Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-FOUR

I have been making for some time a daylong and occasionally even nightlong chase of Blake's "Tyger". Listen to the poem and tell me if the fiery fellow is not worth the chase:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The various questions leaping out of the poem have drawn from my mind a multitude of answers. And it is a great temptation to lay these answers before you. But once I start I shall not stop for at least six hours. Let me keep away from you the endless fascination

Page 203

that those six stanzas have held for me. I shall content — or rather discontent — myself now with a few words.

To me The Tyger is not about a natural beast of prey standing as a symbol of all those forces in the world, including psychological ones within ourselves, that are at once destructive and admirable. Nor does it set out for me an earthly carnivore to symbolise a supernatural power which is either a grandiose Satanism or a wrathful Godhead. I believe this poem to be directly about a supernatural power and using only the form and name of a natural beast of prey and merely the semblance of world-forces. Blake's Tyger, in my view, is a bewildering projection, by Divinity, of a luminous anger, a beautiful violence, drawn from the highest light and the deepest mystery, against a Satanism of perverted brilliance — of armed rebellious stars — dwelling within an unearthly Night whose dense obscurity of entangling error is like a huge forest. The whole movement of creating the Tyger to oppose and defeat those stars and reduce them to throwing down their weapons and shed-ding tears — this movement to out-Satan Satan, as it were, in a divine manner takes place for me in Heaven. And it is really complementary though seeming contradictory to the other which made the Divine Lamb, the manifestation of perfect gentleness and peacefulness. It is part of a supernatural history prior to earth and its jungles and animals and men. Of course, what once went forth in Heaven would be ready to strike on earth if any being here repeated in its own way the starry perversion that occurred there. But basically the six stanzas are a poetic-mystic visualisation of a supra-terrestrial drama. And this drama, in spite of the poet's knowing the supreme hand or eye behind it, shakes his heart and mind and leads him to wonder whether the God who could be so tender could also be so terrible.

To elaborate and prove my thesis, with a close analysis of the poem's internal structure of idea, image, attitude and with a host of references to Blake's other works as well as to Christian reli-gious thought in general and Milton's Paradise Lost in particular, I shall prepare a special set of Talks which I may one day expand into a book for the scrutiny of Blake-experts.¹ Today we shall not go any further on a safari to hunt the ultimate significance of Blake's symbol.

1. PUBLISHERS' NOTE — K. D. Sethna has brought out by now a book on the the subject under the title, Blake's Tyger: A Christological Interpretation.

Page 204

You may say: "Why bring in so much mystification? Is it not better to take the poem as a fairly simple though highly imagina-tive depiction of the physical Tyger as opposed to the physical Lamb and of the puzzled awe such an animal inspires about its Creator who is the Creator too of its mild opposite? Why not stop with letting this animal symbolise the great destructive forces of Nature? It is a pity to complicate matters instead of adopting a reading such as even an intelligent child may find congenial! After all, isn't this poem taught often at school?"

Well, I have much sympathy with the intelligent child and can enjoy several sallies of its mind. But its condition may be com-pared to that of a grown-up Indian with whom I once went to a Zoo. This chap had come from a village and knew elementary English, but he was a pretty bright person, though perhaps not "burning bright". We had a look at those interesting jumpy crea-tures with a convenient pocket in their tummies where they keep their young ones — the well-known creatures from Australia, the Kangaroos. My friend read correctly the board on which their name had been written. Then we moved to another part of the Zoo. Tigers were there, in a big area ringed with tall iron bars. This appeared a sufficiently safe arrangement, but the keepers had still felt obliged to put up a board near the area, warning the public not to go too near. The board said: DANGEROUS. My friend spelled out the word slowly, letter by letter, and very brightly exclaimed: "Oh, on that side we had Kangaroos and now here we have Dangaroos!"

My friend got hold of something, no doubt, to distinguish in his mind the striped carnivorous quadrupeds before him, but because of his imperfect acquaintance with English he did not catch the full fearfulness of their symmetry. Analogously, with regard to Blake's Tyger, if in spite of knowing English we are inadequately conver-sant with Blake's visionary symbolic mind and method of expres-sion and with the bulk of his poetic creation in which his highly original mythopoeic and occult-spiritual form of Christianity finds vivid and profound though also at times fantastic play, we shall fail to gauge the inmost light and might of the beast of prey he sets poetically before us.

Of course, the immediate charm that comes from the simplicity of the exoteric reading gets destroyed. But "immediate charm" cannot be the final criterion in the interpretation of poetry such as

Page 205

Blake's — or that of the ancient Indian Rishis. Many people have protested against Sri Aurobindo's interpretation of the Rigveda. For thousands of years a paradoxical situation has obtained in India. The very name "Rigveda" connotes "Poetry of Knowl-edge" and tradition has it that this Poetry is something heard from the mouths of the Gods. And yet the distinction has been made between the Veda's way of religion and the Upanishad's way of spirituality. The Veda is called the way of Ritual and Worship or of Ceremonial Works, while the Upanishads are the way of Inner Illumination and Knowledge. Curiously, this latter way is known also as Vedanta, which means the end or concluding portion of Veda. Yet people have held that the Rishis of the Veda were semi-barbarous priests chanting excitedly about the pleasure of having a large number of cows which would provide them with the ancient Indian equivalent of the American Milk Bar — the pleasure of having a lot of horses, especially a horse called Dadhikravan which had the peculiarity of being a marcher always towards the dawn — the pleasure of a drink known as Soma with which the semi-barbarian priests got so intoxicated that they thought they were partners of heaven with Indra and Agni and Surya — the pleasure of all kinds of wealth including a strange kind which was hidden within wonderful oceans and rivers — the pleasure of smiting dusky Dravidians whom they dubbed Dasyus and Dasas ("ene-mies" and "slaves") and even sometimes described as quite nose-less! This view of the ancient Rishis has satisfied Indians and, much more, Europeans who have turned scholars of Indian anti-quity. But surely there was something fishy in the contradiction between, on the one side, the age-old reverence in which the Rishis were held as well as the high repute the Veda had acquired and, on the other, the "immediate charm" of the simple terre-a-terre reading of the Vedic terms. Sri Aurobindo has come along and found that the cows and horses no less than the other themes of the Vedic hymns are deeply symbolic and all the elements of the Vedic life as depicted by the Rishis belong essentially to a super-nature and carry occult-spiritual significances. A genuine pity, this complicated esoteric explication by Sri Aurobindo. But what are we to do about truth?

One thing certainly we can blame Blake for — just as we can blame the Vedic Rishis. In The Tyger he has adopted a form which could tempt the unwary to take a non-symbolic view except insofar

Page 206

as the animal apostrophised may stand for Nature's destructive forces in general. Perhaps some friend of Blake's did blame him for it. He seems to have soon dropped being easy on the surface. He snarled and gnarled his surfaces so much in his later works that we are simply obliged to dig for meanings inside. If his Tyger was all that I have made it out to be, he should not have let the physical impression of the animal come fairly strong despite the teasing elusive terms round about and the challenging fifth stanza about the stars. What he should perhaps have done was to write a piece like the following by a contemporary poet. See whether you can make head or tail of it beyond that it deals with no fauna of our earth. It is called Green Tiger and runs:

There is no going to the Gold

Save on four feet

Of the Green Tiger in whose heart's hold

Is the ineffable heat.

Raw with a burning body

Ruled by no thought —

Hero of the huge head roaring

Ever to be caught!

Backward and forward he struggles,

Till Sun and Moon tame

By cutting his neck asunder:

Then the heart's flame

Is free and the blind gap brings

A new life's beat —

Red Dragon with eagle-wings

Yet tiger-feet!

Time's blood is sap between

God's flower, God's root —

Infinity waits but to crown

This Super-brute.

There you have supernatural symbolism with a vengeance . I shall leave you to tackle the Green Tiger as best you can. I shall

Page 207

only give you the comment Sri Aurobindo dictated on the poetic quality of it: "Very forceful and original poem. There may be some doubt as to whether the images have coalesced into a perfect whole. But it may be that if they did, the startling originality of their combination might lose something of its vehement force, and in that case it must be allowed to stand as it is. At any rate it is an extremely original and powerful achievement." (9-4-1950)

This poem lands us pat in the midst of two modern movements — Symbolism and Surrealism. The term "Symbolism" is here used in a special connotation: the adjective from it is not "Symbolic". What Blake's Tyger vividly anticipates and what Green Tiger exem-plifies is a particular way of being symbolic that has come to be known as Symbolist. The adjective is framed after its original from France, and Symbolism in the special sense is a mode of poetry consummated first in the France of the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It is associated with the names of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme, Valery and some others. But it is not exactly a single mode of poetry. There are varieties of Sym-bolism and not all continue or consummate the Blakean type. Let me give you the main four heads.

(1)Synaesthesis. This means union and fusion of sensations. Here colours, sounds, smells, tastes answer to one another and get interpreted in one another's terms. One sense evokes several others as though all were inextricably associated with it or actually implicit in it. That again points to a sixth sense beyond the five, a basic sense which has got differentiated into five kinds: the Manas of Indian psychology, the fundamental Sense-mind at the back of all sensation and independent of them and even capable of func-tioning without the sense-organs. Synaesthesis is Inter-sense Sym-bolism or Inter-sense Correspondence. Rimbaud is perhaps its most powerful practitioner. He set forth the doctrine of it in the famous words: "The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and planned derangement of all the senses."

(2)Horizontal Harmony. This means that everything in the universe reflects every other thing. The reflection implies, on the one hand, that one object can stand for the significance of another: all similes and metaphors proceed on the assumption of a horizon-tal harmony, for they seek to illuminate each object in terms of an apparently different one. That points to a single manifold of form-activity — a universal Nature-force identical behind all objects

Page 208

and, while variously manifesting them, keeping a subtle or secret affinity amongst them, an affinity whose discovery enlarges or intensifies the quality of each. But Horizontal Harmony is more than Inter-object Symbolism or Inter-object Correspondence. It is also a harmony between Nature's scenes and man's moods, as if the objective and the subjective were two sides of the same ex-perience and all Nature were a condition of the poet's conscious being. Nature may thus be entered by a sort of empathy, in-feeling, and its shapes and hues read by an answering mood. Or else a mood may seize upon Nature's shapes and hues and turn them to a personal symbol. An Inter-object-subject Symbolism or Correspondence makes the complete Horizontal Harmony. Per-haps the most general doctrine of it, touching on the essential state of all poetry, is Valery's words on the "poetic emotion": "I recog-nize it in myself by this: that all possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings, events, feelings, and actions, while keeping their usual appearance, are suddenly placed in an indefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship with the modes of our general sensibility. That is to say that these well-known things and beings — or rather the ideas that represent them — somehow change in value. They attract one another, they are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary; they become (if you will permit the expression) musicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically related." On the side of converting Nature into personal mood-symbolism, we may cite the statement of Verlaine who was the most sensitive practitioner of Horizontal Harmony: "The landscape is a state of the soul."

(3) Vertical Harmony. This means the presence of the physical universe as an emanation of a supraphysical. A higher world is reflected or imaged in earthly things. The originals or archetypes of what exists in our universe are beyond in a super-cosmos. "As above, so below" — thus runs the old Hermetic formula. The Platonic Ideas and the flux of phenomena — there you have another version of the same vision. Here we have a linking up of the Symbolist with the Symbolic of all poetry: all poetry, as we have often said, is full of image-pointers, direct or indirect, of some hidden multitudinous perfection of Beauty and Bliss. But there are certain differences or rather refinements and specialisa-tions in the Symbolist view, as we can readily see from Blake's Tyger. Whatever the interpretation of the poem, that which is the

Page 209

Tyger never gets mentioned in the poem. A strange animal is before us, though not quite different from the striped carnivorous quadruped with which are familiar - luckily not too familiar, for otherwise we would be fit to become the theme of some such intuitive piece of verse as the following, which recounts the sad story of a Gujarati named Mulji:

Mulji met a Tyger —

The Tyger was bulgy,

And the bulge was Mulji.

Such intimate familiarity would give us rather the horizontal har-mony than the vertical. At least, Mulji in the Tyger's lengthwise stomach would be horizontally harmonious with the digestive juices there. To return from Mulji to Blakeji, the Tyger symbo-lising something is alone presented. No comparison is directly made. Suppose we take Blake's poem to be about the Sher-e-Kashmir, Sheikh Abdulla, vis-a-vis the invasion by Afridi tribesmen whose spears he brought low and whose consequent tears fertilised the heavenly vale of Jammu. Nowhere are we told that we have a picture of the loud-laughing large-toothed Ex-premier of Kashmir, with his spectacles "burning bright" at us. Thus a characteristic of vertical Symbolism is that the object which is compared to another is itself suppressed and we have the metaphor only in evidence.

Another characteristic is that the expression is not explanatory and that, as far as possible, direct thinking is absent: pictures stand in front of us with suggestive outline and colour. A series of images makes the poem's significance. Blake's piece is not quite a sheer one of this kind of Symbolism: some intellectual questioning is earried on. But the overall impression is of sheer vision. We may note that Bowra calls it "pure poetry" . He means that the object of the vision is vivified straight away and is not mediated by any thinking terms, any explanatory matter. We shall, some time in the future, discuss the concept of "pure poetry": at the moment we may just observe that the poetry which does not think but sees and feels is called "pure" by some critics.

A third characteristic is that the central image is not quite of a physical reality. It bears some resemblance to it but has a strange-ness which marks it as supernatural or occult or spiritual: a mysti-

Page 210

cism of one sort or another is at play in the picture. The whole atmosphere is charged with the presence of a world beyond the one we know from day to day. A dream-reality seems to be at work — an unusual projection from an in-world or an over-world. In Blake's poem this is not overwhelmingly strong as in Green Tyger, but it is strong enough to hit our solar plexus in a queer way: we are not only afraid of his Tyger, we have the feeling to get down on our shaking knees and worship the creature as if it were a god-like terror manifesting in its colossal glory at which we dare not point any rifle but on the contrary feel like shouting: "Come, please, and gobble us up: thus alone our mortal weakness will cease and we ourselves shall be immortal Tygers far greater than any Sher-e-Kashmir who can be easily locked up by a Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed."

Vertical Harmony does not imply only a supercosmos reflected in our world. It implies also that the human being is a microcosm. In him the whole universe is summed up — or comes to a climax — and he corresponds most keenly to the Supercosmos. The Super-cosmos may be regarded as a Superman. Blake called the ultimate reality the Eternal Man or the Universal Man. A general way of defining this aspect of Vertical Harmony is that, just as in Hori-zontal Harmony the universe is a state of the soul, here the Trans-cendent, the Ideal Existence beyond, is a soul-state — but to get to this soul-state we have to pass with intense feeling and imagination to something which is neither the perceived object as we know it in our world nor the perceiving subject as we know it in ourselves. In its highest manifestation this Symbolism may be summed up in the words of its most subtle and sophisticated practitioner, Mallarme: "A supreme flash from which is roused That Shape which no one is."

(4) A multifoliate all-inclusive play of themes. This means that all varieties of subjects — good and bad, agreeable and horrid, edifying and sordid — could serve poetry and be part of its power-ful vision. No cordon sanitaire at all! Stars and slime, swans and maggots, Madonnas and harlots — every imaginable object may be laid hands on and converted into a symbol of the poet's grope for Perfection, a straight or curved or twisted path to his sense of the Ideal, his achievement of the flawless poetic form. Baudelaire is the intensest initiator of this Symbolism as well as of the em-bryos, so to speak, of the other types. Viele-Griffin, Laforgue,

Page 211

Stuart Merrill, Francis Jammes, Paul Fort carry it on in their own individual manners. Such symbolism takes up somewhat feverishly the happy hold of Wordsworth on common things and Whitman's exultant embrace of even the malodorous and the clinical as part of an epiphany. Was it not Whitman who said something like: "The odour of my armpits is holier than any prayer"? Perhaps the most comprehensive formulation of this Symbolism comes from a French writer whose name eludes me at the moment: "What characterises Symbolism is the passion of a moment whose gesture is infinite."

All the four kinds mix and mingle; especially the Mallarmean kind takes up all the others and puts them under its own Platonic-Swedenborgian light. It is Symbolism proper, Symbolism quintessential, and demands our attention most along the line from Blake.

Page 212