Daily Poetry Readings #162: The Song of the Militant Romance by Wyndham Lewis | Dr Iain McGilchrist

Part 162 of a daily series of readings of his favourite poetry by Dr Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary. Today’s poem is The Song of the Militant Romance by Wyndham Lewis.

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~ The Song of the Militant Romance by Wyndham Lewis ~

Again let me do a lot of extraordinary talking.
Again let me do a lot!
Let me abound in speeches—let me abound!—publicly polyglot.
Better a blind word to bluster with—better a bad word than none lieber Gott!
Watch me push into my witch’s vortex all the Englishman’s got
To cackle and rattle with—you catch my intention?—to be busily balking
The tongue-tied Briton—that is my outlandish plot!
To put a spark in his damp peat—a squib for the Scotchman—
Starch for the Irish—to give a teutonic-cum-Scot
Breadth to all that is slender in Anglo-cum-Oxfordshire-Saxony,
Over-pretty in Eire—to give to this watery galaxy
A Norseman’s seasalted stamina, a dram of the Volsung’s salt blood.

As to the trick of prosody, the method of conveying the matter,
Frankly I shall provoke the maximum of saxophone clatter.
I shall not take ‘limping’ iambics, not borrow from Archilochous
His ‘light-horse gallop’, nor drive us into a short distich that would bog us.
I shall not go back to Skeltonics, nor listen to Doctor Guest.
I know with my bold Fourteener I have the measure that suits us best
I shall drive the matter along as I have driven it from the first,
My peristalsis is well-nigh perfect in burst upon well-timed burst—
I shall drive my coach and four through the strictest of hippical treatises.
I do not want to know too closely the number of beats it is.
So shipwreck the nerves to enable the vessel the better to float.
This cockle shell’s what it first was built for, and a most sea-worthy boat.
At roll-call Byron Dominus uttered at a fool-school,
Shouted by scottish ushers, caused his lordship to sob like a fool,
Yet Byron was the first to laugh at the over-sensitive Keats
‘Snuffed out by an article’, those were the words. A couple of rubber teats
Should have been supplied beyond any question to these over-touchy pets—
For me, you are free to spit your hardest and explode your bloody spleen
Regarding my bold compact Fourteener, or my four less than fourteen.

So set up a shouting for me! Get a Donnybrook racket on!
Hound down the drowsy latin goliaths that clutter the lexicon—
Send a contingent over to intone in our battle-line—
Wrench the trumpet out of the centre of a monkish leonine—
Courtmartial the stripling slackers who dance in the dull Rhyme Royal—
Send staggering out all the stammerers who stick round as Chaucer’s foil—
Dig out the dogs from the doggerel of the hudibrastic couplet—
Hot up the cold-as-mutton songbirds of the plantagenet cabinet!
Go back to the Confessor’s palace and distangle some anglo-saxon,
And borrow a bellow or two from the pictish or from the Manxman.
Set all our mother-tongue reeling, with the eruption of obsolete vocables,
Disrupt it with all the grammars, that are ground down to cement it—with obstacles
Strew all the cricket pitches, the sleek tennis-lawns of our tongue—
Instal a nasty cold in our larynx—a breathlessness in our lung!

But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting—
That is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop
And not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting,
Nor the needle’s scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot.
Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind’s ear open—
Shut up the mind’s eye—all will be music! What
Sculpture of sound cannot—what cannot as a fluid token
Words—that nothing else cannot!

But when the great blind talking is set up and thoroughly got going—
When you are accustomed to be stunned—
When the thunder of this palaver breaks with a gentle soughing
Of discreet Zephyrs, or of dull surf underground—
Full-roaring, when sinus sinus is outblowing,
Backed up by a bellow of sheer blarney loudest-lunged—
That is the moment to compel from speech
That hybrid beyond language—hybrid only words can reach.

Break out word-storms!—a proper tongue-burst! Split
Our palate down the middle—shatter it!
Give us hare-lip and cross us with a seal
That we may emit the most ear-splitting squeal!
Let words forsake their syntax and ambit—
The dam of all the lexicons gone west!—
Chaos restored, why then by such storms hit
The brain can mint its imagery best.
Whoever heard of perfect sense or perfect rhythm.
Matching the magic of extreme verbal schism?

The remaining verses can be viewed at the following link: https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/song-militant-romance