Talks on Poetry

TALK ELEVEN

I find on my table two books that look like the collections of my own poems. Who has placed them here? Oh, the lady on the last bench? Well, what am I supposed to do with my own books? Do you want me to read some poems out of them? I don't know whether I can do so — but we shall see. All depends on whether I can show modesty convincingly enough and then overcome it entirely for your sake!

This morning I must be very very very serious to balance the light-heartedness of last time. I must be so long-faced that I can't even say, "Good morning." But if I said "Bad morning" you'd again start laughing. So I'll just keep a solemn countenance and mournfully sigh out the morning's goodness. But, really speaking, laughter is the most natural accompaniment of study in a Poetry Class. No doubt, Arnold has said that great poetry carries a high seriousness with it. But poetry's high seriousness has behind it a creative Ananda. Poetry, says Sri Aurobindo, repeats in its own way and on a small scale the original universal Delight with which the Supreme Soul created all things and set the cosmic rhythms going. Now, it should be very natural for Ananda both to smile and to laugh. Of course there can be a quiet or dumb happiness — a happiness which is ineffable. And poetry, with its burden of unspoken magnitudes, has to do with an ineffable bliss, but its work is to convey that bliss by means of wonderful speech just as the Supreme Soul is believed to have set the World-Word vibra-ting. And if sound is permitted — nay, demanded — in connection with the spiritual Ananda that is at the heart of poetry, a legiti-macy is given to express this Ananda by laughter also while we are dealing with the work of poets. Even the Gods are said to laugh — they who are the masters of the Spirit's Delight. Kalidasa charac-terises the whiteness of Mount Kailasa as the eternal laughter of a God. And Homer's Gods are constantly breaking into laughter over the follies of men. Aeschylus, one of the greatest of the Greek poets, saw Neptune laughing in that immortal line:

The innumerable laughter of the waves.

Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Kingdom of God does not banish laughter, though it agrees with the Christian notion that in Heaven

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there is no giving or taking in marriage. Perhaps it is particularly the absence of marriage in Heaven that makes laughter possible there — marriage is a pretty serious affair. Sri Aurobindo remarks too that humour is the salt of life. Well, it is at least one of the salts. There are many kinds — bathing salts, smelling salts, somer-saults. I suppose humour should be considered somersaulty!

Well, let its somersault land us back into our subject: Poetic Diction. Poetic Diction is not to be avoided like the plague, but aspirants to poetry should be careful about it just as much as about Proselike Diction. Otherwise they will perpetrate poems like the one that was sent to an editor, bearing the title: Why do I live? The editor replied under the title: "Because you sent your poem from a safe distance and did not personally hand it to me." I don't know whether this particular poet enjoyed the joke at his expense. But poets, as a rule, are not dull fellows. They have a fund of humour which comes out at times at the most odd moments. Don't you know what Campbell once did? He took his poem on the Battle of Hohenlinden to a publisher. Its first stanza runs:

On Linden when the sun was low

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow

And dark as Winter was the flow

Of Iser rolling rapidly.

After handing the piece to the publisher, Campbell whose head was still humming with poetry stepped out to the stairs but missed his footing and went tumbling down. The publisher rushed to the landing and asked: "What's happening?" Campbell shouted back in the midst of his tumble: "I, sir, rolling rapidly."

The line so wittily used by Campbell is not a piece of marked Poetic Diction. But it is a well-turned thing. And even very good lines can be written without Poetic Diction and with words of the most simple and ordinary character. We have already illustrated how even words like "shop" and "business" and "digestion" can be rendered most effectively poetic. But the majority of such miracles depend on a context of marked Poetic Diction , charming or dynamic . What I want to give you now are lines of a Prose like Diction without being prosaic, lines observing too an almost prose- order in the run of their words and yet achieving .poetic distinction because of a subtle power of rhythm and intensity of form which

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convey an emotion or an idea in a manner beyond prose. There is the line Shakespeare has put into Hamlet's mouth —

To be or not to be, that is the question —

perhaps the most famous question asked in all poetry. There is also the query of Shakespeare's Lear, which we have already quoted:

Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all?

There is Donne's impatient protest to his girl-friend:

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love.

There is Sri Aurobindo's line:

All our earth starts in mud and ends with sky.

We have cited Beddoes at a moment of high polysyllabic Poetic Diction. Here he is at a moment of ordinary speech, completely monosyllabic which yet is poignant poetry:

I shall see him

No more. All hell is made of these two words.

The poetic form which brings the two words concerned just at the start of the second line contributes to the piercing effect of this proselike poetry.

I have referred to a subtle power of rhythm and an intensity of form as differentiating such poetry from prose. Rhythm and form can be very open and evident at times and produce a poetry of marvellous word-music. This word-music is often produced with the help of Poetic Diction. But it does not necessarily depend on it. Let me give you some lines with a distinct musical effect. Herrick has one on music itself:

Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.

The musicality of Milton's

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And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay is undeniable. Sri Aurobindo's

O my sweet flower,

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

has a remarkable music, at once relentless and mournful in its mood. The hard consonants — the r's and d's — communicate a sense of relentless doom, while the m in "whelmed", pressed between two other consonant-sounds and involving a shutting of the lips, suggests the flood's dense massive flow as well as its absorptive power. There are other effects too, but perhaps the arrangement of the vowels, long or short, is the principal factor in the musicality of the rhythm. Their arrangement, in combination with the right kind of consonants, is also responsible for Shake-speare's enchantment of the ear in that verse on Autumnal trees:

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

The mellifluousness of the birds is brought by the repeated trill of the r and it deepens in the mind the pathos of the absence which is spoken of and which is rhythmically suggested by the moan of the n in "ruined" and "sang". The first spondee and the last spondee — "Bare ru..." and "birds sang" — play with their heavy insis-tence the part of beginning and completing the sense of an un-endurable burden of sadness. About the melody of birds there is another phrase equally musical — it is Keats's — where the poet speaks of their presence and not their absence:

And hearken to the birds' love-learned song

The dewy leaves among.

The words "bare" and "ruin" which are so effective in Shake-speare's line recur in one of Milton's, which has led a critic to aver that it is the most musical in the English language:

To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.

Nothing of paramount importance seems said here, though "Athe-

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nian" has considerable associations in the European mind. What confers poetic immortality on the line is its pattern of assonances and long vowels. There is no Poetic Diction present, unless we count the inversion "ruin bare" to be constituting it. Nor is Poetic Diction, except again by one inversion, at play in the second of the following two verses of Milton's —

And saw the Ravens with their horny beaks

Food to Elijah bringing, Even and Morn —

yet this line is a source of endless pleasure to the ear by its ringing of bells. In itself — that is, if we omit the work of the Ravens — it tells of an extremely commonplace act. But the rhythm breathes magic into it.

We shall pause a little. Since one of you has taken all the trouble to bring my books of poems here, I should not leave them quite unopened. What poem would you like me to read? Triumph is AW. Very well. It is the poet's Credo, his confession of faith. People believe in the Divine on the strength of the happiness they get or the beauty they see around, but that would be to depend on conditions and, when those conditions on which they have reared their confidence are shaken or removed, what happens?... This poet is an absolutist: he makes his position independent of this or that reason. He will feel and love and declare the Divine Presence in joy and sorrow, light and shadow, youth and old age, life and death. Now listen:

I build Thee not on golden dreams

Nor on the wide world's winsomeness;

Deeper than all I set my love —

A faith that is foundationless!

Not only where Thy silver steps

Twinkle a night of nenuphars,

But everywhere I see Thy heaven:

I love the night between the stars.

O mine the smiling power to feel

A secret sun with blinded eyes,

And through a dreaming worship bear

As benediction wintry skies.

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For ever in my heart I hear

A time-beat of eternal bliss.

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.

The whole world is my resting-place;

Thy beauty is my motherland:

Sweet enemies are wounds of age —

My body breaks but by Thy hand.

Triumph is all — as though beneath

An unseen flag of rapture's red

A beating of great drums went on

With every giant drummer dead!

I shall say a few explanatory words, especially about the last stanza which may seem a little bewildering. In the first stanza there is "a faith that is foundationless"; this may appear disparaging to the faith, but really it strikes home by an extreme statement the absoluteness of the faith, its disdain of being erected on anything that may be regarded as its justification, its foundation; in other words, its raison d'etre is in itself. But being "foundationless" is not to be without depth: rather, all foundations are too shallow. In the second stanza we have two lines of Poetic Diction — the word "nenuphars" being the most notable instance of it. This word means "water-lilies". The Divine's luminous steps are pictured as kindling in the depths of the night the stars looking like water-lilies in a dark pool. The result — "a night of nenuphars" — is to be contrasted to "the night between the stars", the sheer darkness which too the poet visions as the heaven of the Divine. The verse,

I love the night between the stars

is a favourite of mine — just as it is of a friend who remarks that it has struck on an originality of substance brought out movingly in simple and common words uncommonly combined to suit that substance without yet losing straightforwardness. In the third stanza we get a hint of what this night really is. An inner eye that needs no proof of the Divine is suggested: a happy dreaming worship that can feel the Divine's splendour although the outer

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sight is lost in total darkness. Further, the arch of the sky is seen as a curved palm held over the head and even the gloomy sky of winter is felt by the poet-dreamer's worshipping face as if he were receiving a blessing under that curved palm. The fourth stanza has a poetic pun in "time-beat": on the one hand eternity and time are juxtaposed and the bliss of the former is said to be experienced in the movements of the latter — on the other hand music has always a "time", a certain "tempo", and since here something is heard in the heart the term is apposite to the idea that eternal bliss has grown the very sound of the heart. The sense of eternity-in-time links up with the "White Omnipresence" and the banishment of all fear, while the sense of eternal bliss in the heart connects with the feeling of the kiss of the Divine Love in even the crudest, cruellest and most calamitous touch of experience. I may mention for your interest that a businessman almost jumped up with pleasure on reading:

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss.

No doubt, he is an Aurobindonian, but such a strong response to poetry I had never expected him to give. Maybe his business was in a terrible slump and he had got into nasty holes and these lines cut across his depression, lighting up the fact that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were always there to help if one could fill one's mind and heart with aspiration for their Grace. Stanza five applies the idea of omnipresence concretely to the world we live in: peace and security can be felt in every place, every country, because of the enfolding and sustaining love of the Spirit, a love as of a mother for her child: there is the mother-suggestion in the use of the term "motherland" for the Divine's beauty present secretly in all parts of the earth. The two closing lines of this stanza apply to the process of time what has been just applied to the extension of space: all periods of one's life, even old age with its infirmities, become full of the Divine's contact, the Divine's gracious action. From "the wounds of age" as "sweet enemies" the transition is made by imaginative logic to the idea of death and there the climax is worked out of the poem's central theme: triumph is all. This theme recalls a phrase like "ripeness is all" in Shakespeare, which too is joined with the death-idea:

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Men must endure

Their going hence even as their coming hither:

Ripeness is all...

But the death-idea in the present poem is not necessarily confined to the actual cessation of life: it creates a symbol and the symbol is worked out by a paradoxical picture. Think of a band of giant drummers in an army. They are all killed and the flag under which they had lived and drummed has fallen also: Yet there is a victo-rious action: an invisible flag, red with the flush of rapture, is flying and beneath it great drums are still heard beating. This mighty miraculous drumming, in the midst of complete apparent defeat and death, symbolises the supreme achievement of faith. Note the sound-effect of the last two lines. The r's of "rapture's red" in the second line of the stanza are taken up in both these lines and combined with repeated t's and d's around n's and m's to build a sound-picture of resonant and insistent triumph.

There you are! I hope the lady on the last bench is satisfied. What else, madam?... Oh the word "madam" reminds me of something. I once told you that poetry goes as far back as the most primitive times as a natural expression of whatever means most to the hoping, striving, aching or exulting self in us. I quoted to you the Australian blackfellow's Kangaroo-cry. I may add now that we may regard poetry as the very first self-expression of man. Do you know what the first words of Adam to Eve were in the Garden of Eden? According to the Bible, Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs while he was asleep. What the Bible forgets to tell us is that as soon as he woke up and found her in front of him he bowed and introduced himself to her with the couplet:

Madam,

I'm Adam.

Here from the sheer beginning of human life you have poetry with not only reason in it but also rhyme. And there is even more to it. You may remember my pointing out to you that Shakespeare never lost a chance to be devilishly clever at the same time that he was godlike in greatness. Adam summed up in brief all the clever-ness to come in the tribe of poets. His small sentence is what is called a palindrome, a phrase that reads the same whether you

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say it forward or backward. Read "Madam, I'm Adam" from right to left and you will have the same thing as from left to right.

Perhaps the most famous palindrome is a statement put into the mouth of Napoleon. Napoleon, before he was banished to the God-forsaken island of St. Helena far out in the southern wastes of the Atlantic ocean, had been exiled to the frequently man-visited isle of Elba in the Mediterranean. This happened after the Battle of Leipzig, known as the Battle of the Standards because the flags of five or more nations were flying in it against Napoleon who had returned very much reduced in strength from Moscow. But, al-though he was defeated and put away on Elba, he was hardly the man who could stay put, as the Americans say. The explosive energy that was in him sought every chance to get out of Elba. And he did manage an escape under the very noses of his captors. While sailing under disguise out of the island, his boat was crossed by a British steamer. The captain of the steamer put his horn to his mouth and asked, "What news of Napoleon?" Napoleon himself answered back from his boat, "The Emperor is in excellent health." Yes, the Emperor was in high spirits and fighting fit, but his stay in Elba had altered a good deal of the European situation. A Bourbon had been placed on the French throne, the Army had gone over to the new king, the British and the Prussians had consolidated their positions. Napoleon, of course, made a great bid for power, took over the Army again and valiantly met the British and the Prussians at Waterloo. But to no avail — he lost the battle and his military career came to an end. Somehow Elba had prepared his undoing, it had undermined his ability. During his reminiscent spells at St. Helena he is supposed to have said to the British attendant there: "Able was I ere I saw Elba." Here you have a palindrome of seven words.

Now, if we have still a few minutes to go, I'll open the other of the two books on my table and satisfy you with one more recita-tion. Let me read This Errant Life. It is a poem written in a mood of half-dejection half-wistfulness. One morning the poet felt very much the pull of human things in the midst of his spiritual aspira-tions. All that attracts the heart of a mere man came up before his vision and he expressed the deep draw of it in spite of the tran-siency with which it is associated. But his spiritual yearning too remained. So he declared that the human cannot become the divine unless and until the divine becomes the human and answers

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as the Avatar the heavenward longing of earth:

This errant life is dear although it dies,

And human lips are sweet though they but sing

Of stars estranged from us, and youth's emprise

Is wondrous yet although an unsure thing.

Sky-lucent Bliss untouched by earthiness,

I fear to soar lest tender bonds decrease.

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings, lean down from above;

Temper the unborn Light no thought can trace,

Suffuse my mood with a familiar glow;

For 'tis with mouth of clay I supplicate:

Speak to me heart to heart words intimate,

And all Thy formless glory turn to love

And mould Thy love into a human face.

The poem is simple enough not to call for much explanation. And your looks tell me that you already are familiar with it somehow. Oh you have been made to study it in the past by two professors? I did not know it had become as famous as all that. But Sri Aurobindo has given it rather high praise and it has been translated into both Bengali and Gujarati. It has, I supose, what one may term a poignantly profound sweetness. But by an irony of fate the way it was printed opposite its Gujarati translation knocked some of its high seriousness out by a printer's slip. I hope this mistake does not accidentally happen to be a shrewd comment on the poet's character: in the phrase,

If Thou desirest my weak self to outgrow

Its mortal longings...

the printed version misread "mortal" as "moral"!

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