Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-ONE

So the Quarterly Examination has come and gone, and we are together again. We were as if enemies for a while: now once more there is peace between us and we can look back calmly on wounds given or taken. But is it really a fact that you felt the Quarterly Examination as Keats had felt the Quarterly Review in which his Endymion had been attacked? Surely you can't picture me as a sort of Jeffreys exulting at the sight of your discomfiture? Besides, I was not solely responsible for the paper. The second question asking you to comment on the statement that "poets are born, not made" was neither born from me like a spontaneous sword trying to see how it could be borne by defenceless you, nor was it made by me with a devilish deliberation to watch how dismayed you could be. I merely assented to it. My hand in the business was directly confined to the first question:

"Write on the importance of Form in poetry and comment from the standpoint of Form as well as in general on the poetic qualities of:

(1)And on a sudden lo! the level lake

And the long glories of the winter moon.

(2)And mighty poets in their misery dead.

How would (2) strike you if it were rewritten? —

And mighty poets dead in their misery."

I found your answers a mixed affair. Some of you have tried your best to exercise the critical faculty, but as this faculty has not been active enough in the past its joints were somewhat creaky. Also, you do not have sufficient technical knowledge. And how indeed can there be the full necessary equipment when you are new to the subjects on which I am lecturing? I have no right to be disappointed if your answers to unaccustomed questions were not quite adequate. Many of you had the correct feeling about certain things in the two quotations, but you could not exactly give a living body to it. Well, both to set you on the right tack and to give you

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the consolation that I was not idling while you had to sweat, let me make a comment on the Tennyson lines as well as on the Words-worth phrase.

Face to face with the former, we have first to get an unthinking aesthetic impression by trying to enter into the general sense. Flung before us, revealed all at once and not by degrees, is a night-view of water and sky. At one moment, nothing; at the next, the full view: the white loveliness of the lake beneath the white beauty of the moon, both of them quietly shining in a clear immensity. The intuitive feeling we get through the visual impression is of a vast silence in which earth and non-earth are lying in a luminous harmony. Something sensitive in earth's being to the beyond, some capacity of answering to non-earth seems suggested in the vision of the lake at night, as if in the dull sleep of the earth-consciousness a secret eye got unexpectedly opened and was rap-turously responding to a never-sleeping eye in the ethereal dis-tances. As soon as we catch the imaginative turn of the lines, our outer eyes tend to shut and the inner consciousness starts enjoying not a landscape or waterscape or skyscape but a soulscape.

And the dominant aspect of this soulscape is a bright mono-tone: the lake and the sky and the moon are a spacious oneness of illumined mood. From that oneness the lines have arisen to lay out the contents of it in diverse related details of word-painting and word-music. That oneness is the inner form exteriorised in the form of two pentametric blank-verses achieving pictorial and melodious language.

Let us consider the elements of the melodiousness. All of you have noticed the recurrent l. If you had not noticed it I would have committed suicide in sheer heart-break over your lack of percep-tion. You have saved me from that fate and actually gladdened my heart by saying that the l produces a liquid effect which goes aptly with the lake-theme. But I should add that the repetition of l suggests not only water and water and water: it suggests also a certain uniformity in the state of the water — a certain continuous unchangingness. Of course, we can have unchanging mobility no less than unchanging stability. But when there is the word "level" the recurrent l is seen to be enforcing the suggestion of something that continues to be static, with no rise or fall, no sway or sweep, over a large area and through a protracted time. Here the art of the word "level" calls for a small comment. The word begins and

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ends with the same consonant l: it indicates a liquid sameness spread all through, and the two short e's bring a flatness of vowellation, adding to impress on our minds through our ears the straight unmoving surface of the water.

A further point in connection with the recurrent l is that its presence in "long glories" connects up the moonlight with the lake and immediately throws on us the steady sheen of the moon not only from the sky but also from the reflecting lake. This is an instance of what may be termed poetic logic. In poetry we do not always have clearly expressed connections, intellectually justified sequences. It is the way the words are used, the way the words sound, the way they are linked to one another that logicise a poetic statement. Tennyson does not tell us that since the lake is stretched out under the sky the light of the moon is both above and below: he simply takes the smoothly liquid consonant that has been associated with the prospect of the lake and puts it into the words he has employed for the moon's radiance: at once the intuition in us is touched through the aesthetic sense and we know what has happened by the collocation of moon and lake. Nor does the artistry of poetic logic end here. You will notice that in "long glories" we have on the one side the l which joins the words to what has gone earlier and on the other the consonants n

Between the loud stream and the trembling stars.

Here too a connection was to be established, making it perfectly natural that what applied to the river on earth applied also to the stars in the sky. Tennyson convinces us of the twofold application by so fashioning his phraseology that the same dominant consor nants occur in the words about the river and the stars. In "loud stream" and "trembling stars" we have in common the sounds: l, st, tr, m. The aesthetic intuition feels immediately convinced that the two things spoken of must be hanging together.

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Now for the role of vowels in our two-lined quotation. Many of you have considered this role, but you have not yet realised which vowels are long and which are short. Let me present you with some guidance in general. In the following list are words starting with the consonant most in evidence in the quotation and con-taining the long and the short versions of every vowel:

lake, lack.

lethal, letter.

light, lit.

lo, long.

lute, lug.

loot, look.

The first half of our opening line has short vowels: "And on a sudden..." Even the indefinite article "a" is a slurred sound, neither as in "lake" nor as in "lack" but somewhat like the u in "lug". Even if it were long, it would be unobtrusive because the indefinite article is a very minor word and here it becomes all the more so by standing where in a pentametric blank verse there is a natural slack, an unstressed syllable. Yes, two and a half feet of our line have short vowels — and then we have the exclamatory word "lo" with its long o. The impression is of a vision emerging abruptly into an openness, and the rounded sound of the long o suggests a kind of horizontal circling far and wide and a vertical circling far and high. The suggestion gets filled out when we have finished reading the two lines and realised that the scene includes the moonlit heavens as well as the broad lake. The suggestion of the far and wide horizontal stretch is supported by the very word "lake" with its long a, and that of the vertical breaking into farness and highness is supported by the semi-long o of "glories" and the long oo of "moon". I should say that when we have finished reading the lines and filled out the initial suggestion of "lo" we feel instinctively also that the moon could not be anything except at the full, a silver rondure. Our feeling is aided, of course, by the phrase "long glories" and the deep-toned noun "moon", but it would not be complete without that "lo".

Perhaps you will submit that the short-vowelled "long" is a slight slip on Tennyson's part and that an adjective like "large" with its vowel-length would have been more appropriate. But

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Tennyson was no slave to the craft of vowel-suggestion. "Large" has not the n needed for the connection with "winter moon" though it does bring the l which is significantly operative in "long". In addition, "large" has a reference only to space: it has no pointer to time. The nights of winter are a drawn-out stretch of time: during winter the moon shines for more hours than at any other season. How is the special span of time-sheen to be suggested together with the extended space-flush? No epithet except "long" will perform the twofold function. No doubt, it would have been better if the o here had possessed intrinsic length, but Tennyson has done his utmost to compensate for the missing effect by making the mot juste that is "long" a part of a spondaic foot — "long glo" — so that it is an element in a metrical movement creating by a pair of consecutive stresses an impression of mas-siveness and unbroken continuity: the shortness of the o is forgotten and transcended. I may observe that the spondee's impression is consummated at the line's end by the deep-toned "moon".

One or two of you have remarked that the lake must have been frozen since the season was winter. In the poem, Morte d"Arthur, from which the lines are culled, it was not frozen. But if the lines stand by themselves we have no indication against frozenness. You would be quite justified in choosing to take the surface of the lake to be a smooth expanse of gleaming ice.

Now for the second quotation, the Wordsworthian. I should say at the very start that in this line —

And mighty poets in their misery dead —

the word "dead" refers to "poets" even though it stands next to "misery". I found that one of you was misled by its position, as well as by the epithet "mighty" applied to "poets", into thinking that it is of dead misery, misery conquered and killed by "mighty poets", that the line speaks! Naturally, with this misconception one could say straight away that the changed version —

And mighty poets dead in their misery —

would turn the theme topsy-turvy. But Wordsworth actually means what the changed version makes perfectly clear: only, the

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way he puts things is deeply poetic while that version puts them in a manner clearly prosaic in spite of the metrical mould. We shall come to this difference. At the moment, let me say that the original line carries a tremendous pathos because it packs into a small space of accurately ordered words a lot of tragic significance. Each word is a world of meaning and the complete phrase is a powerful gloss on what may be called the meaning of the world.

Take the very first important word: "mighty". It connotes some-thing great, something sovereign, something grandly capable, and this connotation intensifies the contrast intended in the two later terms: "misery", "dead". Our world is such that even the mighty have to be miserable and to be so helpless as to die as a climax to their miserableness: nay, our world is such that especially the mighty ones have to suffer a dreadful doom. The absolute allitera-tion of the opening sound m, as well as the closing sound y, in "mighty" and "misery", the close alliteration of the dentals in "mighty" and its companion "poets" with those in "dead" — these enforce the sense of the special bearing of the Shakespearean "inauspicious stars" and the Hardyan "crass casualty" on the choicest beings upon earth. Here again we have the subtle yet irresistible play of poetic logic. Change the word "misery", put anything else without the twofold alliteration, or employ an epi-thet for poets without the strength of a dental letter in it to be echoed at the line's end: the picture and feeling of tragedy will not go home with so piercing, so profound a power.

Now we come to the noun "poets". It has a particular affinity with "mighty" and "misery" by its own labial, its lip-consonant p. All the three words hang together indispensably with a funda-mental poetic logic, as if nobody except poets could be utterly mighty and utterly miserable. And I may observe that the running of a lip-consonant through the three words contributes to the appropriateness of the term "poet" which implies one who speaks beautiful words, one who uses his lips in a mighty manner. But, of course, this term strikes the right note in the tragic message of the line for other reasons too. A poet is believed to bring us the light and the delight of a "world far from ours" by his inspired and revelatory art of language. His work is just the opposite of what is signified by "misery" and "dead". A divine Ananda makes him its mouthpiece: a secret realm of immortal beauty is expressive through his verbal creations, creations which are themselves un-

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dying. But, though his songs are heavenly, his life is a hell in a world unappreciative of his gifts. And, though his creations tower above the destructive touch of time, he himself is beaten down most ignobly by the neglect of his fellows and by the merciless march of selfishness and ugliness and cruelty — a march that hurts him all the more because his heart is sensitive with chords that vibrate at once — as keen to feel the smite of earthly sorrow as to feel the caress of unearthly felicity.

At the very head of European literary history we have Homer, a poor blind beggar wandering with his harp and dying without a home. After his death, seven cities disputed with one another to be considered his birthplace! Then there is Dante, exiled from his beloved Florence, homeless for nearly fifteen years, depending on the fickle favours of moody and even boorish patrons. Poignantly he has quintessenced the feeling of his humiliation in those lines:

Tu proverai si come sa di sale

Lo pane altrui e com'e duro calle

Lo scandere e'l salir par altrui scale —

lines which have been translated by Binyon:

Yea, thou shalt learn how salt his food who fares

Upon another's bread — how steep his path

Who treadeth up and down another's stairs.

There is a story that once the Abbott of a monastery was awak-ened in the middle of the night by a knock at the door. When he opened the door, he saw a gaunt old man with weary eyes, who, on being asked what he wanted, said just one word: "Peace." This man was Dante, the greatest poet of Mediaeval Europe. Not until he died did Florence wake up to his worth. And when he was gone it urged its claim for his body upon the city of Ravenna where he had been buried. Byron has referred to the poet's resting-place at Ravenna:

I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid,

A little cupola more neat than solemn

Protects his dust...

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Think, again, of Keats, the most extraordinary young genius in the domain of English poetry — Keats, attacked by brutal critics, loving in vain a woman who hardly realised either his love or his genius, suffering not only from heartbreak but also from con-sumption, spitting out in blood-clots the lungs which had breathed forth the passionate enchanted music of the Ode to a Nightingale and the serene yet intense symphony of the Ode on a Grecian Urn — Keats who died at the age of twenty-four and voiced the depth of his disappointment by offering for his own epitaph the sentence: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." In the eighteenth century, a little earlier than Keats, there was the English poet on whom Wordsworth himself has two touching lines, the youth who lived so poor and yet so disdainful of begging that he had to commit suicide:

I thought of Chatterton, that marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul which perished in its pride...

Even Shelley, though he did not die of physical misery or poverty, lived scorned by his fellows to whom he sang of light and love and liberty. Shelley died young too, by a mishap in the gulf of Spezia: sightless Nature-forces swept his life away at a moment when he was reaching his ripest poetic vision and expression. All who came into contact with him felt a radiant presence and yet he was reviled as atheist, corrupter of morals, enemy of mankind: he was denied even the custody of a child of his. No wonder Shelley never laughed: the load of a world of men blind to beauty lay too heavy on that heavenly heart — the heart which, when his body was burning on a pyre by the Italian sea that had drowned him, was plucked from the flames by a friend. Leigh Hunt, Moore, Byron, Trelawney were there on the beach. It was Trelawney who saved the heart from burning. But during the poet's life it had burned enough — at the same time with love for

The Light whose smile kindles the universe

and pain at the scorching abuse thrown on it by bigots. The remains of the author of Adonais, that superb elegy on Keats, were buried in the same cemetery at Rome where Keats had been laid earlier. Shelley's grave bears the most Shelleyan epitaph pos-

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sible: Cor cordium — "Heart of hearts". Byron, the poet doubled with a man of the world, the dreamer crossed with a cynic, could not help saying about his dead friend: "I do not know any man who would not seem to be a beast by the side of Shelley." Yes, the world has not been very kind to its poets and for the nectar brought by them it has often forced poison on their lips. This anomaly is penetratingly and puissantly uttered once for all by the closing cadence of Wordsworth's line. The word "dead" comes with a finality of climax and, by the same hard consonant at the beginning and at the end, conveys the dull-darkness of inescapable and everlasting loss of life. We almost hear a thud as of a body helplessly, senselessly falling. The device of putting at the end of the line the word indicating with such expressive conclusiveness the end of a poet's life renders any change of the position of "dead" a fatal flaw from the artistic standpoint. The variant —

And mighty poets dead in their misery —

is not unrhythmic or meaningless, yet all the subtle or forceful quality of the verse is gone. The distancing of "misery" from "mighty" weakens the alliterative suggestions on which we have dwelt. And the placing of "dead" right in the middle of the line robs the line of its prolonged pathos and mars the development of the tragedy: the phrase about misery seems tagged on, an after-thought if not even a superfluity. Besides, there is a weak trailing away of the metrical movement: the stress in "misery" is on the first syllable, the third which closes the verse takes only a minor accent which would be meaningful if one were talking of an indefi-nite process but is hardly right when death has already been mentioned: we are not referring to a continuous rotting away after death out of a grief and pain and privation preceding it and culminating in the agony of life's own end. A constructed instead of a created line is what we get by the shifting of Wordsworth's final word. The electricity of the inevitable expression is missing. You can see from this how important are the arrangement and the rhythm of words, how full of vital meaning is the form. Not a single syllable is altered and yet merely because a monosyllable that comes at the close of the fifth foot is placed at the close of the third, what strikes us is not the terrible irony of great singers falling into protracted suffering and irrevocable silence but the

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ironic phenomenon of a line about death failing to convey livingly its sorrowful substance and itself falling half dead upon our ears by using the word "dead" halfway through the run of the verse.

As metrical rhythm, the new line is quite harmonious, perhaps even more musical — but it is an empty music because there is an absence of inner form. The original line echoes or embodies Wordsworth's inner posture of vision, inner movement of feeling —it is true to the poetic intuition and becomes thereby a sovereign instance of a poet's expressive might and a devastating verdict on the crassness of our common world.

If this world is like that, surely a new light, a new life, is needed —a moon of Divine Ananda must shed its "long glories" here and a "level lake" of the soul in us must be rapt in them, covered over and permeated with the wonderful whiteness. Then there would be in the night of our Ignorance an image of what Sri Aurobindo has made King Aswapati vision in the Supreme Knowledge:

Rapture of beatific energies

Joined Time to the Timeless, poles of a single joy;

White vasts were seen where all is wrapped in all.

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