Talks on Poetry

II

STRAY TALKS

Page 404

POETS, POEMS, POETRY

1

I have been given a sort of carte blanche — told that I should read any poem of my choice or else write one myself and explain where the poetry of it lies. Since the subject is poetry as exemplified by a poem, I may be excused a few general introductory remarks on the cause of this whole beautiful business: the poet.

There's the old Latin tag: Poeta nascitur, non fit. A schoolboy has made the startling translation: "Poets are nasty, but don't you get a fit!" Another intuitive youngster has the rendering: "Poets are born, but they are not fit to be!" Well, both the howlers have some sense, though far from the literal one, which is: "Poets are born, not made." The howlers are not quite off the mark because poets are often nasty. Horace has the phrase: vatum irritabile genus, "the irritable tribe of poets"; and it is also a fact that they are born but that many people, especially those to whom they go on spouting their verse, find they cannot be borne any more after birth.

What is forgotten in the midst of the anti-poet protest is, in the first place, that the mere man must not be mixed up with the poet-self even though both are in the same being who confronts the world. In judging the poet we must look at his poetry, the four or five or six metrical feet on which it runs, and not at the feet of clay with which the mere man walks or tries to kick. In the second place, we may attempt to understand how the presence of the poet in the composite being which contains also the mere man could make the latter over-sensitive to the common circumstances of life — circumstances so out of step with the enchanted inner tempo set by the poetic consciousness. Naturally there is a lack of rhyme between the poet-man and his prosaic fellows, resulting in his irritated response.

To revert to the literal sense of the Latin tag: it is true that in the usual course of things a poet, if not born, cannot ever be trained

Page 405

into poetry, but there can be true poets who are made in a way which the maker of that saying never dreamt of. This phenomenon has come about in that unusual course of things which we term spirituality. Take Nirodbaran, for instance, or Arjava (John Chad-wick), two of the poetic luminaries of our Ashram. Arjava was a professor of mathematical or symbolic logic — a mind moving among abstractions: he became a first-rate bard under Sri Aurobindo's touch. Nirodbaran was trained to be a doctor, but his aspiration was towards Apollo, not Aesculapius. He wanted to write sonnets, not prescriptions. He yearned to dispense not medicines but Coleridgean "honey-dew". Here, too, Sri Aurobindo did the trick. Sri Aurobindo knew how to give a poet birth in one who was not born a poet. That is the master art of Yoga — to bring the subtle planes into re-creative action.

The example of a born poet may be given from an incident in the life of Alexander Pope, the 18th century classic. From his very childhood he made poems. He has autobiographically written:

I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

But his father was extremely displeased with this waste of time as he considered it, and so he took little Alexander to task rather severely. He often scolded him and once put him across his knees and administered a good whacking. Poor Alexander cried and cried, and promised his father he would not indulge in that waste of time. But the promise he sobbed out ran:

Papa, Papa, pity take!

I will no more verses make.

Now we have come to the subject proper that has been in my mind. It is whether verses are at all worth making. Poetry consists, as you know, of words, words in a certain rhythmic order with an intensity of vision and emotion infused in them. I shall read to you not one poem but in fact three, showing various sides of the art of poetry. Two of them are written by women.

Women are supposed to be expert at tossing words about. But here is a woman who writes against indulgence in words. She is herself a poet and in order to show the uselessness of words she writes a poem. Which is, of course, a paradox, and we shall dilate

Page 406

upon it after you have heard the poem. The piece is called "Words":

Words — what are words? I, who have drunk my fill

Of sudden joy, of love, of youth, of spring,

I, who have stood like God upon a hill

And thrilled to see a whole sky blossoming,

Never have found one word with half the ache

And wistful wonder of a moon-swept lake,

Nor any loveliness of phrase to show

The delicate drifting miracle of snow!

Words are the fragile ghosts of things that die

In being named. I tell you that the sight

And sting of beauty are enough delight

To close the lips with wonder, and to start

A wild and wordless singing in the heart!

He squanders joy who draws back from the brink

Of beauty for some silly song. I think

God never made a single flowering tree

For poet's babblings — but for ecstasy!

The author is Stella Kobrin. What she wants to convey is that the experience which usually is made to overflow into words by poets is such that words cannot do justice to it. Not only are they inadequate to it; she says they distort it, they turn it into a thing not of true beauty. Something silly, something trivial, something superficial results if expression is given to your thrill at the sight of beauty.

In the second line she mentions the usual themes of poetry, as she conceives them. Sudden joy, love, youth and spring — they are mostly the themes of lyric poetry. And she says that when she has stood upon a hill like God she has seen things which are inexpressible in language. Her central contention is: language cannot cope with exalted inner experience. The implication of "exalted" is important, she says she has stood like God; that conveys the intensity and the immensity of the experience of which she is speaking. It is as if she saw, for the first time, something which had come out of the mind of the Supreme Creator. In the Bible, God is declared to have made the world, looked at it, found it good and then smiled. So it is a wide-ranging and completely

Page 407

satisfying response to the world of beauty that she is trying to communicate to us. And she also implies that whenever we see and feel great beauty we participate in an experience that is divine. Such experience falls into a category which we can consider mystic or spiritual.

There seem to be several shades of meaning in this expression, and we may note that when she says she has "stood upon a hill" the hill itself is suggestive of a height of being — a state not belonging to the common lowlands of life. And then, standing upon a hill, what does she see? She thrills to see the whole sky blossoming. There is a cosmic expanse opened up in front of a lover of beauty. How is all that to be caught in words? It is too vast, it must overflow language, it must break through expression and so poetry must prove insufficient to contain and therefore to convey the glowing plenitude of the experience of nature's beauty.

At this point the writer makes a little shift. She is looking at the sky blossoming but when she is standing on the hill and watching the whole expanse overhead the conviction comes to her that she could

Never have found one word with half the ache

And wistful wonder of a moon-swept lake,

Nor any loveliness of phrase to show

The delicate drifting miracle of snow!

Within the sky she is evidently thinking of the moon as well as of snow falling — two immaculate phenomena — and she thinks of the moon reflected in a lake but she doesn't use the word "reflected" or any analogue of it: she speaks of "a moon-swept lake", a stretch of water that itself is, as it were, washed with moonlight, stirred with moonlight, filled with moonlight and excited with something from above within its depths. That is the suggestion and she speaks of two psychological reactions or responses: ache and wistful wonder. Both of them are intended to be in the looker-on as well as in that which is looked on. The lake itself, in being called moon-swept, is given an ache, a longing and, along with that longing, a wistfulness, the longing for something afar, and in that wistfulness there is a wonder, a startle, a surprise at such a thing happening as a moon sweeping the surface of a lake. And the very

Page 408

sight of this experience attributed to the lake creates in oneself also the ache and the wistful wonder. The expression is such that the preposition "of" which comes after "wonder" can apply to both the experience and the thing experienced. It's an experience of the lake as well as of its beholder. That is the skill with which the language is used. An additional conviction of the insufficiency of poetry is couched in the next two lines about snow.

You can make words as lovely as you like but they will never capture such a miracle as snow delicately drifting. In the course of telling us of both the lake and the snow the poet seems to contradict herself; of course, women are used to self-contradiction, so I don't think she has any scruple about it. She contradicts herself because the words she has used are so emphatic, so expressive of the reality of nature's beauty; she has chosen not the approximate but the exact words, words which can actually catch, reflect, echo the phenomenon; you might call them intuitive words. But, mind you, she uses on both occasions synonymous terms: "wonder" on one occasion and "miracle" on the other. By this she wants to convey, even while she herself is adequately giving tongue to the beauty which she sees, the surpassing quality, the transcendent attribute, of that beauty. A wonder breaks the sun of common processes, it is an exception by which you are baffled. A miracle is something which you cannot explain by natural means, it cannot be achieved even by natural means. Words she considers to be the things used by a human being, the "moon-swept lake" and the "delicately drifting snow" she takes to be things done by a Divine Being and therefore there is an incompatibility between words and nature's beauty — though, if we said "nature's beauty", it would bring in the suggestion of the natural. You might protest that, just like words which are the natural means used by human beings, a lake and snow are things which are equally natural because they belong to the same vast domain of nature to which man himself belongs, But this is a little queerness which we have to overlook; what the writer seeks to drive home is that human beings have not the power to express the divine, the supernatural, the power that the phenomena of the physical world of beautiful things have. No doubt, this is a proposition open to debate, but as a "poetic truth" it has to depend only on the way it is rhythmically felt on our pulses.

Page 409

Words are the fragile ghosts of things that die

In being named....

She means that when you try to express a thing in language the thing does not exist any more. It loses its genuine inner life, it dies, and when it dies all that you catch is only a ghost of it. By the use of names, by the use of words, you never catch the reality of a thing. You get something out of it which is not its true life, it is just like a spectre, a phantom. And it is an obvious fact that when you say something about something what you catch is not the thing itself; it is an echo, an image, a kind of duplication of the thing. But whether to call it a ghost or to call it a soul is an important point. If you call it a soul you mean that you have somehow transmitted by your language the essential life of a thing. If you call it a ghost you suggest what is attenuated, diminished, deprived of true vitality. And I suppose the difference according to us between true poetry and mere verse lies precisely in that. Sri Aurobindo has said that the true intuitive word of poetry catches the inner life-thrill of an object, a person, a situation and embodies it in terms of sound and it is that life-thrill which gives us the true rhythm, the rhythm which is expressive and not just decorative, the rhythm which is born of an inner sympathy and gives the intuitive word which is most exemplified, according to Sri Aurobindo, in Shakespeare. The frequency of the intuitive word in Shakespeare is unsurpassed. Sri Aurobindo says there are only one or two poets who have this intuitive word in extreme abundance. He mentions Shakespeare but who the other one or two may be is anybody's guess. I do not know and I cannot think of anyone else who has written like Shakespeare. In Stella Kobrin's view, even Shakespeare would be a failure, capturing in the words of his poetry not a soul but merely a ghost.

She continues:

...I tell you that the sight

And sting of beauty are enough delight

To close the lips with wonder, and to start.

A wild and wordless singing in the heart!

Very interesting lines, these. She asserts her conviction and in asserting it gives us two characteristics of the experience which

Page 410

poets endeavour to embody in verse: "the sight and sting of beauty." Poetry is most deeply definable as the harmonious self-expression of a thrilled seerhood. The "seerhood" is the "sight" that seizes "beauty". The "sting" of "beauty" corresponds to the "thrilled" state: something smites you, even makes you suffer, but with a certain piercing to the heart which awakens you to your true being, the spark of the Divine in you. Kobrin, however, declares that this double experience of sight and sting gives such an access of "delight", such a spell of "wonder", that you feel they are something impossible to express and all that they do is to create a sort of singing within the heart, a wild singing which you cannot tame, cannot order out in metrical expression; it has to be left a grand, colourful, self-fulfilled chaos, out of which no cosmos of a small song can emerge. It has to be left "wordless", but she uses the locution "wordless singing". "Singing" means the huge rapture which becomes a rhythmic experience, but that has to go on in the recesses of the heart, it cannot and should not be given expression in the form of language. Language constricts its immense spirituality. As soon as language is used the true singing is marred, the presence of the infinite is violated. Perhaps somebody might say: "What about music then? Pure music is wordless singing. Can it express all that poetry, as Kobrin holds, fails to communicate?" There is something in wordless music, according to Sri Aurobindo, which fills us with an almost immediate sense of the infinite. Poetry too can convey the infinite but not perhaps with the same directness; yet poetry is an art which carries the quintessences, as it were, of all the arts: of painting by giving us imagery and pictorial touches, of music by giving us inwardly expressive sounds and patterned accords that lift the sense beyond limited definitions, of sculpture by giving us concentrated moments, carved and chiselled felicities standing out from the general flow like poised attitudes of soul with the suggestion as of archetypal mood-forms. Even quintessential architecture is there in the way these felicitous fixities combine to build up a multitudinous whole of magnificent mystery. But, for Kobrin, poetry cannot seize the wonder that is within, and I suspect she would include music too in the same category as poetry. What she is telling us is that all art-expression is not only futile but a desecration of the experience of beauty in God's world.

She continues:

Page 411

He squanders joy who draws back from the brink

Of beauty for some silly song....

She means that somebody who has the idea of writing a poem cannot fully enter into the experience of beauty. He goes to the brink of beauty to drink the nectarous waters but if he has it in his mind to write a poem about it, he is divided in his experience and cannot really enjoy the full intoxication or, if he halts to write a poem and express what he is experiencing, he spoils the magic by interrupting it. The fullness of the delight will fail to be his and if that is so how is he ever going to embody his experience in poetry? Unless you have got something which brims you, you cannot give a just expression to it. But if you let it brim you, you can't at the same time stop anywhere to write anything. The author doesn't, of course, consider the case of having the full experience and then turning to poetry. Perhaps she would ask: "If you have the full experience, where the hell is the need to say anything? You've got everything, and writing is superfluous, not to speak of its being superficial." In any case, she refers to "silly song", silly because the attempt is to utter the unutterable, to attempt what was never meant to be done:

...I think

God never made a single flowering tree

For poets' babblings — but for ecstasy!

This reminds me of the end of a poem by another poet, a young man who died in the First World War: Joyce Kilmer. He has a whole poem on a tree. It concludes:

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

The same idea as Kobrin's is here, but there is in her lines the additional shade that God never made a tree for men to be foolish enough to write a poem about it. God made a tree, a flowering tree, in order that there might be an ecstasy within us, a sense of the Divine. "Ecstasy" — the word in its etymology signifies "standing outside", you are beside yourself, as we say, and when you are beside yourself you are in no condition really to do anything but be

Page 412

beside. You cannot write poetry in that condition: this is Kobrin's final contention.

We have come to the end of the poem. We have already made some critical comments by the way. What would one say of this piece at the close of its argument? I would say first of all that it is meant to be an argument and there lies its defect. The fact of its being an argument, something mentally conceived and put forth with a view to impress and convince us, is proved by several words in the composition itself. The most typical are "I think". The theme is thought by her, she is reflecting and making a case. If, instead of thinking about poetry, she spoke about it from the very heart of the poet in her, she would not give expression to such an idea. But the idea is correct in the sense that mostly we fail to express what we set out to. The majority of poems are failures, they fall short. The phenomenon of first-rate poetry is a very small one. It's true that there are lengthy epics, but how rare they are! Hundreds of long poems are attempted but most of them come to nothing. It is once in a thousand years that there arises a Homer. Once in another thousand years or so a Virgil comes on. Then after a millennium a Dante appears, and centuries pass before a Milton and a Sri Aurobindo work poetic miracles. The number of epic poets is such that we can count them on the fingers of one hand. Similarly, even writers of short poems, those who have written successful verses again and again, are also just a handful. Most poets who turn out hundreds of pieces succeed in creating a masterpiece just a few times. The difficulty of expressing beauty is certainly a formidable one and, if we understand Kobrin in that sense, we may say her thesis has a truth in it. But she makes her thesis a very sweeping one. It's not exactly a "moon-swept-lake" of a thesis, for it's not a very beautiful one in itself. Yet she has expressed it with a good deal of beauty and by doing so she once more contradicts herself. There is a self-refutation in the whole poem; for her to be effective in saying that poems are ineffective, she has to compose an effective poem! That is the paradox of the whole situation. Otherwise not a shred of conviction would come to us. And again and again we find in this composition memorable utterance — the empathic, the intuitive movement of what we consider to be true poetry comes in. And that is why this poem is worth reading, worth commenting on, worth drawing some lesson from. It does what she says no poet can ever do!

Page 413

Q. So would you call it a wholly successful poem?

Not quite — I would rather call it a success on the whole. I wouldn't call it a poem which is equally successful in every line. And it is successful as a poem, not as a thesis, because by being a poem it confutes its own thesis. I may add that its success is only on a certain plane — a rich mental plane. The intuitive stabs are not very frequent, yet the expression is quite competent almost throughout. Of course, mental poetry can be full of inspiration. I don't see why just by being an expression of the mind a poem cannot have inspiration.

Q. Would you call it thought-out?

I would call it thought-out in the sense that it has a design on our minds. It wants to convince us, it has a theme which the writer wants to establish — rather a thesis, a proposition, which she wants to prove to us. But what it does is not done in an intellectual way. It is done in an inspired mental way. And in being done so, it proves to us that even ideas can become the springs of poetry. A poet can even be highly philosophical. Kobrin is not a poetic philosopher, she just touches the core of an argument and moves on, she makes it tremble and thrill and tingle in our minds and goes on with some suggestive phrase here and there, like that about God never making anything for us to talk about. There you have the profound implication that things have a divine content and because they have a divine content this content cannot be expressed in any form except the form which God has given it. That implication is the real argument, it is not set forth in so many argumentative words but she suggests it every now and then, and by suggesting it with some real poetic force she succeeds in making a poem. It is after all like all poetic truths, something which holds on certain occasions and for a certain number of cases and there is a general suggestion of the frequent if not constant inadequacy of language to give proper shape to that which we feel and that which goes home to our hearts from this marvellous creation of the Divine. Up to that point she sets a poetic truth vibrating in us.

I should like to mention a few technical effects. The piece is in pentameters and the base is iambic - a rising foot, the stress on the second syllable. But the first line starts with a trochaic foot, the

Page 414

stress on the first syllable. And this syllable answers pre-eminently to the poem's subject: "Words". It is a hammer-stroke to drive into our minds the theme. If there had been an iambic foot in this place, the poet could not have produced that specific effect. Of course, any trochee would have served the purely technical purpose of an initial push — but the push is most significant with the chosen word: "Words". And in genuine poetry, technique and significance always coincide.

The third line has again the emphasis on the opening syllable: "I". By putting that emphasis Kobrin creates in us a Subtle confidence, that the person talking to us has had some definite convincing experience which we should accept. Then there is the line:

Never have found one word with half the ache...

We have the same technique, the first syllable accented to enforce the sense. Repeatedly by means of this device the poet tries to create the faith in us that there is someone who speaks with authority and the authority is of experience. The continuation of the phrase leads us to another aspect of inspired technique: alliteration. We have "wistful wonder". Close upon its heels is "delicate drifting" and finally "wild and wordless". This last alliteration, like that of "wistful wonder", plays upon the letter w which is always felt to give an expansive effect, the suggestion of widening out. Look at Wordsworth's

the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world.

There the sense of an immense burden which baffles the mind is clinched by those three w's of "weary", "weight" and "world". And this effect comes most convincingly to us in that line of Sri Aurobindo's where the suggestion of wideness is part of the expressed content of the line:

In the wide workshop of the Wonderful world.

You have four w's there and the expansive effect is tremendous and it is made most acute and conscious for us by the use of the very word "wide".

Page 415