On Savitri
THEME/S
POETRY OF THE THOUGHT-MIND AND
"OVERHEAD POETRY"
MILTON'S PARADISE LOST AND SRI AUROBINDO'S
SAVITRI
Milton knew himself to be for "an audience fit, though few." It is impossible for many to address him in their minds as he makes Eve address Adam:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose,
My glory, my perfection!1
But in a poetic sense Milton can be likened to Adam and regarded as our glory and perfection if we interpret from the standpoint of poetic psychology the phrase:
O sole in whom my thoughts find all repose.
For, Milton is the first English poet to fashion the language of poetic thought: he is the Adam of the creative intelligence in English poetry, and poetic thinking really finds in him all repose - no strain, no gesticulation, an intellectual utterance achieved with sovereign ease on a gigantic scale: the thought-power in us can see its glory and perfection in him and solely in him who has used this power masterfully through 10,565 lines of pentametrical blank verse. Of
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1 Bk. V,28-9.
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course, we should not particularly look here for the inner mind, much less the domains still more occult. "Milton's architecture of thought and verse," writes Sri Aurobindo,1 "is high and powerful and massive, but there are usually no subtle echoes there, no deep chambers: the occult things in man's being are foreign to his intelligence, - for it is in the light of the poetic intelligence that he creates." Then Sri Aurobindo, referring to Vedic imagery, adds: "he does not stray into 'the mystic cavern of the heart', does not follow the inner fire entering like a thief with the Cow of Light into the secrecy of secrecies. Shakespeare does sometimes get in as if by a splendid psychic accident in spite of his preoccupation with the colours and shows of life."
Yes, Milton's mind, as we have already remarked, is not really mystical although it took Heaven and Hell to range over. His achievement, however, is not to be judged by what his mind could not do: the sweep of its positive virtues must be the determinant of our appraisal. Sri Aurobindo2 sums up his triumph: "he has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic without depending in the least on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it..."
Perhaps the claim that Milton is the innovator of English poetry of the thought-mind will be challenged on behalf of Donne. Has not Donne made poetic speech a vehicle of intense thinking? Does he not press all the rest of man's parts into the service of a quivering complicated thought? Well, the very form in which we are led to make the claim for him is an index to the half-way-house position he occupies. His
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1Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), pp. 118-19.
2The Future Poetry, p. 117.
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mind is more recognisably free than Shakespeare's from the Life-urge, but it is yet caught in that urge and is constantly allured to function from within it rather than to work on its own and seize it for vitalising the authentic creations of another power than the nervous being and its dynamic and dramatic thought-quiverings. Donne is trying at the same time to be mental and vital. His is a restless personality and the double effort brings with it all that violence, disturbed rhythm, counter-pointed expression which are extremely effective on occasion but often strike us as no more than a clever torture of the language. The poetic intelligence has not found its proper voice in him. Although his mental ingenuities come alive frequently enough, the genuine orientation of the mind towards intellectual thought is baulked of consummation because a style suitable for the dominant play of the poised intelligence has not yet been launched. Donne was so different a personality from Milton that it is not easy to institute illuminating comparisons except in a very general manner; but we may catch the essential difference between their dealings with the creative intelligence and its native accent by juxtaposing the last stanza of Donne's "Prayer" from his Litany with the end of the exordium to Milton's Book I of Paradise Lost. Donne finely breathes into poetic diction a semi-colloquial tone and an argumentative urgency:
O Holy Ghost, whose temple I
Am, but of mud walls and condensed dust,
And being sacrilegiously
Half wasted with youth's fires, of pride and lust,
Must with new storms be weather-beat;
Double in my heart Thy flame,
Which let devout sad tears intend; and let
(Though this glass lanthorn, flesh, do suffer maim)
Fire, Sacrifice, Priest, Altar be the same.
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Milton, though not infused with the speaking voice's accent, articulates his poetic diction with a high naturalness of insistent thinking:
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dovelike sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the highth of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.1
Here we have the thought-mind perfectly free in its own clear air and, from above, charging the creative vitality with its poetic burden, even as the Divine Spirit whose wide wings are seen by Milton alighting and brooding over the Abyss to impregnate it. The Elizabethan Life Force had already come under the stress of intellectuality before Milton and the speech of Classicism had been essayed: there was even a pressure towards something more than mind, a pressure which we feel best perhaps in Vaughan whose life (1622-95) overlapped with Donne's old age as well as much of Milton's career. But in Milton we have both the liberation and the consummation of the mind's native tongue; for, in Sri Aurobindo's words, Paradise Lost "is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form".2
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1Bk. I,17-26.
2The Future Poetry, p.116.
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But when we speak of the mind's native tongue being Milton's, we do not yet hit off the whole quality of his mental poetry. For, such poetry has several kinds of movement. And in the age - the so-called English "Augustan" - which succeeded that of Milton we have a skilful language of the mind - the language of Dryden, Pope and others - yet without the natural nobility which moves in Milton. Rather there is a polished efficiency arranging glitters of thought. Even when a finer note is added, a tinge of truer feeling, there remains a lack of the authentically uplifting breath; and a well-turned idea, warmed by some sentiment, expresses itself in a meticulously but superficially finished style and proves attractive to the average reader by an artistic coating of the commonplace. We may take an instance from Gray which has some connection with Milton. In his extremely popular Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard Gray has a stanza recalling our minds to a passage in the speech of Belial from which we have quoted in extenso. Gray tries to convey the pathos of a soul about to lose its earthly existence, standing on the verge of death but looking back before crossing over:
For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?1
How different is the accent of the Miltonic utterance - elegiac too in temper yet pitched in a nobler key:
... for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
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1 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 85-8.
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In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?1
No doubt, the line about "those thoughts" is extraordinary even in Milton and is incomparable; but the passage, to stand out against Gray's, could well do with a lesser Miltonic line. Suppose we pick up a phrase2 from elsewhere and read:
this intellectual being,
That to the highth of deity aspired...
The passage would still be worlds apart from the stanza by Gray. Even if we took the expression of a more "intellectual being" than Gray's we should feel Milton's distinctive quality. Here are some verses from a poem of Coleridge in an intellectual vein:
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being!...3
This is the genuine language of the thinking mind, with actually a Miltonic influence on some of the verbal turns. And yet what is often termed Milton's "organ-voice" is wanting -something in the manner and still more in the rhythm, that makes the miracle of the line about "those thoughts" not a sheer freak of revelatory music but an exceptional upsurge from a sort of constant base in the rhythm-roll of Paradise Lost. The reason for this is that, though mostly limited to the mental range of vision and not piercing beyond it to a
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1Bk. II, 146-51.
2Bk.IX,167.
3Human Life: On the Denial of Immortality, 1-5.
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recognisable spiritual sight as distinguished from a high theological view, the thought-mind in Milton echoes the movement of a greater power of cognition: its breath of expressive sound seems caught from a level of consciousness which Sri Aurobindo's system of Yogic psychology considers the first "plane" in the hierarchy of "planes" above the mental level whose instrumental centre is in our brain.
Sri Aurobindo writes of "overhead poetry" - poetry coming from vastnesses of being and consciousness that are as yet unreached by mental man and whose manifestations in him have been rare and sporadic so far. At the top of the gradation which they form is what he calls Overmind, the world of the great Gods who are essentially One Existence and who, from the utterly divine and till now unmanifested Supermind, draw a delegated dynamism for their cosmic functions. The poetic word hailing from the Overmind is the Mantra. We have already spoken of its characteristics. Leading up to its source from the mental plane are the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition. Unlike the Mind proper, the Higher Mind carries a natural awareness of the One Self everywhere and knows and sees through a lofty and comprehensive thought-force. It has "a strong tread often with bare unsandalled feet and moves in a clear-cut light: a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character".1 The One Self everywhere is common to all the overhead planes, but the force at work varies: the Illumined Mind visions rather than thinks. "The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a luminous sweep."2 The Intuition, which must be differentiated from the swift sudden leap of thought which occasionally takes place on the mental level, "is usually a lightning flash showing up a single
1Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Third Series), p. 116.
2ibid.
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spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a single stroke."1 Although none of these three planes has the overwhelming massiveness of the Overmind word and its vibration as from infinite to infinite, all of them have an intrinsic wideness which is not the same as the expansive tension of mental or any other poetry at its most cogent. And Milton has a spontaneous spaciousness of rhythm because, in spite of his thought and word generally lacking in the spiritual depth of the overhead, his rhythm echoes the Higher Mind.
Sri Aurobindo says: "When Milton starts his poem -
Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden Tree -
he is evidently writing from the poetic intelligence. There is nothing of the Higher Mind knowledge or vision either in the substance or the style. But there is a largeness of rhythm and sweep of the language which has a certain kinship to the manner natural to what is above."2 In another place Sri Aurobindo calls Milton's "grand style" a derivate from or substitute for the manner of the "Higher Thought". And here he brings in a comparison with Shakespeare's poetry which too has an affinity with an overhead plane. This affinity seems to be more by the way the vision works than by the sound of its working. Sri Aurobindo3 begins by asking us to take Milton's grand style anywhere at its ordinary level or in its higher elevations: there is always or almost always, he tells us, an echo of the Higher Thought. After citing again
1Ibid.
2Ibid., p. 65.
3Ibid., p. 117.
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the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Sri Aurobindo wants us to consider as an instance,
On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues,
or
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then Sri Aurobindo goes on: "Shakespeare's poetry coruscates with a play of the hues of imagination which we may regard as a mental substitute for the inspiration of the Illumined Mind and sometimes by aiming at an exalted note he links on to the Illumined overhead inspiration itself as in the lines [to sleep] I have more than once quoted:
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?
The rest of that passage falls away in spite of its high-pitched language and resonant rhythm far below the overhead strain. So it is easy for the mind to mistake and take the higher for the lower inspiration or vice versa. Thus Milton's lines might at first sight be taken because of a certain depth of emotion in their large lingering rhythm as having the overhead complexion, but this rhythm loses something of its sovereign right because there are no depths of sense behind it. It conveys nothing but the noble and dignified pathos of the blindness and old age of a great personality fallen into evil days."1
Not that Sri Aurobindo altogether denies to Milton the substance and the expression making the large lingering
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rhythm exercise its sovereign right. He grants: "Naturally, something from the higher planes can come into a poetry whose medium is the poetic intelligence and uplift it."1 A direct uplifting into the Mantric Overmind cannot be expected more frequently than once or twice, but now and again the other overhead levels do mingle their voices with the mental Miltonic or else draw it into themselves: most often their influence, when it does enter in, plays upon a Higher-Mind transfiguration of the mental Miltonic. Perhaps the Higher Mind is directly vocal in:
Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss...2
The Illumined Mind seems to put its own stamp on a Higher-Mind expression when we hear:
Thou Sun, of this great world both eye and soul...3
The deeply suggestive touch of the Intuition appears to lie on a similar utterance that we have already culled:
Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers...4
Possibly a breath of the Overmind itself passes faintly over the same basic speech with the phrase in God's mouth before the creation of the world out of Chaos:
Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill
Infinitude...5
1Ibid., pp. 117-18.
2Bk.V,297.
3Ibid.,171.
4Bk. 111,37-8.
5Bk. VII, 168-69.
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All these phrases, however, are rare wingings that must be carefully distinguished from the general level of Paradise Lost where repeatedly we meet with mental reflections of the overhead. Thus we might easily be tempted to cry "Higher Mind" on reading:
bring back
Through the world's wilderness long-wandered Man
Safe to eternal Paradise of rest.1
But, for all the solemn exquisiteness and expansive poignancy of the second line, a touch of the profundities is still somewhat absent, such as is found in the more simple-worded yet more subtle-thoughted sweep from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
Bear; thou shalt find at last thy road to bliss.
Bliss is the secret stuff of all that lives. [p. 453]
Again, we may imagine the Illumined Mind flashing out of Milton's vivid account of how Satan
Springs upward like a pyramid of fire
Into the wild expanse2
or fusing with the Intuition in the phrase about the Eternal Eye that
forth from his holy mount,
And from within the golden lamps that burn
Nightly before him, saw without their light
Rebellion rising...3
1Bk. XII, 311-14.
2Bk. II, 1013-14.
3Bk.V, 712-15.
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But we should be able to distinguish these semblances from the Illumined Mind truly breaking through the Higher Thought when we get Sri Aurobindo's:
One-pointed to the immaculate Delight,
Questing for God as for a splendid prey,
He mounted burning like a cone of fire [p. 79-80]
and we rise sheer beyond all possible affinities with Milton's "pyramid of fire" or even his "Eternal Eye" when the Illumined Mind comes assimilated into the Intuition and even into the Overmind in the suddenly revelatory:
Our minds hush to a bright Omniscient.[p. 48]
Nor should we be seduced into mixing up the Intuition proper with the suggestive intensity of Milton's
which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell: myself am Hell1 -
or the suggestive obscurity of his
yet from those flames
No light but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe...2
The Intuition proper disturbs our depths in Sri Aurobindo's verses on Hell's weird "epiphanies" -
And serpent grandeurs couching in the mire
Drew adoration to a gleam of slime,[p. 273]
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1Bk. IV, 73-5.
2Bk. 1,62-4.
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or pierces to a sacred secrecy within us with
This dark knew dumbly, immensely the Unknown. [p. 522]
Finally, though the Miltonic poetry can be profoundly moving as well as mighty, we do not yet receive the accent of the Overmind from:
Long were to tell
What I have done, what suffered, with what pain
Voyaged the unreal, vast, unbounded Deep
Of horrible confusion...1
We get the clear Overmind accent in those forceful lines already cited from Sri Aurobindo about Savitri's sacrificial Avatarhood for the evolving world's perfection:
The dubious godhead with his torch of pain
Lit up the chasm of the unfinished world
And called her to fill with her vast self the abyss. [p. 17]
Here I may appropriately quote what Sri Aurobindo wrote to me when in a poem which he had considered "overhead" the line -
An ultimate crown of inexhaustible joy -
was found unsatisfactory by him and I asked him whether it was bad poetry or not "overhead" enough and therefore not in tune with its context. Sri Aurobindo replied: "The line is strong and dignified, but it impresses me as too mental and Miltonic. Milton has very usually (in Paradise Lost) some of the largeness and rhythm of the Higher Mind, but his
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substance is - except at certain heights - mental, mentally grand and noble. The interference of the mental Miltonic is one of the great stumbling blocks when one tries to write from 'above'."1 I changed the line to:
An ultimate crown of joy's infinity.
Sri Aurobindo considered this to be more acceptable as part of the poem concerned. It may be noticed that a small shift is made from the abstractly effective to the concretely effective, from poetic ideation to poetic suggestion, from the conceived spiritual to the perceived spiritual. "Inexhaustible joy" transmits a powerful thought about something beyond the thought-mind: "joy's infinity" conveys a direct vivid sense of the supra-intellectual reality. This reality is now before us with its intrinsic novelty, its natural transcendence of common or human fact: previously it needed to be imagined from a strong hint partly negating such fact and partly magnifying it. Joy is now identified with an infinity: an infinity already there in its own right, with its very being a divine Ananda, hangs upon our view, and when called "an ultimate crown" it immediately brings up the suggestion of a vast overhanging sky free from all trammels. Joy, described as "inexhaustible", had no clear skiey implication: when combined with an ultimate crown", it carried only a massive idea of something domelike above, unhampered by pain.
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri employs constantly and in the highest degree a style presenting spiritual vision and experience in all their concreteness. Even in the moments where a thought-form is prominent, spiritual vision and experience have moulded thought to their own luminous truths instead of thought essaying to capture them in a mental cast for intelligible communication. The style of Savitri thus is different
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1 Life-Literature-Yoga, p. 38.
Page 242
from that of Paradise Lost in very temper and texture. We should commit a psychological mistake to term it Miltonic. Miltonic it is in so far as it organises a stupendous energy with a stupendous control and in so far as Milton has always a spaciousness of utterance. But to dub it Miltonic all round, as most reviews of Savitri have done, is to skim the mere surface of style-quality.
And it differs from the mental Miltonic not only in basic psychology: it differs also in expressive attitude and technical posture. The ends of criticism are hardly served by seeing Miltonism as soon as we have anywhere a high-pitched blank verse embodying at some length an epic theme. The technique of Miltonism is in the first place enjambment, the running over of lines, the sense drawn out inseparably from one verse to another, but with pauses set at varying places within the lines - as in the passage about Beelzebub when fear and desire were swaying his fellow-demons:
Which when Beelzebub perceived - than whom,
Satan except, none higher sat - with grave
Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat, and public care;
And princely counsel in his face yet shone,
Majestic though in ruin. Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look
Drew audience and attention still as night
Or summer's noonday air...1
Savitri has quite a different technique. Take the lines on the heroine herself, conscious of her great transformative mission:
1 Bk. II, 299-309.
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A work she had to do, a word to speak;
Writing the unfinished story of her soul
In thoughts and actions graved in Nature's book
She accepted not to close the luminous page,
Cancel her commerce with eternity,
Or set a signature of weak assent
To the brute balance of the world's exchange. [p. 19]
Sri Aurobindo has made, in a letter, some general remarks on his technique in Savitri. "Savitri," he says, "is blank verse without enjambment (except rarely) - each line a thing by itself and arranged in paragraphs of one, two, three, four, five lines (rarely a longer series), in an attempt to catch something of the Upanishadic and Kalidasian movement, so far as that is a possibility in English...1 Pauses hardly exist in this kind of blank verse; variations of rhythm as between the lines, of caesura, of the distribution of long and short, clipped and open syllables, manifold constructions of vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, assonances, etc., distribution into one line, two line, three or four or five line, many line sentences, care to make each line tell by itself in its own mass and force and at the same time form a harmonious whole -these are the important things."2
Yes, Savitri is mostly end-stopped while Paradise Lost is mainly enjambed, but we must avoid the mistake of reading Milton as if there were to be no retardation of the voice at the close of a line. Although we may not halt as much as we would in an end-stopped structure, we must never forget that poetry is broken up into lines of a certain metrical pattern and the line-unit must be felt to however small a degree. John Diekhoff has even mustered some external evidence that Milton himself, in spite of thinking in run-over blocks and "verse-paragraphs", regarded the line as a more or less
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1Savitri (1954), p. 821.
2Ibid., p. 825.
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isolated unit to be indicated as such by some sort of breath, pause, or lingering at the end.1
The general difference in expressive attitude Sri Aurobindo well touches off half-humourously in a remark drawn by my attachment of the label "Miltonic" to his lines:
The Gods above and Nature sole below
Were the spectators of that mighty strife. [p. 13]
"Miltonic?" asks Sri Aurobindo and goes on to answer: "Surely not. The Miltonic has a statelier more spreading rhythm and a less direct more loftily arranged language. Miltonically I should have written
Only the Sons of Heaven and that executive She
Watched the arbitrament of the high dispute."2
Sri Aurobindo's syntactical construction too is not markedly Latinised like Milton's in numerous places, nor have we in him the typical Miltonic flux and reflux of words except on a very rare occasion as when he says:
A greater darkness waited, a worse reign,
If worse can be where all is evil's extreme;
Yet to the cloaked the uncloaked is naked worst, [p. 211]
(The Inspiration of "Paradise Lost", 1994, pp. 98-113)
1"Terminal Pause in Milton's Verse", Studies in Philology, XXXII (1935), pp. 235-9.
2Savitri, pp. 861-2.
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