On Poetry
THEME/S
TALK FORTY-TWO
We have now to comment critically on the poetry of the thought-mind and on the poetry of the planes beyond it. We have already had a taste of the Miltonic version of "the poetic intelligence" as well as obtained a glimpse of Dryden's exercise of the same poetic agency in dealing with Chaucer's lines on life. While Milton, compared with Shakespeare in two of his splendid bursts of the vital mind, fared very well in his own domain, Dryden came a bit of a cropper, rhetorically artificialising what was spontaneous and moving in the Mediaeval singer. It may be tempting to aver that Dryden failed because he wrote in an age when the Poetic Intelligence acted from its surface part — the part which put into verse-form the reasoning faculty skilfully expressing itself in measured language. Indeed this faculty exposes itself to the danger of an inadequate transmutation of prose into poetry. But the failure is not intrinsic to it. Every faculty in us is capable of being inspired and the surface part of the mind can also catch the Muse's breath. Let me pick out from the age in which Dryden flourished a passage which exemplifies a successful employment of the sheer reason in a poetic shape. My passage is from Dryden himself and is concerned with the very reason we are speaking of with a comparison of its range to the range of what was known as revealed religion which appealed to faith and not to logic. The passage from Dryden's Religio Laid runs:
Dim as the borrowed beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers
Is reason to the soul: and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here, so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows reason at religion's sight;
So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light.
I have always regarded these couplets as poetic inspiration flowing through the movement of the pure intellect. I am sure Dryden,
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living in a period when wisdom was expected to be allied to wit, would have been pleased if someone had told him: "Starting with the belief that not only the moon but also the stars shine by reflection, the couplets point the particular limited utility of the intellect's characteristic function — its play of seizing life's meaning in thought, its constant reflective activity." The language of the couplets is of an argument carried out in a sustained manner, and there is a clarity and directness of expression everywhere: the mind is bent on making its point as lucidly and effectively as possible. But everywhere too are a stirred imagination, a deep emotion — and the initial metaphor is kept right up to the end, while the argument is so phrased as to thrill the heart at each turn of thought. The step-by-step progression of the idea, the slow patient working out of the theme, the recurrent tendency to make a straight statement — these are typical intellectual traits. Yet we have in the piece as a whole a most coherently built picture that makes a careful delicate impact on some profound part in us which immediately feels the truth of what is gradually unfolded. And how apt is the finale of six feet to the preceding pentameters! The sheer length of this verse and the penultimate five-syllabled epithet — "supernatural" — which is the longest and most impressive word in the passage clinch the thesis of religion's superiority by a subtly powerful dialectic of rhythm, structure and style. They demonstrate it to our grey cells by proving it on our senses and pulses.
When we pass beyond the Poetic Intelligence we enter either the Inner Mind and the Psychic Consciousness or rise into the "overhead" hierarchy. It will be enlightening no less than interesting to take one particular word and see how poets have woven it into their work in various manners moulded by diverse planes. I choose the noun "face". There is the simple emotional pull with a faint soul-tinge in the language of the Poetic Intelligence in Aldington's dedicated desire:
She is as gold
Lovely, and far more cold.
Do thou pray with me,
For if I win grace
To kiss twice her face
God has done well to me.
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An inward-moving ingenuity with a vague romantic-spiritual touch upon mental speech meets us in Donne's
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest.
Typical of this "Metaphysical" poet is the tension not only in the idea with its tug this way and that but also in the metrical craft with its unusual play of stress in both the lines.
In contrast to Donne's little picture of hearts in harmony through a mutual mirroring of faces by the eyes, here are lines by an Ashram poet about a state of discord which yet is turned by an inner wisdom's brave front into a spiritual gain:
O face of scorn, you winter not my will:
This heart grew brighter when your breath's proud chill
Flung my diffuse life-blood more richly in!
From the rude love-lacking visage we may slide into a vision of occult abnormal life brought by an inspiration of the Inner Mind guided from above the mental plane to a clear discernment of dreadful details:
A march of goddess figures dark and nude
Alarmed the air with grandiose unease;
Appalling footsteps drew invisibly near,
Shapes that were threats invaded the dream-light,
And ominous beings passed him on the road
Whose very gaze was a calamity:
A charm and sweetness sudden and formidable,
Faces that raised alluring lips and eyes
Approached him armed with beauty like a snare,
But hid a fatal meaning in each line
And could in a moment dangerously change.1
At the other pole of the entities vivified by Sri Aurobindo is the Master himself as seen by a disciple-poet:
1. Savitri (Birth Centenary Edition, 1972), pp. 205-06.
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All heaven's secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body's blinded cry —
A soul of upright splendour like the noon!
Here we are straining beyond the Poetic Intelligence and even the second tier of the overhead ascent, for the Higher Mind which has seized the mental imagination is itself linking its largeness of thought to a wideness of sight proper to the Illumined Mind.
Sri Aurobindo has read a capture of the spiritual-mental Illumination and its domination by the inmost being, the Psychic Consciousness, in the last eight lines of the same disciple's poem with which you are all acquainted:
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.
Please excuse the intrusion of my own work on you, but it comes handy at times because Sri Aurobindo has taken the trouble to distinguish its sources in terms of planes. Thus some lines of "The Sacred Fire" he characterises as felicitously intense with an intuitive edge — an outflow from the inner being not only uttering the psychic truth but also bearing "a fine psychic touch". The second of the two stanzas I am excerpting from this poem of nine stanzas may well represent this touch which is spread over more than sixteen of the lyric's thirty-six lines:
Breathe tenderly your love:
Feed the pure flame
By secret offerings
Of one far Name
Whose rhythms make more rich
That smiling face
Of angel glow within
The heart's embrace...
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Now I should like to bring before you an expression subtly suggestive of an exquisite inwardness inspired by outward Nature-feeling. It is the famous stanza in what is perhaps the finest and most moving lyric in English — Wordsworth's "Three years she grew":
The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place,
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
If I were to comment in the style of Sri Aurobindo I should say: "The Inner Mind where sight and insight happily blend, but making contact with the sweetness and light of the inmost secrecy which is the Psychic Consciousness, and catching a delicate intensity from the plane of sheer Intuition which is spontaneously intimate from its height with the depth of things." Actually, the stanza itself may be said to evoke covertly a sense both of the height and of the depth by beginning with "the stars of midnight", which are, in Sri Aurobindo's vision, symbols of the sheer Intuition-plane, and moving on to explore hidden recesses of the earth with a downward turn of the being, the act of leaning the ear to the mysterious message of little spurts of free-flowing and variously curving water.
Something akin in delicacy of expression as well as in sensitivity of feeling may be traced in a couple of lines from, again, an Ashram-poet:
The sole truth my lips bear is the perfume
From the ecstatic flower of her face.
Here the suggestion is that the poet draws his entire revelatory inspiration from a relationship of pure love to the beauty of a countenance in which a profound bliss of the innermost self has found a rapt outer expression.
The word "rapt" puts me in mind of another line, now by Vaughan, in which too the same ingredients from "overhead" can be spotted though in different proportions:
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Rapt above earth by power of one fair face...
Sri Aurobindo has opined about its mixed source: "Difficult to say. More of Higher Mind perhaps than anything else — but something of illumination and intuition also." I should point out that in reading this line one has to pronounce the preposition "above" with a shift of its usual accent. Instead of stressing the second syllable we have to put some weight on the first, though hardly such as on the opening past participle "Rapt". Or else we have to make the first foot a truncated one and scan the next with three words in a somewhat unusual way — a slack followed by a light pressure and then a strong ictus: "above earth." But the psychology, so to speak, of the line — its raptness — would be vitiated by that unusual trisyllabic skip. It is best to take the first foot as a semi-spondee, anticipating the full spondee with which the verse concludes: "fair face." There are several prepositions or adjectives in English poetry which allow a change of accent as here. To mention a few: "among", "upon", "beyond", "between", "occult", "divine", "extreme", "supreme". Consider for an example the fifth line at the beginning of Savitri, where "the huge foreboding mind of Night"
Lay stretched immobile upon Silence' marge.
The metrical movement would be disturbed if we stressed the preposition in the normal way as in the second line of those two occurring later in Savitri:
A colloquy of the original Gods
Meeting upon the borders of the unknown...1
In the poems of Swinburne we have two interesting accent-inversions. Look at the couplet:
And strewed one marriage-bed with tears and fire
For extreme loathing and supreme desire.
The epithets "extreme" and "supreme" are of the same kind and yet the first is stressed abnormally on the opening syllable and the
1. Ibid., p. 12.
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second on the closing as in normal pronunciation. But elsewhere we have the blasphemous phrase,
The supreme evil, God,
where the accent of the second epithet too is reversed.
To go back to our "face"-motif. I would place on the farthest borders of the unknown, neighbouring the Overmind if not even living in it, that picture of the Dawn-Goddess appearing on the last day of Satyavan's life and almost presaging the ultimate epiphany which would crown earth's evolutionary history:
Infinity's centre, a Face of rapturous calm
Parted the eternal lids that open heaven;
A Form from far beatitudes seemed to near.1
On the same level, the sheer Overmind, we have those unforgettable lines of Marlowe on Helen of Troy, which, according to Sri Aurobindo, manifest the Overmind afflatus more on the emotional or descriptive side than on the ideative:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
If we want the ideative side in prominence, we shall be very well served by Wordsworth's response at Cambridge to the statue of
Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
A masterly art is here, inspired and revelatory. While the "prism" shows an outward orientation of the great scientist, the "silent face" evokes a sense of inwardness, a concentrated mood, and the next line suggests how such a face fits perfectly the sculpture-medium in whose stillness its possessor's genius is caught for all time as if in a superb trance. Again, the impression of all time for the marble image is matched by this image's pointer to the endless exploration of the hitherto unknown which preoccupied Newton's
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mental powers. The inward absorption carries a secret dynamic drive. There is a crescendo in the uplift of the expression. The opening phrase may be considered the Poetic Intelligence's forceful clarity bordering on the Higher Mind's expansive vision and then the Higher Mind itself comes into full action with its wide rhythmic sweep breaking, as it were, beyond into something yet intenser by means of the last word — "ever" — which exceeds the pentameter span by a syllable. With this technical excess we are led on most naturally to the culminating scene — the movement of a unique adventure of speculation across distance after uncharted distance towards Nature's supreme truths. I employ the term "truths" rather than "facts" both because Wordsworth's picture has an aura of philosophical elevation and because Newton's own penetration of Nature was covertly suffused by an intuition of Supernature. For instance, his concept of uniform absolute space in which there was one absolute time at every point had for its background his notion of God's omnipresence and omniscience. If we wish to cull from the work of Wordsworth himself a hint of this hidden all-pervading divine sensorium of all-knowledge in a visible form, we should cite two other lines from the same poem, The Prelude, conjuring up a play of the aurora borealis:
Space like a heaven filled up with northern lights,
Here, nowhere, there, and everywhere at once.
The technique of
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone
is worth noting in brief. The initial trochee of "Voya-" serves to represent the impulsion of the explorer's daring plunge forward. That long-sounding "through" rather than the short-sounding "in" or even the slightly lengthened "o'er" is the mot juste, especially as it is stressed, for introducing the league on league of uncrossed water which is suggested by the drawn-out vowel-value no less than by the strong stresses of "strange seas" and by the sibilant alliteration as if waves were splashing around the ship's career. The irregular metre straightens up in the last two feet which are iambs mirroring, so to speak, a steady course towards a goal. But each iamb takes its accent on a vowel over which the voice gets stretched, so that the suggestion of a continuous oceanic vastness
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is sustained. An extra effect which seems to sum up the boldness and uniqueness of the enterprise is the last word "alone" which actually stands by itself, after a comma, separate from the entire preceding phrase. Simultaneously, however, there is an undercurrent of connection between this last word and the very first one: "Voyaging". Thus the beginning and the end of the line are joined so as to build, in our aesthetic perception, a single whole despite the extensive intervening division which induces "alone", in that terminal position, to make a special disclosure of its significance.
Sri Aurobindo1 characterises the line as being "wonderful" with its "fathomless depth" while regretting that such triumphs of poetic inspiration should occur in Wordsworth quite often in the midst of verse that is flat. What He calls "fathomless depth" is achieved not only by the idea getting an intuitively guided expression but also by — to use his own term — a "spiritual intonation", an inner rhythm, a mysterious sound as though the word-music were a snatch from some reverberation of godlike activity that has no end.
After quoting this line along with Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through eternity
which, by the way, presses into service the preposition "through" in affinity to Wordsworth's use of it, Sri Aurobindo2 says: "In fact, the word-rhythm is only part of what we hear; it is a support for the rhythm we listen to behind in 'the Ear of the ear', srotrasya strotram. To a certain extent, that is what all great poetry at its highest tries to have, but it is only the Overmind rhythm to which it is altogether native and in which it is not only behind the word-rhythm but gets into the word-movement itself and finds a kind of fully supporting body there." It is because of that "Ear of the ear" that the Rishis of the Rigveda took it as their poetic function to be "hearers" of the Truth no less than "seers" of it, kavayah satya-srutah, in their aspiration to utter what is designated the Mantra, the supreme creative speech, the direct declaration of the Overmind. To employ about them some lines from Savitri:
1.The Future Poetry..., p. 1 2 1
2.Ibid., p. 369 .
3.Ibid., p. 363.
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They sang Infinity's names and deathless powers
In metres that reflect the moving worlds,
Sight's sound-waves breaking from the soul's great deeps.
The last line here is a veritable Mantra crystallising the nature of the true Mantric articulation. If we may apply Sri Aurobindo's own description1 of those two great lines from Wordsworth and Milton: "one has the sense here of a rhythm which does not begin or end with the line, but has for ever been sounding in the eternal planes and began even in Time ages ago and which returns into the infinite to go on sounding for ages after." And indeed it is of rhythm that the line speaks most prominently. Every truth-sight has its inherent truth-intonation and this intonation is like a radiant multitude of waves that come into view from what the Rigveda terms hridaye samudra, the immense sea of the inmost heart. The very vibration of that sea — the audible movement as of some mighty peace going forth to drown all the little voices that mislead the mind of man — creates in their place a unifying chord by which every genuine cry of earth would feel soothed and fulfilled. The Mantra, with its haunting thrill of a sovereign revelation, brings an all-harmonising calm: it is — in the accents of another Mantra from a short poem by Sri Aurobindo —
Force one with unimaginable rest.2
A remarkable technical trait of the phrase about "sight's sound-waves" is that seven out of the ten syllables making up the line are intrinsically long vowels and bear massed stresses, four consecutive ones in the first two feet and three such in the last two. I do not know of any other line in English poetry that has so much weight of music as well as of meaning and yet possesses a spontaneous mobility. No completer example can be offered of what these talks have sought to disclose: the heart and the art of poetry.
1.The Future Poetry..., p. 369.
2.Collected Poems (Birth Centenary Edition, 1972), p. 575.
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