Allen Ginsberg 1982 Naropa Dharma Poetics lecture continues from here
AG: There is a much more famous example of the attainment of breath, or the realization of breath, as equivalent to the realization of spirit, or spiritual life, or inspiration, or highest poetic inspiration – and it’s a poem that everybody almost… well, that everybody used to know in the ‘Thirties that went to high school or college, and there were two famous examples – Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Shelley’s “Adonais”, both of which concluded on an ecstatic, totally expansive, inspired note with reference to breath.
So I’ll just read the ends of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” In fact, I think maybe read the whole thing. Oh, there’s not enough time really to go through that, except that you see Shelley’s exercising his awareness of the breath throughout the poem so that it’s in a sense an object lesson in itself. One thing I’ve done as part of teaching poetry often was passed out copies of the poem and then had (a) chorale reading of that in my classes because then everybody directly experiences it, sort of practices that poetic breath rather than hears it.
But let me read then… let’s see. How many have been in my class and heard me read this? Just two. Anybody else here? Why don’t I read that, the “Ode to the West Wind”? At least it’ll be amusing if it isn’t dharmic. It has to do with change and it has to do with a bodhisattvic impulse in it which comes out in the end. But the thing I want to point out is how at the end it actually gets to the reference to breath as the supreme spirit, let us say.
Of course, it’s about the breath because the subject is “Ode to the West Wind” and the wind is the spirit of the earth, or the breath of the earth, or one’s own breath, or joining one’s breath to the great breath or awareness of the breathing.. the immortal breathing of humanity, so to speak.
“O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being/ Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/Are driven…”….”Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!/And, by the incantation of this verse,/ Scatter as from an unextinguished hearth/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!/Be through my lips to unawakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Well, there could be said to be some egocentric bravura in that recitation but what I was trying to do was emphasize, by reading precisely, obeying Shelley’s notation marks – commas, dashes, exclamation points – to follow his breathing as he set it forth musically. That is, as in a piece of music you have the notation… or, as in some music, vocal music, you have a notation of the breathings, so in certain great poetry you do have, by the syntax and the syntax marks, the punctuation – (and) by the punctuation you have indications for breathing. And if you pronounce the poem, so to speak, mantricly, as was intended, going back to the original notation, you very often realize how precise and funny and exalted, spiritual, in terms of the breath, the intention of the poem is, and how courageous the poem is, and how self-realized it is on one level or another. Shelley was particularly good at this kind of hyperventilation. Consciously, I think.
The end of “Adonais,” which I won’t declaim, just read, has the same reference to breath at the end as the most exalted part of the most exalted poem of Shelley, and (is) the poem considered to be the greatest of all Romantic poems and the one poem that every English high school boy realizes as the acme of poesis.
“…That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,/That Beauty in which all things work and move,/That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse Of birth can quench not/Which through the web of being blindly wove/By man and beast and earth and air and sea,/Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of/The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,/Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
“The breath whose might I have invoked in song/Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,/Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng/Whose sails were never to the tempest given;/The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!/I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;/Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,/The soul of Adonais, like a star,/Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.”
Of course that’s a very theistic statement and there’s a soul there and there’s an “inmost veil of Heaven” and there’s an “Eternal,” but the key insight for me is that at the height of the poem, the orgasmic moment, that breath – “The breath whose might I have invoked in song/Descends on me” – and that very often is the theme of the poetry through all ages, from much earlier times where the spirit is invoked, all the way up through Elizabethan times and Shelley and Williams.
to be continued