Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-FIVE

Emphasis on the pictorial element seems to have marked many definitions of "pure poetry". This element can be overdone. And there are many modes of overdoing it. The Symbolist and the Imagist modes are rather specialised ones. A general mode is evident in George Moore's Introduction to an anthology compiled by himself of English verse. Moore defines "pure poetry" as "born of admiration of the only permanent world, the world of things": it is poetry containing no hint of subjectivity, poetry "unsicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", as the greatest of the phanopoeists, Shakespeare, would have put it if he had had something to do not only with Othello, the Moor of Venice, but also with George, the Moore of London.

Typical instances would be Coleridge's lines on the "one red leaf" that could most easily be wind-stirred and that still hung motionless:

There is not wind enough to twirl

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can

Hanging so light and hanging so high

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky —

or, in a more subtle mode, Keats's passage with its breathlessness deepened by a triple negative:

No stir of air was there,

Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass,

But where the dead leaf fell there did it rest.

Perhaps the whole of Keats's Ode to Autumn would be acceptable. But the two other Odes, the one to a Nightingale and that on a Grecian Urn, would be considered somewhat mixed stuff. I have not seen Moore's anthology, but strictly from his view point lines like the following from the Nightingale Ode would not be poetically pure:

Darkling I listen; and for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

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Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —

To thy high requiem become a sod.

And, of Course, the close of the Grecian Urn Ode would be sacrilege against the pure-poetry ideal a la Moore.

A less arbitrary definition than his, so far as the content or substance is conerned, is A. E. Housman's. Housman does not insist that we should adopt one theme or another, nor does he put a ban on subjectivity. Rather, he inclines to believe that subjectivity is the essential content of poetry; but subjectivity does not mean for him any idea. There he is one with Moore and all the rest whose conception of pure poetry we have glanced at. Housman, however, does not condemn ideas as vitiators of the poetic essence. He even goes to the extent of saying that poetry cannot be great without ideas and that poetry with great ideas will always be cherished most by mankind. But he points out that such poetry is not poetry because of these ideas. On the contrary he holds that there are no particularly poetic ideas: every idea can meet with justice in prose. What, in Housman's view, poetry does is to associate its ideas with emotion. Says Housman: "To transfuse emotion — not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer — is the peculiar function of poetry." Subjectivity in the form of emotion is the very stuff of poetry. But this emotional subjectivity has to be transfused by the words: so words have an important role. It is how they do their job that makes poetry or no poetry. "Poetry," Housman tells us, "is not the thing said but a way of saying it." The way, of course, has to be artistic — the expression must be precise and rhythmic, else no vibration would be set up in the reader nor would there be correspondence between what the reader feels and what the writer felt. But, given the precision and the rhythm, it is the emotion that turns the language poetic. Poetry is the emotive way of saying a thing. At this point Housman asks whether this way can be studied by itself, whether there is a poetry

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which transfuses emotion without introducing any idea-content, whether we can have poetry independent of meaning and consequently unmingled and pure.

His answer is Yes. And the very first example he offers is that song from Shakespeare:

Take, O take, those lips away

That so sweetly were forsworn,

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again,

bring again,

Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,

seal'd in vain.

Housman comments: "This is nonsense; but it is ravishing poetry." I suppose by nonsense he intends a use of words whose power over us cannot be attributed to our recognising in them a communication of something directly applicable to life or coherently scrutinisable in thought. Reading the lyric, we may question: "How can eyes mislead the mom? How can kisses be brought again?" A fantasy of feeling is all that is there. But the mood is not quite alien to common human affairs and a general notion of the direction in which the poet's fantasy moves is not impossible. A betrayed lover is desiring to be utterly rid of the betrayer but wants at the same time that he should. become heart-whole again and no part of him should remain with the loved one who has proved false. The tragedy is that what has been handed over to the betrayer is irrecoverably· given and the only means of having it back is to have back the false lover. An acute emotional dilemma is caught in a paradoxical fancy whose terms appear to be self contradictory. Thus, one's kisses can be taken back only if the lips to which they were originally given were once more in touch with one's own lips. But such a situation would hardly amount to getting rid of the betrayer. Further, if the betrayer's eyes have a brightness that can even outdazzle day and lead it astray like one blinded, how should the cheated person hope for deliverance? The extreme loveliness of the cheat makes the victim's cry an impossible demand. It is this impossibility that is driven home by the puzzling fancy about the eyes. Somewhat akin to this fancy is the

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expression in Romeo and Juliet where Romeo, watching Juliet at the night-dance in the hall of the Capulet family, exclaims:

O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

The lyric we have quoted is indeed a kind of irrational fantasy, yet it is not too far from human experience: its nonsense shadows forth a general truth. Even more apt to Housman's thesis are some poems of Blake. Blake is to Housman the purest of poets because repeatedly he produces poems which, without some esoteric key, are no more than exquisite or sublime mysteries. A piece which also is spoken as if by a distressed lover is quoted from Blake by Housman:

My Spectre around me night and day

Like a wild beast guards my way;

My Emanation far within

Weeps incessantly for my sin.

A fathomless and boundless deep,

There we wander, there we weep;

On the hungry craving wind

My Spectre follows thee behind.

He scents thy footsteps in the snow

Wheresoever thou dost go:

Through the wintry hail and rain

When wilt thou return again?

Dost thou not in pride and scorn

Fill with tempests all my morn,

And with jealousies and fears

Fill my pleasant nights with tears?

Seven of my sweet loves thy knife

Has bereaved of their life.

Their marble tombs I built with tears

And with cold and shuddering fears.

Seven more loves weep night and day

Round the tombs where my loves lay,

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And seven more loves attend each night

Around my couch with torches bright.

And seven more loves in my bed

Crown with wine my mournful head,

Pitying and forgiving all

Thy transgressions great and small.

When wilt thou return and view

My loves and them to life renew?

When wilt thou return and live?

When wilt thou pity as I forgive?

Housman's observation on this lyric is: "I am not equal to framing definite ideas which would match that magnificent versification and correspond to the strong tremor of unreasonable excitement which those words set up in some region deeper than the mind." Sri Aurobindo agrees here that no formulable meaning could be offered by way of justice to the intention running through these stanzas. Of course no formulable meaning is ever totally adequate to any poetry; but some satisfying a peu pres is mostly possible. Here the expression comes, without the outer mind's touch on it, from an occult dimension of our being. Housman speaks of "unreasonable excitement" and would dub the poem meaningless. Sri Aurobindo would not employ the exaggerating term "non-sense": he would say that there is perfect sense but from a depth of our being where the thinking mind loses its grip. By an inner soul-perception, an intuitive consciousness, the passage is to be apprehended. To the outer consciousness it must appear to be what Housman calls it: "poetry with so little meaning that nothing except poetic emotion is perceived and matters." In relation to the outer consciousness he is also right when he remarks: "The verses probably possessed for Blake a meaning, and his students think that they have found it; but the meaning is a poor foolish disappointing thing in comparison with the verses themselves."

Poetry shot through and through with mystery by a movement of intense rhythmical feeling which weaves a word-pattern whose drift eludes the thinker in us: this is Housman's conception of "pure poetry". But he does not say that poets should aim at nothing except such a word-pattern. What he emphasises is that

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any poetic word-pattern is poetry by an element that, however mixed with thought, is really independent of it and can be best considered a stir of emotion. To touch us and move us is the function of poetry.

From this position a step is taken by some critics to a theory of "pure poetry" that cares only for word-texture — a fine music of language making suggestions that do not need to convey anything even emotionally important, leave aside anything intellectually significant. Thus they would relish the line from Racine which used to enchant Marcel Proust:

La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae.

(The daughter of Minos and Pasiphae,

(I think they would equally savour a line I might make about the sister of a Parsi student of mine:

The daughter of Minoo and Shirinbai'.)

Similarly they would turn on their tongues the phrases of Milton about all who

Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban,

Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebisond...

There is no intellectual content here, nor any emotional content to speak of. There is only a beauty of word-sound with just a touch upon our understanding. What does our understanding discover? As Middleton Murry tells us, we get a sense of the exotic, the out-of-the-way, the rich and rare — an exoticism soft and languorous in the Racine-line, martial and clangorous in the Milton-verses. A distinguishable sensation or perception is almost all we have. But if we are after such an effect in "pure poetry" we should go beyond even the little touch our understanding receives from the phrases we have quoted. To say "The daughter of Minos and Pasiphae" is surely to declare at least a fact with some directness, though we can make no judgment from it, much less draw any precept. Milton's joustings too convey a fact, however minimally and however drowned in the surge of golden-gonged geography. A more quintessential example of sheer sound would be Rossetti's fivefold symphony of names:

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Cecily, Gertrude , Magdalen,

Margaret, and Rosalys —

or Sri Aurobindo's recital of a yet longer liquidity of nomenclature:

Menaca, Misracayshie, Mullica,

Rambha, Nelabha, Shela, Nolinie,

Lolita, Lavonya and Tillottama...

Of course, Rossetti is speaking of the "five handmaidens" of "Lady Mary" in the heavenly groves and Sri Aurobindo is listing the apsara-companions of the peerless Urvasie, dancer in the courts of Indra. But without their contexts, the lines only suggest lovely things. An Indian ignorant of European names and with no knowledge of Christian religious legend will hardly catch the hint that Rossetti is referring to lovely women. A European similarly placed with regard to matters Indian will equally be at a loss in front of Sri Aurobindo. Lovelinesses of some sort will be all that can come home to the mind from the word-texture and the succession of separate words. But perhaps even here some slight significant clue is supplied: each is shown to be like its associates, all of them representing similar things: it is indirectly imparted that a row of things sharing a quality of beauty is drawn up. "Pure poetry" on the principle implicit in these citations should really have even this oblique information wiped off. And that is possible if wonderful-sounding gibberish is composed. But I am afraid no genuine poet ever deliberately went in for gibberish. It is only the school in France of what is called Dadaism that made gibberish its ultimate aim. A number of writers felt that they must have absolute liberty of expression and should not be asked to produce in the reader anything else than a bewildered agitation of word-impression. When they looked about for a name for themselves, one of them had the brilliant idea: "Let's open the Dictionary at random." The French Dictionary was opened and the first word that jumped to the eye was dada. This is a child's word and means "horse, cock-horse". Its English equivalent would be "gee-gee". Colloquially it means "hobby, hobby-horse". You have the phrases: "aller a dada" ("to ride a cock-horse"), "etre sur son dada" ("to indulge in one's hobby"). So l'ecole dada or dadaisme is a

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negative rebellion of childish whimsicality. One of its masterpieces is by the famous Tristan Tzara:

In your inside there are smoking lamps

the swamp of blue honey

cat crouched in the gold of a flemish inn

boom boom

lots of sand yellow bicyclist

chateaument des papes

manhattan there are tubs of excrement before you.

mbase mbaze bazebaze mleganga garoo.

Very expressive stuff, this, no doubt, but expressive only of chaos. And chaos can hardly be the source of art. Besides, even the chaotic expression is far from pleasing to the ear. Further, the gibberish is not complete: some of the individual units carry some meaning within the ensemble which is perfect chaos. More or less the same may be said of such work as Gertrude Stein's or Hugo Blumner's. But truly to fulfil the principle of the word-music school we should have verbal snatches falling musically combined upon the ear in a foreign tongue. It is then that we shall have total gibberish making pure poetry in its utmost essence.

To those who have no familiarity with Latin, the acme of pure poetry depending solely on artistically arranged word-texture would be lines like the one from Virgil which Arnold Bennett considered the most marvellously rhythmed in all poetic literature:

infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem...

But can anyone rest satisfied with such music without knowing that it conveys:

Words cannot utter, O queen, the grief you bid me

re-waken...

If one at all does remain content without the meaning, one would still automatically weave some meaning from the sounds by their associations with those already meaningful to one. As many Latin words have originated English ones, things like "renovare" and "dolorem" are likely to form a train of ideas in our minds. We may

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have also heard of "Victoria regina", Queen Victoria, and then we may think of some Queen and the renovation of dolour or sorrow. Perhaps German would provide more opaque lines of enchanting rhythm — say, Goethe's

Verweile doch, du bist so schon,

or else his

Das Ewig weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.

Even here the "doch" of the first quotation may suggest the abbreviation of "doctor": "doc." But how far from the truth we shall be! The line means:

Linger a while, thou art so fair.

I doubt if any doctor could deserve such an appeal. A lady-doctor once sent a marriage-proposal to a friend of mine who is now in the Ashram. He simply shuddered because he felt she would try all sorts of medical and surgical experiments on him. I am sure he would fancy the first two words - "Verweile doch" - to be ·an echo of "Fair wily doc" or, still more satisfyingly, "Farewell, doc." As for the other quotation, we may imagine the opening words " Das Ewig" - to stand for C. R. Das in a barrister's wig and we shall be surprised to learn that the lines -signify:

The Eternal Feminine

Is leading us onward.

Well, no matter how mistakenly, how hazily, some connotation is bound to attach to words: words cannot be sheer sound. Nor can they be supposed to have intrinsic meanings of their own by the differences they exhibit in their textures. No doubt, vocables like the old Sanskrit vrka which connoted "tearer" and hence "wolf" answered to a sensation of tearing and the English word "crick" also answers to the sensation of a twist or a tear, but no invariable suggestion can be associated with such sounds. The English "brick" which is very close to the Sanskrit "vrka" has quite a

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different suggestion, if at all there is any answer in the sound to the sense. A skilful writer would match sound to sense in a variety of ways and weave the meaning-units of his verse impressively together by phonetic effects — as does Shakespeare in the lines we have often quoted —

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

To tell my story.

After analysing the phonetic effects, M. L. Rosenthal and A. J. M. Smith remark in their Exploring Poetry (p. 36): "Sounds do not in themselves convey a meaning. Liquid sounds are lighter and more graceful than gutturals, and there are many other differences among sound-effects, but this does not mean that every l ox r carries a definite idea or feeling with it, or every k a harsher idea or feeling. However, in a passage with an unusual number of l's and k's we may find an underlying pattern of pure sound effects balanced against one another — an actual music of sounds. If we want to know the connection between this pure sound-pattern and the feeling and thought of the poem, we must note where the most important words fall. In a good poem, there will be a definite relationship between the points of emphasized thought and emotion and the pattern of sound. Unless we are dealing with nonsense rhymes or pure sound-effects, it is the thought and the emotion that give the sounds their meaning. The words in the Hamlet passage which we must emphasize because of their meaning are also the words in which the most important sound-effects are found. The h's, l's, and so on become associated with these words and take their emotional effect from their meaning. Thus, since 'hold' and 'heart' are strongly stressed, the vowels and consonants in them, when repeated in later words, recall them again: Without these important words, the alliteration alone — the musical effect gained by the repetition of sounds, particularly in stressed syllables — could not ordinarily stir us deeply."

Moreover, if words are taken as if they were nothing save a kind of music, how very poor their musical quality will prove side by side with actual music as heard in Bach or Mozart! As music, they can have no special raison d'etre. Valery who spoke of constructing

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musical patterns of words did not subscribe to the word-music school. Expressive rhythm is one thing — enchanting rhythm without significance is quite another story. Like Mallarme, Valery meant by poetic music not only a play of sound but a play of elusive meaning as in musical compositions. As to the stress on sheer sound in poetry, he was quick to observe: "The richest and most resonant harmonies of Hugo fall as music far short of Berlioz or Wagner."

This inferiority to real music is, of course, no argument against the value of harmonious utterance in the poetic art, provided there is no neglect of substance or matter. Verlaine, as we once said, is a great master of sound-effects and in a subtler fashion than the grandly orchestral Hugo. Also his sound-effects accompany a lyrical spontaneity of word-flow which is almost without a parallel in French poetry and which at times as good as rivals that in English. Apropos of him we could erect a much sounder theory of "pure poetry" on the basis of verse-music. Alan M. Boase writes: "It may or may not be vain to seek to distil 'pure poetry' by a process of patient poetical alchemy — such was Mallarme's method. But 'pure poetry' evokes for most of us some element of spontaneous song. It is this singing quality — perhaps the rarest of all in French poetry — which Verlaine possessed in a supreme degree." Of course, Boase himself points out that the impression Verlaine created of singing with "the simplicity of the bird on the tree" had behind it a sufficient mastery of verbal art, even a conscious virtuosity, but his central power was intuitive spontaneity, and craftsmanship helped it only to carry off complex undertakings with the same smiling certainty as his simple outbursts: nowhere does it replace the birdlike elan, all that it does is to make the bird in him accomplish what the mere bird would not.

Verlainian pure poetry is given a manifesto by the poet himself in the piece entitled Art Poetique. This manifesto lays down the fundamental principle in its opening line:

De la musique avant toute chose...

which may be translated a little freely,

Music above all, music first...

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This initial maxim is elaborated through a series of primarily technical precepts for an art of suggestion. Boase takes several of the subsequent terms and well sums up Verlaine's drift: "L'Im-pair, the source of subtle rhythmical effect; la Meprise, the choice of words in a derived or 'ambiguous' sense; I'lmprecis joint au Precis, the art of half-tones; the Nuance which achieves a unity of key or mood — these are all aspects of such an art. An over-intellectual and an over-facile poetry are equally, in his eyes, its enemies: on the one hand, wit, satire, the conceit, the midnight lamp; on the other, eloquence and empty rhyme." The first set of terms Verlaine employs here are: la Pointe assasine, the murderer Point or intellectual acuteness — l'Esprit cruel, the cruel cleverness or intellectual ironical artifice — le Rire impur, the low laugh or intellecutal levity going against the high seriousness of the poet's mission. The second set of terms are l'Eloquence, resonant rhetoric which, says Verlaine, has to be twisted by the neck; le Rime assagie, vacuous jingle, the sound-swirl of a run-away fancy in love with words.

Everything so far in the poem is concerned with the positives and negatives of the poetic method, the music is of the poetic manner. But towards the end of the piece Verlaine returns to his opening phrase and then he moves to quite a different plane:

De la musique encore et toujours!

Que ton vers soit la chose envolee

Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une ame en allee

Vers d'autres cieux a d'autres amours...

We may render the lines with some freedom:

Music again and music ever!

O make your verse the upsurging thing

Felt by the soul when, wide of wing,

It spans new skies to a new love's quiver...

Music now is a movement of feeling, an intense movement upward, part of the soul's aspiration: a mystical emotion that cannot be held back is revealed as the true power behind the technical music that has been set forth up to now: the aspiration of the heart is made the basic inspiration of the art. The next stanza which is

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the final one of the poem further accentuates the idea and puts it in opposition to what poetry is not. This stanza reads:

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure

Eparse au vent crispe du matin

Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym...

Et tout le reste est litterature.

Arthur Symons has a sensitive version of the lines, except for the second. There the epithet "crispe" is too prominent and unusual to be omitted. If the French sense were kept, it would mean "shrivelled" or "irritated". But that would be absurd. Evidently Verlaine who was fond of English has imported the English sense of "bracing", and in doing so he has committed the "M6prise" advised by himself. Symons's version of the stanza is:

Let your verse be the luck of the lure

Afloat on the winds that at morning hint

Of the odours of thyme and the savour of mint...

And all the rest is literature.

(I would render the second line:

Afloat on the crisp dawn-airs that hint...)

In this stanza poetry and literature stand as contradictory terms for Verlaine just as poetry and reportage do for Mallarm6. And, since everything except the music defined here is classed as literature, Verlaine seems to put under that category even the musical method of suggestion which the poem advises at the beginning — but the real drift is only that even this method would be cancelled out if there were not the music of the ethereal adventure the two closing stanzas hold as their message. An additional implication is perhaps that this inner music can at times run against the very techinque which is intended to support it: it is not restricted to set technical rules, it cannot be pinned down to any formula. But commonly the technique touched upon through most of the poem is the right one and Verlaine must be taken as merely negating self-sufficiency and unconditionality for it, not denying its extreme usefulness as a delicate mould in which the ethereal adventure can embody its floating soul. Haunting rhythm spontaneously subtle

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by being born of a mystical longing which achieves suggestive vision in an art-form delicately shaded: there you have the Ver-lainian pure poetry.

Already in these two stanzas we have an instance of this vaguely meaningful rhythm. But we may give a short piece of Verlaine's in its entirety. It is called La lune blanche:

La lune blanche

Luit dans les bois;

De chaque branche

Part une voix

Sous la ramee...

O bien aimee!

L'etang reflete,

Profond miroir,

La silhouette

Du saule noir

Ou le vent pleure...

Revons, c'est l'heure.

Un vaste et tendre

Apaisement

Semble descendre

Du firmament

Que l'astre irise...

C'est l'heure exquise.

A literal translation, line by line, has been made by one of my students, Bibhash:

The pale moon

Shines in the woods;

From every branch

A voice rises

Beneath the foliage... O beloved one!

The pool reflects,

Mirror profound,

The silhouette

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Of the dismal willow

Where weeps the wind...

'Tis the hour, let's dream.

A vast and tender

Tranquillity

Seems to descend

From the heavens

On which the star

Sheds iridescent lustre...

'Tis the exquisite hour.

Your professor has attempted — perhaps rather rashly — a free poetic equivalent of Verlaine's elusive magic:

The white of the moon

Glints in the wood;

Vaguely a tune

Wafts from each bole

That leaves overbrood...

O love of my soul!

The pool has set

A mirror deep

For the silhouette

Of willows that lour

Where the winds weep...

'Tis the dream-hour.

A tender and vast

Quiet has come,

Downward cast

From the star-lit

Opaline dome...

Hour exquisite!

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