THE WORDS OF POETRY
Degas, the famous painter, once said to Mallarme, the famous poet: "How is it that though I have plenty of ideas I still can't write poetry?" Mallarme replied: "My dear man, poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words."
This statement may seem at first to poke fun at Degas, archly pointing out an obvious truth to the rather dense painter. Mallarme no doubt, had often his tongue in his cheek, but he never lost a chance to comment on the essential nature of poetry. Coming from an indefatigable theoretician of aesthetics, the statement is a bit of literary criticism rather than a piece of academic witticism. It is meant to endow poetry with a special function in words, by which it would stand in particular contrast to what is written with ideas.
Prose no less than poetry employs words, but its eye is primarily on the substance to be conveyed and this substance is ideative and the conveying has to be expository — that is, clear and connected, with intellectual judgment ruling and shaping it even when it is eloquent, moving, image-coloured. Prose deals fundamentally with thoughts, and words to it are a means to an end, and the same thoughts can be expressed by it in many different combinations of words. When it discharges its office with skill and charm and power it attains the status of literature; but its basic character remains unchanged: it is written with ideas and its verbal form does best its job as a go-between. The thought-substance, which can assume various forms, is intended to stand out: the particular words employed fall into the background.
The words of poetry are not simply a means to an end: they are ends in themselves. Poetry begins when words carry as much importance as what they express, and the words of poetry in the main are not vehicles of ideas. At times they may appear ideative, but that is because the intellectual mind has been made a medium, not because this mind is their
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source. The source is something significant without being itself intellectual. Mallarme attempted to cut out the intellectual medium altogether. That is why he is often accused of obscurity and he went himself to the extent of making a cult of the obscure. With the puckish that was seldom away from the high-priestly in him, he once asked for the notes taken by a student during a lecture of his. "I want," he said, "to put a little obscurity into them." But we must not mix up the Mallarmean obscurity with heaviness, clumsiness or haziness of expression. He was obscure not from failure to endow with proper form what he had to say or from confusion of mind. He was so because the things he said were themselves not easily seizable and he desired them to come forth in their own right without intellectual elucidation or representation. Strange symbols quivering up from the subconscious or glimmering down from the superconscious, elusive dream-shades or swift vision-lights — these were the stuff with which his words got filled, these were the inner movements to which his language corresponded and with which it grew rhythmical.
The way Mallarme moulded language to mirror and echo unknown depths of man's consciousness or of the outer world rendered his words conspicuously void of the elements of the thinking intellect: his verse carried nuances in marked opposition to what is meant by "ideas". But all poetry, by springing from an ultra-intellectual source, need not be Mallarmean. Always to rule out a recognisable thought-content is to take too narrow a view and make poetry the pleasure of an esoteric coterie. A wide circle is no less legitimate than such a coterie for the poet's audience. Symbolism, whose dedicated mouthpiece was Mallarme, is itself inclusive of several modes of poetic utterance. Superb symbolist verse of the esoteric coterie is the opening of Mallarme's Le Cygne (The Swan):
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous dechirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
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Ce lac dur oublie que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui!
This may be englished with a mixture of faithfulness and freedom:
Virginal, vivid, beautiful Today —
Will it tear with a stroke of drunken wing this lone
Hard lake where haunts mid hoar-frost's overlay
The transparent glacier of flights unflown?
Challenging mystery and revelatory violence are here: but can we deny that symbolism is splendidly active also in those lines of Yeats from Cool Park and Ballylee — lines which, unlike Mallarme's, have an intellectual atmosphere, an explicitness of reflection and meditation?
At sudden thunder of the mounting swan
I turned about and looked where branches break
The glittering reaches of the flooded lake.
Another emblem there! That stormy white
But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning's gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,
So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.
True poetic audacity and subtlety meet us here despite the undeniable mentalisation, the play of ideas. Symbolism at its highest spiritual level — supra-Mallarmean as well as supra-Yeatsian — can still employ the intellect as its channel: the speech of the intellect is transformed but not effaced and what we get is the sheer poetic revelation for all the philosophical manner adopted, as in the passage from Sri Aurobindo's free-verse Ascent, where too the swan-symbol
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occurs. This symbol comes as a crowning disclosure after the "spirit immortal" has been asked to soar beyond "the turning Wheel", the world of "the grey and the little", and then called upon to outgrow even the Alone and the Absolute and penetrate the Supreme which embraces both Time and Timelessness:
Single and free yet innumerably living,
All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
Act in the world with thy being beyond it...
Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
Rise with the world in thy bosom,
O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.
One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering
winged through the universe,
Spirit immortal.
Yes, the thinking mind is not in itself an enemy of the poetic. As Sri Aurobindo tells us, we, while rising above Nature, must not reject Nature, since there is the Divine's intention of self-unfoldment in it, and surely Nature includes the thinking part of man. From its poise beyond, our art also must lay hands on the natural world and lay bare its true meaning as a progressive manifestation of the Spirit. The thinker in us has thus a role to play in art too: he must act more and more as a mind of light, something that does hot try to seize and shape in its own terms the inner inspired illumination but lets that insight seize and shape it into crystalline concepts.
Poetry cannot be allowed to become altogether a narrow intensity: at the same time that it is intense it must be immense. Without a comprehensiveness it cannot be great in the ultimate measure. But we have yet to hold on to the essence of Mallarme's declaration to Degas.
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And in the first place this essence, as we have already suggested, is: words in poetry assert themselves, words in prose are merely instrumental. Of course, the instrument has to be fine and forceful if it means to be art, but it does no more than clear the way for what is to be communicated. Once this work is done, it fades out of the reader's sight. Quite the reverse happens in poetry: there the form is not subdued to the content. Art in prose is exercised towards a felicitous forgetfulness of form: it is exercised in poetry towards a rapturous remembrance of it.
This distinction does not imply that poetry decks out its language and hangs it with all sorts of ornaments for the sake of ornamentation or that it is "beautified" with a flourish of flowery words. Poetry can be very bare, sparing of epithet and simile, having apparently the gait of a prose of the most functional order, but there is always an intense harmony hidden within it, fusing form and content to an inevitable perfection. Unlike in prose, it has just one form for its content and no other, and every part of it is equally necessary, equally final, by a close-linked inter-activity.
Bare and direct poetry brings us to what in the second place is the poetic essence. Again, as already pointed out, ideas are not the matter of which poetry is built. Even verse that is simple and straightforward in style and looks like an expression of ideas with little of imaginative colour is yet communicative on a far more deeply significant level than prose. And this level is effective in the very effectivity of the words themselves, it lives in the very artistry of the vibrant form.
To realise this, we may pick out some miniature masterpieces of bareness and directness: Milton's
Fall'n Cherub! to be weak is miserable,
Shakespeare's
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
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Wordsworth's
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
F. T. Prince's
What no one yet has understood,
That some great love is over what we do,
A. E. Housman's
The troubles of our proud and angry dust,
Sri Aurobindo's
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Everywhere the words are irreplaceable and combine into a pattern whose each point has a life of its own, which yet unites utterly with a life of the whole. And through that double life a deeper vision than the ideative shines from the look of a simple and straightforward idea. The inspired technique of Shakespeare's line has been well recognised, particularly for its central intensity — four massed stresses ("this harsh world draw"), three of them on long or lengthened vowels, the clotted consonants in all the weighted monosyllables creating a difficulty in respiration, almost a pain in the chest, at the very articulation of the phrase. But a special complex of harmony in the word-body pervades all the lines.
Consider the art of Wordsworth's declaration. We have the pressure of the voice at the very commencement, with the falling rhythm of the first foot's trochee as if from a primal and original height Love went down into the world of manifestation. Next is the firm halting of the voice at "found" after a gap of two slacks syllables as if the poetic seer had discovered the leap of Love across everything to make its
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multiple landing at chosen places of the earth. Now follows the picking up of the aspirated h of the unstressed "had" and "he" by the same sound in the strongly accented but short-vowelled "huts" as if the revelation from on high was definitely caught there in however narrow-seeming a compass and as if the human seeker became there the fulfilled recipient of the revelation. Then there are the three consecutive stresses at the end. They not only hammer into our minds the presence of the "poor men" but also fix in our hearts their humble yet happily side-by-side living. Further, by means of the word "lie", they drive home into our inmost intuitive self the sense that the "Love" with which the poet's insight opened is secretly confirmed here through the closing alliteration, through the echoing I which affines the down-to-the-ground significance of the weighted "lie" to the pure ether, as it were, of the ideal-suggestive wonder-loaded "Love".
An art equally admirable is in Sri Aurobindo's verse — with almost the same inspiration of the technique basically at work, binding the beginning to the end by the alliterative emphasised b and deftly weaving "Bear" and "bliss" into oneness with the middle portion by the s and l and r held together in it. There is even the "find" in the iamb which makes the second foot, to match the "found" in the same metrical place and with the same role in Wordsworth. Only, the whole inner movement is not from the ideal to the actual but the reverse: the human condition starts the line and the divine destiny terminates it. The "plane" is certainly a more fundamentally meaningful one, though the poetic quality as such of the Wordsworth line is no whit less. Now a vast world-cry rings out from profundities of pathos to peaks of beatitude. And both the former and the latter emerge in the ultimate light more momentously if we add the line which immediately follows our quotation and at the same time cull a verse from elsewhere in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri to go before the pair. Then the end of the first line would be the beginning of the second and that of the second would
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commence the third, enriching with a system of word-responses the psychological message and the metaphysical overtone:
To know is best, however hard to bear...
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives.
Each member of the trio illustrates eminently the economical "unbeautified" style that can yet constitute great poetry — the form and the content so fused in a connotative music as to transcend any possible words of prose passing on to us a burden of valuable thoughts.
The words of prose, even at their best, are transmissive: they draw attention less to themselves, whether singly or in an ensemble, than to that which communicates across them. But, if the words of poetry perform a different function, let us not commit the mistake of imagining that they do it by subduing to themselves what makes a communication across their independent existence. That would give rise to sheer verbosity, an excess of sound over sense. The true performance of the poetic word is just to be inseparable from its substance. If you alter the word, the substance ceases to be the same. What a world of difference if Wordsworth came rewritten:
Love had he found in huts where poor men sleep —
or Sri Aurobindo were converted into:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to joy.
Even to substitute "rest" for "lie", and "path" or "way" for "road", would mean utter loss. The word of poetry is not transmissive, it is — if we may coin an epithet — incarnative.
There, too, however, we must discriminate. Poetic in-carnativeness is itself of three varieties. The first takes place
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when language rises from its most primitive stage to a more conscious grade. A man's chuckling, whining, shouting or else imitating Nature's noises to express himself: that is language at its most primitive — a voice of raw feeling or crude sensation. At a slightly higher level we have some stir of thought, but it is tied down to the arranging of sensations and feelings, and the language is still rather awkward and incomplete — helped out by gesture and look. It is not yet a skilful and self-supporting medium. But we have a foreshadowing of the poetic level, for significant onomatopoeia is frequent. And, out of the tremors and quivers of sensation and the thrilled answers of emotion, words can now be vividly born for thought to arrange them. Sri Aurobindo has cited the Sanskrit word vrika, signifying "tearer", for the wolf, as an excellent example of subtly significant speech put by sensation and emotion at the disposal of thought. The English word "wolf" is also of the same kind, though here what is conveyed is a blend of frightening noise and ravenous swallowing. Raised to a degree of greater psychological refinement, language at this level can yield on a collective scale whole lines that make use of such words or their more cunning analogues to constitute a complete unit of expressive poetry. We have Tennyson's
The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm
as an exquisite music snatched from the natural world. Nature and a touch of some mystery behind it come together on a haunting sound-ripple in Seumas O'Sullivan's
And many rivers murmuring in the dark.
An evocation of a supernatural being is Sri Aurobindo's powerful picture — in a narrative written in 1899 — of one of the Serpent-guardians of the Underworld as Hinduism has imagined it:
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Magic Carcotaca all flecked with fire.
A more eleborate triumph in the same genre is the sense Sri Aurobindo creates in us of that Underworld itself, "Hopeless Patala" where
in vague sands
And indeterminable strange rocks and caverns
That into silent blackness huge recede,
Dwell the great serpent and his hosts, writhed forms,
Sinuous, abhorred, through many horrible leagues
Coiling in a half darkness. Shapes he saw,
And heard the hiss and knew the lambent light
Loathsome, but passed compelling his strong soul.
Such speech is surely incarnative, for substance and word have grown one; yet the incarnative function is limited. The poetic perfection is of the surface, whether the surface be of Nature or Supernature. The gross body, sthula sarira — to employ an Upanishadic description — of the poetic movement is made soul-active, the subtle body, suksma sarira, is still not called into play, much less the causal or archetypal body, karana &sarira, which is the inmost and highest truth to be manifested in the incarnative dynamism.
But before the subtle and the causal incarnativeness can come, there intervenes in the process of language what I have labelled as the transmissive use. Here the thinking mind disengages itself from emotion and sensation and Works in the interests of its own acute or rarefied or far-ranging powers. At first it is — to take again a term from Indian philosophical psychology — the witness Purusha, the watching Self, just saying "Yes" or "No" to the Nature-flux, Prakriti, of the speech of sensation and emotion, but by its support or lack of support it gives the flux on the whole a deliberate turn serving its own characteristic purposes. Afterwards there is a greater more detailed lordship, leading to a creativeness exercised from a free domain above and
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beyond sensation and emotion: the Purusha becomes the Ishwara, the Godlike Self, and orders his own representative language. But there is a certain aloofness from words, a being outside them — and somehow the finest potentialities of them are untapped. Words tend to be counters, any word can be made to mean anything provided all agree upon the usage. The closeness between sound and experience, between tone and consciousness, is diminished. Abstract language, though highly efficient in its freedom and analytic exactitude, is the result. But the intellect, in its Ishwara-poise, can also stretch its hand, as it were, to guide the word-flow instead of ruling that flow by its lordly eye. Then we get some warmth of pressure, some feel of nearness, and the thought-speech becomes prose as an art.
A few instances may be offered. The master of words handling them not quite from afar but by a dexterous contact is T. H. Huxley clarifying in one of his "lay sermons" a certain side of universal fact, a side most likely to impress a hard-headed scientist in his moments of enlightened analysis:
"The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance."
The word-master not only leaning near and manipulating his counters but also warming them with the contact of his own mind is the writer of this eloquent excerpt from The Education of Henry Adams (Chapter 28):
"Power is poison. Its effects on Presidents has always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds
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whose lives depend on snatching the carrion."
The wielder of mastery over words, gone further than warming them and grown successful by a hold on their potentialities to kindle them into disclosing secrets of our being with a measured yet moving light, is Robert Green Ingersoll who, atheist though he was by intellectual persuasion, could nonetheless articulate — as At the Bier of a Friend shows — an eternal aspiration of man's heart:
"We have our dream. The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the sands and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any creed, nor of any book, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of death."
As a whole this is true to the dharma (innate law) of prose — it is thought set forth in sequences of progression, employing imagery to render itself clearer, but in places the non-ideative which the ideas are trying to shadow forth pierces through and the rhythmic imagination of poetry takes intermittent charge and at the end stands out boldly in a perfectly phrased and effectively modulated pentameter with a reversed third foot achieving appropriate emphasis and poignancy:
As long | as love | kisses | the lips | of death.
This pentameter may well exemplify in one kind what we have termed the subtle body of poetic incarnativeness, which can be achieved only after the transmissive mode of prose literature has been made sovereignly available in the poet's consciousness during the act of creation. Ideas and a strong controlled precision in transmitting them must grow natural to one before one can pass beyond them to a power of more than gross icarnativeness. Now capable of all thought, words again are no longer counters or even marionettes moved splendidly from outside, but living bodies: the substance gets
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identified with them. There is not the primitive identification but a superior one. To adopt Aurobindonian nomenclature, we have not the soul's blind absorption into Nature but the bright fusing of the inner with the outer, the golden descent of the higher into the lower, a transformation of Nature by the soul and Spirit. Once more we have "sensation" or "emotion", but it is filled with nuances beyond the crude touch, the raw appeal of things — or rather the touch or the appeal of things is not found just vibrantly surface-new by an inner seeing and hearing: the inner itself is seen and heard and the experience of it merged with the sensation-quality, the emotion-aspect, of language.
If we wish to exemplify at more length the incarnative-ness through the subtle body, we cannot do better than start with the sestet of a sonnet of Rupert Brooke's, which when detached from the much inferior octave can stand as an independent piece at once of Nature-evocation and of visionary symbolism:
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day, and after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
A more explicit emblematic expression, the metaphor more directly taxed for psychological suggestion, we meet in a few words of Eliot's, which vivify an adventure of the soul, dangerous and arduous, through a glimpse of exotic geography opening up some strange inner world of pilgrim vision and priestly aspiration:
Across a whole Thibet of broken stones
That lie fang-up, a lifetime's march...
Perhaps a more helpful citation would be one that allows a
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thematic comparison in general with some of those we have listed for gross incarnativeness. Over against "Magic Car-cotaca" and "Hopeless Patala" from Sri Aurobindo's Love and Death we may put a few lines from his Savitri, holding again a vision of Supernature. A perverse paradoxical religion in the worlds of anti-divinity behind the veil is pictorially interpreted:
A dragon power of reptile energies
And strange epiphanies of grovelling Force
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime.
An inlet to a black void at the back of evolutionary Nature comes fraught with its suggestion of an abysmal Enigma:
Weird ran the road which, like fear hastening
Towards that of which it has most terror, passed
Phantasmal between pillared conscious rocks
Sombre and high, gates brooding, whose stone thoughts
Lost their huge sense beyond in giant night.
It is not easy always to discern where the subtle body ends and the causal or archetypal, which discloses concretely the very source of all magic and mystery, begins. From inevitable imaginative description to inevitable imaginative interpretation or suggestion goes the poetic word from the sthula sarira to the suksma: one may succeed in demarcating the two, though at times there is overlapping. But the borders between the interpretative or suggestive on the one side and the revelatory on the other are often shifting or fluctuant. In the last two quotations the causal appears to peep out through the subtle at one or two spots. Similar is the case of a pair of stanzas from John A. Chadwick. No difficulty in distinguishing them from a short poem by C. Day Lewis on a subject we have already illustrated with three passages: the Swan. Day Lewis achieves what a critic has
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designated as "a memorable and clearly realized experience through... one of the most conventional articles of the poet's repertory":
Behold the swan
Riding at her image, anchored there
Complacent, a water-lily upon
The ornamental water:
Queen of the mute October air
She broods in that unbroken
Reverie of reed and water.
This is the sthtula sarira in an elegant posture of sensation and emotion responsive with poetic inwardness to the surface of things. Unquestionably different from it in incarnative shape is Chadwick's
Across unmoving lake
A mirror theme
Of swans with white wings take
Their endless dream.
Poise-perfect is the set
Of lunar-bright
Pinions of trance where silence met
Unveering light.
Sri Aurobindo's comment on the stanzas runs: "Exceedingly beautiful, full of light and colour and suggestive image." Have we here the acme of the suksma sarira sheer and clear or is there a blend of the karana with it or does the pure karana confront us?
Beyond any misgiving, however, in spite of the descriptive and suggestive modes taken up into them, are nine verses that stood together in an old version of Savitri. We may assert the full feel of the causal poetic body when we receive through them the first light of dawn with an effect
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upon the most inward eye:
The impassive skies were neutral, waste and still.
Then a faint hesitating glimmer broke.
A slow miraculous gesture dimly came,
The insistent thrill of a transfiguring touch
Persuaded the inert black quietude
And beauty and wonder disturbed the fields of God.
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light
That glowed along a fading moment's brink
Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge
A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.
What is it that divides this passage from Brooke's sestet? Broadly one may observe: "Something in the manner of the sight, the mode of the rhythm. In Brooke the sight draws natural phenomena more or less as they are — at least through most of the lines — into an inner significance. Except for the tinge of humanising nouns like 'laughter' and 'gesture', these phenomena remain themselves in the first two sentences but are so arranged as to conjure up an extraordinary sense: only in the third sentence is there a sudden quickening of sight into insight — and the inner significance, the extraordinary sense, deals directly with them. In Sri Aurobindo the insight is all the time working in the sight: every movement is inwardly meaningful while being outwardly descriptive. And there is a tone which is addressed to the Upanishadic 'Ear behind the ear': a vast sound-wave rises and falls with an impulsion that mingles the controlled resonance of connotative language with an unfathomable harmony of the Unknown. Such a harmony always accompanies poetic speech, but mostly it enwraps this speech like an aura: here it precipitates in the speech and pervades it."
Perhaps no comment could more elucidate the quality of these nine verses than the answer Sri Aurobindo himself gave to a critic's question apropos of the technique. The critic
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had asked: "Are there not too many double adjectives? Would it not be an improvement if some variety were introduced and a less obvious method followed?" Sri Aurobindo wrote back:
"If a slow wealth-burdened movement is the right thing, as it certainly is here in my judgment, the necessary means have to be used to bring it about — and the double adjective is admirably suited for the purpose. Do not forget that Savitri is spiritual poetry cast into a symbolic figure. Done on this rule,, it is really a new attempt and cannot be hampered by old ideas of technique except when they are assimilable. The attempt at mystic spiritual poetry of the kind I am at demands above all a spiritual objectivity, an intense psychophysical concreteness. According to certain canons, epithets should be used sparingly, free use of them is rhetorical, an 'obvious' device, a crowding of ima?es is bad taste, there should be subtlety of art not displayed but severely concealed. .. Very good for a certain standard of poetry, not so good or not good at all for others. Shakespeare kicks over these traces at every step, Aeschylus freely and frequently, Milton wherever he chooses. Such lines as
In hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire
or
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge —
(note two double adjectives in three lines in the last) — are not subtle or restrained or careful to conceal their elements of powerful technique, they show rather a vivid richness or vehemence, forcing language to its utmost power of expression. That has to be done still more in this kind of mystic
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poetry. I cannot bring out the spiritual objectivity if I have to be miserly about epithets, images, or deny myself the use of all available resources of sound-significance. The double epithets are indispensable here and in the exact order in which they are arranged by me. The rich burdened movement might be secured by other means, but a rich burdened movement of any kind is not my primary object, it is desirable only because it is needed to express the spirit of the action here; and the double epithets are wanted because they are the best, not only one way of securing it. The 'gesture' must be 'slow miraculous' — if it is merely miraculous or merely slow, that does not create a picture of the thing as it is, but of something quite abstract and ordinary or concrete and ordinary — it is the combination that renders the exact nature of the mystic movement, with the 'dimly came' completing it, so that 'gesture' is not here a metaphor but a thing actually done. Equally a 'pale light' or an 'enchanted light' may be very pretty, but it is only the combination that renders the luminosity which is that of the hand acting tentatively in the darkness. That darkness itself is described as a quietude which gives it a subjective spiritual character and brings out the thing symbolised, but the double epithet 'inert black' gives it the needed concreteness so that the quietude ceases to be something abstract and becomes something concrete, objective but still spiritually subjective. Every word must be the right word, with the right atmosphere, the right relation to all the other words, just as every sound in its place and the whole sound together must bring out the imponderable significance which is beyond verbal expression..."
An interesting point for comparison with the Brooke-sestet is provided by the occurrence of a few common words in the two quotations. Sri Aurobindo has spoken of his "gesture" being so supported by the rest of the line as to be no mere metaphor but a thing actually done. In Brooke we have "Frost, with a gesture..." It is vivid but still merely metaphorical. Similarly he has "lit by the rich skies" — a
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happy description of the many-coloured multi-lustred day in action, but it works a different charm altogether from the objective-subjective presence of void Nature and vague Supernature in
Finally, take the neo-romantic "wandering loveliness" generalising "the waves that dance". Although it felicitously widens out the meaning, there is nothing in it of the revelation prepared of the gold-panelled opalescent-hinged gate of dreams by
A wandering hand of pale enchanted light.
Sri Aurobindo has not just seen a divine power behind the dawn-moment: he has brought it right into the speech echoing the break of day and he has done it with an accurate word-scheme and a precise rhythm-design — the latter perhaps even more crucial than the former, for in it the very life-throb of the hidden reality is reproduced, setting up vibrations in our deepest aesthetic self and awakening in us an empathic response to the intuitive art.
It is the intuitiveness that constitutes the poetic karana Sarira — an artistic capture, by the poet's inmost core, of the inmost core of a thing and its manner of pulsation. But there are many levels of being, and poetry can start on any of them, according to the peculiar psychology of the poet. Every great poet need not live on the Aurobindonian level in order to be supreme in his art. What he needs to do is to act intuitively on his own level: this will render his words incarnative of the causal body. Sri Aurobindo himself has instanced dialogue after dialogue from Shakespeare for a sovereign operation of the intuitive mind, creating the ne plus ultra of poetry. And yet, according to Sri Aurobindo, Shakespeare is the poet of the plane of the life-force, the mind borne on a surge of sensation and emotion, throwing up
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ideas in plenty but not for their own sake, least of all for any sum of philosophical vision: they arise to enrich sensation and emotion with ideative correspondences. An outburst of royally intuitive poetry from Shakespeare that Sri Aurobindo has cited has not even any marked ideas carried on the crest of the sensational and emotional being, except in the introductory line — and still all is intensest incarnative language:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world...
Set these lines beside Eliot's on a lifetime's perilous and toilsome march and you will immediately perceive a difference in the degree of poetic inwardness, in the intensity of the imaginative word and of its power to bring out the imponderables by the sound-suggestion. Eliot achieves a poetically pointed statement with an original image, but it is an effect that is a little self-conscious, the "Thibet" which introduces the most telling associations has also slightly the colour of a striking contrivance. The sole phrase comparable to Shakespeare's lines is: "broken stones / That lie fang-up" — and there too it is the last three words that emerge from the very heart of the enthousiasmos. The terror and horror raised up by Shakespeare of the strange half-physical half-supraphysical states and places have a fascinating and compelling intimacy of vision and voice which Eliot as a whole falls short of. Throughout the nine verses Shakespeare has a revelatory music of the plane on which he functions. Eliot's two lines do not hold in each part of them the intensest possible on his own plane.
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We may, however, be asked: "You have said that before both the subtle and the causal incarnativeness are won, the transmissive use of the language must be a background portion of the poetic moment. This implies that 'thought' is present in Claudio's speech on death even if the elements that overwhelmingly impress us are 'sensation' and 'emotion' experienced through an inner seeing and hearing of both the outer and the inner. How would you make out as more 'thoughted' — implicitly if not explicitly — the line
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice
than Tennyson's
The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm?
As for Seumas O'SuIlivan's
And many rivers murmuring in the dark,
it seems surely a more ideative effect for all its sensation-content than anything in Claudio's speech, even a most intense phrase like
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds?
Our reply must read: "There is more complexity in the Shakespearean sensation. And not the least of it comes from the greater presence of emotion than in the two other lines. Emotion always involves a certain attitude and it is because emotion has a more direct play in the Seumas O'Sullivan that you find a clearer ideative effect there than in the Tennyson and pick it out for a 'clincher' against the supposed presence of 'thought' in that intense phrase in the Shakespearean passage. The line from Claudio pitted against the Tennyson has a strong subjective tone: the nerves of mental sensation — to quote a phrase of Sri Aurobindo's — receive an impact through it; one feels in the mind's 'entrails', as it were, the thing described, whereas the ouzel causes no such emotion-
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quiver, it conveys just a happy superficial caress on the emotional being. O'Sullivan is not so much of the surface: a felicitous pricking of it occurs and a concept faintly looms out; but where in it is the keen penetration that gives us in
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
the feeling of the soul caught and confined within an invisible airy nothing that is yet a tyranny and a torture — the feeling which carries with it a living idea of being a helpless and anguished exile for all eternity from human pleasure, human volition? A shuddering heart-deep pessimism, which can either burn to the bone or freeze to the marrow, keeps thinking through sensation and emotion in the entirety of Claudio's excited confrontation of death: this excited confrontation is also a spontaneous contemplation. No doubt, the contemplation is not philosophical, it is the vital mind and not the intellectual at poetic activity here. Shakespeare contemplating is different from Milton or Wordsworth or Shelley or even the mature Keats: still a beat of thought, along with a beat of sensation and emotion, is communicated through the quick core-piercing phraseology and the profoundly ringing rhythm, which makes Shakespeare's body of poetry a 'causal' complex rather than a 'gross' compound or even a 'subtle' congeries."
But this thought does not disengage itself from the sensation-emotion and the latter is one with the energy and pattern of the words. Possibly, Shakespeare in such passages is the example par excellence of the words which Mallarme spoke of to Degas as constituting what ideas are incapable of producing: poetry. And Shakespeare in general too strikes us most by his largesse of words, his imperial way with words. Not only is his vocabulary the most varied among poets — nearly 23,000 different words — but also he has an inexhaustible eagerness for words, a constant adventurousness with them, a godlike delight and superabundant creativeness of idea-exceeding yet significance-seizing sound.
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