Talks on Poetry

TALK TEN

Last time we caught hold of true Poetic Diction with the help of Macbeth's seas-incarnadining hand and had also an appreciative look at genuine Poetic Diction through Keats's magic casements. Today we shall make a few more quotations. No, I shall not start commenting on them in detail — banish that wrinkle of anxiety from your brows. After the magic casements of Keats, Sri Aurobindo's gate of dreams will be the proper thing to show you first. The hour is of dawn-break, when the mind hovers as if on a meeting-point of the physical world and some wonderful Beyond whose secret seems to shine upon us for a while till common day glares out again. Sri Aurobindo describes the slow tentative pro-cess of light taking a revelatory shape in the dim sky:

A wandering hand of pale enchanted light

That moved along a fading moment's brink

Fixed with gold panel and opalescent hinge

A gate of dreams ajar on mystery's verge.

The Poetic Diction here unerringly communicates the reality of a phenomenon at once spiritual and physical — a movement of fire and ether, which makes all the more intense the strange and the supreme by catching up from the familiarities of earth-life the figures of hand and hinge and gate. No other kind of language would have done the work so well.

Before moving to the dawn-break Sri Aurobindo dwells upon the depths of the darkness. One phrase from the opening lines of the long account of those depths I shall cite as authentic Poetic Diction in another style. But I shall lead on to his phrase of mystical grandeur by way of some lines from other poets turning your eyes to the nocturnal sky with a more naturalistic and less supernatural touch, though with a grandeur poetically as memo-rable. Here is a poet named Beddoes speaking:

Crescented night and amethystine stars.

Just take in the picture for a moment. The crescent moon has grown, through the bold conversion of a noun into an adjective by a past-participial termination, a dynamic decoration of the dark-

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ness, a decoration which is not added to the darkness but brought forth by it as if from its own self: the night and the crescent are one fused presence. Also, the starlight is endowed with a precious magnitude by being not compared with the violet-hued pieces of quartz known as amethysts but packed with the very quality of these valuable stones by means of a majestic adjective. I may add that the adjective functions appropriately by its majesty: a short form like "amethyst" instead of "amethystine" would not have reflected in its metaphorical work the high nature of starry exis-tence. How poor, though not quite unpoetic, would the line have been if Beddoes had not kindled up to an imaginative synthesis and a sensitive insight but written:

Night with her crescent and the stars like amethysts.

Night in another mood, equally regal, appears in a sonnet-close of William Watson:

...and over me

The everlasting taciturnity,

The august, inhospitable, inhuman night

Glittering magnificently unperturbed.

That is a high-water mark of power and bears a semi-mystical suggestion. The word "taciturnity" means "reserve in speech", "aversion to communication" — it derives from the Latin "taci-turnus". which again comes from "tacitus" in the same language. "Tacitus" means "silent". A famous Roman historian has the name Tacitus — a writer of forceful brevity who, by not uttering everything, filled a few words with penetrating substance. Hear the phrase in which he castigated Roman imperialists: "Solitu-dinem faciunt et pacem appellant" — "they make a desert and call it peace." It was bold indeed of Tacitus to show up as destructive pretentiousness the ambitions of generals who were his own countrymen and contemporaries. The brevity of Tacitus had very often a bite in it.

The proverb goes that a barking dog seldom bites. Tacitus may be termed, because of his sharp yet controlled expression, a biting dog who never barked. Don't think there is any insult in being termed a dog. The term is not exactly a bit of true Poetic Diction,

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but if a certain beautiful wild flower growing in hedges can be called the Dog-rose and the brightest star in the sky, namely Sirius, can be called the Dog-star, surely Tacitus would not mind my doggy description of him — particularly as it is not quite far from his own kind of style. Besides, I am an incurable lover of the tail-wagging species, as an eighteenth-century practitioner of false Poetic Diction would have put it, and so my phrase is intended to be a tremendous compliment. I believe that if the Supramental fulfilment were not in store for humanity what T. Earle Welby has said would be the last word possible in man's favour: "The only incontrovertible argument for the continuation of the human race is that a world without men would be intolerable to dogs." And let us not forget that even the Supramental destiny which Sri Aurobindo holds out for us can be felt by us as a possibility if our imagination expresses the gripping Grace of God in a language reminiscent of the dog-world: that gripping Grace without which none can hope to be even within ten thousand miles of the Supermind can best be designated, after the poet Francis Thompson, as the Hound of Heaven, a Power which is all the time after us with a hound's tenacity in order to save us in spite of ourselves! More prosaically but still pointedly we may declare that we shall reach the Super-mind because of being dogged by divinity. And what is wrong with associating divinity itself with a doggy movement? Where we read "Dog" an Arab or a Persian who reads not from left to right but from right to left would say "God". More philosophically we may crystallise the whole involutionary and evolutionary process by the formula: "A dog is really a god seen from the other end." You see how easily we can plunge into mystical thought if we possess a dogged mind and can push into mysticism anyhow.

And now that we are back to where we started from after quoting Watson's "everlasting taciturnity" we may appositely finish our examples of true Poetic Diction with Sri Aurobindo's visionary penetration of the night's darkest phase:

Almost one felt opaque, impenetrable,

In the sombre symbol of her eyeless muse

The abysm of the unbodied Infinite.

The last line is a masterpiece not only of Poetic Diction but also of spiritual poetry, a Mantra in the profoundest sense, words born

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from the very reality of the Supreme rather than found by the human intelligence about a superhuman condition.

Apropos of a special diction in poetry I may sound a note of warning. One should never go in for a rich attractive word without getting down to its meaning. One must never rest with guess-work from certain surface suggestions. There is the story of a budding poet who once read the word "carminative" on a bottle of cinna-mon. He was very much taken up with the beauty of the word and saw in it affinities to words like "carmine" and the Latin word "carmen" which connotes "song". He wrote a love-poem and sent it to his girl-friend with one line reading:

My passion carminative as wine.

The lucky lady was non-plussed by the new word and consulted her dictionary. Imagine her surprise and horror when she read that "carminative" means "tending to reduce windiness in the bowels"!

During my school-days I wrote an essay in verse on a Library and wanted to speak of the heaps and heaps of books there on diverse subjects. But I looked out for somewhat uncommon words for my idea. My dictionary gave me "mound" for a heap and I went from "mound" to other words and produced the couplet:

O there were mounds of metaphysical mystery

And poetry-piles and haemorrhoids of history!

I felt I had achieved the grand style, especially with the last phrase. I showed my work to my father who happened to be a doctor. He burst into devastating laughter and made me sink into the ground for shame by informing me that haemorrhoids were small bleeding boils so placed in the body that it would be difficult for one to sit down comfortably. It was the word "pile" with a sense other than "mound" that had made an utter fool of me. When I found "haemorrhoid" for "pile" I should have looked up that impressive polysyllable in my dictionary.

Talking of my essay on a Library I am reminded of two notices put up in a South-Indian library. One ran: "Loose dogs not allowed." The phrase "loose dog", which was intended literally, suggests half-jocularly half-contemptuously a person of lax mora-lity. The second notice, somewhat in contradiction to the first,

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said: "Only low conversation permitted." Evidently what was intended was a prohibition of loud talk, but in English "low conversation" signifies talk which is coarse Or vulgar, the likely conversation of a loose dog!

We Indians have to be wary of the traps of English idiom. Thus, outside a chemist's shop in Bombay, you will read: "We dispense with accuracy." "To dispense" means "to make up and give out medicines," but "to dispense with" means "to do without". A chemist whose job it is to provide you with medicines according to a doctor's prescription would be a terrible danger if he neglected accuracy. Sometimes mistakes occur by a wrong combination of words in a foreign language: two words that are clearly known by themselves may constitute a howler when wrongly combined. In the days when I was in charge of the Ashram's furniture depart-ment — yes, strange as it may seem, I had to furnish rooms with tables and chairs and beds instead of sitting quietly in my own and writing poetry — in those days I once got a note from a European but non-English resident: "Will you please send four wooden blocks to understand my table?" I wrote back: "Certainly — since luckily you haven't asked for four blockheads." Sometimes it is the pronunciation that plays havoc. When Pavitra¹ was here in the early days he used to pronounce English in a Frenchier way than now. His "r" was very French indeed. The French "r" is from the throat and to a non-French ear it may be almost inaudible. Now Pavitra said very often to a Bengali sadhaka who had become friendly with him: "I am a brother to you all." The friend always heard, "I am a bother to you all". And naturally he said with emphatic politeness, "Oh no, no!" and Pavitra would feel such an outcast on being refused to be considered a brother. He thought the Indians so very peculiar. You will find this story told by Sri Aurobindo in his correspondence with Nirodbaran.

The mispronouncing or mishearing of words in other languages has sometimes a farcical effect. The first Indian baronet was a Parsi, a man named Jamshedjee Cursetjee Jeejeebhoy. When he went to England he was invited by Queen Victoria to a party. A grandly attired butler stood at the door of the reception hall and announced the names of the visitors as they came. When the Parsi baronet arrived, the butler inquired his name. He got the answer:

1. Originally Philippe Barbier St.-Hilaire.

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"Jamshedjee Cursetjee Jeejeebhoy." The butler was a little puz-zled but he kept his aplomb and, looking at the Queen, announced in a loud voice: "Damn says he. Curse says he. She's a boy."

Certain mannerisms are also to be avoided. We get into the nervous habit of inserting "You see" or "You know" into our sentences every now and then. A lecturer could very well waste ten minutes out of his fifty by "you see"-ing and "You know"-ing. Another mannerism is "what's called". I have heard a great Bengali scholar in philosophy, now dead, use it with outrageous results. He once visited the Ashram and lectured on the progress of Indian thought in the world. And this is one of the sentences with which he developed his subject: "Then what's called Viveka-nanda sailed away and after many what's called hardships reached Chicago and there at the Parliament of Religions he at last what's called appeared." I simply had to get up and what's called run away in order to avoid an explosion of laughter.

I have quoted this learned professor as using the word "hard-ships". He used it correctly though comically, but I had at College a Science teacher who, knowing that a difficulty is a hardship, would ask about the text which we were studying and in which several points were often hard to grasp: "Have you any hard-ships?" Another misuse of the language, rather a creative one this time, was by a Japanese Consul who visited the British Consul without an appointment. His wife had done the same the day before. This Japanese had always imagined the word "encroach" to be "hencroach". So with the intention of being logically correct in English he bowed and said: "Sir, yesterday you were kind enough to let my wife hencroach upon your time. May I today be allowed to cockroach upon it?".

Often a foreign word casts a spell on us. The name of a vil-lainous character in a famous Russian novel is Raskolnikov. It has all sorts of sinister suggestions for an English ear. But to a Russian it is just. what to an Englishman would be a name like Higgin-bottom. A Russian once remarked that to him the most musical word in the English language was "coal-scuttle", which stands for a pail to carry coals in. All the more if we do not know a language well we fall under the spell of certain sounds. That reminds me in general of the magical effects of incomprehensible words. A name, in ancient thought, was a clue to the nature of a thing. In the Atharva Veda we find a Rishi saying: "O fever, I know thy name.

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Thou shalt not escape me." The practice of modern doctors, in order to create impressive authority for themselves, is to employ names not as revealers of the secrets of diseases but as dumb-founders of the diseased persons visiting them. They substitute a mysterious term for a commonplace one which all their patients understand. When the mysterious term is employed the patient experiences great relief as if he felt the doctor knew the occult evil causing the suffering and therefore possessed the power to deal with it. In a scene in a play of Moliere's we find this practice illustrated:

Patient: I suffer with my head,

Doctor. Doctor: Oh I know. That's Cephalalgia.

Patient: My digestion is also bad.

Doctor: Don't worry at all. I know what it is. It's Dyspepsia.

Now Cephalalgia means Headache, and Dyspepsia means Indiges-tion. The doctor, by merely employing Greek terms, brought instant confidence to the patient. By the way, if I did not know English and went only by my ear I should almost declare the most musical English word to be Dyspepsia and I would imagine it to be the name of a flower!

We have also to guard against certain peculiarities in the saying of names in a foreign language. Words starting with "pneum" do not sound their "p". "A-s-th-m-a" is better pronounced "azma" or "asma" than "asthma". Some English proper names are a devil of a problem. Thus what is written as Marjoriebanks is pro-nounced Marshbanks. What is written as Cholmondeley is pro-nounced Chumly. Once the well-known journalist Horatio Bottom-ley went to interview Lord Cholmondeley. Not being intimate with aristocratic nomenclature he asked the butler whether Lord Chol-mon-de-ley would be good enough to give him a few minutes. The butler politely but with a superior air said, "I shall ask Lord Chumly about it. What name shall I give him as yours, Sir?" Horatio Bottomley handed his visiting card to the butler, and when the latter was looking at the word "Bottomley" the journa-list said with great hauteur: "Please tell Lord Chumly that Mr. Bumly has come to see him."

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