Poetic Parable: A Note on the Poetry of Dom Moraes

Author(s): Francis Doherty

Source: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 52, No. 206 (Summer, 1963), pp. 205-211
Published by: Irish Province of the Society of Jesus
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POETIC PARABLE: A Note
on the Poetry of Dom Moraes
FRANCIS DOHERTY

. . . the 'cult of Restlessness' is the pulse of the Romantic

Enlightenment ever moving between two poles: the possibility of the
inexistence of God and the possibility of the dehumanization of un-
believing (emancipated) man.
(Geoffrey Clive, The Romantic Enlightenment, New York, 1960,
p. 185).

ONE of the interesting things about the literary world

at present is the position of the person who wishes,
because of what he is in spite of education and climate
of thought, to create literature based on a religious
emotion when the object of the possible emotion is
extinct. Such a man is Dom Moraes. I feel his most
moving verse to be that which is presented as fable or
dream, and a look at one of his poems yields something
of interest both as a technical exercise and as high-
lighting a spiritual condition common enough in our
civilization.
The creation of a poetic world which looks to itself
for its own values and raison d'dtre is not what Moraes
is concerned with. Rather, I think, he is attempting to
create in his poetry a world which will still retain some
of the power and value which life once seemed to have
in the days of belief. The world today is a lonelier
place for Moraes and many others than it could have
been before. There is no longer anything to bind man
to man; each person is imprisoned in his personality so
that communication is rarely achieved, if at all. Relig-
ion, in the figure of Christ, is extinct for many and
cannot be accepted as once it was; nevertheless, we
retain the need for a Christ, a need to communicate,
to escape from our prison of self.
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 In his successful poems Moraes (with the reader) leaps from an
overt statement to one unstated but inevitably implied, and what I
feel he is doing in the following poem is creating a parable. We have
a seemingly factual history, a rounded, though truncated, life-history
of a modern isolated, friendless man. The history is told by the poet
and related, quite firmly, to a whole society, to a whole set of values
and ways of behaviour and experiencing. Parable seems a close enough
term, because, like parable, the poem works through the suppression
of the application; we are given the vehicle, not the tenor, if you like.
ONE OF US
We used to drink in the same place.
I never spoke to him. because
Of knowinghim only by the face:
A strangeface: somethingin it was
Naked, shrinking,like a snail
Curledinside its tissue town,
That does not know what winds prevail
Until its own leaf is brought down.
Leaf-shapedthe room in which for years
The poets and their friends would drink
Wheremost transmuteddrink to tears
And some transmittedtears to ink.
And there behind the folded door
He huddled, nibbling his desire.
A glasswould smashupon the floor
And swaddledin its logs the fire
Hiccuppedout uncertainlight.
The lonely drinkerswould start crying,
Or fled in greatcoatsto the night,
But not until the fire was dying
Could he bear to rise, his gaze
Like a priest who says Amen:
And not until the clock said ten
A baffledclinging in the eyes.
Then the thick lips breathedapart.
Stumbling,as if he had not meant
To come at all, he would depart.
I often wonderedwhere he went.
Did he launch out on fruitless flights
Till interceptedby a bus?
This lonely starer at the lights,
Was he another one of us,
Who when the landlord'sburly wife,
Asbestos-gloved,clenchedout the breath
Of the fire, each night of life,
Took one step nearer into death?
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 Christ's parables commonly take the form 'A certain man...', and
his auditors sometimes found them difficult, though intended to be
doctrinally revealing. This poem, as I read it, achieves a certain mode
of life as a parable because of a process in the poem where basic
simile expands into metaphor, and then agglutination of associated
metaphors expands into parable.
Moraes is not presenting fiction (in the sense that the story is
made on the analogy of actual events or possible events, and given
the same indicative mood and a selection of tensal times for action
corresponding to actual events) but something lying between fact and
fiction. This is the region where reality ('it was') and imagination ('it
was as though') are fused in the creation of myth. The simple story is
told for more than the quality of the events themselves, 'by which
moral or spiritual relations are typically set forth, as in the parables
of the New Testament' (0. E. D. parable sense b.). It should become
clear that the poem is concerned with 'moral' and 'spiritual relations',
and that this is achieved through putting to use the expanding simile
and developing the characteristic poetic metaphor.

To come to terms with the passage: -

Naked, shrinking, like a snail

Curled inside its tissue town,
That does not know what winds prevail
Until its own leaf is brought down.
Leaf-shapedthe room...
we need some adjustment of our ordinary terminology. The extended
simile where we seem to have created for us the precarious world of
the stranger by likeness to that of the snail's existence, in fact works
as a metaphor. The simile is made, once created, to stand as one half
of the metaphor in 'leaf-shaped'. The word, though an adjective,
depends for its force upon its relationship with both the description
of the snail's shell ('tissue town') in its fragility as seen by a non-snail,
and its close comfort when apprehended by the snail, and with the
comment on the defencelessness of the seemingly-secure ('Until its
own leaf is brought down'). A rough gloss would be:

this man = the snail (in several ways)

this man = all men = me = you ('one of us')

In a sense, then, the relationship between 'Until its own leaf is

brought down' and 'Leaf-shaped' is the logical relation of general to
particular, of the species to the specimen, and this relation is meta-
Summer 1963 207

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phor, because not a total identity. An analogy might read, 'My room's
a positive ward-room', viz. there are certain things about my room
which are identical with things found in a ship's ward-room, but only
those. What is not expressed by Leaf-shaped', but evidently caught by
the reader, is this whole notion of insecurity (false sense of security)
and the enclosing, the fragile and inevitably short-spanned life. The
relationship, then, is a logical and an extra-logical one, a metaphoric
leap as well as a logical progression.
What unites the stranger, 'us', the room, the fire and the poem
is an interconnected series of linking metaphors which have a common
relationship. They have in common an uneasy sense that there is an
immanent power in things which is of the same nature in all things.
The conception seems, quite plainly, to be related to the dual ex-
pression found, for example, powerfully expressed in Hopkins's:
a) The world is charged with the grandeur of God
and b) Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.
(Hopkins's italics)
that is, that each individual is essentially itself and, also, that there
is a common something that unites them. But, in Moraes, the thing
common to both objects and people is a light which is 'uncertain', and
an individuality which is a prison. The fire, for example, 'swaddled in
its logs', is evidently some sort of comfort, life and inspiration, both
protected and concealed. The light in common can only be fitfully
appreciated because everything is enclosed in protective encumbrances
of flesh, personality.
The obvious parallel, the implied indentification in metaphor, of
'Naked, shrinking, like a snail' and 'He huddled, nibbling his desire'
is a thematic link with 'A baffled clinging in his eyes', 'Or fled in
greatcoats' and 'the landlord's burly wife, Asbestos-gloved.. .'. We
have built up a world of protection against life, the elemental, the
common fire and light, the common humanity. The result is a uniting
of metaphor and image to give a curiously, gently piercing statement
for us of the sense of positive isolation and insecurity; the uncertainty,
the 'baffled' unite both the stranger and 'us' paradoxically, because
this isolation is all we have in common. But it is because this is what
we have in common that Moraes rejects the 'inspiration' of poets
flowing from drink to ink via the maudlin 'tears' in the patterned
lines
Where most transmuteddrink to tears
And some transmittedtedarsto ink.
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This is rejected, not for compasion, because we are too isolated for
that, but for the wondering, dry-eyed half concern for the stranger.
The stranger-figure in his loneliness is the only 'Man of Sorrows'
which Moraes can recognize in the modern world, despised and re-
jected of men, and 'his gaze Like a priest who says Amen . ..'. The
parody in the patterned lines now becomes clear and we can now see
why this reflects or echoes the diminution of compassion to half-
concern. The Last Supper ('transmuted drink to tears') must be par-
odied precisely because parody is the only way that the power of an
extinct belief can be harnessed.
The reduced Christ-figure now suffers only apart, and the curious
first question at the end of the poem allows an off-rhyme with the
mysterious death of Christ (a possible answer is: 'No. He wasn't of
our condition because he was already dead'). In another poem, 'At
Seven O'Clock', centred on a masseur from Ceylon who gave him
massage, the poet presents us with the notion of a Christ who can
depend on being created by the poet, not apprehended or believed in.
The man is described as disdainfully dealing in a sort of re-making,
re-vivifying:
Within my mind he is reborn as Christ:
For each blind dawn he kneads my prostrate thighs,
Thumps on my buttocks with his fist
And breathes, arise.
His activity is one which, put into these terms, ought to provoke a
smile, but it is a comment on the absence of the world of spirit and
Christ except as a convenient and expressive way of thinking of
certain aspects of the human situation.
Moraes, the poet, sees this task of re-creating, of redeeming, as
belonging to the poet, if it belongs at all. This comes out strongly
enough in his treatment of Wordsworth:
But although each Spring brings a newer death to these bones,
I have seen him risen again with the crocus in the Spring.
I have turned my ear to the wind, I have heard him speaking.
I shrank from the bony sorrow in his face.
Yet still I hear those pedagogic tones
Droning away the snow, our old disgrace.
('Bells for William Wordsworth')
There Moraes is re-creating his own Wordsworth, now a Christ-figure,
and the world of poetry with its creative metaphor and image is made
to re-enact the Christ story, to re-create the power of Christ in the
very act of creation. Hence, I suppose, the parody on transubstan-
tiation as a paradigm of poetic creation. Moraes is at work attempting
Summer 1963 209
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to create new myth in place of and upon the old myth no longer, for
him, applicable or :true. Put another way, we can say that he is
basically a religious poet whose world no longer allows him to write
religiously. It might be well if we, in a twentieth century which finds
itself often with a diminishing or an extinct Christ, can be aware of
what was possible in an earlier century in popular literature in
England. Hervey in a mid-eighteenth century Descant upon Creation
could write:

He was a man of Sorrows,and had not where to lay his head; had
not where to lay his head, till he felt the pangs of dissolution, and
was laid in the silent grave; that we, dwelling under the wings of
Omnipotence, and resting in the bosom of infinitive Love, might
spend an harmoniouseternity, in 'singing the song of Moses and of
the Lamb'.

This should set more firmly for us the predicament of a poet like
Dom Moraes who has deliberately to create for himself (and us, the
readers) a 'religious' response to life in a world for him essentially
irredeemable.
Accordingly, in his poetry he can create parable, through ex-
panding metaphors, which will have similar possibilities of applic-
ation to the Biblical parables, and which, in a denial of a too clear
definition and tone, will create beauty and power. In this lies both
his strength and weakness. The figure of Christ, no matter how per-
ceived, will always have intellectual power and emotive force. This
is put to use by Moraes in an 'anti-statement', a statement which
denies the Christian Christ (and that view of man which it involves)
in affirming something about a Christ-figure. He is writing a poetry
which not only draws consciously and in parody on religious sources,
but a poetry which is the only thing he can have if there is no truth
in Christ's reality.
It might not be too mistaken to see a consonance between this
sort of poetry and the current discussion in some non-Catholic theol-
ogical circles about the place of myth in religion:

Thus when Thielicke discusses the question whether myth is in-

dispensable[in religion], at times one has the feeling that what he
means by myth is a story purporting to be about some actual in-
dividual such as Adam or Narcissusbut in reality containing truths
about human beings in general.
(Ian Henderson,Myth in the New Testament,Studies in Biblical
Theology No. 7. S.C.M. Press, London, 1952. pp. 54-55).
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The sort of reduction which this implies seems to fit what I should
like to say about Moraes; and I think that from this reduction stems
a weakness in the poetry. Once the poet sees God as dead, and with
him a potential source of power, control and richness, what is left is
the world of metaphor and simile in which richness can be added to
common sights and sounds. In a poem like 'the Island', for example,
the world has shrunk from a mythological to a psychological (and
Moraes relies on fable) dream or parable where truth is only to be
guessed at, and the nearest we can get is the teasing ambiguity of a
question. The weakness lies in the fact that he is often led into the
creation of images for their own sake and only secondarily to amplify
or extend the fable or parable.
On the other hand, Moraes demonstrates his ability to write a
poetry which is 'open', a poetry which refuses concreteness of applic-
ability, which deals in a condition of modern total isolation with its
unsatisfiable hunger for what would, in another, easier day, have been
called romantic or beautiful. This lack of the hard-boiled, the savage,
produces a poetry which is gently ironic and quite obviously in the
Romantic tradition. When we read the concluding lines of a poem
like 'Getting Married' we see what his qualities are:

Lost in the night we fought; we rushed together

At frontiers of our miles of loneliness
And lived, and parted at a gate
Where the last touch of lips was meant to bless.

This can be called 'open', because, in a real sense, what contributes

to the poetry is the shadow of the paradise, the walled garden or
retreat set apart as 'a region of surpassing beauty, or of supreme bliss'
(O.E.D. sense 3), with both the Biblical and Miltonic tragic irony of the
departure of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. If you like, this
is only vaguely implied, but Moraes works both through the indefinite
and through the implied tenor of a metaphor. The irony is double;
at least in Milton Adam and Eve leave hand in hand.
In much of Moraes, then, we find the values of a sensitive human
being, delighting in the beautiful, suffering from the malaise and
loneliness of the contemporary man without Christ, and stiffening his
poetry with an essential irony, a barrier against regret and against
sentimentality. He is definitely mythopeic, working through the meta-
phoric structure expanded into parable or myth, but as Auden puts
it, 'analogy is not identity; art is not enough'.

Summer 1963 211

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