Talks on Poetry

TALK TWELVE

We gave — before a bit of digression -some instances of markedly musical lines of poetry.

Now I want to recall you to the fact which my quotations prior to the musical lines may have served to spotlight — namely, that lines with no particular music can be great in poetic effect. Let me cite some more to render that fact vivid. I shall take instances picked out by a critic whose name I forget and I shall add one or two the critic seems to have forgotten. On several occasions we have drawn on King Lear's speeches. Here are three lines at almost the beginning of his speech in the midst of the storm on the heath. He is contrasting, in relation to himself, the unruly elements to his ungrateful daughters. After challenging Nature's forces to do their worst he cries:

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,

I never gave you kingdoms, called you children . . .

There is not much melody here, but the emotion very forcefully comes through and its especial means is the feminine ending of each line, the unstressed extra syllable falling over: the very move-ment of the speech gets charged with an emotion that breaks down with the completion of every significant phrase, and the breaking down occurs strikingly at a word — "daughters", "unkindness", "children" — reminding Lear of his own tragedy.

Wordsworth packs a world of pathos in the plain line about the old farmer Michael who, after a life of labour and loving hope, was heart-broken because of his wastrel son. No complaint did he utter, but often to the unfinished sheepfold, which he and his son had started building together, he went

And never lifted up a single stone.

The deep dejection of the brave man is piercingly imaged with masterly restraint through the fact that not even a tiny piece of matter could be raised from its dead passivity. And the pathos is intensified by the collocation of "never", with its background of long time, and "a single stone" which brings our mind to a pin-

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point of space: even though hours and hours may elapse, all their duration cannot help the doom by which an infinitesimal object will remain unmoved. A play of antithetical imagination involving the fundamental framework of physical existence cuts to our hearts.

Sri Aurobindo, in Baji Prabhou, grips us with many lines that have no special music yet are of notable poetic quality. I give a few from a speech of Baji himself:

God within

Rules us, who in the Brahmin and the dog

Can, if He will, show equal godhead...

A dog-lover, I feel a little hurt by the contrast which the dog will be understood by all readers as making to the Brahmin. But one is at liberty to read the contrast as one likes: Sri Aurobindo provides no direct hint as to whether the Brahmin is the higher pole or the lower. At least in South India at present the Brahmin will certainly be regarded as lower than the dog. I for one would adapt Shakespeare's Brutus and say: "Not that I love the Brahmin less, but that I love the dog more." So I would choose to take the two as contrasts in kind rather than contrasts in quality.

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part...

We have a mixture of the homely and the intense, a mixture of hopelessness and tenderness, and it is all the more effective because of the line's total run in monosyllables. There seems to be no fuss in the statement, yet a catch in the heart again and again. This double play is brought about, on the one hand, by the simplicity derived from the homeliness of the language as well as from its monosyllabicism and, on the other hand, by the stopping not only at four significant points — "Since there's no help, / come, / let us kiss / and part" — but also a little with each syllable since each syllable is a word by itself.

To throw into relief the poetic nature of all these lines, however unmarked they may be in musical rhythm, let me throw at you two lines by two famous poets. One is by Meredith: Arthur Symons thinks it the ugliest in English poetry:

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Or is't the widowed's dream for her new mate?

The rhythm here is harsh and halting without serving any purpose, and the expressions "is't" and "widowed's" are acmes of awkward-ness. The substance is itself not unpoetic, but the language is hardly appealing. If the dream were conveyed like this to the new mate dreamt of, he might run away. At least I would: I may be the widowed's dream but the widowed will appear to me like a night-mare through such a line. I have no prejudices against widows, unless my wife wants to become one — though I am not as fond of them as is a Bengali poet who is everywhere dragging in the word bidhava. If the day comes to an end, the earth is widowed of the sun. If a flower is plucked from a plant, the plant becomes a widow. I suppose if a banana were picked off a plate, the plate would be a widow too.

This topic reminds me of an incident in a law-court. The ac-cused, who had a pretty flimsy case, protested to the judge: "My Lord, I have not said a single false word. Everything I have said is true. I have always been wedded to truth." The Judge dryly remarked: "Very likely. But the point is: how long is it since you have been a widower?"

The second line I wish to quote for comparison with the truly poetic though apparently proselike is Wordsworth's notorious:

A Mr. Wilkerson, a clergyman...

Its rhythm is pleasant enough - a foreigner may even delight in its m's and r's and n's, but the sheer prosaicality of its meaning makes the technical chime and the metrical swing go waste on anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of English. It proves how humour-less Wordsworth could sometimes be, obsessed as he was with the momentousness of his own message.

Here I may touch on a point once raised by the critic Middleton Murry. He said that what offends us as bad poetry is not really lines like the one on Mr. Wilkerson, which is quite evidently empty of poetic quality. What offends us, in Murry's view; is falsetto. Falsetto means literally a forced shrill voice above one's natural range and we may in our context understand it as a use of poetic-sounding language to cover up mere fancifulness. One of the worst lines of poetry, to Murry's mind, is this from Stephen Phillips's Marpessa:

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The mystic yearning of the garden wet...

Let us reflect on the verse. Is Phillips indeed pretentious? The feeling that he records seems to have nothing false in it. When a garden is wet with either dew or rain, a fine aroma wafts out and if one believes that plants and trees are alive and can have blind longings one can regard that exquisite freshness of scent as the yearning of a soul-element in them towards some unknown Power — and especially if it is night-time the darkness itself may serve to represent the Power that is unknown. Yes, the feeling behind Phillips's line is not illegitimate. What about his expression of it?

I remember a passage in the French writer Proust expressing very well a slightly different form of this feeling. It runs: "The ecstasy of breathing, through the sound of falling rain, the per-fume of invisible and everlasting lilies." Here there is a wet gar-den in a darkness — the rain-washed lilies are "invisible"; but the ecstasy is of the man and not of the flowers. Where the flowers are concerned, the adjective "everlasting" transfers the man's mystical feeling to them, yet the flowers become not exactly practi-tioners of mysticism but themselves objects towards which the man's practice is directed: their natural aspect is shown under the shadow of the supernatural. And this transformation is begun by the presence of the rain which permeates them with a sky-quality and it is more intensely prepared by the epithet "invisible" which has not only the immediate suggestion of being hidden in dark-ness, in night, but also the remote suggestion of belonging to another order than the visible universe. There is also the piquant felicity of matching a sound with a scent.

Phillips, if his line is taken by itself, has no preparatory finesse: he just blurts out that the wet garden is mystically yearning. Proust's account is more delicately, more skilfully tuned: Phillips's is more matter-of-fact in its mysticism, taking miraculous things for granted. This mode of expression is not necessarily faulty: to put before us straight away an occult or spiritual phenomenon without any opening ceremony can be deeply effective provided the vision has been deep enough to catch the very pulse and posture of the phenomenon presented, and provided the expres-sion is sensitive and precise enough to convey the concreteness of the depth-vision. But Phillips thrusts into the phrase "garden wet" something more than it can hold. Merely by being called wet a

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garden does not come home to us as capable of mystic yearning. Hence the adjective "mystic" seems too facilely introduced: it does not get the support it needs in what follows: it remains a tantalising decoration instead of being a satisfying disclosure. Phillips's phrase, though beautiful at first glance, is found to be too much a thing of light-and-shadow surface when the promise it holds out is of a glimmering profundity. Perhaps Murry is over-critical, but there is sufficient truth in his remark to keep us aware of the obligations of poetic speech. Phillips stands convicted, even though we may not condemn him very harshly.

However, while finding Phillips guilty under the conditions im-posed by Murry, we must not fall into the mistake of passing final judgment on his line until we see it in its own context. Taken in isolation I may say that the somewhat vaguely pretentious epithet "mystic" should be replaced by the more general yet not intrin-sically less suggestive "nameless" — the only substitute which keeps to the idea of an attribute transcending the concerns of the natural world. Still, before we accept the version —

The nameless yearning of the garden wet —

let us look at the original line in the company of those preceding and succeeding it:

Wounded with beauty in the summer night

Young Idas tossed upon his couch and cried,

"Marpessa, O Marpessa!" From the dark

The floating smell of flowers invisible,

The mystic yearning of the garden wet,

The moonless-passing night — into his brain

Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned

In the dim summer; 'twas the moment deep

When we are conscious of the secret dawn

Amid the darkness that we feel is green.

This is how Marpesa opens. Idas is a youth who has fallen in love with the wonderful beauty of the girl Marpessa. She is wooed also by the God Apollo and has to choose between a mortal lover and an immortal. Idas has been restless through the night of summer with his own yearning for the perfection of Marpessa, a perfection

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worthy of even a god's love. But he has kept to his couch. Now in the darkness before dawn, a darkness of surrounding greenery, a poignant sweetness floats to him from the garden that is hidden from sight. Mark that, interestingly enough, Phillips too speaks of "flowers invisible", rich yet innocent entities kin to Proust's invi-sible lilies. Phillips, like Proust, prepares for turning his flowers into mystical presences: the only difference is that he pictures them as mystically yearning instead of being mystically yearned after. But this difference does not invalidate his introduction of mysticism. Besides, the word "mystic" is rather general, though intense, and if the intensity gets justified by the context, it can pass all the more easily and claim the excuse of generality. After the lines before this word, it seems a natural intensification of what is suggested by "invisible" just as much as "everlasting" appears such in Proust. And in the lines which follow it we have the "moment deep" no less than the "secret dawn" to lend it sus-tenance by a throw-back affinity. Further, all that is without is attuned to all that is within: Idas and the garden, sharing the same summer night, are permeated with the same delightful ache for a distant flawlessness, an unattained beauty haunting them. And it is the strengthening of his own longing by the corresponding sweet-ness and poignancy around him that draws him from his couch: they enter his brain and grow one with him and call him forth. What is outward goes inward into him and what is inward in him leans outward. And all that is both inward and outward not only supports the term "mystic" but demands it for its own revelation: the term lights it up and gives it completion.

Perhaps "nameless" may be still recommended as doing the needful without committing the poet so much. But note the metri-cal place where it stands. One syllable of it concludes the first foot, the other initiates the second. Now, in the next line, "moonless" stands exactly in the same metrical place. "Nameless", therefore, may be thought on a back-look to be a small defect disturbing the balance of the rhythm by imparting a sense of monotony to "moonless" without sufficient justification. Moreover, "nameless" in the full context of Phillips's passage is a little colourless, missing the focal point the vision requires. Perhaps Phillips, for all the beauty of his passage, is on the whole less poetic in substance than Proust, even less bold in his mystical evocation, but he does manage to ring true in that line.

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We may dismiss Murry's charge. Ladies and gentlemen, Phillips is acquitted. The case is closed.

I have brought in this discussion to train your critical faculty. When judging poetry you must look at it from various sides and seek for parallel expressions which may throw light on a particular phrase. This discussion is one of the many ways in which I have been trying to make you face poetic speech. Unless you learn to turn a thing this way and that, you cannot be said to have acquired the familiarity which, unlike the proverbial kind which breeds contempt, breeds deeper love, for our aim is to come to grips with poetry in its single intuitive act which has a myriad manifestations not only dealing with a diversity of objects and states but also displaying a many-sidedness of approach and manner, quality and source of inspiration. Shelley has spoken of understanding that grows bright, Gazing at many truths.

I want your understanding, which I may take as bright already, to grow yet brighter by coming into contact with more truths than it has done so far.

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