Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-EIGHT

Today we may round off our discussion of Pure Poetry — with a remark of Sri Aurobindo's. Speaking of the poets of the early nineteenth century and comparing as well as contrasting these voices of the New Romanticism shot with a spiritual aspiration, particularly in alliance with a Nature-mysticism, Sri Aurobindo pairs Wordsworth and Byron on one hand and, on the other, Shelley and Keats. Then he remarks about the two latter: "They are perhaps the two most purely poetic minds that have used the English tongue; but one sings from the skies earthwards, the other looks from earth towards Olympus."¹

In this matter of pure poetry, we may cite a couple of other observations by Sri Aurobindo. About Shelley he says: "Shelley uses language throughout as a poet; he was incapable of falling into the too hard and outward manner of Byron or yielding to the turn towards mere intellectuality which always beset Wordsworth. The grain of his mind was too saturated with the hues of poetic vision, he had too splendid and opulent an imagination, too great a gift of flowing and yet uplifted and inspired speech for such descents..."² Apropos of Keats he declares: "Keats is the first entire artist in word and rhythm in English poetry, — not grandiose, classical and derived like Milton, but direct and original in his artistry, he begins a new era."³

To get all this into proper focus we may note further that, although Shelley and Keats are called the most purely poetic minds, Sri Aurobindo does not rank them on the whole as high as Milton, much less Shakespeare. Even Spenser he puts above them in a total view. Thus, relating them to the Elizabethan Age, he tells us: "They have a greater thing to reveal than the Elizabethan poets, but they do not express it with that constant fullness of native utterance or that more perfect correspondence between substance and form which is the greatness of Shakespeare and Spenser."⁴ After marking the frequent poetic perfection not only of the great Elizabethans but also of Indian poets of a similar inspiration of the Life-spirit, like Kalidasa, Sri Aurobindo puts his finger on the weak spot in the new manifestation: "A poetry of spiritual vision and the sense of things behind life and above the

1. The Future Poetry, Ed. 1972, p. 129. 2. Ibid. , pp. 1 26-27.

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intellect must similarly develop from its essence a characteristic voice, cry, mould of speech, natural way of development, habits of structure."¹ Shelley and Keats, like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake, "were embarrassed by the same difficulty of a time which was not ready for work of this kind, not prepared for it by any past development, not fitted for it by anything in the common atmosphere of the age.... Each besides had an immense development of that force of separative personality which is in art at least the characteristic of our later humanity. There is nothing of that common aim and manner which brings into one category the Elizabethan dramatists or the contemporaries of Pope and Dry-den."²

This means that, in spite of their supreme poetic gifts, Shelley and Keats fell short of complete fulfilment because they erupted as it were, into an age which was not organically ready for spiritual self-expression, and because there was no pervasive awareness of the sort of revelatory work they had to do. But this also means that, if their age had been ready and they themselves had possessed more insight into their general destiny, Shelley and Keats, on account of their supreme gifts, could have stood higher than Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser so far as "fullness of native utterance" and "perfect correspondence between substance and form" are concerned. Neither of them had the capacity to create living characters: so they could not have competed with Shakespeare in what may specifically be termed creative genius and perhaps even Milton's solitary creation, Satan, would have breathed more life than anything in Shelley and Keats. But they would have equalled and excelled Spenser all-round. Spenser has "more of a descriptive vision than of the larger creative power or narrative force"³ and so his human figures through whom he works out his scheme of a romantico-ethical story stand as the "allegorical body" of the powers of Good and Evil rather than as these Powers' "expressive opportunity of life."⁴

What made Shelley and Keats hold the promise of surpassing all English poets in the matter of expression is picked out by Sri Aurobindo under a different aspect in either of them. As we saw, Shelley he distinguished for the freedom his language had from a hard and outward manner as well as from a manner merely intel-

1 . Ibid. , p. 1 13. 2. Ibid. ,

3 . Ibid. , p. 75. 4. Ibid. , p. 77.

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lectual: this freedom made him use language always as a poet and, on the positive side, it lay in his mind being deeply hued with poetic vision, splendidly charged with imagination and greatly gifted with a high and intense fluency of speech. A radiant spontaneity of rhythmic utterance is the essence of Shelley.

Keats brings a power of extreme originality in choice of poetic words. An acute sense of beauty is ever at work in his compositions: beauty sensuous, beauty imaginative, beauty intellectual, beauty mystical is the very soul of him and he is in possession of an expressive instrument alive to the demands of the inner ear which is the true maker of poetic rhythm. Sri Aurobindo has well said in general how the inner ear's action takes place. "Technically, we may say that this comes in when the poet becomes, in Keats' phrase, a miser of sound and syllable, economical of his means, not in the sense of a niggardly sparing, but of making the most of all its possibilities of sound."¹ He further explains: "...every sound is made the most of, whether in its suppression or in its swelling expansion, its narrowness or its open wideness, in order to get in the combined effect something which the ordinary flow of poetry cannot give us."² Here we may touch on another side of the perfecting of the poet's means. Keats, adapting Spenser, used in a letter Of his the phrase: "fill every rift with ore." This implies an enriching of every step of the poetic expression — enriching not in the sense of a glaring ornamentation but of picking and choosing one's words with a view to bringing out the finest suggestion of a thing, the finest shade of an idea, the finest stir of an experience and not allow anything commonplace, anything already used, anything easily found: it is not enough that the conception should be subtle or great in a broad manner, it must be expressed in the most artistically original mode. A radiant artistry of rhythmic utterance is the essence of Keats.

Poetry is an art, and so every poet is an artist. But the poet is he who sings, the artist is he who makes the song. In Shelley it is the singing impulse that is predominant, in Keats the impulse by which the song is made. Shelley is busy primarily with the soul that is to be embodied, Keats with the body that is to be ensouled. But both of them at their best have equally the soul and the body. The difference of stress brings, of course, a difference in the texture of their work. Shelley's work is not so attention-drawing in details as

1. Ibid., p. 2 1 . 2. Ibid. ,

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is Keats's: it has more a general sweep of lustrous language, while Keats's has a specific, a distinct, an individualised sparkle in almost each step of the movement. There is no essential loss by him of wholeness, just as with Shelley there is no essential loss of particularity; yet the eye and ear of the one are more in love with the parts while those of the other are more enamoured of the ensemble. It is rather a question of temperamental variation than of variation in poetic quality. In Shelley the poet as such is more audible, in Keats the artist as such is more visible; but, in both of them, the poet and the artist function with a sheerness and purity that are unique in English.

What we have called temperamental variation in the midst of their equal uniqueness as pure poets is formulated by Sri Aurobindo in more significant and comprehensive terms when he tells us that Shelley sings from the skies earthwards, Keats looks from earth towards Olympus. Shelley is fundamentally aware of the spiritual, though it is never the exclusively spiritual: his three godheads — celestial Light, celestial Love, celestial Liberty — he always tries passionately to bring down to earth without losing their intrinsic shape and colour. People often picture Shelley as a being who is entirely absorbed in the ethereal and who, when he touches the earthly, does so with a lesser poetry. Going by this idea, I once set out to purge his famous Ode to the Skylark of what struck me as comparatively grosser and hence unShelleyan ingredients so that the whole might be of one shimmering iridescent piece. Sri Aurobindo pulled me up short and in a masterly letter showed me that earth is not intrinsically less divine than the ether and that to forget Shelley's constant endeavour to marry the two because he saw the same divinity within them is to cut out from him a most meaningful and characteristic element. However, it must be granted that the spiritual and not the physical held his gaze first and foremost: from there he looked downwards with the eyes of the rapturous reformer.

Keats is aware, first and foremost, of the physical, the sights and sounds and scents and touches of the earth, the shapes and energies that achieve a concrete beauty, a beauty living to the senses. Yet he is not confined to sensuous wonders. His heart aches for the divine originals of them and he moves intensely through his imagination and his thought to see and feel within terrestrial shapes and energies the Gods and Goddesses breathing and moving. No

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doubt, he frequently lingers overmuch with the delights of the earth, but never with them in their crude forms, and his deepmost endeavour is, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, "the discovery of the divine Idea, Power and living norm of Beauty which by its breath of delight has created the universe, supports it and moves towards a greater perfection, inspires the harmonies of inward sight and outward form, yearns and strives towards the fullness of its own self-discovery by love and delight."¹

Shelley and Keats stand side by side with an apparent antinomy but with an essential identity. Not that they realised this identity at all when they came into contact with each other: Keats was a less out-raying personality than Shelley and he found Shelley's work not sufficiently alert to the needs of craftsmanship as he understood them, and he felt that he would best develop if he did not get too much into Shelley's floating aura of magnanimity with its streamers of a world-message. Shelley saw in Keats a soul exquisitely struggling for expression within an entanglement of hypersensitive art-conscience, and he was eager to impart to him all the elan and speed through the ether that were his own speciality. When, however, Keats died, Shelley wrote the superb Adonais, in which he recognises and proclaims his own essential oneness with all that Keats stood for and strove after. It was in the fitness of things that one out of the two most purely poetic minds in English literature should write the greatest of all elegies on the other, affirming with him his unity in death when the unity in life remained unrealised and seeing in a final vision his own death soon following that of Adonais as if in answer to a call and joining them both together in the Vastness and Light that were the inner essence of either one's poetry. Do you remember the closing stanza of Shelley's poem? —

The breath whose might I have invoked in song

Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,

Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

The massy earth and sphered sky are riven!

I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;

Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the Abode where the Eternals are.

1. Ibid., pp. 1 30-3 1 .

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Now that we have started quoting we may continue with some characteristic passages and appreciate the pure poetry which habitually ascends from "massy earth" and that which mostly descends from "sphered sky." Here is Shelley apostrophising Emilia Viviani, the Italian girl whom he found immured in a convent by a tyrannical father and who seemed to the young English poet the embodiment of everything celestial:

Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,

Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman

All that is insupportable in thee

Of light and love and immortality!

...the brightness

Of her divinest presence trembles through

Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew

Embodied in the windless heaven of June,

Amid the splendour-winged stars, the Moon

Burns inextinguishably beautiful.

Here again is Shelley describing, in the song of the Fourth Spirit in the First Act of his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound, the poet:

Nor seeks or finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aerial kisses

Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake-reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy bloom,

Nor heed nor see what things they be,

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurselings of immortality!

Here finally is Shelley in a moment of unsurpassable aspiration — simple, direct, penetrating to the core of the mystical sense:

I loved — oh, no, I mean not one of ye,

Or any earthly soul, though ye are dear

As human heart to human heart may be,

I loved I know not what; but this lone sphere

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And all that it contains contains not thee,

Thou whom, seen nowhere, I feel everywhere.

Now look at Keats. When we think of him we think of phrases like: "the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings" or "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" or "From silken Samarkand to cedar'd Lebanon", or, at a deeper level, "The journey homeward to habitual self — phrases in which every word counts in its individuality and every sound fills out the sense with what the words themselves cannot hold. Keats comes to us with packed yet subtle pictures —

But here there is no light

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

Words carry in such lines the very texture of things, but their function is also to suggest and not merely express: how perfectly the phrase about the light being blown from heaven with the breezes conjures up the sense of glimmers falling upon the forest-depths by the soft swaying of the thick foliage hung above. Keats is a master too of objective fidelity touched with subjective significance:

A little noiseless noise among the leaves

Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

Or else we have the poignantly human leading on to the en-chantingly visionary, as in the great passage where the Nightingale's song becomes the music of an Immortal Bird binding together the perishing ages and the severed areas of existence:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

The same that oft-times hath

Charm'd magic casements opening on the foam

Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.

I do not know whether criticism has noted the subtle artistry of this

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passage which has striking felicities enough. The sad heart of Ruth admits of a path, while the faery lands forlorn are rendered difficult of access by perilous seas — Ruth is sick for her own home, while those magic casements are in dream-distances — she stands in tears that are the common lot of humanity, while they look out on waters that human labour can hardly cross — everywhere we have a lovely contrast and yet the intimate and touching human picture prepares the remote and exquisite snatch out of gram-marye, for Ruth is away from her home, a great gulf divides her from her heart's vision, and those tears of hers are salt and shining as the seas and the corn may be waving in the wind before her wistful gaze like the heave and fall of the foam-flecked surf and the bending swaying ears of the harvest are alien, a grievous strangeness secretly sister to the bewitching unknown that pierces the heart with the beauty caught through those windows that are the eyes of eternal reverie.

From the Nightingale's Song let us turn to an even deeper spell that Keats can cast with a merging of sight and sound, sound and silence. Recollect those lines on the carvings upon the sides of the Grecian Urn:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

We verge on the mystical in such visions that carry us into a world-effacing trance, as it were. And a remarkable mixture of the mystical and the morbid, a picture of divine distress we come across in a passage that Graham Hough has called "verse of a sere, burnt-out splendour that exceeds anything else in Keats":

Then saw I a wan face,

Not pin'd by human sorrows, but bright-blanch'd

By an immortal sickness which kills not,

It works a constant change, which happy death

Can put no end to; deathwards progressing

To no death was that visage; it had past

The lily and the snow...

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We may now sum up from Sri Aurobindo's view of Shelley and Keats what pure poetry amounts to. It is poetry in which the outward manner does not predominate. It is poetry which is not mere intellectuality decked out and metricised. It is poetry which is a-thrill with something inward and has concrete vision and marked rhythm. It is poetry lifted far beyond prose by a perfection of form, either with details prominent yet harmonised or with details hurried and washed into oneness. It is poetry where the substance is steeped in the depths of one's being and the form is touched by the sense of some nameless perfection. It is poetry in which this kind of substance and this kind of form are so fast a unity that any attempt to separate them changes the very life of the joint creation.

Mind you, though Shelley and Keats were both haunted by a mystic hunger, they are not pure poets because the mystic element is explicit in their best work. If mystic explicitness were the sine qua non, Shakespeare who has little of it would not be so supreme. But a mystic implicitness is indispensable. For, without it ordinary things and themes and emotions and ideas of the human situation could not have reached the acme of expressive form that Shakespeare shows again and again and again. This acme is impossible unless one lives aware of what I have called a nameless perfection whose presence is in the depths of one's being. Poets achieve pure poetry of various types by a kind of aesthetic spirituality which need not even believe openly in Soul or God. But the fact that spirituality, even if under an aesthetic aspect, is necessary is important and significant. And it is also important and significant that the two most purely poetic minds who have used the English language were openly lit up with a sense of the spiritual, however mentalised and not directly Yogic that sense might have been. Perhaps here we have a pointer that supreme work on a supreme scale is possible more to those who have such a sense not only implicit but explicit. Let me repeat that Shelley and Keats are not greater than Shakespeare, or even than Lucretius who was an avowed atheist and materialist. But they could have been greater in poetic expression if they had found the right milieu and consciousness and manner for the spiritual bent of their true selves and thus fulfilled the gift they had of extreme and all-pervading poetic utterance — the most abundant gift of pure poetry.

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