas from one poet to another, but we have not really examined the question of how this process operates to give us pleasure and to enlarge our experience of the world. And here, I wish to make use of the analysis contained in Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction. The quotation from Newman at the beginning of this essay speaks of the benefits of enlarging the mind from the point of view of an observer, but appreciation of poetry is a very private business and it is very possible to imagine a person with a well-rounded education as still failing to be deeply moved by poetry—in other words, of lacking private benefits from exposure to poetic ideas. Moreover, in my discussions so far, I have been principally concerned with the poet, and not the poet’s reader.

Barfield describes the experience of the aesthetic imagination as a “felt change of consciousness” and by “consciousness” he means “all my awareness of my surroundings … including my own feelings”. He further suggests that our appreciation of a poem—that is to say, the emotional response of pleasure (but this word is far too restrictive)—is a transitory thing. The useful analogy he gives is of a coil of wire passing between the poles of a magnet to produce an electric current. Electricity is only generated when the coil is moving. In similar fashion, the mood or response we feel from a poem only occurs in that instant when we change from one state of consciousness to another. Of course, we may well commit the poem, or parts of the poem, to memory—as many readers will have done with one or more of my examples above—but we still find ourselves reciting the pieces audibly or inaudibly. Why? Is it not because we are looking, once again, to experience that emotion accompanying the “changed state of consciousness”?

The emotion itself is a much harder thing to talk about. There is, to be sure, a simple pleasure, almost physical, in hearing or reciting certain sorts of poetry purely because of its structure—the way the poem sounds. In my examples above, the Border Ballad fits this category beautifully. So too, I imagine, does Homer in the original Greek. Indeed, I have sat in a class where students with no knowledge of Greek (myself included) were spellbound purely by the sound of the work being read out by a competent speaker of Archaic Greek.

Closely connected to this form of pleasurable experience is that marvellous effect of reading a poem from a much earlier period in the history of the English language and being overcome by the beauty of the language itself. I have seen the line in Spenser “not perceable by power of any starre” used by many authors and, like myself they are obviously moved by the archaisms in the language. Indeed, many modern poets have used this feature to great advantage. T.S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell come to mind immediately but, in the context of this present essay, one of the most powerful examples comes from Ezra Pound. Here is his version of the prelude to the Homeric nekyia, translated from the Latin of Andreas Divas into an earlier form of the English language (Canto 1):

Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,

To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities

Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever

With glitter of sun-rays

Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven

Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.

The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place

Aforesaid by Circe.

But something deeper is at work in our appreciation of poetry and it is with this that I now wish to conclude. When Barfield writes of the sensations accompanying his “felt change of consciousness”, he usually does so in terms of a pleasurable experience. But of course, it is much more intense than that. For me, the writer who comes closest to explaining this heightened mood is Barfield’s friend and fellow Inkling, C.S. Lewis. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis attempts to describe the state of mind after three childhood “experiences”—two literary and one simply “the memory of a memory”. All of these “felt changes of consciousness” involved what he called “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”. It is neither pleasure nor happiness and he simply calls it Joy; hence the title of his autobiography. The title is entirely apt, because pleasure and even happiness is often within our power, but Joy is not. Recall Blake:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

I think this description of Lewis’s—of an overwhelming longing for something just beyond our knowledge—is true to experience, certainly to my own experience. For Lewis, of course, it was to attain fulfilment in the Christian religion, but we can imagine a Platonist, for instance, finding the ultimate source in the Idea of the Good. From an ontological point of view we might well express it as that sudden apprehension of Beauty as an attribute of Being, and exclaim with St Augustine: “Too late, too late have I loved thee, O Beauty of ancient days.”