A PERSONAL DOCUMENT
People sometimes ask me: "How do you get poetic inspiration?" Inspiration comes to me in the form of a sudden spark or flame-seed falling into the consciousness. A kind of shock is felt and I know that the soul is pregnant with a poem. The poem may follow after a brief interval or there may be a long period of gestation, but I am absolutely certain of its growth in the subliminal as soon as that subtle shock is experienced. For instance, "Pointers", beginning —
Everything points now
Somewhere, somewhere,
Silverly straining
Through the dusk air —
was the result of my gazing out at the sky through a window one evening. Something unexpectedly touched me from the faint atmosphere, and two ideas sprang up at the same time — "softness" and "piercing through". But I was unable yet to discover definitely what import they might bear. I fumbled a little while, when looking out through another window I spied a long cloud like a white finger through the thin dusk. A sense of completeness in the inner impregnation came to me, and the first draft of the poem was the almost immediate result.
At other times the impulse or rather the impact is got less directly from Nature or life than from books. Thus I came across the French words: "O divine adorable Mere!" They arrested me by their combination of sublimity and sweetness. Very much moved, I tried to become more consciously aware of the feeling — to visualise concretely its implications. I remembered my frequent experience at the feet of the Mother — as if some ecstasy were trickling luminously into
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the heart; so the line at once occurred to me: "And the still heart drinks heaven drop by drop." It is the last line of the poem composed: the rest was a matter of discerning the whole sequence of mental and emotional gestures consummated in that final soul-act.
Often a simile or metaphor or imaginative phrase in some author strikes the mind and becomes a part of one's own peculiar vision, gathering around the skeletonic symmetry borrowed from that author a living flesh of significance quite original and individual to oneself. Several of my poems are born in this way and the debt I owe most for such inspiration is, among English writers, to Francis Thompson. It is a kind of plagiarism which is often practised by poets, even by very great ones, and most legitimately too so long as one either improves the matter adopted or clothes it in a novel hue and harmony. Virgil's quarrying from Homer is well-known, so also are Chaucer's beautiful imitation of the Italians and Milton's recutting the gems he discovered in the splendour of the Classics. Wordsworth's finely intonated
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn
is undoubtedly a reminiscence of Spenser's
Triton blowing loud his wreathed home;
while Keats's
...Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn
is a superb transfiguration of Wordsworth's idea about his "lady of the lake":
Sole-sitting by the shores of old Romance.
A certain similarity of language or imagery between one poet
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and another is an extremely interesting starting-point for a revealing study of their psychological uniquenesses as evinced by the different applications they make of analogous phrases or figures.
Once the glow of inspiration is somehow caught, there is no telling the manner in which a poem may develop. My poems commence almost anywhere; that is, I do not begin at the beginning and reach gradually the close. Stanzas spurt up haphazard: usually I have the ending first and then perhaps the opening or part of the middle. I find myself mostly on the peak of the poetic experience to be embodied and then work down in the reverse way. The whole inspiration is summed up in an intense cumulative moment and afterwards set forth in its broad manifold bearings — a phenomenon perhaps akin to what Mozart meant by saying that he heard his musical pieces not in a succession of notes but all at once as one whole and later arranged them out. This arranging out or setting forth is also frequently done by fits and starts, and the first draft of a poem is bound to show lacunae, gaps not only of epithets or substantives or verbs but also of entire lines and even complete stanzas. The missing links I for one try to supply by raising myself to a tenseness of expressive effort in which I keep humming what precedes and follows the absent words or lines so as to kindle or conjure up the connection between them; or I gather myself into a deep silence and cast a hook, as it were, into the inner spiritual being and wait for the necessary words or lines to get caught and give a pull which immediately enlightens my consciousness with their essential form and substance.
*
I believe that this fragmentary method of inspiration is due to insufficient liaison between the outer transmitting mind and the elemental poetic enthousiasmos. It is not correct to say that "born" poets encounter no difficulties; there is indeed a supreme class of poets who could never have done
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the prodigious amount of fine work which stands to their credit if they had not been gifted with an almost supernatural spontaneity of perfect utterance, but otherwise facility is a dangerous delight. A powerful facility prevented Victor Hugo from seeing that often when he was thrilled by some profound emotion he did not take care to plumb it adequately but just took the surface suggestion and, led on by his mastery over language, manufactured rhetoric instead of poetry. He rose grandly in verbal excitement but without having plunged deep enough in thought and emotion: so there remained even in the midst of his most grandiose flights a not infrequent ring of insincerity: he sounded like a prophet, but a prophet who had not lived up to his own message. One was astonished at his eloquence, but not taken absolute prisoner — sense and soul laid under a spell — as one is again and again by the speeches in Shakespeare. Shelley was a "born" poet, so much so that, after Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, nobody has been productive to such an extent and with such a sustained poetic quality as he, yet it was not because of his facility only that he could be a channel of almost continual inspiration. It was his inspiration that made his facility bear fruit — he wrote easily enough when he fell in love with Harriet Westbrook but no poet of his young age wrote more wretchedly. Nothing before "Alastor" is of any value: one has only to read his ludicrous juvenilia to wonder how so weak and unoriginal a versifier could almost at a leap become a feeder on honey-dew and a drinker of paradisal milk. The fact was that in some way a connection got established between the outer and the inner, the man and the Muse that was the soul of his soul.
How unspeakably important it is for the man who feels the seed of song in him to get the sun and rain that shall awake its giant potentialities may be realised from the instances we know of men possessing wonderful talents yet baulked of that ability to take one step forward which constitutes the salto mortale between verse and poetry. A mind like Pope could have put to magnificent use the
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neatness, clarity, point and speed of his versification if only the true spirit had possessed him. As it was, he wrote rarely anything comparable to those four lines of his which show what we have lost because his talents never caught fire — lines which by their solitary excellence epitomise in what they say the tragedy of the man who wrote them:
Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,
Dull sullen prisoners in the body's cage:
Dim lamps of life, that burn a length of years
Useless, unseen as lamps in sepulchres.
Speaking about myself, I fear I would have been nearly a lamp in a sepulchre — in spite of my having indulged the itch for poetic composition for a length of years — without the liberating touch of Sri Aurobindo. Ever since boyhood the pen has been to me the ultima Thule of all pleasure and the poetic output of my early teens was prolific but blissfully innocent of the true poetic glow, except perhaps in a chance phrase here and there, and my first notion about metre were most laughably original: I actually used to imagine that if one packed two or more lines, by means of close or spaced, small or large writing, into equal lengths across the page they became metrically uniform! Later I learned to scan and developed a pseudo-Byronic style which gradually grew more individual, yet something of Byron's temperament remained and, in conjunction with an incisive intellectuality, love of the recherche and a passionate complex decadent desire for sense-experience, led me to my first true self-expression in poetry. I say "true" not meaning aesthetically valuable but as showing the promise of something such to come: there was an evolving consciousness of rhythm, image-beauty, structure. However, apart even from technical defects, one element seems at present to me to have definitely flawed much of that early production — an element which has been admired by "modernistic" minds of my own milieu, with the result that the book I published then and half
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regret now is still discussed and praised for its vital frenzy and perverse intellectual zest. Luckily it was under the nom de plume of Maddalo, the name given by Shelley to Byron and hinting in my hands at a kind of Shelleyan idealism gone Byronically topsy-turvy in which Byron's healthy vulgarity became sicklied o'er with the pale cast of a gout d'infini lost in a world of sensations — a fever of the soul, so to speak, striving after a grotesque perfection — idealism expending its power in a twisted intensity of physical passion. No doubt there were a few fine efflorescences in the midst of this strange psycho-analytic mysticism and towards the end of the phase illustrated by the book a catharsis of the sensations was perceptible, an opening of the genuine emotional being, less pathological, less modernistic, more directly inclined towards the spiritual depths. And, though now something verging on sentimentality threatened to use the intellectual energy to shape variously another ingenious idea-pattern of image and word-colour, there was some true liberation into the pure accent of poetry. Still, I cannot be said to have really come into my own, the reason being that my centre of most individual inspiration was not, as I had imagined, in the mind or in the passionate nature, but in something beyond them — an amor Dei not merely intellectual or inclined to see in a rosy haze the common feelings and bodily excitements, but aching for the Spiritual, the Eternal in its unadulterated form, a straight nisus towards deity. The trouble, however, for those whose poetic inspiration must be drawn from beyond the normal mind in order to be perfect and who yet have too active and ingenious an intellect is that, until' the latter is fully illumined with the Spirit's smiling certainties, the inspiration is likely to come in fitful rushes and a lot of shaping has to be done, conscious artistry to be practised — not to cover up and conceal the gaps but patiently to draw out, from within, that part of the poetry which has got suspended somewhere in the subliminal instead of coming through like the rest. A strong faculty of self-criticism has to be acquired, a Flaubertian sense of the only word and the
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unique cadence, lest the pondering consciousness should too easily content itself with rhetoric and ornament in lieu of the inevitable expression. Once acquired, this faculty is a veritable oestrum and the poor poet goes sometimes fretting for days before he sleeps the sleep of the just, the man who has done justice to the divine discontent in him. Dorothy Wordsworth records how William once wore his nerves to shreds trying to find a new revealing epithet for the cuckoo. I can quite understand William's scrupulousness — would he had never learned to wear his readers' nerves to shreds as he did in later life by finding a country parson's tongue in trees and Sunday School sermons in stones! I myself have spent a whole fortnight on tenterhooks for the sake of one noun1 and had to wait for over a year before a certain inspired line brought down in a sudden stream its complete context of an eighteen-lined poem.2 One does not, however, regret these poetic pains: I can never sufficiently thank Sri Aurobindo for his yogic power that put me in touch with the inspiration my real temperament was fumbling towards through blind alleys, but, next to the faultless prolificity for which I aspire, there is nothing I could value more than his critically opening in me an eye to sift in my work the gold from the tinsel glitter that might accompany it, together with his gift to me of a ear that can occasionally catch the "sweet everlasting Voices."
There are, of course, many poems the whole of which are bull's eyes scored at one shot: some of Shelley's have that look and Shakespeare in his best passages must have laid line after mighty line without needing to halt anywhere or amend anything: has he not the reputation of having never blotted a single word? If he really wrote Macbeth in this fashion, that play is surely the most amazing miracle of the human mind, for excepting perhaps a couple of short scenes at the very start, it is one unbroken rush of imaginative grandeur. Lear, that other peak of his genius, has an intenser dramatic
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quality in parts and is vaster in its sweep of occult elemental vision, but the progress of its poetry is not so consistently high as here: if not valleys, it has marked lesser and greater eminences, while the mountain that is Macbeth uplifts, gigantically, an almost straight sky-line. But even Shakespeare is now and then liable to slips which make us wish he had done a little "blotting". Take the lines (from Hamlet):
...When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear...
One doubts if the concluding "bear" is an embellishment, almost repeating as it does the sound of the bodkin's epithet; it may not be easy to substitute this quasi-homophone, but Shakespeare ought to have spurred his super-Pegasus to carry him over the difficulty. Often the impetuosity of a poem or its dazzling richness covers up such peccadilloes, and in blank verse, where the technique is a special one and factors like assonance and consonance have got to help the reader forget the absence of end-rhymes, one cannot as legitimately pick fault with regard to these points as in rhymed poetry, but even there it is possible to overstep the limit. Where rhyme is already playing its part, force and fluency and fertility of imagination become unquestionably more chaste and quintessential in their functions if they are not strained to render little flaws less prominent. All the same, it must be added that one can easily fly from the eddies of irresponsible inspiration to the hard and dry rocks of hyper-critical technique, failing to see the effective use possible in some places of what would be defective in others. Thus, a sound (particularly if stressed) in a line, echoed noticeably by another coming rather close in the next, may be open to objection, as in
Lo then my love — a single-aimed fearless dart!
Shall it not pierce lone-leaping through the void
The dim indifference of Thy God-heart?
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I would regard it as a positive improvement to replace "fearless" by "flinchless"; but when an undeniably poetic suggestion is secured, all theoretical qualms must be thrown to the winds — a suggestion as in the line,
Burns with a benison the murk of time,
where a word like "dark" instead of "murk" would weaken the competent "murk"-combating power the similar sound gives to "burns", while "gloom" would render the rhythm at the close too congestedly labial and sticky: one would have to press the lips together and pause twice without any perceptible interval. Swinburne would have preferred "murk" simply on the ground that it interwove an extra echo-effect with the general rhyme-scheme of the stanza from which the line is taken, and he would have considered the substitution of "fearless" by "flinchless" a serious blunder. Perhaps "fearless" too can be defended, though not as so inevitable a word as "murk"; but to concede without demur the utter lightness of Swinburne's tendency towards extra effects, assonantal, alliterative of rhymal, would be to forget that, even with a great metrist and musician in verse like him, there were occasions when these devices struck an artificial note which his rapid complicated lyricism could not excuse.
I do not share the present-day cult for the frigidly terse, the roughly deliberate, which inveighs against Swinburne's so-called effusiveness, verbal and rhythmic. Keats, too, would seem pompous, romantic, colourfully emotional, and thus open to the charge of effusiveness in the eyes of the extremists of cold and dry light in poetry. My criticism of Swinburne is directed only at his failure sometimes to practise the art which naturalises art and not at his penchant for harmonic recurrences or rich proliferations of word and idea and sentiment. There is in him a rhythmic ecstasy which
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is of the fundamental essence of poetic expression: without that breath of exaltation no poetry is possible and on the wings of it Atalanta in Calydon and Tristram of Lyonesse reach a sheer glory of inspiration nowhere else to be found in Victorian times. Tennyson's art and music are a pale finicky dandyism compared to this masterful exuberance: the older poet surpassed Swinburne in sense of character and in narrative skill, but in the true furor poeticus the younger was with the very few masters of English verse, while Tennyson never fulfilled on a grand scale that subtle yet pungent quality his genius possessed by which he could interpret languid and intricate distempers of the heart against a changing detailed background of sympathetic landscape-colour. This quality he himself was not completely conscious of: else he would not have smothered it under a suave or sentimental superficiality. Anyway, the supreme accent is not often his — such as many pages of Tristram of Lyonesse reveal; much less can we hope for it in the anti-Swinburne school that makes a fetish of neglecting the high enchantment their bete noire seldom lacked. Of course, Swinburne's style is not the sole possible medium for such enchantment: no poet could be more concise, more clear-cut than Dante, but there is also a richness in his restraint, he is a fire on the leash. Whether controlled or expansive, it is a rhythmic intensity of vision that constitutes great verse, a thrilled mating of sense and sound within an austerely beautiful or an ample and luxurious bed of metrical rhythm. Swinburne was mostly for ampleness and luxury — not in the least a fault by itself: when he failed it was not because of his style or temperament but because there happened in him pretty often a curious division between the music and the matter of his inspiration. The former, except when the art remained somehow insufficiently concealed or naturalised, left him very rarely: almost always his song was a bright flux and reflux, "a foam that the sea-winds fret", as he himself put it, but he did not invariably take care that "the thought at its heart should be deep as the sea".
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What happens in the case of many modern poets is nearly the opposite: they have the stuff of poetic experience and even a certain power of language, but the sound and the rhythm that uplift everything, the charm or the nobility of mental and emotional stress in language — these are absent. Instead we perceive either a flat colloquialism or a self-conscious cleverness, the latter defect perhaps more fatally prominent. Even when they are not openly cutting intellectual capers, they seek after a flaring abnormality of form and phrase in order to prove their virtuosity. It is not true that their utterances lack depth; only, the tendency nowadays is to say deep things in a clever way, which can be done in prose provided the writer keeps within due measure, whereas the function of poetry is, if we may hazard an antithesis, to say clever things in a profound way. Poetry aspires to give the talent or genius for getting striking images a noble thought-value, a fine emotional tone, instead of letting it succumb to the temptation of scintillating itself away in mere epigram. Analyse true poetry wherever you find it and you will immediately notice how clever the similes and metaphors are. Take Wordsworth's
It is a beauteous evening calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.
Is it not ingenious of the poet to link up the idea of a nun to that of the departing day? Yet, we are not struck only by the novelty of it: a hush full of rapture falls on us and the tense emotion with which the link is rhythmically forged in his mind goes straight to some inner centre of vision in ourselves. Give a modern poet the same clue and instead of converting the surface brilliance of the analogy into a profound luminosity which has a touch of something ineffable he will perhaps perpetrate a stroke of unexpected double entendre and at least mutilate the noble theme even if in spite of his modern predilections he is still a true poet. I can more
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or less conceive what some Ezra Pound gifted with no negligible force and subtlety would do. Most probably he would resort to a pyrotechnic display of cross-light imagery in treating the fast-fading sacred atmosphere of Wordsworth's sunset:
The evening's red tranquillity Is like a short but beautiful nun Whose silent thoughts are haunted by The bleeding Son!
These hypothetical lines have at least some rhythm and completeness, unlike the fantastic free verse and violent excess of word-vision several contemporary poets are practising — rather poetasters, for Yeats and AE and, at their best, Abercrombie and Masefield are in the great tradition of English poetry. But the lines are spoiled none the less by their too patent intellectuality and striving after flamboyant effect.
In modern poetry, much that is neither frigid nor hectic, that avoids conceit and mental acrobacy no less than being prosaic and undistinguished, is yet outside the pale of inspired rhythmic speech because the modern critical conscience is too easily satisfied. A writer full of promise begins to relax his artist-sinews when he is not asked uncompromisingly for the best and nothing save the best within his power. One remembers how a chorus of unreserved praise crowned Gordon Bottomley as the most astonishing creator of the poetic drama since the seventeenth century. Poor Stephen Phillips with his Paolo and Francesca and Herod seemed quite forgotten; but that did not matter, for it is the nature of enthusiasm to forget rivals and, even if the critics had wanted to be just, Phillips would not have occurred to them, so completely has the "ripple of oblivion" gone over
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his brief incandescence. The important question was: Did Gordon Bottomley deserve the laurels of a true dramatic poet? Without doubt, he displayed the instinct of a dramatist: he could create revealing situations and throw into vivid relief the phantoms of his mind. In that sense he was "poetic" enough — "poet" meaning in Greek a maker of forms; but there is form of dramatic situation and there is form of character and there is form of imaginative word-music. Balzac shares with Shakespeare the vastest power known to Europe of living characterisation and is his superior in plot-weaving: a regular world criss-crossed by remarkable incidents and tense with vital genius he projects out of his multifarious being. But has he Shakespeare's word-music, Shakespeare's miraculous rhythm of metaphorical thought? He fashions here and there a striking sentence like "La gloire est le soleil des morts", but that is all: he does not teem with unforgettable phrase or rhythm. It is true that his medium was different, but Victor Hugo too was a creator in prose, though not so intense in emanation of character as Balzac, and even in prose he had what Shakespeare had in poetry, though naturally there not to such a heart-disturbing degree as Shakespeare — the gift of imaginative music. Passages in his novels, therefore, approximate often to great poetry, while Balzac for all his giant capacity of dramatic fiction is not seldom the despair of both the artisf s and the grammarian's ear. What Hugo lacked here also was enough depth and sincerity — a lack which flawed his poetic vision just as want of word-music left Balzac's creative gusto incomplete. In the case of Gordon Bottomley, there is sufficient creativeness of event and personal nature, and no false "high-faluting" alienates the reader's sympathy. He is sincere and restrained, never unduly raising his tone nor straining after rhetorical flourishes, and his language can be suggestive; but in his caution against rhetoric he clings too much to the conversational rhythm and the merely adequate pitch of language. Verbal surprise and rhythmical spontaneity are not constant in his verse: no lightning leaps out
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from his lines, no celestial thunder rolls through them, with that fine frequency so needful in poetry, in especial when rhyme is absent. Leaving aside pentameter-freaks with which he intersperses his plays, such as the almost unscan-nable
Like an after-thought that deceives nobody,
his average movement and idiom are weak and their weakness is rendered more glaring, as Enid Hamer points out, by sudden bursts of poetic adjectives:
I know not why it is I must be fighting,
For ever fighting, when the slaying of men
Is a more weary and aimless thing to me
Than most men think it... and most women too.
There is a woman here who grieves she loves me,
And she too must be fighting me for ever
With her dim ravenous unsated mind.
This is from King Lear's Wife; possibly the tone is meant to anticipate that of the "foolish fond old man" in Shakespeare, though Lear mad seems to have been inspired, and, when sober, just puerile. But even in Bottomley's best play, Gruach, which is conceived as a prelude to Macbeth, showing what kind of girl Lady Macbeth must have been when she first met her husband, and is admirable for its dramatic structure, live characterisation, thrilled atmosphere of forces seen and unseen — even Gruach is not a perfect success as poetic drama. The author is surely a poet: that is revealed in a score of instances — passages of varying lengths: but in between these oases lie considerable deserts not exactly of dull thought, false feeling, inadequate phraseology or technical gaucherie but of rhythmical commonplace and imaginative feebleness. There is a certain haunting presence of imagination throughout the play but it does not focus itself as much as it should nor where foci arc formed does it tingle
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and glow with the necessary intensity, so as to give again and again either a wide-winged eagle-sweep or a light lark-soar of enchantment. Of really marked poetic style — that is, a clean spurt of originality in sound and significance — only three or four moments occur besides the one striking passage sustained on a level where for the first time the poet in Gordon Bottomley may be considered to achieve something of a Shakespearean sovereignty of expression. Gruach, going to the hearth and gathering a handful of wood-ashes, pronounces a curse on the house and the family in which she has been immured:
It shall go down, or like a broken tree
Whiten and crumble to a hollow bone;
The moon shall soften it to a cowering dread,
And shapeless noises shall inhabit it.
(She moves slowly from the hearth to the great door, scattering the ash with a sower's motion as she goes)
I sow and I sow the chaff of the seed of fire:
The waving barren harvest of wilding flame
Shall here spring up, nourished by stormy air.
Come ruin, ruin and grief upon this old
Dwelling of sorrow and my captivity.
My mother died of grief; it is not ill
Her hard unfaithful race should die of grief.
Come, ruin, down upon this greedy life,
Destruction and unseating of the mind;
Woe, be embodied to their unclosing eyes
While brackish tears run down and lodge in their lips,
And all they have flies up in flakes of flame,
To fall as now these ashes.
That is marvellous; and if Gruach had more of this level, it would be a unique performance. Seeing it one might have thought Gordon Bottomley would do what, despite several
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astounding fragments, Beddoes, the only other poet who entered the Elizabethan lists with some real hope of success, failed in because of temperamental defects. Great poetic drama consists not only in an exciting accuracy of plot, in a delicate or powerful portrayal of personality, in subtle or sublime action: it has something in the language superadded to all these — a kind of profound exuberance which is no otiose decoration but a rich overflowing as if the words were made to grow wider and deeper than their own logical connotations and to carry in their combined music a rapturous heat or a vibrating splendour their separate sounds or any other combination could never give. Judged by that standard, Gruach is what a great artist in the making would produce, showing a very developed dramatist but not yet a full-fledged poet. It is a pity Gordon Bottomley did not cultivate a conscious artistry keen enough to make it a prelude to some Macbeth from his own pen!
A conscious artistry careful of every sound and syllable, loading each rift with ore according to Keat's famous advice, is, however, fruitful only when the self-critical mind succeeds in drawing down a new corrective inspiration where the old creative inspiration has left hiatuses. Otherwise a sort of ornate or eloquent labour or else a false simplicity must result — in any case, artifice instead of art. But even inspired verbal technique is just one side of poem-building: though it is true that the highest poetry demands the smallest detail to be a gem, a collection of gems cannot sparkle into a perfect poem. Besides the necessity of fusing idea and emotion in beautiful precise and moving words, there is another desideratum: each poem under composition must be sensitive to that quality so notable in Greek literature of being felt as a whole. Of course a general plan is indispensable, and a satisfying conclusion, too, by way of climax pregnant with a significant resolution of the mood or a clear winding-up as though the energy naturally came to rest, unburdened of all
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its intention. But a certain selective control also has to be practised, by which the work throughout its varicoloured play preserves its essential tone and temper, its basic unity of idea, its original emotive vibration. This control must be ruthless if it is to shape a poem in the proper image of the archetype that from behind the external consciousness, either directly or in response to life's stimulus, presses for manifestation. Not merely the rough and the insipid have to be ruled out: the charming and the effective must also be sacrificed if they do not agree with the peculiar substance and style of a poem: else the creation, no matter how delightful, how august in general, remains yet faulty to the instinct which considers the scheme with an analytic view at the same time that it appreciates the total impression. And when the poem is long and complex in its psychological chiaroscuro so that it is a masterly blending of many mood-phases, each well-nigh a little poem by itself, the same scrupulousness needs to be applied on a large scale: that is to say, not simply the ensemble but every mood-phase must be executed with the same attentive gradation of shades, not one scene should lack its individual perfection as well as its vital propriety in the full plan. Usually a laxity vitiates either the parts or the whole; there is much vividness and skill of detail without a taut constructive technique or the work is done with an eye to cumulative effect at the expense of the minutiae. And it must be repeated that constant poetic value is not sufficient: both in the harmonisation of the masses and in the disposition of qualities within each mass the poet must be coupled with the artist. For example, the first book of Keats's Hyperion as it was originally prepared was magnificent in its total impression, but there was a curious flaw in the picture with which it opened though every line was admirable. Thus, no poet would be ashamed to have written
No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as a young vulture's wing
Would spread upon a field of green-ear'd corn,
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so clever and delicately suggestive of its meaning was the indirect allusive turn Keats had given to the language in order to keep the manner of the whole passage consistent. Yet in the passage itself the two complete lines from the above seem out of place:
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung above his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went noiseless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips.
The manner and the music are of a piece, an identical type of imaginative method is at work; what is wrong with the lines,
is the sudden change of sight-suggestion by means of that subtle method, the incongruity of shape, colour, association — as though some touch of Titian's rich gaiety crept into a sombre strangeness a la Rembrandt. Figures from a "brave new world" have brought their hues into the mournful mystery and quiet round an old order declining to its grave. What has a young vulture, in the eager force and novelty of its flight through unobstructed space, got to do with the dense sunken shadows framing Saturn's fallen divinity; or the enlivening fresh gleam of an abundant harvest, with the
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primeval foliage that broods over him and his surroundings of chill silence? How can the atmosphere, however tranquil, of a landscape where those natural and bright and vivid entities flourish merge in the grey motionless unfamiliarity evoked by Keats in all the other lines? There is no poetic failure, only a failure in consistency, a lapse of the dominant motive; and Keats, artist to the marrow, was troubled by the discrepancy. So, before sending his manuscript to the press, he tried to improve the lines: the young vulture he spirited away, also the glaring colour and life introduced by the green-eared corn, and re-wrote:
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not at all the dandelion's fleece.
The first line fitted in flawlessly, the word "summer" suggesting calm and, though implicative of sun, general enough in its explicit purely seasonal significance not to contrast with Saturn's forest-world in which, even if summer's sun were shining somewhere, the heat and light could be checked by the thick overgrowth. The second still struck a dissonant chord: the dandelion whose gay sound too was a little out of tune in that context was primarily objectionable because its dazzling yellow was again an intrusion from a blithe colourful scene foreign to the mood. The disturbance was not so directly bright as that by an adjective like "green" added to a noun like "corn" redolent with bountiful memories, but an alien intensity was none the less mixed up, for all its indirectness, with the picture. Hence Keats, when the proof-sheets came to him, cast about for the appropriate visual tone, and almost at the last moment found it:
Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass.
A remarkable triumph of artistry! — as precise as the line deleted but without its aura. The picture grew complete,
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shapely, harmonious: "grass", by its neutral association and peculiar dry sound, and "feather'd", by its insistence on shape and texture, distracted the attention from the imaginable freshness or colour of the objects mentioned, saving thus the subdued spell of the passage from being broken. Keats deserves all the praise he has won from critics for these alterations, for he has thereby accomplished an entire manifestation of one of the aesthetic archetypes, the conscientious pursuit of which can alone justify poetic composition.
To allude to the two sides of poem-building as a double quest for an archetype lays one open to the charge of playing the mystagogue. But I really do not know in what other way one can faithfully represent the poetic process. That something abnormal takes place cannot be denied — call it what you will, subliminal upsurge or supraliminal downpour: the point is, the poet during the afflatus is aware of a thrilled idealistic quality in the diverse mood-modulations of that mediative force in him, polishing each detail and shaping the totality, which we call his style. But let it not be misunderstood that style is mere personal idiosyncrasy of expression or that it is primarily a question of verbal distinctness. Style here is not the man as in the Buffonian definition: it is what the man is not but aspires to be — it is that in him which attempts to transmit his intuition of a final, absolute and perfect loveliness hidden in his heart, which his normal exteriorised consciousness is not identified with but is always fascinated by, in spite of all the perversities and weaknesses to which he is subject. Style takes birth when the poet fashions his work according to his feeling of this ineffable deep down in himself, when he makes words respond to the pressure of its delight and accomplish thereby their own suggestive possibilities: it is the way in which his consciousness trembles to the touch of an utter Beauty beyond words.
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For, all that words do is to provide the writer with a stimulus towards establishing a more concentrated contact between his intelligence and his instinct of perfect Beauty and then to reflect that light within him. They are to him as a strange wine with which he gets intoxicated and sees visions. They cast a spell on him, draw him into a waking trance in which he opens wide the gates upon some inner world of flawless archetypal dreams. Dreaming, he gives his medium the mould of his ecstasy, an impress of the manner in which he found contact with a perfection, inviolable and lovely, which smiles in secret behind the fragmentary uglinesses of surface-existence. Of course, one need not believe explicitly in a Jewish or Christian, Hindu or Mohammedan deity in order to be a great poet. One may even, like the earlier Aldous Huxley, consider God just a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach. But some such nameless feeling there always must be before we have poetry: for style, which is the process of poetry, is nothing else save the animation of language by this feeling. Hence the usual distinction of Matter and Manner is, when applied to genuine poetic literature, insufficiently clarifying inasmuch as by Matter is meant the idea and Manner its expression in language. Rather, Matter is the corpus of words with their infinite potentialities on which the poet works — it is his crude material, the quarry which attracts his creative impulse, the indeterminate chaos which lures him to impregnate it with the god in him. And it would be far more profound in connection with true poetic literature to speak not of Matter and Manner but Matter and Spirit. It is indeed Spirit, a transcendent Beauty perceived by the writer, that shapes a piece of poetry, though it may act on different levels in a Francis Thompson and in a Baudelaire. But its presence is unmistakable on whatever plane and in whatever personality it may shimmer through the veil of articulate sound. On a congenial level of manifestation it bursts upon us in the "majestic instancy" of a Hound of Heaven; it is, however, none the less present, irradiating the
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ordinary rhythm of life, in an utterance of such exquisitely decadent despair as
Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres vieux!
The only pity from my point of view is that Baudelaire could not allow the Spirit in him to find tongue in the highest key possible to his consciousness. No poet but is eternally grateful for a magnificent phenomenon like Baudelaire; but one need not on that account be completely satisfied with him: I for one endeavour to catch a glimpse of the supreme noumenon behind Baudelaire. And that is why I am not fundamentally content even if in my own personal output there comes into being many a phrase which, to use Alfred Douglas's powerful figure, could be thrust "like a lean knife between the ribs of Time". It is not merely first-rate poetry I yearn to produce: most gratefully I receive whatever the Gods grant, but it is my constant aspiration to manifest a particular kind of rhythm, a particular soul-vibration — spiritually the highest which I can recognise now that Sri Aurobindo has shown me the path of inwardness. Great verse has a vast variety of word-movement and on the wings of many different styles can one reach the top of Parnassus. Shakespeare's teeming vitality of phrase, Shelley's ethereal rainbow-speech, Yeats's jewelled spontaneities of occult utterance have all the inevitable character which makes for immortal life in human memory: they are each a type of poetic masterhood, but the rhythm I search for is not dominantly there. The expression is flawless, the music unimpeachable, but where is any assured glow of the voice of some supreme consciousness that rolls from the everlasting to the everlasting, the voice not of that multi-coloured passion which filled the spacious Elizabethan days or that haloed subtlety of emotion which is Shelley's inimitable genius or that exquisite sensibility whereby Yeats conjures
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up vistas of a twilight perfection — the voice which for a moment before returning to its home of fathomless awe lingers in a miraculous line like Wordsworth's
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
Notes and References
1. "Alchemy" in line 14 of "Sky-rims"
2. "Pool of Lonelinesses"
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