Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-THREE

Your brains must have fairly reeled in an attempt to get into some sort of focus the "lustre" of the "Reality" Sri Aurobindo has shown in the lines I discussed in our last talk. Perhaps a reeling brain is the best help towards knowing such a Reality from within. What I mean is a condition of the sort the Zen Buddhists of Japan seek to impart or undergo. I don't mean the whack on the head which at times the Zen Master, in order to bring about Satori or flash of insight, gives to a disciple at the proper psychological moment, saying to himself, "Now for my stick to make a mystic of him!" I mean not the physical but the mental shock-system employing the method of what is called a Koan. A Koan is the statement of a problem insoluble by the intellect and pushing the intellect beyond itself when it sincerely and perseveringly broods on the problem in order to solve the insoluble. The statement takes usually a somewhat flippant form which yet is not devoid of a sense of crisis. Thus the Master may tell his disciple: "A man with two children holding on to his two hands slips over a precipice. His teeth get clenched in the branch of a tree hanging over the edge. He is too far from the precipice-face to get a foot-hold. His hands are still grasping the kids. A friend leans over the edge from above and asks him, 'What is Zen?' What answer would you make if you were asked?"

And now that we are on the topics of ultimate truth and the stunning of thought I may appropriately close my talk on Logopoeia by asking ourselves a few questions about a passage from Keats's famous Ode on a Grecian Urn where both these topics are involved. The passage has posed a textual problem too and critics have debated the reading ever since the time of Keats. We shall deal with all the difficulties.

Let me first outline to you the complex theme of the Ode. The poet takes the scenes and figures carved on a Grecian Urn and imaginatively reconstructs the life of ancient Greece through them — a life which is full of a surging activity in contrast to the stillness and immobility of the Urn itself. The first vision of that life is in the excited lines:

What gods or men are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

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But the carved state in which this life comes to the poet for reconstruction is an arrestment for ever of the surge of movement and music. Thus the theme is not only a contrast between the Urn and the life portrayed upon it: the theme is also the contrast between that life in itself and its state in the portrayal on the Urn. An ancient actuality, a varied pattern of vitality in times past has been taken up into sculpture: it has been caught into the stilled perpetuation which sculpture effects of what is transient by representing it in marble. The theme thus develops into sculpture's upliftment of an aspect of life into a posture of beauty above the changes of time — time which leads all human passion to sorrow and surfeit, and all human living to degeneration and death. This posture of beauty, at once expressive and immobile, acquires a definition in terms of inwardness in the lines where Keats dwells on the musicians carved as playing their pipes. Theirs is a music that is silent because the playing is depicted in silent stone. Yet this music is felt to be far superior to any that can actually be played; for, it is free from the limited and the temporary which all played music is — it is part of an infinite possibility, a limitless ideality. And the feeling of its magic and mystery is embodied in the quietly challenging and equably modulating lines which are some of Keats's best:

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...

It is in the last line that the sculpted posture of beauty gets an inward definition. The silent music provided by sculpture is rea-lised by the "spirit" to which the "ditties of no tone" are said to be played. Spirit now is contrasted to sense, "the sensual. ear" . The power of sculpture is suggested as belonging to the depth of spirit, a domain beyond the surface-sensations of life . .

Such, to my mind, is the shape of the complex theme of the poem as it proceeds towards its close. The equation of the art of sculpture to the spirit's depth is hinted as early as the second stanza out of the five that make up the poem. It is carried towards final illumination through the penultimate stanza. The vitality represented so far is of pleasure and desire: now it is concentrated in the worship-motif. Festivity and love that figure in detail at the

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end of the second stanza and at the beginning of the third are replaced by the ritual of religion. The stanza opens —

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

The procession is described — first the "mysterious priest" leading towards the "green altar" the garlanded "heifer lowing at the skies". Behind the sacramental victim is the rest of the crowd, the "folk" of the "little town" emptied for the ritual "this pious morn". William Walsh, a modern critic, has characterised the stanza as associating the natural and the numinous: that is to say, the familiar and the religiously solemn, the human and the superhuman, the material world and the mystery beyond. And, contemplating the blend of the natural and the numinous, the poet says:

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

After these lines the poet reaches the grand finale, The reintroduced motifs of "evermore" and of silence together with the worship-motif render the transition spontaneous to the stanza which culminates in the Logopoeia with which our discussion shall end, an example combining the finely reflective and the powerfully epigrammatic and constituting a problem of several sorts which is worth examining. The stanza is:

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth, beauty," — that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The stanza begins phanopoeically: from the fourth line onwards it is logopoeic. Let us go over it slowly. "O Attic shape!" — the

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Urn is of course addressed and it is called by the adjective referring to Attica, ancient Athens. In being called Attic its artistic perfection is suggested: the adjective in phrases like "Attic salt" and "Attic wit" connotes exquisite refinement. Robert Bridges introduces a rather irreverent note by saying that Keats here stumbles upon a pun: the word "attic" in English means also the highest storey of a house, usually a room at the top where all sorts of odds and ends, old furniture, clothes, vases are stored. The Grecian Urn may be regarded as an object of that sort. Well, this notion was never in Keats's mind, I am sure, though double shades in general cannot be ruled out in his verse. What Keats intended is made clear by the second phrase: "Fair attitude!" A thing of poised yet expressive beauty is what he sets before us. Over the surface of this Urn the sculptor has wrought a fringe of human figures and natural objects in marble. "Brede" is archaic English for "braid" which, among other things, signifies border-decoration as in embroidery. Now we reach the logopoeic lines. Keats says that the Urn which is a silent form puts us in the frame of mind in which we would be if we contemplated the fact of Eternity — it creates a mystic mood in which we are carried beyond all thinkable things, all things that we can describe in intelligible speech: we are borne off towards an experience of the inconceivable, the ineffable. Here the theme of melodies unheard which led us to sculpture's essence of Spirit — essence later connected to religious mystery — finds intense though brief illumination. Then the Urn is again apostrophised. It is called "Cold Pastoral!" The meaning of the noun is: "a play, poem or picture portraying country life." Here there is a marble picture, as it were — a picture that is cold because marble is cold and also because there is no agitation of life-activity. The coldness, however, is not of death: it is not of life lost but of life transcended. And the portrayal coldly done is such that it shall survive the generation to which Keats belongs. The expression is somewhat similar to the line in the Ode to a Nightingale:

No hungry generations tread thee down...

When old age will take Keats's contemporaries to death, the Urn will stay unchanged. Free from precarious and frustrating life, it is free from all woe. Amidst the woe of Keats's time it stands as a

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reminder of the Eternal: after this time, when there will be other woe, it will yet be the same reminder. It will be a friend to man and give man a message of supreme significance.

Now we reach two puzzles discussed again and again by critics. One is: To whom or what are we to ascribe the words:

...that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

At first look Keats seems suddenly addressing his reading public and giving his own commendation of the phrase which the Urn is imagined as uttering to man: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Some critics opine that both the lines are the utterance of the Urn. A third alternative was proposed — for the first time, I believe, in the history of criticism — by one of you when I happened to mention the puzzle in private. It is that Keats is addressing not his reading public but the Urn itself after its message to man has been stated. What is the correct interpretation? The other puzzle is the sense of the philosophical epigram: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The argument of those who make the Urn's message consist only of five words is that only these words are in inverted commas. Against the conclusion drawn from this limited use of the quotation marks, we may point to the poem as originally written. There is Keats's own autograph and there are the transcripts made by his friends Brown, Woodhouse and Dilke. Nowhere in these versions which are the earliest, the most foundational, are there any inverted commas. The whole statement after "say'st" is one piece, evidently the Urn's deliverance. Also, when in January 1820 the poem appeared in Annals of the Fine Arts XV, they are absent: the only difference from the unprinted text is that a new sentence begins with "That is all..." The difference cannot prevent the new sentence from being part of the Urn's message. The sole intention seems to be to separate with greater clearness two sections of a single pronouncement. If we keep this point in mind we shall be better equipped to face the fact which the five-word-wallahs flaunt before us — namely, that in the volume of poems Keats published in June of the same year he put those five words within inverted commas. We are told: "Here is Keats's definitive version." But let us ask: "Has he still kept the words apart by a full stop as in Annals of the Fine Arts? Or has he joined them to the remainder as in the

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original version, with just a comma and a dash? He has effected no radical distinction. Whatever separation was required has evidently been effected by the inverted commas. It would seem that the same distinction as intended by starting a new sentence after the first five words without putting the latter in inverted commas has been brought about by employing these marks and what has thus been brought about renders it unnecessary to use a full stop. The full stop did not introduce a new speaker: analogically, in view of the removal of the full stop, the inverted commas also do not introduce Keats in persona propria as distinguished from the Urn. So far as the speaker is concerned, the inverted commas are equivalent in function to the full stop.

Further, the word "ye" in Keats's own mouth in an address to his reading public would be at variance with the form of speech adopted in the phrases of the same stanza:

....tease us out of thought....

and

...in midst of other woe

Than ours...

Keats and his reading public are taken together by him as one group in the first-personal plural pronouns "us" and "ours": he does not stand over against it as "ye" would make him do. If he were directly speaking in his own person he would say:

that is all

We know on earth, and all we need to know.

"We" would be in accord with "us" and "ours" and at the same time serve for the poet's commendation of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" if such commendation were intended. The absence of this natural "we" should indicate that Keats is not personally underlining anything addressed to his reading public and that "ye" is spoken by the Urn.

It may be asked: "Why should the Urn say 'Ye' instead of 'thou' when, as Keats tells us in line 8, it is addressing 'man'?" A con-vincing answer can be made in several steps. Keats had already

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used "thou" in reference to the Urn itself two lines earlier —

...a friend to man, to whom thou say'st...

The Urn employing "thou" again would constitute an artistic blemish, an awkwardness of language, even a confusion in meaning. It must employ either "you" or "ye". In general, "ye" was considered in the old days to have more poetic associations than "you". In the lines about unheard melodies "ye" is used — "therefore, ye soft pipes, play on" — where "you" could have done duty as well. Of course, "ye" there is in the plural number, but that is not the reason for rejecting "you" which too is legitimate for the plural: the reason is the better poetic effect to Keats's ear which more than the ear of other Romantic poets was influenced by Spenser. To justify "ye" in the poem's last line all we require to do is to ask whether "ye" may replace "thou" which is in the singular number. Surely it is known that "you" can replace "thou". I can give a very apt quotation in this matter —some lines of Otway in his drama Venice Preserved:

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

Here "woman" is generically addressed just as "man" is generi-cally mentioned in Keats's line (as well as here): the only difference is that Otway says "you" for woman and Keats "ye" for man. In Otway's lighter context "you" is quite appropriate. The more exalted speech that is the close of Keats's Ode calls for "ye": this form brings poetically the right tone. The only doubt possible is whether "ye" can be in the singular just as "you" can. Its equivalence to it in the plural should itself tend to assure us here. And actually, among its uses, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1936 (p. 2465, col. 1) lists one in which it takes the place of "thou" in addressing a single person (originally as a sign of respect or deference). Today it is most frequent in familiar phrases like "How d'ye do?", "What d'ye think?", "Thank ye", "I tell ye". But poetry too is not devoid of instances which leave no doubt. When we read Scott's

Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye!

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or Tennyson's

'Damsel,' he said, 'ye be not all to blame',

the singular number is apparent.

At this place we may glance at the highly original proposition that Keats is addressing the Urn. Since he has been often addressing it in the course of the Ode and has started the poem with an address to it, there is no inherent implausibility in the proposition. Further, we have established that "ye" can stand for "thou". So, when we find Otway and some others using "you" for "thou", why could not Keats make "ye" do the same job? Linguistically, we cannot rule out the possibility that the poet is speaking to the Urn. However, we may question the occasion for the sudden shift from "thou" to "ye" — and not only one "ye" but two. Of course, if the shift is made once, we may expect it to be made twice for consistency's sake. But the very consistency here reminds us of Keats's sense of harmony. We feel that he would not change over from "thou" to "ye" in a capricious manner: he would do it only if the interests of significance or of style demanded it. Poets can be capricious, but Keats of the Ode-period especially was a scrupulous and controlled craftsman with a clear head. And there is no imaginative reason here why he should break into a repeated "ye" when "thou" would be the smoothest and most harmonious term. Besides, to say to the Urn that all it knows and all it needs to know is "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" does not add very much to the power of the poem: it sounds almost like a truism, a superfluous assertion: the words following those within quotation marks would be a meaningful and momentous endorsement if they were directed by the Urn to man or by Keats to his reading public which also is human. Again, the connection which the comma and the dash institute between these words and the five preceding them is not exactly favourable to the alternative my student has put forth. Appreciative though I am of its originality, I do not think we should go outside the two that have generally been discussed.

Now we may proceed from the points already considered for taking as the Urn's own utterance all that succeeds the first five words. Those points being settled, we may touch on some others. If the Urn's message ends with the first five words, we get Keats doing here what he usually does not: he seldom directly addresses

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his reader or readers. Also, we make him forget his keen artistic sense: a personal intrusion in favour of the reading public breaks the thematic unity of the poem by bringing in a jarring didactic note from outside: whatever lesson there may be should arise organically from the treatment of the subject and be, as it were, in character and not stick out by superimposition: the Urn itself expressing a message would be in tune with the treatment whereas the poet coming forward with a homily would be an inartistic jolt such as Keats would avoid. Some might even say, as C. M. Bowra does, that if he himself is talking, we get a statement from him which makes him "a ruthless aesthete" going against all that he has said elsewhere about the importance of human activities and relations: according to Bowra, what would be emphasised is the exclusive importance of Art and it would be natural for the Urn to lay stress on this importance but for Keats to say that nothing beyond Art matters would be something at odds with his general outlook at this period of his life as known from his letters as well as other poems.

Bowra's contention might hold if "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" had only an Art-connotation. But all the rest of the considerations we have advanced are enough to prove that the inverted commas are not meant to cut short the Urn's speech. What they do is to divide clearly the speech into two sections, the first presenting a sort of motto, an aphorism or piece of doctrine, a general and impersonal and universal text, and the second the Urn's own comment on it. The opening five words are as if a quotation, and the quotation marks serve to mark it off as such. Whether they have only an Art-connotation or no, they certainly do bear on Art in a momentous mode and thus it is natural that the Urn, as itself a piece of Art, should add its own endorsement.

Now we have to attempt an interpretation of the formula emphasised as all-important by the Urn. One interpretation is that beauty alone matters. But this ignores the double statement and the balance set up between beauty and truth. Another interpretation is that in Art there should be nothing merely beautiful. On the one hand, gross realism is to be avoided; on the other, ornament for ornament's sake must be eschewed. Realism without beauty cannot be Art: decorativeness without a basis of reality can also not be Art. Representation of brute fact is ugly whereas Art has to do with beauty: colour and image and sound without any

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touch on things felt and known is sheer fancy whereas Art deals with truth. Beauty and truth are both essential to Art and they do not exist apart from each other and outside of each other: nothing can be true unless it is beautiful and nothing can be beautiful unless it is true. This is taken by many critics as the significance of those five words. The words are regarded as a precept for Art-creators and a definition of artistic work for Art-appreciators.

No doubt, Art has neither to rest satisfied with brute fact nor to stay content with colour and image and sound for their own sake. But surely Keats shows the Grecian Urn to be doing more than avoiding gross realism or ornament for ornament's sake? And does not all Art bring a revealing vision, go beyond the surface of things, the mere existence of things as well as beyond the play of fancy and hence beyond the surface of the curious constructive mind? In doing this, what exactly does it achieve? Let us recapitulate our findings on sculpture from the poem before us. According to Keats, the Grecian Urn has brought a sense of something above the precariousness and frustration of ordinary life and this something is a wonderfully expressive stillness, an infinitely suggestive silence whose sweet plenitude goes deeper than the world of sense and is realised by the spirit: what the Urn brings is a revelation of the supra-sensuous to the depths of the spirit: it communicates a spiritual reality to the spiritual consciousness through a representation of beautiful form in which the changes of time are transcended. After saying this in effect, Keats reconstructs a scene of religious ritual from the Urn's figures and touches again on the motifs of perpetuation and silence. Then he introduces the word "eternity". The Grecian Urn with a perplexing exquisiteness bears us above the perceptive and conceptive powers and activities of thought as though towards a divine reality, a divine consciousness that is ineffably eternal. The statement — "beauty is truth, truth beauty" — comes on top of all that the Urn has already been said by the poet to do and gathers up and completes the significance communicated so far of the little master-piece from Attica: it "caps, crowns and clinches all". If it did not perform that function, it would be an anti-climax or pompous irrelevance. It may include the doctrine of eschewing both gross realism and ornament for ornament's sake; but it must contain a wider and deeper substance vibrant with the metaphysical and the mystical. And unless it did this, even the Urn's commendation of it

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as a message of paramount importance age after age to "man" in his state of "woe" would sound hollow.

To understand the beauty-truth equation in a metaphysical and mystical sense relevant to the Urn we must look for a mediating term between them provided by the poem itself. This term is "eter-nity". The general meaning of "eternity" we have set forth. But there is a particular shade which we must now note. The Urn teases us out of thought not only by its time-transcending and spirit-packed silence: it does so too, by its perfect form. It is the "silent form" that is said to "tease us out of thought/As doth eternity". Eternity is seen as manifesting somehow through the silent form shown by the Urn. It is thus a Reality in which a divine archetype of the Urn's silent form exists. We may say that it is the original Divine Form in which all that has a changing shape on earth is poised in a permanence of perfection: time with its mutability of contour and colour has a stop there and its essence is held immortally before the Supreme Sight of an Intelligence higher than discursive thought. The immutable truth of the world of phenomena, the basic and unmarred reality behind them, is held in that beatific vision; and this truth, by being the essential Form of earth's contour and colour, is necessarily and fundamentally Beauty. Eternity is essential Beauty that is essential Truth and it is both these by a perfect permanence from which the shortcomings due to change in a universe of finite objects have been exceeded and transfigured. Only to this understanding of beauty and truth can we be led through what Keats has visioned in relation to the Grecian Urn and its marble mouldings. It is the Platonic idea. And that the idea should be Platonic is but fitting in the context of an Urn which is Grecian.

Of course, this Keatsian Platonism emerges from the contemplation of a piece of Art, but it has not only an Art-connotation. It is not confined to what is usually taken as "aesthetic": it implies that Art is a medium of the Divine Reality and that this Divine Reality which Art reveals is the dispeller of human woe.

Hence, when the rest of the Urn's message endorses the Platonic aphorism, Art as such is not boosted as of sovereign importance. Sovereign importance is given to the bliss-breathing Divine Reality revealed by Art. Knowledge of its dual unity is declared to be the sole knowledge worth the name: every other kind of knowledge is trivial. The words — "that is all" — signify, as Walsh

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suggests, "that is the finally important thing". And this knowledge is not only the sole knowledge worth the name: it is also the sole knowledge necessary. The one sure and indispensable knowledge is of the Divine Reality which is the goal at once of our pursuit of the beautiful and our pursuit of the true and whose presence is suggested to us in the thought-hushed profundity of happy vision that is ours vis-a-vis the multi-carved perfection of the Grecian Urn.

This knowledge is akin to the jnana for which a mighty ardour runs through the Indian .Upanishads. "I would know That which being known , everything is known" - "What shall I do with the knowledge which will not bring me Immortality?" - such pronouncements carry the same rare atmosphere within which glow those five words of Keats in the context of his Ode.

All the seven lines beginning from "Thou, silent form" we have distinguished as Logopoeia. In their bringing to a culmination the metaphysical and mystical sense hinted in the rest of the poem they may be characterised as conveying the sense of what Greek philosophers called Logos in a special connotation. Logos literally means "thought-word", but the Greek philosophers came to define it as the Word of the Divine Reason, God as the Creative Idea-Expression. The Keatsian passage is therefore Logopoeia in a double manner: its inmost subject is the Logos and its turn of speech has the thought-element in predominance.

Perhaps I have talked a little above your heads. Now that we are about to close the talk and go our own ways I may part from you no less than from Logopoeia with a logopoeic passage which nobody can accuse of being "highbrow". I shall recite it to you with the Indian gesture of salaam which serves for parting as well as for meeting and I shall ask you to bear in mind the thought which its words convey. The lines were written by an uncommonly thoughtful I.C.S. Englishman for his fellow-officers in India and refer to a gesture connected with all kinds of brows and not only the high ones:

To passerby who makes salaam

Don't raise a finger meagrely,

With air of contumelious calm;

But with entire uplifted palm

Reciprocate it eagerly.

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