Classical and Romantic

2

The "planes" of poetic expression - the psychological plane of Classicism: the creative Intelligence - the four phases of Classicism

We have quoted Sri Aurobindo as saying that the poet, by means of the images Nature affords us not on one but on many planes of her creation, aims essentially at interpreting what she conceals from us but is ready, when rightly approached, to reveal. "Many planes of creation" - it is through such a vision of things that we get Sri Aurobindo's formula of Classical and Romantic. But how shall we understand a plane of creation? We need not go into metaphysics: it is here sufficient for us to concentrate on the psychological aspect.

The variety of planes and the differences among them can be understood if we note what levels of experience the art-creating soul-stress and soul-sight may be employed to pre-sent in poetic form. We have already learnt from Sri Aurobindo of the change undergone by the divine enthousiasmos of poetic power when it passes through the mind after the intuitive soul has served as its inmost medium. He has pointed to various parts of our mentality dominating in the change. On these parts he¹ has written elsewhere in general: "We take little account of the psychology of poetic genius and are content with saying that the word of the poet is the speech of the imagination or that he works by an inspiration. But this is an insufficient account; for imagination is of many different kinds and inspiration touches the mind at different levels and breaks out through different media before it issues through the gates of the creative imagination." Doubtless, "all poetry except that of the most outward kind, - a verse movement which is separable rather by distinction of form than power of the soul from prose, - is in its inmost inspiration and character intui-tive",² and so one sort of poetry differs from another by "the level or the depth of the self from which the poetic intuition,

Page 15

usually modified in transmission, immediately acts"³: it differs by the intuition's "intervening psychological instrument rather than its primary initiating movement".⁴ The most common among the many dissimilar levels or depths of the self, serving as intervening psychological instruments, are named by Sri Aurobindo the subtle-physical, the vital and the mental planes. Beyond these are the rarely exploited planes where the inwardness necessary to all poetry plunges or rises to the directly mystical and spiritual consciousness.

Since man is typically a mental being and Sri Aurobindo speaks of inspiration touching the mind at different levels, we should more correctly say that man's poetry usually comes from the subtle-physical mind or the vital mind or the intellectual mind. The last is the mind proper, the first two are the mind functioning as what we may broadly term "sense" and "heart" in distinction from "thought".

The subtle-physical, the vital and the mental planes to which these terms point may be more clearly distinguished by the uses to which the "spiritual excitement" that all poetry starts from is put in the transmission. It may be used, says Sri Aurobindo,⁵ "to give a deeper and more luminous force and a heightened beauty to the perceptions of outward life or to the inner but still surface movements of emotion and passion or the power of thought to perceive certain individual and universal truths which enlighten or which raise to a greater meaning the sensible appearances of the inner and outer life of Nature and man".

The mystical and spiritual planes come into play "when the mind of man begins to see more intimately the forces behind life, the powers concealed by our subjective existence, and the poet can attempt to reveal them more directly or at least to use the outward physical and vital and thought symbol only as a suggestion of greater things".⁶ More fully do these planes manifest "when the soul in things comes nearer to man or other worlds than the physical open themselves to him".⁷ These planes attain their entire liberation in poetic form when the Divine, the Infinite, the Eternal, the One Self of all is either

Page 16

the possession of the poet or else at least find the poet sufficiently receptive to their very body and beauty, as it were, for them to put by their veils and fill moment after flashing moment of his creative speech.

Of course, in poetry of all kinds, sense, heart and thought no less than the basic soul-intuitiveness and the Spirit's original afflatus are concerned, so that all the planes function together; but this or that element, the power typical of one plane or another may be the matrix and determinant, the remainder acting in terms of its psychological bent and texture. In Sri Aurobindo's view, there is always a determinant matrix though there is no absolute fixity and an alteration of such a matrix is never quite ruled out. Every poet has on the whole an enduring cast of being, a persisting stand of consciousness.

And the cast, the stand are all the more enduring and persistent because they correspond mostly to the general psychological state in which the nation and the age to which he belongs happens to be. " ... the poetic vision, like everything else, follows necessarily the evolution of the human mind and, according to the age and environment, it has its levels, its ascents and descents and its returns."⁸ There are periods when "the eye of... man is turned upon the physical world about him, the interests of the story of life and its primary ideas and emotions; he sees man and his world only, or sees the other worlds and their gods and beings in that image also, but magnified and heightened".⁹ In such periods the human group and the poetry natural to it functions from the subtle-physical plane of being and consciousness. In other periods, man begins to intellectualise, but still on the same subject-matter: there is more introspection and what forces itself on his view when he turns more inward is the desire-soul with its intenser sensation and passions and then life and the world are seen with a new quivering sensitiveness and colourful longing. The human group living thus and the poetry appealing to its imagination through the sense-mind and the emotions have their being and consciousness deployed from the vital plane. In still other periods man is not content to let thought be involved in the

Page 17

desire-soul but detaches it and needs to know from a freer height what life and world and his own existence are: he tries with a calmer eye "to probe, analyse, get the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature".¹⁰ Then the human group and its poetry move on the mental plane: that is to say, the movement of their being and consciousness is to interpret outward and inward existence to the reasoning intelli-gence.

Most poetry is either of the subtle-physical, the vital or the mental plane - and most poetry, by the very turn of the human psychological constitution, has a prevalent plane, a single determinant matrix, that is mental or vital or subtle-physical. Consequently, a poet is Classical or Romantic, or whatever else we may designate him, according as he articu-lates habitually from a particular plane. And since a plane is something more definite and pervasive than merely a parti-cular side of our complex psychology, the Classical and Romantic to Sri Aurobindo cannot be distinguished by Lucas's "difference mainly of degree". Not that they can never combine or shade off into each other. They certainly can and also there are some common powers at work in both, even as the pure poetic essence is the same on each plane. But all this does not rub away genuine dividing lines.

Sri Aurobindo's reading of the psychological plane of Classicism is evident from several remarks of his. Thus Milton's poetry, amidst the posture and gait personal to him, is, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, "a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance".¹¹And he adds: "This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement." He speaks also of "the lucid, restrained, intellectual and ideal classic form, in which high or strong ideas govern and develop the presenta-tion of life and thought in an atmosphere of clear beauty and the vision of the satisfied intelligence"¹² and he calls the

Page 18

achievement of this form "the greatness of the Greek and Latin poets" who are the prototypes of Classicism. The plane of consciousness from which these ancients write is, to use another phrase of Sri Aurobindo's, "the creative poetic intelli-gence"¹³ and all Classical work done since bears the stamp of the same origin: "most classical poetry," says Sri Aurobindo,¹⁴ "is fundamentally poetry of the pure poetic intelligence." Broadly, Classicism is "the clear and straightforward expres-sion of thought with a just, harmonious and lucid turn".¹⁵ It "insists on the presentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which it is the visible expression" .¹⁶ On the side of form, as a result of the type of intellectual power at work, the particular, though never effaced, is taken up into the general; and details, though never suppressed, are subdued to the whole.

But Classical poetry, we must remember, is not the sole possible product of the creative intelligence. The mind of thought can be different from what it is in this poetry. We have spoken of "the type of intellectual power at work" in Classi-cism. And the type is distinguished, as we can gather from the assertions of Sri Aurobindo, by a clarity, a straightforwardness, a bare loftiness or strength, a just and harmonious presenta-tion, a restrained and tempered beauty. When the intellectual mind becomes complex and crowded, its poetry is still of the creative intelligence but it is no longer Classical.

Further, Classical poetry succeeds in being a language of intellectual thought "without detriment to the vital power of the poetic spirit and the all-seizing effect of its word" because "there is a balance maintained between thought and life, the life passing into self-observing thought and the thought returning on the life to shape it in its own vital image.... A just balance between observing thought and life is the distinctive effort of classical poetry and that endeavour gave it its stamp in Athens or Rome or in much of the epic or classical literature of ancient India".¹⁷

However, Classicism is not all of one piece within its own psychological type. In Europe it has a history of four phases.

Page 19

The first and prototypal, the Graeco-Roman phase, especially in its Greek spirit, is marked by what Sri Aurobindo terms the dealing with life from a large viewpoint taken by "the inspired reason and the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense" .¹⁸ What exactly are we to understand by "the inspired reason"? In general we may say that when the inspired reason is the medium of poetry "the external presentation of life gives place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge".¹⁹ In more detail and in the round we may consider the inspired reason to be strong thought-power seeing relations and connections between things and putting them into broad concepts to interpret the world, but a thought-power receiving some influence from agencies wider, deeper, higher than itself, an influence which it yet converts into mental terms so that ultimately it seems only the mind itself loftily inspired to a high clarity of life-vision. As for the enlightened and chastened aesthetic sense, we may take it to be the aesthetic sense which is very sensitive to the form-beauty of things but particularly the form-beauty that is general harmony, a shapely interrelated whole, and that stands forth in a sort of light satisfying the thought-mind and making a kind of chaste or poised fusion of beauty with truth - beauty in which no minutiae unduly stick out, truth in which the eye is steady upon the object yet always assimilates the external appearance into an inner interpretative presentation. This aesthetic sense operates also in the domain of emotion; it is itself a subtle feeling giving fineness to all other feelings and keeping the emotional nature within bounds, exercising ex-quisite "taste" and happy "measure" in matters of the heart and the passions, a smiling control and a shaping propriety over the elan of assertive individuality.

The chief names usually listed in Graeco-Roman Classicism are Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil and Lucretius. These six, all things considered, are indeed greater than the brilliant sextet: Pindar, Simonides, Sappho, Horace, Catullus, Ovid. There need be no quarrel on this score. But does

Page 20

Homer belong exactly to the same pychological plane as the others put with him? If we associate him with them it must be with a small reservation derived from Sri Aurobindo's  insight. Sri Aurobindo, in the interests of accuracy, regards Homer as a poet not of the creative intelligence but of the subtle-physical plane at its work of creation. Homer's is a poetry of external life: he is the singer of man at the stage when "he turns first his view on the outward physical world and on his own life of outward action and concentrates on that or throws into its mould his life-suggestions, his thought, his religious idea, and, if he arrives at some vision of an inner spiritual truth, he puts even that into forms and figures of the physical life and physical Nature".²⁰ "A primitive epic bard like Homer," Sri Aurobindo has said, "thinks only by the way and seems to be carried constantly forward in the stream of his strenuous action and to cast out as he goes only so much of surface thought and character and feeling as obviously emerges in a strong and single and natural speech and action."²¹ Such a poet does not typify the mental plane, even as he does not typify the plane of the Life-force - or, rather, since man is characteristically a mental being, we should say that Homer's is the subtle-physical mind and not the vital mind or the mind proper. But, as Sri Aurobindo observes, poetry "can reach great heights in this kind of mental mould, can see the physical forms of the gods, lift to a certain greatness by its vision and disclose a divine quality in even the most obvious, material and .outward being and action of man; and in this type we have Homer".²²

Homer thus is not supreme in the strict Classical category where the eye of the poet rises to the clarities and widenesses of a thought which intimately perceives and understands life. As a result, his effect on the cultural consciousness of ancient Greece through his two epics was different from that of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides through their dramas. To quote Sri Aurobindo again: "The epic poems revealed the Hellenic people to itself in the lucid and clear nobility and beauty of an uplifting of life and an aesthetic sense of the humanity and divinity of man; the later art and poetry inter-

Page 21

preted to Athens her religious ideas, her thought, her aesthetic instincts, the soul of grandeur and beauty of her culture."²³ But we may note that something of the essential Greek soul operates in Homer in the same way as in the later art and poetry. Lucidity, clarity, a high and fine delight of the beautiful are the features common to him and his successors, however dissimilar the planes from which he and they make poetry. There is another feature too that has to be considered. He has not their high and active intelligence nor their unremitting "high seriousness". He has a certain comedic or realistic vein which links him to Chaucer who also is a poet of outward character and act. There is the comic relief of "things like the burlesque life on Olympus, or Irus the beggar, or Ajax slipping in the offal";²⁴ and there is the realism of Homer's humbler folk. Not that the later mind of Greece was divorced from laughter or from depiction of low life; the Greeks of the time of Aeschylus and Sophocles "staged a burlesque after each tragic trilogy",²⁵ but they never mixed the genres. What, however, akins Homer to them is that nothing in his epics is allowed to be "fantastic enough to endanger the seriousness of the whole"²⁶ and the low-life realism "is never in danger of making ridiculous the heroic side of his story. Thersites is speedily silenced; the swineherd of Odysseus remains 'the god-like swineherd', himself a king's son".²⁷ More important still, Homer, unlike Chaucer, is no observer of external life "without any preoccupying idea, without any ulterior design, simply as it reflects itself in the individual mind and temperament of the poet":²⁸ he is moved to reveal and idealise and thus, in a broad sense, to interpret and not merely present. "When we read the Iliad or the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature."²⁹ Again: "... it is the adventures and trials and strength and courage of the soul of man in Odysseus which makes the greatness of the Odyssey and not merely the vivid incident and picturesque surrounding circumstance, and it is

Page 22

the clash of great and strong spirits with the gods leaning down to participate in their struggle which makes the greatness of the Iliad and not merely the action and stir of battle."³⁰ Yet again: "Homer with all his epic vigour of outward presentation does not show us the heroes and their deeds before Troy in their actuality as they really were to the normal vision of men, but much rather as they were or might have been to the vision of the gods."³¹

This vision is not of the intense vital plane, turning everything into moved thought and emotion and sensation of the life-soul, carried forward in its own passionate surge, nor is here the mind-soul's climbing to a freer height to get a clear and detached idea of life's workings, man seeking "to domi-nate his emotions and vital intuitions and see with the calm eye of his reason, to probe, analyse, get at the law and cause and general and particular rule of himself and Nature" .³² Homer subjects impulse and action to no change by the vital or mental vision, but his subtle-physical sight is intuitive and interpreta-tive - and, like the mental sight of his successors, it is so "on large and comparatively bare lines dwelling only on the salient details for a first strong and provisionally adequate view".³³

Considering all this and the constant play of aesthesis, we may declare that if Homer worked from the subtle-physical plane the power which he kept the least subordinated to this matrix was the inspired reason and the chastened and enlightened aesthetic sense, just as what his successors kept the least subordinated to their matrix was the perception of external life, the steady eye upon the object. By a not wholly illegitimate extension of the psychological meaning of Greek Classicism we may for our purpose deem Homer Classical.

Standing on a common basis, each of the six masters in Graeco-Roman Classicism has his own quality.* Homer is eminent by the simultaneous presence of simplicity, ampli-tude, dynamic sweep, smoothness and splendour in his style. Aeschylus brings a packed terrific sublimity, daring in colour

* Illustrative quotations at the end of the Chapter.

Page 23

and image, at once weighty and impetuous. Sophocles shines out by calm elevation and measured wideness: as Arnold puts it, he gives the impression of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole: Newman speaks of his sweet composure and melodious fullness. Euripides carries his effect by a pointed versatile ease, a piquancy wedded to deep grace and a brilliance of quick pathos. Virgil is most chiselled, most euphonious, a blend of elegance and majesty, exhibiting a charming strength, a dignified sensitivity. Lucretius comes in rushing force and grandeur winged with philosophical imaginativeness.

Classicism has a later phase which continues the Graeco-Roman spirit of poetic utterance, but in its two great names it is the philosophical intellect ruled by theology: Dante brings mediaeval Roman Catholic thought to bear upon the cosmos, Milton post-Renaissance Puritan thought to survey the uni-verse. Their ancestor, as it were, in Graeco-Roman Classicism is Lucretius of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), but there is no theology there, rather the very opposite, an anti-religious thought based on the theories of Democritus and Epicurus, also the story-element which plays through La Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost is absent. Dante is distin-guished by a severe and concise and clear-cut force of intellect with a strong intuitive drive which affects us as much by what is left suggestively unsaid as by what is incisively articulated with a few exact significant strokes. Emotion in him is deep but firm and he commands a power of primitive symbols, a pictorial narrative ability, a rich religious fervour, a sustained artistic form as in Virgil though not so elaborate as in the author of the Aeneid whom he took for his literary master. Milton is distinguished by a complex grandeur matched with immense and copious yet controlled energy. His too is a sensuous imagination over which the shadow of a very for- malistic religious intellect falls. He is capable of superb epic creativeness when inspired, but the art often becomes no more than externally constructive, though in sheer sculpture of rhythmic word it never fails.

The next phase of Classicism is the French, mainly under

Page 24

Louis XIV. It crystallises the French poetic genius, about which Sri Aurobindo writes that it is much more limited than the Graeco-Roman, much less powerful in inspiration. "For it deals with life from the standpoint not of the inspired reason, but of the dear-thinking intellect, not of the enlightened aesthetic sense, but of emotional sentiment. These are its two constant powers; the one gives it its brain-stuff, the other its poetical fervour and appeal."³⁴ These two motives, which are of the very essence of the French spirit, have been faithfully adhered to and therefore French Classicism has almost always found a satisfying and characteristic form by which it has exercised a great influence from time to time on other Euro-pean literatures. The difference, however, of its quality from that of the Graeco-Roman we may gauge by understanding how the dear-thinking intellect differs from the inspired reason and how emotional sentiment varies from the enlight-ened aesthetic sense. The first may be defined as intellect which depends considerably on itself, believes itself capable, un-aided, to cope with the world, becomes argumentative and demonstrative rather than inspiredly lucid. When things are seen by it in an outward "rational" clarity, it thinks it has the whole truth. It is logical and analytic, while the inspired reason is not only more synthetic but has a background of keener intuitiveness. Emotional sentiment is feeling which on one side is fervent and on the other tender; which inclines towards heroic ardour as well as towards poignant sentimentality; which is at once a strength and a weakness of emotion and is capable of warm enthusiasm no less than lax infatuation; which stands on the verge of high chivalry and also on the brink of facile tearfulness. But, all through, it is considerably touched by the temper and climate of thought and is not sheer impulse or passion. For the dear-thinking intellect tends to give us not so much creation of life as studies of it, "thought about the meaning of character and emotion and event and elaborate description rather than the living presence of these things. Passion, direct feeling, ardent emotion, sincerity of sensuous joy are chilled... and give place to a play of senti-

Page 25

ment , - sentiment which is an indulgence of the intelligent observing mind in the aesthesis, the rasa of feeling, passion, emotion, sense...."³⁵ One step more and these latter get thinned away into "a subtle, at the end almost unreal fineness^".36 No such extreme attenuation happens in French Classicism in its golden age, but the perfect balance between thought and life is not maintained with the sovereignty peculiar to Graeco-Roman Classicism. However, the poetic achievement of French Classicism is admirable enough and its two motives at their best "give us, in Corneille, "a strong nobility of character",³⁷ a pulsing and powerful rhetoric and, in Racine, "a fine grace of poetic sentiment",³⁸ a clear controlled poignancy. Racine is also one of the world's master artists in expression, comparable in his own way with Virgil and Milton, a much lesser way in quality yet unique for evoking poetry from language of the commonest.

The fourth phase of Classicism comes in the so-called Augustan Age of England, the age of Dryden and Pope. As Sri Aurobindo remarks: "It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted for the strength and weight of the Latin manner an exceeding superficiality and triviality. It followed more readily contemporary French models, but missed... their culture, taste, tact of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry...."³⁹

contributions are satire and the mock-epic. It practises a neat, clear, pointed utterance of superficial ideas in the form of

epigrams mostly struck out with the help of antithesis. There is a masterly treatment of the shallow and the commonplace. A robust vigour and a confident driving force are nearly always at the disposal of the writers and here they excel as a rule their nearest French exemplars. Although their diction becomes .conventionalised and artificial, governed by the desire to please the urbane intellect and the decorous sentiment, some memorable moments are there of steady incisiveness and metallic mobility in Dryden and of intense archness and effective clatter in Pope. Pope's truly imaginative moments are

Page 26

no more than a few lines. In the following he seems to hit off with real vision his own tragedy as poet:

Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,

Dull, sullen prisoners in the body's cage:

Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years,

Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres.

Once or twice in Dryden we even get an instance of what the dear-thinking intellect can do supremely in an external manner when a deep inspiration blows through it. The opening of Religio Laici is eighteenth-century Classicism at its purest peak of poetry.'

The artificial and conventional nature of the style in this age can at once be seen by taking any lines from Homer and putting them before Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here are two addressed by Ulysses in surprise to Elpenor who, unknown to his leader, had fallen overboard to his death in the sea and afterwards met Ulysses in the Underworld: Homer, in as straightforward a rendering as a somewhat corresponding metrical mould allows, would run:

How hast thou come, Elpenor, under the shadowy

darkness?

Camest thou faster on foot than I in my black-hued

galley?

Pope ' works these questions into four verses of elaborate superfluities:

O say, what angry power Elpenor led

To glide in shades and wander with the dead?

How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,

Outfly the nimble sail and leave the lagging wind?

Ruskin, disgusted with the falseness of such poetry, has shown in contrast the exquisite sincerity of a line of Keats's which, though with a slight Romantic touch in the style, reflects part of the surprise uttered by Ulysses:

Page 27

How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?

Even where there is no obvious falseness the characteristic level of eighteenth-century Classicism falls below the quality both of articulation and of the mind behind the voice that belongs to the truly Classical. We have merely to pick anything representative out of Pope and set it beside a similar culling from Milton (not even necessarily from Milton at his best in Paradise Lost), in order to prove the crudeness of this Classicism. Next to the satiric, the reflective vein is most congenial to Pope, as in

Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree

Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.

Submit. - In this, or any other sphere,

Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:

Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,

Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.

Let us listen to Milton in the same vein and on his own blindness, the "degree" of "weakness" bestowed by Heaven on him and perplexing him as to how "to serve therewith" his Maker:

God doth not need

Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best

Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state

Is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait.

We can feel at once that Pope's wisdom is not graceful in . gesture and sounds no depths but is jauntily skimmed off the clever brain.

To appreciate true classicism in all its aspects and not only the reflective and, even in this aspect, to appreciate it in the round, we may glance at it under four heads, saying of it what

Page 28

Denham, in the antithetical fashion dear to the eighteenth century, drew as his lesson in poetry from observation of the river Thames:

Though deep, yet clear: though gentle, yet not dull:

Strong, without rage: without o'erflowing, full.

The four heads cannot always be disengaged from one another; often all of them are fused, at times some go hand in hand, but a rough division can be made and illustrated. Of course, when non-English poets are illustrated, it is the originals rather than the translations that are to be considered, though the partly free translations attempt to approach them in quality and manner.

In the deep yet clear type, we may cite that "world-cry" from Horner:

I was the son of Zeus the Cronion, yet have I suffered Infinite pain.

(K.D.S.)

Equally magnificent in its expression of a similar motive in a more picturesque style is the voice of Aeschylus's Prometheus:

Aether divine, and Winds of swiftest wing!

Founts of all rivers! All the Deeps that know

The innumerable laughter of the waves!

All-Mother Earth, Sun's circle of all-sight!

What a God bears at the hands of Gods, behold.

(K.D.S.)

The Sophoclean Chorus makes a masterpiece of sweetness and light:

O let a life be mine

In word and deed both reverent and pure -

True to those Laws whose feet, for ever sure,

Page 29

Tread still the heights divine!

For Heaven alone begot them, to endure -

Not our mortality

Hath power to bid them be;

On them Oblivion's slumber hath no hold;

Yes, God is great in them, and grows not old.

(Lucas)

A paradoxical aspect of the world-scene is laid bare by Euripides's pathetic irony:

When I remember that the gods take thought

For human life, often in hours of grief

To me this faith has brought

Comfort and heart's relief.

Yet, though a wistful understanding lies

Deep in my hope, experience grows and faith recedes:

Men's fortunes fall and rise

Not answering to their deeds.

(Vellacott)

Virgil has fine firm brevities of wisdom:

Facilis descensus Avemo...

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadare ad auras,

Hoc opus, hoc labor est.

Easy the descent into Darkness;

Turning our feet and escaping back to the shining spaces -

There lies the task and that is the labour.

(K.D.S.)

Dante is at once tense and tender in his profundity:

Me la bonta infinita ha si gran braccia

Che prende cio, che si rivolge a lei -

Page 30

But infinite Goodness throws out arms so wide

They gather each soul straining back to it -

(K.D.S.)

or

E la sua voluntade e nostra pace.

His will alone is our tranquillity. (K.D.S.)

And there is Milton with his "organ-voice", prophet-pitched in

And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all Temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for thou know' st. Thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast abyss

And mad'st it pregnant. What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support;

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men -

or keyed to splendid pride in

one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

What matter where if I be still the same? -

or majestically modulating to beauty:

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move

Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird

Sings darkling, and inshadiest covert hid

Tunes her nocturnal note.

Corneille is stately in his penetrating practicality:

Page 31

A vaincre sans peril, on triomphe sans gloire -

Defeating without danger, one conquers without glory -

(K.D.S.)

or

Chaque instant de la vie est un pas vers la mort.

Each moment of our life is a step towards our death.

(K.D.S.)

Lastly, Dryden's sublimation in his Religio Laici, of didactic thinking, almost as of prose, by a revealingly sustained image and a suggestive atmosphere conjured up by a deft play of vowels sounds and modulating consonants, cannot be omitted:

Dim, as the borrowed beams of moon and stars

To lonely, weary, wandering travellers

Is Reason to the soul: and as on high

These rolling fires discover but the sky,

Not light us here, so Reason's glimmering ray

Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,

But guide us upward to a better day.

And as those nightly tapers disappear

When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,

So pale grows Reason at Religion's sight,

So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.

To exemplify the gentle-yet-not-dull type we may begin with Simonides whose epitaph for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae is immortal for its sensitive understatement:

Tell them at Lacedaemon, passer-by,

That here obedient to their laws we lie.

(Lucas)

Dante brings many lines of a vivid delicacy, like these from the passage where Beatrice descends from Heaven to the soul of Virgil on Dante's behalf:

Page 32

Io son Beatrice, che ti facio andare:

Vegno di loco, ove tornar disio:

Amor me mosso, che mi fa parlare.

Beatrice am I who now thy haste beseech:

Out of a place that lures me back I come:

Love brought me here and love impels my speech.

(K.D.S.)

Milton has the famous passage:

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail

Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,

Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,

And what may quiet us in a death so noble,

or this softly attractive simile:

Innumerable as the stars of night

Or stars of morning, dew-drops which the Sun

Impearls on every leaf and every flower,

or that smoothly defunctive music with which his epos ends:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow

Through Eden took their solitary way.

Coreille has many a calm yet concise adequacy like

Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des Etoiles -

This shadowy light that falls here from the stars.

(K.D.S.)

Page 33

Racine commands some remarkable effects, incantatory yet the gentlest:

Dans 1'orient desert quel devient mon ennui.

In the desert orient how my weariness grew!

(KD.S.)

Geoffrey Brereton says that this phrase comes without any hyperbole, on your own level, and has you by the throat before you can reflect. Perfect too in suave directness is the couplet:

Belle sans ornement, dans le simple appareil

D'une beaute qu'on vient d'arracher au sommeil.

Lovely with not one ornament, in the simple sweep

Of a beauty that has just been startled out of sleep.

(K.D.S.)

For the strong-without-rage type, nothing can be better than Homer on the priest of Apollo returning with bitter thoughts after Agamemnon's refusal to give him back his captured daughter:

Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured

Ocean -

(Sri Aurobindo)

or the subsequent description of the Sun-God himself as he descended towards the Greek camp to avenge the wrong done to his worshipper - a description rhythmed out with a poised irresistibleness and imaged with an audacious simplicity:

Down from the peaks of Olympus he came, wrath vexing

his heart-strings,

Over his shoulders carrying arrows and double-packed

quiver,

Page 34

And, with the speed of his moving, his silver bow shaken

about him

Clanged, and he came like the Night.

(K.D.S. - the first line from Sri Aurobindo)

Then take those terrible yet beautiful words of Clytemnestra in Aeschylus after she has thrown an embroidered robe upon her husband in his bath and killed him. She lifts the blood-stained robe and says:

Round him I flung, like a fishing-net escapeless,

These folds of fatal splendour; then I struck

Twice - and with twice-repeated cry of woe

His limbs gave way beneath him; where he fell,

A third time yet I hewed him, as in prayer

And sacrifice to the infernal Zeus,

Deliverer of the dead.

So on the earth he gasped his life away,

And from his lips burst forth a gush of blood,

That splashed me, like a shower of dark red rain;

And I rejoiced in it as wheat grows glad

With heaven's moisture, when the ear is born.

(Lucas)

Lucretius is stupendous at times, as in those phrases where he describes the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the way of rational investigation:

Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra

Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi

Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque

.

Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood everywhere

victor;

Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls he ventured,

Page 35

Crossing the measureless span of the all with his thought

and his dreaming.

(K.D.S.)

Virgil can make us hear the very gates of the Gods swing formidably on their hinges:

Panditur interea domus omnipotenti Olympi.

Wide-open lay by that hour the house of omnipotent

Olympus.

(K.D.S.)

Dante's restrained energy can be shown in countless lines: here is he invoking Apollo, the vanquisher of the uncouth presumptuous Marsyas:

Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue

Si come quando Marsia traesti

Della vagina delle membre sue.

Enter within my bosom and there breathe

The self-same power you had of singing when

You tore Marsyas from his body's sheath.

(K.D.S.)

Milton teems with strength, large-swept as in

Millions of spirits for his fault amerced

Of Heaven and from Eternal Splendour flung

For his revolt, yet faithful how they stood,

Their glory withered. As, when Heaven's fire

Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,

With singed top their stately growth though bare

Stands on the blasted heath -

or dose-gathered as in

Page 36

Fall'n Cherub, to be weak is miserable,

Doing or suffering -

or brief-cut as in

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Corneille provides many an occasion of dignified force, like

Rome n'est plus dans Rome, elle est toute ou je suis -

Rome is no more in Rome, it stands wherever I am -

(K.D.S.)

or, in the opposite vein,

Je rends graces aux Dieux de n'etre pas Romain,

Pour conserver encore quelque chose d'humain.

I give my thanks unto the Gods that I am no Roman

But still within me keep some touches of the human.

(K.D.S.)

The full-without-overflowing type may be instanced from the hexameters close on the opening of Homer's Odyssey:

Many the woes in his soul he suffered driven on the waters,

Fending from fate his life and the homeward course of his

comrades.

Them even so he saved not, for all his desire and his

striving,

Who by their own infatuate madness piteously perished,

Fools in their hearts! for they slew the herds the deity

pastured,

Helios high-climbing, but he from them reft their return

and the daylight.

(Sri Aurobindo)

Page 37

Virgil is the sovereign hand at this type, briefly marvellous:

O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem -

Fiercer griefs you have suffered: to these too God will give

ending -

(Sri Aurobindo)

or

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore -

Forth did they stretch their hands with love of the shore

beyond them -

(K.D.S.)

or the verse that Arnold Bennett used to consider the most

musical in all poetry:

Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem.

Grief that no words can utter, O Queen, thou bid'st me

re-waken.

(K.D.S.)

Dante also specialises in this genre - with a greater severity, his heart breaking yet backbone firm:

Tu proverai si come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui e com'e duro calle

Lo scendere e'l salir 1'altrui scale.

How bitter another's bread is, thou shalt know

By tasting it: and how hard to the feet

Another's stairs are, up and down to go.

(Laurence Binyon)

Milton the stern Puritan springs several surprises of the

Page 38

utmost poignancy held on the rein: those lines Arnold admired to excess for their closing sequence of long vowels, most of them in slow limping monosyllables enforcing the pathos of the sense:

Not that fair field

Of Enna where Proserpin gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world,

or the passage on the poet's own blindness:

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,

Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,

Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine -

also the phrases about the blind Samson, intensely subjective in

Dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon,

intensely objective in

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

Racine is well-known for achieving with the most ordinary vocabulary, plainly set forth, a moving exquisiteness for which the Romantics and even other Classical writers need more elaborate means:

Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee,

Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee?

Ariane, my sister, by what Jove's deep hurt

Died'st thou upon this shore that all desert?

(K.D.S.)

Page 39

A little less subdued, he has still an essential simplicity as of conversation:

Impitoyable Dieu, toi seul as tout conduit.

God without pity, none but thou brought all to pass.

(K.D.S.)

Even a shade of colour does not lessen the same heart-shatter-ing' directness and candour:

J' ai senti son beau corps tout froid entre mes bras.

I felt her beautiful body all cold within my arms.

(K.D.S.)

References

Page 40