On Poetry
THEME/S
From Kathleen Raine
I have received and read your Blake's Tyger with delight. I must, I think, concede you the victory - your laying out of the whole map of Blake's inner world and its dynamics in the context of Milton's poem does convince. Whether when Blake wrote The Tyger he himself as yet saw that whole universe as a whole scarcely matters, since it was already implicit, as the oak within the acorn. You have woven every symbolic term into the complete pattern. Perhaps in the Milton chapter I was tempted to think that you had done little more than show that Blake uses a Miltonic vocabulary, that all those grand Miltonic words in The Tyger are simply that - a Miltonic symbolic and linguistic vocabulary - but your chapter on Los, his 'furnaces', and the 'fires' in general throughout the poem do convince me. It all fits together. Yours is a scheme of advaita, mine dualistic, and finally the non-dual universe must be right and we know that for Blake heaven and hell, good and evil, the 'contraries', must be married in 'Jesus, the Imagination'.
I find myself reflecting on the 'wrath-fires' of the Father, as the matrix of creation (Boehme) as surely depicted in the Milton diagram of the Four Worlds with these fires without; in this scheme Jesus, the Son, is the principle of Light, whose origin is in the fires but whose nature is different -mild and gentle. The 'fires' of creation are 'humanized' only in Jesus, and is not the Tyger one of the 'dehumanized' denizens of the Forests? But you may well be right, that fire is Urizen's enemy, and Los, who 'kept the divine vision' is the Smith who dared 'seize the fire' - the agent of Jesus the Imagination. I am bound to admit that I did not give enough
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place to Paradise Lost as a source - laziness, lack of thoroughness in tracing the symbols - and of course Blake's Jesus is not Milton's Son ('reason') but rather the 'first commander of the heavenly host' from whom 'the Messiah fell* and made a heaven for himself in the Abyss (Urizen's world).
In a few details I shall disagree - 'And did those feet in ancient time' are universally taken to be those of Jesus, who according to legend visited Britain with Joseph of Ari-mathea, who planted the legendary 'Glastonbury Thorn' which blooms at Christmas. Not that it matters. Jerusalem remains his 'bride'.
You have certainly shown that Blake and Milton's mythological world - the same inner universe, in many essentials - is the terrain of the Tyger. I would still put in a plea for the Gnostic-Hermetic sources, for Blake was, after all, immersed in Boehme and Paracelsus at that time. Also for my view that the symbols of the poem are inseparable, you can't say the forests existed 'before' the tyger, they go together. Blake was after all a Swedenborgian, and Sweden-borg described how surroundings, in the spirit-world, come into being as 'correspondences' of some 'state' (state of mind) and tyger and forests of the night are a single 'correspondence' just as are lamb and meadow. But, finally, yes, I must concede that the Tyger-fire is the divine wrath, at however many removes, that for Blake fire is creative, destroyer of darkness and evil, Christ the Judge in his 'Chariot of Fire'.
Little did I imagine that I would finally read Blake's Tyger in Tiger-land. - Just back from the Radha Soami Ashram in N. Punjab (where on Sunday there were nearly 500,000 -half a million - people present, in a sort of peaceful kingdom of the Golden Age, of which their Master is like a King of the Golden Age) with plan to visit a nature reserve in which there are tygers - if I have the good luck to see one.
I think I told you that I had been stricken with deafness, this seems slowly to be improving. I don't wear my hearing-
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aid all the time now by any means. What if we are deaf to many unheard sounds, blind to many unseen visions? It has been a useful demonstration. The deaf could well argue that birds do not sing!
I'm to pick up in Connaught Circle Sisir Kumar Ghose's new books. Have also been collecting Kapila Vatsyayan's magnificent publications from the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts. So in the next Temenos I shall have a long review of Indian publications - India has something unique to tell us about Blake, about poetry, about the roots of the arts. I hope to have your paper also by then. I think I'il have to review your book and S.K. Ghose's myself, I can't trust anyone else in England to do that task. Kapila's Lexicon of Sanskrit basic terms I shall merely, with infinite respect, describe. But these terms - Brahman, Purusha, Atman, etc. etc. - we of the West will have to learn if we wish to think about that universe to which they relate, Blake himself lacked such a vocabulary, but after all what a magnificent mythology he forged from such sources as were available to him. It is not surprising that it has taken an Indian mind (your own) to see the whole as a whole, and in context. I did my best, but in this match I must, as I said, concede you victory. A pity you can't add this to your appendix!
Santosh Pal, by the way - a Yeats scholar - much admires your Shakespeare book which I have not read!
Now also from your photograph I can glimpse a corner of your book-lined room, which you say I visited!
Very warm and delighted congratulations.
(6.4 .1989}
From K. D. Sethna
I must be quite a Michael Ventris to have read your handwritten letter. Have you heard of him? He was a scholar in Greek who deciphered the famous Linear B script for which there is no bilingual inscription. There is no such inscription in regard to the Harappa Culture, either. Many
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attempts have been made to read the Harappa script, but none so far has been satisfactory to all scholars. I have myself made a small suggestive effort in my book Karpasa* in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, in which, as in my earlier study The Problem of Aryan Origins - Prom an Indian Point of View, 1 argue along several separate lines that the Rigveda was much earlier than the Harappa Culture and that the latter was at once a derivative, a development and a deviation from the former. Ventris, as the master code-breaker, was requested to tackle the Harappan problem. Within a month of this request he died in a motor accident, as if the Harappans who lived c. 25001500 B.C.. were bent on leading modern Indologists a dance.
I believe I have managed to get all your hieroglyphs correct except one word which too I would have deciphered if I had still had with me the copy of Blake's complete works which Sir Geoffrey Keynes had presented to me after reading the first draft of my book. Unfortunately, the paper on which Blake was printed contained some acidic material and the whole book turned dark brown and started to crumble. Cutting out Keynes's words on the fly-leaf I had to throw the book away. The word which has baffled me is in the sentence: "...and of course Blake's Jesus is not Milton's Son ('reason') but rather the 'first Commander [?] of the heavenly host' from whom 'the Messiah fell" and made a heaven for himself in the Abyss (Urizen's world),"
What you have said about my work is extremely gratifying. Thank you for such generous praise. Coming from you it is not only generous: it is also authoritative and enlightening. I deeply appreciate the spirit in which you write about your letter: "A pity you can't add this to your appendix!"
I have read about the Radha Soami Ashram. It was Paul
* Cotton.
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Brunton's Search in Secret India which first introduced me to it. Its original creator was still alive at the time, a remarkable man.
Tigers are a familiar sight in all Indian zoos, as are lions, though rarely their joint offspring - Tigons or Ligers. I have the honour of having caught the tail of a lioness in the Madras animal park. She had flung it out of the bars of her cage in a sitting posture. 1 just couldn't resist the temptation of touching it. What a burst of thunder followed, and like a streak of lightning leaping back into a cloud the tail was pulled in.
I am glad your deafness is decreasing. Perhaps by the time you return to England you'll be in full possession of your hearing ability. Surely deafness is much less of a misfortune than blindness. I have posted you my Shakespeare book, hoping it won't prove a disappointment in your eyes. Read at least the part which deals with the Dark Lady and the Rival Poet - and, of course, the exposition of the system of internal chronology which comes at the start.
Now to the "few details" in which you "disagree". You say: " And did those feet in ancient time' are universally taken to be those of Jesus..." But stanzas 1 and 2 are obviously built on the same plan, implying two figures -except that in the second stanza Jesus ('the Countenance Divine') comes in the two opening lines whereas in the first 'the holy Lamb of God" comes in the two closing ones. A pair of persons is apparently present in both. According to the "universal" reading, Jesus is twice mentioned in stahza 1, though two questions are asked as in stanza 2, with the second question introduced in both the stanzas by "And..." just as the first question is. It's clear to me that Blake intended a parallel design with a small change in the constituent sequence of characters. Besides, if Jerusalem is one of the two characters in the poem, as surely the second stanza makes explicit, it should be most natural to see her in the first stanza when Blake elsewhere writes of her feet walking and never those of Jesus doing so? -
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The hills and valleys felt her feet -
(Another lyric in Milton)
or
How distant far from Albion! his hills & his valleys no
more
Receive the feet of Jerusalem...
(Jerusalem 4, 79, lines 14-15)
Please reflect again over my interpretation: it is more relevant as well as more symmetrical. Besides, the first of the other lyrics in Milton which are the sequel of this famous one, mentions Jerusalem walking with Jesus who, as in our poem, is called the Lamb of God:
She walks upon our meadows green,
The Lamb of God walks by her side.
It is the same scene. The only variation is that here meadows are green while there mountains are and that the two walkers who are together here in one place are shown walking in apparently different places though "mountains green" could be themselves "pleasant pastures".
As for the Gnostic-Hermetic sources for which you have entered a plea, Blake was certainly under their influence in the period when he wrote The Tyger and we see their influence in the poem itself in the description of the tyger's making. The Fifth Book of the Hermetica describes the cunning of the demiurgic Workman who frames man in the womb: "Who circumscribed and marked out his eyes?... Who opened his mouth and tied together his sinews?... Who hardened and made strong the bones... who made the heart like a Pyramis?" The imagery of forests of the night also resembles the Gnostic-Hermetic vision, but I have tried to show at some length that Blake, even in other works than The Tyger, is never fully Gnostic-Hermetic nor Sweden-borgian. We have Urizen himself recalling after his fall his former happy state in Supernature:
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Then in my ivory pavillion I slumber'd in the noon
And walked in the silent night among sweet-smelling
flowers...
So we have night in Heaven. Albion recounting what happened to him when he lost his supernatural wholeness
says:
First fled my Sons & then my Daughters, then my Wild
Animations,
My Cattle next, last even the Dog of my Gate; the
Forests fled...
In my book I have commented: "Mark the phrase 'the Forests fled'. It proves that unfallen Albion, the Eternal Man, contained in his divine existence the very forests which come to symbolize the temporal world split from the light of the All." Night and forests don't come into being with the Fall from Heaven: their divine counterparts are in Heaven itself. Furthermore, we have a Fall in Heaven before the Fall from it. There the heavenly "silent night" is perverted by Urizen and we are told of "that deadly night" and "the night of councils dark". The pre-existence of night and forests in a divine form is not the vision of the Gnostic-Hermetic or Swedenborgian Blake but of the Miltonic Blake, and their perversion preceding the Fall from Heaven echoes also Book VI of Paradise Lost.
When you write: "You can't say the forests existed 'before' the tyger, they go together" you are not wrong, but their togetherness need not be taken exclusively in the Swedenborgian sense. The tyger as part of the forests of the night is Swedenborgian, but the tyger fighting against them is Christological-Miltonic. This tyger of fiery divine wrath is indeed fashioned at the same time the forests of the night spring into being in Heaven, and their togetherness there is of mutual opposition. Similarly, if the forests of the night which first sprang up in Heaven as a perversion have their
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symbolic reflex on earth, the tyger which burns bright in them would still be their enemy. One more point: though the tyger of fiery divine wrath and the forests of the night cannot be separated in existence and though they make an antithesis together, there could be a synthesis of them, or a pair of inseparables, in a happy Edenic way - a tyger of mobile splendour in a forest of rooted mystery. Perhaps Albion's "Wild Animations", as contrasted with his "Cattle" and "Dog", refer to paradisal Tygers and Lions?
Now a truce to discussion. My Shakespeare-book which should soon be in your hands has on its back-cover a larger replica of the picture in which you have marked my book-lined background. I must explain that the glasses which look darkish are really ordinary specs on which light has not fallen.
You haven't said how long still you will be in Delhi. I surmise this means that no flying back soon to Paultons Square is in prospect.
It's great news that you would be reviewing Blake's Tyger along with some other Indian publications in the next Temenos. Do you think it is possible for Jean Mambrino to review The Obscure and the Mysterious: A Research in Mallarme's Symbolist Poetry? The TLS completely ignored it just as it had ignored the book of our old correspondence in spite of your renown. My Shakespeare-book too got no notice. I have sent my Blake-study to the Blake Trust in England and the Blake Quarterly in the USA.
By the way, I haven't forgotten the article for you. More than two-thirds has been written.
(12.4.1989)
Thank you for your letter of 12.4.89 and hope my script too may bear a remote relation to the primordial human quest-ings and questionings of the Rig Veda. What is civilization but an unending conversation and exchange of our treasures
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with one another from the beginning of time until now? "Why read novels?' an American friend said to me, a propos the stories one hears every day, and Ramchandra Gandhi said only yesterday that 'Satsang' is the essence of civilization.
I too don't have my Blake with me but I believe the passage in the marriage of Heaven and Hell reads 'the first commander of the heavenly host (Lucifer that is) the Messiah fell, and made a heaven for himself from what he stole from the Abyss'. Deeply true, if the Messiah is 'reason'! As to tygers, I still have not seen one in India, we have postponed our visit to the nature-reserve, no Tygons or Ligers either. We have deferred our plan because a painter here - Kishori Kaul, whose work 1 much like - wants to paint a portrait of me. Seeing a Tyger in the Forests of the Night is not given to any tourist. Charan Singh, the Master of Beas, says that each time a V.I.P, visits a reserve, one Tiger is drugged so as to be easily on show, A great shame -I prefer to leave such epiphanies to the divine Master of Tigers & Tygers.
Well, the Feet on the hills of Albion could be either those of Jesus or Jerusalem, and are plainly both! If one counts feet there must be four. Did the Tyger's feet as well as the Lamb's walk those hills? If not, it is time that beast appeared in England's polluted and unpleasant land as it has become. Not altogether so, of course, there are still many 'golden builders' at work and the Daughters of Albian sing Jerusalem at all Women's Institute gatherings with heartfelt gusto. As to the 'forests of affliction' and 'the ancient trees' you are doubtless right to point out that, unfallen, all things are 'in their eternal forms' in the Divine Humanity. It is in the created world that evil appears. As an Indian you cannot do otherwise than affirm advaita.
Piloo pointed out to me that Sethna is a common Parsee name (she herself is a Parsee) and the only other Sethnas I know are the family of General Sethna whose daughter, Shirnaz, is writing her doctorate thesis on Blake and Zoroaster - she has found a surprising number of possible
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Zoroastrian elements in Blake. Your affinity with the 'fire' would in that case be one more link with the Tyger.
I much look forward to read the Shakespeare book but am at present in the middle of Sisirkumar Ghose's book on mysticism. Your, and his, writings are what India should be contributing to learning; not the carbon-copy culture of your Universities which for the most part adopt and copy western attitudes and values, adding only to the darkening of the light. Sri Aurobindo was an evolutionist and optimist & I hope he may be right, but the possibility of a different outcome looks very real. And so it is foretold in the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts, I understand, and in the Mahabharata, most vividly.
(19.4.1989)
You keep me hard at work. I have now read most of the "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" book and again admire your skill in setting piece to piece, words, phrases, and reconstructing a complete picture, with recognizable human features. I am entirely convinced by your argument for William Herbert - in my garden you'll get two kinds of marjoram, sweet marjoram, and 'knotted marjoram' and of course you are absolutely right about the tight-curled hair! It would help if academics ever looked at nature! I'm not so happy about the 'dark lady', having been strongly inclined to think A.L. Rowse is right in his identification - the Italian musician fits so well the picture of the kind of social milieu from which Shakespeare would have been likely to choose a mistress - not, certainly, the courtesans and bawds. And a young lord could also have been charmed by her gifted playing. Of course I'm not an authority but I favour Emilia Lanier rather than your 'Anastasia' who seems rather a featureless young lady. But who knows? I have not yet read your chapter on the 'worthier pen', but I will do so.
Our Tyger expedition fell through, because a painter
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here, Kishori Kaul, wanted to paint my portrait. She will presently be going to Auroville for a while as a 'painter in residence' so I am sure you will meet her. I sent you messages through her sister-in-law's husband, Mr. Jayant Patel, who came in while the painting was in progress, and will I hope remember to carry my greetings. Kishori's portrait is liked by all - I feel she has captured my essence, although I cannot judge since none can 'see oursels as ithers see us'. It is an evanescent face, and indeed she is a painter who dissolves all things into light. I am deeply happy to leave this likeness in India. She is a very gifted painter, and strangely enough my first publisher, Tambimuttu, wanted to give her an exhibition in London, but their meeting took place just three days before he died. So strangely do the threads of life weave us all together in a pattern of which we are only a part whose whole is so much vaster than we can know.
It's an impressive piece of Shakespeare scholarship - I wonder if Muriel Bradbrook has the book? If not I will lend her my copy on my return to England - on May 6th.
(27.4.1989)
I have three letters from you, one of them a Temenos postcard asking me to send a copy of Blake's Tyger to Piloo Jungalwallah, a fellow Parsi. I sent it to her at once, marking it "For Favour of Review" but at the same time inscribing her name with my compliments. Do you know what "Jungalwallah" means? It means either "one who owns a jungle" or "one who hails from a jungle". My name "Sethna" stands for "one who belongs to, or else is associated with, a family of masters". My imagination likes to trace my line to the third son of Adam - "Seth" - with a Gujarati suffix - "na" -added! I wonder what the etymology of "Raine" is. Does the word derive from the French "reine" or is it an Old-English form of "rain"?
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The thesis of Shirnaz Sethna on Blake and Zoroaster is bound to be an original contribution. The Fire-worshippers attracted several Romantic poets - Byron in Giaour, Moore in a part of Lolla Rookh and Landor in Gebir. I shouldn't be surprised if Blake's preoccupation with "fires" had a Zoroastrian touch somewhere.
Yes, the word I couldn't quite make out must be "commander". As for seeing a Tyger, why do you have to visit a Nature-Reserve where this great animal will have to be drugged for a V.I.P.'s visit - even if these initials would stand now for "Very Inspired Person"? An ordinary Zoo should serve your purpose.
I am glad you grant that "those feet" could be Jerusalem's, even though you may think Jesus's more likely. When you write that the Daughters of Albion still sing Jerusalem with heart-felt gusto, I may fancifully say that their gatherings represent the Sanskrit SATSANG interpreted Englishly: they SAT and SANG.
I incline to look upon them and others of their kind in all parts of the globe not as desperate fighters for a lost cause in a time which, according to "the Bible, the Koran and other Islamic texts" as welt as the Hindu Mahabharata, is the beginning of the end, a Gotterdammerung, a Pralaya, a universal holocaust. I look upon them as scattered harbingers of the Day Sri Aurobindo has prophesied of earth's fulfilment - not merely Sri Aurobindo as, in your words, "an evolutionist and optimist" but also Sri Aurobindo as the seer and realiser of the Supermind. the archetypal Truth-Consciousness which is both the primal Creator and the ultimate Transformer of earthly existence, a supreme status and dynamism of the Divine with which none of the past religions or philosophical or poetic visionaries had concretely come in contact. Sri Aurobindo did not live in cloudland; he was realist enough to know how bad were things at present and how much worse they could get. If in spite of his latter-day preoccupation not with the "Empyrean" but what he called the "Abyss", the common world-stuff which had to
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be illumined, he held out the promise of a divine life, a full descent of the 'Empyrean", I cannot help having faith in what he foresaw as coming to pass no matter what difficulties and even disasters might be met with on the way.
Now for my Shakespeare-book. I am so glad you have read most of it and find it skilful scholarship. I think my most solid contribution comes in the last part, which is concerned with "A Worthier Pen". If I have convinced you of William Herbert, it's surely something accomplished. You consider my "Anastasia" "rather a featureless young lady", but don't you believe it is some achievement to have given, if not "a local habitation", at least "a name" to what has been so "airy" a "nothing" - a name conjured from the poet's own words in the sole context in the Sonnets where he mentions the word "name" in connection with his dark enchantress? And the point about her being dark is of central importance where a historically located person like Rowse's Emilia Lanier whom you prefer is concerned. You forget that Rowse's reading of the word "brown" for her in Simon Forman's diaries was proved wrong by Stanley Wells in the TLS of May 11, 1973, p. 628. Going straight to the manuscript in the Bodleian, Wells finds Rowse's description of Emilia as "very brown" to be a gross misreading, like several other instances of careless transcription on Rowse's part. Forman calls her not "brown" but "braue" ("brave" in modern orthography). According to Wells, "braue" probably means "handsome", "flamboyant", perhaps shading into "promiscuous". And is not Wells talking good sense when, referring to Rowse's quotation from Forman, he remarks: "This is a more plausible statement than that a woman aged twenty-seven was once 'brown'"? Wells's case was so strong that Rowse himself had to concede the correction in The Listener of June 10, 1973. An indirect proof of Emilia's non-brunette feature comes from another TLS pointer. In the issue of June 7, 1974, p. 604, col. 3 we read: "That Forman does not in fact remark on her coloration is especially unfortunate for, as this book (Rowse's Simon Forman)
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shows, he often enough observes the complexion of female clients who were unfashionably dark,"
Here I may remind you that even the other prop Rowse had offered - namely, that in accord with the punning "Will" sonnets Emilia was married to William Lanier - has broken down. Mary Edmond has proved that Emilia was married not to William but to Alfonso Lanier. This, again, was admitted by Rowse. And yet he felt so strongly that Emilia had to be Shakespeare's Dark Lady that he cast about for any reed to lean on. He finds it "not surprising that Shakespeare's mistress should come to consult Forman, since his known landlady, Mrs. Mountjoy, did so." There is not the slightest logic here. Besides, Rowse believes that Emilia's affair with Shakespeare was over before she entered Forman's parlour in 1597: how then can she be connected with Mrs. Mountjoy with whom Shakespeare had lodged some time between 1602 and 1604? Finally there is the argument which Rowse considers very impressive. Emilia was a bit of a poet and once wrote, as though echoing Shakespeare's famous "All the world's a stage",
For well you know, this world is but a stage
Where all do play their parts and must be gone.
Rowse's argument boils down to saying: "If Emilia echoed Shakespeare's idea, she must have been his mistress." Surely, hundreds of people heard his plays and the expressed idea must have been a platitude in so markedly dramatic and stage-struck an age as the Elizabethan?
What seems to have bent you in favour of Emilia is simply the fact that Shakespeare's Dark Lady, as Sonnet 128 tells us, used to play on a musical instrument and that Emilia was the daughter of Battista Bassano, one of the Queen's Musicians. No doubt, here is a better "social milieu", but can it suffice to solve our problem?
I'll be very glad if you will be kind enough to show my book to Muriel Bradbrook. On pp. 13 and 14 of my study I
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have quotations from her Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (Penguin Books), pp. 94 and 103-04. A comment from her will mean much to me.
Where will Kishori kaul's portrait of you be? Will she be bringing it along with her to Auroville? If so, I would very much like to take a look at you as a being of light, your true self. Jayant Patel is well known to me. So is his wife Aster who is a permanent resident of Auroville. Is your portrait in oils or water-colour? I believe water-colour can catch better the pervasion of things by light, but the great Impressionists to whom light meant the very substance of nature were oil-painters, weren't they?
I hope this letter catches you before you vanish to England. I hope also you'll catch a glimpse of my "Rival Poet" while still in Delhi.
It has been a delightful time receiving letters from you at such short intervals.
(1.5.1989)
It seems strange to be writing to you from London where everyone is saying what a hot summer - little do they know! But it is pleasant Shakespearean weather with may-blossom and early roses, not to say 'lilac-time'. Your letter to Delhi has been forwarded to me - I have not yet had time to read your 'worthier pen' detection, but I still favour Emilia Lanier. No need to 'prove' she was dark, if she was Italian, that is dark by English standards - dark hair and that 'brown' olive skin. Just as to say 'Indian' would by English standards (especially in the 16th century) be to say 'dark' even though your marriage-advertisements ask for 'fair' brides, meaning Aryan light-brown rather than tribal dark skins. I can't see Shakespeare expressing surprise that a lady who had invited a 'blind-date' with Burbage and had submitted willingly enough to the playwright instead of the actor proving false, since she was clearly promiscuous from the
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start. A court musician is much more likely to have enchanted Shakespeare - and the aristocratic Mr. W.H. - than a London adventuress - after all the Dark Lady was a gifted artist, and music clearly enchanted Shakespeare. As it doubtless did William Herbert. However I am not a Shakespeare scholar and all I am really saying is that an Italian player of the virginals at the court of Elizabeth strikes me as the Dark Lady I would invent if I were a fiction-writer. I will let Muriel Bradbrook read your book, I'm sure she will enjoy it whoever her own candidate may be.
1 hope you will have by now met - or will soon meet -Kishori Kaul, whose portrait of me is in oils but full of light. It reminds me a bit of the Elizabethan 'mask of youth' but 1 do feel she has captured 'the face I had before the world was made'. She is a true artist, I hope you will meet her. I did a television conversation with Ramu Gandhi. in which it is shown.
1 am back to a mountain of letters which make me wish I had stayed in India and never come back. But here lies my task, whether what is at hand is the destruction of earth and sea and our beautiful world and ultimately ourselves, or Sri Aurobindo's opposite picture of the future, or maybe both, in some mysterious way we do not understand — that we may outgrow this planet, or mode of apprehending it. Be that as it may our tasks are plain.
Your being a Parsee must in part explain your affinity with the beast of fire and that fiery principle you delight in. Piloo is a very devout practising Parsee, and so is Shirnaz's family (General Sethna is her father). I gave - with Keshav Malik - a poetry-reading in the beautiful garden of another Parsee lady - Mrs. Freny Billimoria, a painter, the night before I returned. There were green parrots flying over the trees. and mosquitoes over the grass It was all very beautiful, and alas a few hours later I was flying over the rocky wilderness of Afghanistan then Russia for hours and hours, and arriving here was like descending to another planet. You all suddenly seem very far away, like people dwelling in
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Blake's Sun singing 'Holy, holy holy is the Lord God Almighty.'
(10.5 .1989}
It is so long since 1 last heard from yon that I wonder if all is well with you? 1 do hope that neither illness nor any other of life's ills has touched you? It seemed so easy to exchange letters when I was in Delhi - under the rays of Surya - and here in England psychologically as well as physically in another land. 1 wonder if you met Kishori Kaul who was going to be in Auroville, and who painted a beautiful portrait of me?
1 am now getting together Temenos 11 and Piloo Jungal-wallah's review of the Tyger will go in - 1 think she sent you a copy. She is herself deep in Blake and enjoyed plunging into the 'wars of Intellect'. She is in England at present and we are going up together to a Sufi community in Scotland to whom I have promised a week on Blake's Job engravings, Blake's final word on the transforming power of the Imagination. I am still hoping that your contribution on Aurobindo's view on poetry may reach me in time to go into this number. I very much look forward to including something from you in Temenos, and it would be good to have it in this issue, where your book is also discussed.
I have been in USA for the last three weeks, the most total contrast possible with India, with its high standard of living and low standard of life, the hideous flabby bodies, uninhabited by soul, the atrocious clothes, the excess of food and every kind of proliferation of machine-made goods of the utmost vulgarity. And yet a country of such great natural beauty, which the American Way of Life has not succeeded in destroying. And with it all, a great desire to learn, an energy and desire for spiritual teaching, and more rishis and lamas and rinpoches than in their own countries. Seeds of every religion and cult and sect in the world there
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falls on fertile virgin soil. So long as it in no way interferes with personal freedom (written after all into the American constitution) Americans will try anything - for a time. For some crazy sect they will without a backward thought leave spouses and children (especially the women) and of course marriage is a very tenuous relationship, and children are brought up by the television-set. There is still an echo of an older, more dignified America of course and there is much sincerity and generosity. And whatever is happening to our world is happening in that country. Whether they will destroy the world or see the beginnings of a sort of univer-salism that would be something better than our old sectarian and nationalist cultures you and I may not live long enough into the next century to see. Just as well perhaps.
But the Lindisfarne Press, with whom I was staying for a time, have published an excellent book by Robert MacDer-mott entitled The Essential Aurobindo, which I read while I was there.
Dear Dr. Sethna, I do hope all is well with you.
The lilies were in my garden earlier this year.
(6.8.1989)
I have two letters of yours - May 10 and August 6, the latter with a fascinating coloured photo of "Lilium regale in Kathleen's garden". Both the letters express your concern about me, the second rather intensely because of my long silence. Piloo Jungalwalla also conveyed by a hurried letter how anxious you had been to be assured that all was well with me. Thank you very much for the worry. It feels good to have a heart in far England remembering one so warmly. Why do I say "far"? England is the one country to which I am deeply attached - to its own depths where Shakespeare has always his ecstasy and agony over the Dark Lady and the Fair Friend, Donne's voice keeps ringing -
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Batter my heart, three-person'd God, till now
You have but knock'd -
and Wordsworth can say about the very stones on the highway, "I saw them feel" and even the jolly Chesterton within earshot of the familiar North Sea washing his beer-swilling island can wander back in legend and write of a Celtic chief:
He heard the noise of a nameless sea
On an undiscovered isle.
Perhaps I am thinking of an England that has passed away, but I cannot help the dream of an inner reality that will persist as long as an idealistic project like Temenos is carried on by a soul whose "evanescent" face has been caught for ever in line and hue by Kishori Kaul.
We met some time ago when she visited me from Auroville with an album of her paintings. Looking at your portrait and feeling the subtle presence it conveyed, I asked a technical question: "Did Kathleen really wear a blue dress or is it your creation in order to match the visionary blue of her eyes?" I was glad to hear that the colour of the dress was her own inspiration. We swapped impressions of you -mine, of course, derived from your letters and your poems. In the course of our talk I happened to mention that I too at one time had the urge to be a painter. She asked me if I would show her anything I had done. I said: "Once I had the idea to make a picture of every poem I wrote - but did not go further than illustrating just two poems. One was about the two birds made famous by the Upanishads - a red agitated bird below on a wide-spreading tree of Nature, eager to eat fruit after fruit but never satisfied, and high above on the topmost bough it could see the other:
Lost in a dream no hunger broke,
This calm bird, aureoled, immense,
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Sat motionless: all fruit it found
Within its own magnificence.
The second picture showed a large expanse of land under a deep grey sky pricked with some stars. Below, a long winding road climbs gradually a hill and reaches its end between two peaks jointly haloed by a full moon. Kishori appreciated the technique as well as the theme. Coming from so gifted an artist, the compliment pleased me very much. The next day she dropped in again and gave me a cassette of your poetry recorded by yourself. Before I could play it, friends snatched it away, promising to return it soon. I am eager to hear you.
On July 15 I had to go to Madras for the extraction of a wisdom-tooth embedded in the gum in the right jaw. The expert dentist took nearly an hour to get it out. The trouble was that its root had stuck to the jaw-bone. So a regular excavation of the bone had to be made. The night was very painful. When the Pondy doctor saw the X-ray picture he was aghast at the bigness of the hole made. He advised I should live on semi-liquid food for two months and talk as little as possible. After a fortnight I threw all caution to the winds and lived naturally. I am none the worse for it. 1 suppose I'll carry the excavation all my life. In terms of sadhana, 1 can now say that at least my right jaw-bone has become hol(e)y.
For the last month or so 1 have been at my typewriter making a long comment on the latest paper (70 printed pages) of the well-known Finnish scholar Asko Parpola. The subject is Indological. It is almost "Finnished" now, perhaps a good match to his own work.
One of these days I must turn to the article you have asked me to write. Much of it is ready but the grand finale has still to be managed. I must invoke Sri Aurobindo's help to get it done soon.
Have you passed my Shakespeare book on to Muriel Bradbrook? Her opinion will be valuable. 1 can understand
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your sympathy with Emilia Lanier. But history is not made on such preferences. I think it was Miss Bradbrook who once wrote that not a shred of evidence exists that Emilia and Shakespeare ever met.
(12.9.1989)
I was so relieved to hear from you - I don't know why I had felt that a somewhat sudden interruption of our lively exchange of letters while I was in Delhi was because something was amiss. It was, of course - I am so sorry about your painful experience with the 'holey' tooth - have you caught the punning habit from Shakespeare? By the same post I received a letter from Kishori Kaul, who had felt much enriched by her visit to Auroville, and had news of you also. She is a lovely, gifted painter and her portrait of the face I had/before the world was made is very much better than the one I have now; though she has, I feel, caught something of the poet I should have been. In the end I realize that I should have followed the guidance of my Daimon and not allowed a thousand things to distract me; even Blake? I can't go so far as that, and what happiness scholarship also has been; but in a hundred years four lines of true poetry will outlast all the hard work editing Temenos and writing books and attending conferences. Don"t you feel the same? The poetic vision whether expressed in verse or in some other art is more enduring than all else. But, again, it sometimes flowers out of the more mundane things. Yet I wonder, I've given too much heed to lesser things, in part because my sense of guilt at pursuing the vocation of the poet has been very great. I did so at the expense of much pain given to others. I doubt whether a woman can or should assume that part at all, the price is too high, to ourselves or to others or both. But perhaps the price of beauty and poetry is always high, Shakespeare suffered and Blake was alone, and Shelley, and Mozart, Milton too. Donne, whom
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you cite? All I fear have paid the price of suffering, or others have. The two worlds obey different laws. But I've just been rereading Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge (I'm giving four seminars on the Duino Elegies) and he sees woman as the custodian of the soul's love, and of the beauty of la dame au Licorne. Something the modern world so greatly lacks, the receptive not the active genius - he would have deplored 'women's lib'. As I do, although I have lived it all too much.
Yes, the England of the Imagination is eternal and no poetry is greater than ours has been. It all seemed to end with the last war - before that war there were Eliot and Yeats and David Jones and Dylan Thomas and Edwin Muir and Vernon Watkins and de la Mare and many fine poets of lesser stature. Now there is no-one; David Gascoyne stands alone. I do my best which is not good enough. Otherwise a celebration by commonplace writers, of the commonplace, for commonplace readers. The commonplace is for those who will not look higher; and that is why I do hope you will be able to finish your paper on the necessity for a hierarchic universe. Materialism and technology level all. Jeremy Reed is gifted but not great: Peter Redgrove forceful but falls short of humanity. After ten years Jeremy is the only poet of truly imaginative quality Temenos has found in this country. Scotland a little better, and John Montague in Ireland, but there too Yeats's words 'We were the last romantics, chose for theme/Traditional sanctity and loveliness' are true enough. I found nothing of that quality in India either and found the many imitations of the worst elements in a decadent English and American poetry with so little to offer very depressing. People here are deaf to the cosmic music, and why need India follow suit just in order to be in the fashion? When you have so much to teach us, and we so great a need to be reminded.
I did send your book to Muriel Bradbrook. She was going to stay with me this weekend but a close friend who lives with her is seriously ill and so I have not been able to ask her about your book. I know she does not believe there ever was
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a 'dark lady'. I think she is wrong, those sonnets are written in blood and anguish, not just a warning to young courtiers. I still think it was Emilia Lanier. But now the fashion is that Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford (isn't it?) so we have to start all over again. It seems to me that people can't believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare because it's almost impossible to believe that any human being could do so. It seems like a stream flowing from the cosmic ground itself of which Shakespeare was but the vehicle. So in a sense no-one wrote Shakespeare. Don't you like my theory? No-one could have written his works, it would have been humanly impossible to know what he knew! I have been deeply moved by the 'India of the Imagination' which the new Indian nation seems to be letting go just as modern England the England of the Imagination. Both are eternal but meanwhile the Reign of Quantity threatens us both. Perhaps that tide will turn. Perhaps it's too late to save this lovely earth. We can't know. Meanwhile our souls are nourished by nature and these great works of the imagination and we sustain one another with our best thoughts.
Piloo Nannavutti's review of your Tyger is now with the printer and will go in the next Temenos, which will be delayed, again, by the time it will take to have plates made of work by Cecil Collins, a wonderful painter - he died in June, when there was a big retrospective exhibition of his work at the Tate. It was like seeing the fields of Paradise disclosed in the heart of London's opening streets.
Muriel Bradbrook is knowledgeable about Shakespeare's England, but a bit unimaginative, you know!
I'm so glad to hear from you once more and that, the tooth apart, all is well.
(1.10.1989)
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