Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY

We have regarded Sri Aurobindo's Rose of God as a symphonic masterpiece of the highest melopoeia — the acme of Intonation or Incantation. I want now to speak a little of what Sri Aurobindo has termed undertones and overtones — "speak a little" because I do not know much about the matter and Sri Aurobindo himself has provided us with only a few hints. He has not even defined "under-tone" or "overtone". He has just given a few examples of lines with undertones, lines with overtones, lines with both together and lines with neither. The last-named can be good poetry but in them the rhythm of the outer being is insistent and what impresses us is the admirable metrical music more than the play of an inner music moulding the metre. Of course the. inner music is always there: what we are considering is its marked presence.

I should like to point out that undertones and overtones due to this marked presence may not coincide with Intonation or Incan-tation. In the latter, some spiritual cadence comes to the ear. This cadence can never be without undertones or overtones, yet all undertones and overtones are not spiritual. The spiritual cadence can be reached as the result of some strong intensity of the sen-suous, the emotional or the intellectual tone manipulating the metrical rhythm: this is what mostly happens in poetry not drawn direct from mystical sources. Poetry direct from these sources carries the spiritual cadence clearly in itself and breathes it into the metrical rhythm. But undertones and overtones are in themselves simply the inner rhythm becoming prominent. Perhaps all melo-poeia may be said to have undertones and overtones as its basis.

Let me put before you Sri Aurobindo's examples. There is excellent metrical rhythm without any undertone or overtone in Shakespeare's

Journeys end in lovers' meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

(By the way, why the wise man's son and not the wise man himself? Perhaps only the son would be interested in lovers' meeting?) Now hear Shakespeare beginning to have undertones:

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

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Again Shakespeare's

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,

has admirable metrical rhythm, but Sri Aurobindo can catch no undertones or overtones in it. Undertones run exquisitely all through the same poet's

In maiden meditation, fancy-free,

while his

In the dark backward and abysm of time

is all overtones. Both undertones and overtones are present in those lines we have quoted from Hamlet more than once:

Absent thee from felicity a while

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain.

If I may pick a longer passage to illustrate an intermixture of lines with neither undertones nor overtones and lines with either, consider the famous soliloquy of Romeo by the body of Juliet whom he takes as dead. You know the story? Juliet had consulted her family's medico to give her a sleeping draught which might fool others into believing that she had passed away. Unfortunately she could not take Romeo into her confidence: so the poor lover is beside himself with grief and resolves to follow her into the un-known:

Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe

That unsubstantial death is amorous;

And that the lean abhorred monster keeps

Thee here in dark to be his paramour?

For fear of that, I will still stay with thee;

And never from this palace of dim night

Depart again; here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chambermaids; O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest;

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And shake the yoke of inauspicous stars

From this world-wearied flesh.

I think the first two lines have practically no undertones or over-tones. The third and fourth seem to me to have undertones quite audible. The fifth appears just to keep them going, but the next two are full of them. The phrase about the worms being Juliet's chambermaids strikes me as losing them somewhat. The remaining part of the passage comes to my ear surcharged with both under-tones and overtones, the latter predominating at the very end.

How shall we distinguish undertones from overtones? We may say in general that the former reach us with a music of intensity more than wideness, delicacy rather than power: where wideness and power are there the overtones rule the rhythm. But it is not always easy to draw a line. Is intensity or delicacy lacking in the following from Shakespeare?

Take, O, take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn;

And those eyes, the break of day,

Lights that do mislead the morn;

But my kisses bring again,

Bring again;

Seals of love, but sealed in vain,

Sealed in vain.

Sri Aurobindo has declared that this whole lyric is all overtones!

Now some concluding remarks on melopoeia. In all melopoeia, language does what music is supposed to do: possess us directly with sound and enchant or elevate us. But I must emphasise that it is music transferred into terms of language. The two are different in their processes. Word-melopoeia need not always lend itself to being set to a tune. And it is a curious fact that some of the greatest melopoeics in verse have had very little ear for music — they were practically tone-deaf. Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne, Hugo, Yeats, though they have written about music itself, were all tone-deafs in more or less degree. Swinburne was such an extreme case that if he had heard the tunes, without the words, of "God Save the Queen" and "Bandemataram" played in turn to an audience of mixed Englishmen and Indians, he would have been

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able to distinguish the difference of tune only by watching whether Englishmen had stood up or Indians had done so!

If I may be permitted to be a little personal, I myself, though fairly capable of a bit of melopoeia in verse and acutely conscious of it when others create it, can scarcely be described as having in any technical sense an ear for music. Not that I run away from music — oh no, I do not share the opinion of the student who paraphrased most originally Keats's

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter...

Keats, as you must be aware, is referring to the engravings on a Grecian Urn, engravings of a procession in which musicians are playing on pipes. Their music is of course inaudible but therefore all the more enchanting to our spirit: it is filled with a sweetness to which we are constrained to put no limit or end such as sense-experience has to put to tunes actually heard. The student boldly produced the howler: "It's nice to listen to music, but much nicer not to." Well, I have in my time listened to most of the great compositions of Europe and several classics of Indian music and on a number of occasions let myself go in ecstatic "Wah-wah"'s. But never ask me to remember a tune and repeat it to you. If I try to reproduce it, I invariably create something else — a new com-position which most people consider a decomposition. My own poems, however, are saved to a great extent from being decompo-sitions by my not having enough of a melopoeic mania. Poets who are enamoured of sound run often the risk of trusting to the sound-effect to carry off a sense either trivial or thin or else prosaic. A chronic case of thinness of sense is Swinburne who in later life lost himself in complex eddies of sound with hardly perceptible mean-ing. Milton, on the other hand, had always substantial significance, but at times he permitted it to be prose set to organ music — grand resonance sweeping merely intellectual matter along. Tennyson suffered from triviality. He once declared to his friend Carlyle: "I think I am the greatest master, after Shakespeare, of the rhythmic phrase in poetry, but I have really nothing to say." I may add that Carlyle rated Tennyson highly and saw him as a mighty bard constantly "cosmicising the chaos within him". Perhaps what im-pressed Carlyle was not Tennyson's poetic speech so much as his

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frequent capacity for silence. Tennyson used often to visit Carlyle and they would sit at either end of the fireplace, smoking away. Two or three hours of an evening they would thus spend, each hidden in his own cloud of smoke and uttering not a word. At the close of the evening they would shake hands and say, "What a grand time we have had together!" Carlyle, as is well known, spent almost a lifetime of writing and lecturing on the virtues of silence. To him, Tennyson, no matter what he wrote, could not but be a sage because of those dumb evenings.

Here I may warn you against confusing Tennysonian triviality or Swinburnian thinness with what is musically elusive in verse. There are snatches of song in Shakespeare whose meaning cannot be caught in any sensible paraphrase but which produce no im-pression of being trivial or thin. On the contrary we are aware of an intensely significant emotion, but the emotion defies reason, so that to sober thought Shakespeare seems talking nonsense while actually there is a subtlety of mood seizable only by a sensitive intuition. An instance is the song from Measure for Measure which Sri Aurobindo has cited for overtones all through: "Take, O, take those lips away..." The poet Housman, in a critical lecture, asks how eyes could mislead the morn and how kisses could be brought again. He finds the notions nonsensical. But he is not foolish enough to condemn the song. Far from it. He considers it wonder-ful poetry. Only, he concludes that the function of poetry is to appeal to our solar plexus and that its essential work is not to say anything intelligible but to transfuse emotion. Here he is mis-taken. If Housman had said apropos of this lyric, "to transfuse emotionally a vision-mood beyond the mere mind", he would have hit the nail on the head: he would have made the head feel all intellectual sense knocked out by the hitting but he would have pierced through it to the thrilled dreaming heart of the matter and touched there something received from poetry's ultimate source which is overhead.

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