Talks on Poetry

TALK FOUR

Now in the lines of Sri Aurobindo's we have put together for study —

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,...

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity —

we come, from the poet who is the vision-catcher and from the eternal eye for which he acts the visionary, to what is caught, the thing visioned. It is "the sudden kingfisher". Technically we cannot help being struck by the way the adjective stands — at the end of the line. In poetry, lines are either end-stopped or enjambed. Enjambment (a French word) connoted originally the continuing of the sentence of one couplet into the next instead of stopping short. In general it connotes the running on of the phrase of one line into another instead of ending with the line's end or at least pausing there as a sort of self-sufficient unit. "Sudden" makes an enjambment and it makes it by what is termed a feminine ending. Lines have either masculine or feminine endings (rhymed or un-rhymed): the former close the line with a syllable that is stressed (heavily or lightly), the latter carry it beyond the stressed to an unstressed syllable. I do not know why this kind of termination is dubbed "feminine". Perhaps it is a hint of the feminine propensity not to stop speaking when one should stop, but to continue past the right limit! The phrase "feminine ending" would then be a sort of paradox, a sarcasm as if to say that such an ending is really no ending except in feminine eyes. Enjambment itself may be desig-nated as a feminine ending of another type — the line refusing to cease where it technically terminates but overflowing into the next.

Milton's blank verse is full of enjambment though not of un-stressed syllables hanging out at the ends of lines. May we connect his line-overflows with the fact that he had several wives (in succession, of course) and many daughters — all of them rendering his house a place of interminable babble and by their overflow of talk setting him a pattern of blank verse in which the lines very often push on and join up instead of properly pausing or concluding? At least we know that when Milton went blind he taught

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his daughters to read Greek and Latin to him without understanding what these languages said. He did not teach them the meanings of Greek and Latin words nor their syntactical structure but only how to pronounce them. The poor girls were bored with long hours of gibberish recitation to their papa. They must have frequently protested, but Milton was adamant. When one of his friends asked him why he had not taught them Greek and Latin properly, he tartly replied: "One tongue is sufficient for any woman."

He meant, of course, that a woman makes more than enough use of even one language and if she had more than one at her command she would — to employ a coinage of Milton himself — turn a house into a Pandemonium ("an abode of all demons, a place of lawless violence or uproar, an utter confusion"). One may wonder whether Milton's celebrated laments over his blindness did not have an unexpressed undertone of regret that he went blind rather than deaf. According to Herbert Grierson, his most moving — that is, most tragically poignant — line is the one in which the blind Samson under the open midday sky cries out:

O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon!

Well, if Milton had been deaf and not blind, his most happy line would have been an utterance under his own roof when his women-folk got up at sunrise:

O calm, calm, calm amid the uproar at dawn!

In the interests of literary history I may say that Milton's women-folk must have themselves had a trying time with the poet. One of his wives is reported to have run away from him. He was not exactly an amiable person. He had the typical Puritan's low opinion of human nature (other people's human nature) and the censorious lip and even the heavy hand. He was a lifelong believer in the birch for young people.

Enjambment and the feminine ending have taken us a little off the track. Let us return to our "sudden". The positioning of it at the end of an enjambed line carries a host of suggestions far subtler than any to do with feminine talk. The first effect is to startle us by the occurrence of an adjective without its noun, an

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occurrence besides at so marked a place in the line as its very close. Technically the meaning of this adjective is reinforced by its separated terminal position. But there are still other effects. One is in relation to the verb "caught". Suddenness suggests a quick movement which takes one by surprise and which may be thought uncatchable. So we have here the unexpected event of the almost uncatchable being caught, a tribute to the catcher, a hint of the the mobile miracle that is the artist mind, a mind that can overtake anything and make an imaginative capture of it. You may remember —

The Kangaroo ran very fast,

But I ran faster.

Well, here you may read between the lines:

The kingfisher was sudden,

But I outsuddened him.

How sudden the bird was is told us in the next line where it is said to be "flashing". Even something as rapid and fleeting and momentary as a flash can be seized by the poet's pursuing eye. And a further shade of the miracle comes out with the word "eternal". We took this word to mean both an eternity of time and an eternity of timelessness, the memorable everlasting value poetry gives to a mortal thing as well as the value which a Divine Consciousness holds as the eternal archetype of a thing that happens in the movement of time. The poet seizes flash-like objects for ever: once seized, they are never submerged — if we may cite a Shakespearean phrase —

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

Also, the contrast between the Divine Consciousness and the time-process is brought out by "sudden". The character of time is transitoriness, momentariness: nothing stands still, all life is a succession of infinitesimal brevities, a series of suddennesses. This constant evanescence is vividly counterposed to Eternity by the concrete figure of the sudden kingfisher. The kingfisher in its incredibly swift flight is a symbol of all time. A slower-moving

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object would have failed to drive home both the perpetuation that the poet achieves and the archetypal divinity he serves, and his service of that eternity is struck out most clear for us by the marked terminal position of "sudden".

We may add that if "sudden" had come in the next line, the poetic stroke would have been diminished. Suppose Sri Aurobindo had written:

I caught for some deep eye that is eternal

The sudden kingfisher's flash to a darkling pool.

Here we have eternity in one line and time in another. Do we not blur their contrast a little by this sheer division? Have you heard of Kohler's experiments to ascertain the psychology of apes? One experiment puts a banana outside a chimpanzee's cage, exactly in front of the animal but beyond his arm's reach. To the right of the chimpanzee, outside the cage, a stick is put. The ape looks straight at the banana and then turns his head to look at the stick. The means of getting at the banana and drawing it into the cage is there but it needs another look than the one which takes in the banana. The animal is found unable to co-ordinate the two looks and arrive at a logical procedure for getting hold of the fruit, as it would if the stick were alongside the banana or in a line with it. We feel rather like the chimpanzee if "eternal" is in line one and the expression suggesting the temporal is in line two. The needed contrast which would kindle up the significance of the poetic vision gets a trifle weakened: there is a slight loss of immediacy, a slight failure in the meaningful fusion of the objects presented: the revelatory intuition is retarded and we have to reach the revelation by a bit of thought-effort: the technique is not fully co-operative with the vision.

We may draw attention to some other defects also. At first sight one may feel that the whole phenomenon of the kingfisher is shown in its completeness in a single line, the second, and that this is a poetic gain. But consider the metrical rhythm of the line. Too many syllables — 12 in fact — are crowded together, creating a dancing wavering rhythm which serves ill the simple straight swift motion of the bird. Again, what stands in central focus now is the flash and not the kingfisher. Many different things may be said to give a flash: a sort of generality is caught through the flashing, a

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less distinct less individualised and hence less concrete symbol is conjured up. The mention of the kingfisher seems hardly significant and inevitable: this particular bird with its special size, shape, colour, gesture appears somewhat wasted and correspondingly wasted is the pool which can have vital importance only if not the flash but the kingfisher with its habit of food-hunting in watery spots holds the chief place.

This point, as well as to some extent the point in regard to the metre, would be valid even if Sri Aurobindo wrote:

I caught for some eternal eye the flashing

Of the sudden kingfisher to a darkling pool.

The sole advantage over the other version would be that the contrast between eternity and time would be more forceful by the retention of a word charged with momentariness in the very line where "some eternal eye" figures. But then force would be lessened in the intended contrast between "flashing" and "darkling". Besides, to put the "flashing" before the "sudden kingfisher" is not so logical or so artistic as the other way round. The adjective for the kingfisher becomes unimpressive and almost superfluous after the intensity of "flashing": also the act of flashing and the quality of suddenness grow two separate things instead of the former emerging from the latter and being the latter itself in an intense manifestation. The alliteration of the f-sounds and the sh-sounds in the two words "flashing" and "kingfisher" loses its expressive inevitability. In the phrase "kingfisher flashing" the alliteration in the second word brings out a power already there in the bird so that the act of flashing is the natural and spontaneous flow of the kingfisher's being and is prepared, rendered unavoidable, made the true gesture of it. If "flashing" precedes "kingfisher" we have something blurted out before its time, and if the precedence is too far ahead the alliteration itself goes to waste.

Sri Aurobindo's arrangement of all the words is the most felici-tious and the sort of enjambment he achieves is also happier than any other; for no other can be so marked as an adjective divorced from its noun — "sudden" poised for the fraction of a second apart from "kingfisher" — but carrying us on imperatively to what it qualifies. This enjambment suggests that, though momentariness is here, there is no cessation of the movement itself: we are hurried

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forward, pressed onward to the next line, so that we have a continuous movement of momentarinesses. Such a movement serves Sri Aurobindo's subject very appropriately, since the subject is not the kingfisher sitting out on a tree its series of moments that follow one another, but the kingfisher in motion in the time-flux, the kingfisher flashing. The suggestion of "flashing" is anticipated and prepared by the enjambed technique working through "sudden". Further, the whole last foot in which the adjective stands is what is called an amphibrach: the foot consists of three syllables — "the sudden" — with only the central syllable stressed. Metrically it is like the last foot of the Shakespearean verse already quoted:

The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling...

Sri Aurobindo¹ has called Shakespeare's last foot "a spacious amphibrach like a long plunge of a wave" and remarked about the entire line's structure of four stressed intrinsically long vowels and one stressed vowel that is intrinsically short, all of them forming a run of two iambs, a pyrrhic, a spondee and an amphibrach: "no more expressive rhythm could have been contrived to convey potently the power, the excitement and the amplitude of the poet's vision." Our amphibrach is not spacious: its vowel is not quanti-tatively long like the o in "rolling": the vowel here is a short u and even the final syllable "en" is almost a half-syllable. The amphi-brach is a rather compressed one, but there is enough of the unstressed third syllable to make with the stressed one preceding it a falling movement. Here too is a plunge, though not of a high-risen wave: it is a packed rather than a spacious plunge and as such it is quite in conformity with the small bird that the kingfisher is, and the falling movement is in perfect tune with the kingfisher's act of flying down from a tree to a pool. "Flashing" here implies not only a swift movement but also a downward one and, just as the enjambment anticipates and prepares the former, the feminine ending anticipates and prepares the latter. However, the swift downward movement of the small kingfisher would hardly be hinted so well by the amphibrach enjambment if the last two syllables of the foot were not the significant word "sudden". Now we reach the kingfisher itself. We shall not dwell on the

1. Collected Poems (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry. 1972). p. 35 1 .

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metrical technique of the line given to its activity — except to make two remarks. The word "kingfisher" at the start of the line has two stresses, a main on "king" and a minor on "fish", but both fall on short vowels, and both the vowels are the same short i. So we have a suggestion at once of brevity and force, insignificance and insistence, a bird small but dynamic, an object tiny yet attention-gripping — in sum, the diminutive diver and hunter with the little body and long beak and bright plumage and proud crest. At the end of the line we have the word "pool", a word with a long vowel-sound which especially evokes a sense of something significant deep down to which the kingfisher dives. So much for the purely metrical technique. Now for a few aspects of the verbal technique.

"Darkling" after "flashing" and before "pool" is an interesting effect in the picture of the kingfisher. It means being in the dark, being hidden, and its immediate function is to tell us that the pool was in a place of shadows, that it was a sort of secrecy. but the sound of the word , the combination of r and k and /, calls up the vision of a liquid glimmer-gloom and makes the word the most apt adjective for a hidden or shadowed thing which is a pool . And then there is the play it makes with the preceding present participle "flashing" . "Flashing" in itself blends the impression of lightning with the impression of a sweep and swish of wings through the air again the aptest term for the rapid leap of colourful bird-life . But its connection with "darkling" presents our thought simultaneously with two facts that go beyond the mere account of a bird diving for its fishy food. We see something intensely luminous dropping into something mysterious. It is a vision of keen beauty disappearing - but not to be swallowed up and lost. A sense we get as of a. masterful plunge of brightness into a dark profundity. There is not exactly the. exquisite casualty of Nashe's

Brightness falls from the air

but a sort of dangerous adventure in which life laughingly dares darkness and plucks its prey from it. There is evanescence, no doubt, the time-touch, yet within the evanescence beats a triumph. This vision of life arises as though we were being shown what the phenomena of ordinary existence would look like when they are caught by the poet for some eternal eye and given their ultimate

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interpretation — or rather we have at once those phenomena and the deeper version of them that is their truth in eternity.

Further, you may notice that the whole event described here is so much like the essential poetic experience itself. An airy colour-fulness drops with a winged burst of revelatory light into a hidden depth in order to bring up from this depth some life-nourishing secret. We have the poetic intuition falling into the poet's inner being and capturing its contents for the poet's self-expression. And just remember that a darkling pool closely resembles an eye wait-ing with in-drawn expectant stillness for a shining disclosure from above which will lay bare to that receptivity what lies within the dreamer's own vigilant soul, what hides there to feed with its mysterious life the light that fell from on high.

Indeed a many-aspected statement is present in Sri Aurobindo's picture, and its relevance to the poetic process is completed by the next line which I have joined on to these two:

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.

The poet is primarily a seer, but his instrument for seizing his vision and communicating it is the word: it is by the inspired sound that he creates a form for his intuitive sight. The full Vedic des-cription of the poetic tribe is kavayah satyasrutah, which Sri Aurobindo elucidates as "seers and hearers of the poetic truth and poetic word".¹ The inspired sound is implicit in the poetic act — and, just as the poet's vision must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal eye, the poet's word must ultimately have behind it the working of some eternal ear. The ultimate home of the poetic process is the spiritual Akash, the Self-space of the Spirit, the Divine Consciousness's infinity of self-extension. And this infinity has its creative vibrations that are at the basis of all cosmos. These vibrations are to be caught, however distantly or indirectly, by the sound of poetry. In terms of our own quotation, what the poet metricises when he captures in his verse. the king-fisher's downward flight and its descending wing-wafts, its plung-ing beat of pinions, is the rhythm-beats of the spacious ether of the Eternal Being who is the secret substance, one of whose vibrant materialisations is the kingfisher.

1. The Future Poetry, p. 30.

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We may, however, question the verb "metred". Modernists believe that metre is an artificial shackle on poetry from which they want to escape into what they call "free verse". But actually no verse can be free without ceasing to be verse: if there is no regulating principle of a discernible kind, however subtle be its regulation, we have the laxer movement of prose, and if that laxer movement tries to pass off as poetry by some device like cutting itself up into long and short lines and sprinkling a few out-of-the-way locutions on a run of commonly turned phrases, then we do not have real verse but a pretentious and ineffectual falsity, about whose relation to prose we shall have to say, even at the risk of an atrocious and well-worn pun, that it is not prose but worse! Poetry must have not only intensity of vision and intensity of word: it must have also intensity of rhythm. And how is rhythm to be intense without having a central cadence in the midst of variations, a base of harmonic recurrences over which modulations play, a base which is never overlaid with too much modulation but rings out its uniformity through the diversity. In the older literatures, metre tended to be of a set form. But to be of set form is not the essence of metre. It was so because thus alone something in the older consciousness, the strong sense of order, of dharma , got represented in art. When the consciousness changes and becomes more individualised, more complex, as in modern times, the metre may follow suit. Every age can make its own metrical designs and our age may devise or discover less apparent regularities and complicate or subtilise its schemes of sound. There is no harm in that, though in an epoch of individuality we cannot insist that an individual who still finds something of the older metres a natural mould of his mood-movements should mechanically conform to the new non-conformity! All must have a right to be individual and if people want to be boldly experimental in prosody they may do so, but the soul of metre must not be lost - or else poetry in the truest connotation will get lost with it. Even what is termed "free verse" is, when it is still true poetry, a broad pattern of returning effects, a pattern rounded off and swaying under a dextrous disguise as a single whole - and it is true poetry precisely by being not really free but just differently bound than the older poetic creations.

My own penchant is for metre and I grant some point to an amusing exaggeration by George Gissing. Gissing expressed hor-

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ror of "miserable men who do not know — who have never even heard of—the minuter differences between Dochmiacs and Antis-pasts". If you happen to be those miserable men I may tell you that a Dochmiac is a five-syllabled Greek foot composed of short-long-long-short-long and an Antispast is a four-syllabled Greek foot consisting of short-long-long-short. But I am afraid I cannot tell you more minute differences than that the former has one final long in excess of the latter, and if there is yet minuter difference I myself shall have to live in the misery of ignorance. What, how-ever, I do know I may concretely impart to you by illustrating a Dochmiac and an Antispast through a compliment to our horror-stricken ecstatic of metre:

Perhaps the compliment seems too high-pitched. But that there is an essence of truth in it will be conceded if we track metre to its origin in the Divine Ananda, the Delight of the All-wise. Sri Aurobindo has stated very well the truth about metre. "All crea-tion," he writes,¹ "proceeds on a basis of oneness and sameness with a superstructure of diversity, and there is the highest creation where is the intensest power of basic unity and sameness and on that supporting basis the intensest power of appropriate and gov-erned diversity. Metre was in the thought of the Vedic poets the reproduction in speech of great creative world-rhythms; it is not a mere formal construction, though it may be made by the mind into even such a lifeless form: but even that lifeless form or convention, when genius and inspiration breathe the force of life into it, becomes again what it was meant to be, It becomes itself and serves its own true and great purpose. There IS an intonation of poetry which is different from the flatter and looser intonation of prose, and with it a heightened or gathered intensity of language, a deepened vibrating intensity of rhythm, an intense inspiration in the thought-substance. One leaps up with this rhythmic spring or flies upon these wings of rhythmic exaltation to. a higher scale of consciousness which expresses things common with an uncommon power both .0f vision and of utterance and things uncommon with their own native and revealing accent; It expresses them, as no

1. Collected Poems, pp. 368-69.

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mere prose speech can do, with a certain kind of deep appealing intimacy of truth which poetic rhythm alone gives to expressive form and power of language: the greater this element, the greater is the poetry. The essence of this power can be there without metre, but metre is its spontaneous form, raises it to its acme. The tradition of metre is not a vain and foolish convention followed by the great poets of the past in a primitive ignorance unconscious of their own bondage; it is in spite of its appearance of human convention a law of Nature, an innermost mind-nature, a highest speech-nature."

The verb "metred", therefore, in the last line of our quotation may be held to be perfectly in order, especially in a context where infinity is said to be the visioner of the finite and the creator of poetry through the human soul.

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