Robert Graves, best known for I, Claudius, was interested in the roots of poetic language. His book The White Goddess is an erudite search for the sources of a primal poetic vocabulary. He felt finding it would provide a skeleton’s key to unsolved poetic mysteries. For example, what the Siren’s sang when Ulysses was tied to the mast. Graves’ book goes through ancient groves, into secret poetic societies, down winding paths. One of his ideas is that any true poet shares in this ancient poetic language.
No doubt early poets shared a hermetic symbolic language among themselves, for who else was reading at the time? Yet, I think that symbols in poetry, if they’re to be understood by anyone, must bear a direct relationship to something tangible. As far as the Siren’s Song goes, each sailor would’ve heard a call to them alone, from their beloved, from someone lost to them, perhaps from the home they left behind before embarking for Troy.
People are attracted by mystery, obscurity and secrets. These promise, if pierced, special understanding. There are many poets who’ve used complex symbolic language. Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot are two. In my reading of these poets, I always have the impression they’re describing the tangible world around them by simple symbolic exchange. They want to say something clearly but know it must be done indirectly to have an effect. Rimbaud’s The Drunken Boat is his dispassionate look on at the world with which he has broken any emotional connection; A Season in Hell a masked confessional autobiography. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” a self-conscious aging man taking stock of his limitations and feelings of inadequacy while wandering around London.
When I was a child, I recall many of the later Beatles’ songs, as well as those of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and others, taken as seriously as if were the words of a Holy Sage. Songs were analyzed and dissected, obscure references from Hindu Scripture and Shamanic ritual formulas were sought. It was in this populist intellectual setting that Charles Manson would’ve done his exegesis of The White Album to “the Family” at the Spahn Ranch, finding in it his ideas on the coming Apocalypse and their special role in it.
At the time, the song “I Am the Walrus” was an impenetrable mystery. Now, looking at the words, it seems obvious that the song is about Lennon’s disenchantment with touring and the lack of personal identity he felt being one of The Beatles. Consider the opening lines:
I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together
Then the refrain:
I am the eggman,
They are the eggmen,
I am the walrus.
He’s talking about existing in a situation where he’s indistinguishable from the people around him and feels personally alienated. Or the stanza:
Sitting on a cornflake,
Waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee shirt,
Stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you been a naughty boy,
You let your face grow long.
He’s in a hotel having breakfast waiting for the tour bus to take him to the next concert hall while being told to smile for the cameras. The rest of the song follows suit, from the “pretty policemen in a row” (who guarded them while on tour) to “sitting in an English Garden” and the feelings of disenchantment he felt with an imposed social life. My explanations aren’t definitive, and every word can’t be explained.
I can’t imagine any poet writing not to be understood by an audience. If the Celtic Bards wrote in cryptic symbols, between themselves they knew what they were saying. I recall Nirvana as a band that had a reputation for hard-to-understand, poetic lyrics. But again, if one just reads the words it becomes clear. “In Bloom,” which could seem like a series of non-sequiturs, is clear when one realizes it’s about the primacy of our physical nature over our personal identity. Every line tells the story of a teenager who finds himself in a new sexualized body and can’t deal with it. He likes to shoot his gun, but he knows not what it means.
Most lines in popular songs have stuck in my mind not because they’re particularly poetic, but because they give rise to thoughts away from the song itself. I prefer these. Take the line from “Fun, Fun, Fun” by the Beach Boys: Come along with me ‘cause we got a lot of things to do now.
This leads me to think they really had nothing to do, and probably never did or would, but that, when one is young, somehow doing nothing is the same as doing everything.