Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-EIGHT

Let us continue from where we left off in the last lecture — or, if you think that what I said last time left you in a bewilderedly broken condition of mind, I shall refer not to the last lecture but to the last fracture. Perhaps my words now will set some of the broken pieces together.

Mallarme's is a mysticism of a very mystifying kind Before him there had been mystical poetry, but except for Blake it had not the quality of mystification which this Frenchman brought into play. His was a step necessary in the evolution of the poetic conscious-ness towards what Sri Aurobindo has called the Future Poetry, a poetry written not only with its substance drawn from beyond the mind but also with its very form, its very mode of expression drawn from there. Mallarme on the whole falls short of the Aurobindonian spiritual revelation. But that was to be expected. He is a transition-stage — perfect so far as he goes. And his success is all the more notable because he wrote in French. French is the speech par excellence of mental nettete and ordonnance, the clearness and orderliness belonging to the thinking mind. The French people, by and large, have not yet accepted Mallarme. We have a few critics who go mad over him but the majority of Frenchmen look on him as a sort of traitor to the literary genius of France and condemn his work as mostly a failure. But Mallarme's wrestle with a tongue such as French had its own advantages for his admirers. This tongue imposes certain restrictions on anarchy of expression. Its stress on shapeliness, its insistence on connectedness saved Mallarme from running riot in ambiguity. English lends itself far more easily to the ambiguous, so that English Mysticism often seems to deserve being spelt Misty Schism — Schism (pronounced Sizm) meaning in general a separation from the main body of a doctrine, especially a religious doctrine. The nature of the French language is ever a check against becoming involuted in idea and expression and construction. Thus Mallarme was forced, by the very medium in which he worked, to produce with each poem a systematic whole of enigmatic imagery.

Of course, it was because he was a true artist — unlike the Dadaists and Surrealists who came in the wake of his Symbolism — that he aimed at the significant form that goes with all Art; but

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if he had not worked in French his enigmatic imagery might have created much less of a perceptibly systematic whole: he would have been tempted to greater laxity in total contour. His achievement lay in making his imagery enigmatic not by a chaos of wandering phantasmagorias but by a cosmos of related figurative queernesses. He broke through the surface of intelligible statement not with a number of haphazard punctures but with a collection of piercing points which when added up constituted a big aperture sucking the reader into a world unknown to the thinking mind, particularly the French thinking mind. If we may indulge in a bit of punning, a poem of Mallarme's was at the same time a systematic W-h-o-l-e and a systematic H-o-l-e. His art may be described as a sort of camouflage by which you are made to see a well-built well-carved slab of stone and invited to step on it and the moment you step on it you find that what you took to be a stone is nothing save a grey gap with a sharp outline. Straight away you drop through the apparently solid into a depth where your mind can find no hand-hold or foot-hold.

Assiduously Mallarme took care to make his readers' hands grip emptiness and their feet dance in a vacuum. In this he differs from the poetry to which Sri Aurobindo points. That poetry is unclear, if at all, because it seeks to reveal what cannot be rendered quite discernible to the ordinary mind; it wants to reveal the ultra-mental to the fullest extent — without mentalising it but also without seeking non-clarity for its own sake or as if non-clarity were the very condition of spiritual speech. Mallarme had no notion that when you go far beyond the mind you enter into a realm where Truth can disclose itself massively as well as minutely. On the Spirit's Himalayan heights there is a divine power of expression by which what is divinely inexpressible by mental words stands internally self-lit in living language. Mallarme did not know the Everests and Kanchanjangas and Gaurishankers of the Spirit. His mystical domain — except on a few rare occasions when he touched the Aurobindonian light — was what Sri Aurobindo terms the middle worlds, the occult planes whose self-utterance is often in itself a crypticism, a baffling pattern. Mallarme is keenly conscious of this crypticism and sought always to avoid being clear though never falling into the chaotic. Obscurity he felt as the key to the mystery which he intuited beyond the thinking mind. And his preoccupation with the obscure is well hit off in an anecdote.

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Once he was lecturing. Looking at the faces of his audience he got the impression that they seemed to make out what he was saying. A member of the audience had taken notes for publication. At the end of his lecture Mallarme asked for those notes, saying: "I want to put some obscurity into them."

To make a fetish of obscurity in order to poetise the mysterious is to misconstrue the proper mode of poetic embodiment. In our own day we are frequently faced with amorphous stuff, shapeless disjointed descriptions, a jumble of phraseological fragments. And we are told that this kind of thing is necessary in order to convey vividly the broken state of the modern mind and the modern world. Our life is all in bits: our poetry about it should also be a splintered composition: how else can we faithfully transmit to the reader a sense of our subject? But such an argument is just like saying: If there is a heap of pieces and we want to reflect them in a mirror, the mirror should also be a broken one! The truth is that in order to reflect exactly and effectively a world in fragments and a life in splinters our art should be a very bright whole, a polished intact mirror. Art lies in communicating with a perfection of expressive form whatever it takes for its subject: intense skill of description, penetrative cunning of suggestion, synthesising genius of presentation, these are the artist's means of catching faithfully even the amorphous and disjointed, even the elusive and cryptic. Not that art should always be simple and immediate in its effects: it can be complicated and oblique, but whatever form it adopts in response to its theme and according to the temper of the artist must have a fundamental relatedness and an ultimate wholeness: , otherwise Form, which is the very mark of Art, would be lacking and there would be no Art but merely a spurt and splash of coloured convolutions.

Mallarme was too much of a genuine poet to lack Form. And, by its very nature, much of his Matter could not help looking cryptic. But within his subtly realised wholes he tended to go in deliberately for entanglements under the mistaken notion that thus alone could he represent what to the thinking mind would be an entangled domain of poetic reverie.

The two main means of the Mallarmean obscurity were the queer collocation of images and the queer collocation of words. Or, if by poetic words we understand sounds charged with sugges-

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tions of images, we may say that Mallarme's art was a new manner of employing words: to be more accurate, a new status given to the function of words.

Words are always of great importance to a poet. Now that the topic has come up I may as well treat it in general no less than in particular reference to Mallarme. Some of the things I shall say may look like a repetition of several points made at the beginning of our Poetry Class. But as these points are basic, a little repetition in a novel way will not do any harm. Besides, I count upon your having forgotten at least half of them.

Perhaps the best distinction we may draw between prose and poetry is that in prose the words are only a means to an end whereas in poetry they are as much an end as a means. Of course in prose too we have to attend to our language, but we attend in order that the thoughts we wish to express may get better clothed. And here we can always distinguish between the thought and the expression. The same thought can be expressed in prose in different ways. Poetry uses words with another spirit. Here words in themselves are the object of attention. Clearness and orderliness of language are not our whole aim. Colour, music, subtlety of suggestion, appeal to emotion, stir of imagination — all these are to be compassed by poetic speech. And, what is more essential, the words are to be not a clothing for whatever is to be said but themselves the very body of it. They cannot be cut apart from the substance as you can extract the substance of prose from prose-words or as you can take off your clothes and jump into your bath. Poetic words are not like a shirt which has some value for your social life but is not essential to your very existence. It can be pulled off and you will still be yourself, though perhaps not so smart to some eyes. Poetic words are not even like your trousers which are a somewhat more necessary part of civilised living. Poetic words, with their strong charge of beautiful emotion, can make you pant but cannot be equated to your pants! They are a vesture that is intrinsic to the body. This vesture is like your skin. I do not think that if you tried to take off your skin in order to get naked and enjoy a good bath, you would succeed famously. I am afraid you would be bathed in blood instead of in water. And most probably a thorough loss of skin will mean loss of life as well. Poetic substance and poetic words are joined together just as the limbs are joined to the skin: the two are inseparable and the

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moment you remove the words the substance is no longer what it was and may even suffer death.

If we may change the metaphor a little, the words in poetry are not transmissive as in prose but incarnative. They are not a jeep which you can jump into and drive to a place and then jump out of: they are like your legs with which you can go to places but out of which you can never leap. A further change of metaphor will perhaps bring more pointedly home the difference between mere prose, literary prose and true poetry. Mere prose is like the average man, either simple or clever. God has made him in His own image, but the human copy and the divine original are quite distinguishable. Literary prose is like those remarkable beings whom India describes as Vibhutis. They are human-looking, yet a breath of the superhuman animates and drives them. They act by inspiration. However, the inspiration is a power which gets into them without their being one with it. The two are still separable. Not so with those rare beings whom India knows as Avatars. The Avatar is the Divine incarnate: the Divine is fused with the human and it is impossible to say where the human ends and the Divine begins. The Divine is the human, the human is the Divine. Poetry is language in which the substance attains Avatarhood — in two senses. First, when you touch the limbs, as it were, of a poem you touch the very Spirit moving them: the words of poetry are the substance itself exteriorised: the substance cannot be what it is without the words being what they are. Secondly, the manner in which poetry lives and moves is as the manner of a god — the words make a totality faultless in the shape and rhythm of every detail. The quality of Avatarhood endows words in poetry with extreme importance. Not certainly words as sheer sounds, how-ever lovely. Words as living expressive units are poetic — and words particularly as expressive of something else than what is called an idea. Prose consists of using language as an instrument of ideas. Poetry consists of using language not as an instrument of anything but as the audible self of something else than ideas. Both these aspects come into a story told about Mallarme and the - painter Degas.

Degas was one of those who attended Mallarme's Tuesday-evenings and listened to his exposition of the Poetic Art. He was already an excellent painter, but now he was fired with the aspiration to write poetry. He made several attempts and found that they

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were unsuccessful. He was sufficiently a student of poetry to realise that he had failed. But he could not understand the cause of his failure. So he came to Mallarme and, scratching his head and making a sour face, said to the poet: "Cher Maitre, how is it that I have so many fine ideas and yet cannot write poetry?" Mallarme, gently putting one hand on the dejected shoulders of the painter and with the other caressing his own little beard, replied: "My good friend, poetry is not written with ideas: it is written with words."

What Mallarme meant was that poetry is an art in which lan-guage is a prime force and which has to do with deeper and subtler subjective processes than ideas. So long as ideas dominate one, one will only create prose. Only when one looks on the medium of expression with a particularly sensitive absorption in it, one can be in the mood to create poetry. And if one were genuinely open to inspiration and not just a windbag, one would employ words that manifest what lies beyond the range of the ideative intellect. This distinction between the windbag and the artist is significant. Other-wise the emphasis on words can lead to mere wordiness, a luxu-riance in language divorced from the supra-intellectual. To escape from mere ideas is not automatically to produce poetry: poetry is a matter of inwardness becoming outwardness. And the true inwardness holds in itself the words of poetry ready for outward pro-jection. Though, when we start writing, we may not be aware of their presence inside, the words of poetry are themselves from deep within. So an approach that is wholly verbal in the outward sense is not Mallarme's. What Mallarme intended is to shift the focus from ideas and to use the spirit of language, free from the idea-grip, as a mode of invoking the expressive activity of the supra-intellectual. A poet's interest in words is always such a mode of invocation. The poet lets the spirit of language haunt him and then his eyes become entranced and begin vaguely to turn words into vibrant conjurors of strange visions which stimulate the mind to peer into mysteries and bring from the dominions of dreams the passionate patterns of a life more dynamic, more meaningful than the movements of the waking world. Yes, a poet is always an invoker of the beautiful beyond through the magic of word-intoxication. But all poets do not aim at writing the kind of poetry that is Mallarme's ideal. And we may say that Mallarmean poetry is not the only type worth producing: la Rive et le Mystere can be

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sung forth in many tones. But this is a type eminently worth noting as a stage in the evolution towards the Aurobindonian Future Poetry. And in order to write from beyond the mind his advice about the importance of words is valuable. To still the ideative intelligence and concentrate on words with a will to make them reveal something which that intelligence cannot give: this is an aesthetic sadhana which is bound to be creative in the short or long run. And this is precisely the truth that is behind another saying of Mallarme's: "Yield the initiative to words."

You may ask: "Why bother about words? If we concentrate on what is beyond the intelligence, is it not enough?" No — we may get the touch of the supra-intellectual but not of its speech. The poet is one who approaches the supra-intellectual with a keen word-sense, an ear intent on expressive sounds. Without this move-ment towards the secret presence of pre-existent words in the Beyond, you can have Yogic sadhana but not the aesthetic sa-dhana necessary for poetry. You have to be an ardent lover of words, an audacious master of words, a sensitive and receptive slave of words — hearing at all times the vague wandering rustle of their wings in the profundities and the distances of your being. Words of light and power and sweetness already caught by past poets must float about you, tune your heart to their magic wafts until it is thrilled to a concentrated calling of luminous and lordly and lovely words still uncaught, still waiting for human seizure in the revelatory secrecies that wrap like some starry empyrean the ultimate hush where all splendours fall asleep. It is not enough to look inwardly upward to the constellate spaces: he who would be a poet has to strain his ear together with his eye and keep dreaming of the music of the spheres.

"Music": the term is most appropriate in a lecture on Mal-larm6's poetry. For the sort of poetry he wanted to write by yielding the initiative to words is perhaps best indicated in another saying of his, which his friend and semi-follower Paul Valery paraphrases: "Our object is to recover from Music our own right." This means that somehow Music has monopolised what should belong to Poetry also. But when Mallarme's dictum is quoted, people imagine that he wished to create very melodious verse: what we have called Melopoeia. Well, Mallarme did create certain wonderfully rhythmed lines, but if we wish to have Melopoeia in French we do not particularly go to Mallarme. We go more to

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Verlaine than to him — Verlaine with lines like:

Et O les voix d'enfants chantant dans la cupole!

(And O the voices of children singing in the cupola!)

Expressive rhythm, of course, Mallarme always aimed at, but he never tried to rival the melodiousness, the sheer sound-rapture of Music. In fact, no poet can; nor should any poet regret that he cannot. Poetry has another way with sound. But poetry is capable of a very marked richness of audible values: Mallarme is not especially after them — what he is after is a subtle movement of words. For, what struck him as the goal of Poetry is not musical sound but musical meaning. What would you say is the meaning of Music? How does Music convey its meaning? No words that you can understand are spoken. No ideas that you can formulate are conveyed. And yet you feel that something momentous, something significant is communicated. Of course, since poetry is written with words that have a certain connotation and not with mere independent sounds, musical meaning cannot be transmitted to the full in Poetry. But to achieve through Poetry as much as possible a catching up of our consciousness beyond formulable ideas, through Poetry to suffuse words as much as possible with the feeling of a wordless Beyond by means of a design of images accompanied by a minimum of directly intelligible discourse — this is to recover from Music the right that is Poetry's as well. And this is what Mallarme had in mind when he wrote in a sonnet that the ideal of the Poet is:

Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu...

(To give a purer sense to the speech of the tribe...)

Mallarme divided the use of words into two categories. One he designated Rapportage, the other Poesie. Under Rapportage he included all language that informs, describes, instructs, argues, explains: language whose principal motive is to make us understand something, and that goes about its business straightforwardly and with no special attention to rhythm. Poetry works by suggestion, allusion, evocation, and brings in both shadowiness of

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image and subtlety of rhythm. The more we divest speech of demonstrative intention, of rational content, the more poetic we are. Much of the world's poetic output, even at its greatest, is a mixture of Rapportage and Poesie. The lines, the passages of Poetry at its quintessential are very few. The ideal poet, in Mal-larme's opinion, should go on purifying further and further the speech of the race, the speech even of the poetic tribe, and arrive at a technique of shadowy representation, an art of haunting obscurity. Then he would produce Pure Poetry. And in doing so he would be the true Symbolist.

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