Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-SIX

The Verlainian "pure poetry" about which we have talked should satisfy the definition offered by the Abbe Bremond. Have you heard of the Abbe Bremond? It seems very few in India know that he existed. The only Abbes known here are the Abbe Faria whom Dumas made unforgettable by his Count of Monte Cristo and the contemporary Abbe Breuil who has made his name as an anthropologist. Bremond is not easy to come by in even our libraries and bookshops. I remember inquiring about him at a bookseller's in Bombay. The chap had a fondness for both French literature and Persian — possibly because the Persian language is considered the French of Asia. I asked him, "Have you heard of the Abbe Bremond?" he at once replied, "Oh, I haven't heard of such a river being in Persia. None of the poets have sung of it — as, for instance, they have sung of Rooknabad. You must be familiar with your Hafiz." And he began chanting:

Kinar e ab e Rooknabad, gulgushte Musullara.

I was a little puzzled, then I realised that ab in Persian means "water" and "Abbe Bremond" sounded similar to "Ab e Rook-ndbdd" — "the waters of Rooknabad" figuring in that line which signifies, if I am not mistaken,

The banks of the river Rooknabad and the rose-bowers of Musulla.

Years later, I discovered that even residents in French India were not familiar with his name. I looked up an old Indian Christian in Pondicherry whom I had known to be a book-lover. When I mentioned the Abbe Bremond to him he simply stood and gaped. I felt most self-conscious and began wondering whether I had committed some mistake in pronunciation. I remembered an incident mentioned by Bernard Shaw in the preface to his Back to Methuselah. Shaw was a small boy at the time it occurred. He was with his nurse who was buying something at a local bookstall. A fat elderly man entered, advanced to the counter and said pompously, "Have you the works of the celebrated Buffoon?" Shaw comments in his preface that his own works were at that time unwritten, or it

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is possible that the shop assistant might have misunderstood him so far as to produce a copy of his plays. What, of course, the solemn and weighty gentleman had wanted was the books not of any humorist but of the famous French scientific writer Buffon. When my friend stood staring I thought I had made some sort of Buffoon out of Bremond. But my fears were set at rest when the old fellow put a hand to his ear, bent that organ a little towards me and squeaked with irritation: "Vraiment? Mais quoi vraiment?" I knew he had turned half-deaf since I had last met him. But his conversion of Bremond into "Vraiment" and his firing at me that adverb in question-form were not quite uninspired. For, many a Frenchman must have disbelieved his ears and exploded into that one-word query — "truly?" — when first the Abbe put forward his surprising propositions on poetry.

I have not been able to get at the original of Bremond's thesis. But I remember its central idea. Long ago I gathered it from an essay by Middleton Murry on the Abbe's two little books: La Poesie pure and Poesie et Priere. With Ravindra Khanna's help I traced this essay in our library, but I feel that, excellent in his own way though Murry is, there are shades in Bremond which he strikes me as overlooking. So I shall present Bremond to you — briefly, of course, since I am cut off from the original sources — with a mixture of Murry and my own sense of the Frenchman's drift.

By the by, I may tell you that in France he has a title to fame which is more special in one sense than even the Abbe Breuil's. Whatever Breuil may be, Bremond is one of those whom the French people call "Immortals". In France an Immortal is he who is elected a member of the French Academy, that august institution which lays down the law on language and literature. There are only forty Academicians at any time and one cannot be an Academician, no matter how deserving, unless somebody who is already an Immortal obliges one by dying Well, Fate was kind to Bremond before he himself took his conge. But the speech with which he made his debut in the Academy was considered rather inconsiderate to the older members. He propounded a mystical theory of poetry that quite upset their rationalistic livers, and he paralysed their none-too-active brains by bringing to the aid of his mystical heresies a genuine knowledge of English poets and English art-critics. I don't know how many of the octogenarian Im-

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mortals got dangerously ill, but, as far as I remember, several French writers got a chance soon after Bremond's debut to enter the Academy.

Bremond discerns in Poetry "Magic recueillante... qui nous invite a une quietude, ou nous n'avons plus qu'a nous laisser faire, mais activement, par un plus grand et meilleur que nous. La prose, une phosphorescence vive et voltigeante, qui nous attire loin de nous-memes. La poesie, un rappel de l'interieur..." ("In-drawing magic... which calls us to a quietude, where we have nothing more to do than be carried, but actively, by one greater and better than we are. Prose, a lively and leaping phosphorescence which pulls us away from ourselves. Poetry, a reminder of the inward...") Bre-mond quotes the phrase of Keats about poems yet to come: "There is an awful warmth about my heart, like a load of immortality." Then he comments: "Ce poids, ou veut-il nous preci-piter, sinon vers ces augustes retraites ou nous attend, ou nous appelle une presence plus qu'humaine? S'il en faut croire Walter Pater, 'tous les arts aspirent a rejoindere la musique'. Non, ils aspirent tous, mais chacun par les magiques intermediaires qui lui sont propres, — les mots, les notes, les couleurs, les lignes, — ils aspirent tous a rejoindre la priere." ("This load, where would it plunge us if not towards those august recesses where awaits us, where beckons us, a presence more than human? If one is to believe Walter Pater, 'all art aspires to the condition of music'. No, all the arts aspire, but each by the magic medium proper to it — words, notes, colours, lines — they all aspire to the condition of prayer.")

Bremond regards the poet as one in whom something that is bent towards mysticism has at the crucial moment taken the wrong turning. Instead of surrendering to the silent spiritual contemplation which is the supreme form of prayer, the poet's soul is lured by the demon of expression to attempt utterance of what can never be uttered. The poet in a man is a mystic manque, a spiritual seeker who on the very threshold of the Holy of Holies goes astray because he bursts into speech: poetry, being a way of speech, blocks the path to the Ineffable. But the poet's communication still seeks always to be mystical. Whether he intellectually admits it or no, all poetry tends to convey a mystical state of being. "Pure poetry" is the rhythmic language which allows or enforces this communication. A mystic manque, the poet as poet need be

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neither moral nor pious and he may not even strive to express anything directly spiritual; but the more perfect the poetry in its own right the nearer it comes by its own inevitable nature to a spell which produces a sense of prayer in the reader.

And how does it grow "prayerful", how does it approach the mystic's silent ecstasy? Bremond says that it cannot do so by its thought-content. The highest spiritual contemplation is a suspension of thought. So the rational or reflective or logopoeic part of poetry is not the true spellbinder, the pure poetic essence. Bremond tells us that Keats originally started his Endymion with the line:

A thing of beauty is a constant joy —

but later changed it to:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

I shall postpone at the moment my own opinion on the nature of the change. According to Bremond, the thought-content in both the versions is hardly distinguishable, but through the second "the current passes" while through the first there is no transmission. What has happened? Bremond opines that the mystical state which, known or unknown to Keats, was hiding behind Keats's poetic movement has communicated its prayerfulness by means of the rhythmic word-pattern constituting the music of poetry. Thus, though poetry does not aspire primarily to the condition of music but to the condition of prayer, it achieves its prayerfulness through a condition of verbal music. Of course, since, for Bremond, silence no less than thought-absence is the stuff of the authentic mystical rapture, the mysticism accomplished is indirect, yet it is mysticism all the same because its means is the inspired rhythmic quality of the verse acting independently of the thought-content. So, poetry may be defined a la Bremond as mystical music that does not depend for its absolute effect on the presence of any idea, the presence of even any recognisable mystical idea. What idea worth mentioning, at least what markable mystical idea, is in that line of Racine which we have already cited as a favourite of Proust's and which is also dear to Bremond:

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La fille de Minos et de Pasiphae

And yet, according to Bremond, it casts a spell by its rhythm and turns us mysteriously inward to the soul. If — prosody permitting — we changed the position of the words and wrote:

La fille de Pasiphae et de Minos,

we would have an ugly coughing phrase because of two separately sounded e's being jammed together — the one ending the fourth foot, the other starting the fifth. There would also be a lack of finality at the line's close because of the four-syllabled name coming before the two-syllabled. Rhythmical reasons would stop the "current" from passing although not only the idea but the words as well remained identical.

Bremond would not go to the extreme of saying that "pure poetry" is devoid of even the perceptional content found in the Racine phrase — the mental observation of a certain legendary child-parent relation. What he does urge is that the idea-factor can be reduced almost to the vanishing point without the poetry suffering in the least and that this is possible because poetry principally conveys an indirect mystical experience and conveys it essentially through verbal music.

Bremond seems in general the nearest to the principles which Edgar Allan Poe enunciated in 1850 and which led Baudelaire seven years later in his Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe to use for the first time in literary history the words "pure poetry". Poe's principles may be set forth under five heads:

1)Poetry is an elevating excitement of the soul — quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the heart, or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the reason.

2)Indefiniteness is an essential element of the true poetic expression, a suggestive indefiniteness answering by means of words to the mysteriousness of the soul's excitement.

3)The words of poetry, on the one hand, bring perceptible images to render vivid the mysterious and, on the other, they approximate to a musical effect not in the sense of cadence or lilt but in the sense of sounds that without intelligible words convey a meaning.

4)Both the imagery and the music must create a whole that is ordered despite being vague.

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5) The degree of soul-excitement which would entitle a poem to be so called at all cannot be sustained throughout a composition of any length — a long poem being merely a number of short ones linked up by non-poetic matter camouflaged as poetry.

We may note that Poe, although emphasising mystery, does not extol crypticism: he does not make it a sine qua non that poetry should be like Mallarme's or even like Valery's. Also, he does not set expression loose from meaning or from achievement of a significant pattern: all that he wants the music of words to do is rhythmically to articulate vague soul-sensations to the understanding. Further, when he asks for perceptible images he does not exclude either connective transitions among them or the holding of them together in a picture whose wholeness can be seized: what he desires is that the poem should be short enough for the brief intensities possible to us of the soul, and that consequently it should be exclusive of non-poetic transitions and capable of a kind of poetic logic welding the parts subtly together by imaginative or rhythmic associations. There is a kind of rapture merged with sobriety in the poetry that Poe idealises and this is due to his moving away from intellectual discourse not to sheer emotion, much less to subconscious irrationality, but to the soul — something other than the truth-arguing reason or the feeling-intoxicated heart but not devoid of its own special luminosity or its own special excitement. The soul is other than the reason yet not blind or chaotic, other than emotions yet not cold or regimented. It is "elevating" and therefore a higher or deeper power than either the intellect or the heart, a power which does not suffer by being "independent" of them but escapes their limitations while possessing the essence of their virtues, their utilities, in a form beyond them and possessed of what they lack.

The only criticism we may offer of Poe's principles is that they make indefiniteness the general attribute of a whole poem in all its parts. Is there any such need in poetry? No doubt, the soul is the real poet, but is mysteriousness its only property? The mysterious-ness denotes the soul's transcendence of our ordinary faculties: these faculties cannot cope with the soul's experience. But to believe that the soul cannot communicate anything clearly to us is a gratuitous assumption and contradicts the soul's possession of the essence of all our powers. What is required is simply that the core of every poem must have the soul's mystery in it — the quality

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by which a poem exceeds whatever the understanding intellect can limit by its formulations. This need not exclude many things possible for the intellect to understand. Poetry wholly pervaded by the quality of indefiniteness is just one kind of soul-expression.

Poe himself, in some of his best work, did not adhere to his own principles in the narrow sense — indeed no poet ever does. Louis Untermeyer speaks of his having written "a few of the purest lyrics in the language", and continues: "I use 'pure' in Poe's limited sense; poetry, as opposed to science, being to him the communication of 'perceptible images with indefinite sensations to which music is an essential'. The deservedly famous and magical lyric 'To Helen', written in his early teens, is a proof." Here are the three stanzas making up the piece:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nicean barks of yore

That gently o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary way-worn wanderer bore

To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand,

Ah! Psyche, from the regions which

Are holy land!

The poem is particularly interesting by being "eclectic" — that is, by combining qualities which often fall apart. In the first stanza the theme — "Helen, thy beauty" — comes redolent of the legendary Helen of Troy over whom a nine-year war was fought as we learn from Homer. It comes also with an echo of Marlowe's great lines on that Helen:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burned the topless towers of Ilium?

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The "thousand ships" join up with the "Nicean barks" here. But the barks of Nicaea, unlike those ships, are moving towards the "native shore", not towards a foreign land: happy rest is their destination after long labour. And the barks by their Trojan-War association recall to us the warrior who took the longest to return: not only the labour of war at Ilium but also the labour of an ill-starred voyage over unknown waters lay behind him. This was Odysseus who after the fall of Ilium was carried off his course and had to plough the seas for eleven years before reaching his native Ithaca. An Odyssean travail of the poet's being is what Poe's Helen puts an end to by her beauty. Poe's Helen is evidently not Helen of Troy, who was no cause of ultimate rest to Odysseus, yet the new Helen carries an aura of her, as it were, and becomes an ideal woman in whom legends of perfect loveliness are alive and by whom the trouble and the fatigue felt by man from the beginnings of history are relieved. Her ideal-real womanhood is conjured up in this stanza as an exquisite presence — the noun "beauty" of the opening line, the adverb "gently" of the second and the adjective "perfumed" of the third are the key-note to chords resolving the pressure of the phrase "weary way-worn wanderer".

In the second stanza another key-note is given to the theme. The remembrance of Helen, of the Greek warriors who besieged Troy for her sake, and of Odysseus who was one of them — this remembrance becomes the gateway to a sense of the temper, both in life and art, of the ancient world. The Woman addressed is seen as the embodiment of that temper which was behind the culture of not only Greece but also Rome. The poet is felt to be a stormy nature who, after inner dangers and difficulties, has now arrived — through the vision of her shapely mass of curling hair, her finely chiselled nobility of face and feature, her well-built yet supple and fluent body — at a calm assured elevated condition of mind as if at some safe and splendid port after a chequered voyage. The second stanza associates with the exquisite presence evoked in the first an air of serene majesty — the key-note here to chords resolving the pressure of the motif "desperate seas" is in the adjective "classic" in the second line and the nouns "glory" and "grandeur" in the fourth and fifth respectively.

In the last stanza the Helen-suggestion brings about another change of key-note. Now too the days "of yore" mix their light with the poet's life, but what shines out is not anything adequately

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expressible. The lovely woman is beheld against a bright open window that is as if a niche, a recess, to hold a statue, and she looks like a statue moulded by some Greek or Roman sculptor. Poised she still is, but there is a lamp in her hand, a lamp made of a precious stone, a lamp which may be fancied as catching for human guidance the brilliance beyond the window. And for this semi-enigmatic figure the one word that breaks on the poet's mind from the antiquity to which he has referred in the two earlier stanzas is: Psyche. The word means "Soul" and by itself designates the inmost essence of human existence, a spark of the Divine. But in Greek mythology it spells also the name of the girl who married Eros the God of Love, lost him by attempting to look directly into his face and won him back after undergoing various trials imposed on her by his mother Aphrodite. So there may be a hint that the woman who is "Soul" to the poet's longings and searchings has herself also suffered before becoming for him a joy from the depths of the being. But the immediate impact of his apostrophe brings less a mythological memory than a religious rapture. For, the ancient world from which the name "Psyche" is echoed he calls "holy land" and by that phrase he blends Biblical associations with a Graeco-Roman context.

The blending seems to have been facilitated by the influence of some lines from Keats's Ode to Psyche. Keats tells us that the story of Psyche was developed too late for her to be worshipped as a goddess and he promises to erect her a temple within him and be her priest:

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

Holy the air, the water, and the fire...

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind...

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in!

In spite of difference of idea we have here most of the basic

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imaginative effects found in Poe's last stanza. The open casement of a fane in which Psyche might be thought of as installed in statue-form, the bright torch in her hand, herself drawing from the beholder the expression "O brightest!" and carrying into the regions of the poet's mind the holiness that is truly hers though unrecognised in ancient cults of the holy — all these elements assume a new yet recognisable shape when Poe writes:

Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand,

Ah! Psyche, from the regions which

Are holy land!,

Poe, however, has quite another temper of presentation than Keats. Keats here is earthly-concrete despite his reference to some "untrodden region" of his mind and to "shadowy thought". Poe brings that very region and that very thought into play without yet losing the vivid visual touch: as against Keats's earthy-concrete he is ethereal-concrete. And, by being so, he strikes a key-note varying from those of the first and the second stanzas. Just as the second associates an air of serene majesty with the exquisite presence conjured up in the first, the third penetrates this air with the intensity of a mysterious light — we get the key-note in the first line's adjective "brilliant", the fourth's noun "Psyche" and the fifth's adjective "holy" — the key-note to chords resolving the pressure of the motif concentrating sorrow and entreaty in just that interjection "Ah!"

The three diverse key-notes which throw into relief the eclecticism, the combination of qualities usually falling apart, may also be summed up in the several place-words in the poem: "Nicean" — "Greece" and "Rome" — "holy land". Each voices a distinct poetic mood. And if the whole piece is "pure poetry", "pure poetry" is shown to be many-mooded, capable of manifesting itself through either the enchantingly lovely, the tranquilly noble or the radiantly elusive. If we may take our cue from a word in the middle verse, we may distinguish the three moods and modes as Romantic, Classical, Symbolic. And each of the three verses can be a poem by itself: they vary even in the rhyme-scheme — ababb, ababa, abbab. The first verse has a rich particularity of speech wedded to a vague yearning whose fulfilment comes from a distant

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delight. The second carries an apt generality of language infused with an adventurous ardour reaching its rest in a magnificent security. The third breathes a strange suggestiveness of phrase that turns one inward or upward in a subtle seeking to be self-lost and self-found in a sacred or awesome secrecy.

Poe was by nature inclined to write the last type of poetry and it is through his work of this type that he most influenced the French poets who prepared or founded the school of Symbolism — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery. But in the three-stanza'd composition before us we have a complexity of consciousness poised in a catholic inspiration with no special bias towards the Symbolic or Symbolist except in so far as the end of the composition strikes a strange and sacred note. In this piece Poesque "pure poetry" is impartial and discloses more than one way of being: what is common to all the ways is a certain musical movement bearing a certain fineness of conception and perception and arising from what may be termed a thrilled intuition which appeals — as Poe would have put it — from the soul in the poet to the soul in us. This quality common to the three ways is the inner substance and form — the specifically poetic core which stands out from prose-expression. Around this core there is a changing colour-fulness in the Romantic stanza, a controlled yet cogent lucidity in the Classical, a figured and gestured mystery in the Symbolic: the difference in the environing expression makes no odds to the poetic purity.

Personally I would not rank this poem of Poe's extremely high, but there is no doubt of its inspired character and, as I have already said, its eclecticism makes it a good choice in a discussion that usually leans overmuch to one side or another. And we may observe that Baudelaire who apropos of Poe's work first wrote of "pure poetry" betrays also no narrow cult. He too distinguishes the essence of poetry from both truth and sentiment, from "la pature de la raison" ("the nourishment of the reason") as well as from ''l'ivresse du coeur" ("the drunkenness of the heart"), so that didacticism and discourse on the one hand and heated effusiveness on the other are both disqualified. And he stresses for "pure poetry" not any particular purity of language but the unimpeded play of the faculty we know as Imagination. Like Blake, Words-worth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, he considers Imagination as constituting poetry and as the queen of all the faculties. Imagina-

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tion to him is no wild instinctive force: it is a conscious power in which all the powers of the being fuse and come to a focus: it is the seeing and organising power of the spirit (l'esprit) by which the subtle patterns of life and Nature are discovered or created. Baudelaire in his own poetry expresses a special kind of mind — colour-fully semi-morbid, darkly semi-mystical, magically obsessed with modern motifs, heaven-haunted by the lights and shadows of sophisticated and decadent Paris — but he does not lay it down that poetry should be always Baudelairian, always curiously scented with "les fleurs du mal" To possess the specific quality that marks off poetry from prose he demands nothing more than the insight of Imagination rhythmically revealing hidden concords in things.

If this is "pure poetry," as Baudelaire understood it from Poe's "principles", it resolves itself into whatever is felt to be untranslatable into prose. We get a formula covering every sort of poetic phenomenon and asking only for a penetrating harmonious vision as the life of it. The formula emerges into a frankly and soberly universal air in A. C. Bradley's discussion, Poetry for Poetry's Sake. Bradley writes: "When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or almost purely poetic, we find the identity of form and content; and the degree of purity attained may be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless to convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own. Where the notion of doing so is simply ludicrous, you have quintessential poetry." Bradley also remarks that in poetry "meaning cannot be expressed in any but its own words, nor can the words be changed without changing the meaning". This statement would contradict Bremond's contention that Keats's first version —

A thing of beauty is a constant joy

and his final one—

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever

are hardly distinguishable in idea. Bradley would see not only in the verbal music but also in the meaning musicalised just a difference which is crucial and renders the latter version, unlike the former, electric with inspiration. I agree with Bradley and, before we go further, I shall try to mark all the differences.

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