Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-NINE

Mallarme, with precise yet puzzling image-combinations that would suggest a meaning as elusive as in wordless Music, sought to embody in poetic words a supra-intellectual sense of some perfect Beyond of Silence. His attitude to the work he had undertaken is stated by Stefan George (pronounced Gayorgay), one of his early admirers, in a forceful German phrase:

Und fur sein denkbild blutend Mallarme.

which means,

And bleeding for his ideal, Mallarme.

It is well known how whole-heartedly Mallarme dedicated his life to achieving his poetic object. But people who feel that he sought some Beyond mistake certain expressions in his poetry as giving the real mystic magnet to which his aspiration was drawn. Thus Robert Conquest, at the end of a sonnet, has very memorably but still mistakenly summed up Mallarme's search by a contrasting combination of him with another poet, the English Andrew Mar-veil. The sonnet-end formulates a general ideal for poetry:

Marvell's absorption into local green,

Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue.

These are splendid lines and by themselves they set up an ideal worth pursuing. Marvell, as you perhaps know already, was a poet of the time of Crabbe, Crashaw, Herbert, Donne, Vaughan: he belonged to the seventeenth century group which includes all these and whose members are called "the Metaphysicals". These poets carry that label not because they were all aching for some-thing mystical: their chief characteristic is a marriage of physical sensations with abstract ideas by means of imagery that is intellec-tually ingenious and drawn from subtle learning and scholarship and philosophical and scientific literature — imagery escaping, for all its cleverness and far-fetchedness, the charge of being mere fancy and stark conceit. Thus Donne in an inspired lyric compares himself and his sweetheart to a pair of compasses: whether the

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lovers are near to each other or removed and apart, their relationship is shown very acutely as the posture or play of the instrument for describing circles, with two legs connected at one end by a movable joint. Most of the Metaphysicals did have strong religious leanings. But, as the phrase quoted about Marvell makes it clear, Marvell was not quite mystical-minded: he was more interested in earth's beauty than in the beauty of an otherwhere, and he was interested in local settings — the particular things in front of us. Into these things however, he infused a very novel significance and expressed himself with a sensitive and subtle wit. Thus, in a famous poem, one on a Garden, he speaks of

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

This is the couplet Conquest has in mind when he speaks of

Marvell's absorption into local green.

Marvell himself refers to a spot where trees make a shade over him, a green shade whose cool colour sinks into him, making him forget the entire world, mentally destroy as it were the whole of the creation and concentrate himself in just a delighful consciousness drenched in the sensation of greenness. But that is not all: there comes here, I believe, a bit of subtlety. The annihilation of all that's made does not only mean an exclusion of everything except a thought filled with the presence of the green shade: it also means a creation by the mind, of something of its own from the objects of the world, so that all that is physically sensed is submerged in a subjective vision, vivid and wonderful, at the same time centred in the immaterial and matching the objective environment. Marvell would not be a Metaphysical without such a shade within a shade. But the delight in the local earth-scene is definitely there despite the inner touch. And this delight is, according to our sonneteer, one of the two important functions of the poetic imagination: the poetic imagination must not lose hold on earth, the small limited objects before us, the elements of our immediate experience.

The other important function is to save us from being earth- bound: we should be able, while keeping our grip on the terres-

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trial, to soar to the utmost limits of perception and conception. Away to the farthest distance our mind must penetrate with an insatiable hunger for the Supreme — for the supernatural, the divine. This counterpoise to local interest is set forth in the mystical suggestion of the line:

Mallarme's cry for supernatural blue —

a line recalling the phrase I quoted to you some days back from Mallarme himself:

Je suis hante: l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur! l'Azur!

Evidently this phrase has haunted Conquest. It is also the phrase, by the way, with which the students at the school where Mallarme was condemned to teach English used to tease him. Every day they would scribble it on the blackboard. Poor Mallarme would look at the blackboard each morning, forgetting that the same words would be there. He must have got sick of seeing one of his most effective lines repeated endlessly. Yes, it is an extremely effective line and in itself sums up faultlessly the other extreme to what Marvell on the whole represents. A complete ideal comes in those two lines, very poetically worded. It is the same ideal that Words-worth embodies at the close of his lyric on the Skylark. The Skylark is a bird pictured by Wordsworth as enjoying "a privacy of glorious light" in the lofty ether where it wings and sings, but the poet makes it still no despiser of "the earth where cares abound." Even while it is musically ecstatic in the celestial heights its eyes are on the little nest down below in the local tree spoken of by Marvell — down below in the Marvellous green which balances the Mallarmean blue high above. Wordsworth puts the beautiful balance of extremes in the couplet calling the Skylark

Type of the Wise who soar but never roam,

True to the kindred points of heaven and home!

I wonder if this couplet could apply also to the spirit of my lectures? But it would perhaps be too much of a compliment. The more correct way to state the truth about the peculiarity of my twice-a-week speechifying would seem to be:

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Type of the Strange a-soar while being earth-rover,

Fixed on a point though wandering all over!

And the immediate point of my latest digression is that Mallarme's Beyond in the fullest, in the final sense is not any superhuman blue.

No doubt, as that line from him attests, our Symbolist poet was considerably concerned with the Azure. But if we understand exactly how he was concerned, we shall see that it was not the God of his ultimate aspiration. To begin with, we have to relate the Azure to what his mind was afflicted with from the very beginning of his poetic career: the state which he calls Ennui. There was always in the midst of life's movement and variety a gnawing boredom. This boredom, this Ennui had two shades. One came from the idealist in Mallarme: his impatience with ordinary day-to-day existence with its meaningless triviality set in the midst of a huge grossness, the fatigue of soul which, as he said Hamletwise in La Musique et les Lettres, "one feels with this too solid and heavy world". The other shade was connected with the artist in him. The artist, obsessed by the idealist's boredom with the commonplace and the average, sought to bring forth a poetry expressive of what is truly significant, something the commonplace and the average cannot give — what Mallarme terms "something other than the real". But this search for the right kind of poetic utterance was frustrated: the artist was unable to catch the truly significant to his heart's satisfaction: hence the fatigue of his mind under the load of the inexpressible. And behind this sterility there is a strange experience which overwhelmed Mallarme at a very early age.

Not knowing where to turn from the tiring banality of life, he had a yearning for some sort of self-annulment, a plunge into some sleep as it were of living death, a sleep which he at once dreaded and desired. This yearning seems to have become intense enough to bring about a subjective crisis. In his twenty-fifth year he had the experience that he was just an apparition through which a Void was somehow acting, that he was himself a Void strangely turned into name and form! In a letter to his friend Cazalis he said that while writing he had actually to sit before a mirror in order to mark his own body and reassure himself of his own existence: if the mirror were removed he would feel faded into a vacuity. The words he used remind us strongly of a few phrases in two sonnets

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of Sri Aurobindo's. Of course, there is a difference in the quality of the Aurobindonian experiences and that of Mallarme's, but the basic drive behind them seems identical. The sonnet called The Word of the Silence begins with the quatrian:

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,

A world of sight clear and inimitable,

A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,

A greatness pure of thought, virgin of will.

And in the sonnet named Nirvana we have the lines:

...A Peace stupendous, featureless, still

Replaces all. What once was I, in It

A silent unnamed emptiness...

Mallarme writes to his friend: "Je suis maintenant impersonnel, et non plus le Stephane que tu as connu, mais une aptitude qu'a l'univers spirituel a se voir et a se developper a travers ce qui fut moi." ("I am now impersonal and no longer the Stephane whom you have known, but a turn which the spiritual universe possesses for seeing itself and developing itself through what was I.")

But there is no unmixed joy of release here: there is a delight but also a devastation, because Mallarme seems to have contacted something deeply superconscient through something abysmally inconscient. His letter, at the height of the crisis, says: "J'ai implore la grande Nuit, qui m'a exhauce et a etendu ses tenebres." ("I have implored the great Night, who has hearkened to me and spread out her darknesses.") When this experience of a painful paradise of self-erasure, behind which was active the truth stated by Sri Aurobindo at the close of another sonnet:

The darkness was the Omnipotent's abode,

Hood of Omniscience, a blind mask of God—

when this experience passed through the consciousness of the artist Mallarme trying to poetise "something else than the real", it assumed the character of an infinite ideality which refused to yield its secret in language. It got symbolised by the blank piece of paper before which he so often sat at night. In the inner room his wife

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would be in bed, with their little baby-girl, but in the outer room he would be sitting, all alone, a mirror on the opposite wall, a sheet of paper under his pen, his eyes gazing a while in the mirror and then fixing themselves on the whiteness. He would be unable, on the one hand, to lower himself by giving tongue to life's commonplaceness and, on the other, to heighten himself into the speech of what is free and pure from the taint of the trivial. This suspension, sometimes night-long, between two incapacities is well touched off in those lines of his:

...la clarte deserte de ma lampe

Sur le vide papier que la blancheur defend...

(...the lonely lustre of my lamp

On the bare paper guarded by its own white...)

This whiteness of the paper in front of him became a symbol at once of his sterility and of the dazzle of a Perfection he vaguely intuited. It is for the sake of that dazzle which was as yet no more than a delightful daze that Mallarme tells us he spent during his youth a period of bitter idleness, fighting with the difficulty of his poetic job and forsaking

l'enfance

Adorable des bois de roses sous l'azur

Naturel...

(The infancy Adorable of rose-woods with their crown Of natural azure...)

Here the Azure is recalled as if it were an Eden of young hopes and innocent hungers, an Eden of contentment with fresh in-experienced life, a self-contained felicity within Nature's own circle of flowers around and of the blue sky above — two realities that are often together and even merge in his moods.

But natural happiness, however sweet, was not for Mallarme. Within this happiness he felt a variety of shades that, even while attractive, crossed the crystallinity of the new vision that he was developing out of his self-lost and world-lost contact with a Pro-

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found simultaneously dark and divine, the new aspiration that he was cultivating by fusing this contact with the aesthetic Platonism growing from his dissatisfaction with all tangible forms and his ache for the ideal Form enfranchised from limits and changes. We shall mark all the shades felt by him within the Azure. At the moment I shall end with repeating that the Azure was not his final cry. On the one side he was being sucked up into an enormous Black: on the other he was drawn towards a vast White. Within him they appeared to mix in a most disturbing manner. Beyond him they were felt as one indefinable Mystery. Between that depth of divine distance and his own perplexed existence there hung the multifoliate Azure.

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