Talks on Poetry

TALK THREE

In the last two talks we touched on the poetic mood and the poetic process from various sides and gave them a high significance and value. Today I wish to quote a few lines from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri, which sum up, as it were, the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. But before I do so I must notice a possible objection to the spiritual view we have taken of the poetic process. We may be told: "All fine poets do not offer us spiritual matter. They speak of all sorts of earthly things and some of them are even disbelievers. Lucretius, the great Roman poet, scoffed at religion, and said that the gods were created by human fear: he was a materialist and atheist by intellectual persuasion."

This is quite true but what it means is simply that a lot of poetry does not directly refer to any divine reality. It does not prove poetry to be non-spiritual in its origin as well as in its process. The spirituality lies fundamentally in the Form and not in the Sub-stance — or, rather, since we have defined Form as really an inward thing exteriorising itself, poetry is spiritual by the manner in which any substance is inwardly experienced and explored and then outwardly expressed in a rhythmic Form answering to the thrill of the experience and exploration. Poetry, whatever its subject, communicates a sense of perfect beauty by its absolute and unimpeachable expression. All that it says comes with the faultless face and gait of a godhead. How even materialism and atheism could come like this is well suggested by a phrase of Elizabeth Browning about Lucretius. She writes in a poem that he "denied divinely the Divine".

This intrinsic divineness should provide us with a safe passage everywhere in the world of poetry and also steady us against any wavering in our appreciation on account of themes not usually associated with the pleasant, the agreeable. Poetry is of an endless diversity and we shall lose much if we are too choosy. But, of course, first we must learn by sympathy something of the poet's aesthetic mode: without it we shall pervert the drift of his art. The poet has an acute universal aesthesis, he can discover the essence of beauty in what others may pass by as plain or even condemn as ugly. He is not guided by the conventional idea or feeling of the beautiful. He can take up for poetic expression anything that catches his mind. By a subtle transmutation he reveals in the most

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unpromising subject the significant form which is within or behind it and which, in however weird or bizarre or grotesque a fashion, comes through it under the intensity of the poetic process. The student of poetry should be ready to respond even to what Flecker calls a monstrous beauty

Like the hindquarters of an elephant.

Do not be shocked by this phrase. There is a paradoxical perfection of cumbersome ease in the movements of an elephant's posterior parts, and the poet would be unworthy of the name if he failed to thrill to it and make us light up in response by his word and rhythm. Mark, in passing, how expressive in technique the line is: two initial monosyllables followed by a trisyllable between which and another such word there are again two monosyllables, a symmetrical swaying of two equally long words with short equal intervals, a slow ponderous double movement interspersed with, and thrown into relief by, a pair of small gaps.

Now we may turn to Sri Aurobindo's lines. They occur in Book V, Canto 3, of Savitri, where he is describing the early life of Satyavan. In Canto 2 Satyavan is called

A wanderer communing with depth and marge.

This is itself a suggestive summary of the poet's mood.in its basic orientation. The poet moves among a diversity of things but every-where he gets into living touch with what seems to overpass the limits of life, he is in his mood always at the edge of things, communing with the beyond and experiencing profundities in all with which he establishes a contact of consciousness. Yes, this line is a good hint of the poetic process. But it is not what I specifically wish to put before you. The lines I want to quote are some others — six in all, not occurring immediately after one another, but presenting in the combination I have made of them a brief yet precise picture of what I have termed the psychology and metaphysics of poetry. Mind you, I am not saying that Sri Aurobindo is exclusively describing the poetic mood and process: I am adapting to my own purposes some phrases of his that can be taken to describe them because they occur in a context where the inward soul-development of Satyavan is described in relation to his ex-

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perience and exploration of Nature, a soul-development on a broad scale that does issue also in art-activity on Satyavan's part. Here are the lines:

As if to a deeper country of the soul

Transposing the vivid imagery of earth,

Through an inner seeing and sense a wakening came...

I caught for some eternal eye the sudden

Kingfisher flashing to a darkling pool,...

And metred the rhythm-beats of infinity.

In the first three lines we have the indication of a new awareness which is not on the surface but in the depth of our being, the depth that is our soul. On a hasty reading, we may be inclined to think that the word "soul" is here used in a general way for our self and that several countries are ascribed to it, some shallow and some deep, and that the reference is not so much to the soul in a special connotation as to "a deeper country". Such an interpretation would be a mistake, The soul is not here a generalisation, it is acutely contrasted to "earth": the two phrases — "of the soul" and "of earth" — are balanced against each other: there are only two countries implied, the country of earth and the country of the soul, the former a surface territory, the latter a "deeper" domain. And by "earth" with its "vivid imagery" is meant the contents of our normal waking consciousness packed with thousands of observations, whereas the "soul" stands for a consciousness other than the life-force and mind operating in conjunction with a material body and brain. This consciousness is ordinarily like a dream-region, but the poet undergoes there a novel "wakening" by which he reinterprets in a different and deeper light the earth-experience. Nor is that all. His reinterpretation involves the experience of new things in the soul's depths, things which are as if earthly objects "transposed" into them but which in reality exist in their own right, native to those depths and constituting the originals whose copies or representatives are earthly objects. The quality of the experience of these originals is to be gauged from the use of the word "sotd". Poetry is primarily a speech of the soul - not the mind's exclamation, not the cry of the life-force, not the lifting of the body's voice. All of them are audible too, but in tune with a central' note that is the soul's, a note charged with some divine

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presence. It is because the soul finds tongue through the poet that there is a light in poetry, a delight in poetry. Light and delight are the soul's very stuff, and by virtue of them the poetic expression which fuses the "vivid imagery of earth" with the soul's "inner seeing and sense" is not just a fanciful entertainment but a kind of revelation. Of course it is not directly a spiritual, a mystic movement: it is only indirectly so and even when its subject is spiritual or mystic the poet does not necessarily become a Yogi or a Rishi. But the soul-quality ensures, as Sri Aurobindo puts it in The Future Poetry,1 that the genuine poetic expression is not merely a pastime, not even a godlike one: "it is a great formative and illuminative power."

The psychological instrument of this power is defined by the phrase: "inner seeing and sense." Here the stress is not only on the inwardness: it is also on sight. The poet is fundamentally concerned with the activity of the eye. When he turns to the phenomena of earth, what he busies himself with is their "vivid imagery". An image is primarily something visual. A keen experience of shapes and colours is the poet's speciality and it is this that is conveyed in the words: "seeing and sense". "Sense" is a term suggesting at once perception and feeling and understanding, a contact of consciousness with an object; but the main channel of the contact here is the sight. The perceiving, feeling, understanding consciousness of the poet comes to an active point, an effective focus, through the function of seeing: his the concentration and merging of all sense in vision. "Vision," says Sri Aurobindo in The Future Poetry,² "is the characteristic power of the poet, as is discriminative thought the essential gift of the philosopher and analytic observation the natural genius of the scientist." A very acute and felicitous statement, this. Note first the noun "power" in connection with the poet. It recalls to us De Quincey's division of literature into the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Philosophy and science are the literature of knowledge while all prose and poetry that are pieces of art fall under the category of literature of power because they affect the emotions and change attitudes and remould character. Note next the adjective "essential" in relation to the philosopher's gift. Philosophy is supposed to make clear the basic principle of reality, the essence

1. P. 10. 2. P. 29.

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of things. Then note the epithet "natural" apropos of the scientist's work. The scientist cuts into the physical universe and reaches down to its system of laws — his field is what commonly passes as Nature. A born master of words has made the statement, instinctively using the most expressive turns'. But we are not at the moment concerned so much with the art of the statement as with its isolation of the poet's function from the functions of the philosopher and the scientist: this function is primarily neither to think out reality nor to dissect phenomena but to experience the play of light and shadow, fixity and flux, individual form and multiple pattern: the poet may have a philosophic or a scientific bent (Lucretius had both), but he must exercise it in a glory of sight, set forth everything with intimate image, evocative symbol.

The ancient Indian word for poet is Kavi, which means one who sees and reveals. Of course the revealing, the making manifest, the showing out is an inevitable part of the poet's function, and it is this function that is stressed in the Latin term poeta from the Greek poetes, which stands for "maker", "fashioner", "creator". But the whole labour of formation lies in rendering visible, in making us see, what has been seen by the one who forms. The vision is the first factor, the embodiment and communication of it is the second. The Indian name goes to the root of the matter in speaking of the seer who reveals instead of the revealer who has seen. Shakespeare — the greatest poetic phenomenon in English history, poetry incarnate if ever such a thing has happened — bears out the Indian characterisation by the famous passage describing what the poet does. In picturing the poet's activity he speaks of "the poet's eye" —

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Yes, the poet is primarily a seer, but we may remember that he does not stop with mere sight of the surface of reality: his is not sight so much as insight: he sees through, behind, within, and he bodies forth the forms of things unknown, and there is always

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something unfathomable about his vision — a distance beyond distance, a depth beyond depth: this constitutes the transcendence of the intellectual meaning by poetry.

Ultimately the transcendence derives from the Supreme Spirit, the Poet Creator whose words are worlds. The human poet's vision has a contact, remote or close, with "some eternal eye," as the phrase runs in the fourth line of our quotation from Savitri. Sri Aurobindo has written in The Future Poetry:¹ "The intellectual, vital, sensible truths are subordinate things; the breath of poetry should give us along with them or it may even be apart from them, some more essential truth of the being of things, their very power which springs in the last resort from something eternal in their heart and secrecy, hrdaye guhayam, expressive even in the mo-ments and transiences of life." Mark the words: "something eter-nal". In another place in The Future Poetry² we read that the poet may start from anything, "he may start from the colour of a rose, or the power or beauty of a character, or the splendour of an action, or go away from all these into his own secret soul and its most hidden movements. The one thing needful is that he should be able to go beyond the word or image he uses or the form of the thing he sees, not be limited by them, but get into the light of that which they have the power to reveal and flood them with it until they overflow with its suggestions or seem even to lose themselves and disappear into the revelation. At the highest he himself dis-appears into sight: the personality of the poet is lost in the eternity of the vision, and the Spirit of all seems alone to be there speaking out sovereignly its own secrets." Note again the turn: "the eternity of the vision." The Eternal Eye is at the back of all poetic perfection, and what this Eye visions is the Divine Presence taking flawless shape in a super-cosmos. To that shape the poet, in one way or another, converts the objects or events he depicts.

This conversion is the act put before us in the fourth and fifth lines. Every word and turn in them is worth pondering. "I caught," Sri Aurobindo makes Satyavan say. There is implied no mere touching, no mere pulling, not even mere holding. Nothing tentative is here: we have an absolute seizure, a capturing that is precise and complete. The poet gathers and grips a thing un-erringly and for good. Such a gathering and gripping suggests to us

1. Pp. 219-20. 2. P. 35.

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a shade in the adjective "eternal" which is not directly mystical but still very pertinent to the artistic process. Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine1 talks of timeless eternity and time-eternity - an eternity which is outside or beyond the time-movement and an eternity which is constituted by time itsel( going on and on without end. This latter kind - indefinitely continuing world-existence - poetry achieves for whatever it catches. The perfection of phrase in which it embodies its vision makes that vision memorable for ever: it confers immortality on its themes by expressing them in such a way that the expression gets imprinted indelibly on the human mind: it eternises for all future an occurrence or an object of the present or the past. As Landor says:

Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives,

Alcestis rises from the shades;

Verse calls them forth: 'tis verse that gives

Immortal youth to mortal maids.

Shakespeare in several places in his Sonnets declares that his powerful verse shall outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. In one sonnet he asks: who or what can save you, my lover, from being destroyed or forgotten? And he gives an answer paradoxically pointed:

O None unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Of course, the black ink here is not any and every writing fluid of a dark colour but the content of the ink-horn in which the quill of Shakespeare got dipped in order to trace on paper the quiverings of his poetic imagination.

Now to the rest of the quotation from Savitri. But before we proceed, let us hark back a little to observe an unconscious yet highly relevant pun. A pun, you know, is a play on words, either a use of the same word to suggest different meanings or a use of different words with different meanings but the same sound. A wit at the court of Louis XIV claimed that he could make a pun on any subject. Louis asked him to do so on Louis himself, the king. The

1. P. 324 (American Edition, 1949).

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pun-maker refused, saying, "Sire, the King is no subject". Here the same word "subject" is employed in the two different meanings of "theme" and "one who is ruled by a king". The second kind of punning word-play finds an excellent example in Hilaire Belloc's epitaph for himself:

When I am gone, let this of me be said:

"His sins were scarlet, but his books were read."

That the habit of punning is not unworthy of even great poets may be established from the practice of Shakespeare himself. He never misses an opportunity for a double-entendre. Three whole sonnets of his are devoted to turning to all possible uses the word "Will", including the use of it for his own name William. Sometimes in the midst of the most serious writing he indulges his pun-mania, so that his poetry is at once godlike in greatness and devilishly clever. One of the most famous instances is the sonnet-beginning,

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action,

which is perhaps too naughty to be explained by me in this young Class and luckily too much of a complex knot— too knotty — for you to unravel on your own. Of course punning goes back to a time far earlier than Shakespeare's. Even the Rishis of the Rig-veda were in a special sense pun-makers. According to Sri Aurobindo, there was throughout the hymns an esoteric cult and an exoteric religion, a hidden spiritual meaning and an outer secular suggestion. Go — wait a minute, I am not asking you to take a holiday. I am not using an English word. It is an instance of what the Rishis did: they employed the Sanskrit word Go to signify both a ray and a cow. To the ordinary primitive Aryan of the time it stood for a very useful milk-yielding animal but to the initiate it spoke of the pure white light of the Divine Knowledge. The habit of punning which the Rishis started went down as a legacy to later days and reached very ingenious forms in Classical Sanskrit literature where the slesha was to be met with at every step. The Classical Sanskrit scholars would have been delighted with Shakespeare and if they had known English they would have paid a compliment simultaneously to his vast learning and to his inexhaus-

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tible employment of that learning in the interests of the slesha, the pun: they would have called him a real pundit!

Even things like Shakespeare's "his eye I eyed" would have been admired by them. And it is from this bit of somewhat excessive punning that I wish to lead you on to the unconscious yet deeply significant double-entendre that has occurred in Sri Aurobindo's lines. Mark the phrase: "I caught for some eternal eye..." The first personal pronoun with which it starts may be taken to suggest that the catching for some eternal eye is done by the poet's own visual organ, his own faculty of sight, his own eye. The whole personality of the poet, his total self or "I", is summed up in his visual organ: the essential poetic part of a poet's being is his faculty of seeing. And it is through this faculty that he proceeds to discover in all things the significance and value these things could have or should have or do have for the Eye of the Divine Creator.

We are all the more emboldened to point out this pun because in a certain sense all poetry is punning. When we designate it as symbolic what do we mean except that through one thing which is apparent we are pushed on to another which is concealed? The same image, the same word, has a surface suggestion and a depth suggestion. And in the rest of the passage which I have built up from Sri Aurobindo I am going to read depth suggestions through the surface ones, depth suggestions which are warranted because of the adjective "eternal" which is central to the passage.

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