Talks on Poetry

TALK SIXTEEN

Early this morning I ran across one of our students, who had been absent last time. I naturally said, "How are you keeping?" It was a minute later that I thought I should have put the question in the typical South-Indian way. In South India many English-fancying people fuse several phrases into one and ask: "How are you, I hope?" And the general answer is: "Somewhat, I am afraid." Don't ask me to explain these compact sentences. But surely I can appreciate their piquancy. I'll tell you some other things also, equally worth remembering.

Once at a railway station a chap was trying to enter a crowded third-class carriage. He had all sorts of bundles under his arms and an umbrella slung over his shoulder and there dangled from one hand a cage with a parrot in it. Somebody who had secured a place near the carriage-entrance tried to dissuade him from inflicting such an assortment of luggage plus himself on the already bursting compartment. The man with the parrot-cage got indignant and exclaimed: "You think you are a who?" Immediately the other fellow retorted: "Well, if I am a who, then you are a no doubt!" I am sure the squabblers understood each other and we can also intuit the drift of their squabble. Perhaps some day these delicious Indianisms will get into the English language.

And why not? English has several oddities of its own already and Americanisms are fast making headway. At least many Indian words have become current coin in England. There is, chief of all, the great word "Avatar". In English it has come to connote not only an incarnation of God but also, in a general sense, a manifestation or display as well as a phase. I can speak of somebody's business-avatar, meaning that personality of his which tackles business. One can also speak of Yeats's two avatars as a poet — his early phase and his later. There is then the word "bobbery" in English meaning "disturbance, row, fuss", from the Hindi "Bap-re" — "O father!" (an interjection of dismay). The word "bungalow", meaning a lightly built one-storeyed or temporary house, comes from the Indian "bangla" meaning "belonging to Bengal". "Cot", a light bedstead, is the Indian "khat". "Cushy", standing for "easy, pleasant, comfortable", is the Indian "khush" ("pleasant"). Occasionally an Indian word entering English re-tains its exact original form but undergoes a change in pronuncia-

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tion or accent. Thus when an Englishman of Oxford says "Parsee" he makes an actual Parsi sit up and take notice, because the name falls a little oddly on his ear with the Englishman's lengthen-ing of the second syllable and his accent on it. Similarly, Buddha becomes "Booda", accented on the first syllable and with the double o pronounced short as in "book".

I have wondered whether "veranda" is an Indian word. My dictionary gives it a Portuguese origin. But it is common across the length and breadth of India. Mentioning it, I am reminded of some provincial peculiarities here in pronouncing English. In Gujarat sh seems difficult: it lapses intos, English is called Inglis and "ocean" becomes "osun". Bengalis get all twisted up in differentiating between b and v. I had a Bengali friend who used to take lessons in English from me. He could not for the life of him pronounce "above". It became either "abub" or else "avuv". The Bengali language has, in fact, no v-sound. And that brings me to my "veranda". You know that at one time I was in charge of the Ashram furniture. Once I had to get a cot removed from the house of an Ashramite called Barinda. On my way I met an inmate of the house and asked where the cot exactly was. He said: "The cot is on Barinda." I was rather shocked. Barinda was a fairly old man and the idea of the cot lying on him was disquieting. I protested: "Surely, Barinda must be on the cot?" I got the reply: "No, the cot is on Barinda." I made haste to the house — only to find the cot on the veranda!

Enough of digression. Last time we closed with a digression and this time we have opened with one. Let's get to work. We have divided, a la Patmore, the poetic phrase into the piquant, the felicitous, the magnificent. Now I shall make another kind of division — three classes, each of which can hold all the three types of poetic phrase. I shall borrow it from the Anglo-American modernist poet Ezra Pound. I believe Pound was in a mental home — but not because he was a poet. Poets are already mad in a special way — they cannot go mad in the ordinary manner: it must be the non-poetic avatar of Pound that qualified for the mental home. Anyway, his classification of poetry which I am about to adopt hails from his early days when his was only the poetic madness which is well known from ancient times — the furor poeticus, as the Romans characterised it.

Pound offers us the three heads: Melopoeia, Phanopoeia, Logo-

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poeia. The first term is easily seen as the Greek for "Song-making", the third as the Greek for "Word-making". The second looks somewhat obscure,. but we may remember the last half of the word "epiphany" : this half connotes "appearing, showing, manifesting. " So Phanopoeia means vision-making. It is concerned with imagery. But we should not identify ''Image-making" with what is called Imagism. Imagism is the work of a particular movement or school of poetry which arose round about 1915 as a reaction against the vague emotional poeticism of the late-Victorian age and insisted on poetry with a clear outline and a hard core, generally one image set forth in objective language. Pound himself was among the leaders of this school and took it to be the best practitioner of image-making. We should not restrict our notion by his .early penchant.

Broadly speaking, all poetry is image-making, since the poet is primarily the seer, the artistic visualiser. But, while all poetry is based on sight and insight, not all of it has the image-aspect in prominence. The two other aspects that can stand out are Melo-poeia and Logopoeia. In the former we are impressed overwhelm-ingly by the music of the verse: often the very structure invites being set to music. Phanopoeia resembles not music so much as painting and sculpture. Logopoeia is a poetic play essentially of ideas: as Pound puts it, "it is the dance of the intellect among words" — it is the conceptive word as distinguished from the musical or the pictorial-sculpturesque.

We have already quoted lines that were markedly musical — melopoeic lines. Long passages, even whole poems, can be melo-poeic — for example, the song which Milton has put into his Masque called Comus. I have selected this song because it has nothing momentous to say, no great theme is here, no high thought or sentiment is turned into verse-music: a mere picture with some feeling behind it is presented, the picture of a Lake-Goddess to whom an appeal has been made to come to the help of a maiden lost in a wood and exposed to a satyr's lust. By having nothing momentous said, the song yields pure melopoeia:

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of Lillies knitting

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The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,

Listen for dear honour's sake.

Goddess of the silver lake,

Listen and save.

This is word-music of the most beautiful order, made not only by the sound-texture within each line but also by the varying pattern of short and long line-units and by the skill in disposing the rhymes, some of which are close to each other and some distanced. Two pairs of rhyme-lines have actually three lines intervening in one instance and even four in the other. Between "fair" and "hair" we have "sitting", "wave" and "knitting". Between "wave" and "save" there are "knitting", "hair", "sake" and "lake". But even here no dissatisfaction of the ear is felt and, when the delayed rhyme comes, it is not as if a fault were set right at last but as if a new delight beyond the ordinary were created. This is so because the intervening words "knitting" and "hair" are themselves rhymes to previous words and fall on the ear with accomplished pleasure, and "lake" and "sake" by their immediate rhyming fill very markedly whatever gap may be dug by the delay in rhyming "wave" to "save". The distance between "fair" and "hair" is shortened by the word "where" in line 2, occurring without stress and hence getting somewhat subdued yet contri-buting to the rhyme-effect in a subtle fashion. The subdual itself is artistic because otherwise a slightly cheap impression would be produced — a clear rhyme sticking out in the middle of a line to the end-word of the line preceding. As regards "wave" and "save", note how many times the long a occurs in the lines be-tween those that have these end-words. I shall string all of them together: braids, train, sake, lake. Out of these, "sake" and "lake" are themselves end-words and constitute assonantal or vowel rhymes directly to "wave" and "save". The running of the long a through the second half of the poem is a very musical element weaving it into one piece. The short i is also a cohesive force — perhaps "force" is hardly the right word, so let us say: the short i is also a cohesive charm; it is present in every line, and almost in the middle of the poem — line 4 it is gathered up in a striking profusion:

In twisted braids of Lillies knitting,

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as if to wake the ear to the leit motif, the dominant note.

Another cohesive charm is the way the two halves of the lyric are formed. The first half is from the line ending with "fair" to the one ending with "hair": the second from the line ending with "wave" to that ending with "save". Now, certain rhymes — "fair-hair", "sitting-knitting", "wave-save" — are so placed that one partner of each pair comes in either half. This makes the halves overlap. Further, the only line in the first half that remains un-rhymed — namely, the "wave"-line — rhymes with the closing line of the second half: conversely, the sole line remaining unrhymed in the second half — namely, the "hair"-line — rhymes with the-opening line of the first half. This binds together the very begin-ning and end of the lyric, beginning and end which are also linked musically by both of them being not only the same metrical length (a dimeter of two syllables to a foot) but also the only two lines in the poem that have this length. Set over against all these connec-tive factors is the sheer variety of the distances at which the rhymes are put. There are four rhyme-pairs, all formed at different inter-vals. We have already noted how "fair-hair" gets formed with three lines separating the partners and "wave-save" with four, while "sake-lake" is immediate: we may add that "sitting-knit-ting" takes a single line between. Thus on the one hand we have extreme diversity and, on the other, a many-moded integration: the poem is tightly twined in the midst of its multiple liquidity. If we may borrow some suggestions of the poem itself, we may say that the technique has the soft slipping quality of Sabrina's "amber-dropping hair", but still holds together the "loose train" of this loveliness in "twisted braids of Lillies".

Of course it is not merely the general or detailed music and the structural artistry that immortalise the poem. The language itself is sensitively, delicately, picturesquely chosen. Can, for example, the stuff of lake-water be better conveyed than by the words no less than the sounds —

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave?

"Glassy" gives the water's shining and mirroring smoothness, "cool" its freshness and soothingness, "translucent" its deepness at the same time gleaming and mysterious. The l sound is in each of the adjectives, making the water-stuff glide through all and run

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them together. The third adjective "translucent" — possessing the length of the other two combined — carries also sounds related to the a of "glassy" and the oo of "cool", so that the sense of connection tends to get cumulative and clinched. This line, no less than the fifth —

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair —

is a full pentameter and joins up with the bulk of Milton's poetic creation which is in Paradise Lost and both of them by being somewhat far from their rhyme-partners bear just a touch of the blank-verse constituting that epic. They suggest to us a transition from the kind of melopoeia here practised to another which we may find there. Milton has not only song-music, he has also sym-phony-music and we should be doing injustice to the total con-notation of "melopoeia" if we failed to put under this term the symphonic splendour of Paradise Lost. In that epic, Milton hears in remarkable rhythm the grand events he visualises as happening in Heaven and Hell and Earth. Sound bearing out the sense, not with an obvious echo but with a power of stirring the mind to the magnitude of the events related, meets us in a passage like:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

As in the Sabrina-lyric we have various phrase-lengths con-cealed within the pentametrical uniformity of appearance — a changing artistry of pauses lends both diversity and aptness to the musical motives. Written out according to this artistry, the passage would read:

Him

The Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion,

Down

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To bottomless perdition,

There to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

Even in the lines that demand to be set forth as full pentameters we have a difference of movement. The penultimate line —

In adamantine chains and penal fire —

makes a faint division into three feet and two feet because of the conjunction "and", while stretched out inexorably to a length which is the total of those divisions is the second line —

Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky —

as well as the last —

Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.

And the inexorableness of utter pentametrical length is most ap-posite just in these two verses — the initial suggestion of the absolute doom of downfall when the hurling from Heaven is done and the final suggestion of it when the plunging into Hell is accomplished. The two verses are also subtly affined by the "sky" of the one getting its rhyme in the "defy" of the other.

In a different but equally significant way the last line links up with the very first word of the passage. This line is, grammatically, the relative clause going with that word, but between "Him" and "Who" there are four and a half lines. Both the connection and the separation are meaningful. Mark first how by putting "Him" at the very start of the passage Milton not only emphasises the being who falls ever downward through the lines but also indicates the sheer top from which the prolonged falling takes place. Mark then how by suspending the connection of "Who" with "Him" Milton suggests forcibly not only the prolongation of the fall through depth on depth of space but also the abysmal end of the very same being who was at the ethereal top. Syntax was never mani-pulated in the whole world's poetry to such an expressive effect. I may further point out how the phonetic note struck at the begin-

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ning in common for both the superhuman antagonists — the labial consonant of m accompanied by p — rings all through the passage (here and there the p replaced by its fellow-explosive b) sustaining the sense of the fierce duel and repeats in the last line the exact occurrence in the first of m twice and p once, thus again vivifying the two extremes of the downfall-drama as well as rounding off the passionate yet controlled grandeur of the music let loose. Do not forget, finally, that, just as "Him" is recalled once more in the last line by "Who", the "Almighty Power" is recalled there — and there alone in the entire passage — by the synonym "the Omni-potent" — a further touch of coordination and completion.

All these, of course, are details of the sound-art wedded to the structure. What envelops us most unforgettably is the ensemble of the melopoeic symphony, the superb sonority of the polysyllabism punctuated at suitable places by the dynamic directness of mono-syllables especially at the end of each line and with its acme in that emphatic "down" after both a trisyllable and a pause. But here too, as in the Sabrina-lyric, it would not be correct to aver that the masterly effect is due to the sound-art alone and not to the word-craft. Sri Aurobindo has well remarked with reference to the epic melopoeia of the passage: "the sound, the rhythmic resonance, the rhythmic significance is undoubtedly the predominant factor; it makes us hear and feel the crash and clamour and clangour of the downfall of the rebel angel: but that is not all, we do not merely hear as if one were listening to the roar of ruin of a collapsing bomb-shattered house, but saw nothing, we have the vision and the full psychological commotion of the hideous and flaming ruin of the downfall and it is the tremendous force of the words that makes us see as well as hear."

We have now hardly any time to proceed in our general treat-ment of poetry as melopoeia. I have some other quotations to give, illustrating what I may call Intonation or Incantation. But with Milton's symphonically suspended melopoeic sentence we shall suspend our discussion for the present.

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