Talks on Poetry

TALK TWO

It seems that last time my stick was lying across the table. God knows how it came to be there. But a teacher passing by, after the bell had rung, noticed it and said to me later, "Better not keep the stick there." I asked him whether it had looked too aggressively evident in that place, as if I had been about to violate the rule that has been set up for all the teachers. He nodded. Well, I have no intention to break the rule, even if the parents or guardians of all of you wrote to me as the parents of a certain boy once wrote to a teacher: "Please don't whack our son. He is very delicate and at home we never beat him except in self-defence."

Yes, my intentions are perfectly peaceful. We may therefore forget the physical stick. But the mention of it serves to remind me to put before you a piece of mental beating done by a famous American writer — a heavy beating of poets and poetry, a wholesale downright castigation. The writer's name is H. L. Mencken. His attack runs thus:

"On the precise nature of this beautiful balderdash you can get all the information you need by opening at random the nearest book of verse. The ideas you will find in it may be divided into two main divisions. The first consists of denials of objective facts; the second, of denials of subjective facts. Specimen of the first sort:

God's in His heaven —

All's right with the world.

Specimen of the second:

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

It is my contention that all poetry (forgetting for the moment its possible merit as mere sound) may be resolved into either one or the other of these frightful imbecilities — that its essential charac-ter lies in the bold flouting of what every reflective adult knows to be the truth."¹

What have we to say against Mr. Mencken while admiring the

1. Selected Prejudices, p. 7.

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pungency of his style? The very first thing is: he misconceives poetry by believing that "mere sound" is added to "balderdash" to make the beauty of poetry. Not to know the vital importance of form is not to know what poetry is doing. And the ignorance of this vital importance comes because one fails to realise the inwardness of form. Form is not something added from outside to create "possible merit" by beautiful vibrations in the air. The beautiful vibrations result by virtue of an inner harmony seized by the poet, a special thrill of experience, a special movement of the being in the shape of inner vision and inner emotion: that thrill and movement translates itself, in a successful poem, into the sound-arrangement of words, the powerful yet measured music of verbal rhythm. If poetry says anything, the substance cannot be cut asunder from the way it is expressed. Of course, there is an intelligible statement by the poet, but the verbal rhythm carries and conveys what cannot be put into an intelligible statement and it is only when we take the intelligible statement in the very sound-body the poet has given it that we receive what he wants to give. The accessible meaning is a kind of clear centre around which there is a huge halo of splendour and of mystery with marvellous suggestions. It is because of this halo that we can say about poetry, adopting a phrase of Meredith's about the Spirit of Colour:

Its touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends.

A paraphrase will give us what the intellect can make of the poetic significance — and this will often be sufficiently valuable; but if we accept it as the message of a poem or of a phrase of poetry we may slip into committing the second folly which we can charge to Mencken: the folly of believing that poetry should aim at giving an objective truth or a subjective truth such as every reflective adult can recognise.

Mind you, I am not saying that every objective or subjective truth is bypassed by poetry on purpose. I have mentioned Mencken's "reflective adult". This phrase stands for the average grown-up person whose thought, whose reflective activity is concerned with the obvious world of common sense. If we turn such a person into a supreme standard we shall overlook three-fourths of the valuable activity of the human consciousness. The reflective

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adult could never be a Plato considering the obvious world of common sense as no ultimate reality but the poor image of an eternal and ideal Beauty that one can grasp only by a slow graded progression of both love and logic in a sort of philosophical ecstasy. The reflective adult could never be the hero gladly throwing away his life for the sake of a Cause that is most sacred to his inmost heart though most intangible to the sober mind: a Bharat Mata, a Mother India — not the monthly review of culture whose editor I am but the ageless Goddess who is the Nation-Soul enkindling all our culture, the Mother India of whom I try to be not too unworthy a son. The reflective adult could never be a Buddha renouncing all the possessions and advantages of worldly life in order to gain a divine desirelessness that is a plenitude of peace, an illimitable freedom which to the ordinary man he could describe as only a universal Zero. The reflective adult could never be even an Einstein rejecting the evident world as the basis of the ultimate theory of physics and constructing by what he calls an intuitive act a four-dimensional continuum of fused time and space as the foundation for all practical calculation. The poet, or in general the artist, can never be the reflective adult: he would regard such a person as not the pure stuff of what humanity should be but something sullied: the adult of this kind would be to him adulterated stuff. The word "reflective" does not impress him: the adult is reflective only in the sense of mirroring what is in front of his nose, his mind reflects like a looking-glass the surface of existence and never penetrates beyond.

Poetry goes beyond the usual knowledge acquired by looking outward or inward. It plunges farther than the objective or subjective surface of being — without really rejecting this surface. It sees the surface as constituting symbols of a hidden reality and, at its intensest, it lays a hand however lightly on the body of that reality itself. In various ways it uses the surface of being, objective or subjective, as pointers, peep-holes, glimmerings of a secret Splendour or a magnificent Mystery. It is this activity of poetry that we call its magic. Sometimes the magic is not intense enough and then it can mislead us into thinking that the poet is trying to talk common sense but merely succeeding in talking nonsense.

The two quotations which Mencken has offered may strike us as by themselves not magical enough and therefore somewhat easily made a target of criticism. But the second specimen, even from the

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standpoint of common sense, is surely no imbecility. Do we not all feel that we have some freedom of choice in our actions and some power to rise above our circumstances? Did not Mencken feel that instead of coming down with a big stick on poetry he could have observed mentally the non-caning rule of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education — or that if an idea of his were severely criticised by a Poetry teacher of that Centre he could still keep a smile on his stolid face? Surely, in however small a field, we can achieve mastery over our fate and captaincy of our soul. Perhaps the poet has cast his perception into a very resonant form and this resonant form annoyed Mencken until he felt that he was only using his stick against the delicate poet in sheer self-defence, only withstanding the attack of a sweeping dogmatic generalisation. But I think he is not giving fair play here — and certainly not giving it in the case of the first quotation. At times a poetic phrase can be severed from its context and still remain effective; at other times it cannot. Poetry creates a mood of insight not always in a single phrase but often by a cumulative, a collective effect. And if we want to receive the real impact of those two lines,

God's in His heaven —

All's right with the world,

we should look at the whole piece of which they are the conclusion.

Perhaps you will remind me of Sri Aurobindo's characterisation of these lines as being couched in "a sprightly-forcible manner".¹ You may tell me that this is a bit of condemnatory criticism and no excuse should be found for its object. But let, me draw your attention to the context of Sri Aurobindo's observation. He is speaking of the kind of poetry he calls "adequate" or "effective", and he points beyond it to a finer grade of poetic style. He regards even that grade — which can be exemplified from Chaucer, Milton, Shelley, Keats — as still not the ultimate. Sri Aurobindo is writing from a comparative vision. That is my first contention. The second is that when he further talks of Browning's "robust cheerfulness of temperament"² giving rise to the language of these lines,

1.The Future Poetry (1972 Edition), p. 26.

2.Ibid., p. 27.

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and adds that "an opposite temperament may well smile at it as vigorous optimistic fustian", he takes the two tripping lines in absolute isolation while evaluating their message and manner. It is quite legitimate for the purposes of critical illustration to do such a thing, and nobody can find fault with Sri Aurobindo's judgment here. But Heel sure that, in another frame of reference, he would pronounce differently. Besides, his phrase — "vigorous optimistic fustian" — is not his final sentence in persona propria upon the contents of the Browningian sprightly forcibleness. The phrase is what "an opposite temperament", going to its own extreme, would exaggeratedly condemn.

With this courteous bow of elucidative understanding in Sri Aurobindo's direction I may proceed to my own task.

The whole piece which concludes with our lines is from Browning's play Pippa Passes and is the song of a simple young girl going to her work. It is small enough for Mencken to have quoted in full:

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in His heaven—

All's right with the world!

This is not sublime poetry, not great poetry, but surely it has a delicacy of mood and movement that is faultless with a rare economy. Let us see briefly what it does. It has the sense of a time when the ordinary world is at its loveliest, its youngest, its freshest — the spring-season full of colour and fragrance, the break of day with the few first enchanting touches of light on the long darkness, the early hour of seven when we are sufficiently awake and yet not too glaringly exteriorised but keep a mixture of dream and common sense. Secondly, there is the brief selective vision of those features of the ordinary world which are either a thing at its most exquisite or a thing in its most right place. What can be more exquisite than a combination of pearly dewdrops with a purple hillside, or a lark lifting its wings and breaking free of the earth?

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And can the lark be more appropriately placed than in the sky, winging upwards its small body of song within a vast silence, or can the snail be more appropriately situated with its spiral protective shell and its two tiny searching horns than on the shrub or tree which is spikey and serves a snail with juts on which it can rest again and again and from which it can safely proceed to look for its flowery food? We have on the whole the suggestion of a perfect moment in a world which Browning knew very well to be in many respects an imperfect one. Yes, he was no blind fool — but he could see, as Mencken cannot, that certain combinations of phe-nomena can give a feeling as if for a while the imperfect world were disclosing a Divine Presence and becoming the glimpse of a supercosmos in which everything manifests a flawless Beauty. This visionary moment has been embodied by Browning in his little lyric with a sensitive choice of word-pictures and word-rhythms. When we take his poem from start to finish, we do feel that he is justified in saying that God's in His heaven and all's right with the world. The conclusion is the conclusion of a mood-formulation, it is not philosophy, not science, not common sense pronouncing an opinion for all time. It is the culmination of a shimmering insight and comes to the rightly responsive reader as something indisputable — not a frightful imbecility but a revelation on a miniature scale.

We have to know what poetry is trying to do and then be in a receptive state in order to appreciate it. The consideration of Browning's lyric as a whole proves Mencken to be mistaken in still another way. Every line, except the last two, states nothing but objective facts. Will Mencken deny that the year is recurrently at the spring, or that the sun rises again and again to make daylight, or that seven o'clock strikes every day? The poet does not always fly away from objective facts. But surely he does not stay locked up in them. As I remarked, he takes them as symbols — pointers, peep-holes, glimmerings of a greater concealed Reality — and he drives home, mightily or softly, to our souls his symbol-sense of that Reality and occasionally his touch on it. And the means by which he drives them home are a felicity of vivid phrase and a felicity of harmonious rhythm.

Even the other quotation which in itself may be felt as dogmati-cally resonant becomes a natural cry of triumph in its proper context. As far as I recollect, the piece in which the lines occur was

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written by William Ernest Henley in hospital after a serious acci-dent which fobbed him of one of his legs. It is entitled Invictus, which is the Latin for "Unconquered". Listen to all the stanzas:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

We can see clearly that Henley is not declaring himself to be possessed of a power that can do anything and everything. He does not boast that he can alter the whole world's course or make his soul accomplish whatever it wants with events or people. He is simply putting on record in the midst of appalling misfortunes the courage within him. Whether any gods have infused this courage into his being or whether it is something that is his own he does not know, but if it is a gift he is grateful for it. All that he knows is that nothing can make him afraid or break down in spirit. External Nature may be cruel, the path of his life may be full of blows, the hidden Powers beyond life and Nature may have decreed difficulties and dooms for him: all these things still leave him with his own self under control. Neither painful life nor grim death, neither present troubles'nor future tribulations can take away from him his self-mastery, the resolve not to lament, the refusal to fear, the ability to command his own response to adverse circumstances.

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And the manifesto of his courage is worked out in a series of progressive affirmations. When we come to the end we feel the conclusion as a correct summing-up with no unnatural flamboyance or brag: it is a strong simple straightforward statement that has no false note or any ring of fatuity. The suspicion of a touch of arbitrary absoluteness in it disappears when we reach the closing lines through the imaginative and rhythmic logic of the brave beauty lifting its voice in the preceding four stanzas.

But perhaps the quarrel between Mencken and poetry is a matter of two different tempers, two different views of the function of speech. Whatever poetry might say would be taken in a different light by a man who did not see or feel poetically from inside him. He and the poet talk dissimilar languages, and the poet's purport, the spirit in which he has spoken are as if in a foreign tongue whose inner nuances and significant turns are missed by one who approaches it with half-knowledge as well as with another bent of mind than the speaker's. Do you know how a certain Armenian interpreted the famous Biblical phrase that reads in English: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"? This foreigner expressed his understanding of it thus: "The whiskey is good but the meat is rotten."

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