Overhead Poetry

Pharphar

("...Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams"—Milton)

Where is the glassy gold of Pharphar

Or its echoing silver-grey

When the magic ethers of evening

Wash one the various day?

I have travelled the whole earth over

Yet never found

The beautiful body of Pharphar

Or its soul of secret sound.

But all my dreams are an answer

To Pharphar's blmd career;

And the songs that I sing are an image

Of quiets I long to hear.

For, only this unreached beauty

No time shall mar—

This river of infinite distance,

Pharphar.

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Sri Aurobindo's Comment

"Very beautiful indeed, subtle and gleaming and delicate. The sound-suggestions are perfect. I suppose it comes from some plane of intuitive inspiration."

A Comparison between "Pharphar" and

Walter De la Mare's "Arabia"¹

"It is indeed charming—De la Mare seems to have an unfailing beauty of language and rhythm and an inspired loveliness of fancy that is captivating. But still it is fancy, the mind playing with its delicate imaginations. A hint of something deeper tries to get through sometimes, but it does not go beyond a hint. That is the difference between his poem and the one it inspired from you. There is some kinship though no sameness in the rhythm and the tone of delicate remoteness it brings with it. But in your poem that something deeper

¹ ARABIA

Far arc the shades of Arabia

Where the Princes ride at noon,

'Mid the verdurous vales and thickets,

Under the ghost of a moon;

And so dark is that vaulted purple

Flowers in the forest rise

And toss into blossom 'gainst the phantom stars

Pale in the noonday skies.

Sweet is the music of Arabia

In my heart when out of dreams

I still in the thin clear mirk of dawn

Descry her gliding streams;

Hear her strange lutes on the green banks

Ring loud with the grief and delight

Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians

In the brooding silence of night...

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is not hinted, it is caught—throughout—in all the expressions, but especially in such lines as

When the magic ethers of evening

Wash one the various day

or

The beautiful body of Pharphar

Or its soul of secret sound

or

This river of infinite distance,

Pharphar.

These expressions give a sort of body to the occult without taking from it its strangeness and do not leave it in mist or in shadowy image or luminous silhouette. That is what a fully successful spiritual or occult poetry has to do, to make the occult and the spiritual real to the vision of the consciousness, the feeling. The occult is most often materialised as by Scott and Shakespeare or else pictured in mists, the spiritual mentalised, as in many attempts at spiritual poetry—a reflection in the mind is not enough. For success in the former, Arjava's 'Totalitarian' with the stark occult reality of its vision is a good example; for the latter there are lines both in his poems and yours that I could instance, but I cannot recall them accurately just now-but have you not somewhere a line

The mute unshadowed spaces of her mind?

That would be an instance of the concrete convincing reality of which

_______________

They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;

No beauty on earth I see

But shadowed with that dream recalls

Her loveliness to me:

Still eyes look coldly upon me,

Cold voices whisper and say—

"He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,

They have stolen his wits away."

I am speaking—a spiritual state not hinted at or abstractly put as the metaphysical poets most often do it but presented with a tangible accuracy which one who has lived in the silent wideness of his spiritualised mind can at once recognise as the embodiment in word of his experience.

"I do not mean for a moment to deny the value of the exquisite texture of dream in De la Mare's representation, but still this completer embodiment achieves more."

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