Inspiration and Effort

A POET, A POEM AND A COMMENTATOR

A LETTER

My delay in acknowledging and estimating your commentary on my poem, A Poet's Stammer,¹ must have led you to think: "How cold and ungrateful are poets — they don't care how much labour critics spend on appreciating them." But that would be a mistake.

Poetry is not everybody's pet and the poet knowing how much "life's clamour" tends to drown his small silvery voice is hardly likely to miss valuing the few leaps he finds of the reader-heart to his tune. If there is any neglect by him, it is due to other causes than coldness and ingratitude. Often the work he turns out is so intensely dedicated to what Graves calls the "White Goddess" (none other than Homer's "Thea" and Milton's "Heavenly Muse") that he feels nothing more is necessary to be done about it. Praise or blame seems irrelevant. At times even publication appears to be pointless. All that the poem, if it is really good, requires or demands after it has been offered at the inner altar is — another poem

¹ My dream is spoken

As if by sound

Were tremulously broken

some vow profound.

A timeless hush

Draws ever back

The winging music-rush

Upon thought's track.

Though syllables sweep

Like golden birds

Far lonelihoods of sleep

Dwindle my words.-

Beyond life's clamour

A mystery mars

 Speech-light to a myriad stammer

Of flickering stars.

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equally good! For the White Goddess is Infinity calling. She is the endless Creatrix and from each creature of hers she asks also endless creation. Or else the sequel she desires for every living poem is the poet's living out of its perfection. And this may mean either an attempt by the poet to draw himself inward into a silence where the fragments of his fallen nature get composed into "one entire and perfect chrysolite" — or an endeavour on his part to go beyond great words into great actions where all his limbs work to compose patterns of a dynamic truth that is a silent beauty, rather than the poet's significant forms, his patterns of an eloquent beauty that is a static truth.

To come down a little from this somewhat rarefied plane of Art's semi-mystic philosophy, I may add that frequently the seeming coldness and ingratitude are due simply to the fact that the poor poet was up to his ears in the irresistible tides of an enormous urgent undertaking that had nothing to do with mysticism or philosophy, even if it still had something to do with Art though not without a mixture of the service to God with service to Mammon.

I am afraid I am still writing with the Mantle on. Let me quite come out of it and "talk turkey", as they say in the States. For the last month or so I have been at my typewriter for nearly eight hours every day. I'll briefly tell you why. The firm of MacGibbon & Kee and of Panther Books had announced a prize of £3000 for the best book submitted of any kind before 31st March. I thought: "Why not have a go with my most recent work?" A perfect copy had to be prepared in a race against time. So I set about the race and now at last it is over. I have tried to do my best, but the Gibbon and the Panther in the names of the firms concerned are none too happily suggestive to a lifelong lover of Plato. Plato long ago spoke of the difficulty of dealing with the ape and the tiger in man. But let me not be led away by a poet's sensitivity to sound. An Aurobindonian poet should be mystic but not pessimistic.

This brings me round very naturally to your "explication"

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of A Poet's Stammer. Your first two pages are unexceptionable. When we come to the third I find your point about "urge to communicate" a little difficult to accept. You say: "The urge to communicate is so powerful that the pattern of the dream is threatening to break ('tremulous' having the suggestion of shaking and being shaken). The temptation to speak (when one has taken the vow of silence) is irresistible." I smiled when I read the last sentence. No doubt, every poet has something of the feminine in him but surely not so much as to make him incapable of containing a secret and to render the forbidden fruit the most tempting for him? The poet is not impelled to speak just because he has taken a vow to the contrary. Rather, when he is impelled to speak, it is as if he were breaking a sacred silence to which his soul is pledged. The impulsion does not threaten to break the pattern of the dream; perhaps the reverse would be the true thing to say. The pattern of the dream has the power to break the impulsion — it constantly works to absorb the poet's inner consciousness and that is why he feels a "tension" in the act of speech and the breaking of some vow to remain plunged in the profundities of the Beyond. The tremulousness is not in the dream-pattern as the result of the poet's urge to communicate: it is in the poet's own communicating movement as an effect of the pull which that pattern has on him. This word prepares the final metaphor of the "flickering stars". In fact all the stanzas prepare it in one way or another. What "tremulously" does here is done in the second stanza by "draws ever back" and in the third by "dwindles". And there is a concrete reason for it. But before I give the reason let me make a remark on the puzzling "dwindles".

At present this verb is used in the intransitive. But I am reviving an old transitive form of the late seventeenth century, a form which is more rare than obsolete: it means "to cause to shrink, to make less, or to bring low". The first and second senses apply here.

To return to my point. In the days when this poem was written, inspiration used to come mostly with the last lines of

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a poem flashing first into mind. A poem would be felt as pressing for birth when suddenly, while reading or looking at things or reflecting or aspiring, a small shock would be felt in the core of the being (which would be something midway between mind and heart). It was like a shining seed, a packed pulsation, an intuitive thrill, without yet any clear knowledge of what had been intuited. As soon I had this experience I was sure that a poem was on the way. But what would emerge first was the climax of the thing that was piercing through the inner into the outer. The culminating revelation would crystallise and the job then would be to trace the process leading to the crystallisation. To put it another way: I would find myself standing on the peak of the poetic moment and I had to discover the way by which I got there without my knowing how. And the success of the writing lay in disclosing correctly the process and the passage. It was as if the whole poem had already been waiting behind, showing me its grand finale of a tail or, if one likes, its ultimate crown of a head. As in a super-detective story, my job was: "find the body." It could very well happen that a poet would tag on to the part in his hand a body not quite belonging to it. The work might be compared to a modern palaeontologist's, the reconstruction of a prehistoric animal from one bone-fossil. Or one may think of the Latin saying: Ex pede Herculem — "From a foot, Hercules". Anyway, with a hushed inner receptivity I would try to get slowly the entire poem whose crest or conclusion I had chanced upon. Here also there would not always be a proper order of emergence. Not always did the first stanza spring out first. Even middle portions would appear. And I had finally to recognise what should stand where. A Poet's Stammer was born in this fashion — the two ending lines forming the actual historical beginning. I suppose such paradoxes are to be expected when it is Mystery that becomes History.

Another feature of my poetry in the old days was that a certain basic image would be variously worked out — facet

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after facet but in spite of different reflections the same central vision. Here "a myriad stammer/Of flickering stars" is the heart of the imaginative insight. And everything preceding this expression would in diverse modes and manners anticipate it so that when it did come it would bring the sense of a flaming all-fusing fulfilment, the white inevitable seal in which all the visionary colours would come to rest.

Perhaps this feature of the inspiration is what determined the hysteron-vroteron fashion in which the poem took birth. The central image broke forth at the end of the poem and gave the clue to the remainder of the piece to be drawn out. It set the poetic consciousness along a certain track, it provided a guiding light by which I might be prevented from drifting along false paths of seeing and feeling. Here I had to ask myself whether the new stanzas answered in their vision to the fundamental flickering-stars image — an image in which there was the sense at the same time of a far light, a tiny light, a tremulous light, a vast scatter of such lights against an infinite background of fathomless secrecy. If you keep this image steadily in your mind you will find a key to the whole creative movement of the poem's symbolism, thought-scheme and sound-design.

Yes, even the sound-design. For the peculiar stanza form adopted is also expressive of the basic vision. And this brings me to your question: "I shall be happy if you can explain to me the significance of the inversion in the first stanza."

There are several points here to be marked. The inversion makes for suspense and a final focus on "Some vow profound" which in the inner imaginative experience serves to balance the speaking of the words and to explain why this speaking should be such as it is pictured in the poem. The inversion also induces a feel of the breaking that is mentioned: the regular order of the phrases would not correspond to the shape of the significance, the posture of the meaning, the gesture of the semantic action. Again, the natural non-inverted sequence of the language —

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My words are spoken

As if some vow profound

Were tremulously broken

By sound —

would make the second line a trimeter and the fourth a unimeter in contradiction of the metrical lengths disposed in the rest of the poem's stanzas, and create an initial dissonance in the spelled harmony intended. It would thus spoil something of the mysterious atmosphere and suggestion which are the true life of this kind of utterance from what Sri Aurobindo calls "intuitive mind". There would, further, be a marring of the musical mysticism which lies in the stanza-structure. For, two trimeter lines — the second and the third — would stand together and make a somewhat heavy mass and not be so effective rhythmically as the present form in which there is a pattern of jet-jet-gush-jet, a sort of subtly stammering movement.

As for the symbolism and the thought-scheme, you must have now got an answer to your query. The golden birds (with vibrant wings) prefigure the star-image, while themselves symbolising truth-gleams, song-awakening, ethereal elevation. The speech-light is of course the manifesting power, but this power gets worked upon by the tremendous Ineffable of ultimate Reality and what gets manifested is not the full infinity of this Divine Darkness but a boundless wealth of intense pin-points, between which the mute Mystery still holds sway. The speech-light is at once let loose and held back: hence the dwindling of the revelatory words. The lonelihoods of sleep are the depths of God-trance which are behind all creation. The true poet is, as it were, in touch with them in the profundities of his being and is constantly being pulled into them in the very act of expressing their locked light, their truth-secrets. The visual correlate of these lonelihoods is, as I have already hinted earlier, the night-sky.

Your whole last page of interpretation is original. I had no conscious notion of all this series you set up: (1) sound, (2)

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winging music-rush, (3) syllables sweeping, (4) words, (5) flickering stars. Your exposition here is ingenious but brings out, I think, some genuine complexity of implication. It is a fine piece of reading between the lines or, more appropriately, behind the scenes.

The third page is, on the whole, weak. If you pep it up with more of the pasyanti vak of which you speak, you will have a well-knit texture of interpretation.

P.S. Soon after writing this letter I fell to turning the pages of Literary Criticism in America, edited with an Introduction by Albert D. Van Nostrand. Opening in the midst of Emerson's essay on the Poet I struck on the following passage which has an interesting general relation both to what I have said and to what you have.

"Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity..." (p. 72)

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