Grow old they shall not

It is the time of year again when I tussle with the question of how George’s friend Laurence Binyon’s half-line ‘They shall grow not old’ should be spoken (or mutely read), what it means depending on how you speak it, and why at least 30% of those speaking it in public at war memorials tomorrow will say: ‘They shall not grow old’.

I owe my slant on it this year to our loyal supporter John Dewey. Back in May, John sent me a two-page article from the London Review of Books about the late Eric Griffiths, a lecturer in English at Cambridge. What John was recommending to my attention was the discussion by the reviewer, John Mullan, of Griffiths’s 1989 book The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry. In Mullan’s words, the book’s thesis is that

poetry (in particular, Victorian poetry) can make much of a reader’s uncertainty about how to speak it. The ambiguity in the intonation of a text may create a mute polyphony through which we see rather than hear alternative ways of voicing the written words, and are led to reflect on the interplay of those possible voicings.

Nothing surprising there, one might think, but Griffiths’s innovation was to show, in Mullan’s words, ‘how certain poets contrive lines that cannot be voiced in a satisfactory way’. What? They contrive to write lines that can’t be satisfactorily spoken because the ‘polyphony’ of alternative visual meanings interferes with the voicing?

Yes. I think it is true. An example Griffiths gives is Thomas Hardy’s poem After a Journey, in which a widower revisits the spot where he and his wife courted. Griffiths rightly points out that the line ‘What have you now found to say of our past’ looks as though it has a mournful movement, but with a quickening of reading it could mean: ‘What is it now?’ And the lines ‘I see what you are doing: you are leading me on/To the spots we knew when we haunted here together’ definitely hint, thanks to the possible colloquial and peremptory intonation of ‘see what you are doing’ and ‘leading me on’, at annoyance with her and fear that even the ghost of someone we loved is not to be trusted.

In his book, Griffiths tested this theory on the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, Hardy and Hopkins, but as it happens the first example that sprang to mind from my own university teaching has an association with John Dewey himself.

The last two lines of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which is about the destruction of an ordinary man by Peter the Great’s mad city (forgive the simplification), read:

I tut zhe khladnyi trup ego
Pokhoronili radi Boga.

A literal-lexical translation might be:

And there and then his cold corpse
They buried for God’s sake.

A Soviet commentary explained that ‘for God’s sake’ means here ‘free of charge’. Well, not really! John Dewey’s version in his John Dryden Award-shortlisted translation of The Bronze Horseman captures the contextual meaning best:

[…] His remains were here
Interred with simple rites, as fitting.

However, the temptation to read the last two Russian words with their most common, colloquial force is almost irresistible. This would approximate to: ‘For God’s sake! For crying out loud! God help us! How horrible is all this [story that I have told]?’ — and that is the subtext that I feel sure Pushkin intended. It is very difficult not to hear that intonation.

What Griffiths is talking about is not, of course, the familiar seven types of ambiguity that poetry thrives on. He is implying that the reader’s mute reading perception of multiple voicings of certain lines of poetry actually stops the reader in his/her tracks, tongue ties the reader, makes it impossible to speak such lines satisfactorily.

Surely ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ is an example of this? The fact that about 30% of people change the word order tells you that they find it unspeakable as it stands. To restate the old conundrum: should the half-line be read as ‘grow-not old’ or ‘grow not-old’? Metrically, the most insistent reading is ‘not-old’, but rationally — ‘grammatically’ — we see it as a plain archaic inverted negative, which is why so many people simply modify it to ‘shall not grow old’. However, the fact that Binyon chose to commit ‘grow not old’ to print suggests to me that, to use Griffths’s word, he contrived to write an unvoiceable line. And I may have found persuasive proof of that…

I have spent an hour searching the Web for examples of an inverted negative of the compound future in English, and the only one I can find is Binyon’s. Precisely where you would expect to find some, in the ‘archaic’ language of the King James Bible, none came up: it is all ‘man shall not live by’, ‘they shall not enter’, ‘I shall not die’ etc, where the negative comes after the auxiliary verb, not after the main verb. My conclusion is that Binyon strained this construction into being. He contrived it in order to beguile us with the thought that the Fallen will not merely ‘not-grow old’, they will grow into a continuing transcendent, glorious state of ‘not-oldness’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’  Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.