SRI AUROBINDO'S SAVITRI AND TENNYSONIAN
BLANK VERSE
A LETTER
I was much interested to read the views you have sent me of the two dons — one English, the other Irish — on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. The first of these Academics seems to me rather misguided in his evaluation of the epic's blank verse.
No doubt, he is right in saying that there was plenty of end-stopped blank verse in English before Savitri — but did you actually say that the only type had been the enjambed? Most probably, when you pointed out the "originality" of Sri Aurobindo's metrical form, you had more things in mind than merely its abstention from overflowing. It is a form deliberately adopted and deftly manipulated. Of course, whatever Sri Aurobindo wrote in his later life was not from the actively planning intelligence: it all came to him from "overhead" through the Yogi's silent mind — but the overhead inspiration does assume the modes of the mind and it can produce psychological phenomena which can be differentiated among themselves as those which look instinctively immediate and those which look consciously selective and formative. In his early days Sri Aurobindo had not gathered any body of technical knowledge and it was his keen art-feeling — engendered by his long self-steeping in the greatest and finest poetry of several countries — that was his guide. But later he acquired a mass of technical knowledge, and a critical sense constantly accompanied the dictates of the poetic enthousiasmos; he knew with wide-open eyes, as it were, how the inspiration worked and where it came from and whether it was anywhere distorted in the transmission. Even here, as he has written to me, he did not "think": he saw and felt; but whereas formerly he had just felt he now saw as well, and it is this seeing against a
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background of technical knowledge that constitutes what, in our ordinary language, we may call his deliberate adoption of a form and his deft manipulation of it.
This implies that his end-stopped blank verse was not merely opposed to the overflowing kind by being end-stopped: it had other and deeper motives, wider purposes, higher functions and was even end-stopping itself on account of these factors in a way all its own — all its own both with regard to the single verse-unit and in respect of the various ensembles the verse-units built up (blocks of one line, two lines, three or four or five lines). I question whether the early Elizabethans and the young Shakespeare had any crystallised art-idea when they "practised" a blank verse based on the unit of the single line. They followed a model that had somehow come into vogue and they had not yet realised the full possibilities of the enjambed variety.
Tennyson's revival of "this sort of blank verse" must have had more consciousness behind it, just as in a greater way Milton was conscious of the overflowing sort in his "organ music" and the mature Shakespeare in the large curves of his many-motioned violin, though I may doubt if the Shakespearian "consciousness" was much more than the Life Force of the Late Renaissance complexly kindling up to self-sight within this individual instrument of intense passion and curious imagination. But to compare Tennyson's revival with Sri Aurobindo's and, much more, to compare the practice of Marlowe, Kyd and the young Shakespeare with it is to overlook the very heart of the Aurobindonian art: "an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalida-sian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English", as Sri Aurobindo himself briefly and rather modestly puts it.
I may grant that certain Elizabethan and Tennysonian effects take on a fresh avatar in passages of Savitri, and a critic may legitimately juxtapose some Marlovian "mighty line" with any of Sri Aurobindo's, of which one may feel that here
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The wide world-rhythms wove their stupendous chant,
or a commentator may justly measure the accent of a Tennysonian novelty against some song-thrill of new discovery in Sri Aurobindo,
A bow-twang's hum of young experiment.
But surface-affinities discoverable here and there hardly justify the verdict of your professor friend: "Much of Aurobindo's blank verse seems to me Tennysonian..." It is a superficial verdict — and its character is little improved when the writer brings in what he must be considering a similarity of temper and adds that Sri Aurobindo was affected "also possibly by the Tennysonian blank verse of Sir Edwin Arnold, whose work he certainly knew well".
Mind you, I am not a hundred per cent denigrator of Tennyson the Poet. I set a fairly high value on his "young experiment", but his old performance, which constitutes the bulk of his work, is well hit off by Sri Aurobindo himself apropos of Indians writing blank verse: "Tennyson is a perilous model and can have a weakening and corrupting influence and the 'Princess' and 'Idylls of the King' which seem to have set the tone for Indo-English blank verse are perhaps the worst choice possible for such a role. There is plenty of clever craftsmanship but it is mostly false and superficial and without true strength or inspired movement or poetic force. As for language and substance his influence tends to bring a thin artificial decorative prettiness or pic-turesqueness varied by an elaborate false simplicity and an attempt at a kind of brilliant, sometimes lusciously brilliant sentimental or sententious commonplace." Even the nineteenth-century blank verse of Sri Aurobindo — Urvasie, Love and Death, The Hero and the Nymph (the last-named a translation of a drama of Kalidasa's) — are free from the typical Tennysonese, and it is free not merely by being impetuously enjambed as against Tennyson's mixture of end-stopping
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and overflow. Somewhere in my writings I have put together a passage of Tennyson's and one of Sri Aurobindo's that have some similarity of general theme and pointed out the world of difference in vibrancy, sensitiveness, vision-vitality, art-intensity. Here is Tennyson in the middle of the Enid story:
O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro' the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen...
Now take the following from Love and Death — part of a lover's lament visiting the underworld:
...O miserable race of men,
With violent and passionate souls you come
Foredoomed upon the earth and live brief days
In fear and anguish, snatching at stray beams
Of sunlight, little fragrances of flowers;
Then from your spacious earth in a great horror
Descend into this night, and here too soon
Must expiate your few inadequate joys.
O bargain hard! Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here...
Sri Aurobindo appears to make a Tennysonian take-off but immediately he soars up into an intoxicating ozone and his touch-down is still with "trailing clouds of glory". Mark too the dissimilarity of the sheer form, the verse-body that goes soaring. Tennyson is loosely articulated, with a generic shape, so to speak, rather than a specific one: only one line (the sixth) has some originality of contour —
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Groping,/how man/y, until/we pass/and reach —
but it is a newness languidly achieved. Sri Aurobindo disposes his beats with a constant vivacity of variation, and the very motion of mind and mood becomes a face and figure of beauty ("Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes", to remember a Byronic snatch). Particularly the last five lines and a half have that organic out-thrust and "a terrible beauty is born". They modulate themselves on a most creative in-stress. But the moulded energy is multi-toned, rhythmed "in inward time", in the earlier lines as well, though with less passion and more poignancy.
The usual tendency of commentators — at least in India — is to bracket Savitri's blank verse with that of Paradise Lost. So far as quality is concerned, this is not such an off-the-centre remark, yet it still bespeaks an obtuseness, a non-particularity of the aesthetic sensorium in the matter of turn, rhythm-curve, line-structure. The significant difference between the Miltonic and the Aurobindonian, in spite of a general common impression of elevated tone and massive dynamism, I have set forth in some detail in the course of a number of Notes published some years back. But I suppose that to an English scholar the opposition between the repeated enjambment of Paradise Lost and the predominant end-stopping of Savitri is too insistent to be ignored and hence is inhibitive of a glib comparison of Milton with Sri Aurobindo. That, however, is no reason why Tennyson's end-stopping in a good part of his verse should push one into the equal and perhaps worse glibness of Tennysonifyihg an afflatus so remote as is Sri Aurobindo's from that of The Princess and The Idylls.
To complete my contention that such compositions of the Victorian Poet-Laureate have really nothing to do with the "future poetry" in Sri Aurobindo's epic "Legend and Symbol", I may pick out a few lines to contrast the thought-quality of the two. Savitri became in its final version a Philosophy as well as a Legend and a Symbol, and there are,
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as the second Professor ably discerns, innumerable currents of philosophical thought in it. Now, one may urge that the passage I have culled from the Enid story does not totally lend itself to a juxtaposition with my excerpt from Love and Death. It has less of image-colour, less of emotional abandon, more of mental vision, a broad touch of poetic philosophising, with phrases like "taking true for false, or false for true" and "that other, where we see as we are seen". A movement is indicated from the twilight-illusions of this world to a world of verity, from the troubles of time to the equipoise of eternity. Well, let us extract whatever intellectually poetic pleasure we can from the thrill Tennyson conveys to us of his grey matter in the moulding hands of the Muse — and then let us look at a short spell of spiritual thinking in Savitri which transfers to a different plane the basic motif of the passage from Love and Death, with even a linking phrase ("Death helps us not") from it:
Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure.
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme...
(Book 10, Canto 6, p. 221)
The utter depths of the soul surge up here and move with a mighty measure in which the speech of the intellect is recognisably caught yet carried beyond itself by the Spirit's undertones and overtones. Not alone the waves of an unfathomable sound-significance but also the living hues of a genuine mind-vision playing in and out of their sweep towards luminous horizons are foreign to dear old Alfred for all his floating hair and prophet beard and mist-rapt eye trying to swim beyond our ken on a portwine-dark strange sea of thought. (I must apologise to Homer and Wordsworth for tainting the lovely "stock-description" of the one and the grand trouvaille of the other with a touch of the bibulous.)
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Please do not think I am prejudiced in favour of the second don as against the first because the former has given Savitri high praise. It is the temper of the mind behind the pronouncements that I have considered. If the latter had offered authentic criticism after realising what sort of work, both in matter and manner, this epic is I would have respected his viewpoint even while attacking it — or perhaps I may have seen some area of agreement upon the ordinary level of literary criticism. Savitri is not a completely finished creation, it did not receive the absolute ultima lima from its author. So one may, if one wants, pick fault with a few parts of it from an overall outlook, if one does not have a sufficient inlook to take one away from such petty and superficial carping. And an impartial judge is bound to concede some room to competent reservations. But a facile summing-up cannot be let pass. Perhaps the Professor did not intend to make any censure. At least the mode of his expression is not censorious at all. But he appears to have given a very perfunctory response, as if to imply, "Oh, you make too much of it all — a fair amount is deja vu."
From his letter to you I can see that he is a very kind and helpful person. And the suggestion he proffers to you to "say something about the remarkable parallel between the legend of Savitri and that of Alcestis" seems a fruitful one.
I had no idea the other Professor was such an old man. His mind has kept its full vigour and, what is more, its penetrating power. All his observations go to the heart of a thing — and he has many observations to make. I cannot conceive of a better tribute in a short space than his few lines by way of a general comment: "The poem has impressed me by its sublimity, richness of imagery, and lofty spiritual level, allied with great skill in interpreting unusual psychic experiences through appropriate imagery." And what genuine warmth of response is there in the other declaration: "I... greatly appreciated the privilege...of making the acquaintance of Savitri, a truly remarkable poem." Then there is the perspicacity of his note: "there are two points which struck
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me emphatically. (1) The frequent echoes — quite deliberate — of well-known lines in English poetry in Savitri. They are all over the place. (2) Sri Aurobindo says somewhere in the prose notes that he has discussed and examined in the poem every important philosophical theory... You have touched on the matter in various places in your thesis, but a detailed examination would call for a book all to itself. Some day perhaps you or a pupil of yours will write this book; but it would call of course for considerable philosophical equipment." Finally, there is the statement equally worth marking: "I may add that I was immensely impressed by the extraordinary combination of East and West in the poem, of ancient Indian lore with the thought and experience of the modern cosmopolitan world."
I see too that in this Professor's last letter to you, he refers again to Savitri as "this great poem" and goes on to say: "I am interested in Sri Aurobindo and his work... Already there is a small collection of books in our world-famous library in Trinity College, Dublin, dealing with Sri Aurobindo and his work and writings. Your book will be a most valuable addition to the growing group of works in this important field."
You were indeed lucky to come into contact with such a fine consciousness. I write "consciousness" on purpose instead of "mind", for here there seems to have been an all-round sensitiveness and perceptiveness, a culture that permeated the whole being.
I am glad you have undertaken to carry out one of his wishes — that you should try a comparative study of Dante and Sri Aurobindo. Here I may note that in Savitri we have not only deliberate echoes of several great lines of English poetry, lines passed through the typical Aurobindonian spirituality, but also reverberations from the poetic literature of other countries. Dante too has contributed some strains. One may be mentioned at once. Do you remember the story he makes Ulysses tell, but none of the classics know, the story which has served as the basis of Tennyson's Ulysses,
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that memorable success of his in blank verse, along with Morte d'Arthur and Tithonus? I have Laurence Binyon's translation — poetic enough but naturally nowhere near Dante's unique blend of simplicity and exaltation, clear-cut flow and concentrated force. Dante's Ulysses tells his comrades:
"Brothers," I said, "who manfully, despite
Ten thousand perils, have attained the West,
In the brief vigil that remains of light
To feel in, stoop not to renounce the quest
Of what may in the sun's path be essayed,
The world that never man-kind hath possessed.
Think on the seed ye spring from! Ye were made
Not to live life of brute beasts in the field
But follow virtue and knowledge unafraid."
Now listen to what Savitri's father, King Aswapati, caught of
A word that leaped from some far sky of thought.
Sri Aurobindo's passage is much longer than Dante's. I'll cull a few parts of it:
"O Force-compelled, Fate-driven earth-born race,
O petty adventurers in an infinite world
And prisoners of a dwarf humanity,
How long will you tread the circling tracks of mind
Around your little self and petty things?
But not for a changeless littleness were you meant,
Not for vain repetition were you built;
Out of the Immortal's substance you were made;
Your actions can be swift revealing steps,
Your life a changeful mould for growing gods....
A greater destiny waits you in your front:...
You shall awake into the spirit's air...
And look through Nature with sun-gazing lids...
Authors of earth's high change, to you it is given
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To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul
And touch the mighty Mother stark awake
And meet the Omnipotent in this house of flesh
And make of life the million-bodied One.
The earth you tread is a border screened from heaven;
The life you lead conceals the light you are.
Immortal Powers sweep flaming past your doors;
Far-off upon your tops the god-chant sounds
While to exceed yourselves thought's trumpets call,
Heard by a few, but fewer dare aspire,
The nympholepts of the ecstasy and the blaze...." 1
This is a fine example of the end-stopped technique, with just two lines effectively enjambed:
To cross the dangerous spaces of the soul...
And the whole passage has an affinity in a general manner to the grand finale of Tennyson's Dante-inspired little piece — perhaps the noblest blank verse the Victorian poet penned:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From the eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
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The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tennysonian blank verse of this calibre — as adroit in end-stopping as in overflowing and charged everywhere with a winging afflatus, whether light and mobile, or massive and high-poised — may well stand beside the Aurobindonian as sheer poetry. But Ulysses is an exception and not the rule. Neither can it, for all its masterful semi-mystic romanticism, match the deeper tones that sweep through Savitri again and again. Perhaps the passage with the Dante-correspondence does not quite bring those tones home to the inner ear as markedly as others, such as:
Thought lay down in a mighty voicelessness;
The toiling thinker widened and grew still,
Wisdom transcendent touched his quivering heart;
His soul could sail beyond thought's luminous bar;
Mind screened no more the shoreless infinite.
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a faint glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
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Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
If we may close in a technical strain, we may observe that in the last five lines here there is an intriguing mixture of the end-stopped and the enjambed, not in the sense that they alternate but in the sense that they appear to fuse. The first line is a regular overflow — while the next two form a partnership which is not easy to distinguish as the one kind or the other: the two kinds interplay, seeming at the same time a single whole and a pair of self-sufficient parts. Nor, when the third line is taken along with the two terminal ones, can this whole be really cut into three independent phrases, yet the links are so delicate and subtle that each has a telling life of its own and a monumental strength which still has a singing and a soaring, in which the great significance-packed words turn ethereally luminous and, on some haunting undertone of suggestion and some suffusing overtone of vision, achieve a poetic paradox which we can only characterise as the uttering of the Unutterable.
What exactly we mean may be indicated by a few critical hints. When we read at the very start of the passage —
The toiling thinker widened and grew still —
we can see and feel with a fair distinctness the movement of the human mind towards the Spirit beyond it. The weighty spondee of the initial line's first foot, the next trochee with its reversal of the basic iamb-flow of the metre and then the couple of regular beats leading to a sort of uninsistent trailing away of the poet's own voice into voicelessness — all these are effects we can discern. Similarly we can measure the drift of the succeeding line, with its first three regular feet conjuring up a large easy transition from the finite to the infinite, and then an accentless pyrrhic balanced at the end of the line by a spondee — "grew still" — conveying the
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fullness of the spiritual state, the culmination of the God-ward growth of the soul. The two lines together prepare the other duo with which the revelatory passage reaches its resolution. But in that duo we tend to lose our bearings. The phrases are not striking with a conscious poetry. The opening expression — "Where judgment ceases and the word is mute" — is most simple and direct, almost a prose locution: what animates it to a pitch far beyond the finest prose is a deep undercurrent, an intonation which nearly effaces the stresses and carries its meaning on a stream of silence, as it were. The next pentameter appears to have as abstract an air with its "Unconceived", an economical straightforwardness striving after no colourful imaginative effect, yet accomplishing an extreme of the vivid and visionary by the vocables "lies pathless". They evoke the sense of a super-personal Divinity in an eternal self-extension that defies all attempt of discriminative thought to pass across its mystery. And the epithet "alone" comes as a summing-up of the utter transcendence — or, if you like, a humming-up of the ultimate Silence, a tolling as of a huge golden bell, a very sky-dome ringing, to round off the multitudinous activity of the universe and announce the reign of the unfathomable Supracosmic, the boundless Godhead reposing in His secret self-luminosity, dissolving the universe into its indescribable divine potentiality. This is a poetry in which seeing and feeling draw intensely inward and disappear into an immense unmediated experience: seeing and feeling are then no longer needed: all the supernatural Wonder which words seek to communicate by seeing and feeling is now as if known by identity with it: there is here a spontaneous power of poetic Yoga holding by a transparency of language this Wonder in its own authentic plenitude of existence.
What Tennysonian blank verses can vibrate with the quality of such a Mantra?
Reference
1. Savitri (Revised edition, 1993), Book Four, Canto Three, pp. 370-71.)
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