Talks on Poetry

TALK SEVEN

I have already brought to your notice the many kinds of feet which go into a metrical line. There are also many possible lengths of such a line. We have a dimeter (a line of two feet), a trimeter (a line of three), a tetrameter (a line of four), a pentameter (a line of five), an alexandrine (a line of six), a heptameter (a line of seven), an octometer (a line of eight). You must have marked the absence of the word "hexameter" for a line of six feet. I have put an alexandrine instead, because the series I have listed is composed of the feet which are the most common in English — iamb, trochee, anapaest. The iamb is the commonest. And the usual six-foot line of iambs is called the alexandrine. The hexameter has Greek and Latin associations and is based on the ancient model of five dactyls and a closing spondee (or trochee):

Tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtiti tumtum (or tumti).

Of all the line-lengths the pentameter is the staple one in English, whereas the staple in French is the alexandrine and that in Latin or Greek the hexameter. This difference has its raison d'etre in one of the problems of poetic expression — namely, to find a line-length in which a significant phrase can reach its most telling stature, a self-sufficiency and completeness combined with rich-ness. When a language has not a great many words of one syllable, it needs a longer line for such a phrase than where monosyllabic words abound. French is more polysyllabic than English, and Greek and Latin have words of greater length than French. It is natural then that the staple line in Greek and Latin should have the hexameter's fifteen syllables, and that French should have the twelve-syllabled alexandrine as the staple line and English the ten-syllabled iambic pentameter. Homer has an average of five words to his hexameter, which means that the average length of a Greek word is three syllables. The same can hardly be said of an English word. There are thousands of lines in English which are most effectively monosyllabic. There is Shakespeare's:

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain —

in Hamlet's last words to Horatio, a line which is one of the glories

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of poetic expression, summing up a universal experience in the simplest words whose metrical scheme of pyrrhic, spondee, spon-dee, iamb and iamb causes with two units of massed stresses on words carrying peculiar accumulations of consonants an actual difficulty to the vocal breath. Shakespeare has also three consecu-tive lines in Lear, thirty-two monosyllabic words in a row:

And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? O thou wilt come no more —

lines of a predominantly iambic metre which are followed by one of five trochees

Never, never, never, never, never —

which buttress up the sense of the phrase "O thou wilt come no more" by not only a repetition of hopelessness but also an inver-sion of the metre as if to press home the negation of life and to utter through the falling movement of the foot at once the absolute drop into the death spoken of and the irreversible collapse of the speaker into despair. Wordsworth has two of his finest lines totally monosyllabic:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,

and

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

The second quotation is considered by Sri Aurobindo a sheer Mantra, a phrase embodying a state or event of the profoundest consciousness in a rhythm arising out of the very thrill of that state or event: it hails from the same supreme source called the Over-mind as the greatest expressions from the Rigveda and the Upa-nishads. Once Sri Aurobindo had put its source a little lower — in the Intuition-plane which is third in the "overhead" levels from the Mind proper, the intervening two being the Higher Mind and the Illumined Mind; but later he raised its origin to the Overmind, saying that since his first judgment he had himself moved more

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intimately in "the fields of sleep". Sri Aurobindo can create unfor-gettable effects with monosyllables:

It bore the stroke of That which kills and saves,

or

With the Light that dwells near the dark end of things,

or

The One by whom all live, who lives by none,

or that tremendous statement of Savitri's whole dynamic being against the argued sophistries of Yama, the God of Death, that passionate refusal to be overwhelmed by the mere Reason which can destroy but cannot build:

I am, I love, I see, I act, I will.

Effects like these are as good as impossible in French or Greek or Latin and, we may add, Italian. Even an alexandrine in English can be made immortal poetry with monosyllables. Already the third line of the citation from Lear was an alexandrine. Here is another from a sonnet of Phillip Sydney's in which the poet, casting about for matter to communicate to his beloved and unable to do anything genuine, ends with an intense guiding word from the Muse:

Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write!

An almost complete hexameter too can be monosyllabic. Take from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion the verse about Troy and the aged messenger from Achilles —

Filled with her deeds and her dreams her gods looked

out on the Argive —

or the other in which the Amazon Queen Penthesilia recalls her younger days —

Once when the streams of my East sang low to my ear,

not this Ocean —

or that on Achilles as figured by his messenger —

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Swift as his sword and his spear are the speech and the

wrath from his bosom.

In each of these examples the last foot can easily be turned from a trochaic dissyllable to a spondee of two monosyllables: "grey Greek" can substitute "Argive", "loud sea" replace "Ocean", "deep heart" stand instead of "bosom".

Yes, English can give fine effects by monosyllables and uniquely wonderful ones in a pentameter. But the monosyllabic character of much of English, plus its Teutonic base, has its disadvantages too. Sometimes the combined simplicity and splendour that are natural to Greek and Latin, even when they are talking of the commonest things, is difficult in English. Professor Campbell has somewhere drawn our attention to Homer's phrase about the dog Argos which, old and uncared for, is lying at the doorstep when Ulysses returns home after his long wanderings. Homer says of the dog: "enipleios kynoraisteon." The first word has four syllables, the second has five scanned as four. Considering their reference to a common thing, the English translation which would correspond to the spirit of the phrase would be: "full of lice." But how flat and unmusical the English turn is! We may essay a polysyllabic version less crude: "swarming with parasites." Here we have some grace and rhythm, yet hardly the richness and delicacy of the Greek original, and there is a soupcon of the pompous and artificial if we attend not to the sound alone but also to the significance. Perhaps the best echo and equivalence to the original would be a mixture of the polysyllabic and the monosyllabic: "swarming with lice". Even then the words "with lice" have not one shred of the unpretentious beauty of "kynoraisteon".

I may tell you, however, that several words which have common-ly no dignity (whether monosyllabic or polysyllabic) can in the hands of an inspired poet kindle up with a peculiar charm or force. Take the word "shop", give it to Milton and see what he does:

And set to work millions of spinning worms

That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk.

A most original surprise suggestive of exquisite industry springs at us here. Now take the word "digestion" and see what Shakespeare can make of it as compared to what it may be in the mouth of a

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doctor. He turns it to vigorous and vivid use when he speaks of lives and fortunes consumed

In hot digestion of this cormorant war.

A cormorant is a voracious sea-bird, three feet in length and its three-syllabled name can strongly suggest rapacity of any kind, by the combination of its vowels and consonants, but the living touch of war's large-scale terrible destructiveness will hardly be commu-nicated without the support to the adjective "cormorant" by the direct physiological phrase "hot digestion". Then there is the word "business" with its prosaic commercial associations. Stephen Phillips, a poet with whom Sri Aurobindo had some acquaintance in his college days at Cambridge because Sri Aurobindo's brother Manmohan and Phillips were great chums, brings it in when he talks of the underworld, Hades, during Christ's alleged brief visit to that place of shadows and tortures:

Dreadful suspended business and vast life

Pausing....

Sri Aurobindo introduces an almost direct commercial combina-tion or partnership when he writes in Savitri:

Then shall the business fail of Death and Night.

"Business" here conveys to us certain aspects of the cosmic deal-ings of the Spirits of Destruction and Ignorance: the sharpness, the assiduous cunning, the greedy competition with God's work in the world, the alert exploitation of man's folly and frailty. The term "frailty" recalls to me lines of another poet, indicative of God's work through the cosmic process:

There is no haste in heaven, no frailty mars

The very quiet business of the stars.

I used to quote fairly often from this poet during the first year of my professorship and give his name as Narik Lama. The name intrigued a Dutch lady who was attending my lectures, a highly

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educated person interested in English poetry. She could not trace this poet anywhere. She must have consulted Indo-English antho-logies and then looked for Tibeto-English ones, if any. I may provide you with a clue to the poet's identity. Read his name from the wrong side — from right to left.

To ears not sensitive to English poetic sound-values and haunted much by non-English word-music, many English words, especially when monosyllabic, are bound to be somewhat undignified, if not actually crude. There was the Spanish Ambassador in the days of Elizabeth who felt highly offended on being offered as assistant a man of the name of Cuts. How can the bearer of so plebeian and abbreviated an appellation impress an ear accustomed to grand things like "Don Quixote de la Mancha"? And I must admit that Spanish names have a very satisfying emotional effect. Some years ago I came across the name of a contemporary Spanish writer, an exile from Franco's Spain who had settled to a professorship at Oxford: Salvador de Madariaga. As soon as I found this name I felt it could not be bettered as an ejaculation in moments of annoyance or anger. I needed no swear-words any more. When-ever worked up and irritated I would explode into "Salvador de Madariaga" and get complete relief and satisfaction. Some time after my discovery I attended at Bombay a Congress for Cultural Freedom to which several eminent men of letters from England and elsewhere had been invited. During a preliminary discussion I got riled and burst into my "Salvador de Madariaga". A very intelligent-faced old man whose brainy aspect was enhanced by his. almost total baldness came up to me and inquired with exquisite manners whether he had offended me in any way. I was taken by surprise. "But why do you ask me, sir?" I queried. He bowed and introduced himself as Salvador de Madariaga! We became great friends and I was charmed by his constant wit and admired his acute intellect and his fund of knowledge. Before I came away to Pondicherry that year — it was 1951 — to attend the All-India Convention for the Sri Aurobindo International University I got Don Salvador to send a Message to the Convention.

Don Salvador who knows several European languages besides his own Spanish is a master of English and fully appreciative of English sound-values. But in the seventeenth century an English scholar of Italian — a man named Pinkerton — felt so keenly the lack of dignity in English as compared to Italian that he made the

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proposal that English words should be provided with Italian end-ings and thus rendered more aristocratic. The idea did not catch on. I suppose Englishmen felt affronted and also realised that the whole genius of the language would be vitiated and its special possibilities spoiled by such an artificial grafting of foreign termina-tions. De Quincey summed up very tellingly the failure of Pinker-ton's Italianising fantasy: "Luckilissime this proposalio of the ab-surdissimo Pinkertonio was not adoptado by anybodyini what-everano."

Great English poets have been happy enough with the rhythmic resources of their language. But there have been periods when small poets believed that common words should never be admitted into their verse. In France, after the heyday of Classicism, there was such a period almost down to the time of Hugo. Hugo brought about a number of revolutions in the poetic world. On the one side he was the King of the Romanticists — introducing the titanic and the grandiose and the mysterious into the French poetic imagina-tion. Up to his time, except for certain tendencies in Corneille, the balanced and the beautiful and the bright were the Gods of poetry. Hugo poured the limit-breaking imperious ocean, thrust up the rugged and monstrous mountain, pushed the savage and shadow-haunted forest into the well-measured, shapely, lucid domain of French literature. Before him Rousseau had brought the essential energy of Romanticism, but Hugo swelled and solidified and spread it in all directions. On the other side, he touched with pleasure the ordinary things of life on which the Classicists had looked down their refined noses — noses which, I suppose, had never been common enough to catch a cold and sneeze. If sneeze they did, it was with the finest fragrant snuff, and Oh the sneezing was done most artistically so as to make a symphony out of the ordinary "atishoo". I don't know how a sneeze can be made symphonic. Perhaps Ravibala there amongst you — a born singer — can tell us. She won't? Well, then I must hazard that it was done with something like "a-a-a-ti-shoo-oo". And when the noses were wiped, it was with a piece of cloth which their owners dared not call a mere handkerchief, a mouchoir. But Hugo introduced into a poetic drama of his the wretched plebeian word "mouchoir". It was flung impertinently into the face of cultured Paris. That was in 1830 on the night of November 25 when his play Hernani was first performed. Instantly there was a commotion in the theatre.

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Threats and insults were hurled, blows were exchanged, sticks thudded down on heads and shoulders. The Classicists and the Romanticists were at open war. Through the melee of bloody brows and broken bones the Romanticists won and Hugo set free, as he said, "tous les vieux mots damnes" — "all the old con-demned words."

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