Overhead Poetry

The Triumph of Dante

These arms, stretched through ten hollow years,

have brought her

Back to my heart! A light, a hush immense

Falls suddenly upon my voice of tears,

Out of a sky whose each blue moment bears

The sun-touch of a rapt omnipotence.

Ineffable the secrecies supreme

Pass and elude my gaze—an exquisite

Failure to hold some nectarous Infinite!

The uncertainties of time grow shadowless

And never but with startling loveliness,

A white shiver of breeze on moonlit water,

Flies the chill thought of death across my dream.

For, how shall earth be dark when human eyes

Mirror the love whose smile is paradise?—

A smile that misers not its golden store

But gives itself and yearns to give yet more,

As though God's light were inexhaustible

Not for His joy but this one heart to fill!

Sri Aurobindo's Comment

On an early version in which all the fines were not the same as in the final version but where those from "an exquisite" to "yet more" were already there, Sri Aurobindo wrote marking the latter:

"The lines are magnificent—of the highest order."

On the present version of the whole poem:

"Exceedingly fine in all its lines. The one objection that could be made is that there are different kinds of inevitability and not one kind throughout, but that would be hypercriticism when there is so much that is of the first excellence."

"There are three different tones or pitches of inspiration in the poem, each in its own manner reaching inevitability. The first seven

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lines up to 'gaze' bear as a whole the stamp of a high elevation of thought and vision—height and illumination lifted up still farther by the Intuition to its own inspired level; one passage (lines 3, 4) seems to me almost to touch in its tone of expression an Over-mind seeing. But here 'A light, a hush... a voice of tears' anticipates the second movement by an element of subtle inner intensity in it. This inner intensity—where a deep secret intimacy of feeling and seeing replaces the height and large luminosity—characterises the rest of the first part. This passage has a seizing originality and authenticity in it—it is here that one gets a pure inevitability. In the last lines the intuition descends towards the higher mental plane with á less revelatory power in it but more precise in its illumination. That is the difference between sheer vision and thought. But the poem is exceedingly fine as a whole, the close also is of the first order."

The description "pure inevitability" in this comment is to be understood in reference to the various kinds of style which, apart from the various sources or planes of inspiration, have been distinguished by Sri Aurobindo. A letter of his, answering a question about pure inevitability, reads:

"To the two requisites you mention which are technical—'the Tightness of individual words and phrases, the Tightness of the general lingual reconstruction of the poetic vision: that is, the manner, syntactical and psychological, of whole sentences and their co-ordination'—two others have to be added, a certain smiling sureness of touch and inner breath of perfect perfection, bora not made, in the words themselves, and a certain absolute winging movement in the rhythm. Without an inevitable rhythm there can be no inevitable wording. If you understand all that, you are lucky. But how to explain the inexplicable, something that is self-existent? That simply means an absoluteness, one might say, an inexplicably perfect and in-fitting thisness and thereness and thatness and every-thingelseness so satisfying in every way as to be unalterable. All perfection is not necessarily inevitability. I have tried to explain in 'The Future Poetry'—very unsuccessfully I am afraid—that there are different grades of perfection in poetry: adequateness, effectivity,

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illumination of language, inspiredness—finally, inevitability. These are things one has to learn to feel, one can't analyse.

"All the styles, 'adequate', 'effective', etc., can be raised to inevitability in their own line.

"The supreme inevitability is something more even than that, a speech overwhelmingly sheer, pure and true, a quintessential essence of convincingly perfect utterance. That goes out of all classification and is unanalysable. Instances would include the most different kinds of style—Keats' 'magic casements', Wordsworth's Newton and his 'fields of sleep', Shakespeare's 'Macbeth has murdered sleep', Homer's descent of Apollo from Olympus, Virgil's 'Sunt lacrimae rerum' and his 'O passi graviora'.

"Homer's passage translated into English would be perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this: 'And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved, and he came made like unto the night.' His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead.

"I don't think there is any co-ordination between the differences of style and the different planes of inspiration—unless one can say that the effective style comes from the higher mind, illumined from the illumined mind, the inspired from the plane of intuition. But I don't know whether that would stand at all times—especially when each style reaches its inevitable power."

We may note here apropos of The Triumph of Dante that about Dante's own plane of poetry Sri Aurobindo has said: "Dante writes from the poetic intelligence with a strong intuitive drive behind it" — while about his style Sri Aurobindo has pronounced: "The 'forceful adequate' might apply to much of Dante's writing, but much also is sheer inevitable; elsewhere it is the inspired style.... Dante's simplicity comes from a penetrating directness of poetic vision. It

is not the simplicity of an adequate style."

Three, out of the four possible inevitabilities other than the fifth and final and unclassifiable one, may be explicitly illustrated from a sonnet by the very author of The Triumph of Dante:

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