Sri Aurobindo - The Poet

The Longest Sentence in English Poetry

The longest sentence in English poetry—143 words and, if a compound is counted as two, 144—is in Savitri, Book IV, Conto III, P.426.

We must understand, of course, that true sentence-length does not really depend on putting a full-stop as late as possible and substituting commas and semi-colons and colons for it wherever we can. The true length is organic. The construction is such that the components, however independent-seeming, are grammatically inseparable. Many of them are really subordinate clauses or else contain words that internally link them together, as against mere external linkage by means of and's which add mechanically rather than organically to the length of a sentence. In the instance from Savitri we have an ultra-Homeric simile, a long-drawn-out comparison whose sense, beginning with "As", is completed only when the full comparative picture has been painted and then the central situation which the simile illuminates is stated. If a sentence starts with an "As", it cannot be complete until there is a "so also" or its equivalent in some form at the other end to introduce the main theme.

Further, in a truly long sentence, not only is the syntax organic: the very organicity has what we may call a living limita-tiveness which practically ensures that the sentence would assimilate within its vital system only the right amount of detail necessary to unfold the central meaning: a limit is intrinsically imposed upon the length, rendering this length, and no other, vitally significant. Such organicity is different from that of a passage where to enrich the theme one can go on drawing the length out with illustrative minutiae.

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Thus A Nocturnal Reverie by Anne, Countess of Winchelsea (1660?-1720), cast in heroic couplets, consists of one long sentence running into 50 lines and 367 words or, with each of its four compounds rating as two words, 371. The main clause does not appear until the forty-sixth line; most of the poem up to this point is a series of qualifying clauses. But the structure has no living limitativeness in the stria sense. The poem starts with

In such a night, when every louder wind

Is to its distant cavern safe confined—

and continues with particular on particular of imagery intended to create an atmosphere of peace, all the images introduced by the conjunction "when." The images do serve a single mood or impression, but they are not dictated by any palpable necessity which would exclude others—nor are they even in direct spatial relationship among themselves. There is no internal reason why, with more abundant observation, the poet should not have gone on adding many more than she had already done. In the sentence from Sri Aurobindo we have no open-endedness of this sort. The theme demands a special restricted development: nothing except a number of relevant details can be brought in within the organic form, giving it its length.

Sri Aurobindo's theme is: how, on hearing some words from her father Aswapathy, Savitri wakes up to the sense of her true mission:

As when the mantra sinks in Yoga's ear,

Its message enters stirring the blind brain

And keeps in the dim ignorant cells its sound;

The hearer understands a form of words

And, musing on the index thought it holds,

He strives to read it with the labouring mind,

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But finds bright hints, not the embodied truth:

Then, falling silent in himself to know

He meets the deeper listening of his soul:

The Word repeats itself in rhythmic strains:

Thought, vision, feeling, sense, the body's self

Are seized unalterably and he endures

An ecstasy and an immortal change;

He feels a Wideness and becomes a Power,

All knowledge rushes on him like a sea:

Transmuted by the white spiritual ray

He walks in naked heavens of joy and calm,

Sees the God-face and hears transcendent speech:

An equal greatness in her life was sown.

Perhaps the next longest sentence—141 words and, if the three compounds count each for 2, 144 as in Sri Aurobindo's sentence—ends Matthew Arnold's Scholar Gypsy, again a unit composed of an elaborated simile.

In this connection it may be of interest to mention that the longest sentence in English prose—659 words—is said to be in Chapter 4, Section 6 of Jeremy Taylor's well-known book Holy Dying. The next longest—432 words—occurs, I gather, on pp. 80-81 of the English translation of Proust's Swann's Way (Chatto & Windus's Phoenix Library). The longest after this—321 words—comes on p. 624 of The Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo (American Edition, 1949). This sentence is the second in the paragraph which starts speaking of "a unity behind diversity and discord" as "the secret of the variety of human religions and philosophies". It runs:

"Whether they see dimly the material world as the body of the Divine, or life as a great pulsation of the breath of Divine Existence, or all things as thoughts of the cosmic Mind, or realise that there is a Spirit which is greater than these things, their

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subtler and yet more wonderful source and creator,—whether they find God only in the Inconscient or as the one Conscious in inconscient things or as an ineffable superconscious Existence to reach whom we must leave behind our terrestrial being and annul the mind, life and body, or, overcoming division, see that He is all these at once and accept fearlessly the large consequences of that vision,—whether they worship Him with universality as the Cosmic Being or limit him and themselves, like the Positivist, in humanity only or, on the contrary, carried away by the vision of the timeless and spaceless Immutable, reject Him in Nature and Cosmos,—whether they adore Him in various strange or beautiful or magnified forms of the human ego or for His perfect possession of the qualities to which man aspires, His Divinity revealed to them as a supreme Power, Love, Beauty, Truth, Righteousness, Wisdom,—whether they perceive Him as the Lord of Nature, Father and Creator, or as Nature herself and the universal Mother, pursue Him as the Lover and attracter of souls or serve Him as the hidden Master of all works, bow down before the one God or the manifold Deity, the one divine Man or the one Divine in all men or, more largely, discover the One whose presence enables us to become unified in consciousness or in works or in life with all beings, unified with all things in Time and Space, unified with Nature and her influences and even her inanimate forces,—the truth behind must ever be the same because all is the one Divine Infinite whom all are seeking."

This sentence may at first strike one as mechanically additive within its organic structure rather than as coming alive with an internal limitativeness. But actually the alternatives listed have a self-restrictive character: only a fixed number of them are relevant, exhausting the real possibilities of the variety into which human religions and philosophies can meaningfully proliferate in relation to the secret divine unity.

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