Talks on Poetry

I

SERIES OF TALKS

THE HEART AND THE ART OF POETRY

TALK ONE

We are here to study the marvel that is poetry. But a Poetry Class involves duties as well as beauties, and I wish to get over the most prosaic of all duties before we launch into our delightful work. You know that the whole lot of you are supposed to grace the benches of this room with regular attendance and I am expected to go through the horrible task of taking the roll-call. I want to avoid the horror. So let me express a hope. There is a famous riddle: in an accident what is better than presence of mind? The answer is: absence of body. Well, I sincerely hope you will not regard me in the light of an accident and deal with me by absence of body. Let presence of body be always there — and, of course, let it not be accompanied by absence of mind. For otherwise we cannot achieve what is the first fundamental of success in a Poetry Class.

In a Poetry Class the primary thing the professor should say to his students is that they and he should try to rhyme: in other words, be in tune and have harmonious responses. We cannot quite be the same in metre. Metre is a system of rhythmic units composed of stressed or unstressed syllables and called feet. There are various kinds of feet — the most frequently used being iambs, trochees, spondees, pyrrhics, anapaests, dactyls. I shall not deal with all their details just now. I shall merely say that a spondee has two syllables that are equally stressed and an anapaest has three syllables the first two of which have no stress and are termed slacks while the third bears a stress. I pick out these metrical units because they are relevant to my remark that we cannot be quite the same in metre. The metre of all of you may be said to be spondaic: your feet fall with equal stress on the ground. Mine do not on account of a limp in one of them. And I use a stick to help me walk better. So my metre is two slacks and one stress: I am an anapaestic fellow. Yes, we have to differ in metrical movement. But there is no reason why a predominantly spondaic line should

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not rhyme with a predominantly anapaestic. I may give an illustra-tion by adopting some phrases of Sri Aurobindo's poetry and adapting some others of it to make the sort of couplet we want:

You will see that the first line has three spondees out of five metrical units and the second has three anapaests out of the same number.

I may point out another feature that is both appropriate and desi-rable. I expect something more than a rhyme-harmony between us. Our association should be not only a harmony on the whole by end-rhymes but also a harmony by internal details. One line may be Amal and the other may be Class Arts English, First Year, but in the Amal line, while anapaests predominate, there should be at least a single spondee and in the line that is Class Arts English, First Year, the Amalian movement should not be quite absent. The couplet I have presented accomplishes the needful. In the first line there is an anapaest which stands for my being included in you:

and the second line has a spondee which stands for your being included in me:

This mutual inclusion would imply agreement by some kind of psychological interpenetration over and above agreement by a common purpose and general sympathy. Not from the surface, not from the outside, should we have reciprocal response: we should enter into one another's mind to enjoy and understand poetry together.

Poetry is not a matter of surfaces, of outsides; it is a matter of profundities, of insides, and the appreciation of it has to come by a response of the inner self, the inmost soul. I want to give you what I have felt most vividly of the poetic utterance, my stir to it in the recesses of my being and I want my words to get into your recesses so that you too may kindle up likewise. Then alone will poetry have been truly taught and truly learned.

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Perhaps you will say: "You are a poet yourself, but we are not. How can we respond in the way you wish?" But, while pleading guilty to the charge of being a poet, I say: "There is a poet in each of us, because each of us has in his composite personality a dreamer, an idealist, a beauty-lover, a seeker of concordances, and poetry is but these beings in us grown vocal, finding tongue. Now, there are two ways in which the vocalisation, the tongue-finding can take place. Either you burst into poetic speech or else you get so identified with the creative life-process of somebody else's poem that you feel as if the poem came out of your own soul. That is to say, when reading a poem, you experience as it were the actual writing of it. First, you draw away from common clamours and hold an attentive and receptive silence in yourself, for all poetry comes from beyond the ordinary noises of the world and of our own mind, from an in-world or an over-world whose native voice we can hear only when we turn to it with an intense hush. Not that poets always openly practise this hush by going into solitude or by shutting their ears to daily distractions. What hap-pens very often is just an automatic inward switching off even while the outer self is engaged in common occupations or else two lines run side by side, an inner line of receptive attention catching the in-world's or the over-world's vibration and an outer line directed towards day-to-day affairs. But, in whatever form, essen-tially there is what I have called an intense hush. You too have to repeat in yourself the calm which precedes all creation. But the calm is extremely sensitive — it is nothing dull and apathetic. It is all alert, it is emotion and imagination held in a profound poise, ready to light up. You have to thrill to the significant turn of the word-sound, you have to glow with the imagery in which the thoughts and feelings move. Then the poem repeats in you the act of its creation and what has happened to the writer happens to the reader. This is a wonderful experience and by it you can feel as if you were Shakespeare, you were Shelley, you were even Sri Aurobindo!"

Thus all of you can indirectly be poets. And who knows that even in the direct sense you may not poetically blossom forth if you intensely re-live the expression of other poets? At least it was the experience of Keats that he awoke to his own poetic possibili-ties by intensely re-living the work of Spenser. And most poets draw a quickening spark from great poems when their own crea-

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tive fire sinks a little. If I may indulge in a bit of symbol-reading I should declare that the description which this Class bears is a promise of a direct poetic flowering in many of you. This Class of Arts English, First Year, is called AE 1 — and all of you must be aware that the name of a great English spiritual poet was AE. Rather, it was his pen-name: George Russell, under the influence of Plotinus, Theosophy and his own visions, once signed an article with AEON. The printer somehow knocked out the last two letters. So the author was left with the first two. A lover of mystery, he gladly accepted this stroke of fate. Now, AE 1 may mean that there can be various grades of AE and you are the first grade, which may in turn mean either the lowest rung, the begin-ner's level, or the top of the scale of excellence. If the top can be signified by the English usage, "Oh, it is A1!", why should I not understand a similar shade of significance in the phrase, "Oh, you are AE 1!"?

Whatever the interpretation of that numeral, let us hold fast to the symbolic suggestion of the letters AE and let us remember that the AE in you, the direct or the indirect poet, is at once the most natural part of your being and the part most to be watched, most to be carefully kept alive. The poet is as old as history, he lies at the very roots of human life. Anthropology tells us that the mind of early man worked more in terms of poetry than in those of prose. Not that early man talked about everything in accomplished verses: surely he spoke prose about daily trivialities. But when he employed language not for mere utility, when he employed it for a satisfying self-expression and with an enjoyment in its use he spontaneously composed poetry. Present-day primitive races have a large fund of poetic utterance. Of course the utterance is itself primitive, but it shows how very naturally the poetic impulse comes to the mind and heart of man. Have you read the Australian blackfellow's hunt-cry? Listen:

The Kangaroo was very fast,

But I ran faster.

The Kangaroo was very fat;

I ate him.

Kangaroo!

Kangaroo!

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This will hardly strike you as the sort of poetry you would like to write. Nor would I specially recommend it. But we should not overlook its qualities. Take the opening two lines. Evidently they refer to the capture of the Kangaroo; yet they nowhere speak of it. What is spoken of is only the relative speeds of the animal and the man. Literally we may consider them indications of a race in which the man won. But the unspoken suggestion is of a race in which the life of the animal was at stake. Just by declaring that the man outstripped the animal the lines tell us of a successful hunt. Nor do we feel the competition to be all unequal. The Kangaroo by its exceptional speed set a challenge to the hunter and only by a rare burst of vital force did he get hold of it. We have the beginnings of an imaginative gusto here as well as of the intuitive manner of speech. The intuitive manner by its keen compactness and kindling contact of words needs to express no more than half of the matter: it is a manner that makes silence itself the most effective speech. Perhaps in the blackfellow's harping on the race there is also a touch of delicacy by the omission to speak of slaughter. The next two lines are much cruder, yet even here the slaughter is only by a gross implication and even here we have a tinge of elementary intuitiveness. Not only is the enjoyment of a substantial meal conveyed. Also a conquest of quantity by quality is suggested — the comparatively smaller man getting the bigger animal inside him. Then the last two lines which are a sheer outlet of joy are not merely a magnified belch of satisfaction. A triumph-cry is raised in which we have, besides a sense of emotional completion, a sense of imaginative self-enhancement as if the living reality not only of one Kangaroo but of the entire Kangaroo-species had passed into the man and added to him an extra power of being. Mark too the double exclamation, One appropriate to the conquering of the animal and the other to the consumption of it: an instinct of artistic logic is at play. And the repetition of the word communicates also the singer's love of significant sound, his relish of the music of a rich-ringing important appellative.

In crude quintessence we have, almost all the qualities of poetic creation. You will have noticed that I have dwelt considerably on the mode of utterance, the way things are put: in short, the form. Wherever there is poetry, be it primitive or highly progressed, the form is remarkable. The more highly progressed it is, the more remarkable the form. And it is the form that grips us or bespells us

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though we may not know it. I should like you to awake to the presence of the form in every poem you come across. You may have always been aware that poetry says wonderful things, but you must realise that the wonderfulness is bound up with the manner of saying: the words are such as draw attention to themselves either by their fineness or by their sensitive combination and the sounds are a direct power and both make a marked pattern exciting the eye and ear. When poets foregather, they rarely discuss the substance of their work: they are most interested in the "how" of the whole activity — the particular turn of the image, the special collocation of phrases, the chime or clash of rhythms. And it is because the poetic effect takes place by means of this turn, this collocation, this rhythmic play that after the initial uncritical happy surrender to a poem has been made for the sake of its general intuitive impact, the understanding appreciation of form is necessary if you are to be wholly intimate with the true nature of poetry.

Let me, however, hasten to say that by form I do not mean anything exclusively outward — the mere technique. It is always helpful for a poet to master the technical niceties of his job and the reader too will increase his pleasure in poetry by noting the inspired tricks of the poetic trade. But the fact that the tricks are inspired and not invented is never to be forgotten. Poetry takes the word-form it does, not only by externalising the substance, the theme, but also by externalising an internal manner, an internal form. The "how" of expression originates in the "how" of experience or, to be more accurate, in the "how" of vision and emotion. Not just the thing you inwardly see or inwardly thrill to, but the mode in which the imagination shapes, the manner in which the thrill modulates — these are the determinants of the word-form in which the substance, the theme, ultimately appears. There are a hundred ways of seeing and feeling, and the intuitive way is what creates poetry. An energy that shoots deep by a bright leap of vision and by a keen quiver of emotion is the poetic impulse and what renders a verbal image poetic is the particular shining slant with which the vision darted and the particular vibration with which the emotion was intense. You cannot make an image revelatory or a word-movement significant in sound without these inner phenomena. No matter how much you manipulate your technique from the outside, you will never achieve the inevitable eye-opener,

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the impeccable ear-enchanter in your poem. Of course, a poet by shuffling his words about in various experimental shapes can at times strike on the right gesture and gait of language, but what recognises a gesture and a gait to be right is an inner sensitiveness which knows at once that the true visionary and rhythmic mode of experience has been reflected and echoed in the expression. The hidden life-glow of a thing as glimpsed through a certain break in the consciousness, the secret life-throb of a thing as caught by a certain shake of the consciousness — there you have the origin of the authentic word-arrangement conjuring up a penetrating picture and a felicitous rhythm. The form which the mind and heart take inside is the maker of the technical design outside. When, therefore, I insist on study of form as vital to poetic appreciation I do not mean anything superficial. I mean the recognition of the inspired excitement within through the verbal form without. But I mean also that a close alert response to the verbal form without is the sole path to the fullness of this recognition.

If I were asked to illustrate in brief what poetry is I should quote a few lines from Thomas Nashe and comment on their verbal form. Most probably you are familiar with the lines:

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour:

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye...

Here we have two levels of inspiration. The first two lines give us the poetic mot juste, the appropriate poetic word. The next three give us the mot inevitable of poetry, poetry's perfect archetypal word. The whole temper and pitch of utterance undergo a decisive change towards an absolute enchantment.

The opening line is a good but none-too-original metaphor — the seeing of all beauty as a short-lived blossom. The second shows the poet stirring to the challenge of the metaphor and entering into the vivid details of flowery transience. The word "wrinkles" gives point to the metaphor: it immediately connects with the human face ageing, but it applies also to the creasing and shrivelling to which a flower is subject when it is in decline. Already the imagi- nation has started being penetrative. And when we come to the

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word "devour" we have it at an intenser pitch. This word hits off most effectively the ravage of time, time the devourer of all things, be they ever so beautiful, but the effectiveness of expression is not the sole function of this word nor does it constitute the master-stroke here: it is the appropriateness of this word to the wrinkling that makes the poetic climax of the two lines: wrinkling involves the shrinkage of the flower, its process towards disappearance, and the shrinkage is as if the wrinkles were eating up the surface of the flower with their lines like clenching mouths, until the petals dry up into insignificant lifelessness. A common occurrence in Nature is passed through a new vision which conveys the very bite of mortality and gathers all human fate into a symbol small yet packed with profound pathos.

But the imagination is still working in bondage to common facts, though it turns that bondage uncommonly vivid and wide in mean-ing. In the third line the imagination leaps clear away into a revelation lit up by a magic at once ineffably mournful and rap-turous, mournful by the import of the imagery, rapturous by the words and the rhythm through which the imagery becomes in-tensely significant. Beyond the unavoidable tragedy of the beauti-ful growing aged and shrunken we move to the heart-shattering irony of beauty dropping from the height of its triumph, straight from its very resplendence. And the imagery, while being ex-quisitely precise, has what I may term a universal vagueness that makes it not only multi-suggestive but the symbol of an unap-peasable world-woe. What exactly is this "brightness" in the "air"? It may be a rose in all its tremulous uplifted glory. It may be a meteor swift and silvery on high. It may be the sun itself at the zenith of noon. Or it may be a human face aglow with both grace of feature and grace of fortune. We have a generality concrete with the living essence of the uncertainty of all earth-bliss. And the rhythm has an airy delicacy fused with a helpless falling move-ment. This extremely appropriate movement is due to the first two feet being a succession of trochees, the weak syllable coming after the strong in either foot —

The airy delicacy is due to the texture of the verse, the r at the beginning and the middle and the end, the sibilance at the end of

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the first foot and in the middle of the second, the f combined with l and m in the middle foot. Note also that while the right types of consonants echo one another no vowel-sound is repeated, even "falls" and "from" have different nuances of vowellation: thus the open sounds are a music without emphasis. All round, no more felicitously rhythmical pattern could be woven to support, strength-en and quicken the significance of the verse.

In the next line the poetic intuition, which has proceeded from the particular flower-vision and acquired a new meaning and grown universal, comes to focus again in a particular vision — that of "queens" — and there it gains clarity with the words "young and fair" associated with the act of dying. The line in itself is not extraordinary: it is almost as if from a child's book of stories, but, even apart from its simple charm, what saves it from being hackneyed in sentiment and even endows it with positive freshness is its organic connection with the preceding line and the succeeding, which have extraordinary magic and evocativeness. Those lines and this are one tissue. And a subtle relation it keeps with them, as well as with what goes still before, by picking up the f of "flower" and "falls", the k of "wrinkles" and the d of "devour" and anticipating with the d and the k the "dust" and the "closed" of the next line.

The particularity and clarity of vision at which we arrive in the "Queens"-phrase become rich and intense in the poignancy of the next verse where we have on the one side the dark concreteness of blind dust and on the other the luminous concreteness of the life-kindled eye not only in general but with a special directness and fullness because the eye is of the most perfect face in human history, the face of Helen. Mark how effectively from the brightest of all faces the brightest feature is selected, concentrating beauty and thereby concentrating too the dullness of death. This dullness is communicated by the massed dentals in the three opening words — "Dust hath closed" — just as the loveliness extinguished is hinted by the l-chime in "closed" and "Helen". The h in "hath" and "Helen" suggests a repeated sigh, while the occurrence of the s three times, with slight variations of sound, orders a delicate hush in our being to match the silencing of a rare life's happy throb by death. But do not forget that the exquisiteness of the hush would be totally ruined if we were to read "has" instead of "hath". Just the difference in one consonant and the line would be not a

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deeply moving masterpiece of many sound-suggestions but a hissing horror. See it for yourself by saying, "Dust has closed Helen's eye." So much depends on so small a touch of mere sound.

In passing, I may remark that in the last line "dust" throws our attention back not only to the third line's "brightness" but also to its "air" — the throw-back serving to emphasise the magnitude and the depth of the fall: the creature or object whose natural element is a high rarity, an ethereal continuity, descends suddenly to the lowest level of being and the most common, the most crumbled state. Again, the long o of "closed" strikes a note of profound finality and perpetuity, and the note is clinched, so to speak, by the packing of two consonants on either side: the doom of closure is all-pressing, all-blocking.

Lastly, I should like to point out a certain rounding-off in the imaginative process of the whole passage. Nashe started by identifying beauty with a flower: he concludes on a phrase that brings up a picture once more of that identification — Helen of legendary loveliness summed up in the most flower-like feature of her body, the small colourful softness that was her eye.

Before we leave Nashe we may reflect for a moment on a scholar's suggestion that originally the terminal word of the third line was not "air" but "hair". This is possible and perhaps makes for greater consistency: the wrinkle-devoured skin, the brightness-losing hair, the dust-closed eye — a poetic vision all of one piece and referring exclusively to the human face. But Emerson would be proved right in saying: "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." If Nashe thought of achieving a marked unity by means of "hair", he was sacrificing the poet in him to the rational syste-matiser. The poetic pattern is not woven by the outer intelligence: it has a unity created by magic rather than logic, though the magic need not be quite defiant of analytic understanding. "Air", by its unfixed yet many-sided generality, brings in a world-cry: "hair" limits the imagination to one single phenomenon. It takes away the Virgilian "tears of things". Besides, there is actually no compulsion in the first line to conjure up just the skin of a face. The skin is certainly implied, but only by inclusion in a wider class, and what we have before us is the picture of a flower. The flower-metaphor holds a lovely generality within its particularity and what We may call the logic of magic is best satisfied by the wide prospect opened up by "air". From this prospect we come to "queens" as a

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fine discovery, whereas "hair" would render "queens" not so revelatory a fineness but something more rationally expected. In short, Nashe's passage would lose its perfection and what precedes as well as succeeds the third line would be somewhat dulled, apart from this line itself turning rather trite, though still pretty, instead of being the ever-bright beauty that it is in its present form.

Now I shall return to a point made earlier: the poet, though the most natural part of your being, is yet the part most to be watched, most to be carefully kept alive. Poetry as an art is older than prose because the emotional and the imaginative in man is older than the intellectual, and the moment the more deeply established part of us is stirred the impulse to poetry is there. But mere expression of emotion and imagination is not poetry: shudders and screams, fantasies and nightmares do not immediately make art. The aesthetic instinct and the intuitive sense have to work, at once intensifying and chastening emotion and imagination. Nor can we, who are not primitives, not Australian blackfellows, bypass the intellect: we have to be both finer and subtler with its aspirations and acutenesses, even while avoiding its dry breath of abstraction. Otherwise we shall let loose only a barbaric cleverness and perpetrate modernist poetry. I for one prefer the Kangaroo-cry to much of this kind of verse which is trivially violent and effectively queer. How necessary it is to be vigilant over the poetic impulse can be realised if we look at the outburst that comes naturally to many modernist poets. Let me offer you a specimen to carry home with you as a warning:

I can take my shirt and tear it

And so make a ripping razzly noise,

And the people will say,

"Look at him tear his shirt!"

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