Among the reviews of The Nightingale’s
Code, my ‘poetic study’ published by Touched Press
in October last year, one common note was sounded. Whether the reviewer
was appreciative (Paula Radice in Freewheelin’), dubious
(Jim Gillan in Isis) or dismissive (Nigel Williamson in Uncut), the
same point got picked on by each of them to demonstrate my occasionally
– some said, and some said chronically – wayward thinking.
This egregious fallacy was my suggestion that ‘To Ramona’,
in its title, refers to the Tarot, and in particular to two cards,
the High Priestess and the Wheel of Fortune. I’ll restate my
case in a moment. Here is how Paula Radice responded to it:
‘I can accept… Gibbens’s view that the cycle
of the first seven albums (up to the “cycle” accident!)
turns around a midpoint of “To Ramona” on Another Side
Of Bob Dylan… Where Gibbens loses me is then putting forward,
as part of the justification for this thesis, that the first part
of the title – To Ra – means Tora, the Tarot, and the
Latin rota or “wheel”, and that these were deliberate
inferences on Dylan’s part. It just seems unnecessary, indeed
counter-productive…’
And this was Nigel Williamson’s view:
‘… if you didn’t see the significance in the
fact that the first four letters of the title “To Ramona”
spell TORA, which is the word on the scroll held by the High Priestess
in the Tarot pack, then your appreciation of Dylan is superficial
indeed. You’re probably the sort of person who doesn’t
even appreciate that his early lyrics are characterised by the use
of the metrical foot known as the anaepest. [sic]’
This is mere misrepresentation. I do not imply – certainly not
in the section under discussion here, and I hope nowhere else –
that someone’s listening which is not informed by the circumstances
or connections I fetch to a song, whether from far or near, is therefore
shallow or wrong or inadequate. If I propose a thought you had not
already had, or convey some fact you didn’t know, am I thereby
calling you ignorant? No: though not being able to copy the correct
spelling of a word – like ‘anapæst’, say –
from a book you are reviewing could be considered ignorant.
Never mind. For now, I’m interested in why this ‘To Ra’
idea of mine caught the flak. But first let me explain it a bit more.
My argument seems not to have been clear in the book, since none of
the three reviews I’ve mentioned restated quite what I thought
I had proposed. I’m not suggesting that Dylan juggled the four
letters TORA to get Tarot and also ‘rota’, the Latin wheel,
or that he would ever expect anyone to follow such a leap if he had
made it.
The letters appear like this, ‘TORA’, on the High Priestess
card, and they also appear at the four cardinal points around the
Wheel of Fortune, as T–A–R–O, just as N, E, S, W
appear on a compass. But Dylan did not need to connect these himself
– the link is made by A.E. Waite, who designed the pack in question,
in his accompanying book The Key to the Tarot. He points out the letters
and explains that they can be read clockwise from T in the ‘North’
position, back to T again, to spell ‘Tarot’; or from R
in the South, clockwise, to read ‘Rota’; or from the T,
anticlockwise, as far round as A, to read Tora. He further points
out that this is the word on the High Priestess’s scroll, and
that it stands for Torah, which is the Hebrew for law, or instruction,
or direction, and the name given to the first five books of the Bible.
Before we go any further, there are a few supporting points I should
make. First, these writings of A.E. Waite are not at all obscure or
esoteric. The Waite pack is probably the most popular form of the
Tarot to this day, and would have been by far the most likely pack
you’d come across in 1964, back before the general revival of
the ‘occult’ led to a profusion of new designs. Likewise,
Waite’s book is one of the favourite beginner’s guides
to the cards and has been reprinted many times. I bought it as a cheap,
recently published paperback in the 1980s.
Second, we know that, many years later, Dylan took an interest in
the Tarot and the Waite pack in particular. He ‘quotes’
the Empress card from it on the back sleeve of Desire. Even from a
cursory look at the symbols and the ways of interpreting them, the
influence of cartomancy – and especially the kind of symbolism
that Waite draws from, mixing the biblical with the magical –
can be seen both in Street-Legal and Renaldo & Clara.
In the film, when Joan Baez appears as the Woman in White clutching
a red rose, she echoes both the Empress, who wears a white gown sprigged
with red roses, and the High Priestess herself, who wears a blue mantle
over what I take to be a shimmering white gown. (It’s coloured
white in places and blue in others – I think to give a moonlit
effect. She has the full moon set in her crown and the crescent moon
at her feet, and sits as it were in an alcove between two pillars,
one black and one white.)
In Waite’s little instruction pamphlet that comes in the box
with the cards, the High Priestess is said to represent, in a reading,
‘the woman who interests the Querent, if male; the Querent herself,
if female’. She also stands for ‘silence, tenacity,
mystery, wisdom’. (Which is about as much detail as any
of the biographers have been able to disclose about the character
of Sara Dylan, isn’t it?) For all her virginal and remote attributes,
it’s the Priestess and not, for example, the much more ‘earthy’
seeming Empress, who signifies a sexual and romantic relationship
with a woman.
Now perhaps we can see a link between the High Priestess and ‘To
Ramona’, with its peculiar blend of ‘high’ philosophising
and sensual romancing. It doesn’t seem to me far-fetched to
suggest that the song arises from the combination of experience of
and meditation on this image. It’s interesting that ‘Torah’
should mean instruction or direction, given that the song mixes several
direct instructions – ‘come closer, shut softly your
watery eyes’ – with its more abstract teachings –
‘Everything passes, everything changes’ and so on.
Here I should make a third substantiating point. This stuff about
the Tarot may or may not interest you, but I think you’ll agree
that it is directly relevant to one period of Dylan’s work at
least; that he clearly had its symbolism in mind about the time of
Street-Legal and Renaldo & Clara, and that he invites us, as openly
as he has ever done with any outside source, apart from the Bible,
to use the Tarot as a ‘key’ to some of his images. But
that was then. Is it likely that he’d known about, let alone
thought about the cards, and used their symbolism as a source for
his art as early as the mid-1960s?
Well, the biographical evidence suggests that he learned about the
Tarot from Sara, whom he most likely met sometime in 1964. Now here’s
a nice piece of circumstantial evidence. The cover photograph of Bringing
It All Back Home was taken in the first weeks of 1965. Put the
Empress on the back cover of Desire alongside Sally Grossman, the
lady in red on the front of BIABH (much easier to see if you’ve
got the LPs). Do my eyes deceive me, or is that almost the same pose?
I hope I’ve made a case, at least, that Dylan’s quite
deep knowledge of the Tarot could go back a long way before Renaldo
& Clara.
While I’m making this defence, I’d like to make a retraction
too. In my book I claimed of the Dylans, ‘We can date their
meeting fairly accurately’. This was showing off, because
I was pleased with myself for having tracked down two decaying hurricanes
that hit New York in the autumn of 1964 – on 14th and 24th September
– and concluded that this must pinpoint the ‘tropical
storm’ that is mentioned in the song ‘Sara’ as marking
their meeting. They were the only truly tropical storms to reach the
northeastern seaboard that season, but it’s still just a guess,
and a far cry from ‘fairly accurate’ dating.
I’d much rather, really, that they’d met a lot earlier,
before 9th June 1964, for example, when Another Side was
recorded. Then maybe that storm could be the tremendous one of ‘Chimes
of Freedom’, and they could be that ‘we’: ‘Starry-eyed
and laughing as I recall when we were caught, / Trapped by no track
of hours…’
The ‘message’ of ‘Chimes of Freedom’, with
its Sermon on the Mount echoes, also chimes with that line in ‘Sara’
– ‘A messenger sent me in a tropical storm.’
(The sentence is ambiguous: he was sent along by the messenger is
the top meaning; but it can be read grammatically as ‘How
did I meet you?… [By means of] a messenger sent [to] me in a
tropical storm.’)
If a ‘real-life’ Ramona is required, Sara is a much more
natural one than, say, Joan Baez. The Tarot doesn’t seem like
Joanie’s bag, and nor do the confusion and tears that Ramona
shows. But the feeling of being torn that the song describes wouldn’t
be surprising in a woman, like Sara at that time, with a young child
and a marriage falling apart.
Identifying Sara, or anyone else, with Ramona doesn’t tell us
much about the song (though the song might tell us something biographically
about a relationship). But associating Ramona with the High Priestess,
it seems to me, does add something to the song. It strengthens our
sense of Ramona’s dignity – ‘the strength of
your skin’, those ‘magnetic movements’
– that counterbalances this temporary bewilderment and weakness.
It heightens the feeling of reciprocity. If Ramona is, in her better
self, like the Priestess, then she is herself the source of wisdom
and knowledge, and this situation where the singer is spelling out
the facts of life for her could as easily be reversed, as the last
lines acknowledge: ‘And someday, baby, / Who knows, maybe
/ I’ll come and be crying to you.’
As the precursor to a string of notable ‘advice-to-a-woman’
songs – ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, ‘Like
a Rolling Stone’, ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ –
the Priestess image reinforces a basic respect that underlies them,
that keeps them, somehow, despite their outspokenness, from sounding
merely gloating or contemptuous.
Much has been said of the viciousness, the sneer, the anger
of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, but what has kept
it alive so long is the way that this is mixed with a kind of stateliness. And
this stateliness pertains to the person that the song describes,
just as it does in ‘Queen Jane’. We may see the women,
in the images, stripped of their trappings of comfort, prestige and
power, but in the music we see them somehow the stronger for it. What
makes the songs moving and lasting is the feeling that Dylan conveys,
in everything apart from the words, that he’s not crowing ‘I
told you so’, but saying rather, as he says Ramona says, ‘You’re
better than no-one / And no-one is better than you’.
That is a philosophical constant of Dylan’s work, a ‘something
understood’ that keeps him on a level with us, however ostensibly
preaching or haranguing or even vituperative his words. And this is
what enables them effectively to preach and teach.
My reason for mentioning the ‘To Ra’ hypothesis in The
Nightingale’s Code was not so much to do with the High
Priestess as with the Wheel, the Rota. Of course, this period of Dylan’s
life was a ‘turning point’. What intrigued me was how
consciously he seems to have realised it. The
image of a wheel or ring is deliberately evoked in the front of Bringing
It All Back Home, and it occurs in that key song ‘Mr Tambourine
Man’, in the tambourine itself and in the ‘smoke-rings’
of the mind, and also in ‘To Ramona’: ‘my words
would turn into a meaningless ring… Everything passes, everything
changes’.
I go on to discuss how Another Side itself seems to rotate
around this central point, ‘To Ramona’, turning from a
positive first side – Incident, Freedom, Free, Really –
to a negative second – Don’t, Ain’t, Plain, Nitemare
and so on; turning right round, in the end, from ‘All I
really want to do is, baby, be friends with you’ to ‘It
ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe.’ From
there I go on to suggest an even wider wheel, still centred on ‘To
Ramona’, with the three folk albums on one side and the three
rock albums on the other. And there I leave you to decide for yourselves
with what kind of consciousness Dylan could have created the ‘centre’
of such a wheel, when he could not know where it would stop.
Which brings me back to my original question, why the reference to
such esoterica as the Tarot got picked up. If there is any substance
to my idea of a larger organised form to the whole sequence of Dylan’s
first seven records, then how did it get organised? It suggests a
shaping power of imagination far beyond what the ordinary Selfhood
could encompass.
The Canadian critic Northrop Frye wrote in Fearful Symmetry,
his inspiring study of William Blake, ‘If a man of genius
spends all his life perfecting works of art, it is hardly far-fetched
to see his life’s work as itself a larger work of art with everything
he produced integral to it’. This idea he expanded further
in Anatomy of Criticism, which might flippantly be called the
prequel to Fearful Symmetry, since it outlines the vision of all literature
which he had seen through his reading of Blake: ‘It is clear
that criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there is a quality
in literature which enables it to be so. We have to adopt the hypothesis,
then, that just as there is an order of nature behind the natural sciences,
so literature is not a piled aggregate of “works”, but an
order of words.’
My aim in The Nightingale’s Code was simply to set such
a vision of Dylan’s work afoot. To be honest – not wanting
to launch an anti-advertising campaign – this was what I’d
missed in the critical studies I’ve read. The observations accumulate
but they don’t seem to assemble into a picture. It’s not
clear what the details are details of.
I wanted to show how, for example, song might relate to song on an LP;
how LPs themselves might be constellated in phases or cycles –
or chapters, if you like. Also, what might be constants of the whole
work, the forms and images that speak to each other across it. In this
I seem so far to have failed, since the critic who was most responsive
to the book, Paula Radice, took exception to precisely this schematic
aspect of it.
The tenor of most Dylan criticism at the moment is to celebrate the
diversity of his work – to multiply its breadth and open-endedness.
At the same time, I believe the perception that Dylan’s work is
a whole, even while it can’t yet be seen whole, is well established
– for example among the readership of this magazine. Many people
– I would guess it’s probably most of the people who enjoy
his music – have the sense that it’s worth getting to know
extensively. There may be a certain consensus on the highs and lows,
as well as our own personal charts, but I think most of us feel that
the body of work adds up to something more than a selection of its highlights,
however collectively edited. Don’t you also find yourself more
often drawn back to, and getting more out of, a Dylan record you regard
as second-rate, than is the case with many a first-rate record by other
artists?
Of course there are two important obstacles to studying Dylan as Frye
studied Blake. One is that he is alive, and we can’t claim to
see the work whole while it is still unfinished. The other is that it’s
not literature. What constitutes the canon of Dylan’s work? ‘Mr
Tambourine Man’, say, is an element of it, but what is ‘Mr
Tambourine Man’? The first track on Side 2 of Bringing It
All Back Home, or any one of the hundreds of other performances
by Dylan himself, or for that matter by anyone else?
In my book I opt for the official releases as forming a canon within
the canon, so to speak. The artist himself gives some warrant for this.
He doesn’t, at least in later years, give his songs in concert
until they’re out on record – so that the live versions
must to some extent be heard as subsequent variants of an original.
The profusion of variants with Dylan has no real parallel among the
poets of literature, but it’s not an alien thing altogether.
The canons of poets are mostly synthetic; few are crystalline, fixed
and simple. ‘A’ poem is often surrounded by a penumbra of
other versions, earlier forms and later revisions. The ‘death-bed
collected’ is the usual basis of a canon: the poems, and the forms
of them, that were last authorised by the poet in their lifetime. But
this needn’t prevail. Whitman, Wordsworth and Auden, for example,
are all felt to have done injustice to their early work with later changes,
and so there is often an alternative version of the poems as they first
appeared.
The canon of William Blake is, in fact, a striking anomaly something
like Dylan’s. Not because Blake showed uncertainty in constituting
his works: of him, more than any other English poet, we can say that
the canon is ‘writ in stone’, since he personally, laboriously
engraved in copper every single letter and punctuation mark of his completed
poems. But the works he conceived are unities of word and image, and
each copy of one of his Prophetic Books is unique, a combination of
printing and painting.
If he had had the audience and the resources, there might be as many
Miltons and Jerusalems as there are ‘Mr Tambourine Men’.
Well, almost. So the words of one of the poems reprinted in a book are
not the actual thing that Blake made. This is why his work, though its
influence grows year by year, is still regarded as obscure: because
it is, and will be until there is a permanent free public exhibition
of all his illuminated books together. At least there is, at last, two
centuries on, an affordable one-volume, full-size reproduction (The
Complete Illuminated Books, Thames & Hudson, 2000, £29.95).
For future generations, the canon of Dylan’s work will pretty
certainly include the concert recordings, studio outtakes and so on
which are currently collected and curated by the fans. This is a fittingly
democratic way for it to form, outside the ambit of the academies which
Dylan has often berated. But I predict that the official albums will
be the central structure around which the rest is organised, and I think
that Dylan appreciates this, despite his pronouncements in periods of
discouragement that he didn’t really care about making records,
so long as he could perform. This was when he didn’t particularly
care about making new songs either: compare and contrast with the clear
sense of achievement that comes through in interviews now at having
made ‘a great album’ in "Love And Theft".
In an album, a set of songs is organised into a greater whole; in a
concert they are organised into another, different whole. ‘Sugar
Baby’ belongs at the end of ‘Love And Theft’; in a
concert we might discover that it also belongs perfectly between ‘Buckets
of Rain’, say, and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’.
This independence of the songs, their constant movement in relation
to each other, does not diminish the order of the canon, but serves
to knot it all the more integrally together. It may seem to have no
parallel with the way that poems appear in a poet’s book, always
the same words on the same page. Yet what Dylan does for us with his
songs is quite close to the way that poets begin to be read when we
know them well enough, so we can turn from one poem to another, cross
refer, even read two poems side by side, nearly simultaneously.
When I called my book The Nightingale’s Code I was obviously
playing on the idea that Dylan is an enigma – that Dylanologists
are still engaged in trying to ‘decode’ his lyrics. But
I meant it more seriously in the sense of a ‘code of behaviour’,
like the ‘code of the road’. The word comes from the Latin
codex, which means originally a block of wood. A block was split to
form leaves on which to engrave important and permanent documents, such
as laws. In English the word ‘code’ – before it became
synonymous with ‘cipher’ – meant ‘a digest of
the laws of a country, or of those relating to any subject’ and
‘a collection of writings forming a book’ (Oxford English
Dictionary). In other words, it’s an alternative term for the
‘canon’ that I’ve been using here. To my mind, the
‘code’ in Dylan – in the secret-language sense –
is simply his ‘code’ in this second sense: the integrated
body of work in terms of which each part can be interpreted.
The resistance to my ‘To Ra’ idea – an arcane reference
couched in a form rather like a cryptic crossword clue – springs
I think from a generally healthy scepticism about hidden meanings and
skeleton keys. Ingenious and cryptological explanations have fallen
out of favour, due to their own excesses, and Dylanology pursues more
sober, empirical and encyclopaedic projects. What was valuable, however,
even in such wild theories as A.J. Weberman’s, was their search
for the ‘thread’ of Dylan’s work. Weberman’s
‘plot’, applied to Dylan’s career up to the early
Seventies, was the story of a Revolution betrayed by its leader (as
far as I can make it out). He supplied for Dylan’s country music
the cry of ‘Judas!’ that had earlier been flung at his rock
music.
If we don’t find schemes like this – or Stephen Pickering’s
interpretation of the poet’s progress in terms of the Cabala and
Jewish mysticism – satisfying, it’s because they seem reductive.
Tying the form of artistic creation to another, extrinsic form, they
restrict rather than expand its scope.
The problem with approaching poetry or song as ‘code’ is
that code in itself is meaningless. Once it has been deciphered it is
ignored; it adds nothing more to the real message it was concealing.
If a song is coded in this sense, then all our responses to what it
‘seems’ to be about would be like delusions. Hence our natural
hostility to what is effectively a destructive form of interpretation.
But a song can have ‘hidden’ or ‘other’ meanings
in another way: not as concealed within it or ‘behind’ it,
but hidden in the sense that we don’t see them until we see the
larger form of which the thing we are looking at is a part. These are
the relations that give a work of art its third dimension, its depth.
The larger form is the artist’s body of work and also the ‘order
of words’ that Northrop Frye speaks of, the total form of literature.
With Dylan, of course, we cannot say simply ‘literature’.
One of the reasons he strikes us as such an important figure is that
an integral view of his work has to place it simultaneously in both
literature and ‘popular music’ (there’s no word as
neat as ‘literature’ to describe this other field); and
therefore he unites, or reunites, these estranged relations. He’s
not alone in doing this. Burns, Brecht and Lorca are three who spring
to mind as co-conspirators, but their work has all ended up as books,
and been subsumed into literature, and Dylan’s will not be subsumed.
In fact, at the moment the emphasis is the other way, partly because
of the nature of Dylan’s writing in its current phase, and partly
because that ‘other’ field – the golden triangle that
lies between points A (for art music like avant-garde jazz), C (for
commercial or chart music) and F (for the various shades of ‘folk’
music and field recordings) – is at present, thanks to CDs and
expiring copyrights, being formed into a canon of its own. In this respect
"Love And Theft" is not ‘retro’ at all,
because its encyclopaedia of ‘thefts’ goes hand in hand
with a whole new level of documentation of its sources.
Reference-spotting can be illuminating, but it’s not the end of
hearing Dylan’s music in an integrated way – and it may
not even be the beginning. Let’s say that the 12 songs of "Love
And Theft" allude to 100 other records (it’s probably
not an overestimate): we don’t necessarily get farther into it
even if we track down every last one of them. The important thing would
be to listen back and forth, so to speak. To know the why of one reference
will tell us more than to know that 99 others exist.
Which brings me back to my Tarot reference. The point is not that ‘To
Ramona’ is really about a playing card instead of a person, or
that Bob Dylan once practised divination. The point is that the High
Priestess helps us see the ground on which Ramona moves, a harmony to
her melody, if you like. A further quote from Northrop Frye, from Fearful
Symmetry, may suggest how John Donne and Woody Guthrie, Tarot and
‘corpse evangelists’, ‘To Ramona’ and ‘Chimes
of Freedom’ all come to combine in the form we know as Another
Side.
Speaking of the Renaissance humanists, he points out: ‘They
had in common a dislike of the scholastic philosophy in which religion
had got itself entangled, and most of them upheld, for religion as well
as for literature, imaginative interpretation against argument, the
visions of Plato against the logic of Aristotle, the Word of God against
the reason of man.’ He goes on to say: ‘The doctrine
of the Word of God explains the interest of so many of the humanists,
not only in Biblical scholarship and translation, but in occult sciences.
Cabbalism, for instance, was a source of new imaginative interpretations
of the Bible. Other branches of occultism, including alchemy, also provided
complex and synthetic conceptions which could be employed to understand
the central form of Christianity as a vision rather than a doctrine
or ritual…’
It remains only to say that in Dylan’s case the matter of references
and possible allusions is slightly complicated by that aspect of him
that plays the Riddler or the Jokerman. ‘Rainy Day Women #12 &
35’, anyone? Well, 1, 2, 3, 5 are the first four prime numbers,
and the next in the sequence is 7, and this is the first track
on Dylan’s seventh album. I’ve also speculated that they’re
the numbers of hexagrams in the I Ching – something else he’s
known to have been interested in, and once refers to openly: ‘I
threw the I Ching yesterday, said there might be some thunder at the
well.’
An interesting reading in the light of Blood on the Tracks,
though ambiguously put. I’d assume it was hexagram 51, Thunder,
moving to hexagram 48, The Well, but it could be the other way round.
Either way, the judgment on The Well is fitting for that fresh tapping
of former powers: ‘The town may be changed, but the well cannot
be changed. It neither decreases nor increases…’ And
the Thunder of the I Ching, as described in the translator Richard Wilhelm’s
commentary – ‘A yang line develops below two yin lines
and presses upward forcibly… It is symbolised by thunder, which
bursts forth from the earth’ – is something that might
well be called Planet Waves.
So to return to Nos 12 and 35 – hexagram 12 is Standstill or Stagnation, and
Blonde On Blonde is all about stasis and stuckness. Richard
Wilhelm comments: ‘This hexagram is linked with the
seventh month… when the year has passed its zenith and autumnal
decay is setting in.’ That seventh album again, and
according to my seasonal arrangement of Dylan’s records, Blonde
On Blonde is an autumnal work.
And 35? That’s called Progress and the image is of the sun rising
over the earth. What lies beyond the stasis of Blonde On Blonde is,
whaddyaknow, a New Morning.
These are plausible references for the numbers, if you think they are
there for any reason. They’re also both biblically important.
Twelve, as in tribes and apostles, and 35 as a number of the apocalyptic
proportion, as stated in the formula of Revelation, ‘a time,
and times, and half a time’, i.e. 1 of any unit, plus 2 of
it, plus a half = 3.5 and any of its multiples, like 7, or 70, or 35.
The formula occurs, in fact, in chapter 12 of Revelation: ‘And
to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly
into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time,
and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent
cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might
cause her to be carried away of the flood.’ (‘Rainy Day
Women’, anyone?) ‘And the earth helped the woman, and the
earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon
cast out of his mouth. And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and
went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments
of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.’(‘They’ll
stone ya when you’re tryin’ to be so good’ anyone?)
Yet the suspicion is strong that they could actually be any numbers,
and that what they mean at the beginning of the record, attached so
arbitrarily to a title so arbitrarily attached to its song, is: prepare
to be baffled.
And yet, and still – why those particular numbers? Follow the
Riddler into the labyrinth, but let a thread unwind as you go, or you
may end up lost in there.
A final quote from Northrop Frye. Of Blake he says: ‘He is
not writing for a tired pedant who feels merely badgered by difficulty:
he is writing for enthusiasts of poetry who, like the readers of mystery
stories, enjoy sitting up nights trying to find out what the mystery
is.
