'Lines That Give You Gooseflesh'

“The stars in his firmament were Yeats, Eliot and Wallace Stevens . . .,” and yet he wrote like none of them, at least so far as this reader can see. Byron Rogers refers to the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas in The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas (Aurum, 2006). Rogers completes his sentence: “. . . but his favourite English poets [were] Shakespeare and Blake,” and then quotes Thomas: “They are capable of lines that give you gooseflesh.” Dedicated readers know the feeling. You read a line, a passage, sometimes merely a phrase, and an involuntary tingle rises up the spine and shimmers in the shoulders and skull. For me, the sensation is more closely associated with music, as in the opening phrase in Armstrong's "West End Blues," Bechet's "Blue Horizon" and Miles Davis’ "Boplicity” from the Birth of the Cool sessions. This suggests that what produces gooseflesh in poetry is, at least in part, the product of rhythm. Rogers tells us that Thomas’ first example was “Pah, it smells of mortality,” from Act IV, Scene 6 of King Lear. Thomas is conflating lines. Lear says:

“There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the

sulphurous pit,

Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie,

fie, fie! pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet,

good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination:

there’s money for thee.”

Gloucester replies, “O, let me kiss that hand!” and Lear says, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.” I won’t quibble with Thomas’ memory. The lines as he remembers them and as Shakespeare wrote them pass the gooseflesh test. The second example Byron quotes from Thomas is “He is at dinner. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.” The source is Hamlet,Act 4, Scene 3. Again, there’s a slight and forgivable slip of memory. Claudius asks where Polonius is. Hamlet replies, “At supper.” Claudius expresses surprise, and Hamlet tells him:

  

 “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain

convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your

worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all

creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for

maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but

variable service, two dishes, but to one table:

that’s the end.”

Both passages cited by Thomas as giving him gooseflesh deal with death in the rawest terms. I carry around with me less ghoulish lines from Coleridge, Housman, Allen Tate, Henry Vaughan, Basil Bunting, Yvor Winters and Emily Dickinson that produce a similar effect.