On Poetry
THEME/S
COVENTRY PATMORFS CHARACTERISATION
OF THE POETIC PHRASE*
Coventry Patmore distinguishes the poetic phrase under three heads: piquancy, felicity, magnificence. And he remarks that the supreme phrase of poetry mingles all these qualities in various measures.
Let us try to define the terms. Piquancy in poetry is an agreeable sharpness, a pleasantly disturbing irritant, a sort of fine paradoxicality. "Felicity" is a term very often used for all kinds of appropriate poetic expressions. In a special sense distinct from what the other two terms connote, felicity in poetry is a strikingly apt delightfulness which does not stimulate as piquancy does but which, even when inge-niousness is present, causes a deep satisfaction with the keen beauty-part of the utterance. Magnificence is a power widening and enrichening the vision: it has an overwhelming loveliness rather than a stimulating or a delighting one, it is a bold lavishness though what is lavished is yet well-organised.
We may broadly illustrate Patmore's classification with three brief examples from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri For piquancy, take:
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep.
For felicity, mark:
All can be done if the God-touch is there
* Adapted from No. 5, 14
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For magnificence, revolve:
I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.
The first line hits off with a profound cleverness the stupidity of so-called wise men where the manifestation of the Divine such as Sri Aurobindo has in mind is concerned, a manifestation ultimately transforming the physical being itself. The wise men will chatter away, discussing the pros and cons of the Life Divine in the integral Aurobindonian sense. I shall not be surprised if some of them, who may be married and harried men, turn round and say: "Why all this bother and exertion about the Life Divine when our urgent need is really the Wife Divine?" But even if they are not so foolish they will still be too much lost in intellectual hairsplitting and abstract logic to note the growth of God going on under their very noses. The only growth which they can note under their noses is their own moustaches. And perhaps there too they do not see that the moustaches are often shockingly untrimmed. Then there is the word "sleep". After their barren discussions they are contented enough to go to sleep—or perhaps each of them is already asleep during the logic-chopping by the others, and certainly all of them, even while jabbering away, are all the time asleep to the fact of God's increasing manifestation. The word "sleep" picks out with devastating brevity both the complacence and the unconsciousness of those who wag their tongues in a merely mental way about occult and spiritual phenomena.
If we look a little closely at the two parts of the piquant statement we shall observe a number of important implications. When God's growing up is contrasted to the wise men's talking and sleeping we should understand that the former activity goes on in a great silence and that this silence differs radically
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from the quiet into which the wise men fall by slumbering. The difference is precisely that the wise men fall into a dark quiet whereas God grows up in a peaceful perfection of light: the adverb "up" is significant, showing the progressive direction of the evolving divinity, a direction opposite to the downward movement, the sinking and submergence of awareness, that is the sleep of the mere mind after its bouts of pretentious philosophy about things beyond its ken. I may also mention a breath of the inevitable, a throb of the spontaneously organic, in the alliteration of "God" and "grow", as if to grow up were an act of the very nature of God. The presence of the same vowel o, though first in a short sound and then in a long one, strengthens the effect. The only other pointed alliteration is of "while" and the opening word 'Vise" of the second half of the statement. This, together with the assonance the two words make by their long i's renders it subtly appropriate that God's growth should take place during the period when talking and sleeping are carried on by wise men. And what God does is itself timed with what these men do by the long duration of the vowel, the quantitative lingering of the voice, in all the three vocables concerned: "grow", "talk", "sleep".
So much for the piquant line. The first thing to mark about the next phrase is the deeply melodious ring, the tolling as of a golden bell, with which Sri Aurobindo starts it: "All can be done,..." A grand announcement is made with a controlled power of musical language. But the line is felicitous not only because it is beautifully moving in a poisedly powerful way: it is felicitous also because it has a subdued piquancy exquisitely held in the contrast between "All" and "touch". It says that everything is possible—and the omni-possibility is said to be compassed by nothing more than a touch of God: one finger of light brought by the hand of His Grace can dissolve adamantine
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difficulties, ages of massive darkness. And observe how the vowel-quantities help out the significance. The smallness required of the miraculous agency is conveyed by the short though stressed vowels in "God-touch", while the bigness of what is miraculously conquerable is there in the long stressed vowel of "All". But the conquest of the apparently big by the apparently small is shown by the stressed yet short vowel of "done" which anticipates and prepares the quantities of "God-touch". And a further expressiveness is achieved by the repetition, in "touch", of the very sound that is short in "done". We may even see the intuitive work of the poet's art in the fact that the same sound which is long in "All" is repeated in a short form in "God" as if to render the latter word capable, in its own terms, of matching the former whose meaning is to be met and coped with by its meaning.
If there is any line in European literature of which I am most reminded, both as regards sound and substance, by this of Sri Aurobindo's, it is Dante's famous
E la sua voluntade è nostra pace.
Sri Aurobindo's line rivals Dante's as well as affines itself to it in what I may call the art no less than the heart. Before I proceed, let me tell you that in Italian the ch (while ch is always k) and the e is always pronounced when it is an end-vowel, unless it gets merged in another vowel immediately following it. To begin the comparison: there is here also the note of a deeply melodious bell, though now more with l's than with n's in the opening: "E la sua voluntade." Literally, the whole line may be Englished: "And His Will is our peace." Such a translation has an admirable directness, but the majesty of the original is absent. And absent too is the note we have spoken of. To catch this note as well as something of the polysyllabism
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which gives the Italian that majesty, a translator has written:
His Will alone is our tranquillity.
An excellent line, this, but a little different in its total effect from Dante's. It has the resonance, yet not the directness of the original. And the sense of cessation of unrest brought by the s and ch sounds of "nostra pace" is lacking. I think this sense will come out if we write:
His Will alone is our serenity.
Then we shall have three sibilances—those in "His" and "is" and "serenity"—answering to the three related sounds, sibilant or semi-sibilant, of the Italian "sua" and "nostra" and "pace". Going back to Sri Aurobindo's line, I may draw your attention to the fact that my comparison of it with Dante's in the original does not end with the bell-rhythm. The s and ch of "nostra pace" are also almost exactly present here, though in reverse order, in "touch" and "is".
So much for the art of the two lines. What about the heart? I suggest that the same heart is in both, approached and traversed from two opposite sides. In the Dante line we may read a profound faith in the rightness of God no less than in His almightiness—almightiness against which nothing can prevail. Only God's Will is the ultimate determinant, and whatever He wills is right. A full acceptance of His omniscient decisions, a total surrender to His omnipotent acts—in short, an utter love which wants nothing except what He in His wisdom and power gives—is the sole road to attaining peace. This means a humility before the afflictions and adversities of life, a resignation to the blows of circumstance, a devotion that never doubts in the
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midst of doom—because all unpleasant happenings are seen to be the workings of God's inscrutable hand which nothing can stop and which even through the worst has to be taken as doing the best for us. To illustrate most acutely what is meant, we may look at a stanza from a French poem of the sixteenth century, Malherbe's celebrated Consolation à M. du Perrier sur la Mort de sa Fille. In this stanza, which is the final one, Malherbe, after saying that the rich and the poor alike are subject to the law of Death, la Mort, tells the grieving and inconsolable father:
De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience
Il est mal à propos;
Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science
Qui nous met en repos.
In the last two lines we have Dante's simplicity of penetrating intuitiveness transposed into a moving clarity typical of French verse at its finest. John Chadwick whom we Aurobindonians know as Arjava has rendered Malherbe most sensitively throughout the poem and especially in the closing verse (where the pronoun "her" in his version refers, of course, to Death):
Impatient murmurs or embittered turning
Against her, deem not best;
Save willing the thing God wills, no other learning
Shall bring us to our rest.
The religious quality recommended is a mixture of what Indian Yoga terms samatā, śraddhā and bhakti, a mixture ofequanimity, faith and devotion to be practised vis-a-vis all occurrences and conditions; and the result is spiritual calm.
Sri Aurobindo's line also involves God's Will, for it speaks of
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things being done with the help of the God-touch and wherever there is a conscious doing there is will. Here too we have the idea that God's Will is almighty and that it is the most right fore yes, right, since surely the "All" that can be done is not anything mean or cruel or depraved: Sri Aurobindo is not saying, "You can succeed in being a thorough devil if you call God's touch to your aid." The thing which ought to be done, the action which would lead to the true, the beautiful, the good, is intended though not in a conventional sense which shies away from the bold, the grim, the stormy—and we are told that no matter how difficult or impossible-seeming such right action may be, we shall be victorious by having on our side the power of God in even a small measure. But the Tightness and the power of God are visioned here primarily not as the establisher of things as they are: they are visioned primarily as the changer of established things. Of course, God is both. He has brought forth an imperfect universe, but only in order to make it perfect. And, since He has brought it forth, even in the most imperfect state of affairs His Will towards perfection must be at work, so that whatever imperfection is present is perfecdy in place and carries His Will in itself. The universe therefore is a paradox. It is at the same time God's Will already manifest and a mass of difficulties and darknesses in which this Will has to manifest progressively and create bliss and light. A single truth with two faces is before us and the Dante-line shows one face and the line of Sri Aurobindo shows the other face which must be seen if we are to transform earth-existence into the Life Divine.
Even Death, in Sri Aurobindo's view, need not be accepted as an irrevocable decree of God. Just as ignorance in the mind has to be removed, just as misery in the emotional being has to be abolished, just as incapacity in the life-force has to be eradicated, so also whatever in the physical form tends towards disintegration—that is, towards death—has to be conquered. "A tall
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order," the sceptic may sneer—but to grant that God's perfection awaits to be manifested is logically to imply this extreme triumph, though the triumph can be got only after a colossal travail. An unavoidable part of the instrument for that triumph is "willing the thing God wills" and taking with love the varied operations of the Universal Spirit in its drive through our little likes and dislikes. Then only can we build on a solid foundation —the foundation of a supreme peace—the hope and aspiration and effort of transfiguring the scheme of the universe with the fiat of the Transcendent Spirit that awaits with its archetypes to remould man and evolve even in man's body the Immortal. So we may bring the Aurobindonian idea to some kind of expository focus of relation with the Dantesque by picking up again the theme of Death from Malherbe's poem and writing against Chadwick's translation of his final stanza the following:
Impatient murmur nor embittered turning
Against Death wins escape:
Only the God-touch on man's body burning
Calls forth the immortal shape.
The sense here is that we certainly have to start with the Dantesque attitude: we must stand imperturbable, since neither complaint nor resentment can free us from mortality. The sole help lies in receiving the luminous touch of God more and more upon our physical substance and converting the clay-sheath into the concealed divine original of it.
Now for a few words on the magnificence of that third verse from Sri Aurobindo:
I must clear immediately a possible misunderstanding. I have
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always described the poet as, among other things, a dreamer. I have meant that the poet looks beyond the actual and thrills to a hidden perfection, to the Transcendent Spirit's veiled archetypes and to the Universal Spirit's secret omnipresent beauty. God the Dream in this sense must never be rejected and should be cherished if God the Fire is to come into play. In fact, the two are fused—and in poetry itself the reverie and the realising rapture are indissoluble. Has not Gerald Manley Hopkins characterised the very activity of the poetic imagination as deriving from this rapture, in that phrase of his—
Sweet fire, the sire of Muse...?
The Dream against which Sri Aurobindo makes his Savitri pit herself is an indulgence in high visions accepted as wonders that cannot take birth—wonders about which he writes:
Behold this fleeting of light-tasselled shapes,
Aerial raiment of unbodied gods;
A rapture of things that never can be born...
Cloud satisfies cloud, phantom to longing phantom
Leans sweetly, sweetly is clasped or sweetly chased...
The mysticism which Sri Aurobindo proclaims through Savitri's lips is a dynamic mysticism opposed to lying content with a Divine Perfection shining in some ever-aloof ether, a beautiful but issueless splendour. It holds God to be a power self-effectuating in the world of men, not merely a Light but also a Fire, the Truth that conquers by consuming our imperfections. Nor is the Fire-idea confined to the Power-aspect of God. Dreams such as Savitri abjures have a far-awayness that can never be palpable to the heart. Fire is the very inhabitant of the heart—nay, it is the heart's own substance. When God is
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Fire, He is an intense intimacy—a supreme Love close and all-consummating. With His centre in the seat of longing, He becomes a rapture that can radiate forth into the physical world and make it rich with a wide and wonderful communion, a manifold infinite oneness. To approach and call into ourselves and treasure as our delight a Godhead conceived and felt as what Patmore in a magnificent phrase of his own has termed a "crimson-throbbing Glow"—to do this is to make possible God's incarnation in each of us, to do this is to bring the God-touch that can do all and to help God grow up in the midst of the foolish wise men of the world. Thus Sri Aurobindo's magnificence of phrase reveals the pure yet passionate Yoga that is the secret of the irresistible divine potentiality asserted by his felicity of phrase and the ground of the spiritual evolution that his piquancy of phrase prophesies.
We may conclude with two points about the technique of the line. First, the three parts of the verse—"I cherish/God the Fire,/not God the Dream"—are held together in a subtle role of continuity by the occurrence of r in each. Secondly, the word "cherish" is most effectively in tune with the positive content of the statement carried by the word "Fire" as distinguished from the negative content of the word "Dream". For, "cherish" means, according to the Oxford Dictionary, not only to nurse, foster, cling to, hold dear but also to keep warm—and its very sound suggests the peculiar substance and activity of fire: the rich delicacy that is a scorching softness, the childlike quiver that is a rapture-rush.
In connection with this line we may watch the very soul of the poetic process coming into its own through the several revisions Savitri underwent in Sri Aurobindo's constant endeavour to lift it higher and higher in spiritual content and form. In the earlier versions we find a play of penetrating revelatory idea reaching its fulfilment just short of that absolute profundity of
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suggestion which is so easy and natural in an increasing degree in the later recasts. The last of these versions has Savitri declaring to Death:
Advance, O Death,
Beyond the phantom beauty of this world,
Of its vague citizens I am not one,
Nor has my heart consented to be foiled.
I cherish there the fire and not the dream.
We have here an effective statement, but the poetic point is made with a mingling of the piquant and the felicitous rather than with the magnificent outstanding. By itself this is no fault. What may be regarded as a slight shortcoming is that the line's "there" directs us beyond itself to a preceding referent -"my heart"—and prevents the sheer self-sufficiency distinguishing the world's greatest one-line utterances.
Sri Aurobindo moves towards this quality in a variant dating back to the same early period:
I cherish, god, the fire and not the dream.
A very impressive affirmation is achieved, piercing with a certain finality to a fundamental posture of militance and intransigence in a region of happy illusions. No doubt, the word "god" with a small g, applied as it always is to Death in the poem, has again a reference backward, but it is not too much of a bar to self-containment: it can be taken as a generality instead of a particularity. In any case, we are in the presence of the mot juste with this line. In that fine form the phrase would be a credit to any poet, and nobody would think of any falling short until he saw how Sri Aurobindo suddenly brought what we may term the mot inévitable in the ultimate recension of the passage:
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Beyond the phantom beauty of this world;
For of its citizens I am not one.
The full potential of the penetrating revelatory idea is released, the expression acquires the utmost intensity, the rhythmic movement an absolute concentration. The omission of the line about Savitri's "heart" and, in the verse preceding it, the dropping of the adjective "vague" and the introduction of the linking "For" give the formulation a spare directness as well as a close-jointedness. And these characteristics serve also to set off the closing phrase's new directness of a dense rather than a spare kind and its break-away, as it were, from the passage into an ether of psychological attitudes free from all contexts. Further, by comparison with the older version we may mark how in the closing phrase, with its capitalised G and the term "God" ringing out twice, the speaker's inner being at its profoundest and at its most forceful is laid open and startingly suggests without the least veil that even in spirituality there can be a crucial choice between divine truths, on which may hinge the entire destiny of man the evolutionary aspirant.
As a Parsi, I find Sri Aurobindo's magnificent phrase especially appealing. The Parsis are known as Fire-worshippers. Their temples hold the Supreme Being in the symbol of Fire. Day and night the flames are fed on sandalwood and what burns in every Parsi temple today is a fire lit from the one which the Parsis brought, guarded most loyally, most lovingly, from Iran after the Arabs had overrun the country and threatened to kill or convert. The faithful few toiled across the sea in small boats and sought refuge in India cherishing God the Fire. And this beloved glory had come through long ages of sandalwood-sustained force from the great golden presence kindled by the
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prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster to the Greeks) in remote antiquity. The self-same Fire that was set burning thousands of years ago has burned without cessation right up to this day, thanks on the one side to the zeal of the Zarathustrians and on the other to the tolerance of the Hindu faith that sees a myriad ways to reach the Divine and finds no way alien to its own essence. And perhaps it is because the Parsis made their home in the midst of India's multi-minded aspiration and realisation that they have developed a receptivity to all kinds of cultures easily assimilating various values, eastern or western—and that some of them have become Aurobindonians as if they had been born to be such.
I may add that this turn on their part is aided by a historical fact. The Fire-cult is as much Vedic as Zarathustrian and the Vedic spirit lives on in Sri Aurobindo who has written the poignant poem called Bride of the Fire, the splendid poem named Bird of Fire, the book of translations from the Rigveda entitled Hymns to the Mystic Fire. Thus the magnificence of the line which he has put into the mouth of Savitri is no accidental flare-up of spiritual fieriness in him: it is the organic expression of a Vedic-cum-Zarathustrian affinity and focuses in a fiery credo a sustained experience such as he voices in his Descent:
Thoughts that left the Almighty's flaming mansions,
Blaze in my spirit.
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