Talks on Poetry

TALK THIRTY-TWO

We have remarked that Phanopoeia tends generally to be less a failure than Logopoeia. We may now glance at a case in which the latter surpasses the former. It is a case in which the technical device called Aposiopesis has play, though the actual determinant of the poetic quality is not this device. Aposiopesis means a sudden breaking off in speech. In Christabel Coleridge has written of a half-human half-demon creature, the outwardly fair Lady Geraldine. When describing the undressing of this woman before Christabel, he originally had the lines:

Behold! her bosom and half her side

Are lean and old and foul of hue.

This is not exactly open Phanopoeia, but its appeal is to the sight. It is an effectively repellent visual touch, the direct description of a preternatural horror. In The Ancient Mariner Coleridge has used this method very successfully — you may remember the glittering eye and the skinny hand of the old salt himself. Coleridge felt that Christabel was a more eerie poem and everything in it should be suggested rather than depicted. So he redid the lines with a break in the speech. Instead of finishing the sentence he took a new turn cutting out all direct description. The rewritten lines run:

Behold! her bosom and half her side —

A thing to dream of, not to tell.

This is pretty abstract as far as details go, but the removal of the state of Lady Geraldine's body from any this-world possibility to the possibilities of a world of nightmare confers extra effectiveness. When Shelley read the passage he fainted!

This incident is one of the two on record in which lines of poetry produced a bodily effect more serious than the usual ones mentioned by Housman: the standing up of the hair on the skin, the watering of the eyes, the tingling of the spine, the piercing sensa-tion in the solar plexus. Emily Dickinson speaks even of a feeling as if the top of the head were blown off. None of these effects, however marked, have caused any serious physical disturbance. What happened to Shelley is matched only by what happened to

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Blake. Once the passage was read out to him, in which Words-worth claims that the theme he has chosen for his song is the profoundest — namely, the human mind itself. Compared to the human mind, Wordsworth says, all high and even supernatural realities are nothing. He lists all that the human mind exceeds and in the course of listing them he writes:

Jehovah — with his thunder and the choir

Of shouting Angels and the empyreal throne —

I pass them unalarmed...

Hearing these verses, Blake turned pale and asked his friend: "Does Mr. W. think he can surpass Jehovah?" Then an acute colic set in, which went on increasing and almost threatened to kill Blake! And here too the disturbing phrase — "I pass them unalarmed" — is rather on the side of Logopoeia.

Talking of illnesses I am reminded of a piece of Logopoeia in Shakespeare which will give me a chance to complete the roll of medicos I started during my discussion of Phanopoeia. Apropos of Eliot's simile of the etherised evening and Shakespeare's passage beginning "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?" I brought in a number of Ashram surgeons and physicians. The name of one doctor got left out. I shall do it honour now. Shakespeare, as you know, is a king of Phanopoeia, his very mind moves phano-poeically. Rarely is he markedly logopoeic. In one line he is logopoeic in perhaps the worst way in all poetic history. The correct description of the way is found in the very line, which reads:

In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

When Bernard Shaw once heard Mrs Patrick Campbell say this line he could not believe Shakespeare could have perpetrated anything so bad. He accused her of having improvised it to cover up a lapse of memory. Shakespeare is not such a terrible flop always. In fact, he has a few very successful Logopoeias. Many of his great speeches would be logopoeic by their argumentative trend but for his visual sense. His imagination is all the time breaking in. For instance, Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be" is a series of self-questionings in which a number of semi-philo-

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sophical issues are touched on. From the very start, however, images are crowding into the language. Still, in a few passages Shakespeare keeps up the true logopoeic level. I shall give you two examples. The first is of a less serious kind but quite poetic with its dry humour. It is a short passage Which calls up to our mind the Ashram-medico left out. Not the physicians nor the surgeons are our heroes on this occasion. Today we shall celebrate our dentist Dr. Patil. His job, as you must be aware,is to see that before we become supramental we do not become supradental! We may be inclined not to give his job the importance it deserves. But Shakespeare has a dig at the savants, the wise men, who look down their noses at it — until something goes wrong with their wisdom-teeth:

For there was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,

However they have writ the style of gods

And made a push at chance and sufferance.

In plain prose, philosophers may have high-falutingly made light of our mortal situation in which ill-luck and suffering have play, but let them get a cavity in their teeth and they will be jumping about with exclamations which, whether melopoeic or phanopoeic or logopoeic, would certainly not be philosophic.

Of course, all of you who are so very young cannot imagine the awful inferno that is toothache or the powerless purgatory that is toothlessness. Very few, out of the people who depend on false sets of teeth, cut heroic figures: evidently, artificial teeth do not do this kind of cutting very well. I have heard of one person only who, using such teeth, had yet the fiery spirit of a hundred-fanged dragon. It was an Arab chief, a Sheikh of the desert, who had joined hands with T.E. Lawrence when this Arabianised English-man rallied the Bedouins against the Germans and their allies the Turks in the First World War. That Arab chief was so angry with the Germans that, when he remembered that the false teeth which he had been wearing for years had come from a dental firm in Berlin, he pulled them out and, with a violent "Bismillah" from his gap of a mouth, smashed them on the ground. This was, I think, just before a battle. And not only through one battle but through many he went with an unabated "Bismillah" and won fame as the Toothless Terror.

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I knew another practically toothless man who was the exact opposite. His nerves were so shaky that he could never stand the sight of a drop of blood. Not only this: he even fought shy of red colour anywhere: it reminded him of blood and he would at once faint. Our Ashram Stores had to take care not to give him red hair-oil. Green oil was always given. If by any chance red was handed to him he would be all ready to collapse in Pavitra's arms! He even told me that to look at a red pencil was enough to make him dizzy. I do not know for sure that this ultra-sensitiveness was due directly to his nearly toothless condition, but it seems he had lost a lot of blood when some of his last few stumps had been pulled out, and ever since that operation he could not bear redness. I am sure he could never have stood the reading of the newspapers of today. The mention of Red China everywhere would have made him look like the victim of a Communist purge.

I suppose you know that it was in connection with dentistry that one of the most thrilling moments of medical history occurred — the first administration of a general anaesthetic. Nitrous oxide or "laughing gas" had already been discovered, but not applied to surgical cases before Dr. Riggs the dentist took Dr. Wells the physician in his hands. Dr. Wells had a bad tooth needing extraction. But it was a firmly rooted molar and it would have made the patient howl madly if pulled out in the old way. You must be aware what the old way was. The patient's chair was put against a wall and his hands strapped down to the arms of the chair. The dentist would stand before him with a huge forceps held in both hands. On grasping the tooth with the forceps the dentist would pin down the patient in the chair by planting his own right foot on the patient's chest. Then, with the foot pushing and the hands pulling, the tooth would be out of the patient's mouth accompanied by a hideous yell. All this was avoided by a few whiffs of laughing gas. Dr. Wells became a completely co-operative dummy. In front of hundreds of people the dentist extracted the physician's tooth and demonstrated the efficacy of general anaesthesia. Soon after the operation Dr. Wells opened his eyes and holding up from the tray on the table beside him the extracted molar shouted to the audience: "Here's a new era in tooth-pulling!" The next moment he took a look at the molar between his fingers. Dr. Wells went suddenly pale. It was a perfectly whole and healthy tooth. Dr. Riggs had extracted the wrong molar! The

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perfect co-operation of the unconscious patient unable to know which tooth was being painlessly pulled out had indeed ushered in a new era in erroneously effective dentistry! Dr. Wells went for Dr. Riggs and with one hefty punch on the nose knocked him senseless in turn. Luckily for our own day there has come the local anaesthetic — the injection of novocaine in the gums leaving the patient in full possession of his senses and even looking into a mirror to see that the dentist catches hold of the right tooth.

Dr. Patil and Shakespeare have led us into quite a digression. Let us return to Logopoeia, bidding adieu to our dentist but not to the poet. We have said that Shakespeare is constantly passing over from Logopoeia to Phanopoeia. But in a certain passage in Macbeth he keeps the true logopoeic level for several lines. There Macbeth is debating the murder of King Duncan who is a guest for the night at Macbeth's castle:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly: if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success, that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'd jump the life to come...

It is rather a complex passage. The first "done" means "ended", the second "completed", the third "performed". The sense is that if the murder can be regarded as a perfectly finished thing when it is carried out completely, then the best course is to commit it soon. This sense is elaborated in the next phrase. "Trammel up" means "arrest, bind up, entangle". Macbeth wishes that the murder should have no sequel, run no risk of later discovery and ultimate punishment: the fatal blow which would lead to the cessation of Duncan's life — his "surcease" — should be in the moment of that cessation a total success for ever and constitute in itself the whole history of the crime — the full being and the entire ending of the dark deed here upon the earth. If there were no after-effects, no possible results dangerous to the criminal, then Macbeth would consider the success sufficiently tempting for him to ignore the next life and risk whatever might be the consequences after his own death, whatever the punishment meted out by God in the

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other world. The passage is very effective in expression and is regarded as high poetry by the critics. But, as they have noted, it has a sibilant hissing quality rather than the quality of melody. It can certainly not be called melopoeic. But its broken rhythms and its tendency to harshness of sound are themselves deemed by criticism the master-means of poetically bringing about the communication intended by Shakespeare — the communication of desperate haste and breathless excitement. As Cleanth Brooks and R.P. Warren tell us, the lines give with their lack of ordinary melodious effects the impression of a conspiratorial whisper. Not only Melopoeia but also Phanopoeia is absent through most of the passage. Though the language is extremely vivid and has a seeing power in words like "trammel" and "catch", explicit imagery is wanting except towards the close where we have "the bank and shoal of time". A shoal is a place of shallow water in which there is a submerged sand-bank. It would seem that Shakespeare is imaging death as a strip of land between two seas — the one being time, the other eternity. Personally I do not quite grasp the appo-siteness of the metaphor, but Shakespeare's language is vigorous enough to make the picture of the bank and shoal, upon which the act of "jumping" the next life is to be done, a telling one.

The passage as a whole is intense Logopoeia of what we may term the vital mind at work: the nerves are at play, the sensations are astir all through the thinking process. In contrast see the working of the mind proper, the true reflective being drawing up the living energy into its own uses: here is a speech made by Milton's Satan at sight of the infernal regions to which he has been condemned:

Hail, horrors, hail,

Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor; one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less than He

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built

Here for His envy, will not drive us hence:

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Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

A Titanism is articulate in the lines, but, however misdirected, the sheer sense of the mind's independence is magnificent: this independence is celebrated in language hailing from the mental plane itself. It would be difficult to excel the poetic quality of this passage where thought and not sight or music is the main feature. But we may observe that nothing is abstract: we feel a movement of concrete thinking: the very ideas are as if objects which the mind arranges and juxtaposes, and the language too is what I may call eyeful thought, though the eyefulness is not as marked as in Shakespeare. This eyeful thought may be contrasted to the thoughtful eye that is the character of Phanopoeia. The eye of course has always to be at work in poetry; but it can be either adjectival or substantive. The difference in the position it occupies may perhaps be illustrated most interestingly by two passages from Sri Aurobindo.

There is the sestet of the mighty Nirvana-sonnet:

Only the illimitable Permanent

Is here. A Peace stupendous, featureless, still

Replaces all. What once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness content

Either to fade in the Unknowable

Or thrill with the luminous seas of the Infinite.

The last line is phanopoeic, all the others are logopoeic. But here too we have no touch of dry intellectuality. All the less here because Sri Aurobindo, though couching his experience in terms of thought, is really writing what he has called "Overhead Poetry" — poetry breaking from secret planes of consciousness above the mind. It is Thought with a capital T. Not the vital mind, nor the mind proper, but the spiritual mind is vibrant throughout, with its touch on spiritual realities that are known by subtle inner senses or by direct identity through an extension of one's sheer self. Eyeful Thought uttering an experience that goes beyond all earth and all hell and even all heaven into a pure infinitude where name and form are effaced has been set artistically working by the realisation

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Sri Aurobindo had at Baroda in 1908. A further vivification, as it were, of the Unknowable spoken of is given us in some lines in Savitri where also the Overhead planes function but through an Eye with a capital E. The Thoughtful Eye is now at work to show us that the Unknowable is not an impotent void or a divine darkness: even when there is a negation of all that we can con-ceive, even when there is an emptiness of all intelligible positives, what remains is yet a plenary light: only, that plenitude is lost in complete mystery for our conception. This mystery, however, must not be named either Being or Non-being: beyond Being, it passes into Non-being — yet even to say Non-being is to define it too much and also to confine it too much. Observe how Sri Aurobindo compasses the mystery:

If all existence could renounce to be,

And Being take refuge in Non-being's arms

And Non-being could strike out its ciphered round,

Some lustre of that Reality might appear.

The terms are at once Yes and No. Existence is said to give itself up to non-existence, but the giving up is a refuge and what it gives itself up to waits as if with arms. The arms connect with the ciphered round: the ciphered round is, of course, zero, but the circle is suggested to be formed by the joined arms of Non-being around Being. And when Non-being is said to strike out its own zero, what do we understand? On the one hand, a deeper negation than Non-being, as if the zero were too concrete as well as too limited to indicate the supreme vacuity which the Ultimate is to our experience. On the other hand, to strike out the zero is to cancel the negation brought by Non-being and suggest a new positive which yet is not Being. The last line supports this suggestion, and, in the act of calling the Ultimate "that Reality", differentiates the Ultimate from both "existence" and its opposite. Further, a nameless thrill is hinted by all the lines in the process of the ever profounder immergence. Being lets itself be absorbed as though into an indescribable Lover and Non-being has a dynamism of self-denial, and what results and remains breaks out like light: a flush and a warmth no less than a vividness are present. Finally, I may ask you to note that after all the enigmatic Yes and No have been practised the realisation is just "some lustre": not

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the whole Presence of the final Absence but merely a bit of its all-swallowing glory comes into view. This stroke of "some"-ness is the crowning surprise: we think that everything that is possible in order to go from the deep to the deeper and to the deepest has been done and then we are told that the utmost we can do brings no more than a moiety of the sovereign secrecy to our realisation!

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