Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form
By Donald Hall

   When we pursue the psychic origins of our satisfaction with poetic form, we come to the end of the trail.  It is deep in the woods, and there is a fire; Twinbird sits quietly, absorbed in the play of flame that leaps and falls; Goatfoot dances by the fire, his eyes reflecting the orange coals, as his lean foot taps the stone.  Inside the fire there is a mother and child, made one, the universe of the red coal.  This is Milktongue.

1. Some Premises

First, in connection with oppositions:

1. Any quality of poetry can be used for a number of purposes, including opposed purposes.  Thus, concentration on technique has often been used to trivialize content, by poets afraid of what they will learn about themselves.  But concentration on technique can absorb the attention while unacknowledged material enters the language; so technique can facilitate inspiration.
On the other hand, a poet can subscribe to an antitechnical doctrine of inspiration in a way that simply substitutes one technique for another.  Surrealism can become as formulaic as a pastoral elegy.
2. When a poet says he is doing north, look and see if he is not actually doing south.  Chances are that his bent is so entirely south that he must swear total allegiance to north in order to include the globe.
3. Energy arises from conflict.  Without conflict, no energy.  Yin and yang.  Dark and light.  Pleasure and pain.  No synthesis without thesis and antithesis.  Conflict of course need not be binary but may include a number of terms.
4. Every present event that moves us deeply connects in our psyches with something (or things) in the past.  The analogy is the two pieces of carbon that make an arc light.  When they come close enough, the spark leaps across.  The one mourning is all mourning; “After the first death, there is no other.”  This generalization applies to the composition of poems (writing) and to the recomposition of poems (reading).
5. The way out is the same as the way in.  To investigate the process of making a poem is not merely an exercise in curiosity or gossip, but an attempt to understand the nature of literature.  In the act of reading, the reader undergoes a process—largely without awareness, as the author was largely without intention—which resembles, like a slightly fainter copy of the original, the process of discovery or recovery that the poet went through in his madness or inspiration.

And then, more general:

6. A poem is one man’s inside talking to another man’s inside.  It may also be reasonable man talking to reasonable man, bit if it is not inside talking to inside, it is not a poem.  This inside speaks through the second language of poetry, the unintended language.  Sometimes, as in surrealism, the second language is the only language.  It is the ancient prong of carbon in the arc light.  We all share more when we are five years old than when we are twenty-five; more at five minutes than at five years.  The second language allows poetry to be universal.
7. Lyric poetry, typically, has one goal and one message, which is to urge the condition of inwardness, the “inside” from which its own structure derives.

2. Form: The Sensual Body

      There is the old false distinction between vates and poiein.  It is a boring distinction, and I apologize for dragging it out again.  I want to use it in its own despite.
      The poiein, from the Greek verb for making or doing, becomes the poet—the master of craft, the maker of the labyrinth of epic or tragedy or lyric hymn, tale-teller and spell-binder.  The vates is bound in his own spell.  He is the rhapsode Socrates patronized in Ion.  In his purest form he utters what he does not understand at all, be he oracle or Andre Breton.  He is the visionary, divinely inspired, who like Blake may take dictation from voices.
        But Blake’s voices returned to dictate revisions.  The more intimately we observe any poet who claims extremes of inspiration or of craftsmanship, the more we realize that his claims are a disguise.  There is no poiein for the same reason that there is no vates.  The claims may be serious (they may be the compensatory distortion which allows the poet to write at all) and the claims may affect the looks of the poem---a surrealist poem and a neoclassic Imitation of Horace look different—but the distinction becomes trivial when we discover the psychic origins of poetic form.
        I speak of the psychic origins of poetic form.  Psychologists have written convincingly of the origins of the material of arts, in wish-fulfillment and in the universality of myth.  We need not go over ideas of the poet as daydreamer, or of the collective unconsciousness.  Ernst Kris’s “regression in the service of the ego” names an event but does not explain how it comes about.  But one bit of Freud’s essay on the poet as daydreamer has been a clue in this search.  At the end of his intelligent, snippy paper, Freud says that he lacks time now to deal with form, but that he suspects that formal pleasure is related to forepleasure.  Then he ducks through the curtain and disappears.  Suppose we consider the implications of his parting shot.  Forepleasure develops out of the sensuality of the whole body which the infant experiences in the pleasure of the crib and of the breast.  The connection between forepleasure and infancy is the motion from rationality to metaphor.
        But to begin our search for the psychic origins of poetic form, we must first think of what is usually meant by the word “form,” and then we must look for the reality.  So often form is looked upon only as the fulfillment of metrical expectations.  Meter is nothing but a loose set of probabilities; it is a trick easily learned; anyone can learn to arrange one-hundred-and-forty syllables so that the even syllables are louder than the odd ones, and every tenth syllable rhymes; the object will be a sonnet.  But only when you have forgotten the requirements of meter do you begin to write poetry in it.  The resolutions of form which ultimately provide the wholeness of a poem—resolutions of syntax, metaphor, diction, and sound—are minute and subtle and vary from poem to poem.  They vary from sonnet to sonnet, or, equally and not more greatly, from sonnet to free verse lyric.
        Meter is no more seriously binding than the frame we put around a picture.  But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.  Free verse is simply less predictable.  Yeats said that the finished poem made a sound like the click of the lid on a perfectly made box.  One-hundred-and-forty syllables, organized into a sonnet, do not necessarily make a click; the same number of syllables, dispersed in asymmetric lines of free verse, will click like a lid if the poem is good.  In the sonnet and in the free verse poem, the poet improvises toward that click, and achieves his resolution in unpredictable ways.  The rhymes and line-lengths of the sonnet are too gross to contribute greatly to that sense of resolution.  The click is our sense of lyric form.  This pleasure in resolution is Twinbird.
        The wholeness and identity of the completed poem, thepoem as object in time, the sensual body of the poem—this wholeness depends upon a complex of unpredictable fulfillments.  The satisfying resolutions in a sonnet are more subtle than rhyme and meter, and less predictable.  The body of sound grows in resolutions like assonance and alliteration, and in near-misses of both; or in the alternations, the going-away and coming-back, of fast and slow, long and short, high and low.  The poet—free verse or meter, whatever—may start with lines full of long vowels, glide on dipthong sounds like “eye” and “ay” for instance, move to quick alternative lines of short vowels and clipped consonants, and return in a coda to the long vowels “eye” and “ay.”  The assonance is shaped like a saucer.
        The requirements of fixity are complex, and the conscious mind seldom deals with them.  Any poet who has written metrically can write arithmetically correct iambic pentameter as fast as his hand can move.  In improvising toward the click, the poet is mostly aware of what sounds right and what does not.  When something persists in not sounding right, the poet can examine it bit by bit—can analyze it—in the attempt to consult his knowledge and apply it.
        This knowledge is habitual.  It is usually not visible to the poet, but it is available for consultation.  When you learn something so well that you forget it, you can begin to do it.  You dance best when you forget that you are dancing.  Athletics—a tennis stroke, swimming, a receiver catching a football—is full of examples of actions done as if by instinct, which are actually learned procedure, studied and practiced until they become “second nature.”  So it is with poetry.  The literary form of poems is created largely by learning—in collaboration with the unconscious by a process I will talk about later.  Possible resolutions of metaphor, diction, and sound are coded into memory from our reading of criticism, from our talk with other poets, and from our revisions of our own work, with the conscious analysis that this revision entails.  New resolutions are combinations of parts of old ones, making new what may later be combined again and made new again.
        When the experienced reader takes a poem in, his sense of fixity comes also from memory.  He too has the codes in his head.  The new poem fulfills the old habits of expectation in some unexpected way.  The reader does not know why—unless he bothers to analyze; then probably not fully—he  is pleased by the sensual body of the poem.  He does not need to know why, unless he must write about it.  The pleasure is sufficient.  Since the poet’s madness is the reader’s madness, the resolution of the mad material is the reader’s resolution as well as the poet’s.  The way in is the same as the way out.
        Whatever else we may say of a poem we admire, it exists as a sensual body.  It is beautiful and pleasant, manifest content aside, like a worn stone that is good to touch, or like a shape of flowers arranged or accidental.  This sensual body reaches us through our mouths, which are warm in the love of vowels held together, and in the muscles of our legs which as in dance tap the motion and pause of linear and syntactic structure.  These pleasures are Milktongue and Goatfoot.
        There is a nonintellectual beauty in the moving together of words in phrases—“the music of diction”—and in resolution of image and metaphor.  The sophisticated reader of poetry responds quickly to the sensual body of a poem before he interrogates the poem at all.  The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.  (So Pound said that technique is the test of sincerity.)  We will glance through a poem rapidly and if it is a skillful fake we will feel repelled.  If the poem is alive and honest, we will feel assent in our quickening pulse—though it might take us some time to explain what we were reacting to.
        The soi-distant vates feels that he speaks from the unconscious (or with the voice of the God), and the poiein that he makes all of this wholesomeness of shape on purpose.  Both of them disguise the truth.  All poets are poiein and vates.  The poiein comes from memory of reading, and the vates from memory of infancy.  The sensual body of the poem derives from memory of reading most obviously, but ultimately it leads us back further—to the most primitive psychic origins of poetic form.

3. Conflict Makes Energy

        People frequently notice that poetry concerns itself with unpleasant subjects: death, deprivation, loneliness, despair, if love then the death of love, and abandonment.  Of course there are happy poems, but in English poetry there are few which are happy through and through—and these few tend to be light, short, pleasant, and forgettable.  Most memorable happy poems have a portion of blackness in them.  Over all—Keats, Blake, Donne, Yeats, Eliot, Shakespeare, Wordsworth—there is more dark than light, more elegy than celebration.  There is no great poem in our language which is simply happy.
        Noticing these facts, we reach for explanations: maybe to be happy is to be a simpleton; maybe poets are morbid; maybe life is darker than it is light; maybe when you are happy you are too busy being happy to write poems about it and when you are sad, you write poems in order to do something.  There may be half-truths in these common ideas, but the real explanation lies in the structure of a poem; and, I suggest, in the structure of human reality.
        Energy arises from conflict.
A)   The sensual body of a poem is a pleasure separate from any message the poem
may contain.
        B)  If the poem contains a message which is pleasurable (a word I have just
substituted for “happy”), then the two pleasures walk agreeably together for a few feet, and collapse into a smiling lethargy.  The happy poem sleeps in the sun.
C)    If the message of the poem, on the whole, is terrifying—that They flee from me,
that one time did me seek; that I am sick, I must die; that On Margate Sands/I can connect/Nothing with nothing; that Things fall apart, the center will not hold—then pain of message and pleasure of body copulate in a glorious conflict-dance of energy.  This alternation of pleasure and pain is so swift as to seem simultaneous, to be simultaneous in the complexity both of creation and reception, a fused circle of yin and yang, a oneness in diversity.
        The pain is clear to anyone.  The pleasure is clear (dear) to anyone who loves poems.  If we acknowledge the pleasure of the sensual body of the poem, we can see why painful poems are best: conflict makes energy and resolves our suffering into ambivalent living tissue.  If human nature is necessarily ambivalent, then the structure of the energetic poem resembles the structure of human nature.
        The sensual body, in poems, is not simply a compensation for the pain of the message. It is considerably more important, and more central to the nature of poetry.  When we pursue the psychic origins of our satisfaction with poetic form, we come to the end of the trail.  It is deep in the woods, and there is a fire; Twinbird sits quietly, absorbed in the play of flame that leaps and falls; Goatfoot dances by the fire, his eyes reflecting the orange coals, as his lean foot taps the stone.  Inside the fire there is a mother and child, made one, the universe of the red coal.  This is Milktongue.

4. Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird

        Once at a conference on creativity, a young linguist presented a model of language.  Xeroxed in outline, it was beautiful like a concrete poem.  I looked for language as used in poems and looked for it a long time.  Finally I found it, under “autistic utterance,” with the note that this utterance might later be refined into lyric poetry.  It reminded me of another conference I had attended a year or two earlier.  A psychoanalyst delivered a paper on deriving biographical information about an author from his fiction.  He distributed mimeographed copies of his paper, which his secretary had typed from his obscure handwriting; he began his remarks by presenting a list of errata.  The first correction was, “For ‘autistic,’ read ‘artistic’ throughout.”
        The newborn infant cries, he sucks at the air until he finds the nipple.  At first he finds his hand to suck by accident—fingers, thumb; then he learns to repeat that pleasure.  Another mouth-pleasure is the autistic babble, the “goo-goo,” the small cooing and purring and bubbling.  These are sounds of pleasure; they are without message, except that a parent interprets them as “happy”: pleasure is happy.  Wittgenstein once said that we could sing the song with expression or without expression; very well, he said, let us have the expression without the song. (He was being ironic; I am not.)  The baby’s autistic murmur is the expression without the song.  His small tongue curls around the sounds, the way his tongue warms with the tiny thread of milk that he pulls from his mother.  This is Milktongue, and in poetry it is the deep and primitive pleasure of vowels in the mouth, of assonance and of holds on adjacent long vowels; of consonance, mmmm, and alliteration.  It is Dylan Thomas and the curlew cry; it is That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea; it is Then, in a wailful choir, the small gnats mourn.
        As Milktongue mouths the noises it curls around, the rest of his body plays in pleasure also.  His fists open and close spasmodically.  His small bowed lags, no good for walking, contract and expand in a rhythmic beat.  He has begun the dance, his muscles move like his heartbeat, and Goatfoot improvises his circle round the fire.  His whole body throbs and thrills with pleasure.  The first parts of his body which he notices are his hands; then his feet.  The strange birds fly at his head, waver, and pause.  After a while he perceives that there are two of them.  They begin to act when he wishes them to act, and since the mental creates the physical, Twinbird is the first magic he performs.  He examines these independent/dependent twin birds.  They are exactly alike.  And they are exactly unalike, mirror images of each other, the perfection of opposite-same.
        As the infant grows, the noises split off partly into messages.  “Mmm” can be milk and mother.  “Da-da” belongs to another huge shape.  He crawls and his muscles become useful to move him toward the toy and the soda cracker.  Twinbird flies more and more at his will, as Milktongue speaks, and Goatfoot crawls.  But still he rolls on his back and his legs beat in the air.  Still, the sister hands flutter at his face.  Still, the noises without message fill the happy time of waking before hunger, and the softening down, milktongue full, into sleep.  The growing child skips rope, hops, dances to a music outside intelligence, rhymes to the hopscotch or jump rope, and listens to the sounds his parents please him with:

   Pease porridge hot
   Pease porridge cold
   Pease porridge-in-the-pot
   Five days old.

Or himself learns:

   Bah, bah, black sheep
   Have you any wool;
   Yes, sir, yes, sir,
   Three bags full.
   One for my master,
   One for my dame
   And one for the little boy
   That lives down the lane.

The mouth-pleasure, the muscle-pleasure, the pleasure of match-unmatch.
        But “Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing boy.”  Civilized humans try gradually to cut away the autistic component in their speech.  Goatfoot survives in the dance, Twinbird in rhyme and resolution of dance and noise.  Milktongue hides itself more.  It ties us to the mother so obviously that men are ashamed of it.  Tribal society was unashamed and worshipped Milktongue in religion and history.  Among the outcast in the modern world, Milktongue sometimes endures in language, as it does in the American black world, and in the world of poor Southern whites.  In Ireland where the mother (and the Virgin) are still central, Milktongue remains in swearing and in the love of sweet speech.  Probably, in most of the modern world, Milktongue exists only in smoking, eating, and drinking; and in oral sexuality.
        But Milktongue and Goatfoot and Twinbird have always lived in the lyric poem, for poet and for reader.  They are the ancestors, and they remain the psychic origins of poetic form, primitive both personally (back to the crib) and historically (back to the fire in front of the cave).  They keep pure the sensual pleasure that is the dark secret shape of the poem.  We need an intermediary to deal with them, for a clear reason: Goatfoot and Milktongue and Twinbird, like other figures that inhabit the forest, are wholly preverbal.  They live before words.
        They approach the edge of the clearing, able to come close because the Priestess has no eyes to frighten them with.  The Priestess, built of the memory of old pleasures, only knows how to select and order.  The Priestess does not know what she says, but she knows that she says it in dactylic hexameter.  Goatfoot and Milktongue and Twinbird leave gifts at the edge of the forest.  The Priestess picks up the gifts, and turns to the light, and speaks words that carry the dark mysterious memory of the forest and the pleasure.
        The poet writing, and the reader reading, lulled by Goatfoot and Milktongue and Twinbird into the oldest world, become able to think as the infant thinks, with transformation and omnipotence and magic.  The form of the poem, because it exists separately from the messages, can act as a trigger or catalyst to activate not messages but types of mental behavior.  Coleridge spoke of meter as effecting the willing suspension of disbelief.  They are the three memories of the body—not only meter; and they are powerful magic—not only suspension of disbelief.  The form of the poem unlocks the mind to old pleasures.  Pleasure leaves the mind vulnerable to the content of experience before we have intellectualized the experience and made it acceptable to the civilized consciousness.  The form allows the mind to encounter real experience, and so the real message is permitted to speak—but only because the figures in the forest, untouched by messages, have danced and crooned and shaped.
        The release of power and sweetness!  Milktongue also remembers hunger, and the cry without answer.  Goatfoot remembers falling, and the ache that bent the night.  Twinbird remembers the loss of his brother, so long he believed in abandonment forever.  From the earliest times, poetry has existed in order to retrieve, to find again, and to release.  In the man who writes the poem, in the reader who lives it again, in the ideas, the wit, the images, the doctrines, the exhortations, the laments and the cries of joy, the lost forest struggles to be born again inside the woods.  The life or urge and instinct, that rages and coos, kicks and frolics, as it chooses only without choosing—this life is the life the poem grows from, and leans toward.