Joyce Chadwick and John A. Chadwick, contemporary with each other and belonging to our own time, are hardly heard of in English critical circles. The former died in England in 1950, the latter in India as far back as 1939; but their works have made little headway. Identical in surname, they were yet no relatives; they did not even come in contact and wrote without knowledge of each other's poetry. But their common surname is highly symbolic; for both expressed themselves under a similar spiritual stress and combined with the typical English note a mystic motive either directly caught from or indirectly attuned to modern renascent India.
1. THE POETIC VISION OF JOYCE CHADWICK
Selected Verse1 by Joyce Chadwick — this slender volume of nine poems I received from the author in August 1950, with six poems inscribed in ink in her own hand on the blank spaces. It confirmed the very favourable judgment prompted by three poems she had sent me for publication in the cultural review, Mother India, whose editor I was. My opinion has not changed over all these years. And that has made me wonder all the more how English critics could be completely oblivious of a poet not only genuine but of a really rare sensibility.
Of course, in a general way, all genuine poets possess a sensibility that is rare: indeed without it they cannot write living poetry. But there is a range of sensibility that most poets share despite the individual perception of each — and there is a range which is uncommon and shared by only a few like Miss Chadwick. The latter range may not by itself make a poet finer or greater, but it does provide us with a most unusual "inscape" and "instress", a depth of vision and an intensity of emotion that reveal with a vivid directness occult, mystical, spiritual meanings and convey a keen
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sense of the superhuman, the divine, the eternal.
I cannot say that Miss Chadwick's work is uniformly excellent. Perhaps this is a grave criticism, considering that the book presents "selected verse" and that the poems number no more than fifteen in all. But two things must be said to counteract the gravity of this censure. To be uniformly excellent in the poetic disclosure of such "inscape" and "instress" as we have in Miss Chadwick's work is to expect almost the impossible and, in view of this difficulty, I may aver that the amount of her excellence is large. Besides, there is a flamelike livingness in her work, perceptible in the background even when not fully brought out, which shows the possibility of writing often at one's highest. Both, therefore, as promise and as achievement, her selected verse is remarkable.
Not only freshly found word and image — intense, beautiful, deepening into distances — but also a strange rhythm imparting an emotion that seems to come with a holy force as if to remake one's life and, through the new subjectivity, a new objective world: this is the general impression Miss Chadwick's best work leaves on me. That is why she must be read not with the eye alone. The sounds must get their full value and be physically heard if their suggestions are to envelop us and succeed in materialising, as it were, the inner mystery. When the poems are read with clear though soft audibility, a heart-breaking loveliness is realised: the heart thrills and breaks, so to speak, into a rapt smile and a dream-exploring sight, the eyes catching hold not only of things but also of what is wonderfully behind them and, by that vision, drawing the depths out. This vision, we may say, is of "the force and the function" such as Miss Chadwick puzzles over in the stanzas called Felled Hornbeams which were published in an English magazine2 and speak of "a firm blue-grey" revealed when hornbeam thickets were cut down on a hill:
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...No watching has taught me as yet
What is the activity of blue-grey light
Flashing from log to dead leaf, leaf to eyesight;
Running the logs on a blue-grey squirrel's feet.
Received at the same time from the printed page and from the vibrated air, the best pieces in Selected Verse are at once delicate and dynamic — a structure often as of modulated mist which one imagines a breath might dissolve and yet marble-strong with a packed precision and purity that pattern forth significances from unknown dimensions of being.
The opening piece, To God the Creator, is perhaps the most magnificent in the genre I have tried to indicate. There is some touch of Hopkins — a gripping, rapture-raw, close-flashing though complex directness — and some touch of Abercrombie's uplifting thought-vigour and impatient massing of ideas — and a touch of the later Yeats's taut ex-quisiteness crossed with the quivering and plunging passion that is the mind of the Metaphysicals. But when I say this I do not mean anything imitative. The touches are only signs of broad affinities. Even if there were imitation, the fusing of three or four such temperaments and manners would itself be a striking originality. But there is much more here. Miss Chadwick has a mood and a music all her own, full of a more insistent mystical experience, a concreter seeing of spiritual presences — and the technique too is individual.
In view of that experience and seeing, the truest affinity we may trace is perhaps with what we may call the general or essential poetic current passing through some of the English-writing disciples of that Master of "Integral Yoga" from India, Sri Aurobindo, though most of their work Miss Chadwick could scarcely have seen before penning hers. They are, as a rule, more elaborate-structured, more clearly moulded in even their complexities and may be said to have more poise in the midst of their dazzlements: she is more nervous in not only her intricate but also her massive
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movements, she puts shade within shade with great quickness (often telescoping the grammar), as if she were a little afraid lest she should lose the light that breaks upon her in gushes through what appear to be expanding and contracting apertures. Yet there is for all the difference a subtle resemblance, all the less liable to be missed if one lets the ear "read" and the intuition understand — a resemblance which, when felt, seems to make her and them part of some new emergent Zeitgeist one in fundamental drive behind renascent India's rediscovery of "inwardness" and modernist Europe's "heritage of Symbolism".
There is hardly a poem in Miss Chadwick's booklet without the suggestion in it of the leap upward of a Godhead secret within the human or the leap outward of a Godhead waiting in world-nature or the leap downward of a Godhead poised above the mind's knowledge. Occasionally it is difficult to make distinctions: all the three leaps seem to fuse, as also in the strangely affecting lines she sent me in a letter (dated 23rd August 1949), introducing them with some words on their theme: "Last November I did a poem about artists which ended —
Coming with knowledge out of the primal Fire —
The felt and the kept: not to be lost any more —
Questing soul through the whole of body can pour
White, red, apricot, grey, rose, amethyst, pure B
lue, and the shrill
Colourless Fire."
But there is sometimes a wrestling with the sense she has of the marvels within, around, above, and a turning of them into poetic shape with a deliberative and constructive imagination — a vivid forceful thinking out in images: then the effect is not directly revealing and the inner tone which is almost never absent gets weakened. Here and there we meet with a certain smiling ambiguity, as though the poet were happy with her own seizures of spiritual nuances and did not
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care whether the word-body into which she puts them brought out their beauty in full. An example may be found even outside her booklet — in a poem I received for publication, called The Sun's Quiet Side:
Blake's Moon "with delight
Sits and smiles on the night":
I've known that Moon — but smiling on a day.
It was in me,
And round our hub, gyrating Possibility:
Wind smoking along grasses,
And quiet, heavy horses;
People, and creative and destructive forces —
But which was which, or what was meant or was a
meaning distorted —
Of that, no knowledge.
O which is which, and what is meant, and how is
meaning distorted?
Ssh! This Moon is a strange Moon —
And wisdom reachable by being still in it wholly
delighted.
This poem, except for two or three lines, may serve also to illustrate in one of several ways the occasions when Miss Chadwick's language has a lowered intensity and the idiom of our times displays its accidental as distinguished from its essential character and we feel the merely contemporary accent rather than the individually modern.
From Selected Verse, as total successes I should choose To God the Creator, A Woman Said This in My Dream, The Seven Abilities of the Body, All Shape has a Sun and a Moon in It and Ability. I have said enough about the first in my general description of Miss Chadwick's inspiration. I specially fancy in it the lines:
No prophet's notion of you, yours I want;
I want you, tiger-fierce, like lilacs gentle,
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Your breath may burn me so, or so enchant:
No matter, come! And if your hurricane Will
My littleness do disperse and my presumption,
And so I am split and burned and, shrivelled, fall,
I can but fall into your dark Destruction —
And your Destruction is you.
This transposes to another and perhaps a feminine plane the mood and impulse of lines by one of the poets who have sprung up around Sri Aurobindo in response to his own literary as well as Yogic creativity. Those lines Miss Chadwick had not at all read when she wrote hers. They are from a poem addressed to the god Agni of the Rigveda: the Rigvedic Agni is the divine Fire visioned in various forms as the secret urge of our evolution towards the perfect Splendour that is the Spirit:
O smile of heaven locked in a seed of light —
O music burning through the heart's dumb rock —
O beast of beauty with the golden beard —
O lust-consumer in the virgin's bed —
Come with thy myriad eyes that face all truth,
Thy myriad arms equal to each desire!...
Shatter or save, but fill this gap of gloom...
Work thy strange will, but load our gaze no more
With unexplorable freedoms of black air,
An infinite rapture veiled by infinite pain.
Lightning of Truth, God's lava passion, come!
Possibly the feminity, no less than the difference, of the plane to which Miss Chadwick has transposed the mood and impulse of these lines may be indicated more directly by following up her verse —
And so I am split and burned and, shrivelled, fall —
not with her own two —
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I can but fall into your dark Destruction
And your Destruction is you —
but with a rephrasing of their admirable point and force more deliberately, thus:
I can but strike the depth of a Destruction
Whose very darkness is you.
In the same poem I like immensely the following also:
Now you are golden around me. I am dark,
Central and safe within you, winged with you;
Move in your music towards that mundane mark
All moves to, but entranced...
It is a fine commingling of the mood of "the Cloud of Unknowing" with something Shelleyan as well as Dantes-que. Miss Chadwick's glimpses of God as Nature itself super-natured are most enchantingly concrete:
Sweeter to smell than sun-warmed cedar bark,
Shaped with more grace than cats or willow trees,
Harder than stone, more soft than petals, cool
Than a pear, musical than bees,
Movement of stars, May thunder, autumn's full
Glorious gale-paeans in green uplifted seas
That fall again like young gannets; kind like sleep,
Stiller than old carp in a lily pool...
And I find poignantly profound the phrases:
What is the stabbing principle in these
Homely delights? — why dreadful as dear
Dogs barking across mist-riding moonlit hills
Out of old farms, ducks quacking, linden-trees
Sweet far beyond pleasure when the turned summer fills
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Field, courtyard, bee-soul with their blossoms' tune — Bell-note surely to returned Paradise?
Here we have to a distinct advantage the qualities of the English genius which, even in its mystical orientation, differs in several respects from the Indian. One of the points of difference — and this is what is here — is a more intimately affectionate awareness of the outer life's details, including the details of Nature. Other points which are hardly an advantage are, in general, a tendency to have the inner vision in excited spurts instead of in a steady glow and a proclivity to hold together the golden glimpses either in a sort of happy heap or by means of a cementing intellectual imagination instead of catching them up against an immediately perceived mystical background which serves to make them cohere.
I am touched deeply also by the first paragraph of Beyond the Moonbeam:
Labour done,
To her own music, slenderly,
the Moon goes down; Leaving the sea to anguish for the shore alone,
The growth-struck seedling alone split and spiral on;
Child-bearing, love-bereft women strive to find
Beyond the Moon's working a more pitiful Mind.
It is worth pausing a little over both the art and the significance of these lines. The brief opening phrase, "Labour done", could not technically be bettered for suggestion of nothing more remaining to be accomplished and of a quiet yet implacable finality. The next line —
To her own music, slenderly, the Moon goes down —
is a triumph of subtlety. In conjunction with the words preceding it, it manages to convey with an easy concision that now the Moon is free from the cosmic toil to which it was
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applied and so it attends to its own being's rhythm, gets rapt in its own beauty which is an exquisiteness no travail can exhaust or mar, and moves out of the world's sight to a repose that has no ears for the struggle and the agony of the world. This last shade of meaning is brought out clearly in the next three lines which carry in perfect language the pathos of a world derelict of the light and abandoned to the loneliness of its own self, all its movement and growth and creativity a painful thwarted grope. The concluding words of the passage, hinting the blind direction of the search by "child-bearing, love-bereft women" —
Beyond the Moon's working a more pitiful Mind —
are a veritable masterpiece, full of "the tears of things", charged with the terrible coldness of the vast and beautiful powers that rule our sublunary life, powers attracting and stimulating us, working within our hearts and limbs, giving us short spells of pleasure and then forsaking us to an unfathomable woe — a woe which strains towards some Mystery beyond the indifferent wonders of the visible universe and calls out for compassion, for understanding, for guidance and personal response. Mark the craftsmanship of the line — the play of all the three labials in the language (b, m, p), the scheme of a varied fivefold labiality which gives an extreme or saturated sense of an alliterative yet spontaneous insistence expressing the constant cry of the human soul: the labial alliteration is especially apt because a sustained "feel" is created by it of trembling lips of prayer appealing beyond time to eternity. And the two m's of "more" and "Mind" pick up significantly the initial sound in "Moon", as if to connect Nature with Supernature and to pass through both the beauty and the power of the former to some marvellous Godhead that gives the cosmos its being and also transcends the cosmic workings by bringing not only beauty and power but also a brooding love.
One wishes the whole of Beyond the Moonbeam had the
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same inspiration. Not that the rest is infelicitous or superficial; but except for a line here and there we miss the absolute accent. It seems that, though Miss Chadwick has generally a deftness of phrase, she is mostly at her best in short snatches and in small poems. Take A Woman Said This in My Dream:
"Father, give me
Half a crown.
I must pay
For time to pray:
Holiness is
Dear to-day.
Father, give me half a queen's,
Half a martyr's
Crown."
This has admirably the crosslight of a dream-experience which yet goes beyond mere dreaming to the spontaneous and surprising felicities of the inner mystic mind. I think it is unique in its naive but still deep charm and its sudden splendour of suggestion with the help of a revelatory pun. In another way the poem Miss Chadwick has written out in ink on page 9, The Seven Abilities of the Body, is also of the same exceptional quality:
All the powers before they go
Bless a body's overthrow:
Scarlet, rose and purple toil —
And the honeysuckle Heart —
To despoil.
These that held it, loosen the knot:
The grey inhabitant of the throat Moulds it out;
The white watcher in" the head
Spreads by gazing at it, the rout;
The blue lily over them
Is — already — on a new stem.
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An exquisite occultism is here, a freshness and an unstrained surprise by means must simple yet packed with breath-taking secrets. I am inclined to put All Shape Has a Sun and a Moon in It (again a poem handwritten in my copy) on a par with these two gems, because of its pure distilled intuitive-ness:
A Moon that sees,
A Sun that is,
Form finds in itself
On its knees.
Kneeling Man
Arising can
Move delighted in any place
That silvern face,
That flaming head,
On his little, needed, neat
Clay feet.
This kind of art is a rarity, seldom practised before except by Emily Dickinson perhaps, but not by her in the same fashion. Hers was a certain intuitive epigrammaticism or else paradox-play that by a most economical inspiration, in which homely phrases were injected unpredictably with a piquant splendour, pricked open the mystery of the human heart or pinned down the far-calling strangeness lurking in familiar sights: Joyce Chadwick's is an intuitive symbolism, an immediate seizing of inner realities through concrete unela-borated emblems or emblematic gestures. Emily Dickinson seems to catch through the wide-awake intelligence's two outward-gazing eyes intense twinkles from life's depths: Joyce Chadwick is an artist of what is termed by Eastern initiates the Third Eye and she operates with quick flashes in a dimension of which the wide-awake intelligence knows nothing but into which one might slip between waking and slumber.
Something of this art but now less occult though still inly-lit is in the lines from No!:
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Old woman, you want praise for a flower
Who should sigh for a Sickle,
Who should burn for a Bonfire.
But the connection with the common world is more clear. That does not detract from the poetry as such, and Miss Chadwick is fine too in her straightforward descriptive mysticism:
Still, I arose on a white ladder,
Thence in the ultimate whiteness was:
Its energies dropping in pansy-petal
Rich heats for the terminal
Cold body to use —
White light, white will,
White fire that forms all,
Be you wine or be you fever
Working in me, your manifestation...
This booklet is, of course, not everybody's meat, and a tendency in places to be in both thought and language condensed and complicated may keep some people away and, I should add, a degree of elusiveness, a sort of bright slipping through the fingers, in a few poems may discourage the average reader; but these are not in themselves faults. And though they are not always enlivened into positive qualities and merits by Miss Chadwick, I am of the opinion that Selected Verse — especially my copy of it with the poet's additions — achieves, on a small scale, a good deal of radiant value in an extraordinary and difficult field. What perhaps is most precious about it is the glimpse it gives of the luminous future open to the poet in a broadening vista. But the future in the usual sense was never to be.
A couple of excerpts from her two last letters will provide the explanation. The letter dated 20th June 1950 begins:
"I have to thank you for a letter which very strongly
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'spoke to my condition', as the Quakers call it. This 'remoulding' process — now marvellous and fascinating to watch!
Sun the Person is leaning down;
His rustle of Godhead's on my skin;
It takes my pain
To use, I suppose,
To colour a rose,
To kill a man.
Within, within
The hands are working; the lips whistle
Into my mouth the pomp of his purple
Golden magnificent Breath...
As He does, I look down on my death.
The deep X-ray treatment was, I admit, terrifying. One had the feeling of a much too powerful force being hurled into one's body by people without any at all adequate knowledge of what they were doing — of course, no spiritual or occult knowledge. The whole thing was 'State medicine' at its worst, and regimentation at its maddest. (Even the times of getting reactions were fixed and woe betide you if you got one sooner! It was just ignored and you must get on as best you could for another 48 hours or so, when the same condition became legitimate and something was done for it.) Finally the exhaustion they produced was so great that they had to leave off, but expect me to go back and begin the whole thing over again..."
The next communication, dated 9th September 1950, is from a Nursing Home. After a few literary and political comments it says:
"You must excuse a poor letter. I was brought to this place five weeks ago, having been nearly killed by a second course of deep X-ray treatment. Thanks to blood-transfusion
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and good care I have recovered from that, but a new growth has started which is not operable, and I do not expect to be in this body a great while longer. The packing-up process takes a lot of energy, which is why this letter is what Keats called 'such stuff. But it is a necessary process... 'All suffering in the evolution is a preparation of strength and bliss.' It is this which has to be set up against the prevalent and, I am sure, absurdly exaggerated dread of cancer there is in this country. For the rest it is just an example of the sweeping out of that 'dusty room' of which we are told in The Yoga and Its objects."3
2. THE INSPIRATION AND ART OF
JOHN A. CHADWICK
The most famous work of the prominent philosophical writer, C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature, is inscribed to J. A. Chadwick. Although this inscription is enough to hint to us the esteem in which, even as a young man, that student of philosophy and Mathematical Logic was held, we can never guess from it that he deserves an essay which might well be entitled Chadwick and His Place in the World. For it is not as a philosopher or mathematical logician that he has become significant, nor was it at Cambridge that he did so. Only after leaving Trinity College to sail to India and after throwing up a professorship at an educational institution at Lucknow he suddenly flowered into a poet of exceptional quality. What brought about the flowering was his stay in Sri Aurobindo's Ashram of Yoga at Pondicherry. There, after a short spell, he made one of a group of poets writing in English whom, during the 1930s, Sri Aurobindo carried with a most acute and intimate care, both analytic and constructive, towards the Ideal of a perfect mystical and spiritual expression.
As we might expect of a mind trained to careful intellectuality, Chadwick — or Arjava, as he came to be known from the name Arjavananda (meaning "Joy of straightforward-
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ness") given him by Sri Aurobindo — did not achieve closeness to the Ideal through a lavish spontaneity whose very breath is song. A deliberate self-critical compact perfection belonged to him. Instead of taking the Kingdom of Heaven by a stormy frontal assault, he laid slow seige to it and won its treasures by patient compulsion — a victory no less complete though differing in plan and technique.
Here too is a superb energy of imagination expended not so much in a royal diffusion as in concentrated exquisiteness or magnificence. We feel, to quote the poet's own words from a sonnet, "a chaos-ending chisel-smite" in each work — a faultless statue emerges in which every line and curve has been traced by an inspired precision. Naturally the result is less prolific — a volume4 of merely 327 short poems with 2 playlets in verse, published soon after their author's untimely death in 1939 — but a greater stress is brought to bear upon the understanding, a stress which produces a peculiar intensity of rapture packed with haloed mysteries, so to speak — unfamiliar twilights, symbolic enchantments, hieratic seclusions — and yet no narrowness in the ultimate revelation made: the sole difficulty lies in turning the key which throws the esoteric doors wide open into expanse on shining expanse of heights and depths.
It is an art which may be a little baffling at first, but for those who can absorb its strange atmosphere there awaits a reward often of a beauty which takes one's breath away by its magic spells or by its grave amplitudes of spirituality. The style is highly original with unexpected turns that are vividly forceful and a power of pregnant construction armed with a genius for rhythmical innovation is everywhere manifest — as in that finely as well as incisively imaged poem called Communication:
Ebbing and waning of joy, the day estranged:
Here, petalled evening droops;
Below sky-rim the petals have drifted — all is changed
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To a dim listless stalk where Twilight stoops
Horizonward; and then
The black scorpion, Night, lifts claws of loneliness
and loops
The zenith and all the sky
(Its venomed blackness is in the life-blood of men).
...O then, love-armed cry,
Bring with compulsive dream the moon's foreglow
Over the difficult edge
Of being, that eastward-straining hopes may know
Lit pearl of untarrying pledge, —
Counsel, and laughter, and undissembling eyes.
Time-tameless thought shall dredge
Wide welcome for the glimpsed sail of moonrise,
The ship of understanding and conjoined wills,
The keel of trust from far-off friendly skies.
Remarkable as this poem is, with its subtle variations of tempo and appositely manipulated expressive drive which promise a capacity for effective blank verse if ever the poet were to be inspired in that direction, Chadwick's most majestic work seems to be those flights where bursts upon the gaze an imaginative colour widening every moment into some "objective correlative" of high philosophy charged with the profoundest spiritual illumination. A striking instance is Moksha:
As one who saunters on the seabanks in a wilderness
of day
Is dazzled by the sunshot marge and rippling
counterchange
Of wavebeams and an eagerhood of quivering wings
that range —
Grey on the sky's rim, — white on the foam-pathway, —
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Each man is wildered myriadly by outsight and
surface tone
Engirdling soul with clamour, by this fragmentary mood,
This patter of Time's marring steps across the solitude
Of Truth's abidingness, Self-Blissful and Alone.
But when eastward-streaming shadows bring the hush
of eventide
The wave-lapped sun can wield again his glory
of hencegoing
And furnish by his lowlihead vast dreams of
heaven-knowing —
A golden wave-way to the One where Beauty's
archetypes abide.
One can see how deftly the fourteener can be modulated by a hand conscious of the possibility it offers of many internal tones — swirl and stream and surge playing significant roles within the cumulative dignity of the whole movement. The two alexandrines in the above quotation are very suggestive also — the fourth line with its truncated first foot and its inverted accent in the fourth produces by the resultant emphasis on "grey" and "white" just the changeful bewildering effect which is sought to be conveyed by the sense of the stanza; while the eighth line, marking a contrast to the three longer ones preceding it, is eloquent of the self-compactness and isolation attributed therein to Truth. In a similar way the comparative lengthening out of the finale seems to indicate the triumphant roll of the meaning like a lustrous billow towards some immutable mystery beyond the mind's horizon. All the three stanzas are consummately inspired art, and no greater praise is possible than that the middle — particularly in its second half — might well be one of the supreme moments of the Upanishads, a Mantra.
The large and lofty utterance met with in the major Upanishads, carrying with it an echo of some rhythm infinitely vibrating out of a stupendous Unknowable, is indeed d
a rara avis in the atmosphere of the English language. Hardly any recent poet of the British Isles writing with a marked mystical penchant shows even a glimmer of it. AE has filled his verse with a wonderful simplicity of soul-vision; Yeats of the earlier phase brings a poignancy dipped in secret wells of faery colour and, when the later masterful will is at play, there is the "gold mosaic" of "God's holy fire" and the cry to be gathered into "the artifice of eternity"; Kathleen Raine now and then gives her song a crystalline touch of inward meditation in which yet the pulse both of the elements and of the human heart finds a richer rhythm. Among the less known poets there are James Cousins and Joyce Chadwick, gravely or delicately articulate in their intimacy with Light. But the best work of all these, whatever its aesthetic perfection, falls short of the eagle-height of spiritual quality. Not the substance by itself confers that pure zenith; what is necessary is a profound intonation vitally one with substance and language, and John Chadwick at his finest reflects something of this triple intensity because his English mind has more consistently steeped itself in Yoga and caught a breath from what we may call the luminous spaces of Sri Aurobindo's inner life.
If we wish to find among English-writing poets a match to that pair of lines ending with the full yet far-away gong of the word "alone" we shall have to pick out from Wordsworth his noblest music. Curiously enough the verses that equal them are just the two that also end with the same word's long rounded o and bell-like consonance — the lines on Newton's face in the bust at Cambridge:
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
And here it may be significant to mention that the terminal "alone" is not confined to Wordsworth's and Chadwick's Upanishadic pictures. It seems to have some innate affinity with the peak utterance of the Spirit, for it crowns too one of
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Sri Aurobindo's own poetic masterpieces, a passage visioning the very state hinted by Chadwick:
Across a void retreating sky he glimpsed
Through a last glimmer and drift of vanishing stars
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.5
To continue with Chadwick: he is not only a spiritual poet but an occult one. And in his occult sensibility too he strikes a new note. His Unicorn —
Unicorn uncreated,
Time may grow tired, not you!
For changes of rhythm are dated
By the clang of your topaz shoe —
and his Phoenix —
Tranquil the phoenix poise of golden-crested
Fleece-white and sorrowless
Head of the undefeated vision who had nested
Where on Time's moments looms the Everlivingness —
are neither of them merely traditional figures; they are a fresh contribution to symbolic sight. The white Unicorn with its single pointed projection on the head seems to be a symbol of purity and of faithfulness to a spiritual purpose, while the golden yellow of the topaz is emblematic of some spiritual principle behind manifested life in the recurrences as well as the variations of Time's movement. The Phoenix appears to stand for a power of some solar altitude of divine Truth, a power missioned to renew in the heart of Time the flame of aspiration towards the unquenchable and imperturbable luminosity above that has to be caught and intimately felt in Time's flux. But the achievement of Chadwick's symbolic
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Symbolic sight again, blending now the outer scene with an inner occult-spiritual lucidity of shape and significance, casts its spell on us in that short piece called Unveering Light:
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.
The swan is an old symbol of the human soul as a representative of the immaculate Eternal. But here it is given a specially revelatory attitude. The compound adjective "lunar-bright" immediately refers our imagination from the embodied soul to some Beyond of sheer Bliss. And the relationship indicated between the bird and the lake suggests a unison between the soul and environing nature. Here is a double reception of the transcendent beauty and purity — the soul realising its divine origin not only by an in-look towards the heavenly height but also by an out-look upon the natural elements amongst which it lives with the ideal of progressively manifesting the supreme light in the changeful character of earth's limited existence. That existence is here glimpsed in a transformed moment of tranquillity and made one in substance as it were with the soul's vision of its own enraptured being — and the whole double identity is caught by the poet's eye in a tranced inner dimension where the perfection that is to be accomplished in Time waits full-formed in an immutable Nunc Stans, an ever-standing Now of Eternity.
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...the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall
and
...the dark turf 'neath the starred and leafy sky.
Delicately imitative, this, of an occult landscape, but how stark and realistic a projection of some "terrible elsewhere" are Chadwick's
...the empty eerie courtyard
With no name
or
...a crescent moon swung wanly
White as curd.
And, as the poems proceed, de la Mare goes on increasing
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his exquisite ghostliness with strange movements whose meaning is elusive, while Chadwick presses home to a weirdly dynamic symbol of a soul-attitude struck by the human in accord with some drama of hell's tyranny and murderous monotony. Here is de la Mare's ending:
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward
When the plunging hoofs were gone —
and this is the way Chadwick recounts how his "traveller", feeling frantic after having flashed his single sword-blade in a night where none resisted,
Hurled his weapon through the gloaming,
Took no aim; Saw his likenesses around him m
Like his own — Then first knew in that cold starlight
Hell, alone.
De la Mare's poetry is undeniably fine in a daintily phantasmal vein, but it is ever so far from Chadwick's dreadful revelation of an occult depth reaching its climax with the gripping resonance once more of that predicative epithet about whose poetic suggestiveness we have already remarked.
Perhaps something of this kind of dreadful revelation dealing with the soul's own recesses is to be found in a few verses of that eccentric little genius Emily Dickinson, where e
she emphasises the individual's solitary confrontation of himself in some spectral profundity of consciousness. She lacks Chadwick's direct occult sight and consummate symbolic art, but she has an occult feel by means of an inward-straining thought and a terse elliptic style adding to the psychological eeriness:
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one's own self encounter
In lonesome place...
Even when a scene of external earth-nature is clearly recognisable, Chadwick always throws a visionary hue upon it, calling up immediately a soul-reality: as in that atmospheric snatch, half Yeatsian half de la Maresque —
Drowsy pinions whitely winging
Smoulder dimly past the strand —
or in those lines that end with a most sensitive vibration from the depths of the Godward-turned psyche —
...the eve
Has limned a trance upon the air,
A swirl of sunset on the stream,
An ecstasy of quivering bells that seem
Born from the heart of prayer.
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But Chadwick is not only depth-suggestive; he has many moments that burst upon us with amplitude and power. Instead of a sensitive psychic vibration, indirect in its description of the physical stars twinkling as though tinkling, he can look straight at the constellated firmament and give us an in-feeling of it in a line where the entirely monosyllabic pentameter with its various dispositions of similar or dissimilar vowels and consonants and with its meaningful massings of stress makes a most effective conjuration:
You stars that span with strength long leagues of space
.
Or else, with less direct power but equally direct communication of a vast experience-value, we have the same starry phenomenon:
To gaze and gaze upon the fire-strewn sky
Until the hush of heaven loom within.
Here there is a breath of what Sri Aurobindo has called "overhead" rhythm. This rhythm, winging down as if from some boundlessness above the brain-clamped mind, tends in Chadwick to touch at times the very summit. And the Upanishadic magnificence of a poetic gesture like the following apostrophe to the transcendent divine Force which he visions as drawing the quintessence of a triple Absolute of Being, Consciousness, Delight, and reigning from on high over the mental plane like a Sun-kingdom of Knowledge, is, like those verses about Truth's solitude that is perfectly withdrawn from the mind's "fragmentary mood", the most memorable of Chadwick's poetic victories:
Unsullied wisdom of gold which was thrice refined,
Shine in the clear space of holy noon
On all the upland hollows of the mind:
May every shadow-harbouring thought be strewn
With solar vastness and compelled
To feel all fear and all self-limits quelled.
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of course, the fact that a poet seizes or at least neighbours the Mantra does not mean that he is so filled with a supreme spirituality that he can never drop to a lower level of utterance. Neither must we expect all his speech on that level to be one tissue of originality. In Chadwick we may trace, except when he is at his best, certain general influences from poets preceding or contemporary. The Nature-poems, start-lingly fresh though they are as a whole, share in details the vocabulary of Edmund Blunden's inspired pastoralism enamoured of the English countryside. The magic vision within many verses casts our mind back to Yeats's Celticism and here and there is a drift of dreamy fancifulness not very far removed from de la Mare. Even on some occasions the colouring shows a touch of the minutely marking as well as luxurious painter eye of the young Tennyson, and not infrequently the phrasing bears an aspect of traditional poeticism from Spenser down to William Watson, which especially the rebellious modernist ear may dub wearying. In a semi-modernist manner we get at a few moments an affinity to Gerard Manley Hopkins. But if we look deeper and hear more intently we realise that in the echo-semblances themselves a novel genius runs to create a general pattern of mind which is sheer Chadwick and that an artistic flair lends by vigorous compactness or airy suggestiveness originality even of language to the ensemble and makes almost every stanza if not every line sparkle in at least one place with pure dew on whatever petals may have grown from the past or have reflected contemporary burgeonings. This should restrain the critic from pronouncing anything to be stale or even merely traditional.
Further, we must remember that Chadwick is not confined to old forms of verse. He is perfectly aware of recent tendencies and can exploit the possibilities of new forms without losing the true poetic quality. Thus he has several experiments in free verse, each an artistic success, and at times he not only works out the substance revelatorily in faultless language and rhythm but also brings superb depth and energy:
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A green-grey twilight hush in the ageless forest,
After the immense canopy of boughs
Has strained all glare and vivid colours from the sunlight.
Plinths of tree and stems of giant creeper rise up from the
floor of dimness
To the full height of these grey spaces
In a cathedral calm.
A plashy thud of some hard-rinded fruit
Ripples momently the tapestries of hush.
The greyness and the quiet are over all, a many-fathomed
covering of ocean mystery.
The turbulence of harsh atomic being,
Those hard and garish colours of the upper day
Are no more;
And only a faint dissolving line, a bubble's
membrane holds
Frontiers of existence and not-being.
We may apply to this the remarks made by Sri Aurobindo about another splendid performance in free verse: "Its rhythmic achievement solves entirely the problem of free verse. The object of free verse is to find a rhythm in which one can dispense with rhyme and the limitations of a fixed metre and yet have a poetic rhythm, not either a flat or an elevated prose rhythm cut up into lengths. I think this poem shows how it can be done. There is a true poetic rhythm, even a metrical beat, but without any fixity, pliant and varying with the curve or sweep of the thought and carrying admirably its perfect poetic expression." We may also note here, in passing, the phrases: "a plashy thud" and "a bubble's membrane." They do not sound quite poetic in the old style of verse-writing. But they are entirely in place not merely in free verse but also in the type of work turned out by Chadwick in all forms, and they constantly mix a sort of modernism with his usual avoidance of the modernist degradation of poetry. They are intrinsic to his aim, as Sri Aurobindo pointed out at the very commencement of
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Modern-sounding or traditional-seeming, Chadwick's artistic technique is nearly always flawless, and it is original by more than a living sense of word-value and rhythm-value reinforcing thought and vision: there is the originality of the thought and the vision themselves. And this originality is of a rare order by being mysticism which is not merely intellectual or emotional but comes of a genuine intuitive hold on hidden domains. Even when the symbols chosen are old ones, verging on the well-worn, he can transmute everything into a masterpiece. Who has not heard of the shell that brings from its whorl the long boom of breakers? And has not Swinburne familiarised us to easy enthusiasms like "the sea, my mother", and "my mother the sea"? But take now Chadwick's:
Out of an infinite ocean
Time arose;
By his shore with a thunderous motion
That Splendour flows.
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Cast on the beach;
Hold it and hark to the singing, —
Eternity speech.
Flotsam and jetsam of Onehood
Unbaffled and free, Spurring Time to remember his sonhood,
His mother — the Sea.
With masterful ease the whole depth of the poetic significance of sea-born land and stray sea-cast shell is plumbed and a power of mystical sight creates a little marvel of profound word and rhythm out of what may seem almost nursery-rhyme properties. In view of this power, whether exercised with striking novelty or within a known symbo-logy, Chadwick's art in even its most traditional appearance must be distinguished as a new element at play in poetic literature, a pioneering triumph of one kind in what Sri Aurobindo has designated as "Future Poetry". And this triumph which springs from a heart of spiritual feeling attuned to an inmost Presence never so permanent and piercing in any English poet and approached in intensity by perhaps none else than Shelley and AE, is not a matter of a few isolated poems. In piece after piece that Presence makes Chadwick an expert discloser of mystical songscapes. We should hardly exaggerate in saying that it leads his poetry to overtop in sustained quality the production of all his English contemporaries and to hold a promise of greatness rendering his premature death a tragedy whose true significance can be adequately uttered only by a fineness of word comparable to his own, whether the fineness quickens, the imagination by a sober felicity as in
Boles of strength with that whisper of blessing,
or by a rhapsodical beauty as in
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Lustrously pale like the starlight when the air has been
washed by the rain,
Gleam and bend cloud-centaurs from afar
Moon-bow that is aiming, silver-taut,
Arrows made of silence at a star,
or with a vividly strange suggestiveness —
Only a moon-pale ledge of rock,
Lapped by that sullen waste
Of Limbo-drift where a shadowy flock
Of dream-birds spaced
In the unquiet wideness of their lonelihood
Are as that sky-line aimlessly empty of good —
or with an exceedingly exquisite "moon-prompted" aspiration —
Power and immaculate Glory
Whom outward eyes may greet —
In this hour might the inward quicken,
Cloudlessly meet
Mother and Beauty Divine —
or with an august intuitiveness coupled with an inmost poignancy, setting Shiva before us —
Aimless yet knowing each goal, —
As unfrontiered Space
Moves not at all,
But centres in each place
One instant effortless control;
Or as the pity finds Thy face
When on Thy shrine the tears and bel-leaves fall,
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or with a profound ingenuity of "counterchanged" sense-perceptions spiritualised —
Timid clamour-pomps we see
Whose mingled sound
Leave naked yet the limbs of earthly faring:
While all around
The undraped silences go Selfward, wearing
Form's ecstasy —
or with a powerful insight symbolling the seer-trance by a "rock-hewn cavern" open to unrealised spiritual possibilities —
So sleep the strong and keep their guarded peace,
Whilst gracious dreams from aisles of future Time
Lean past the bars of Being, whisper their secret word,
Yearn to be made rock...Dilapidate Sublime —
or with a fusion of almost all the varieties exemplified above of poetic imaged speech in a grand attitude of keenly felt self-dedication to the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo:
Precarious boat that brought me to this strand
Shall feed flame-pinnacles from stem to stern,
Till not one rib my backward glance can find —
Down to the very keelson they shall burn.
Now to the unreal sea-line I would no more yearn;
Fain to touch with feet an unimagined land...
The gates of false glamour have closed behind;
There is no return.
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Notes and References
2. Poetry, the Magazine of The British Poetry Association, edited by Hardiman Scott, Vol. 1, No. 2, Summer 1949, p. 7.
3. An early booklet by Sri Aurobindo.
4. Poems by Arjava (J. A. Chadwick), with a Foreword by Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon), published by John M. Watkins, 21 Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road, London, W. C. 2, printed at Government Central Press, Hyderabad, Deccan, India, 1941.
5. Savitri (Sri Aurobindo International University Centre Collection, Vol. II, Pondicherry, 1954), Book I, Canto 3, p. 39.
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