On Poetry
THEME/S
EZRA POUND'S CLASSIFICATION OF POETRY *
EXAMPLES FROM SAVITRI
We have divided, à la Patmore, the poetic phrase into the piquant, the felicitous, the magnificent. Now we may make another kind of division—three classes, each of which can hold all the three Patmorean types. I shall borrow it from the Anglo-American modernist poet Ezra Pound. I believe Pound is at present in a mental home—but not because he is a poet. Poets are already mad in a special way—they cannot go mad in the ordinary manner: it must be the non-poetic avatar of Pound that has qualified for the mental home. Anyway, his classification of poetry which I am about to adopt hails from his early days when his was only the poetic madness which is well known from ancient times—the furor poeticus, as the Romans characterised it.
Pound offers us the three heads: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logopoeia. The first term is easily seen as the Greek for "Song-making", the third as the Greek for "Word-making". The second looks somewhat obscure, but we may remember the last half of the word "epiphany": this half connotes "appearing, showing, manifesting". So Phanopoeia means "Vision-making". It is concerned with images. But we must not identify it with what is called Imagism. Imagism is the work of a particular movement or school of poetry which arose round about 1915 as a reaction against the vague emotional poeti-cism of the later Victorian age and insisted on poetry with a clear outline and a hard core, generally one image set forth in objective language. Pound himself was among the leaders of this school and perhaps took it to be the best practitioner
*Culled and enlarged from Nos. 16, 17, 22, 32, 33
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of Phanopoeia. We should not restrict our notion by any such penchant.
Broadly speaking, all poetry is concerned with images, since the poet is primarily the seer, the artistic visualiser. But, while poetry is based on sight and insight, not all of it has the image-aspect in prominence. The two other aspects that can stand out are Melopoeia and Logopoeia. In the former we are impressed overwhelmingly by the music of the verse: often the very structure invites being set to music. Phanopoeia resembles not music so much as painting and sculpture. Logopoeia is the poetic play essentially of ideas: it employs words principally for their meaning: as Pound puts it, "it is the dance of the intellect among words"—it is the con-ceptive word as distinguished from the musical or the pictorial-sculpturesque. But I should like to stress Pound's characterisation of it as "dance". For, unless it has rhythm and harmony, posture and gesture along with the markedly intellectual theme, it cannot be "poiesis" at all.
Musical poetry, like any other, is itself divisible into several modes. There is the early Milton effect—
With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay—
which may be matched with the early Sri Aurobindo:
Sweet water hurrying from reluctant rocks.
Of course, the art in both these instances is not merely of sound-beauty: there is an expressiveness in the sounds and in the arrangement of the words. Thus the Miltonic delay in its quantitative no less than its qualitative character is suggested by the three adjectives in succession prolonging the phrase before the latter reaches its significant completeness
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and resolution in a word whose final stressed syllable is itself a long open vowel-sound. Similarly the Aurobindo-nian hurry goes home to us in four ways: (I) the double accentual pressure of the opening spondaic foot, particularly with the first syllable an intrinsic long; (2) the five r's running through the line; (3) the last two of them making a marked alliteration in the very words where clustered consonants (ct, nt, cks) mply impediment and unwillingness, an "amorous delay" caused by the rocks' sense of the water's sweetness; (4) the occurrence of the same sound s at the end of the line as at the beginning and nowhere else in the verse, thereby rounding off, as it were, the initial motif in spite of the hindering double consonant in which it figures.
Melopoeia is also in the late Milton effect about all who
Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond,
conjuring up the exotic, the out-of-the-way, the rich and rare, the mighty and magnificent by the sheer power of nomenclature. A comparable effect, now not with a fivefold surge of golden-gonged geography but with a fivefold wash and ripple of silver-tongued hagiology, is Rossetti's roll-call of "Lady Mary"'s attendants in Heaven:
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys.
Sri Aurobindo's recital of the list of Apsara-companions of the peerless Urvasie, dancer in the courts of Indra, is at a yet longer liquidity of proper-nouned loveliness:
Menaca, Misracayshie, Mullica,
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Rambha, Nelabha, Shela, Nolinie, Lolita, Lavonya and Tillottama...
It is possible to be intoxicated with such Melopoeia, just as Marcel Proust could never tire of that enchantment from Racine:
La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaë.
(The daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë.)
But we do not have here the finest that poetry can offer in this genre, lacking as it does what Rossetti called "fundamental brain-work". We need a deeper pleasure if we are to rest with Melopoeia. And this pleasure is not found even in the early Milton and early Sri Aurobindo we have cited; for their meaning is still not vital enough. Much less can we stop with effects like Tennyson's
The mellow ouzel fluting in the elm
or his more famous and quite perfect
The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
From early Sri Aurobindo we can bring a fairly flawless snatch of the same witchery:
unseen and near
The windlark gurgles in the golden leaves,
The woodworm spins in shrillness on the bough...
But surely Melopoeia cannot claim its true climax here.
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Perhaps the greatest master of climactic Melopoeia is Virgil. According to Arnold Bennett, the most marvellously rhythmed line in all poetic literature is Aeneas's gesture of helplessness when Queen Dido of Carthage asks him for the story of Troy:
Infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem.
The ring of profound pathos in these Latin vocables is as good as impossible to transfer into English. The nearest I can attempt is:
Queen, you bid me recall a grief no words can fathom, or else:
Words cannot utter, O Queen, the sorrow you bid me remember.
Then there is that other cry in which a whole world of aching human experience obtains its repose in a resignation one with heroic hope:
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem.
Sri Aurobindo has essentially caught its charmed anguish and wisdom in his English version:
Fiercer griefs we have suffered; to these too God will give ending.
Dante also is no mean master of the same art; and Milton of Paradise Lost can match the poets of both the Aeneid and La Divina Commedia. Indeed Milton demonstrates most
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impressively how Melopoeia could be not only lyrical but also epical, a stupendous music in which a grandiose meaning finds organic reverberation. Sound bearing out the sense, not with an obvious echo but with a power of stirring the mind to the magnitude of the events related, meets us in a passage like:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
We have various phrase-lengths concealed within the penta-metrical uniformity of appearance—a changing artistry of pauses lends both diversity and aptness to the musical motives. There are several varieties of sound-texture woven across and down the rich fabric. But what envelops us most unforgettably is the ensemble of the melopoeic symphony, the superb sonority of the pollysyllabism punctuated at suitable places by the dynamic directness of monosyllables especially at the end of each line and with its peak-point in that emphatic "down" after both a trisyllable and a pause. However, it would be incorrect to assert that the masterly effect is due to the sound-art alone and not to the word-craft. Sri Aurobindo has well remarked with reference to the epical Melopoeia of the passage: "the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour of the downfall of the rebel angels: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the hideous and flaming ruin of the downfall, and it is the
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tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear."
Sri Aurobindo's comment signs us towards Phanopoeia. But we shall linger yet a little and pass to a deeper dimension of Melopoeia. The moods Milton turns to music belong, for all their imaginative quality, to the outer mind sovereignly inspired and he has complete grasp over the thing to which he responds audio-visually: practically nowhere do we feel that he is in the midst of elusive presences—presences, of course, that are no less concrete for being elusive but that leave our outer mind incapable of entering with certitude into the mood musicalised. It is different with Virgil and, among past English poets, with Shelley. But Virgil and Shelley themselves differ. Both make their sweetest songs out of saddest thought; but the elusive element in Virgil leaps out of an earthly poignancy whereas in Shelley it plays within an ethereal one. A single instance may suffice:
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with thy dear voice revealing A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.
Here we have Melopoeia about Melopoeia itself—song-making about singing—but, despite an actual woman being the singer, the voice heard by the poet is not of the earth, and his own verse is also shot with an inner rhythm. Halfway through the passage the aerial music begins to be more recognisably of a kind which may be designated Intonation or Incantation. Intonation or Incantation is a rhythm which does not arise so much from the words heard as from an echo they make in a mysterious dimension of our being. It has been created in the poet as
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if his eyes were turned inward and fixed on some occult or spiritual presence and then with the light of it on his consciousness his breath brings forth in sound the thrill of that light, making his words throw a spell on the hearer and plunge him to his own being's secret places. Doubdess, all poetry has an inwarddrawing force, but there is a mood and a rhythm that have it in a special degree and render poetic lines spell-binding.
Among modern poets, de la Mare and Yeats are the two that breathe the inner rhythm most audibly, though the former is only mysterious and the latter semi-mystical with what are known as "the middle worlds". For the full mystical Intonation, the plenary spiritual Incantation, we have to go to Sri Aurobindo. Sometimes we catch his inner rhythm in a single line—a haunting hexameter filled with a secret divine solace and strength for all the fumbles and stumbles of our mortality:
Ever we hear in the heart of the peril a flute go before us—
or a hushing pentameter emptying us of every travail, even the happy ache in us of the world's teeming wonder, natural or supernatural:
Unweave the stars and into silence pass.
Sometimes an Alcaic stanza, charged with suspense, sets before us an uplifted poise of the liberated soul:
He who from Time's dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal's breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being,
Seated above in the omniscient Silence—
or a Sapphic verse, gradually gathering momentum, carries
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the thrilled sense of a supernal inspiration visiting a widely, waiting inwardness:
Slow my heart-beats' rhythm like a giant hammer's;
Missioned voices drive to me from God's doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature's summits,
Ecstasy's chariots.
Sometimes a blank-verse apostrophe is tense with the very words from Nature's summits and they are employed to invoke the Supreme Word that has created not a mere poem but a whole world and has the power to re-create it—the Supreme Word that is the Divine Mother turned towards the universe instead of being rapt in Her own self of infinite light, to which the apostrophe makes a reference in the third person while addressing Her aspect of the universe's archetypal Truth in the second:
O Truth defended in thy secret sun,
Voice of her mighty musings in shut heavens
On things withdrawn within her luminous depths,
O Wisdom-Splendour, Mother of the universe,
Creatrix, the Eternal's artist Bride,
Linger not long with thy transmuting hand
Pressed vainly on one golden bar of Time,
As if Time dare not open its heart to God.
O radiant fountain of the world's delight
World-free and unattainable above,
O Bliss who ever dwellst deep hid within
While men seek thee outside and never find,
Mystery and Muse of hieratic tongue,
Incarnate the white passion of thy force,
Mission to earth some living form of thee...
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Perhaps the sheer acme seems reached on the grandest scale in the whole poem Rose of God, which for its colourful complexity sustained through twenty lines requires separate detailed treatment.1 But in that poem and even in the above excerpts it is difficult to say whether we are dealing with Melopoeia or Phanopoeia. As we shall see, Logopoeia too can fuse with an incantatory Melopoeia.
Clear-cut Phanopoeia can be either a pure description or a tissue of simile and metaphor. Similes of a certain kind are themselves descriptions while functioning as comparisons vivifying a theme all the more. Such similes have been dubbed Homeric, because Homer, taking one or two main points in common between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long comparisons which are complete pictures in their own right—small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives—particularly his Sohrab and Rustam—and in the early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death and Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo. He is describing the heavenly nymph Urvasie awaking from a swoon into which she fell under the abducting assault of a Titan. She awakens to the presence of her saviour, King Pururavus:
As when a child falls asleep unawares,
At a closed window on a stormy day,
Looking into the weary rain, and long
Sleeps, and wakes quietly into a life
Of ancient moonlight, first the thoughtfulness
Of that felicitous world to which the soul
1 See the next essay.
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Was visitor in sleep, keeps her sublime
Discurtained eyes; human dismay comes next,
Slowly; last, sudden, they brighten and grow wide
With recognition of an altered world,
Delighted: so woke Urvasie to love.
I shall not linger over the metrical qualities—modulation, pause, enjambment—or the verbal except to mark the phrase: sublime discurtained eyes." The first adjective does not only mean: "exalted" by the wonder visited during slumber. I believe the literal Latin shade is present as in that phrase where, after saying that God made animals earthward-looking, Lucretius tells us: "os sublime dedit homini"—"He gave man an uplifted face." Sri Aurobindo's "child" awakes with her eyes physically uplifted, looking above: a concrete pictorial touch goes with the general psychological suggestion. "Discurtained" has a twofold meaning in the reverse manner. It seems to signify more than just "opened by parting of the lids": here to the concrete sense is added the idea that the earthly veil by which the eyes are shut off from the soul's world has been temporarily removed. Especially as this adjective follows "sublime", it yields that idea in sympathy with the psychological suggestion of the latter: die experience of exaltation is accompanied by the experience of revelation.
Now to our business. One may think that such lengthy similes are mostly decorative, but in fact when the poet has worked with true imagination they throw a subtle light upon a situation and bring out some truth from behind the surface of things. Sri Aurobindo speaks of a child. Urvasie, by being compared to this child, is revealed as a soul of innocence; she is, after all, a nymph of heaven, an Apsara and, as the poem says afterwards, the Apsaras remain ever pure, no matter what they do. The simile makes the child who has fallen
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asleep wake in the midst of moonlight and keep awhile the feeling of the supernatural felicity explored in dream. Moonlight here has a very significant role. The moon is an old Indian symbol of Divine Nectar, supernatural felicity. If, then, the child awakes into a world whose familiarity is found pervaded and altered by "a life of ancient moonlight", a universe as of some primeval mystery laid bare and bestirred by a pure splendour, is it surprising that she should retain the "thoughtfulness" of the felicitous dream-world? Although "human dismay" comes for a moment, it is brightness that finally remains, and the last word of the simile is "delighted", a word which, as applied to the eyes that "grow wide" still in the moonlight, strengthens further the moon's symbolism and the continuity of its light with the atmosphere of the dream-felicity. All this illuminates the love-experience into which Urvasie woke. Just as the swoon into which she had fallen was due to a monstrous attack on her, comparable to the child's day of storm and "weary rain", Urvasie's love-experience, which is essentially one of bliss, is shown to be a white luminosity belonging to some ageless depth of mysterious being and beatitude, some depth into which she must have plunged during her swoon just as the sleeping child is said to have sojourned in a paradisal realm. The elaborate simile has indeed afforded us in a charming way an insight of Urvasie's life and love.
Insight of one thing through the sight of another: this is the function of figurative language. And, in availing himself of that function, the poet —as Aristotle long ago noted—is most characteristically poetic. He is not the inhabitant of a world of distinct particulars, though particulars acquire a rare uniqueness when seen by him. A wind of wonder blows through his consciousness, and over the ordinary world is spread a strangeness which makes each stone brother in beauty
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to the rosebud and each blossom a sister in sublimity to the Pleiades. A twofold change is achieved: the poetic consciousness tunes up. the life-beat, so to say, of each object to an intensity of self-transcendence, and at the same time knits together the various intensities, making them blend and shade off into one another's light and live as moments of one universal Spirit. The poet's imagination is a fiery reflex of this Spirit: there the miracle of the underlying multiple unity is brought into a mirrored conscious prominence. And it is through simile and metaphor that the poet normally reveals the hidden consonances of the universe. Nor does figurative speech develop at a late stage: it is born with him, as it were—and its revelation is always the same. For instance, when Sri Aurobindo in his earliest verses speaks of dallying "with the sweet-lipped rain" or hearing the blue waves that are "like a shaken robe" or gives us, in the very first hexameters he ever wrote, a picture of Paris under the walls of Troy—
Round him the arrows,
Round him the spears of the Argives sang like voices of maidens
Trilling the anthem of bridal bliss, the chant hymeneal;
Round him the warriors fell like flowers strewn at a bridal,
Red with the beauty of blood—
in each case Sri Aurobindo sees objects and events in an interfusing, a transmuting glow of ecstasy, by which the soft humid sibilance of falling water becomes a suggestion of the human heart melting into love's caress, the roll and shimmer and rustle of the sea heard afar becomes the vesture of some ever-mobile spirit, while Priam's son is made to feel in the close-up of danger, in the sting of death and in the colour of carnage about him the passion, the intoxication, the flushed warmth
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to which Helena has turned all his soul, so that in destruction no less than in life there is nothing for him save the rapture of her beauty.
The world to the poetic vision is a pageant of symbols mutually interpretative, and in this it is akin to mystical insight; for, mysticism, in one of its aspects, is very insistently the Cosmic Consciousness. Still, a difference exists between the two. What is—to use the celebrated Coleridgean term—"the esemplastic imagination" in the poetic experience is to the mystic a direct realisation—in his being's very stuff rather than in an imaginative mirror—of "the one Spirit's plastic press", as Shelley puts it. Hence we may regard the poetic experience at once as an initiator of mysticism and as a phenomenon incomplete without the life spiritual lived for its own sake. This experience, for Sri Aurobindo, proved to be both. He who dallied with "the sweet-lipped rain" knew that the passing of the years, from youth towards old age, were meant
To warn the earthward man that he is spirit Dallying with transience...
And with the growth of time the imaginative faculty, gatherer of the many into a single significance, deepened into concrete contact with the hidden World-Self and entered into realms behind and beyond the physical, the vital, the mental and touched Realities which the imagination tries to figure forth by simile and metaphor but which in their supernatural "plane" are substantial in their own right. These Realities are no abstractions needing to be vivified: they hold in themselves the divine originals of earthly objects and can be seen and felt. Shape and colour and palpable stuff in the most actual sense are intended by Sri Aurobindo when in Savitri he makes the spiritual aspirant reach at the top of his inward journey
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White chambers of dalliance with Eternity And the stupendous gates of the Alone.
Phanopoeia at its most intense, at its most fundamental is here.
Equally intense and fundamental but in another manner is the Phanopoeia of a Savitri-line
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in heaven.
Here occult vision is absorbed into an epigrammatic statement, a thought-disclosure. Phanopoeia is inextricably wedded to Logopoeia; and we may take the line as our starting-point for a consideration of logopoeic poetry proper. Nor have we far to go for it. This line does not stand alone; it is immediately followed by another after a comma, and the two make a perfect occasion for comparing the phanopoeic and the logopoeic:
Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in heaven,
The impossible God's sign of things to be.
Let me first explain the meaning. A chimera is a queer mythical creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail—and, as if this combination were not enough, its mouth breathes fire. Sri Aurobindo has made the chimera even queerer than it usually is: he has given it wings—with, I think, a purpose. He uses the word "chimera" for something fantastic in idea, and what he means to say in his first line is: "All strange apparently immaterialisable dreams in earth's mind, all fanciful seemingly unattainable desires in earth's heart—these are not a mere imaginative play of impossibilities: already are they realities in the depths of the unknown Divine, realities as natural as horses, and they are heavenly originals, truths of God, whose distorted representatives on earth are the chimerical notions of
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man, notions which have some quality of aspiration about them as if they were cries sent up to the Supreme, as if they were set winging like prayers to the Omnipotent. Further, the realities existing in heaven, the original truths corresponding to the chimeras, are part of a plan for the earth. Just as steeds are part of the plan actualised in the earth's past and present, those original truths are part of a plan for the earth's future."
Now, with the full meaning of the line before us, we may look at the next. It expresses the same essential idea without any image-colour—almost abstractly, one may say, but with perfect pointedness and fauldess rhythm—that is, in a thoroughly poetic way yet by suppression of all imagery, except perhaps for a light indirect touch of it in "sign". Here is Logopoeia—poetic word-thought—in concentrated clarity matching exactly the compact picturesqueness of the preceding verse's Phanopoeia—poetic word-image.
This concentrated clarity is intuitive in essence, though it may be intuition taking a mental shape and not acting in its own original body. The intuitive nature of it—a straight simple pointer that indicates much in little and suggests more than says it—can be gauged by comparing the verse with these two from elsewhere in Savitri:
The high gods look on man and watch and choose Today's impossibles for the future's base.
The mind's own accent—expository in its mode—is very well heard in this extended pronouncement. The pronouncement mentalises also our "chimera" - line by mentioning "the high gods" and thus bringing in that line's "heaven" no less than the next one's "God". In passing we may remark that the "chimera" - line is also intuitive by its suggestive compactness, but it blends what Sri Aurobindo calls illumination with its
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intuition, a dynamism of brilliant imagery giving the body of pure insight a rich vesture of manifold spiritual sight. Something of this illumination as well as something of intuition transforms very felicitously the mental content in the Phanopoeia of the second half of the following glimpse, from Sri Aurobindo's semi-philosophic colloquy The Rishi,
O King, no thought is vain; our very dreams
Substantial are;
The light we see in fancy, yonder gleams
In the star.
The Logopoeia of the first half here is again typically mental— without a marked drive of intuition, though poetic nonetheless and having, as it were, in its tail-end a faint foresahdow of the intuitive turn which is about to come in its wake. We can observe from the Rishi-excerpt and the Savitri -"quotes" that Logopoeia is most effective when it is intuitive rather than expository. And at its highest it can make as memorable poetry as anything Phanopoeia No line, however astonishing in image, has surpassed the Dantesque assertion which we have culled when discussing Patmore's triple characterisation of the poetic phrase:
E la sua voluntade è nostra pace.
(His Will alone is our serenity.)
Or take these five lines from Savitri:
Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
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A secret Will compels us to endure,
Our life's repose is in the Infinite;
It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.
There is a controlled power in the passage, achieving a refined sublimity that states in marmoreal yet living poetic language the final truth about all existence in the cosmos. One phrase in it—
A secret Will compels us to endure—
reminds us of some lines from Sri Aurobindo's early blank-verse narrative Love and Death, lines which too we have cited before. After lamenting the frustrating transience of life for human beings who come into birth with "passionate and violent souls", Ruru views their entry into the Underworld and cries:
...Death helps us not. He leads
Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,
The naked spirit here...
Very vivid and forceful Phanopoeia is in this phrase. But the Logopoeia of the other lines is no whit less poetic in its own fashion, and the line following them—
Our life's repose is in the Infinite—
is one of the greatest—quite fit to rank beside the verse we have drawn from Dante. In fact, it is the articulation of an idea affined to the one in Dante. Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in connection with a
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life ending not in a cessation of action but in a supreme living, a divine activity in the world as well as beyond. The repose is a consummation, not a quiescence, and in this consummation, according to Sri Aurobindo, there would be what in another peak-moment of spiritual Logopoeia he has described as
Force one with unimaginable rest.
We may well close with this peak-moment, but I have an interesting set of logopoeic passages which would help us differentiate the ways in which the intellect can "dance" among words as it functions on different "planes". Shakespeare is the phanopoeic artist par excellence and that too in a supercharged packed fashion. He has very few elaborate comparisons. His mind is too active and darting for them. But images are the very fabric of his thinking and feeling: his poetry pulses with metaphor upon metaphor and he can rarely stop his Logopoeia from passing into Phanopoeia. However, in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic level for several lines. There Macbeth is debating the murder of King Duncan who is a guest for the night at Macbeth's castle:
If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch
With his surcease success, that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We'd jump the life to come...
It is rather a complex passage. The first "done" means "ended", the second "completed", the third "performed". The sense is that if the murder can be regarded as a perfectly
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finished thing when it is carried out completely then the best course is to commit it soon. This sense is elaborated in the next phrase. "Trammel up" means "arrest, bind up, entangle". Macbeth wishes that the murder would have no sequel, run no risk of later discovery and ultimate punishment: the fatal blow which would lead to the cessation of Duncan's life—his surcease—should be in the moment of that cessation a total success for ever and constitute in itself the whole history of the crime—the full being and the entire ending of the dark deed here upon the earth. If there were no after-effects, no possible results dangerous to the criminal, then Macbeth would consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever punishment doled out by God in the other world. The passage is very effective in expression and is regarded as high poetry by the critics. But, as they have noted, it has a sibilant hissing quality rather than the quality of melody. It can certainly not be called melopoeic. Yet its broken rhythms and its tendency to harshness of sound are themselves deemed by criticism the master-means of poetically bringing about the communication Shakespeare intended—the communication of desperate haste and breathless excitement. As Cleanth Brooks and R. P. Warren tell us, the lines give with their lack of ordinary melodious effects the impression of a conspiratorial whisper. Not only Melopoeia but also Phanopoeia is absent through most of the passage. Though the language is extremely vivid and has a strong seeing power in words like "trammel" and "catch", explicit imagery is wanting except towards the close where we have "the bank and shoal of time". A shoal is a place of shallow water in which there is a submerged sand-bank. It would seem that Shakespeare is imaging death as a strip of land between two seas—the one being time, the other eternity. Personally I do not quite grasp the appositeness of the metaphor, but Shakes-
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peare's language is vigorous enough to make the picture of the bank and shoal, upon which the act of "jumping" the next life is to be done, a telling one.
The passage as a whole is intense Logopoeia of what we may term the vitalistic mind at work: the nerves are at play, the sensations are astir all through the thinking process. In contrast see the working of the mind proper, the true reflective being drawing up the living energy into its own uses: here is a speech made by Milton's Satan at sight of the infernal regions to which he has been condemned:
Hail, horrors, hail,
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor; one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than He
Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
Here for His envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.
A Titanism is articulate in the lines, but, however misdirected, the sheer sense of the mind's independence is magnificent: this independence is celebrated in language hailing from the mental plane itself. It would be difficult to excel the poetic quality of this passage where thought and not sight or music is the main feature. But we may observe that nothing is abstract: we feel a movement of concrete thinking: the very ideas are as if objects
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which the mind arranges and juxtaposes, and the language too is what I may call eyeful thought, though the eyefulness is not as marked as in Shakespeare. This eyeful thought may be contrasted to the thoughtful eye that is the character of Phanopoeia. The eye, of course, has always to be at work in poetry; but it can be either adjectival or substantival. The difference in the position it occupies may perhaps be illustrated most impressively by two passages from Sri Aurobindo.
There is the sestet of the mighty Nirvana-sonnet:
Only the illimitable Permanent
Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still
Replaces all. What once was I, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness content
Either to fade in the Unknowable
Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.
The last line is phanopoeic, all the others logopoeic. But here too we have no touch of dry intellectuality. All the less because Sri Aurobindo, though couching his expression in terms of thought, is really writing what he has called "Overhead Poetry"—poetry breaking from secret planes of consciousness above the mind. It is Thought with a capital T. Not the vitalistic mind, not the mind proper, but the spiritual mind is vibrant throughout, with its touch on spiritual realities that are known by subtle inner senses or by direct identity through an extension of one's sheer self. Eyeful Thought uttering an experience that goes beyond all earth and all hell and even all heaven into a pure infinitude where name and form are effaced has been set artistically working by the realisation Sri Aurobindo had at Baroda in 1908.
A further vivification, as it were, of the Unknowable spoken of is given us in some lines in Savitri where also the Overhead
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planes function but through an eye with a capital E. The Thoughtful Eye is now at work to show us that the Unknowable is not an impotent void or a divine darkness: even when there is a negation of all that we can conceive, even when there is an emptiness of all intelligible positives, what remains is yet a plenary light: only, that plenitude is lost in complete mystery for our conception. This mystery, however, must not be named either Being or Non-being: beyond Being, it passes into Non-being—yet even to say Non-being is to define it too much and also confine it too much. Observe how Sri Aurobindo compasses the mystery:
If all existence could renounce to be,
And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms
And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,
Some lustre of that Reality might appear.
The terms are at once Yes and No. Existence is said to give itself up to non-existence, but the giving up is a refuge and what it gives itself up to waits as if with arms. The arms connect up with the ciphered round: the ciphered round is, of course, zero, but the circle is suggested to be formed by the joined arms of Non-being around Being. And when Non-being is said to strike out its own zero, what do we understand? On the one hand, a deeper negation than Non-being, as if the zero were too concrete as well as too limited to indicate the supreme vacuity which the Ultimate is to our experience. On the other hand, to strike out the zero is to cancel the negation brought by Non-being and suggest a new positive which yet is not Being. The last line supports this suggestion and, in the act of calling the Ultimate "that Reality", differentiates the Ultimate from both "existence" and its opposite. Further, a nameless thrill is hinted by all the lines in the process of the ever profounder
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immergence. Being lets itself be absorbed as though into an indescribable Lover, and Non-being has a dynamism of self-denial, and what results and remains breaks out like light: a flush and a warmth no less than a vividness are present. Finally, we may go on to note that after all the enigmatic Yes and No have been practised the realisation is just "some lustre": not the whole Presence of the final Absence but merely a bit of its all-swallowing glory comes into view. This stroke of "some"-ness is the crowning surprise: we think that everything possible in order to plunge from the deep to the deeper and to the deepest has been done and then we are told that the utmost we can do can bring no more than a moiety of the sovereign secrecy to our realisation!
I have spoken of the Thoughtful Eye acting here; but the thoughtfulness is so great and the whole poetic phenomenon is so much a kind of super-Hegelian dialectic that we may signi-ficantly adapt Sri Aurobindo's own Nirvanic phrase:
What once was Eye, in It
A silent unnamed emptiness.
At the same time the emptiness is full of visionary potency and stands on the verge of either fading in the metaphysical Unknowable or thrilling with the visionary Infinite's luminous seas and regaining Phanopoeia. It would be best to speak of Logophany.
We should take even one more step. There is a Miltonic flux and reflux of sound, a Song Celestial heaves and falls, a mysterious Melopoeia is composed, the Logophany is also a symphony. The three classes proposed by Pound are in unison—or, as he might himself like us to say, they become the pounding of a single giant heart of quintessential spiritual poetry.
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