Talks on Poetry

TALK SEVENTEEN

We were speaking of musical poetry of two kinds — lyric melo-poeia and epic melopoeia. My mind now goes back to a reference I once made to musical Words — like "Coal-scuttle", according to a Russian, and "dyspepsia", according to myself. In the Sabrina-lyric we have quite a number of such words: the very name "Sabrina", then "translucent", "amber-dropping", "lillies" and "silver". But what the subject of musical words particularly sug-gests to me this morning is a word matching my old choice of "dyspepsia". The new word is "lumbago".

You know what "lumbago" means? The dictionary gives it as "rheumatic pain in the lower back and loins." The loins are the region between the false ribs and the hips. Get the word "loins" correctly: don't be like a friend of mine who always referred to his "lions" when he meant his "loins" —just as some people speak of quotations from Sri Aurobindo published in the Ashram Dairy when they mean Diary. Here perhaps the terms are imaginatively interchangeable not because our Dairy-chief Surendra is in any way responsible for the milk-white pages with the quotations at their heads, but because about Sri Aurobindo we can say in Coleridge's language:

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of paradise.

The paradisal milk runs in all of Sri Aurobindo's utterances — they may be said to stream from a Divine Dairy where Vedic cows are luminously fluent under the super-vision of a Surya-Surendra!

To return to "lumbago". Well, this morning I knew its meaning not quietly from any dictionary but growled out from my own lower back by my "lions." Yes, I have a touch of this rheumatic pain. But that does not spoil my pleasure in the name of the painful complaint. "Lumbago" — what harmonious power is there! "Dyspepsia" may be considered lyric melopoeia — "lum-bago" is surely melopoeia in epic form. And, I may add, the way to deal with it must also be epic. We must face it like heroes — but, in a spiritual Ashram, we have to be heroes of the inner being and use mind-force, if not soul-force. I shall tell you how I am going to make history by my battle with this hellish visitor whose

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sound entitles it to be almost a compeer of Satan. Satan is also known as Lucifer. Lucifer and Lumbago could very well be twin Archangels fallen from on high.

The history I shall make in dealing with this fiend will be in three dramatic stages. First, there will be a realisation of the full pre-sence of the dread torturer — full presence summed up by my thundering out the name as it is: "Lumbago!" Next, you will see me tackling the demon and sending him away by a mantric strategy of the resisting will. I shall shout: "Lumba, go!" The last stage will find me quite relieved, a conqueror wearing a reminiscent smile and whispering with a sense of far-away unhappiness the almost fairy-tale expression: "Lumb, ago!"

Talking of musical words, I should perhaps remark that a word which out-dyspepsias and out-lumbagoes everything is "Melopoeia" itself. Now, this word — but no! let me not digress, let me take it only as a musical warning and come back to the point where we stopped last time.

We were with Milton. Milton excels in both lyric and epic melopoeias; and, in either, he exploits to the full what I may term an earthly delicacy or richness: the moods he turns to music belong, for all their imaginative quality, to the outer mind sove-reignly inspired and he has complete grasp over the things he visualises: practically nowhere do we feel that he is in the midst of elusive presences — presences, of course, that are no less concrete for being elusive but that leave our outer mind incapable of enter-ing masterfully into the mood musicalised. It is quite different with Shelley. In him we get a more aerial than earthly melopoeia, either a quiet or a breathless intensity of it, luminous but rarefied. The quiet intensity we catch in a stanza like:

Though the sound overpowers,

Sing again, with thy dear voice revealing

A tone

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one.

Here we have melopoeia about melopoeia itself — song-making about singing, but, though an actual woman is the singer, the voice heard by the poet is not of the earth, and his own verse is also shot

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with an inner rhythm. Often the sign of Shelley's inwardness is the sense he conveys of a light that merges many realities into oneness. Even when he is not ostensibly referring to some world far from ours, even when he talks of this very world he is aware of such a light. Let me quote a few lines in which he is singing of an earth-scene:

When the night is left behind

In the deep East dun and blind,

And the blue noon is over us,

And the multitudinous

Billows murmur at our feet,

Where all earth and heaven meet,

And all things seem only one

In the universal sun...

This is breathless rather than quiet intensity of melopoeia, but the luminosity and rarefication of tone are the same, and the feeling of a radiant oneness — sun-washed instead of moon-bathed — is present. At the end of this passage, just as at the end of the other, the aerial music begins to be more recognisably of a kind which may be designated as Intonation or Incantation. Intonation or Incantation is a rhythm which does not arise so much from the words heard as from an echo they make in a mysterious dimension of our being. It has been created in the poet as if his eyes were turned inward and fixed on some occult or spiritual presence and then with the light of it on his consciousness his breath brings forth in sound the thrill of that light, making his words throw a spell on the hearer and plunge him to his own being's secret places. No doubt, all poetry has an inward-drawing force, but there is a mood and a rhythm that have it in a special degree and render poetic lines spell-binding. Those last two verses —

And all things seem only one

In the universal sun —

evoke, however faintly, however vaguely, the immensity of a Sun-self of the universe and set it making its own subtle all-harmonising sound. The inner music here is a rushing lyricism helped out by the predominantly trochaic metre, just as the inner music of the pre-

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vious quotation, which grows a spell-binder in the last four lines that waft towards us from some divine distance, was a dancing lyricism aided by the predominance of anapaests.

In both we have a sort of unpremeditated art, a simple direct spontaneity. There is a different art possible, a more conscious and deliberate craftsmanship, but it can be equally spontaneous. This may look like a paradox to those who think that spontaneity means something which comes in a single spurt and at the very first push. Budding poets are often indignant when they are criticised; they exclaim: "But it came like that! I did not manufacture it slowly. It poured out in an inspiration." Alas, this business of inspiration is much misunderstood. A poem, of course, is a failure unless it is inspired, a flow of sparkling spontaneity. Yet spontaneity means no more than that a poem has not been constructed but created and carries the language and rhythm of a hidden power beyond the labouring brain. Provided this language and this rhythm have been caught, it does not matter a whit whether a poem was written at one shot or after days and days, whether it came out easily or after much sweating. The sole important thing is to get the inner stuff. Even work of the outer mind such as Milton's is poetic precisely by the inner stuff, and it differs from Shelleyan poetry not by its lacking that stuff but merely by its getting it translated accurately into terms of the outer mind rather than appearing with some hues and harmonies of its own — and Milton's work is at times even greater than Shelley's despite the outer mind because of this mind's accuracy in translating the inner stuff instead of mixing, as Shelley occasionally does, the inner hues and harmonies with thin echoes of them in the external intelligence. Moreover, the inner stuff itself has either a simple direct look or an art-laden aspect, and the kind that seems unpremeditated may manifest after effort by the poet and the kind that seems deliberately set forth may burst out without a moment's thought. There are wheels within wheels in the poetic movement: spontaneity is to be measured only by the authentic touch in the finished product, not by the mode in which the product was finished or by the kind of product the finishing gives us.

Even the art-laden spontaneity is not of one type: it can itself be simple in attitude and motion or be "many-splendoured" and sinuous. The quality of being art-laden is felt in a certain selective-ness of phrase and structure: that is all. Intonation more art-laden

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than Shelley's, yet still simple in attitude and motion, meets us in Walter de la Mare's lyric, All that's Past, opening:

Very old are the woods;

And the buds that break

Out of the briar's boughs

When March winds wake,

So old with their beauty are —

Oh no man knows

Through what wild centuries

Roves back the rose.

The incantatory tone is unmistakable. Long vowels repeating themselves, especially the o's in the second half, and the recur-rence of spondees are the main outer instruments of the spell. But really it is a profound delicacy of feeling that makes its own haunting music from inside, carrying our imagination into some depth of the past so that life becomes not a matter of a few years but a secret continuity ageless with an eternal beauty — and the sense of this beauty takes on vividness through the mention of the rose, the time-honoured symbol of the ideally beautiful. De la Mare is not quite mystical here: he is only mysterious, and the natural rose is just dimly touched by the supernatural, but the exquisite intonation creates the spell as of a sacred chant; and the music gets charged, if not exactly with spiritual presences, at least with strange emanations of them.

To receive the full melopoeia of such verse we must read the lines in a special manner. I know that English poetry is not to be sung but spoken, yet a subtle chanting is not the same thing as sing-song and unless we indulge in it a little we do injustice to the special inspiration here. Most Englishmen would fight shy of the subtle chanting I suggest. Their external being is somewhat ashamed to be caught poetising. They have a matter-of-fact clipped way of speech on their common occasions and all poetic expression irks them as being rather dramatic. The Englishman as a type tends to be inarticulate in his day-to-day nature. When he becomes articulate, it is only by going to the opposite extreme and exploding into immortal poetry. Between the two extremes there seems to be not much connection. Hence when he recites poetry he feels it to be something foreign to his normal being. He almost

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blushes to bring out the imaginative and rhythmic rapture, he tries to pass off the highly expressive abnormality as if it were common-place. I once heard a British Consul in Pondicherry read poetry to me and Arjava (John Chadwick) during a visit by us to him. Knowing we were poets he thought politeness required him to read a poem from a book so that we might feel interested. Oh it was a terrible experience for me! He adopted a most businesslike look and flung out the wonderful words like a shower of stones at us. I don't know how I survived the pelting — or how he survived my indignant horror. Of course, all Englishmen are not so self-conscious about reading poetry: I am referring to the average person in whom the Teutonic element from the composite English being is on top. My fellow-poet in the Ashram, Norman Dowsett, is not so inhibited in this matter — maybe because the element on top in Dowsett is really Norman!

More even than de la Mare, W. B. Yeats in his early phase calls for a bit of chanting tone. There are two phases of Yeats. The later shows him a poet of the athletic intelligence and will, he is taut and powerful and deals with ideas though the ideas have always an occult or mystical background and his rhythm is invariably subtle. The earlier phase brings us a poet washed in the occult or mystical, steeped in strange mythological moods, coloured through and through with the vague depths of what is called the Celtic Twilight, the magic and mystery that were the past of the Celtic element in the complex English psychology, the element still openly at play in Wales and Ireland. Yeats the Irishman is unforgettably wistful and idealistic with Celticism in his early work and brings intonation almost everywhere. More mystically open than in de la Mare is the sense of eternal beauty communicated to us by the Yeatsian incan-tation in the two well-known stanzas knit together by a single rhyme-scheme:

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

The cry of a child by the wayside, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

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With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

Here the rose is clearly a mystical symbol. The poet is addressing his beloved, but the love in which he holds her is cored with the sense of some Perfection that is the ideal to which all outer things should conform. This marvellous inner reality, this flower of flaw-lessness rooted in a depth of dream and adoration, is hurt by the varied cruelty, clumsiness and carelessness marking so many processes of time. A child should be happy and at home, a cart should roll smoothly over the snows without violating their virgin expanse; but what does the poet find? The child is homeless, cruelly left in the open on the road along which a cart clumsily built is trundling· with harsh noises and a ploughman carelessly goes thumping with his hard boots the soft whiteness of winter and sending it shattered and scattered to all sides. The blissful and the beauteous, the harmonious and the whole, the considerate and the sensitive - these compose the world-vision that love longs for, in tune with the Ideality to which it awakens at the sight of the sweetheart. A Divine Presence glows within, an unwithering Rose whose eternity all time-movements should reflect instead of obscuring or betraying as again and again they now do. The pain of the obscuration or betrayal is untellable because what is obscured or betrayed is the Supreme whose loveliness is ineffable. With the lustre and colour of this loveliness kindled in the poet by the face of the beloved that seems at once a reverie and a reality, he cannot rest until he wins the power to refashion the world into a thing of richest light, "a casket of gold" which would serve as a fit shrine surrounding and enfolding with a divine earth and sky and water this reverie-reality where the human and the divine are blended.

The inner delight and the outer anguish felt by the idealist who wants to shape the things of time into a likeness of eternity have both been caught up by the poet into the poignant grace of a perfect lyric, the casket of a golden word-music. The Presence aglow within him is set alive for us by the peculiar artistry of the poem. Yeats breathes that Presence out to us in a stream of simple or opulent intonation filling the audible words with the inaudible rhythms of a mystical feeling.

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But those rhythms will fail to go completely home to us unless our voice attends to the vowellation and the consonance with a special modulation of tone answering to the inner idea-turn and theme-suggestion. Yeats himself always read his own verse with something of a chant. I am sure he avoided the sing-song mono-tony which goes ill with English poetry; but, aware of the pro-fundities whose echoes he was attempting to catch in his word-music, he sought to carry it as near as possible to the effect that sheer music of the wordless variety, has the privilege of producing — the immediate feeling of the soul's silence listening to its own eternal secrets.

I shall close with a brief account of how Yeats composed his work. It will serve to illustrate several points made in the course of our talk. Strange as it may seem, many poems of his were first written out in prose-form. As soon as he got a poetic stir in his being he put down on paper all the thoughts that the stir brought up in his mind. When he had got the several implications set out in any prose that came to him, he began to transpose them into poetry. The transposition was to be no mere metricising or beauti-fying of the prose-matter. A total re-creation had to be achieved. The earth and the sky and the water of common language were to be "re-made, like a casket of gold" before the true poetic harmony could emerge. Entering, beyond the surface-suggestions, into the depths of the ideas he had set forth, he would quicken up his imagination, bring out emotion-charged phrases, roll them on his tongue, keep humming them as he paced to and fro, sit down again and again as if "on a green knoll apart" and beat out on his knees the mysterious rhythms that were unfolding their wings within him. Often there would be a dead stop. The creative impulse would submerge itself The poet would labour and fail, put aside the unfinished work and wait for a more auspicious occasion. Bit by bit the wonder would grow under his hand.

This was quite opposed to the process by which his friend AE wrote his poems. To AE the poetic inspiration came in a straight flow from the recesses of his being, recesses he had visited in his trances. AE may have found it difficult to understand how Yeats could produce faultless poetry, astonishingly lyrical and sponta-neous, with so much labour. Yeats, on the other hand, disbelieved in any inspiration bringing to birth as by a divine afflatus a perfect piece of poetry. The layman would expect AE to have done the

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greater work under the compulsion of an uninterrupted impulse from inside. But actually Yeats is the greater poet, even greater as a creative force despite the apparent constructiveness of his me-thod of composition. Both AE and Yeats had perfect results to offer at the end of their poetic experience — results unimpeach-able in spontaneity. But Yeats was more aware of the poetic possibilities of language, more responsive to the turns of rhythm as enrichers of substance, more varied in his musical moods to em-body the diversity of dream-silences. He stands supreme in mo-dern English poetry and is the master par excellence there of incantatory melopoeia. In poetry written in English, though not necessarily in England, he is surpassed in this genre by Sri Aurobindo alone.

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