On Poetry
THEME/S
TALK FORTY
Between my last lecture and this, quite a gap has fallen. And in that gap I fell down! Yes, I had a nasty toss some days back and had to stay at home for a time. What happened? you will ask. Well, as your Professor of Poetry I may say that my life has a poetic rhythm — a falling movement and a rising movement. Also, I am very much like a simile — very much like what I am doing just now, for I am giving you a simile in comparing myself to one. The Romans had the phrase: Omne simile claudicat — "Every simile limps."
One may understand this in two ways. A simile may limp because it may not come up to the reality: unable to keep pace with the actual, it may fall short of conveying a true idea of what a thing is: one makes a comparison in order to express some quality in a thing, but the comparison may prove to be merely a suggestive statement which cannot bring out the essence of the matter. I consider this view a piece of ineptitude. To my mind, a simile extends and enriches an object, reveals an object's overpassing of its common appearance, establishes its connection and even its oneness with objects beyond itself and makes it part of an under-lying reality wider than individual things and holding the identical essence of a multitude of them. If the simile limps it is because the object fails to measure up to it: the limping comes not because the simile-leg is shorter but because it is longer. To take the most ordinary instance: "This man is like a lion." Do we extend and enrich the man or do we cramp and impoverish him? And do we not hint at something in which man-nature and lion-nature fuse in a kind of world-nature common or basic to both?
The second interpretation is: a simile fastens on a few important features of semblance and ignores others which differ. So no simile copes with an object with completeness. The incompleteness creates the limp. Here too we may argue that if the simile is meant to show something that else would not be revealed in an object the points of difference do not diminish the simile but are neutral inasmuch as they stand outside the purpose of it: some of them may even outshine what is proper to the object. Thus, to revert to our example, a lion has four clawed feet which do not resemble a man's two hands and two feet with their fairly harmless nails. But, in regard to the courage and strength prompting the comparison,
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those four paws are far more effective instruments. I have a high opinion of the illustrative function of a simile. This need not imply a high opinion by myself of my own person, though, of course, some great persons have limped. There was Scott the novelist, there was Byron the poet — and in our times Davies, some of whose verse we have quoted. Timur the terrific conqueror was lame — and Marlowe in his Tamburlane made the Tartar look even more terrific by some of his similes. The Greek god Hephaestus had also an abnormal leg, but Sri Aurobindo in his Ilion brings out his godhead all the same when he describes how from the conference of the deities before the final battle at Troy he descended to take his particular secret station among the fighters:
Down upon earth he came with his lame omnipotent motion.
To return to my not so omnipotent movements, let me wind up by quoting two pieces of advice I have received on the subject of falling down. One is from the English allegorist Bunyan. He said:
He that is down need fear no fall.
But this would mean an extreme "Safety First" measure. I would have to keep sitting on the ground for ever and a day, or else walk on all fours. I prefer what the Chinese sage Confucius has to offer me. He wrote: "Our greatest glory lies not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."
You can't deny that I have risen and I shall try to rise also to the occasion of our present theme: the planes of poetry. I shall begin at the beginning, the foot of the "World-stair": the subtle physical plane. Here it is the outer activities of man and Nature that pass through the poetic imagination and acquire an inwardness which reveals the psychological or even superhuman powers at work in the world. The poet's preoccupation, however, is now not with these powers in their intrinsic quality but with them as completely externalised and seen as physical movements and interrelations. In English the outstanding example is Geoffrey Chaucer, the so-called Father of English Poetry. The adjective "outstanding" is very apt, for his mind stands out rather than in. The designation "Father of English Poetry" is perhaps less apt. Not because there is any poet of considerable stature preceding him, but some critics
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protest that by using this phrase we make Chaucer look as if he were responsible for the birth of something named English Poetry without himself being English Poetry personified. Suppose we speak of the father of Shakespeare: we only make the old man responsible for a birth that is quite different in essential quality from himself. The father of Shakespeare could be a man like any of his son's creations but not at all like his son. He could be like Hamlet or Macbeth or Falstaff or Romeo — at least some sort of Romeo he must have been if Shakespeare was at all to get born — but we do not imagine that Shakespeare's father was like Shakespeare who was the literary father of Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Romeo. So when Chaucer is described as the Father of English Poetry he may be thought to be anything except English Poetry itself. This is declared to be an erroneous suggestion. If the usual designation has to be applied, then Chaucer was a part of what he made: the first child he had was his own self or, let us say, the born poet in him.
In the eyes of some judges of literature, this first child is also the highest form reached by the English poetic genius except for just two who overpass the maker of it: Shakespeare and Milton. Sri Aurobindo, when he wrote The Future Poetry, did not hold Chaucer in very high regard: he was of one mind with Matthew Arnold who found Chaucer lacking in what he called "high seriousness" as well as the "grand style". Only in a few phrases here and there did Matthew Arnold see these properties of what he considered, supreme poetic expression come into the Chaucerian speech — a line, for instance, like:
O martyr souded in virginitie
which, by the way, Arnold with his flair for misquotation changed a little by substituting "to" for "in". "Souded" is the same as the modern "soldered", meaning immovably fixed — here in the virginal consciousness, in the purity of the deep soul. Sri Aurobindo says in The Future Poetry that Chaucer was content to note outward life with chiefly a stir in himself of "a kindly satisfaction..., a blithe sense of humour or a light and easy pathos." The apparent traits of character are described with aptness and vividness, but mostly no phrase probes into the profundities of them. Chaucer's job is to present life interestingly, not to interpret
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it. Ease, grace, lucidity, a fluent yet compact expression adequate to the manifold impression of human nature and earth-nature in a mirror-mind that has no marked depth of its own but has an individual colour, as it were, so that what is imaged is not a mere "yellow primrose" but a thing made yellow and primrosy by a life materialising itself to the vision of a particular temperament. We do not always feel that the medium of verse was absolutely necessary to Chaucer: well-tempered limpid prose could have done almost as well, and actually some of his "Canterbury Tales" are in prose. But now and again among his 17,000 and odd lines there occur passages that exceed the superficial charm possible to rhymed and metred expression and stay with us as precious possessions, even though the place where they stay is not always very profound.
I mean, the poetry is authentic and memorable. The authenticity we can at once recognise by contrasting this poetry with what a well-known later writer has done with it in the attempt to modernise Chaucer and make him presentable to a more cultured sense. Dryden, seeing the archaic and often childlike form in which Chaucer's work stood, tried to put him in the garb of eighteenth century language — and, in doing so, brought about often just a garb without any body inside. Take these lines of Chaucer's — having at least something of high seriousness and achieving a rather striking pathos:
What is this world, what asketh man to have,
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone withouten any companye?
See what Dryden makes of this naive yet touching world-cry:
Vain man! how various a bliss we crave,
Now warm in love, now withering in the grave!
Never, O never more to see the sun!
Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone!
Dryden is obviously "arty". He gets out as much alliteration as possible. Chaucer too alliterates, but his effects are natural and organic: there is no effort to produce an impression. In line 2 the only marked alliteration is with n — it is something inevitable in
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the very sturcture of the phrase and too straightforward to be "arty". And his most effective alliteration is not apparent but subtle. In line 3 the same n-sound, becomes a subtle undertone with the effect as of a deep secret moan of all mortality. Dryden brings, in addition to his two "now" 's and two "never" 's "vain" and "various" in line 1, "warm" and "withering", and is similarly deliberate in his art in the last line. In this line he wants to drive home the pathos with the gong-note of a terminal "alone". Many masterly lines in English poetry have this ending. I may quote a few. There is the Wordsworth line with its fathomless suggestion of daring some unknown wondrous in-world:
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
There is the vivid vision of savage bird-life in Tennyson's
...let the wild
Lean-headed eagles yelp alone...
Then there is another glimpse of bird-life, happily haunting as opposed to fearsomely remote — Housman's
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells, alone.
We get the sense of a deeply felt hollowness even in the richest human experience and the vibrant hint of a religious fulfilment carrying us beyond all tragedy when Dunbar writes:
All love is lost but upon God alone.
Finally, there is Sri Aurobindo's revelation — as superb as Words-worth's and more precise in spiritual substance — of a transcendental reality:
The superconscient realms of motionless peace
Where judgment ceases and the word is mute
And the Unconceived lies pathless and alone.
But Dryden, to my ear, falls flat: his line is constructed, not created. You feel the forced accent — the two "still" 's, the
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"dark" and the "damp", all hammer away at our ears instead of taking them captive by a spell. In the whole passage, only the second verse —
Now warm in love, now withering in the grave —
strikes me as genuinely moving, yet how far is its polished and elaborate achievement from the simple subtlety of Chaucer's
where by just calling the grave "colde" the heat of a thousand suns is packed by silent contrast in the one bare unqualified word "love". It is a little masterpiece of reticence and understatement. Dryden, as if not content to associate love explicitly with warmth; goes out of his way to add a line of his own where he introduces the sun and spoils the line completely by overloading the tragic accent. Those two "never" 's should never have been there. He seeks to pack the very essence of the joie de vivre in the sensation of sunlight, but the thought has no depth of feeling in it. Arnold has done in a positive way what Dryden fails to do in a negative:
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun?
Dryden, however, fails not simply because his way is negative: he fails because the negativeness is underlined too ostentatiously. In the right context and in the right manner one can kick against all limits and come out with a marvellous dramatic impression as does Shakespeare's Lear when he stands before the dead Cordelia:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Five consecutive trochees — a falling movement — with the same word, and what a climax just by the excess and by the antithesis to the iambic metre!
The lines, apart from illustrating the work of genius as against the work of artificial labour, illustrate also a plane different from the creative intelligence as well as from Chaucer's subtle physical:
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the Vital plane, the plane of the Life Force. A vibrant vigour is here which is missing in Chaucer no less than in Dryden. Poetically Chaucer has in his passage something equally good, but the quiver of the nerves of sensation is absent. And this quiver will be realised by us all the more if, beside Chaucer's lines on the emptiness and transience of the world, we set the famous Macbeth-passage, on a part of which we have already commented elsewhere and which again triumphantly employs a repetition, a triple one this time at the very start:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
This kind of vigorous many-motioned passionate language was beyond Chaucer: a complexity is present, yet not mere complexity differentiates the Shakespearian cry from the Chaucerian: this complexity is not a quiet one, it is tempestuous, a surge of wide waves, each wave leaping with a sharp zest and pushing its fellow and mixing with it to create a further movement: the imagery is dynamic and multiple. If Shakespeare is like the sea, Chaucer is like terra firma, solid earth: a certain simplicity, a suave temper carry him on. Mostly he has charm yet rather an obviousness, as when he speaks of the "very gentle parfit knight" 's noble deeds:
At mortal batailles hadde he bene fiftene
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene
In listes thryes, and ay slain his fo...
Put beside these lines Othello's account of his military life:
Of moving accidents, by flood and field;
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the insolent foe...
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Chaucer's eye looks a little below the shaken surface of things and his words give us a just and pleasing expression. Shakespeare's words, as Sri Aurobindo points out,1 with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force of directness in saying it, get, as we might put it, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke its very quality and give us immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill of the life they describe and interpret. No doubt, a greater poetic capacity is at work in Shakespeare than in Chaucer, at least on the whole. But the difference we are out to mark is not so much between the poetic geniuses of the two writers as between the planes from which they write.
From his own subtle physical, Chaucer too can produce supreme effects. Let me quote what seem to me the most pathetic lines a lover ever spoke, pathetic by a heart-breaking homeliness verging on naivete. You may have heard of Troilus and Cressida. Troilus was a Trojan, a brother of Hector, and Cressida was a Greek girl. She had sworn fidelity, and Troilus had given her a brooch as a sign of his love. Once he sees on the coat of Diomedes this very gift of his to Cressida. He says to her:
Through which I see that clene out of your minde
Ye hen me cast, and I ne can nor may,
For all the worlde, within my herte finde
T' unloven you a quarter of a day.
Now listen to Othello expressing his love. He thinks Desdemona is false to him, but he cannot change his heart — though it does drive him to kill her. Here he is giving tongue to his desperate attachment to her beauty:
Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.
Mark the energetic thrust of the language, the grandiose passion in the words. The same thrust, though a little less emphatic and also a
1. The Future Poetry, p. 1 69.
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little less verbally grandiose and with a more imaginative vein, we find in another speech of Othello's —
Had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it.
Judging from the example of Chaucer we might be inclined to believe that except for occasional outbreaks the poetry of the subtle physical plane is condemned to lack elemental energy and must fall short of dazzling glory. But we should be off the mark very much indeed in believing so. For, among poets of this plane, we have no less a figure than Homer. Homer has shown to what heights the poetry of the subtle physical can rise. Like Chaucer he too is preoccupied with external life, but his vision is vast and his eye is interpretative and not only representative. Sri Aurobindo writes: "Homer gives us the life of man always at a high intensity of impulse and action and without subjecting it to any other change he casts it in lines of beauty and in divine proportions; he deals with it as Phidias dealt with the human form when he wished to create a god in marble. When we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are not really upon this earth, but on the earth lifted into some plane of a greater dynamis of life, and so long as we remain there we have a greater vision in a more lustrous air and we feel ourselves raised to a semi-divine stature."1
But how shall we have an idea of Homeric poetry? It is in Greek and to translate great poetry we need a great poet in the new language. Also, Homer wrote in quantitative hexameters and unless we translate him in hexameters of a genuine inspiration and with something of the same sound-spirit we shall miss the final touch of his oceanic verse. One of his most famous lines comes at almost the beginning of the Iliad. Agamemnon has captured Chryseis, the daughter of the high-priest of Apollo. The high-priest approaches him and pleads for the return of his daughter. Agamemnon insolently refuses to hand her over. Then the old man goes home along the Trojan beach, and Homer has the line:
Be d'akeon para thina poluphlois boio thalasses.
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Sri Aurobindo renders it:
Silent he walked by the shore of the many-rumoured ocean.
Here apparently is nothing more than a physical scene serving as the background to a simple psychological state accompanying a bodily human movement. The sounds of the sea are mentioned and the man is described in what modern parlance would call "behaviouristic terms" — his outward condition and activity, his body in motion, his face unspeaking. But what an effect is created! There is the contrast between a moving silence and a moving sound, but a small human silence set against a huge natural sound, and just by the human smallness remaining silent the natural hugeness which is full of sound becomes the voice of that silence and we realise the immensity of the sorrow and the anger the small human figure is feeling, a sorrow and an anger to which the voice proper to that figure could never give true expression and which gets expressed for all time by that multitudinous rumour, that mighty roar of the waters.
To get an effect of a similar greatness in connection with the sea we have to recall that phrase of Shakespeare's in Henry IV's soliloquy on Sleep:
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge?
Now too the human and the elemental are joined, though in a different way: the very roughness and rowdiness of the ocean is converted into a lulling power by the cradlelike swaying of the waves in their rise and fall, and a tiny human figure is served by a monstrous natural force to find peace.
I said that Homer needs an English master of expression and technique to do him justice. You can see for yourself what a world of contrast is there between Sri Aurobindo's rendering of that line and Alexander Pope's in the eighteenth-century pentameter:
Silent he wander'd by the sounding main.
Not that Pope's line is a pure "flop": he has tried to get something
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of the boom of the waters by his n and m resonances, but I feel that the boom is more nasal than natural: the sea-god seems to have a roaring cold and to be speaking through his many-nostrilled nose. Whatever effect is still on the positive side strikes me as somewhat contrived: the inevitable art of the Homeric utterance is lost.
I shall give you another instance of Homer's greatness and two versions of it, neither of which is a failure but each a semi-success. I do not remember the Greek original. But Homer is describing in one of his lengthy similes (limping all over, I am afraid) a night-scene in which there is a flash of lightning in the deep cloudy darkness and as a result a sudden clearing up and a revelation of the whole starry sky. Tennyson thus translates the phrase in well-modulated and expressively enjambed blank verses:
...the immeasurable heavens
Break open to the highest and the stars
Shine...
I believe Homer puts everything into one single line and naturally the effect is fuller and finer, more faithful to the amplitude laid bare at once. But Tennyson shows great skill managing his translation, with the "heavens" a feminine ending suggestive of continuity and then the first foot of the next line a quantitatively long and strongly stressed spondee and the same line holding poised at its far end the noun "stars" and quietly yet by the syntax intrinsically urging us on to the prominent wide-toned verb "Shine" in the next. I think a truer Homeric version is the result, especially as the whole tone is a controlled majesty and drive, than the version made by Chapman in Elizabeth's time:
And the unmeasured firmament breaks to disclose its light.
The expression is very fine, though a little more generalised than Tennyson's: what stamps it as inferior to the latter is the rhythm. Sri Aurobindo considers the rhythm here not equal to the poetic occasion: it is rather jerky, rather explosive, more violent than powerful: it is ballad rhythm camouflaged as a fourteener — two separate bits of four feet and three feet are put together to look large and fluent, a rolling and sinuous and splendid length is not
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there, the fourteener does not get naturally born.
How important the rhythmic life and the life of the verbal arrangement are to the Homeric expression may be judged from a hexametrical translation by an Englishman named Cotterill of a phrase from the Odyssey. Cotterill has done the whole poem into accentual hexameters and off and on he achieves grand effects, but sometimes at the peak-points of Homer he fails in poetic sensitiveness, both in rhythm and word. Here is Homer, godlike yet direct:
Zenos men pais ea Kronion autar oixun
Eikhon apereisien.
Here is Cotterill:
Son of Cronion, of Zeus the Almighty was I, but afflictions
Ever-unending I knew.
The translator has knocked half the world-cry out by a somewhat pompous and cluttered and ill-balanced turn at the end. He has also padded out the line with "the Almighty" which is not in the Greek. I think a more moving approximation of the Homeric afflatus can be struck upon by something like:
I was the child of Zeus the Kronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain.
("Kronion" means "one who has Kronos for his father" — Kronos who is known in English as "Saturn".)
Homer is always simple even in his profundity, straightforward even in his subtlety, natural even in his majesty. A typical instance of this style is at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Odysseus has lost all his companions — most of them because they slew the oxen that were sacred to Helios, the sun-god, who in return brought about their death. Homer says, as F. L. Lucas has pointed out, no more than: "He took from them the day of their home-coming." And in this unassuming phrase he packed a whole world of pathos, touching the most sensitive, the most intimate strings of the human heart. Some of the typical Homeric effects you will find again and again in Sri Aurobindo's Ilion which is not a translation but a new vision of the last day of the siege of Troy, long after Homer has
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finished with his story. Sri Aurobindo is more complex, more rich, more spiritual than Homer, yet he has always Homer's ocean-rumour, Homer's eye on clear-cut shape and gesture and attitude and motion, the subtle physical plane taken up into the Aurobindo-nian universe. And throughout there is the right rhythm, the soul of the Greek quantitative hexameter has been caught without sacrificing the stress-genius of the English language.
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