Talks on Poetry

TALK TWENTY-TWO

A song of Shakespeare's from Measure for Measure closed our discussion of melopoeia. Well, Shakespeare is just the poet with whom to start our discussion of phanopoeia. For, Shakespeare is the superman of imagery. But let us first say a few prefatory words on our subject. Just as the music of melopoeia must come fused with significance, though not necessarily significance acceptable to the reasoning mind, so also the Colour and shape, the contour and gesture brought by phanopoeia must come as organic part of the substance of poetry. By this I mean that true imagery is not something added to an idea or emotion, it does not serve simply as an illustration of either. It is such that the idea or emotion as a poetic entity lives only by it or at least draws its life from the core of it. But by imagery I do not here refer merely to a simile or metaphor. I include pure description which is charged with vision-intensity.

Intense description may pertain directly to the actual theme in hand or indirectly to it through a simile or metaphor which instead of being briefly etched is elaborated as so often in Homer. Homer, taking one or two main points in common between objects or situations or persons, launches again and again on long compa-risons which are themselves complete pictures — small dramatic scenes inset into the main visual reconstruction: the Iliad contains 180 full-length similes and the Odyssey 40. Virgil, Dante and Milton also paint such pictures, but perhaps the best versions of the Homeric comparison outside Homer are in Matthew Arnold's blank-verse narratives — particularly his Sohrab and Rustam — and in those early works of Sri Aurobindo: Urvasie, Love and Death, Baji Prabhou. We may cite one from Sri Aurobindo. He is describing the heavenly nymph Urvasie awaking from a swoon into which she fell under the abducting assault of a Titan. She awakes to the presence of her saviour, King Pururavas:

As when a child falls asleep unaware

At a closed window on a stormy day,

Looking into the weary rain, and long

Sleeps, and wakes quietly into a life

Of ancient moonlight, first the thoughtfulness

Of that felicitous world to which the soul

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Was visitor in sleep, keeps her sublime

Discurtained eyes; human dismay comes next,

Slowly; last, sudden, they brighten and grow wide

With recognition of an altered world,

Delighted: so woke Urvasie to love.

I shan't linger over the metrical qualities or the verbal, except to mark the phrase "sublime discurtained eyes". The first adjective does not only mean "exalted" by the wonder visited during slum-ber. I believe the literal Latin shade is present as in that phrase where, after saying that God made animals earthward-looking, Lucretius tells us: "os sublime dedit homini" — "He gave man an uplifted face." Sri Aurobindo's "child" awakes with her eyes physically uplifted, looking upward: a concrete pictorial touch goes with the general psychological suggestion. "Discurtained" has a twofold meaning in the reverse manner. It seems to signify more than just "opened by parting of the lids": here to the con-crete sense is added the idea that the earthly veil by which the eyes are shut off from the soul's world has been temporarily removed. Especially as this adjective follows "sublime", it yields that idea in sympathy with the psychological suggestion of the latter: the expe-rience of exaltation is accompanied by the experience of revela-tion.

Now to our business. One may think that such lengthy similes are mostly decorative, but in fact when the poet has worked with true imagination they throw a subtle light upon a situation and bring out some truth from behind the surface of things. Sri Aurobindo speaks of a child. Urvasie, by being compared to this child, is revealed as a soul of innocence: she is, after all, a nymph of heaven, an Apsara, and, as the poem says afterwards, the Apsaras remain ever pure, no matter what they do. The simile makes the child who has fallen asleep wake in the midst of moon-light and keep awhile the feeling of the supernatural felicity visited in dream. Moonlight here has a very significant role. The moon is an old Indian symbol of Divine Nectar, supernatural felicity. If, then, the child awakes into a world whose familiarity is found pervaded and altered by "a life of ancient moonlight", is it sur-prising that she should retain the "thoughtfulness" of the felicitous dream-world? Although "human dismay" comes for a moment, it is brightness that finally remains, and the last word of the simile is

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"delighted", a word which, as applied to the eyes that "grow wide" still in the moonlight, strengthens further the moon's sym-bolism and the continuity of its light with the atmosphere of the dream-felicity. All this illuminates the love-experience into which Urvasie woke. Just as the swoon into which she had fallen was due to a monstrous attack on her, comparable to the child's day of storm and "weary rain", Urvasie's love-experience, which is essentially one of bliss, is shown to be a white luminosity belonging to some ageless depth of mysterious being and beatitude, some depth into which she must have plunged during her swoon just as the sleeping child is said to have sojourned in a paradisal realm. The elaborate simile has indeed afforded us in a charming way an insight into Urvasie's life and love.

Shakespeare has very few elaborate comparisons. His mind is too active and darting for them. But almost every pulse and turn of the poet in him is phanopoeic. Images are the very stuff of his thinking and feeling and they are such in several modes. He does not just vivify abstract things, as in the sonnet-opening which depicts the condition or sense of ageing:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves or few or none do hang...

(Was he by any chance referring to his falling hair which left his head the monumental egg we see in his pictures?) He also makes the abstract possess concrete qualities as if it could do no other:

I have lived long enough: my way of life

Is fall'n into the sere, the yellow leaf...

It seems the most natural thing for a way of life to do what it does here. Again, Shakespeare does not rest with activising concretely an observation of the misfortune suffered in a changing mortal existence such as all of us know: e.g.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time...?

He can also catch an awesome impalpable reality in its very es-sence of strangeness, as by that vibrant evocation which Sri Aurobindo finds full of overtones and has somewhere considered

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one of the rarest poetic revelations:

In the dark backward and abysm of time...

We may remark how Shakespeare gets his best effect frequently by a combination of the abstract with the concrete: "sere" with "yellow", "scorns" with "whips", "abysm of time" with "dark backward". Somehow the concreteness thus becomes both inten-sified and magnified.

Of course, the line about the "dark backward" is Shakespeare at an unusual occupation, almost an occupation that is mystical. At a more characteristic level he is a puissantly colourful metaphorist of the objects and scenes he finds around him and he employs all the resources of an abundant vocabulary, as in the apostrophe to Sleep by a troubled King, the apostrophe from which Sri Aurobindo has so often admired for image-vividness as well as for richness of word and rhythm those three lines:

Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast

Seal up the shipboy's eyes and rock his brains

In cradle of the rude imperious surge?

Shakespeare is not shy of double epithets nor of packing his rhythm with alliterative sounds — six r's from the end of the second line to the end of the third.

Sri Aurobindo has also commented on the verses in which Shakespeare, with his eye again on the "surge", commits a meta-phorical violence:

Or take up arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them?¹

Sri Aurobindo imagines what may be called the Johnsonian critical method vis-a-vis such poetry — "the method which expects a precise logical order in thoughts and language and pecks at all that departs from a matter-of-fact or strict and rational ideative cohe-rence or a sober restrained classical taste." Sri Aurobindo writes: "What would the Johnsonian critic say to Shakespeare's famous

1. Actually the lines start "Or to take arms" and not "Or take up arms". I am retaining the form commented on by Sri Aurobindo.

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lines? He would say, 'What a mixture of metaphors and jumble of ideas! Only a lunatic could take up arms against a sea! A sea of troubles is a too fanciful metaphor and, in any case, one can't end the sea by opposing it, it is more likely to end you.' Shakespeare knew very well what he was doing; he saw the mixture as well as any critic and he accepted it because it brought home, with an inspired force which a neater language could not have had, the exact feeling and idea that he wanted to bring out." I may add that a proof of Shakespeare's awareness is that he Skilfully eludes being caught by the Johnsonian critic's booby-trap: "Can one end a sea instead of being ended by it?" Mark that in the second half-line Shakespeare speaks not of ending the sea but of ending the troubles — he uses "them" and not "it".

We can gauge the wrong-headedness of Johnsonian criticism by referring to Johnson's own balancing against one of the most admired passages in Macbeth three couplets from Dryden's drama, The Indian Emperor. Dryden gives the stage-direction: "Enter Cortez alone in a night-gown" — and then the speech of the night-gowned hero:

All things are hush'd, as Nature's self lies dead;

The mountains seem to nod their drowsy head;

The little birds in dreams their songs repeat,

And sleeping flowers beneath the night-dew sweat:

Even Lust and Envy sleep; yet Love denies

Rest to my soul, and slumber to my eyes.

A contemporary of Johnson, Rhymer, singled out this passage as a touchstone of poetic taste. But Wordsworth calls it "vague, bom-bastic and senseless." I for one find it positively comic in parts and, on the whole, a poor play of fancy and sentimentalism.

However, in fighting free of Johnsonian criticism, which is sus-picious of imaginative audacity and partial to the softly pretty and superficially dignified, we must not fall into a penchant for the extravagant and the contorted which were very much in vogue in Shakespeare's day and which Shakespeare himself often dange-rously skirted — things like that outrageous distortion of Homer by Chapman in his translation of the Iliad:

And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know,

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When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of over-throw.

The second line is what is called a conceit — something which, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, does not convey any true vision or emotion but is meant to strike and startle the intellectual imagination. Shakespeare, we said in an earlier Talk, has a strong tendency to be ingenious, but he mostly carries off his ingenuities by working not from the brain-mind but from some white-hot centre of mul-tiple sight in the depths of his passionate vitality. Even when he is not openly energetic, whatever apparent exaggeration he indulges in is supported by a true throb of feeling, a genuine imaginative tension. Thus, when Othello, in his speech before his suicide, tells us of himself as being one

whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum,

we get a picture that, unlike Chapman's of tear-towers, has a pathos appropriate and keen at once by the extreme simile the speaker fetches and by the romantically pricking strangeness of the simile and by the tears' background of rugged restrained dignity which is hinted in the second line.

The vital depths and the keen eye drawing upon them save Shakespeare not only from fanciful falsities but also from the generalities, sedate or high-pitched, that we often encounter in the dramatic language of his contemporaries — even contemporaries who have something or other Shakespearean about them. The Cambridge History of English Literature says: "In the mechanical elements of poetic rhythm, Massinger comes very near to Shake-speare; but, when we look deeper, and come to the consideration of those features of style which do not admit of tabular analysis, we find the widest difference." This difference may be briefly shown to the best effect by a few passages. A. H. Cruickshank has juxtaposed some lines from Massinger with those from Shake-speare to which they have an affinity, and T. S. Eliot has made comments. Here is Massinger speaking —

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Can I call back yesterday with all their aids

Who bow unto my sceptre? or restore

My mind to that tranquillity and peace

It then enjoyed?

("Their aids" is equal to "the aids of those" or "the aids of them" — an example of a peculiar English turn adopted several times by Sri Aurobindo in his writings.) Now take Shakespeare in Othello:

Not poppy nor mandragora

Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world

Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep

Which thou owedst yesterday.

("Owe" in Elizabethan English connotes "possess", "own".) Eliot remarks: "Massinger'S is a general rhetorical question, the lan-guage just and pure but colourless. Shakespeare's has particular significance; and the adjective 'drowsy' and the verb 'medicine' infuse a precise vigour." Again, Massinger writes:

Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect

Crooked and abject means.

Shakespeare has:

God knows, my son,

By what bypaths and indirect crook'd ways

I met this crown.

Says Eliot: "Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare the particular image. 'Indirect crook'd' is forceful in Shakespeare, a mere pleonasm in Massinger. 'Crook'd ways' is a metaphor; Massinger's phrase only the ghost of a metaphor." (Eliot's "forensic" I understand as "affirmative in a public legal-istic manner.") Once more, listen to Massinger:

And now in the evening,

When thou shouldst pass with honour to thy rest,

Wilt thou fall like a meteor?

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Then lend your ears to Shakespeare:

I shall fall

Like a bright exhalation in the evening,

And no man see me more.

("Exhalation" means a puff in the air, a short burst of something vaporous.) Eliot's comment: "Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, 'a bright exhalation' appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the evening; 'meteor' is a dim simile; the word is worn." Finally there is Massinger's:

What you deliver to me shall be locked up,

In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself

Shall keep the key.

And there is Shakespeare's:

'Tis in my memory locked,

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Eliot has the verdict: "In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death, here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift Shakespeare's figure is!"

To put it broadly: everywhere it is the unfailing phanopoeic energy of Shakespeare — his sense of the concrete and his gift of sight — wedded to a supreme word-craftsmanship, that makes his significances leap alive. But perhaps the most characteristic Shake-speareanism is not a single throbbing comparison as in the above excerpts: it is a swift succession of independent metaphors linked only by some inner necessity and by their immediate relevance to the theme, as in Macbeth's appeal to his physician on behalf of his wife:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

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What physician would not be enraptured on hearing an appeal like this? I am sure our Dr. Nripendra or Dr. Gupta would feel like a god if asked to do such things in such language. Perhaps even our Dr. Sanyal and Dr. Satyabrata Sen, though they are more sur-geons than physicians, would thrill; for, Macbeth speaks of pluck-ing a rooted sorrow, razing out brain-troubles and cleansing the stuffed bosom — procedures that appear to call for deep-going operations, the surgeon's job.

But possibly Dr. Sanyal and Dr. Sen would respond more to a certain surprising image of Eliot's and at once brandish their knives in exultant appreciation:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table...

It almost sounds like one surgeon egging another on to take advantage jointly of a wonderfully opportune situation in Nature. To operate on an anaesthetized evening! By Hippocrates, that's a thing few Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons could hope to do — unless the sky falls and overwhelms them with grace. But, leaving aside acknowledged F.R.C.S.'s we may ask whether Eliot has produced here a true poetic image that could please this unconventional F.R.C.S. before you — this Fellow Researching in Comparisons and Symbols or, if you want to generalise, this Fellow Roaring to Cute Students. At once we have to admit that the image is extraordinarily clever. The question is: Is it poetic? Let us try to understand what is intended. Evidently an atmos-phere and a mood are sought to be suggested. When the time of evening is compared to a sick person put under an anaesthetic, ready in his submerged state of mind to be operated upon, and you and I are asked to go somewhere at that time, immediately the keynote of the poem is struck. You and I are going to visit a world whose mind no less than body is sick and has sunk in vitality and awareness. And we are going to perform the operation of probing the cause of this neurotic disease. But merely to strike the keynote successfully is not enough for poetic ends. A justification has to be provided for the comparison made.

The fact that evening-time is neither day nor darkness but the middle term that is twilight gives point to the image so far as the

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psychological element is concerned. The anaesthetised patient who represents the sick world is in a state of mind which is neither life's day nor death's night but a certain hovering mid-existence in which all purpose and drive have grown indistinct, leaving nothing more than an issueless self-absorption. There is also the fact that twilight is characterised by a diffusion of faint red colour: this connects it up with the bleeding which takes place under an opera-tion but of which the patient himself, in his fainted condition, is unaware. That unconscious bleeding may be taken to stand for the patient on whom the operation is performed: the patient is but one mass of unconscious bleeding matter. Then the evening which is composed of a dimness of diffused crimson against the sky can very well be called an anaesthetised patient spread out upon a table during an operation. Finally, we have the word "etherized". It comes from the noun "ether" which belongs to two spheres: the operation-theatre where we may go under anaesthesia, and the space above us which science terms etheric and poetry calls ethe-real. The use of a passive past participle derived from this parti-cular noun is sheer inspiration. The whole imaginative impact of the lines would have evaporated if "chloroformed" instead of "etherized" had been used: the patient and the evening would have missed the ultimate fusion. The case would have been worse than Massinger's "meteor" where Shakespeare has "a bright exha-lation in the evening". "Meteor" is at least a touch upon the eye, however dull. "Chloroformed" would touch only the brain-cells and make a merely ideative connection with the twilight in the sky. "Etherized" nearly evokes an opposite Shakespearean phrase, visual and vivid: "a dim inhalation in the evening".

I think that Eliot, no matter how curiously, has succeeded in making poetry of the kind we have designated as piquant. Ex-tremely piquant phanopoeia is created in the modernist mode which does not put a cordon sanitaire around usually prosaic departments of life but intrudes everywhere with a semi-satiric semi-morbid acuteness of sensation-seeking intellect. Shakespeare would have congratulated Eliot here — Shakespeare who could come out with realistic ingenuities like:

his brain

Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit

After a voyage.

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I suppose the etherized patient's brain must be similarly dry.

Actually, I should be able to decide the point. For, I have been on two occasions an etherized patient. It all happened in London where my father, a Bombay doctor, took me when I was about six years old. I had suffered an attack of infantile paralysis — present pet-name "polio" — and in those days India held out no hopes for a polio-victim. The heel of my left foot had got pulled up by the paralytic infection and the muscles around the left knee had be-come useless. I had to walk with a hand pressed upon my knee in order to force the up-drawn heel down to floor-level. The leg did not have strength enough to let me move like half a ballet-dancer, tripping on one toe! Today, though I still limp, I can walk without doubling up — thanks to the skill of Dr. Tubby, the surgeon under whose knife I lay in an etherized condition. But I don't remember whether my brain, on awaking from the effects of the ether-fumes, felt as if it had been dry like Shakespeare's remainder biscuit. Don't conclude that my forgetting is due to the fact that I was a tiny tot. I remember a host of other things connected with my trip to England. I'll tell you about them one day. I have forgotten simply because I was not interested in the matter. How could I be interested when I had not read Shakespeare and Eliot and when the experience of my etherization was one I wanted very much to raze out? Yes, it was an unpleasant experience. On the first occasion of the two, I hardly knew what was going to occur: so I breathed in the sickly-sweetish fumes like an innocent idiot. On the second occasion everything in me revolted and I endeavoured to get my face away from the mask through which the fumes were being passed into my nose. On failing to be effective with mere nose-movement I got one of my hands into action and pushed the mask off so violently that the anaesthetic liquid flowed over and streamed down my face. I started crying — but the anaesthetician burst out laughing. Oh how I hated the fellow! If Dr. Tubby could have lent me his knife for a second I would have tried to perform an immediate operation on the anaesthetician without bothering to etherize him!

When the liquid was spilt, I hoped that the surgeon would give up the job he had to do. But I was not to be spared. The mask was clamped once more upon my face and, although I still protested, I somehow inhaled the fumes and in a jiffy I — to invert Eliot's simile — was spread out upon the operation-table like an evening against the sky...

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