In Horis Aeternum

Notes on the metres of the poems and their significance drawn from the letters of Sri Aurobindo

In Horis Aeternum

This poem on its technical side aims at finding a halfway house between free verse and regular metrical poetry. It is an attempt to avoid the chaotic amorphousness of free verse and keep to a regular form based on the fixed number of stresses in each line and part of a line while yet there shall be a great plasticity and variety in all the other elements of poetic rhythm, the number of syllables, the management of the feet, if any, the distribution of the stress-beats, the changing modulation of the rhythm. In Horis Aeternum was meant as a first essay in this kind, a very simple and elementary model. The line here is cast into three parts, the first containing two stresses, the second and third each admitting three, four such lines rhymed constituting the stanza.

CWSA > Collected Poems > Six Poems (1934) - Note

In Horis Aeternum and The Bird of Fire

Is The Bird of Fire more of a compromise between a quantitative

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and a purely stress scansion than In Horis Aeternum (where the quantity-aspect seems to be less important than in The Bird of Fire)?

In the In Horis Aeternum I did not follow any regular scheme of quantities, letting them come as was needed by the rhythm. In The Bird of Fire I started with the idea of a quantitative element but abandoned it and remodelled the part of the poem in which I had used the quantitative system.

Letters on Poetry and Art > On Some Poems Written during the 1930s

The Genesis of In Horis Aeternum

Is there some way of keeping the loose swinging gait of anapaests within bounds? If one has used them freely in one or more lines, does it sound too abrupt to close with a strict iambic line—as in the final Alexandrine of:

The wind hush comes, the varied colours westward stream:
Were they joy-tinted coral, or song-light seen-heard in a shell fitfully,
Drifted ashore by the hours as a waif from the day-wide sea
Of Loveliness that smites awake our sorrow-dream?

It is perhaps a pity that the rhythm of the first three lines runs in such well-worn familiar channels. Is this intensified by the sing-song of the second line, which slipped into the Saturnian metre lengthened out by anapaests? The third line might possibly be taken as four dactyls followed by the spondee "day-wide" and the monosyllabic foot "sea". What do you think? And would the four dactyls make the earlier part of a passable hexameter, or would at least one spondee be needed to break up the monotony and too-obvious lilt?

These are things decided by the habit or training of the ear. The intervention of a dactylic (or, if you like, anapaestic) line followed by an Alexandrine would to the ear of a former generation have sounded abrupt and inadmissible. But, I suppose, it would not to an ear accustomed to the greater liberty—or even licence—of latter-day movements.

I do not find that the rhythm of the first three lines is wellworn, though that of the first and third are familiar in type. The second seems to me not only not familiar, but unusual and very effective.

The canter of anapaests can, I suppose, be only relieved by variation or alternation with another metre, as you have done here—or by a very powerful music which would turn the canter into a torrent rush or an oceanic sweep or surge. But the proper medium for the latter up till now has been a large dactylic movement like the Greek or Latin hexameter; Swinburne has tried to get it into the anapaest, but with only occasional success because of his excessive facility and looseness, which makes the sound empty owing to want of spiritual substance. But this third line seems to be naturally dactylic and not anapaestic. Can one speak of catalectic and acatalectic hexameters? If so, this is a very beautiful catalectic hexameter.

I may say that the four lines seem to be in their variation very remarkably appropriate and effective, each exactly expressing by the rhythm the spirit and movement of the thing inwardly seen. I am speaking of each line by itself; the only objection that could be made is to the coming together of so many variations in so brief a whole (if it had been longer, I imagine it would not have mattered) as disturbing to the habit of the ear; but I am inclined to think that this objection would rest less on a reality than a prejudice. The habit of the ear is not fundamental, it can change. What is fundamental in the inner hearing is not, I think, disturbed by the swiftness of the change from the controlled flow of the first line to the wave dance and shimmer of the second, the rapid drift of the third and then the deliberate subtlety of the last line.

Is there in recent poetry an unconscious push towards a new metrical basis altogether for English poetry—shown by the outbreak of free verse, which fails because it is most often not verse at all—and the seeking sometimes for irregularity, sometimes for greater plasticity of verse-movement? Originally, Anglo-Saxon verse depended, if I remember right, on alliteration and rhythm, not on measured feet; Greece and Rome through France and Italy imposed the foot measure on English; perhaps the hidden seeking for freedom, for elbow-room, for the possibility of a varied rhythmic expression necessitated by the complexity of the inner consciousness might find some vent in a measure which would depend not on feet but on lengths and stresses. I have sometimes thought that and it recurred to me while looking at your second line, for on that principle it might be read

One could imagine a measure made of lines in a given number of lengths like that and each length allowed a given number of stresses; there would be many combinations and variations possible. For example (not of good poetry, but of the form),

Perhaps it is only a curious imagination, too difficult and complex to realise, but it came on me strongly, so I put it down on paper.

I have written two more stanzas of the stress-scansion poem so as to complete it and send them to you. In this scansion as I conceive it, the lines may be analysed into feet, as you say all good rhythm can, but in that case the foot measures must be regarded as a quite subsidiary element without any fixed regularity—just as the (true) quantitative element is treated in ordinary verse. The whole indispensable structure of the lines depends upon stress and they must be read on a different principle from the current view—full value must be given to the true stresses and no fictitious stresses, no weight laid on naturally unstressed syllables must be allowed—that is the most important point. Thus:

A far sail on the unchangeable monotone of a slow slumbering sea,
A world of power hushed into symbols of hue, silent unendingly;
Over its head like a gold ball the sun tossed by the gods in their play
Follows its curve,—a blazing eye of Time watching the motionless day.
Here or otherwhere,—poised on the unreachable abrupt snow-solitary ascent
Earth aspiring lifts to the illimitable Light, then ceases broken and spent,
Or in the glowing expanse, arid, fiery and austere, of the desert's hungry soul,—
A breath, a cry, a glimmer from Eternity's face, in a fragment the mystic Whole.

Moment-mere, yet with all eternity packed, lone, fixed, intense,
Out of the ring of these hours that dance and die, caught by the spirit in sense,
In the greatness of a man, in music's outspread wings, in a touch, in a smile, in a sound,
Something that waits, something that wanders and settles not, a once Nothing that was all and is found.

It is an experiment and I shall have to do more before I can be sure that I have caught the whole spirit or sense of this movement; nor do I mean to say that stress-scansion cannot be built on any other principle,—say, on one with more concessions to the old music or with less, breaking more away in the direction of free verse; but the essential, I think, is there.

P.S. It is with some hesitation that I write "a once Nothing", because I am far from sure that the "once" does not overweight the rhythm and make the expression too difficult and compact; but on the other hand without it the sense appears ambiguous and incomplete,—for "a Nothing that was all" might be taken in a too metaphysical light and my object is not to thrust in a metaphysical subtlety but to express the burden of an experience. In the final form I shall probably risk the ambiguity and reject the intruding "once".

19 April 1932

Letters on Poetry and Art > Metrical Experiments

How to read the color-coded changes below? 1. SABCL version : lines with any changes & specific changes 2. CWSA version : lines with any changes & specific changes

NOTES FROM EDITOR

19 April 1932. Sri Aurobindo began this poem while corresponding with Arjava (J. A. Chadwick, a British disciple) about English prosody. He wrote the first stanza in a letter to Arjava and the full poem in a subsequent letter (Letters on Poetry and Art, pp. 231­34. There are two handwritten and two typed manuscripts. One of the typed manuscripts is dated “19.4.32”.