Talks on Poetry

TALK FOURTEEN

We have illustrated piquancy epigrammatic, both in its sober and in its drunken forms — or, more piquantly put, both in its Words-worthy and in its Swinburning manifestations. We shall now cite a less pointed example where the inversion of function which consti-tutes the fine paradoxicality of piquancy is illustrated with a more pictorial turn. W. H. Davies, a modern poet, speaks about the sea trying

With savage joy and effort wild

To smash his rocks with a dead child.

We would expect a smashing and killing of a child with the help of rocks. But that would not convey the vehemence of the hurling waves, the blind ferocity of the breakers. They are so blind in their force that although the child is already dead they are still bent on smashing it, and their force is so impetuous that it cannot feel spent or exercised on a small soft thing like a child's body but only on the hardness of huge rocks, and yet the means they employ is such that one almost laughs at the childishness that takes a child as a hammer to hit at stony opponents. The savagery is not only blind and vehement: it is also naive, without preconceived malice. This last aspect comes out in a verse of W. B. Yeats:

The murderous innocence of the sea.

Here too is piquancy, almost an epigram, but it is mixed with a strong felicity, a packed beauty verging on magnificence. We have clear-cut magnificence with a turn of piquancy towards the end in Sri Aurobindo's simile:

As when the storm-haired Titan-striding sea

Throws on a swimmer its tremendous laugh

Remembering all the joy its waves had drowned...

A touch of sardonic wit is in the laugh of the sea rising high all the more because of its memory of submerging very often with its mightiness the small happinesses of human beings.

In a line of Matthew Arnold's, we have three adjectives each of

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which may be considered as bringing in one of the three qualities, though not in the order given by Patmore. Arnold refers to his separation, real or imaginary, from a French girl named Margue-rite, a separation brought about by various unfortunate factors that are symbolised by the world of waters which he calls

The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.

"Unplumbed" with its suggestion of depth on sonorous and dread-ful depth has magnificence. "Salt" carries piquancy in an unusual manner. To term the sea "salt" is apparently a truism; but, in English, "salt" means a lot of things. For one thing, it means "piquant" itself, as in the phrase: "a salty anecdote." It also means "stinging", "bitter", and it characterises the quality of tears. It suggests, in addition, the "sterile" and "frustrating", as in the line from Sri Aurobindo's early verse:

And salt as the unharvestable sea.

The piquancy, therefore, of Arnold's epithet lies in that epithet's signifying not at all what it obviously, superficially, literally con-notes. The poet here saturates the sea with a power of frustrating sorrow which, as the first adjective tells us, is profound, myste-rious, unmasterable. The idea is the same as in some other lines of Sri Aurobindo's early poetry:

What a voice of grief intrudes

On these happy solitudes!

To the wind that with him dwells

Ocean, old historian, tells

All the dreadful heart of tears

Hidden in the pleasant years.

Summer's children, what do ye

By the stern and cheerless sea?

Arnold's third adjective — "estranging" — becomes, with the combined meaning of the first two colouring it, extraordinarily felicitous: it has a piercingness beautifully presented. "Estran-ging" connotes alienating a person in feeling from another — distancing two hearts. The sea, a deeply mournful and embittering

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mass, has put a gulf between hearts that loved — it has washed away their intimacy and left them on two shores far apart as if unknown to each other. I cannot think of a finer, more expressive culmination to the adjectival inspiration of the line than this in-tense "estranging", with its sound suggestive of the signified sepa-ration by that voice-lengthening as well as semi-sibilant cluster of consonants — str — and that intrinsically long a. Neither "divi-ding", "disjoining" nor "dissevering" could have done the work with anything of the felicity brought by this word in several ways.

We can watch piquancy gathering force- and passing into a wonderful felicity in Dryden's characterisation of what we may call the pleasures of the pains of hell:

In liquid burnings or in dry to dwell

Is all the sad variety of hell.

If we go by his name, I suppose the poet himself would prefer a dry den in Inferno. Each of us is offered by him a choice. If you are in hell, you can always amuse yourself by getting out of boiling water which makes you howl and sitting on red-hot coals which make you scream. But wit is raised to a sort of diamond point of world-pathos in that second line, at once subdued and penetrating, tender and torturing.

Milton expresses the substance of the first line with some magni-ficence in one of his descriptions of the different regions making up Hell: he speaks of Satan moving

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp.

Sri Aurobindo reaches an extreme of felicity with a piquant thrust in it when he comes to the third line in the following passage about the God of Love who does not hesitate to lend Himself to worlds of suffering:

His steps familiar with the lights of heaven

Tread without pain the sword-paved courts of hell:

There he descends to edge eternal joy.

"To edge eternal joy" is to render more intensely keen the bliss of paradise. Ecstasy is not sufficiently ecstatic until it can take the

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experience of calamities cutting like swords, and such calamities have no power to diminish the Divine's rapture that dares every-thing because it carries in itself the assurance of its own eternity as well as the yearning to impart itself to everything painful and terrible— the Divine's rapture that becomes all the deeper by descending triumphantly into the sharp hazards of undivine dark-ness. Perhaps we have a moment of magnificence capping a move-ment of piquancy in the two lines of a poem of Narik Lama already quoted:

White Omnipresence! where is fear?

The mouth of hell can be thy kiss!

The very name "Narik Lama", inverting the actual state of affairs, is an example of poetic piquancy — poetic in the extended sense of referring to a poet! And inasmuch as it gives the sugges-tion of a Tibetan monk, we may say the mere piquancy of inver-sion changes into the felicity of conversion of the quite unmonk-like and decidedly non-Tibetan Amal Kiran into what Shake-speare would have called "something rich and strange". If we start picturing the conversion — yellow robe, shaven head, monastic aloofness — we shall even see the professor-poet acquiring some magnificence, what I may term the magnificence of superhuman poverty, and fitting into the powerful word-painting we find in a verse of J. C. Squire from his poem Rivers:

And that aged Brahmapootra

Who beyond the white Himalaya

Passes many a lamissery

On rocks forlorn and frore,

A block of gaunt grey stone walls

With rows of little barred windows

Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk

Are hidden for evermore.

It is an impressive and vivid stanza, not all of it reaching the perfect intensity but at least one line of it leaving us in no doubt that imaginative magnificence has been achieved:

On rocks forlorn and frore...

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We have also undoubted piquancy in the phrase:

Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silk...

Note the contrast between "shrivelled" and "young" and the support to the first word by the epithet "yellow" with its implica-tion of age and the support to the second by the noun "silk" designating the rich stuff from which the dress is made and answer-ing to the lovely quality of youth.

We may end our differentiation of the three kinds of poetic phrase pointed out by Patmore, with three brief examples from Sri Aurobindo which may fix each kind clearly in your heads. For piquancy, take:

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep.

For felicity, have:

All can be done if the God-touch is there.

For magnificence, accept:

I cherish God the Fire, not God the Dream.

The first line hits off with a profound cleverness the stupidity of so-called wise men where the manifestation of the Divine such as Sri Aurobindo has in mind is concerned. The wise men will chatter away, discussing the pros and cons of the Life Divine. I shall not be surprised if some of them, who may be married and harried men, turn round and say: "Why all this bother and exertion about the Life Divine when our urgent need is really the Wife Divine?" But even if they are not so foolish they will still be too much lost in intellectual hair-splitting and abstract logic to note the growth of God going on under their very noses. The only growth which they can note under their noses is their own moustaches. And perhaps there too they do not see that the moustaches are often shockingly untrimmed. Then there is the word "sleep". After their barren discussion they are contented enough to go to sleep — or perhaps each of them is already asleep during the logic-chopping by the others, and certainly all of them, even while jabbering away, are

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all the time asleep to the fact of God's increasing manifestation. The word "sleep" picks out with devastating brevity both the complacence and the unconsciousness of those who wag their tongues in a merely mental way about occult and spiritual pheno-mena.

If we look a little closely at the two parts of the piquant state-ment we shall observe a number of important implications. When God's growing up is contrasted to wise men's talking and sleeping we should understand that the former activity goes on in a great silence and that this silence differs radically from the quiet into which the wise men fall by slumbering. The difference is precisely that the wise men fall into a dark quiet whereas God grows up in a peaceful perfection of light: the adverb "up" is significant, show-ing the progressive direction of the evolving divinity, a direction opposite to the downward movement, the sinking and submer-gence of awareness, that is the sleep of the mere mind after its bouts of pretentious philosophy about things beyond its ken. I may also mention a touch of the inevitable, a touch of the sponta-neously organic in the alliteration of "God" and "grow", as if to grow up were an act of the very nature of God. The presence of the same vowel o, though first in a short sound and then in a long one, strengthens the touch. The only other pointed, even though not absolute, alliteration is of "while" and the opening word "wise" of the second half of the statement. This, together with the assonance the two words make by their long i, renders it subtly appropriate that God's growth should take place during the period when talking and sleeping are carried on by wise men.

So much for the piquant line. We have not time enough for the others this morning. We shall deal with them on the next occasion. In the few minutes left, I may set right whatever disparagement of wives was there in the dissatisfaction I hinted the wise men as having with their spouses. Lest you should think they felt the need of the Wife Divine because wives fall short badly, I would like to attest that there are many good partners to men — wives who are devoted companions, wonderful home-managers, worthy respec-ters of their husbands' rights: they can be so scrupulous as never even to open letters addressed to their husbands' names — unless, of course, the letters are marked "Private". We must give every-body their due.

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