Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY -ONE

We are ready to take up the third term of our scheme — Logopoeia which comes after Melopoeia and Phanopoeia. Let me remind you of what it stands for. In Melopoeia the prominent feature is the word-music. In Phanopoeia it is the word-imagery. In Logopoeia it is the word-thought — intelligible discourse, play of idea-power, language as a vehicle for reflection. Or, if we go negatively, we may say that Logopoeia means in poetry the expression where neither word-music nor word-imagery is prominent: these features may be there, indeed they have to be there if poetry is to exist at all, but whatever else than they is prominent determines Logopoeia. Since emotion is an indispensable ingredient of poetry and emotion does not need word-music or word-imagery in order to be present we may define Logopoeia as poetic emotion fused with thought-speech more appreciably than with music-speech or image-speech, though never without these last two in some form or other.

It is rather a ticklish job to decide the degree of music-speech or image-speech that would allow poetry to be called thought-speech instead of something else. Take the phrase, perhaps the most famous that Wordsworth has written and one which actually mentions thought itself:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

This phrase relating to the face of Newton in the statue of him by Roubiliac at Cambridge — the statue bearing the inscription "New-ton qui genus humanum ingenio superavit" ("Newton who ex-ceeded the human race in genius") — is Phanopoeia of an extremely high order. The metaphor of "seas" is too open to let Phanopoeia become subdued. If only the word "voyaging" were there — a word which signifies in general English a travel over water — we should realise that seas were intended, but there would be no clear phanopoeic quality. If a less specific word like "travelling" were employed, the phanopoeic quality would be still less in view: a suggestion of concrete movement would be still unmistakable, but it would not call up any precise picture.

Such a suggestion we find in perhaps the greatest phrase Milton

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ever wrote, a phrase which too introduces the very word "thought":

...this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity.

The verb "wander" is absolutely vital here: take it away and the phrase will lose its sovereign character as poetry. Put "travel" and see how it reads:

Those thoughts that travel through eternity.

We have more alliteration, but the line moves less profoundly: vibrations are not set up in the deep layers of our receptive consciousness: they occur in a layer which is deep enough to be named, in Sri Aurobindo's terminology of "planes", Higher Mind, but the sense of space on widening space, expanse on expanse of mystery, continuity on endless continuity of conceptual explora-tion, is lost. "Wander" has a plunging rhythmic effect which in collocation with "thoughts" and "eternity" carries the language to the intense and the immense that are characteristic of what Sri Aurobindo, taking us past Higher Mind through Illumined Mind and Intuition, designates as the utterance of Overmind, the supreme Mantra. "Wander" has a central strength and weight in the letter d, a plumbing resonance in the n preceding and combining with it, a dynamic penetrative roll in the terminal r and what is perhaps the subtlest yet the most impressive thing is the initial w. The letter w has always an expansive touch. When we want to suggest spaciousness or massiveness, w proves extremely useful. Repeated, its quality becomes unescapable — as in Sri Aurobindo's line:

In the wide workshop of the wonderful world,

where spaciousness overwhelms us, aided by the continuity the three similar o's create. In Wordsworth's

...the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

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in the midst of several other technical points — the aspirated h, the reiterated y, the several l-sounds, especially when combined with other consonants, the long six-syllabled adjective "unintelligible" — the three w's create an extensive massiveness.

To return to our subject. The mantric quality is also supreme in the quotation about Newton's face and here too it is the rhythmic total which bears up the emotional idea and image to the divinely revelatory pitch. But the overall feature of the poetry is the metaphor "seas". In Milton's brief masterpiece the concrete suggestion of a passage through space and time and beyond space-time through an experienced eternity is not openly metaphorical and therefore we have Phanopoeia shaded off into Logopoeia: a concisely colossal creation of word-thought confronts us. To get this effect fixed in our mind, let us look at a phrase from Sri Aurobindo which too speaks of thought in a direct manner without being a creation of word-thought:

...the thoughts that skim the fathomless surge

Of Nature and wing back to hidden shores.

Here we have two immensities at play — on the one side Nature's fathomless surge, the infinite Inconscient with its varied evolutionary unfoldment, and on the other the touches, the visitations from the Superconscient in the form of winged thoughts whose home is not Nature's vast flux but some ample stability concealed beyond her — the hidden shores that are domains of spiritual stillness. The Aurobindonian phrase — again, I believe, a Mantric utterance — is even more clearly phanopoeic than the Words-worthian: we have not only the images of "surge" and "shores" but also the very vivid image-activity of "wing". Of course, merely the mention of concrete things is not determinative of Phanopoeia. Poetry has always to make us see and in order to make us see it must deal in concrete suggestions. But there are several ways of dealing in them. Two broad categories would be: explicit and implicit. Sri Aurobindo in the lines cited above is sufficiently outside the borders of the implicit: Milton in his phrase on the intellectual being is not.

Wordsworth who with his thought-seas is explicit enough in the element of sight grows implicit with if at the end of his best short poem, the celebrated Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from

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Recollections of Early Childhood. Perhaps the longest title ever given to a poem is this, a title so long that some poeple's minds can get quite mixed up and a schoolboy has himself become immortal by mentioning the poem not as Ode on Intimations of Immortality but as Ode on Intimate Immorality! Well, this Ode ends with a highly moral idea beautifully vivified and movingly deepened beyond either morality or immorality into an intimate perception of truths behind what Virgil has called "the tears of things" . Wordsworth writes:

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The idea here is very great, the expression is perfect, though the plane may be not quite Overmind so much as a mixture of Higher Mind and Intuition. These planes are not easy to distinguish: we shall one day talk about them and their typical utterances. At the moment we are concerned with drawing a line between Phanopoeia and Logopoeia. The idea Wordsworth has expressed here has strong concrete touches — the concrete "flower" is the focus of attention and "tears" is fairly vivid too, but neither simile nor metaphor disengages itself from the statement and the main "purport of the statement is to present not a picture but a thought about certain kinds of thoughts. I suppose you catch the meaning of the lines. Wordsworth is telling us that his perception has got so sensitively in touch with what lies behind phenomena and the vicissitudes of life and Nature that even the most insignificant-looking flower awakes in him a sense of an eternity, an immortality which stands free of all the pains and sorrows of this world of change: he reaches a level of thinking where an abiding peace envelops him and where the realm of tears, so to speak, does not extend. His is a profound philosophic poise that is conscious of mortality yet is conscious also of what can never pass away: the little flower that fades lets him as if through a tiny doorway into the Divine and Deathless, the Godlike and Griefless.

This is surely distinguishable Logopoeia. Still, it is not perhaps Logopoeic in a very positive form. To impress you with a very positive form I shall pick out two lines of Sri Aurobindo's in which this form is rendered all the more noticeable by being preceded by

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a very positive instance of Phanopoeia. Here are the lines:

Earth's winged chimeras are Truth's steeds in heaven,

The impossible God's sign of things to be.

Let me first explain the meaning. A chimera (pronounced kye-mere-a, accented in the second syllable) is a queer mythical creature with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail — and as if this combination were not enough, its mouth breathes fire. Milton has a line in which several mythological monsters run cheek by jowl:

Gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire.

Sri Aurobindo has made the chimeras even queerer than they usually are: he has given them wings — with, I think, a purpose. He uses the word "chimera" for something fantastic in idea, and what he means to say in his first line is:

He uses the word "chimera" for something fantastic in idea, and what he means to say in his first line is: "All strange apparently unmaterialisable dreams in earth's mind, all fanciful seemingly unattainable desires in earth's heart — all these are not a mere imaginative play of impossibilities: already are they realities in the depths of the unknown Divine, realities as natural as horses, and they are heavenly originals, truths of God, whose distorted representatives on earth are the chimerical notions of man, notions which have some quality of aspiration about them as if they were cries sent up to the Supreme, as if they were set winging like prayers to the Omnipotent. Further, the realities existing in heaven, the original truths corresponding to the chimeras, are part of a plan for the earth. Just as steeds are part of the plan actualised in the earth's past and present, those original truths are part of a plan for the earth's future." Now, with the full meaning of the line before us, look at the next. It expresses the same essential idea without any image-colour — almost abstractly, one may say, but with perfect pointedness and faultless rhythm — that is, in a thoroughly poetic way yet by suppression of all imagery, except perhaps for a slight indirect touch of it in "Sign." Here is Logopoeia — poetic word-thought — in concentrated clarity matching exactly the compact picturesqueness of the preceding verse's Phanopoeia — poetic word-image.

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This concentrated clarity — taking almost an epigrammatic form — is intuitive in essence, though it may be intuition taking a mental shape and not acting in its own original body. All Logopoeia is not intuitive in a direct or a mentalised manner — at least nor markedly so. It can be a mental statement with greater or less felicity, pungency, magnificence. There is the couplet which the Greek poet Simonides composed as epitaph for the Spartans who died at Thermopylae. A band of three hundred under Leonidas were ordered by the State to delay the march of the thousands sent by King Xerxes of Persia. At the narrow pass of Thermopylae they fought for several hours, thus giving precious time to the Athenians to reach up from far away. Every one of them perished. The epitaph by Simonides is a short address by the dead to their countrymen of Lacedaemon, which is another name for Sparta: F. L. Lucas has englished it very well —

Tell them at Lacedaemon, passerby,

That here obedient to their laws we lie.

Heroic unadorned pathos wrought into a masterpiece of understatement in thought-form is here. The Greeks had a genius for straightforward writing which yet spoke volumes and was extremely poetic. The Indian genius is more rich: Phanopoeia rather than Logopoeia is the Indian tendency in poetry. I am sure there would have been quite an opulence of imagery in place of the bare statement of Simonides if Kalidasa had felt a rhythmic relationship with Leonidas and written the epitaph. Of course, Vyasa is an exception among Indian poets. Sri Aurobindo has considered him a great master of bare strength. Among European poets the most successful in chiselled Logopoeia after the Greeks was the Italian Dante. The Italians are not particularly distinguished for control over their emotions. Just as the Frenchman talks with his hands and his shoulders, the Italian carries on his conversation with a lot of gesticulation. But Dante was a severe nature and his style has a clear-cut restrained force: he is one of the few who have been sovereignly logopoeic in poetry. The natural medium for Logopoeia is prose, and therefore poets should not attempt it unless, like Dante, they can command a great intensity of expression with an intuitive drive behind their thought-movement or else a deep emotion charging the reflective attitude. There is a line of Dante's which Eliot has transposed to his own verse, a line with a catch in

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the breath and a tug at the heart without bringing in any extraordinary words, not even any glimmer of an image. The poet looks at the crowd of the dead in the circles of the Underworld and softly exclaims:

I had not thought death had undone so many.

The simplicity of pathos here could hardly be bettered. But a lesser hand would have spoilt the feeling by either too emptily brief a speech or a speech attenuated by being drawn out.

Thus Rupert Brooke in a sonnet which as a whole is a success and which has a splendidly phanopoeic sestet comes quite near to failure in four lines terminating the octave. He also is talking about the dead — the soldiers who fell in the First World War:

These had seen movement, and heard music; known

Slumber and waking; loved, gone proudly friended;

Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;

Touched flowers and fur and cheeks. All this is ended.

The rhythm is good, the stresses and pauses are cleverly and effectively varied, but intensity is absent. Although concrete suggestions are present, yet they do not flame up or shine out into real Phanopoeia. Merely tender talk seems to be made in order to create reminiscences of things dear and now lost; the sheer pang is not communicated. The ideas and the phrases are almost hackneyed: they are narrowly kept to the poetic by some sort of artistic arrangement of syntax and rhythm. But even the rhythm appears to go wrong in one place — the concluding words: "All this is ended." That feminine rhyme has hardly the suggestion of death's ultimate inexorableness. Possibly the extra unstressed hanging syllable is meant to give the impression of a decline and a fall of the life-force. But such an impression, apart from being indecisive in itself, is scarcely appropriate in a poem about young men dead in World War I: the sense of sudden violent death is not conveyed. If the previous rhyming phrase could somehow be managed in another fashion — say, "gone proud of friends" — the last line would close better with a finality of four stresses of varying weight, with the last stress the strongest in the phrase: "All this now ends." Brooke's quatrain is less true pathos than a kind of delicate

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pathostication, the semi-artificial though not quite unskilful stimulation of sad thoughts. Logopoeia, to be successful, has to come from stirred profundities of the reflective mind, no matter how light its touch may be. Of course, Phanopoeia can be a failure too if it is not the inner becoming the outer: no amount of imagery will save the poet from being a versifier if he uses his images with a superficial hand. Even Keats whose superb capacity for the phano-poeic we have observed can come out with a picturesque ludi-crousness in an imaged expression:

A bunch of blooming plums

Ready to melt between an infant's gums.

But the slipperiness of the phanopoeic path is not as full of banana-skins as that of the logopoeic. It is possible even to write effective Phanopoeia with a banana as part of the vision! There is a line by somebody — perhaps Roy Campbell:

Buccaneer the world to bring home a banana.

This is a vigorous poetic substitute for the well-known Latin phrase: "Montes parturiunt et nascetur ridiculus mus" — "Mountains are in travail and a ridiculous mouse will be born." Yes, successful Logopoeia is difficult to achieve. But when it is achieved it can be as memorable poetry as anything phanopoeic. No line, however astonishing in image, has surpassed the Dantesque assertion which we have quoted more than once before:

E'n la sua voluntade e nostra pace —

whose literal translation is: "In His Will is our peace." Or take the following five lines from Sri Aurobindo:

Our being must move eternally through Time;

Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;

A secret Will compels us to endure.

Our life's repose is in the Infinite;

It cannot end, its end is Life supreme.

There is a controlled power in the passage, achieving a refined

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sublimity that states in marmoreal yet living poetic language the final truth about all existence in the cosmos. One phrase in it —

Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;

A secret Will compels us to endure —

reminds me of some lines from Sri Aurobindo's early blank-verse narrative Love and Death: after lamenting the frustrating transience of life for human beings who come into birth with "passionate and violent souls", Ruru views their entry into the Underworld and cries:

... Death helps us not. He leads

Alarmed, all shivering from his chill embrace,

The naked spirit here...

Very vivid and forceful Phanopoeia is in these lines. But the Logopoeia of the other lines is no less poetic in its own way, and the line following them —

Our life's repose is in the Infinite —

is one of the greatest — quite fit to rank beside the phrase we have culled from Dante. In fact, it is the articulation of an idea affined to the one in Dante. Both the verses speak of ultimate rest being found only in God: Dante refers to God in action, Sri Aurobindo to God in pure existence, but, as the next line makes it clear, this God-existence is in connection with a life ending not in a cessation of action but in a supreme living, a divine activity in the world as well as beyond. The repose is a consummation, not a quiescence, and in this consummation, according to Sri Aurobindo, there would be what in another peak-moment of spiritual Logopoeia he has described as

Force one with unimaginable rest.

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