Coping With the Flood

COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM EMPSON (113 pp.)--Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

There is a kind of "intellectual" poetry that the everyday reader is right in never bothering his head about; if he did, he would find it about as unrewarding after study as before. But there is another kind that, like differential calculus and other forms of honest brainwork, has a permanent beauty worth a closer look. Of all living writers, none has done more as a critic to keep this distinction clear or more as a poet to illustrate it than bush-bearded, 42-year-old Englishman William Empson, who now lives by choice in Peiping. For years Empson's work has been admired by people who would put their minds on it, and either ignored or jeered at by a greater number who gave it a fast superficial reading. The first U.S. publication of his collected poems means that the first party may be making a little headway.

Empson's poems came out of hard thinking about poetry. Twenty years ago as a student at Magdalene College, Cambridge, Empson turned on his studies a now legendary power of concentration. In a university famous for mathematics he got a "first" in the subject, then a "starred first" in English.

Shoulder the Sky. In six weeks, in an assigned paper, Empson wrote the first draft of Seven Types of Ambiguity, which became a classic of modern literary criticism. His tutor, Semanticist I. A. Richards, had been exploring the wide range of meanings that various minds can find in the simplest verse. Empson took up the subject and exhausted it. Some readers complained Poet-Mathematician Empson had "read things into poetry that weren't there," erecting double or multiple meanings into a poetic principle.

In the '30s, while teaching in Tokyo and Peiping, Empson began to put together a poetry of his own. Some of his early verses now seem overstrained, jammed with more allusions than anything this side of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But he was probably the first man anywhere to shoulder the brand-new sky of the Cambridge physicists and astronomers and jostle intelligible poetry out of it:

Alas, how hope for freedom, no bars

bind; Space is like earth, rounded, a padded

cell; Plumb the stars depth, your lead bumps

you behind; Blind Satan's voice rattled the whole

of Hell . . .

Empson's masterpiece is a long theological poem, Bacchus, which he finished in China in 1939. Strictly constructed and packed with systematic puns, it has the mass and polish and concealed energy of a jacketed turbine. The divinity in question is not only the releasing god of drunkenness and wit but God Himself, protean and powerful:

The god arkitect whose coping with the Flood

Groyned the white stallion arches of the main (And miner deeps that in the dome

of the brain Take Iris' arches' pupillage and

Word)

Walked on the bucking water like a bird . . .

To this poem, as to others, Empson has provided notes to help the reader of good will. He says of the passage: "[The god is here] Noah or Neptune managing the sea. The point is to get puns for both violent disorder and building a structure . . . Cope--coping-stone and to manage, groynes--breakwaters, the meet of Gothic arches, the sex of the horses. The same kind of control is needed inside your head, a place also round and not well known (miner--"minor"), and it requires chiefly a clarifying connection with the outside world, e.g., by the arches of the eye, whose iris (rainbow) promises safety as to Noah. The externalised Logos [Word] is a sort of promise that the outside world fits our thoughts. Christ walked on the water and the doves of Noah's ark and of the Holy Spirit before creation brooded over it; the idea is that you control the disorder of the outside world by sharing it and delighting in it . . ."

Don't Be Dismayed. Empson's paradox is that he preaches Oriental passivity in the most dynamic sort of Western verse. This is symbolic of Empson's life in China, where he shared the hardships of the Japanese war with his students, trekking overland from Peiping to distant, mountainous Yunnan province, a distance of some 1,800 miles. Books were lost in the flight, so Empson gave a whole course in the English metaphysical poets from memory, reconstructing John Donne's songs and sonnets by substituting lines of his own for lines he had forgotten.

During the war, Empson worked in England for the BBC; he married, and then returned to Peking National University, where he intends to stay. Last summer, however, he taught at Kenyon College, in Ohio--a gentle, wiry little man who, as one friend put it, "wandered around in a cloud of black beard, talking animatedly to himself."

When Empson read it aloud, his Bacchus swept his hearers away with its sonority and music, having an effect that Poet John Crowe Ransom likened to "the blazing beauty of fireworks." But what most impressed them was the detachment with which this prodigious man regarded a notoriously threatened and self-conscious world. The last poem in his new book was a meditation on world culture:

Not wrongly moved by this dismaying scene The thinkers like the nations getting

caught Joined in the organising that they

fought

To scorch all earth of all but one machine.

It can be swung, is what these hopers mean, For all the loony hooters can be

bought On the small ball. It can then all be

taught And reconverted to be kind and clean.

A more heartening fact about the cultures of man

Is their appalling stubbornness. The sea

Is always calm three fathoms down.

The gigantic anthropological circus riotously

Holds open all its booths. The pygmy plan

Is one note each and the tune goes out free.

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