Inspiration and Effort

POETIC VALUES AND POWERS

(A LETTER)

You have defined the poet as a bringer of joy — and, since the joy of the mystical consciousness is the highest, you arrive at the conclusion that the highest type of poet is the mystical. Your conclusion is valid from a certain standpoint, but not as a judgment on art. Is art to be judged by its explicit nearness to or farness from the mystical realisation? The joy which art brings us is not always explicitly the mystical ananda: it is mostly that ananda in a specific disguise and it is not required to be more: hence our judgments on art have to be within the realm of that disguise. A poet is great not by speaking solely of God in a perfect way: he is great by speaking of anything in a way that is perfect. Nothing except perfection of manner embodying a significant substance constitutes the highest poetry. And this perfection does not depend openly on one's belief in or awareness of God. The mysticality or non-mysticality of the theme makes no difference to the status of a poet as a poet. Shakespeare's

After life's fitful fever he sleeps well

which has no definite spiritual significance is not less high poetry than a mystical phrase like Frederic Myers's

Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee.

Nor is the poetry of either of these lines less high than Sri Aurobindo's

Life that meets the Eternal with close breast,

a line which derives in manner as well as matter from a plane of inspiration beyond the mind — an "overhead plane", to

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use an Aurobindonian label — and comes suffused with a fathomlessness of suggestion and harmony absent in the mystical snatch from Myers, the vigour and wideness of which derive from a mental plane, imaginatively and not abstractly so, yet mental all the same. The manner, the form, of the "overhead" line may be described as directly mystical, while that of the non-"overhead" is indirect in its mysticism. Such a difference counts in a mystical consideration: it does not count in the least in the artistic — and the artistic is all that is of moment when a poet's rank is in question. Neither the theme nor the plane of consciousness from which the perfect manner is born introduces any difference in poetic merit.

Even an atheist can be as high a poet as a mystic if there is active in him an inspired fashioner of perfect form. Of course the ultimate source and support of all poetry is the activity by which the Eternal shapes Himself into the archetypal world of perfect truth-forms that are being evolutionarily manifested here in the world of phenomena. But we need have no conscious acknowledgment of that source and support in order to be poets (though I dare say that for a sustained poetic flight over a lifetime some sense of hidden superhuman presences inspiring us is necessary). Nor will conscious acceptance of God make us poets if the fashioner of perfect form is not somehow active in us. Without that fashioner coming into play, "a mystical idea pouring down from above" will not produce poetry. Unless that fashioner receives and embodies it, no poetry will crystallise. God is joy and art too is joy, but God's joy becomes art's only when that fashioner is the medium. Mystical ideas pour down from above into many people, but all don't write a Rose of God, that poem of Sri Aurobindo's which both of us regard as a ne plus ultra of spiritual incantation. I don't aver that a man who has so far given no sign of being a poet will not blossom into one under the impact of a down-pouring mystical idea: some inmates of Sri Aurobindo's Ashram have become poets almost over-night — but that is because the poet, the artist in

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them has been awakened. Since the Divine, the fashioner of the archetypal world of perfect truth-forms, is Himself a supreme artist, the chances are frequent that an intense impact of a mystical idea will awaken the artist in us — and the chances are increased a hundredfold in our Ashram because of Sri Aurobindo's being a master-artist — but it may so happen that the artist in us does not awaken and only the philosopher does or the man of action: then we have a different type of divine manifestation. The mystical idea by itself is not sufficient for poetry to take birth, though it may bring with it, as you say, emotion and vision and rhythm; the artistic or aesthetic transmitting faculty in us has to be at work, the faculty of fashioning flawless form has to be the medium in us of that idea.

A natural corollary to this is that in our appreciation of poetry the perception of flawless form is essential. Without flawless form, no poetry. By "flawless" I don't mean outward technical perfection alone. I mean an outward technical perfection that is an embodiment of the living thrill of the inward afflatus. Without that living thrill we shall have the mechanism of form instead of the organism. The organic form is the sine qua non of poetry and if we don't respond to it we may get out of poetry a lot of pleasure or profit but not the whole poetic profit or pleasure. I believe your failure to rate properly the organic form is responsible for your statement that a spiritual truth expressed in prose can be as successful as in poetry. Successful in what? In giving the intellect a notion easy for it to hold and turn to practical ends? For such success, prose is as good as poetry, perhaps even better. Not, however, for giving us vivid concrete intimacy with the being of that truth, an enrapturing concrete vision of the body of that truth. Spiritual truths are not abstractions or bare ideas: they are presences and entities, they are faces and forms of the Divine and the intellect can by itself take hold of them as little as it can of human faces and forms, presences and entities. The intellect is a valuable faculty; it is always there, I suppose, in some mode or other in all self-aware experience,

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a human mode on our plane and a divine mode on higher planes, but its function is not successful in giving us the being and the body of anything: it has to join with other faculties, other modes of consciousness. To these modes prose cannot make as successful an appeal as does poetry and for the simple reason that the poetic expression is intenser in rhythm no less than in word; it appeals more keenly than prose to our senses and our imagination, to our heart and our intuitive self: it carries home to us better, therefore, a spiritual truth's stuff of body and stuff of being. Prose succeeds in communicating these stuffs as it approaches more and more the form of poetry. Yet inasmuch as it stops short of the full form it misses the last degree of the intensity with which they can be communicated.

In fact, prose is not meant for that extreme communication, and if it forgets this by interspersing its harmony with a marked poetic element like metre it achieves an objectionable hybrid. Leave aside spiritual truths, even non-spiritual communication in prose is spoiled by the intrusion of metre in a regular poetic way. Dickens is notoriously guilty of metricising his prose when aiming at pathos: sentence after sentence in the description of Little Nell's death is iambic blank verse not cut up in lines, and to the true artist ear the passages are jarring. Ruskin also indulges in the same device now and again: he jars less because his vision is poetic and his words too have a poetic turn. Still, his metricised prose in the midst of genuine prose writing is not very pleasant and seems somewhat cheap, as if he were avoiding the true discipline of prose art. Poetic prose should keep regular marked metre at arm's length: what it should have is a subtle subdued play of certain recurrences of beat, a play even more subtle and subdued than a skilful poet's who desires to eschew a monotonous base. After all, the base in poetry has to assert itself on the whole, in spite of the various modulations: in prose there must be no such assertion, only a general euphony emerging from many bases briefly appearing and changing before their appearance can be distinctly

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noticed. Metre in the strictly poetic sense must be taboo if prose is to be good. A few typically poetic motions of the mind may also be said to be out of place — a certain super-audacity, or super-picturesqueness or super-ornamentation or super-compactness. The spell-binding power of metre lends these motions a naturalness and an easy effectivity which are hard to produce in the looser and more pedestrian pace of prose. Prose, therefore, by its very swabhava is debarred from the highest expressive office — the top note of revelation, spiritual or secular. Its excellence, its integrity, depends on its being true to its swabhava and on its not trying to ape in patches the last and crowning perfections of speech belonging to the swabhava of poetry.

It is because form is bound up with those last and crowning perfections that as sensitive a knowledge as possible of the sound-values and the metrical laws of the tongue in which a poem is written is most helpful. Those values and laws go to constitute a good deal of form. Not to be able to distinguish between the long vowels and the short, or to pronounce correctly the combinations of vowels and consonants, or to know where exactly words are accented is to miss the musical significance of English poetry. I say "significance" on purpose, for sounds and beats have not just a quality of fineness and crudeness, concord and discord. More than through anything else, the thrill of the poetic afflatus is transmitted through the rhythm they combine to build. This rhythm bears both the nature of the emotion behind a burst of poetry and the nature of the plane on which the emotion finds tongue. Each emotion has its own vibration, and this vibration is within a larger vibration which characterises the living stuff of a plane of consciousness. For an example take the compactly emotioned descriptive line about wintry boughs in Shakespeare:

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang,

and put it beside Wordsworth's less compact but equally keen-emotioned description:

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...more desolate, more dreary cold

Than a forsaken bird's-nest filled with snow

'Mid its own bush of leafless eglantine.

They have a kindred heart-thrill which communicates itself to the language, but the language shapes itself on dissimilar planes in them, and the dissimilarity is felt even more in the movement and sonance of the words than in their turn and order. In the Shakespeare it is as if our bowels of pity were exquisitely stirred together with our heart, whereas in the Wordsworth the heart seems to set up with delicate piercingness a mournful tremor in our grey cells. To the one the life-force in us, where sensation throws up thought, directly answers; to the other, the mind-force throws up sensation, gives a direct echo: the emotion finds voice in the two lines on two different planes because the two poets do not draw their inspiration through the same plane. Nor is the emotional vibration within the larger one of the predominant plane the only thrill in rhythm: there is a vibration too of the consciousness-stuff becoming a vision, becoming an idea, becoming an intuition of realities that cannot wholly be caught in idea or vision. To hold and communicate all these thrills with all their deep and far-reaching suggestions, sounds and beats are prime factors in poetry. (I mean English poetry, where beats are concerned; other languages have other metrical determinants.) Poetry, and to a lesser degree all imaginative writing, are wholly appreciated, wholly absorbed, wholly lived with and lived in, when the musical significance is felt side by side with the verbal, the former re-inforcing and filling out the latter.

As we go poetically to higher and higher levels of spiritual consciousness — or rather, as higher and higher levels of spiritual consciousness get expressed in poetry — the musical significance keeps increasing and gets more and more important. The mantra, as the Rig Veda and the Upanishads understand it, is characterised chiefly by the unfathomable hints borne on the rhythm. Alter the rhythm,

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however slightly, and the mantric potency is diluted: the words may remain the same and the alteration of rhythm caused by altering their order may let the sense be also the same, and yet the sheer Godhead will depart because, though the verbal sense is the same, the musical sense is different and has not the suggestion of a profoundly penetrating massive infinity and endlessness. If for instance, that superb line of Dilip Kumar Roy's —

His sentinel love broods o'er the universe.

is slightly rewritten —

Broods o'er the universe His sentinel love,

the meaning is unmodified by the inversion, the poetic quality too is as perfect and yet the two lines do not hold the identical vibrancy of the watchful infolding vastness they connote. I believe the rhythm of the one creates mantric waves in the hidden layers of our consciousness, that of the other somehow falls short of this extreme mystical effect. A mystically-minded reader may not lose the sense of the sheer Godhead despite the rhythm being altered; but then it is he and not the line that supplies the sense. People have drawn that sense from the most unlikely poetic phrases because their own sensitivity to the Eternal could contact a spiritual magnitude looming behind secular symbols and rhythms. Since the magnitude was looming behind instead of emerging to the front, it would be wrong to trace their experience directly to the quality of the phrases. Judged in themselves, the phrases could not be credited with mantric might.

To feel the mantric might we must allow the rhythm to get realised by us and this is most satisfactorily done when poetry is read aloud. If we do not read aloud we are prone to pay attention to the verbal sense rather than the musical. Audible reading presses the latter into us more easily; by keeping the outer ear engaged we stop the sound-values

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from escaping — a concrete holding of them is accomplished by the air-undulations we start. Our sensational being is put in action, our very body commences to respond, the nerves grow attentive, the heart follows the rise and fall of the air-undulations, the blood begins singing the poem within our veins. All this stirs the mind that is using the body as its medium and that has become by too much identification with it dependent on bodily means for getting impressed and influenced. I am convinced that if a poem is never read aloud it will not yield its finest magic. Only by repeated audible reading the subtle overtones and undertones spring to life within us. But I do not imply that a poem is always to be read aloud. Once we have gathered its "soul of secret sound" there is no need to hear it each time with the outer ear. In fact, for turning a poem into a meditation we should slowly dispense with the outer ear's ministry. But we must not jump into an utterly soundless commerce with the poem: though not employing that ear we should still hear the sounds, an inner ear giving us service and bearing to us the full rhythmico-metrical significance. With mouth closed we should yet carry on articulation: the eye, or the visual memory when the book is not with us, must be accompanied by the ear in a subtle form: the auditory phenomenon, however inner, must be there. So the distinction between loud reading and silent is not radical: it boils down really to articulating sounds in an outward way or an inward. The inward way may be the goal of effective reading, especially for purposes of meditation, but the outward has to precede it sufficiently and make the inward seizing of the "soul of secret sound" possible before that soul can be borne to deeper and deeper levels of our consciousness.

From what you write, I infer that you believe the process of going deeper and deeper in the consciousness ends with a Great Silence which is the ultimate depth. No doubt, there is a Great Silence — all mystics testify to it. Yet I wonder if in the integral Divine any Great Silence drowns and annuls all speech. A divine silence incompatible with even divine

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speech strikes me as a partial experience — an experience due to our inability to reconcile or hold together seeming opposites of the divine Existence. The Personal and the Impersonal, the Multiple and the Unitary, the Active and the Passive, the Voiceful and the Silent — these are some of the contraries in which God has been conceived and realised — and the tendency is to regard the second term of each pair as the more truly Godlike, as having more of the essence of the Ultimate. The cause of this tendency lies in the lagging of our Nature-parts behind our pure self. The self soars up to the Eternal, but our nature of mind, life and matter remains untransformed. As long as no key to their absolute transformation is found, it is logical to conclude that they labour under a basic undivinity and hence must be finally dropped and escaped from: one step further is to look on them as some incomprehensible illusion that has got attached to the sheer self: all that is personal, multiple, active and voiceful is deemed of less and less worth — secondary, subsidiary, superfluous, phantasmal. Sri Aurobindo, however, has found the key of Nature's transformation: past masters had sometimes dimly glimpsed it and groped for it in a hazy manner, none had clearly seen it and sought for it in the right way and grasped it for good: Sri Aurobindo alone has, and now at last the cry of travailing ages for the plenary Godhead here below and not only there above will be answered: our matter itself will live in the light and the law of the Immortal. Our Nature-parts have their archetypes of truth in a Divine Nature that is inalienable from the Divine Self and, by the descent of that truth without which indeed everything in Nature would be a supportless Maya, our mind and life and body will put on divinity. That is the Aurobindonian revelation. Its bearing on the point we began with is that the final depth of our consciousness is no solitary Great Silence but a Great Silence for ever accompanied with a Great Voice.

Though there is in God a positive ever-present hush which no amount of utterance will abrogate, He is no annulment of all utterance nor is the being of Him such that it

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can never be uttered. He is not exclusively a hush and His being is beyond utterance in only this respect that no speech falling short of the Voicefulness proper to the plane of the supreme Divine is entirely adequate to the Existence, Consciousness, Beatitude and Archetypal Creativity of that plane. In brief, God cannot be truly spoken except by God Himself! To fasten on God an incapacity to utter Himself would be to cast a slur on His Godhead. It is speech taking shape on the level of the human consciousness or even on any-level below the highest divine, that to a more or less extent may be said to "come a cropper". On the highest divine level an everlasting Song that is God goes on simultaneous with God the everlasting Quiet. No inadequacy to capture the very secrets of the Eternal in language mars that interminable Harmony.

Can poetry give us this celestial music? The ancient Indian rishis held that it could, and it is precisely the type of poetry possessing the power to do so that they termed the Mantra. The Mantra, they said, is not anything born of the human consciousness or, rather, anything garbed in the shape and colour of the consciousness that is human. The values and figures of it come from the divine Consciousness straight and sheer: the life-throb and rhythm of it spring from the very heart of the Eternal and the Infinite. It is the direct epiphany in words, the sovereign scripture. Apart from the fact that God's song-aspect is not the one and only He has, there is no Unutterable for it in the essential sense: the sole sense in which it faces the Unutterable is in relation to us, for we can derive in our poetry not His whole Harmony at once but snatches and portions and masses of it. The conditions of the time-state under which alone we are obliged to manifest His Song and Harmony preclude the endless totum simul, the boundless Totality all in an ensemble and in one miraculous illimitable Now. Inasmuch as the totum simul is beyond poetry as we know it, even the Mantra as manifested by us labours always under an impotence and is dogged by the Unutterable. But in itself it is "the Word that was in the

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Beginning," the Logos, the Shabda-Brahman, and when it manifests under our time-conditions it still brings us in essence the flame-tongue of the original Fire that, in the Upanishadic phrase, has gone forth everywhere and become all things.

In view of the Mantra's divine nature I am inclined to make a few remarks as to how exactly your beautiful statement about poetry's shortcoming as well as service should be interpreted. You write apropos of spiritual art of the Aurobindonian character: "the inner journey that one makes with the poet acting as the charioteer becomes a pilgrimage to the spaces beyond in the mystical wideness, but the poet stops at a point and, as if with a finger, points out something far away and seems to say, 'Now the rest of the journey has to be made all alone. The chariot will not go any further. I have been there and I have tried to tell you what it is all about. You have to develop your own wings to reach the foot of the Himalaya of the Unknown.' " What happens has been finely and correctly described here — it is true that we have to pass beyond poetry, acknowledging its high aid, yet also recognising its insufficiency for us. Personal sadhana, personal Yoga is needed — a profound meditative passage to the in-world and the over-world, a passage of stillness in which poetry is left behind. Yes, we have to still everything that we know in our ordinary waking life, the to-and-fro of the consciousness has to end. One-pointed, we have to shoot ourselves into the Eternal as into a target — arrows of silence speeding to the Unseen. But two queries arise: first, have -we to do this because the Unseen is the opposite of all speech? and second, is our procedure due to the defect of poetry or to our inability to get from poetry its full substance of heavenward help? Without depreciating the need of silencing our ordinary consciousness and leaving poetry behind, we can affirm that the Unseen is not incompatible with every kind of speech: it is speech that is not mantric that has to be abandoned as helpless after a particular stage. Even mantric utterance has to be abandoned — but that is because we

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cannot get out of it what is really inside it. Do not blame the Mantra for this. The blame should fall on us, obscured mortals, who cannot get God-realisation even through God's own word. The Mantra is indeed God's own word, a wide door opened into His magnificence" and His mystery. That door is the Divine Himself, in one aspect, drawing us. And if we were apt to mystical experience, we would fuse with the Divine as soon as the Mantra swept across our being. Mantric poetry chariots us only to a certain distance not because poetry cannot carry us right into the Divine but because we are incapable of being charioted by it to the very end. Lack of direct power can be charged to poetry if shape and colour have been given it by the poet on a human level. A varying approximately direct power can be attributed to poetry that is above that level yet still below the sheer divine plane — a power not enough to take us to the grand goal though it may make us neighbour it. But how can we accuse the Mantra of any defect? The inspiration of lines like Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God in which the mantric breath plays all over in different degrees fails by our defect, and not by any fault of its own, to lift us clean across the boundaries of Beatitude: its chariot is not compelled by any internal limitation of power to roll up to a certain mark and there stand still: if no rolling further is possible it can change its luminous locomotion and fly instead of rolling: it has wings as well as wheels and on its pinions it can bear us, if only we let it, to "the foot of the Himalaya of the Unknown" — nay, even to the crest of the Sacred Mountain!

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