Talks on Poetry

2

Now we come to the next poem. It is written in short lines, unlike the iambic pentameters of the previous one. It is also by a woman, as I have already said. This woman gives a reply, you might say, to the other woman. But at the same time there is an element of agreement. She doesn't say that no poetry should be written but she says that poetry should be written only under certain conditions. So she corrects the imbalance of the other one's poem which is categorical in saying that poetry should never be written. This new piece is called: "Advice to Would-be Poets." All of you, I think, are would-be poets; so it should prove useful to all except for Nirod and me who are supposed to have fulfilled ourselves and are now have-been-poets. Well, what does Mary Sinton Leitch say?

Would you be a poet,

Be silent till you drink

Deep of a rainbow

At a brook's brink!

You shall tread deftly

Lest beauty be bereaved

By bruising of a flower.

Your spirit shall be grieved

When a bough is broken,

Else from your lips shall come

No elegy, no idyll,

Or prothalamium.

When you hear the world's laughter

And feel the world's grief

In the wash of a wave,

In the stir of a leaf;

When there shall fall upon you

The shadow of a wing

Though never a bird is in the sky,

Then sing!

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You may remember that the other poem had, towards its end, the phrase: "He squanders joy who draws back from the brink of beauty." Now here we begin with that theme:

...drink

Deep of a rainbow

At a brook's brink!

Kobrin has said that "at the brink of beauty" you must be silent and Leitch says the same thing: "be silent." Yet there is a vital difference. The former wants us not to draw back from its brink and start poetising; the latter wants us to stay by the brink and poetise, but not until we have had the full experience: we must be in no hurry to express ourselves. And here the brink is made the bank of a brook: the brook is a symbol of something which is flowing, it is a symbol of the flux of existence. As old Heraclitus said: Panta rhei, "Everything flows", and Heraclitus is supposed to have added to the flow of things by being, as we are told, "the weeping philosopher", just as Democritus is called "the laughing philosopher". But the flux-symbolism is not all we have here. We are asked to drink deep of a rainbow. This is a peculiar expression. How can you drink deep of a rainbow at the brink of a brook? It suggests that the brook is a tremble and a quiver of many colours and also that it is reflective. There is something marvellous above, which the brook catches in its lucidity, its crystalline quality. Or it can mean, if we think of this verse in the light of the very last verse of the poem, that when you are drinking of the brook you have not just to drink what is there in the brook: you have to feel something which is not there, something which is beyond the brook itself, something which is haunting it in some way: a rainbow presence — that is what you have to get, a beauty that belongs to the world of the imagination, the world of inner vision.

Then the poet gives a second piece of advice:

You shall tread deftly

Lest beauty be bereaved

By bruising of a flower....

There again you have the play of alliteration: "beauty" and "bereaved" and "bruising". This kind of repetition of sounds some-

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times takes the place of logic in poetry. Instead of trying to prove a point we are given a sort of inner connection, a consistency of expression by means of alliteration. The idea is that in the world of nature there is a living spirit. Beauty is conceived as a living spirit capable of feeling. If you tread in an unskilled, gauche, insensitive way, you will hurt the spirit of beauty which is there and which wants to keep her own manifestations or creations as beautiful as she can, as truly expressive of herself as possible. A flower is not meant to be hurt, its petals to be torn apart or its stalk to be broken. Its delicate poise should be left untroubled, and that is why we are asked to be very careful, very conscious of the world spirit, which is the spirit of beauty. A poet has always to feel that there is a living being in the world, a cosmic consciousness, a vast soul of the universe. A poet cannot be a poet unless, whether openly or not, he is both a pantheist and a polytheist over and above whatever other brand of theist he may be. He feels that there are gods Or

Your spirit will be grieved

When a bough is broken...

Not only must you avoid grieving the spirit of nature, you must also yourself be so sensitive that in case you have not trodden deftly and have done something to bruise a flower or break a bough you will be grieved as if you have done a horrible deed, committed a heinous crime. You must have such sensitivity that

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every time you do damage to the smallest piece of beauty you feel as if you should fall on your knees and beg forgiveness from the little thing which is hurt as well as from the great thing which has given birth to it. Unless you feel thus, you will never be a true poet, never give tongue to an elegy, an idyll, a prothalamium. An elegy is a composition which expresses a sad experience, it may not be a lament but there is a sense of the Virgilian "tears of things", a mortality-moved melancholy. An idyll is a poem which expresses a romantic figuration of life, a Shelleyan world "where moonlight and music and feeling are one". A prothalamium is a preliminary to a marriage song. Edmund Spenser of the Elizabethan Age coined the word and made it famous by a poem of his to go with another entitled "Epithalamium", the Marriage Song. This means a poem which expresses joy. Not only the romantic imagination, not only the feeling of "the heartbreak at the heart of things", as Wilfred Owen puts it, but also the common happinesses of earth-existence — nothing deep-delving or high-flying or wide-running is possible unless the poet is super-sensitive.

Next we come to more positive directions for the poet. Here the author puts forth one of the pre-conditions of bursting ihto poetry. When should you really take to singing? She gives an example of what you should do in the first place. The smallest thing holds for you immense significances, as if all mankind were finding tongue in the most tiny and trivial phenomenon you witness. The least occurrence of the objective universe is packed with the drive of all human history on the face of the earth, the whole world's movement through space and time with its million vicissitudes of evolutionary struggle — a struggle carrying tones of both laughter and grief, recurring fulfilment and recurring frustration. Perhaps the rejoicing and suffering of the totality of life and not merely of human history are the tones you have to feel. And the feeling is not to be confined to great events: it has to extend even to infinitesimals like the soft foam-burst of sea-water along the beach and the faint quiver a breath of air makes in delicate foliage. In these small events you have all terrestrial life happy or sorrowful in a low key — low yet with the entire essential meaning of the experience couched there. Before you are able to catch that entire essential meaning at every point of the cosmic scene you must not try to write poetry. That is one pre-condition.

Now we come to another, which is even more profound:

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When there shall fall upon you

The shadow of a wing

Though never a bird is in the sky...

You feel as if a great presence, a wide-spread presence from something very high were there. You are being haunted by it. There is an intense movement going on far above you, and you are aware of it when you are standing on the earth. You have a sensation not only of wideness, of a cosmic being, but of something very elevated far beyond, something transcendental, and you feel there is a supreme being high above who is attracting you. You are with the universe still, but you have the sense of a sort of sky and not only the horizon. And it is as though the feeling that you have were of the shadow of great wings and you look up to see if there is anything really there, but you see nothing. The world you see, the cosmos you see, but here is something not contained within them. It is something supreme but invisible. As Shelley says,

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

You look up and there is nothing there except the world you know, which lis a very grand world no doubt and has to be a very active force in you, yet now you are aware of an invisible reality which is outside this world. There is nothing to the physical eyes, and still you feel something. When you feel it, a kind of supernatural, a kind of divine, a kind of supracosmic movement is held by you in your heart. Then you are in a condition to give utterance to poetry,

Then sing!

There comes a definitive command at the end: you are fit to be a poet. This last verse is very intuitively suggestive and profound. One can write a whole essay on it. The last two stanzas could form the core of a whole theory of poetry which would be very much in tune with Sri Aurobindo's version of the poetic phenomenon. Mark how effectively Mary Sinton Leitch closes the poem. The fourth lines in all the stanzas have several words: "At a brook's brink", "Your spirit shall be grieved", etc. These are either two

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feet or three feet - four syllables or six. But in this last line of the poem there are only two short words:

Then sing!

They fall like great hammers and strike home the central theme in a way which the previous poem fails to do. I should think this piece is more successful than the other because whatever the writer wants to say, even if it be not the totality of what can be said on the subject, is given a certain completeness which is satisfying.

Q: Would you call it didactic?

Yes, in the sense that advice is given on what we should do, but it is not didactic in the ordinary sense of the word because it is full of imagery, full of inner feeling and is not just a number of thoughts arranged effectively to teach us a lesson. In the last verse the poet escapes into a sheer ether of intuitive vision, and what is hinted is deep and the lesson is lightened up as well as lighted up, it becomes air-borne by the form chosen. There is no heaviness about the movement, not even the weightiness which would be impressively associated with a didactic poem. There is a certain springyness, a certain wingedness and all that suggestion of winged-ness ends with the mention of a wing in the end!

Q: Which poem is greater in the beauty of expression?

That is a ticklish question because some would think that where the expression is rich we have the greater beauty, but there is a supreme beauty also in the absolute economy of phrase. So how are you going to define "beauty of expression"?

Q: Suggestiveness?

Suggestiveness can come from both styles. If you take Shakespeare you most frequently find in him a wealth of words. Instead of saying one word he says five. Similarly in Milton you have a plethora of words, art which is enriched, art which is abundant. But sometimes even in Shakespeare you come across very bare lines which are just as effective as his wealth-burdened move-

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merits. Milton too has such effects. In Dante you have, according to Sri Aurobindo, a perfect example of poetry where richness and restraint are fused. There are poets who are restrained rather than rich yet they achieve supreme effects. So it is difficult to say where beauty is more present. All that you can ask is: "In the type of expression selected, which poem succeeds more?" There we have some ground for discussion.

Q: Which poem would you say is more successful by your criterion?

I give my verdict in favour of the second piece. In the genre chosen, the beauty of expression is more here. In its class of poetry it succeeds better than the other does in its own class. But there the judgment is a little complicated since what makes the difference is that the argument of the second poem is not mental as is that of the first. In the first the process of the argument peeps in, while the process is completely concealed or transfigured in the second. The discursive intellect shows itself in the other poem, there are even the very words "I think". But here is no question of thinking: here are diminuitive visions given to us as parts of the argument. Though there is a leaping forward, a process, it is a process of the intellectual imagination more than of the imaginative intellect. The intellect is more prominent in the first poem than here. The imagination is more in evidence here than there. In that sense, though the two poems have something in common, I consider the second to be more successful.

Now, if you still have time to hear me, I'll read you a third poem, with only a very short comment. It's called "Soul of Song." The two other poems have spoken of keeping quiet: one poet says, "Shut up", the other says, "Hold your tongue for a while." The present poet says, "I have shut up, I have held my tongue sufficiently and so I have the right to say something." And, because of the silent inner preparation, what he says answers to all the definitons of poetry which one may briefly essay. I once defined poetry as "Sight and Insight, Light and Delight." I should add a third pair: "Passion and Peace." Let me elaborate the three pairs just a little. The poet has to respond to the colourful surface of the world and at the same time pierce through to catch the response to him of a hidden World-Life. Again, he has to bring a visionary

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understanding upon a surge of creative rapture echoing in some manner the rapture of the Spirit that has created the world. Finally, he has to embody an intensity, a vivida vis, a force of thought and feeling that builds up both detail and totality, but the pulsating dynamic structure should convey a sense of completion, fulfilment, reposeful roundedness, as if an eternal pattern of beauty and truth were progressively caught for ever in the point-instants of time. Now for the poem:

I have been quiet a long while

To fill my singing smile

With a magic beyond the lips of man,

And very quiet will I be

After the burst of minstrelsy

To find at the close

The light with which my tune began.

Glowing behind

The singer's mind,

A mystery journeys forth to meet

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

Its own unplumbed repose.

Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood

To feel far more than the loud heart knows,

Or else the King who moves through the common word

Shall never be heard

And keep unseen the strange infinitude

He bears above our mortal woes,

The purple of his dream divine.

Look deep for his true royalty's sign:

Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!

"The purple of his dream divine": that is the truth at the back of all poetic beauty. But the expression naturally differs from poem to poem. In "Soul of Song" there is what you may call "intonation". This intonation you do feel also in the last verse of "Advice", but here the whole piece is filled with it. We may speak of its intonation more descriptively as a play of undertones and overtones, the vibrations of the being both behind and beyond the mind. But they still leave it a clear-cut disclosure of that being: it is

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not something that is mystery-remote, much less something that is mystery-entangled. What it does is to suggest a mystery with a kind of lucid spontaneous ingeniousness. This does not prevent it from mentioning physical objects and sensations — as in

Across the rapture of rhyming feet

and

...the King who moves through the common word.

Yes, you have imagery in full swing, yet all of it is wrapped and illumined by the atmosphere of the suprasensuous and of the inward. You hear all the time a traffic of depths within and heights above. The poet has stationed himself in those depths, with a keen hushed receptivity to those heights, so that he may be in tune with the mantra, as the Vedic Rishis put it — the Divine Word. Having done this he feels his own readiness for expression, and he looks at the outer world, picks out a few concrete impressions and with their help bestirs himself to poetic speech. At the end of his song he feels again the great silence that has given birth to it and he is able to convey to others the Master-Presence whose home is that silence. It is the communication of that Presence with the very life-sense of it in his music that we hear in the last line:

Haloed with hush he enters, coronaed with calm he goes!

I think, my friends, you also should go now with at least a glint of the same corona.

Such a glint should be natural to you who are all Aurobindo-nians; for if this line points to any earthly counterpart of the Presence it evokes, it is to Sri Aurobindo.

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