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The climax of the first Romanticism: Elizabethan poetry -Shakespeare and Spenser
As a poet of Romantic drama, Shakespeare is - to quote Sri Aurobindo's words1 - "quite unique in his spirit, method and quality. For his contemporaries resemble him only in exter-nals'; they have the same outward form and crude materials, but not the inner dramatic method by which he transformed and gave' them a quite other meaning and value; and later romantic drama, though it has tried hard to imitate the Shakespearian motive and touch, has been governed by another kind of poetic mind and its intrinsic as distinguished from its external method has been really different. It takes hold of life, strings together its unusual effects and labours to make it out of the way, brilliant, coloured, conspicuous. Shakespeare does not do that, except rarely, in early imitative work or when he is uninspired. He does not need to lay violent hands on life and turn it into romantic pyrotechnics; for life itself has taken hold of him in order to recreate itself in his image, and he sits within himself at its heart and pours out from its impulse a throng of beings, as real in the world he creates as men are in this other world from which he takes his hints, a multitude, a riot of living images carried on a many-coloured sea of revealing speech and a never-failing surge of movement. His dramatic method seems indeed to have usually no other intellectual purpose, aesthetic motive or spiritual secret: ordinarily it labours simply for the joy of a multiple poetic vision of life and vital creation with no centre except the life-power itself, no coordination except that thrown out sponta-neously by the unseizable workings of its energy, no unity but the one unity of man and the life-spirit in Nature working in him and before his eyes. It is this sheer creative Ananda of the life-spirit which is Shakespeare; abroad everywhere in that age it incarnates itself in him for the pleasure of poetic self-vision."
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Sri Aurobindo2 continues: "All Shakespeare's powers and limitations, - for it is now permissible to speak of his limita-tions, - arise from this character of the force that moved him to poetic utterance. He is not primarily an artist, a poetical thinker or anything else of the kind, but a great vital creator and intensely, though within marked limits, a seer of life. His art itself is life arranging its forms in its own surge and excitement, not in any kind of symmetry, - for symmetry here there is none, - nor in fine harmonies, but still in its own way supremely and with a certain intimately metric arrangement of its many loose movements, in mobile perspectives, a succes-sion of crowded but successful and satisfying vistas. While he has given a wonderful language to poetic thought, he yet does not think for the sake of thought, but for the sake of life; his way indeed is not so much the poet himself thinking about life, as life thinking itself out in him through many mouths, in many moods and moments, with a rich throng of fine thought-effects, but not for any clear sum of intellectual vision or to any high power of either ideal or spiritual result."
To realise the dissimilarity of note in the very stuff of the utterance between the creative Life-force and the creative Intelligence we have only to juxtapose Shakespeare and Milton. Even a descriptive passage will serve: Shakespeare on wind and water apropos of Sleep's sealing up the eyes of the shipboy upon "the high and giddy mast" and rocking his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge,
And in the visitation of the winds
Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds -
and Milton on the same theme, adopting as Shakespearian a style as possible to him yet betraying the less nerve-thrilled, more deliberate spirit of the intellect and its more generalised manner:
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Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's height, and with the Centre mix the Pole.
To get a clearer perception, listen to Hamlet's soliloquy:
To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.There's the respect,
That makes calamity of so long life...
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of!
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...
or the soliloquy of Claudio:
Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delightful spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world.
As Sri Aurobindo3 puts it, "the words get, one might say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality and give us
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immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill" of what is described and interpreted. Now bend the ear to the accents of Belial's speech in Paradise Lost to appreciate the poetic vision active and vibrant as if directly in the grey cells rather than as a reflex there from the guts:
Our final hope
Is flat despair; we must exasperate
The Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,
And that must end us; that must be our cure,
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
Even where in Shakespeare there is ostensibly a judgment on life, an idea that seems to belong to the thinking mind in its own rights, there is really - as Sri Aurobindo4 notes - a throw-up from the emotional or sensational being. Sri Aurobindo cites the second half of that drawn-out "thought" from Mac-beth:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
To employ a turn from another comment by Sri Aurobindo5 on the last four and a half lines, the thought bears the colour of an
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intuition of the life-soul and is conveyed to our minds in-tensely through our nerves of mental sensation. Compare these closing lines to those verses of Chaucer:
What is this life? What asketh man to have,
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Alone, withouten any companye?
In this phrase, which is one of Chaucer's rare moments of great poetry in the sense of the Arnoldian "high seriousness" of accent, we have a most touching pessimism nobly set forth in a general judgment with the help of two simple external observa-tions. One of them is pressed home: we realise the desolation of death because of that whole last line and the preceding adjective "colde". The other gets a bare mention, it is under-played, but its import is yet filled out satisfyingly in a negative manner: the positives of desolation suggest their unspoken opposites - the warmth and the near presence and the com-panionship of the beloved, which can so suddenly be snatched away from man. An art of masterly naivete is here, making us see and feel tragically how things are in their immediate outward reality. The poet has written memorably but from no more than a "subtle-physical" inwardness of imagination and with an easy adequate limpidity that deeply moves us without directly shaking up our sensations as Shakespeare does and tearing like him at our emotional roots.
The typical Shakespearian seizure of our vital being in the Macbeth-passage can be gauged also by comparing it to Gray's eighteenth-century "gem":
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour: -
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
The thought-mind is active here, not at considerable depth but in a sufficiently impressive fashion which renders the concep-
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tion moving, yet the chiselled imaginative rhetoric stirs us to think poetically rather than setting "our nerves of mental sensation" to feel the poetic idea.
Shakespeare's specific Life-force inspiration may be made to stand out by taking even a certain contemporary of his and putting him over against the dramatist. That contemporary is no less a figure than Francis Bacon whom several scholars consider to have secretly penned the plays and used Shakespeare as a convenient facade. Unfortunately for these scholars Bacon has left us some verse under his own name and we have just to hear it together with the Macbeth-lines in order to realise not only that Bacon was a mediocre poet but also that he functioned from a poetic plane quite unlike the Shakespearian. Here is how his Life starts:
The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man
Less than a span:
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Everything here is coinage of the reflective prose-mind, a sort of anticipation of eighteenth-century semi-didactic verse. Not a trace of the vivida vis from the vital consciousness that breathes in any pronouncement on life and death we may pick out from the famous dramas.
While we are about Bacon we may quote what Sri Aurobindo says in another context - the discussion of "Sight" as "the essential poetic gift" which renders Homer, Shake-speare, Dante, Valmiki, Kalidasa supreme poets. "There is often more thought in a short essay of Bacon's than in a whole play of Shakespeare's, but not even a hundred cryptograms can make him the author of the dramas; for, as he showed when he tried to write poetry, the very nature of his thought-power
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and the characteristic way of expression of the born philosophical thinker hampered him in poetic expression. It was the constant outstreaming of form and thought and image from an abundant vision of life which made Shakespeare, whatever his other deficiencies, the sovereign dramatic poet."6
Dwelling further on Shakespeare's powers and limitations, Sri Aurobindo7 writes: "His development of human character has a sovereign force within its bounds, but it is the soul of the human being as seen through outward character, passion, action, the life-soul, and not either the thought-soul or the deeper psychic being or the profounder truth of the human spirit. Something of these things we may get, but only in shadow or as a partial reflection in a coloured glass, not in their own action.... Nevertheless, his is not a drama of mere exter-nalised action, for it lives from within and more deeply than our external life. This is not Virat, the seer and creator of gross forms, but Hiranyagarbha, the luminous mind of dreams, looking through those forms to see his own images behind them. More than any other poet Shakespeare has accom-plished mentally the legendary feat of the impetuous sage Vishwamitra; his power of vision has created a Shakespearian world of his own, and it is, in spite of its realistic elements, a romantic world in a very true sense of the word, a world of the wonder and free power of life and not of its mere external realities, where what is here dulled and hampered finds a greater enlarged and intense breath of living, an ultra-natural play of beauty, curiosity and amplitude."
Next to Shakespeare in stature as representative of the Romanticism of the Renaissance stands Spenser. In him the strain of sheer vitalistic beauty in a fluid fineness, which is one of Shakespeare's qualities, reaches its fullest abundance, to-gether with a vein of dreamy subtlety which too in the stir and . passion of the master dramatist is not always in independent prominence. In both, the Life-force is not preoccupied with mere externalities: it demands to feel itself more and presses into the subjective being. The penetration, however, is not to a great depth. Sri Aurobindo hits off very well the Spenserian
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achievement in Romanticism as compared with the Shakes-pearian. After noting in the poet of The Faerie Queene a fault in the initial conception, a failure due to an over-absorption in the allegorical turn and to the weaving of an over-tangled skein of allegory, and after pointing out also defects in the execution by which what was intended as an ethical interpretative poem loses its way in faeryland and becomes a series of romantic descriptions and incidents, "a diffuse and richly confused perplexity, not a unity" - after dwelling on shortcomings of constructive power at the centre of Spenser's genius, Sri Aurobindo8 spotlights the essence of the Elizabethan Romanticism:
"Whatever Shakespeare may suggest, - a poet's critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration, - it is not the holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but a moved and excited reception and evocation. Life throws its impressions, but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power in the poet which is not satisfied with mirroring or just beautifully responding, but begins to throw up at once around them its own rich matter of being and so creates something new, more personal, intimate, fuller of an inner vision, emotion, passion of self-expression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare; at another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets farther away from the actuality of life and takes its impressions as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which has an aim at things sym-bolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself, and shadows them out through the magic of romance if it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and image and sheer beauty of sound. Imagination, thought, vision work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather in it as a medium, accepted as the form and force of their being."
The emotional life-mind rather than the intellect proper can
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be traced at once as Spenser's poetic source if we hark back to the accents of Belial's speech in Milton or of that passage in Shelley about Heaven's light and earth's shadows and set them over against the lines in which Despair is represented as trying to lure man to self-destruction with the bait of peace and with the example of one who is pictured as having attained life's goal by dying:
He there does now enjoy eternal rest
And happy ease which thou dost want and crave,
And further from it daily wanderest:
What if some little pain the passage have,
That makes frail flesh to fear"the bitter wave?
Is not short pain well-borne that brings long ease,
And lays the soul to sleep in quiet grave?
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.
Spenser gives us merely a semblance of the reflecting mind; immediately we can recognise a poignant mellifluence of the same power that in Shakespeare is all a-tremble with passion: it is again as if not from the grey cells the poetry took off but from the guts though now with an imaginative rhythm sweetly lulling us into persuasion with a luxury of exquisite sensations posing as thoughts.
Both in Shakespeare and Spenser the flowing over of the Life-force in colourful or lambent extravagance changes the entire sense of poetic form from what it was under Classicism. And the change may best be described as an uprush of individuality within the aesthetic ensemble, corresponding to the same phenomenon in the psychology of the Renaissance. The spirit of Hellenistic humanism turned man's attention to himself and his personal possibilities: he was no longer a mere unit in a feudal social system functioning under divine sanc-tion. Social conformity or a grovelling before a supramundane authority ceased to be his main work. And this stress on the human individual and his vitalistic freedom affected aesthe-
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tics. As already noted, the clearness and orderliness of the Classical intellectual vision strove to subdue details to the totality and one of the main characteristics of an artistic product was that it could be felt very vividly as a whole. In Romanticism at its best there is still a feeling of the whole, for without it there can be no true art; but it becomes much relaxed and the details acquire a lot of importance - they assert themselves individually, even claim a certain right to stand by themselves in their own freedom - and, as a result, we have on the one side a greater richness of the parts than in Classical poetry and on the other a diffuseness of the general effect. This diffuseness has two aspects - a subtlety which is a lack of facile or too clear obviousness in the sense of form, a looseness which is a lack of keen focus in the view of a totality. The one is a quality, the other a defect: we have the former in Shakespeare, the latter in Spenser.
In several of Shakespeare's and Spenser's contemporaries we have a far more glaring version of the same defect in the basic idea and its execution.* And this conceptive and constructive defect in relation to a whole is just the large-scale working of a mental peculiarity which is almost everywhere in the Elizabethans."The Elizabethan intellectual direction," Sri Aurobindo9 has aptly said, "runs always towards conceit and curious complication and it is unable to follow an idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories; seizing on all manner of disparates it tends to throw them together without any real fusion." And the parts themselves of the Elizabethan Romantic ensemble suffer at times from a lack of balance induced by a certain explosiveness in the details, a certain vehemence of tone and exuberance of mind. Thus many expressions, particularly in poets inclined to be continually forceful, are found scattered with failures to make striking images poetic or else with images
* We may make an exception of Ben Jonson and grant that he has the idea of construction, but, as Sri Aurobindo points out, "his execution is heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist" (The Future Poetry, p. 68, fn.).
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that are themselves too artificial. Chapman yields place only to Marlowe in sheer force, but his vital gusto seizes on his intellect for ingenious effects that are Romantic poetry gone astray or berserk. For instance, he forgets Homer's nobility of restrained yet strong emotion and, not content to substitute muscular vigour and nervous rhythm, translates two magnificent lines from the Greek by a couplet in which the first part is padded rhetoric and the second a violent and extravagant conceit empty of all true or high feeling:
And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I
know,
When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of
overthrow.
Even when a verse is free from such startling falsities, there is often a jerkiness flawing it. An exceedingly fine phrase is another rendering from the Iliad:
When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her
light.
But with a most sensitive ear Sri Aurobindo10 has commented that here is a rhythm which does not mate with the idea and the diction. There seems to be a strained and abrupt reaching out towards poetic height of tone, not the assured continuity of the really grand rhythmic ascension, a reflex of which we can feel in even Tennyson's translation of the same passage:
the immeasurable heavens
Break open to their heights, and all the stars
Shine...
Perhaps the jog-trot ballad metre disguised by Chapman as a fourteener makes it difficult to achieve more than a quick sudden canter instead of the epic roll and rise. But something in the very nature of the Romantic life-soul has a risky penchant
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for the loud and the bursting just as the Classical soul of the Intelligence has in its nature a dangerous proclivity to the flat and the rigid.
In summing up successful Romanticism of the Elizabethan kind we may adopt four heads to match those we took from Denham for Classicism. In the first place, we may talk not of clear depth but of a leaping inner coruscation showing up sharply or largely some general aspect of things. Sidney takes us straight, by such coruscation, into the midst of the Romantic genius when he seeks inspiration to write worthily to his love and ends the sonnet of his search:
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my tongue and pen, beating myself for spite, "Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and
write."
Marlowe makes Tamurlaine the mouthpiece of the vaulting ambition let loose by the Renaissance to combine power and knowledge:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Spenser suggests the joy of life that is the aim of the age by a lovely pointing of what is to be avoided - a line of melodious art in which, as a critic has marked, the pathos is enforced, after the rapid movement of the opening words, by the slowing down of the pace at the close, with two stressed syllables which disturb the iambic rhythm:
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Let me not die in languor and long tears.
Kyd has on rare occasions an emotionally dramatic as well as illuminating generality:
Oh eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
Oh life, no life, but lively form of death,
Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs.
Shakespeare - inexhaustible energy and endless imagination -comes with a vivid advice to be ever on the move, alert to time's challenges:
Perseverance, dear my Lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way,
For honour travels in a strait so narrow
Where one but goes abreast: keep, then, the path;
For emulation has a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an entered tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fallen in front rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'errun and trampled on.
With equal vividness he flashlights too the ignorance and emptiness of ambitious human activity:
O, but man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority;
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, - like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.
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And the poet of life abounding can suddenly conjure up a picture of all things as a glorious illusion:
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
A most pregnant summing-up by him in a semi-Stoic semi-mystic tone is:
Men must endure
Their going hence even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.
In the second place, we have not as in Classicism a lively or firm gentleness but a subtly penetrating charm. Spenser is full of it, from the exquisite observation of a butterfly
Now sucking of the sap of herb most meet,
Or of the dew which yet on them does lie,
Now in the sun bathing his tender feet,
or of gnats in summer,
Their murmuring small trumpets sounden wide,
or of distant hill-water,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
to the sensitive description of regal arras
Woven with gold and silk so close and near,
That the rich metal lurked privily,
As feigning to be hid from envious eye;
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Yet here and there, and everywhere unwares
It showed itself and shone unwillingly;
Like a discoloured Snake whose hidden snares
Through the green grass his long bright burnished back
declares,
or of extreme remoteness from the world's din:
careless quiet lies
Wrapped in eternal silence, far from enemies.
A more quivering note of charm enters into other Elizabethans. Thus Ford:
You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much withered.
Shakespeare excels here with unanalysable undertones -
In maiden meditation, fancy-free,
or
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,
and with equally mysterious overtones that can make magic of what may seem nonsense:
Take, O take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn;
But my kisses bring again,
Bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
Sealed in vain.
Not so elusive but still with a fascinating fantasy borne along
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on a baffling confluence of undertones and overtones is the dirge:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are corals made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare is no less successfully "rich and strange" with a far more seizable meaning:
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things. unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.
In the third place, there is instead of strength without rage a certain fiery gust. Marlowe is the grand exemplar in this type, either formidably,
Give me a look that when I bend my brows
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face,
or passionately,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
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or frantically,
Lo here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside...
And shall I die and this unconquered?
or else piquantly:
To make whole cities caper in the air.
Davenant in a couple of exultantly powerful phrases shows his recognition of Marlowe's commanding strength: he says that Marlowe
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire...
(It is to be noted that the first line's rhythmic effect demands the first and the third syllables to be accented in "translunary", not the second as in present practice.)
Chapman has now and then a phrase striking with an exceptionally vivid vehemence at the imagination, like the one about Zeus who, favouring the Trojan Hector and looking wrathfully at the Greek galleys afar which Hector wanted to be set on fire,
wished in any wise
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
Shakespeare, less volcanic, is Marlowe's and Chapman's match with a finer force: Romeo by the side of Juliet -
O here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh -
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or Hamlet with his father's ghost -
the sepulchre
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurned
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again! What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revist'st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous? -
or Othello in a Marlovian outburst which still carries the finer Shakespearian self-possession within it and even hints the massed Miltonic style:
Like to the Pontic Sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up -
or Lady Macbeth providing a more weird and Romantically quivering analogue to the Classical Clytemnestra of Aeschy-lus:
Come, come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage of remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
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And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, 'Hold, hold!'
In the fourth place, instead of fullness without overflowing, an arrowy poignancy meets us, wonder-striking, passion-piercing, delight-evoking. Marlowe's Faustus stands in ecstasy before the vision of Helen,
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
or he agonises at the moment of his own deathwhen Mephisto-pheles threatens his soul:
O, I'll leap up to my God! - Who pulls me down? -
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!...
One drop of it would save my soul, half a drop:
ah my Christ!.. .
Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arms and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
The minor Elizabethans have also a transcendent piercingness at times, as Webster with
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young -
or, less subtly yet at the end no less effectively, with
I have lived
Riotously ill, like some that live in Court,
And sometimes when my face was full of smiles,
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honoured robes their tortures try:
We think caged birds sing when indeed they cry.
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Webster can also mate the piercing with the picturesque:
I am acquainted with sad misery
As the tanned galley-slave is with his oar.
Ford is sometimes Webster's equal in both poetic and dramatic heart-arrowing:
O my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antique gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another
Of death! and death! and death! still I danced forward.
Shakespeare brings it in many modes: Romeo rapturously imaginative -
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
She seems to hang upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear -
Othello at once opulently and wistfully fantastic -
Had she been true,
If Heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it -
Lear with a fantasy of vehement sorrow:
Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasures; here, I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man -
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or of a sorrow that is most naive yet a heart-breaking dis-tractedness:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir -
Hamlet with a profound insight converting personal pathos into" a world-cry about whose third line a critic observes, "the breast actually labours to get through it":
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story -
Macbeth deeply and desperately visionary about his murderer hands:
What hands are here? How they pluck out mine eyes;
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red -
Cleopatra bearing the deadly asp at her breast and gathering into a brief intense metaphor the whole drama of the situation and of her soul, what Sri Aurobindo11 terms "the disdainful compassion for the fury of the chosen instrument of self-destruction which vainly thinks it can truly hurt her, the call to death to act swiftly and yet the sense of being high above what death can do":
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
Be angry and despatch -
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Cleopatra again voicing - when her handmaiden apostrophises her dying sovereignty "O eastern star!"-her feeling of love's final and sweetest fulfilment through her lover's ministry to her heart, fulfilment as if in a rapt intimate motherhood at the very moment of asp-stung death:
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
References
1.The Future Poetry, pp. 70-71.
2.Ibid., pp. 71-72.
3.Ibid., p. 169.
4.Life, Literature, Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo, Revised & Enlarged Edition (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry), 1967, pp. 53-54.
5.The Future Poetry, p. 278.
6.Ibid., p. 30.
7.Ibid., p. 72.
8.Ibid., pp. 79-80.
9.Ibid., p. 76.
10.Ibid., p. 315.
11.Ibid., p. 316.
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