A READER'S CRITICISM OF A POEM AND
THE POET'S REJOINDER
LOVE AND DEATH
We sign mortality in our marriage-beds.
Brief bliss alone cries out for the unborn child
To carry a little farther man's flickering heart;
That kiss of creation proves death's seal on our life.
Immortals need no mating: dawns to come
Laugh ever already in their sun-stream blood.
They strive to sow the future with no sparks
From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh.
O soul, clasp not in love the body's doom.
Let love be largeness never called to leap
Breathless for kindling from two death-bound halves —
Man that must perish, woman that must fall —
An impossible unfading hermaphrodite.
Lain under vast-hung mystery at night,
Make the heart's throb count, star by lonely star,
The myriad moments of one breakless peace —
Void whose infinity nowhere needs to run
To keep the whole cosmos a-glimmer within.
Moved by that huge hush as by one beloved
Whose secret will is a brightness in your pulse,
You shall be free of the grave's gape in each kiss
And of the future's fret in your small veins....
If all life's slaves to the hunger-that-is-death
Found this enraptured endless liberty,
The flesh, now strained to a breath beyond its own,
Would draw from deeps where the Perfect lives
all dreams
A dense divinity no time-strokes cleave.
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A Reader's Criticism
Dear Mr. Sethna,
I read your poem "Love and Death" in the Mother India of December 5, 1969. Your first line, "We sign mortality in our marriage-beds" has a fribbling intervention of mind. Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with. 'Mating' itself takes lines unknown which are more interesting than becoming 'immortal'.
The writhing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, "From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh", takes us to the body's doom which is a self-inflicted doom. There is inevitable defeat in using the word 'hermaphrodite'.
My God, why do you find 'the grave's gape in each kiss'? Does it not lose the sensational potency of a poet? One may have hunger for a woman or for a pound of apricots. I feel that you have pitched all your wits against 'flesh'.
The Poet's Rejoinder
Dear Professor X,
Thank you for your letter about my poem. I suppose you expect me to comment on your criticism.
Well, as Gertrude Stein would have said — or perhaps has said — "A poem is a poem is a poem..." You are a Professor of English, not of Philosophy or Erotics. So why not give primarily an aesthetic response to my lines? I don't see — except in one place — that you have considered them as poetry at all. And in this one place I am afraid you have caught the rhythm wrongly. You speak of "the writhing movement of 'f'-sounds in the eighth line, 'From a fast-failing fire of fearful flesh'." What you have mistaken for writhing is really the trembling, quivering, flickering movement that is natural to an 'f'-alliteration, as in Shakespeare's
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After life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Shakespeare has a twofold rhythm — with sibilants accompanying the fricatives — because he wants to suggest not only the "evermore unrest" (as one of his Sonnets has it) of life but also the soothing end of it like a perpetual falling into slumber by a fever-ridden patient. I have kept up the restlessness all through in order to suggest life's process of brief burning and the fear within it that vitality might soon vanish, leaving no trace behind of the body's passionate existence. No doubt, life has other aspects than this, but I am not concerned with all of them: I am concerned with one, and the relevant question from the literary point of view is whether I have expressed it successfully. You don't raise this question. And nothing of the poem's aesthetic gesture and posture has gone home to you. Is it a good poem or not? Has it felicity of word and rhythm, intensity of vision, force of style, the ultimate quality of being felt as a whole? I should expect you to ponder this issue before discussing the "philosophy" of the verses or the element of erotic truth in the imaginative picture.
Let me come now to your quarrel with my attitude and message. You refer to "a fribbling intervention of mind" in my opening sentence:
"Intervention of mind" I admit — in the sense that here is poetry of thought probing the problem of love. Thought surely is legitimate in poetry provided it is not abstract but moves with an intuitive edge. I do not plead guilty to "fribbling". I should say I am doing the very opposite of being frivolous: I am taking the phenomenon of love more seriously than people usually do. I am trying to understand why there is in us the urge to mate, and I say that it is because we are incomplete beings — incomplete both inwardly and outwardly — and one of the marks of our
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incompleteness is our little span of life, our mortality. To escape this sense of a life ending too soon and putting a finis to our hopes and dreams and aspirations, we move towards procreation, a continuance of our beings in the form of our children, a multiplication of our selves beyond the death of the body, a vicarious immortality. And in the act of reproduction there is also a drive of idealism: we have the vague prayer within us that our children may be wonderful — paragons of beauty, vessels of light, embodiments of happiness. The completion we ourselves lack is instinctively sought for in what we create: this is the point of the word "hermaphrodite" which I have used: it symbolises the wholeness that is not ours, the consummation of the frag-mentariness which pushes us towards a counterpart. And I have qualified the word with the epithets: "impossible" and "unfading". The latter implies the overcoming of the death dogging us; the former has the double sense of an ideal perfection and an unrealisable ideal. We fail here: our children prove to be like us — both fragmentary and mortal. Every time we make the vain attempt in our marriage-beds to pass beyond these hallmarks of our existence we confirm them. If we wish to achieve plenitude and perpetuity of being, we must search for their secret in another way.
Much of this import you seem to have missed. You mention "a self-inflicted doom" and accuse me of using words so as to involve "inevitable defeat". But the doom and defeat are in the nature of things. Against that fact you have only the peeved protest: " 'Mating' itself takes lines .unknown which are more interesting than becoming immortal." Nobody denies other lines; but my pointers are no mere trifling. And I may add that you are off the mark when you exclaim: "My God, why do you find 'the grave's gape in each kiss'? Does it not lose the sensational potency of a poet?" I grant that a poet must have "sensational potency". But it would be illegitimate to confine it to the enjoyment of kisses or, as you say afterwards, having "hunger for a woman or for a pound of apricots". No doubt, Shakespeare
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showed "sensational potency" in the exquisite intensity of love he portrayed in Romeo and Juliet and the tremendous immensity of passion he depicted in Antony and Cleopatra. Striking indeed is the "sensational potency" of the lines:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear,
or
Age cannot wither her nor custom stale
Her infinite variety,
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven.
Yet is there a poverty of "sensational potency" when Romeo himself agonises in the vault?
And here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh,
or when Cleopatra adjures the asp:
Come, mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie: poor venomous fool,
Be angry, and despatch.
Not life but death is desired in these two passages: the foiled vital current turns awry and abandons the world of the
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senses. Again, there is disgust with that world in Hamlet's
cry —
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!...
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
or in the Prince's recoil —
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeyed and making love
Over the nasty sty...
Would you say that "sensational potency" is absent in these outbursts which hardly celebrate the earth as a bed of roses or appreciate the pleasures of the marriage-bed? Macbeth too is surely not lacking in "sensational potency" with such words as:
I have lived long enough: my way of life
Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf:
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but in their stead,
Curses, not loud, but deep, mouth-honour, breath...
or — leading on to a line already quoted —
Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy. Duncan is in his grave;
Lear also comes with splendid poetry, though his bowels
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have turned against life and love. He shouts to the storm on the heath —
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once That make ungrateful men! —
and he castigates women and their passions —
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above;
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends':
There's hell, there's darkness, there is the
sulphurous pit...
Then take Shakespeare of the Sonnets. Has he forfeited "sensational potency" by penning the passages:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action,
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth that disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please,
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay,
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge?
Is this thy body's end?
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To cut a long story short: "sensational potency" for a poet does not lie solely in exalting the sexual desire, praising life and love, pleading the cause of flesh. It can be just as manifest, just as dynamic, just as magnificent in the exact reverse of all these turns. A poet remains a poet, and retains all his "sensational potency", as long as he charges his language with seeing and feeling, as long as his speech is of things proved upon his pulses. If you can show that my poem is not vivid, vision-packed, impassioned in its call beyond physical passion, then I shall admit that I have lost my poetic spirit.
Most probably you will here argue: "Is there not a contradiction in terms when a man talks of sensationally denying the life of the senses? If a poet is a poet only by speaking in the language of sensation, then surely the life of the senses must be understood as being of paramount importance for him. He is going against his own grain by refusing that greatest of sensations: making love to a woman."
There are a number of non-sequiturs in the argument. First of all, about the problem we can say from the practical standpoint what was said when Stephenson's steam-engine was put on trial before sceptical theoreticians of science: solvitur ambulando, "it is solved by the moving". In other words, the problem here is solved by the very fact that superb poetry has been made down the ages and can still be made for all that may run counter to what you consider of paramount importance for the poet. Secondly, making love to a woman is not of the essence of the sense-life: it is just one mode of it: there are various other modes like Wordsworth's animistic and pantheistic Nature-love, Keats's happy self-identification with every kind of natural energy and form, Rupert Brooke's intimate response of joy to the touch of objects, the craftsman's-love of moulding matter, etc. Thirdly, the senses are not, in their origin, merely physical powers: the life of the Spirit is a life of inner vision, inner contact, inner fusion — it is a life of concrete experience of the Divine
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and of marvellous universes beyond the physical, it is a life in which the Infinite and Eternal are no abstractions but the uttermost Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, the Heavens, the Platonic World of Archetypal Forms, the Supreme Beauty, the Inexhaustible Love. All that we know of the sense-life in the physical universe, including enjoyment of woman and union with her, is a pale shadow of the sensuousness of the Spirit. The shadow, however, has a value and can be used and may be used both for life and poetry. What its origin permits is that it can be used easily and splendidly for an expression of spirituality. If some part of it is found obstructive to the spiritual trend, it can be avoided without the other parts needing to be sacrificed. Even in the doubtful part, there can be a Spirit-helpful aspect which may be sifted from its opposite and a new "sensational potency" established with the old terms brought into a new relation. A man and a woman can be close friends, with a pure passion between them — and that would be a "sensational potency" too, but clear of sex, clear of ordinary excitement.
If you like to believe that, merely because I have seen and expressed the tragic frustration of life behind the ecstasy human beings prize so much and because I look for a greater and intenser fulfilment of our embodied existence, I have pitched all my wits against flesh, you are welcome to do so. But to my mind you will have only shut your eyes to the deeper truths of the divine adventure of the Word made flesh. I have argued that poetry even in a non-vitalistic vein can be fully poetic if the non-vitalism itself has been imaginatively and emotionally experienced and uttered. But, of course, if one lives too ascetically and turns away from
Life that is deep and wonder-vast,
or fails to feel that
The world is charged with the grandeur of God,
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and no cry rises in one like
Glory be to God for dappled things —
well, then one may be said to have pitched one's wits against flesh. Very few poets, however non-vitalistic, have lost their keen response to the world's beauty. And a mystic poet of the Aurobindonian Yoga will never do so. It seems to me absurd to contend that by passing beyond the sexual urge one ceases to be thrilled by the colour and shape and pattern of things. Even the beauty of a woman's face and form can thrill one without one's getting into a fever to mate with her or to treat her like a pound of apricots.
Here I may note your fling at me: "Marriage is a flame which must have lighted you. The poem is rigged up in 'dense divinity' which presumes an ego to feel with." I don't know what precisely you mean by "rigged up". I guess you imply some sort of obsession with or unnatural absorption in being "divinised". And you see the ego rampant there. But all idealism, mystic or otherwise, cannot be branded as obsession and suspected of egoism. To dream of and hope for an ultimate divinisation of the body by some super-Yoga may be like what older generations used to call 'crying for the moon'. But to set one's idealism so high need not be an egoistic movement, nor can we assert, in view of the recent moon-landings, that it is an ache for the unattainable. Your accusation of egoism is too hasty. You hardly know the constant emptying of ego that the Yogic discipline demands. As for the other part of your statement, it is certainly a fact that if my father had not married my mother I would not have been born. I am not a cynical celibate like the one who wanted his own epitaph to be:
I've lived quite glad
Without a dame:
I wish my dad
Had done the same.
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I am thankful that I have come into this world, but before I accept "marriage" as the divinely appointed destiny of man at all times I have to inquire what the ultimate purpose of all this evolution through the millennia of earth's history has been. Marriage — or rather, mating-— has been Nature's means up to now of bringing souls into the world and of continuing the existence of the race, as well as of making men and women feel less fragmentary for the time being. But even if no substitute means is available at present it does not follow that all humans should go in for marriage and mating throughout their lives. If some exceptional seekers of Perfection feel that by entirely avoiding them they can attain a finer and deeper and wider consciousness, beneficial to themselves and to others, they are quite justified in cutting them out. The race will not come to an end by their brahmacharya. Thousands and thousands will always be there to propagate their kind. Of course, to preach to the whole world at present to abstain from marriage and mating at all periods would be an anti-life movement. But to tell the whole world that at some time or other, before all life-powers fail, a person should turn away from his practice so far of procreation and go in for the spiritual experience, the transcendence of desire in a vast Brahmic Consciousness or in a rapturous Bhakti-surrender to the Personal Deity — to tell this is surely nothing anti-life. Rather it is a call to Super-life. Indian Culture has always sent forth this call with its system of the four ashramas. I see a great wisdom there and refuse to shrivel up in shame at your jibe.
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