On Poetry
THEME/S
II
1
Blank verse, ever since Shakespeare and Milton gave it the shape of their genius, has been the mould par excellence of English poetry. Its unrhymed lines of five feet, variously modulating on the iambic base of a light unstressed syllable followed by a heavy stressed one (x/), have proved capable of equalling the epic effects of the Greek and Latin hexameter. English poets, however, have been haunted by the cadences of the ancient world and have often tried to transfer into their language the hexameter itself — the "heroic" blank verse of Greece and Rome. The mould which Shakespeare and Milton adopted and perfected is unlikely ever to fall into desuetude. It had its birth in the predominantly iambic nature of the English tongue and its span of five feet holds a poetic gesture admirably substantial and balanced for a language which is less polysyllabic than Greek or Latin. But though it has these advantages it has still not the swing and the structural music of the classical hexameter. A good line of Milton's is nearer the sound of prose than one of Virgil's. No matter how intense the word and the rhythm, the metrical structure is not as distinct, as markedly harmonious. When Milton writes about Satan:
His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined and the excess
Of glory obscured,
it is not impossible to mistake the description for prose of a highly patterned and euphonious order. But who with a trained ear can mistake for a snatch of prose-sound the Virgil-ian phrases about the priestess of Apollo?
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Sed pectum anhelum
Et rabie fera corda tument, majorque videri
Nec mortale sonans, adflata est numine quando
Jam propione Dei.1
Apart from any difference due to the larger freedom in Latin for poetic word-arrangement, there is here a more outstanding metrical form without yet the least sing-song, a more striking beauty and power in the structure itself.
If the classical hexameter could be "Englishified" our poets would have two sovereign strings to their bow, each with its own special quality. So it is worth asking whence arises the marvellous metrical swing of Homer and Virgil. The classical hexameter is a run of five dactyls ending with a spondee, allowing a substitution anywhere of the first four dactyls by a spondee — the fifth being usually left untouched — and of the terminal spondee by a trochaic foot. But the dactyl, the spondee and the trochee do not mean in Greek and Latin the English /xx,//,/x. For, poetry in the ancient world was based not on stress but on quantity. Quantity is the time taken by the voice to pronounce the vowel on which a syllable is supported. It reckons syllables as short (⌣) and long (—) instead of light and heavy; a word like "widow" which in English is a trochee or heavy in the first syllable and light in the second would be according to classical quantity an iamb, the first syllable short and the second long. Quantity ruled the metre in Greek and Latin because those languages were highly inflected. Where moods, cases, tenses, genders, numbers vary a great deal, the way a syllable is pronounced alters not merely the rhythm but the actual meaning of a word or a sentence; so the quantity of a syllable gets particularly noted and becomes the most important variable and ultimately the basic determinant of metre. Stress, if any, is allotted a subsidiary role. In English, with its few inflexions, the role of quantity has been so far subsidiary
1. But her bosom heaved, her heart swelled with frenzy and she was ampler to behold. Her voice was no longer human, as she sensed the approach and breath
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to stress; it does not affect the metre but only the rhythm. It helps euphony, diversifies the pace or else enforces sense by sound, bringing out rhythmically the essence of a thing. How important to poetic effect though not to metre itself the role of quantity often is, can be seen from many fine verses — these, for example, from Spenser:
Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in.
The long "o" of "open" vivifies the meaning of that word, the long "a" of "gates" hints the openness which those objects are capable of and which the poet desires to be evoked from them. The long "i" of "wide" needs no explanation. Listen to Tennyson's
And on a sudden lo! the level lake.
Here what adds to the poetic spell of the alliteration is the right sprinkling of long with short vowels in the alliterative words. In "lo!" the vowel, long as well as unclosed by any consonant, gives the broad vista revealed unexpectedly and all at once. In "level", the two short "e"'s bear out the motionless uniformity and evenness of the water that is seen, while the long "a" of "lake" shows us the same water as no small pond but a considerable expanse. Let the ear judge Sri Aurobindo's line from Love and Death:
Through the great silence that was now his soul.
The hushing sibilance of it is accompanied by a series of five long vowels, most of which are driven home all the more by strong stresses: the effect is of amplitude, depth and a huge power held in suspense, a psychological effect which could never have been produced by the idea and the experience being partly couched in other vowel-values — say,
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Through the great stillness that was now his spirit.
It is clear that quantity is no negligible part of English poetry; but Sri Aurobindo in his masterly essay On Quantitative Metre affirms that until it is explicitly and avowedly the base the quality of the ancient hexameter cannot be reproduced. No doubt, that quality is an inner one; the very spirit of the hexameter must be caught, the poet's blood must have the surge of the Iliad and the broad even stream of the Aeneid before he can play Homer and Virgil in English, Yet a proper sense of the outer form is also needed for the inner spirit to find natural and constant embodiment.
A proper sense: that is the desideratum. Several poets have tried to carry over into English all the rules of quantity obtaining in the classical tongues. Sri Aurobindo does not belong to their school. A Greek or Latin line is never read primarily with an attention to accents: in it the voice has to spread out more evenly, giving each syllable the full sound-value demanded by the inflected character of the language. Up to the very last syllable in the line the voice has to articulate carefully the sounds to get the accurate shade of sense. In English the stresses tend to sweep us on in jump after jump over the unstressed syllables so that those sounds that have no intrinsic length get somewhat slurred. The more uniform dwelling of the voice along a Greek or Latin line of poetry connects sound to sound in a close bond and confers on each vowel a value due not merely to its intrinsic length or shortness nor even to a shortening or lengthening of it by one or more consonants coming after in the same word, but also to the consonants with which the next word begins. In English the casting back of an influence by the consonants of the next word is not there at all: the word-units are more separate and independent. Even the invariable lengthening of a vowel by-two or more consonants in the same word would be arbitrary: the word "length" itself is long by its consonant-load, while the word "shortness" remains short in both syllables in spite of it. The difference in voice-value we feel between these two short syllables arises from the stress
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on the first. In a noun like "transports" where the same "ort"-sound followed by a consonant is unstressed, the voice passes too rapidly to give us any such distinct feeling. The English ear seldom notes any lingering of the voice over unstressed syllables except where the vowel possesses intrinsic length. If consonant-weight is given a carte blanche to lengthen quantity, the sound-effect of many lines of English poetry would suffer. Such lines are expressive in their vowels because they ignore the classical canon. Take one instance: Sri Aurobindo's Baji Prabhou begins with the description of an extremely hot "noon of Deccan", making nature and man alike feel
Imprisoned by that bronze and brilliant sky.
It is because the English ear receives a deft accumulation of quantitative shorts in all the important words before that final long "sky" that there is suggested by the vowellation the intense quick-enveloping heat, the cramping unescapable glare, the parching and stifling close atmosphere, narrowing as it were so wide a thing as the sky to a prison in which one could scarcely move and breathe. The consonants in Sri Aurobindo's line, by their number as well as their individual sounds, introduce marked poetic significances: the recurrence of labials before an "r" and nasals neighboured by a sibilant make an impression of aggressive shining strength; but they do not sufficiently retard the voice to convert an intrinsic short into a long though they may create shades of shortness as they may create also shades of length among longs that are intrinsic. To forget that this is so according to almost a fundamental law in English would be, in Sri Aurobindo's view, as serious as to forget the stress-stroke. Niggling concessions like saying that mostly the doubled consonant, as in "brilliant", does not double the sound and so must be considered single take too poor an account of the essential differentia of English from Greek or Latin: dominant stress. An intrinsic long cannot be wholly denied attention, but generally our voice is whisked away from a short that is without stress, no matter how many consonants may
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attend on it. Thus the English ear can never accept the fantastic lengthening of the vowel in an insignificant word like "of" in the phrase "of Spring" with which Robert Bridges ends a hexameter line built on classical principles. Just because the "o" is followed by four consonants, one in the word itself and three in the next it does not lose its shortness and become equal in status to a stressed word like "Spring". As a hexameter-close, the words cannot form a spondee. Bridges is not always twisting the English ear with such perversity, he has more genuine endings in a translation from Virgil, but even there the rest of the lines have false quantities too patent to be waived:
To point out a few artificialities: the first and last syllables of "uncertain", the second of "secretly" and "colours", a flick of a word like "in" or "is" as well as a minor word like "and" or "hath" assume, when the lines are read, a quantitative length foreign to them in spite of their queues of consonants. In fact, when the lines are read as English poetry the stresses impose themselves on the ear and weave a metrical scheme which is far from giving importance to most of the supposed quantitative longs, and records upon our tympanum no reasonable approximation to the Latin hexameter. The sole resemblance is that in the last two feet of each line accent and length coincide as in Latin. The rest of the feet.fail for two reasons: in the first place, the lengths of Bridges are often spurious and, in the second, the English stress is not identical in nature with the Latin accent. Latin, richly inflected, based itself on quantity in its poetic forms, leaving accent to be a minor instrument of rhythm,
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a high pitch and not a downward weight of the voice. English, poorly inflected, has become stamped with stress, and stress in it can never play the second fiddle. Where the ear refuses to grow deaf to that stamp or to accept the throw-back of consonantal influence, no amount of Virgilian accent-design, artistry of diction and feel of word-atmosphere on the part of Bridges can re-create in his translation the characteristic structure and rhythm of the original measure:
The failure of Bridges comes at the end of a long series of failures and drives the last nail into the coffin of strict classical quantity in English.
If quantity is to have its say it must be filled with a true English life, it must be something natural to the language and in tune with its genius of ineffaceable stress. Poets in the past have groped towards a kind of compromise, making stress coincide as much as possible with what they reckoned as length. Their experiments are vitiated by many inconsistencies, hampered as they were because of the obsession of two or more consonants giving length to a vowel preceding them. Sri Aurobindo rejects their false theory and stumbling practice. Quoting Harvey's
he points out that the word "and" ought by classical rules
* I am using the sign * to distinguish the Latin from the English stress.
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to be an inexorable long and yet Harvey treats it as a short. Sidney's
draws from him the pertinent query: By what classical rule can the first syllable of "woman's" be regarded as long? By stress alone and not either by intrinsic or indirect dwelling of the voice does it acquire length. Quantity, with Sidney and Harvey, seems fickle and it does not serve any vital purpose: it merely misguides them into scanning syllables like those of "woman's" and the last two of "abundance" as spondaic though the ear flatly contradicts the eye's illusion of a retarding of the voice by a clutter of consonants. When this illusion gets the better of the stress-sense it mars the intended rhythm, as in the line of Sidney s protege, Abraham Fraunce:
The first three feet can admit of no hexametrical reading of the classical type (dactyls or spondees) if we observe the stresses as indeed we must above anything else in English. Sheer quantity, without the slightest plausible stress, cannot accumulate the voice in the main syllable of a hexameter foot in English: not even intrinsic length has the power to do it, much less a fiction foisted on the language by an exotic analogy. Fraunce's line is more or less a brother to those of Bridges and convinces us that to run with an utterly alien hare yet try to hunt with a thoroughly English hound produces often a weird medley of movements.
Why not then accept only clear intrinsic length and always
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fuse stress with it? Will not that give us the perfect English hexameter? The answer is that the demands of such a hexameter will be impossible to fulfil if we are to write with spontaneous ease and not be hindered at every step by an exclusive vocabulary. It may not be beyond a poet's compass to fashion occasional lines to the tune of
Surely a poet would be gloomed into dejection and darkened by weariness, were he permitted nothing save to dance to a tune so exacting. Words with clear intrinsic length do not strew like Vallombrosan leaves even the flow of Greek and Latin: if the help of consonant-load had been swept away, Homer would have been left dumbly twiddling his fingers at his lyre and Virgil impotently biting his quill. To dispense with that help and add stress as a sine qua non is to hag-ride the poor English hexametrist.
Impatient of preposterous curbs no less than fictitious values and haphazard movements, most poets have chosen to throw overboard all classicism and to construct their hexameters according to the English prosody of heavy and light instead of long and short. Sri Aurobindo recognises the naturalness and flexibility thus brought into the technique, but he is not satisfied with the results offered by the practitioners of the accentual hexameter. There are many reasons why they have not created sustained poetry. Most of them were not men of first-rate genius. And whatever gifts capable of being kindled to genius at rare moments they had were dimmed by the themes they chose, trivial themes alien to the spirit of the ancient measure, and by the defective metrical form accepted as the stress equivalent of that quantitative mould. The Greek and Latin poets had dealt with subjects evoking naturally the high seriousness, the dynamic vision, the intense aesthesis that
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were the constituents of their genius. Thus, a medium technically full of rhythmic resources of beauty and power got lifted to climax after climax of epic and pastoral and satire. Where in Longfellow or Clough, the two most famous among the accentual hexametrists, is any burst of climaxes in an adequate medium? Even Kingsley who is better at construction and metre-management has mostly a tenuous rhythm: his meagre talent could not touch his constructive instinct to supreme issues. His constructive instinct itself was impeded at times by the inadequate idea he shared with the others of what the English hexameter should be. The majority of the experimenters do not scruple to make use of weak accents as if they were full stresses: words like "but" and "in" and "if" (intrinsic shorts) can bear a slight accentual pressure in feet of two syllables but in feet of three they prove their weakness too openly unless filled with importance by a peculiar position. Tribrachs (three light syllables) are thus cooked up as dactyls without discrimination or limit. Then again, since spondees are none too easily found in English to replace dactyls, trochees run riot as modulations; but the trochee, if it comes in too frequently without being justified by the sense and by a subtle rhythmic need, ruins the metre and substitutes the variety of a lifeless jogtrot for the monotony of a mechanical canter. A modulation other than the spondee or trochee to substitute the dactyl was never consciously admitted as part of the technique: hence, though employed here and there, it could not be utilised to the top of its potentialities. Even in the hands of a poet finer than Kingsley, Clough or Longfellow, the movement lacks ease and power except for a few almost accidental steps. Here is a translation from the Iliad by George Meredith:
Now, as when fire voracious catches the undipped
woodland,
This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind
and the scrubwood
Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's
fury raging,
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So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scat
tered
Trojans fell, and in numbers amany the horses, neck-
stiffened,
Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the
warfield,
Missing their blameless charioteers, but for these, they
were outstretched
Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their
home-mates.
Another passage by the same poet is about Zeus speaking to the weeping horses of Achilles:
Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow his
head shook
Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spoke
in his bosom:
"Why, ye hapless gave we to Peleus, you to a mortal Master; ye that are ageless both ye, both of you deathless!
Was it that ye among men most wretched should come
to have heart-grief?
'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there
wretcheder nowhere
Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with
breath and has movement."
Some lines are definitely good, their rhythm comes living to us and their structure is firm yet flexible. But the general impression both the quotations give is of a deliberate artificial rush or run and there is considerable jolting if not limping. Meredith introduces with success a large number of spondees, especially at the end of his lines: spondees either by stress alone or stress and quantity. He has also a skilful enjambment, a running-over from line to line. Admirable is the effect of mobile force and volume in the second line overlapping the third in
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the account of Agamemnon in the fight. Almost as fine in its own way is the note of pathos, pausing and progressing, with a suggestive burden of repetition, in the two opening lines, beautifully enjambed, of the speech of Zeus — "Why, ye hapless...". The sixth line of the first excerpt and the last of the second are not unsatisfying. Nevertheless we are left disappointed with the sum-total. If we were to give a summary description, no better would be to hand than two phrases picked out from the passages themselves: the first passage seems on the whole "neck-stiffened", the second "flat upon earth".
These labels can be attached to nearly all the accentual hexameters written by English poets. Sri Aurobindo believes that there is a flaw at the very source of them: the mould through which the poetry flows is ill-fitted for sustained inspiration. He declares that though whatever is radically un-English in the classical rules has to be brushed aside and though we cannot ignore stress in forming our feet we still cannot catch the characteristic structure and rhythm of the old hexameter without keeping quantity as the base. A veritable paradox, this — until we realise how Sri Aurobindo views stress.
Perhaps the best approach to Sri Aurobindo's view is by way of his pronouncement on the backward influence of consonants. An intrinsic short becomes long in the classical languages by being buttressed up with consonants, but, as we have seen, the English stress whips away our voice from all places that are unstressed and at the same time have no intrinsic length to make the voice linger. The special force of the ictus robs unstressed short syllables from getting the length they would if the ictus did not operate, if it did not take to itself the mass of voice which would otherwise go to them. This means that there is a transference of voice-mass, the stressed syllable appropriating what would render the unstressed intrinsic short a long one in languages that are not governed primarily by stress. An equivalent, therefore, of length which was caused by consonantal crowding in Greek or Latin is in English collected wherever stress falls. Stress appears from this angle a quantity-builder, a creator of metrical length independent of the intrinsic value of the syllable
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which stands under it. That it should be a quantity-builder is but natural; for what after all is stress in terms of voice-value? It is like a hammer-stroke driving a syllable firmly in for other syllables that are unstressed to hang or take support on in a metrical foot. Its function is not dissimilar to that of length in a Greek or Latin foot; it confers importance and strength on a syllable. The sole difference is that stress gives strength and importance from above, by a vertical pressure or weight of the voice, and length in the classical sense does it by a stretching of the voice, by laying a horizontal weight-bar. Even an intrinsically short syllable becomes through stress a support for unstressed longs: if no special strength, weight or mass of voice accrued to it, foot-building upon it would be impossible. Quantity makes the voice dwell more on a syllable, stress does the same, though by a different method and though that kind of increased dwelling has nuances according as the stressed syllable is intrinsically short or long. Such nuances often serve to create subtle psychologies of sound which render the sense inwardly vibrant and vivid to our consciousness. They do not change the fundamental mass of voice collected by stress. Longs and shorts place themselves under one general category of metrical length when the ictus falls on them fully and emphatically and is no mere voice-inflexion as in words like "is" and "have" which carry a weak accent except by a certain pattern of the syntax. Sri Aurobindo is the first to look on stress in a quantitative light with a confident sweeping gesture of finality, even as he is the first to crush uncompromisingly the fallacy of the general throw-back of consonantal influence on quantity in English—and that is what makes really original his loosening of the knot of the hexameter. His view is not just a juggling with names, an arbitrary and otiose re-labelling. The quantitative light leads to a form other than the current accentual one. The accentual hexameter takes no stock of the unstressed intrinsic long, it sets out to deal only with stress. Sri Aurobindo builds with two factors: the length of stress and the length of the unstressed natural long. The former must always take precedence in English and constitute the main syllable of a hexameter foot, but if the latter is consciously acknowledged
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as having a say in the metre, then a principle of construction is brought out, which is obscured in the conventional mould but which is absolutely essential in order to catch the spirit of the old hexameter, for, without letting intrinsic longs come by their due we cannot hope to catch fully that quantitative spirit.
Not that we must have unaccented longs everywhere:
Swinburne's
Sudden and steady the music as eight hoofs trample and
thunder
is as perfectly Virgilian in its ring as Virgil's own
Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,1
and Virgilian too is Whitman's cadence —
Silent, avoiding the moon-beams, blending myself with
the shadows.
The unaccented long is not at play in the Swinburne line, while in the Whitman it comes only in the final syllable but does not bring out any revolutionary principle. Here the classical structure-music and rhythm-soul are kept by means of the sheer quantity-building of stress. The field of construction, however, is much narrowed down if we do not see that when the Biblical
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the
morning?
or that verse detachable from the semi-burlesque mock-heroic context of dough's Bothie of Toberna-Vuolich,
He like a god came leaving his ample Olympian
chamber,
1. With a four-footed din the horse-hooves trample the crumbling plain.
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has the true Homeric note in movement and rhythm and structural swing, another quantity-value than stress-length also claims our notice. In the quotation from Clough the first foot has the word "like" which is intrinsically long: in combination with the stressed "he" and the unstressed "a" it forms to the ear a quantitative anti-bacchius (- - ⌣). Similarly,in the apostrophe to Lucifer, the sound-value of "art" and "thou" join with the stressed "How" to create on a quantitative basis a light molossus (- - -), light because there is not the same weight of accent on the three words. We thus have modulations unrealised in the accentual scansion. The accentual hexameter accepts the dactyl as the only trisyllabic foot permissible. No doubt the dactyl must predominate, but the quantitative nature of the true hexameter compels us to reckon with the unstressed long as part of the metre and on that reckoning the dactyl cannot ever in English be the all-sufficient foot. And once we accept non-dactylic trisyllable modulations there is no reason why the new feet should have only the unstressed long as their part determinant. There is room too for other stresses than the main one at the beginning of the foot. Such modulations are even less realised in the accentual mould. The quantitative basis leads to them as an inevitable logical result and opens a wide avenue of escape from the monotony to which the accentual hexametrists have condemned their mould by the somewhat paradoxical procedure of trying not a whit to preserve the quantitative spirit of the classical hexameter and trying their utmost to imitate the type of feet prevalent in it. Save for the licence of using a trochee anywhere in lieu of a spondee, they have worshipped blindly the classical norm. The hexameter of Homer and Virgil, like all other metrical forms in Greek and Latin, is narrow in its range of substituted feet because the spirit of the old languages does not clamour for them. In constructing the English hexameter we should boldly enlarge that range, since English poetry has had from the beginning an extreme elasticity in foot-substitution. English metres do not obey a fixed pattern as faithfully as Greek and Latin do; the genius of the language invites a wider play
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of modulation and to un-English the hexameter by denying it that natural elasticity on the ground that it will not duplicate the classical type is to see the structure and form of poetry with a scholarly instead of a creative eye. Just as the English element of stress cannot be blinked, so too the English penchant for varied modulation is unavoidable. Most of the modulations current in English poetry are dissyllabic except for the anapaest (x x /) which is a frequent occurrence, especially in a glide-form, and the dactyl which appears on rare occasions; yet where the language is apt to modulation there is no reason why a less thumbed variety should not be exploited. In fact, such a variety does intrude itself with significant force in several lines among the Elizabethans. The most celebrated is Webster's
This revealing of abrupt surcharged unexpressed emotion by an unusual foot, a bacchius, is almost rivalled in Marlowe's note of dread by means of a cretic (/X/):
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Even the accentual hexameter does not always stick to its norm. Take the two best lines from Meredith's Homer-translation already quoted:
This way | bears it and | that the great | whirl of the |
wind and the | scrubwood
Stretches up | torn, flung | forward a | length by the | fire's
fury | raging.
We are faced here as in most of his other hexametrical successes with a telling departure from the conventional modula- tions of the accentual mould. The third foot — — is no dactyl or spondee or trochee. It is a cretic and both by its extra weight and its originality of movement it adds to the vitality and suggestion of the initial spondee and the hurling dactyls in the rest of the line. The next line is also expressively "footed": a strong spondee and two dactyls, one on either side of it, represent in the first half the ravage of the trees and their heavy falling and being flung out on the ground, while in the second half there is an anti-bacchius — between a dactyl and a trochee, making us feel a fierce dense power which is intensified by the alliteration and the intrinsic vowel-lengths. But these wonderful effects happen freakishly in the accentual system, they are no acknowledged feature of the technique. And where they do happen, not even the strong stresses prevent them from losing a little of their sound-values. "That the great" takes the primary stress according to the norm of dactylic accentuation on "that". Neither the intrinsic nor the stress length of "great" is brought out in toto. We are led somewhat to muffle them in order to make the foot a dactyl. If an instrument like the kymograph which measures speech in hundredths of a second recorded this foot as part of the accentual dactylic line in which it occurs, it would show the time of "that" as longer than the time of "great" even though the ictus falls on both and the intrinsic quantity of the former is short and of the latter long. A quantitative system in which stress remains effective in the main syllable of a foot but without the
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dactylic tyranny of the accentual base would stop this falsification. Unstressed longs in clear metrical power are needed by the English hexameter to achieve a rhythmic kinship to the Iliad and the Aeneid; unusual stress-combinations are needed by it to acquire a pliancy in keeping with all other metrical patterns in English. To give these two factors of foot-construction a many-shaded naturalness and a thorough sound-value Sri Aurobindo's vision of the hexameter with a quantitative light on stress is ideally called for.
Suitable foot-changes, of course, are not the only things required for breathing life into the hexameter. The accent-stroke must fall suggestively now on intrinsic longs, now on intrinsic shorts. There must be a sensitive placing of the pauses and occasional overflow from one line to another. Word-grouping and sentence-structure must be attended to. A subtle play of vowellation and consonant harmonies must bring the ear relief and pleasure. Indeed, there is no end of technical skill wanted or practicable. But nowhere should the technique be handled mechanically. An inner cry for variety must get answered wherever the poet takes the help of the artist. It is the unrestricted and unjustified trochaic modulations in Clough that kill the soul of the hexameter rhythm in his verse. What makes Longfellow tame and feeble is the insensitive plethora of basic beats. Kingsley is spoiled by his thinness of inspiration, his instinctive skill as technician counterbalanced by his inanity as poet. All of them and many others like Meredith suffer to a more or less degree from a low level of poetic afflatus on the one hand and on the other an unconsciousness of the true nature and art of the hexameter in its English rebirth. The level is to a considerable extent dragged down by the feeling of fumbling in a half-realised medium, the incubus of conducting an experiment under semi-artificial conditions. Skill without proper insight into what the character and possibilities of the medium are, inspiration without the power either to sustain it or to apply it rightly — these have been the defects of all the past endeavours. Sri Aurobindo's eminence in this field lies in his fusing a deep and plenary breath of inspiration with a
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wide-eyed artistry that is attuned to the soul both of classical and English poetics.
It is not in the hexameter alone that Sri Aurobindo succeeds. Many kinds of quantitative verse he has revived in forms natural to English. Alcaics, Sapphics and several less known varieties make up the series of examples that follow his essay on quantitative metre. His hexametrical composition, however, is the most important, for it tackles the chief knot of the quantitative problem. To loosen that knot for good, an actual masterpiece must be brought forth — harmonies that live before us and can lay an impregnating touch on future poets. It is one thing to theorise brilliantly, quite another to embody the theory in poetic practice and roll out grand rhythms. But Sri Aurobindo laughs at difficulties. With supreme audacity he evokes the name of Homer himself by calling his poem Ilion. Ilion is a fragment of 374 lines — a first glimpse given us of a long epic lying unfinished among the manuscripts of Sri Aurobindo the poet for whom Sri Aurobindo the Yogi is able to find meagre time. But certain facts serve to focus our scrutiny upon it almost as if it were a full-blown epic. It is written in a metre whose large promise has scarcely been fulfilled so far; this would render an inspired use of that metre for a few hundred lines a major achievement. Further, its deliberate choice of Homer's theme in a metre that reached its acme in the Iliad challenges antiquity's loftiest poetic creation and leads us to dwell on quality and ignore bulk, since to Homerise for even a few hundred lines would be to sit among the utterly elect.
2
Can Ilion be called Homeric in any valid connotation of the term? The term may be taken to mean two things — the mind of Homer and the poetic art of Homer. To both must Sri Aurobindo bring a basic resemblance if his Ilion is to be Homeric to the full. Basic — and not superficial: that point is important. Sri Aurobindo need not ask himself at every turn:
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Am I thinking and feeling precisely as Homer would vis-a-vis the same object, event or situation? Such a similarity is neither possible nor desirable: it would impair the spontaneous evolving of a poetic work. What Sri Aurobindo, having picked out Homer's theme for new treatment, must do is to preserve in the midst of his own individual psychology Homer's fundamental bent of mind and Homer's general world-view. One cannot, with a mental bent and a world-view poles apart from Homer's, write naturally about the Heroic Age of the Iliad. Whatever differences there may be should be delicately adjusted. Sri Aurobindo's mind is complex and many-dimensioned, at once more sensuous, more philosophical and more spiritual than Homer's. But there is in it an insistent objectivity which, for all the un-Homeric spheres of consciousness objectified or symbolised by him, kins him to the ancient bard's constant look outward on clear-cut shape and gesture, attitude and motion. As a rule, Sri Aurobindo's imagination is subtler, seeking comparisons and contrasts in rarer nuances of life's and Nature's moods, in less familiar phenomena than are caught in Homer's celebrated similes. Still, there is no taint of conceit or sophistication: the images have an untortured appeal, a fine elemental touch across their subtlety. He has also a less austere and less limited use of colour; and his colour comes from a gaze thrown outward from a more inward consciousness, so that, though he loses no jot of the breadth and vehemence and poignancy of physical existence, he wraps them in an atmosphere of the Unknown and the Divine in an intenser and deeper way than Homer. He takes care, nevertheless, not to exceed the Greek sense of the deific. Within that sense he gives rein to his profound Indian awareness and understanding of the Spiritual. The Greek theos is not merely a super-splendid form acting from without on human beings; he is also a super-conscious force acting from within — and he is more than a personal entity. Behind the anthropomorphic and the divinely statuesque, behind the impalpable and the divinely psychological, there are vastnesses, pervasive world-wills employing the outward or the inward as a focus for their mysterious rule over all the desires and emotions of
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men and the vicissitudes of life. This mysterious rule, this overshadow of Fate Sri Aurobindo expresses more consciously and with greater explicitness than Homer. Not that he lets the Indian insight obtrude upon the Greek vision: only, this insight helps the essence of that vision to emerge more luminously. He is, therefore, Aurobindonian without ceasing to be basically Homeric. The same applies to his poetic art. If the style is anything of the man, we cannot expect Sri Aurobindo to duplicate Homer's precise brand of epic expression. It is a certain essence of Homer that he must retain. The texture of the language, the quality and rhythm of the words, separate as well as combined, must not be thin or cheap or crude; neither must it be affected. The metrical workmanship must not be rough and loose on the one hand, nor too smart and regimented on the other. Everywhere there must be splendour and smoothness — and yet a certain simplicity and strength. No exotic exclusiveness in the splendid language-texture, no over-artistry or exquisite monotony in the smooth metre-movement; both must have a strong direct varied life, they must seem to belong to Nature, the free and large and open stretches of wind and wave. So long as Sri Aurobindo does not lack these essentials he remains Homeric, even if he has more multiplicity within his unity than Homer and his wind blows from directions uncommon to Hellas and his wave has more complex curves than the Aegean.
Ilion commences with a new day breaking over the besieged city:
Dawn in her journey eternal compelling the labour of
mortals,
Dawn the beginner of things with the night for their
rest or their ending,
Pallid and bright-lipped arrived from the mists and the
chill of the Euxine.
Earth in the dawn-fire delivered from starry and
shadowy vastness
Woke to the wonder of life and its passion and sorrow
and beauty,
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All on her bosom sustaining, the patient compassionate
Mother.
Out of the formless vision of Night with its look on
things hidden,
Given to the gaze of the azure she lay in her garment of
greenness,
Wearing light on her brow. In the dawn-ray lofty and
voiceless
Ida climbed with her god-haunted peaks into diamond
lustres,
Ida first of the hills with the ranges silent beyond her Watching the dawn in their giant companies, as since
the ages
First began they had watched her, upbearing Time on
their summits.
Troas cold on her plain awaited the boon of the sunshine. There, like a hope through an emerald dream sole-pacing
for ever.
Stealing to wideness beyond, crept Simois lame in his
currents,
Guiding his argent thread mid the green of the reeds
and the grasses.
Headlong, impatient of Space and its boundaries, Time
and its slowness,
Xanthus clamoured aloud as he ran to the far-surging
waters,
Joining his call to the many-voiced roar of the mighty
Aegean,
Answering Ocean's limitless cry like a whelp to its parent.
Forests looked up through their rifts, the ravines grew
aware of their shadows.
Closer now gliding glimmered the golden feet of the
goddess.
Over the hills and the headlands spreading her
garment of splendour,
Fateful she came with her eyes impartial looking on
all things,
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Bringer to man of the day of his fortune and day of his
downfall.
Full of her luminous errand, careless of eve and its
weeping,
Fateful she paused unconcerned above Ilion's mysteried
greatness,
Domes like shimmering tongues of the crystal flames
of the morning.
Opalesque rhythm-line of tower-tops, notes of the lyre
of the sun-god.
High over all that a nation had built and its love and its
laughter,
Lighting the last time highway and homestead, market
and temple,
Looking on men who must die and women destined to
sorrow.
Looking on beauty fire must lay low and the sickle of
slaughter,
Fateful she lifted the doom-scroll red with the script of
the Immortals,
Deep in the invisible air that folds in the race and its
morrows
Fixed it, and passed on smiling the smile of the griefless
and deathless, —
Dealers of death though death they know not, who in
the morning
Scatter the seed of the event for the reaping ready at
nightfall.
Over the brooding of plains and the agelong trance of
the summits
Out of the sun and its spaces she came, pausing tranquil and fatal,
And, at a distance followed by the golden herds of the
sun-god,
Carried the burden of Light and its riddle and danger
to Hellas.
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No doubt can be entertained about the magnificence of these lines. The Olympian measure of the ancients is once more abroad. It is not the use of Homeric locutions like "god-haunted peaks" and "the many-voiced roar" that affine these verses to Homer: it is the majestic energy of the words and the speed and sinuousness and sonority of their rhythms that put them on a par with the spirit of the Iliad, And these elements preserve that spirit even though Homer, treating the same scene, would have had a less "inward" description of things nor dwelt so much with a revealing eye on the divinity of his "rosy-fingered Dawn". At last the power and beauty of the old quantitative hexameter has come into its own in the English language. At last there is the absolute control which incessantly varies the music without hurting the instrument. Each line is alert with its undulating or bounding life and all the lines hang together with an underlying master-note building up a significant sum-total of harmony. The dactyls ring out clear and full, there is no shirking their insistence, they get all the strength they can by emphatic stresses and all the variety they need by the meaningful stroke of the stress on intrinsic longs or intrinsic shorts. Where they yield to modulations it is not just to placate an academic law. The spondaic and trochaic units are spontaneous and purposeful. Here is the former endowing by a double accent-weight plus a double intrinsic length the words with a poised portentousness in almost the middle of a line otherwise norma] except for a slight divergence in the penultimate foot:
Fateful she | lifted the | doom-scroll | red with the |
script of the Im| mortals.
No better instance of the suggestive trochee can be demanded than
Looking on | men who must | die and | women |
destined to | sorrow,
where in fact two trochees are next to each other, a perilous
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situation which yet saves itself most triumphantly by rhythmically inducing a keen feeling the normal dactyls would quite destroy. Remove the unusual turn of sound, rewrite either
Looking on men who must | die and on | women
destined to sorrow
or
Looking on men who must | die and |
women pre|destined to sorrow
or else
Looking on men who must | die and on |
and what you have is in different degrees of formality a metri-cised statement instead of moving poetry. The dropped syllables which cause the trochees in the place of dactyls are here like a catch in the breath followed by a missed heart-beat: they create unexpectedly a depth of emotion. Equally appropriate are other departures from the base, daring trisyllabic departures which get their whole significant and rhythmic value in a quantitative system. A line early in the passage,
possesses its superb poetic quality with the help not only of imaginative words playing alliteration and assonance but also of its stressed and unstressed intrinsic longs one after another and its two modulations. The modulations are in both places the anti-bacchius. The characteristic of the anti-bacchius (- - ⌣) is a massing without any curbed or thickened effect. If spondees had been used, the line would have lost all its joint sense of vastness and deliverance. Neither dactyls nor trochees
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would have done the necessary massing which the two anti-bacchiuses carry out in their own dissimilar ways. The anti-bacchius of "shadowy" indicates the mass of night, the huge star-sprinkled and star-distanced gloom, but since the mass is not close-packed and the gloom has a tenuous largeness their peculiarity is rhythmed to us by the stress being only on one syllable and that syllable an intrinsic short while the intrinsic long is left unstressed like the short immediately after and, besides being left unstressed, made perhaps to have even its length slightly shaded off by the vowel-sound following its "o"-sound. A different psychology is held by the anti-bacchius in which "dawn-fire" makes the massing. Both the words are natural longs and both are stressed: an intense concentration is indicated in keeping with the idea of the gathering dense light of the sun. The final unstressed short which thins off or loosens out the foot brings the delivering movement whereby the earth emerges into day from the ambiguous infinity of the dark hours — a movement which is continued in the next foot, a dactyl, in which even the stressed syllable is a natural short like the others that are without the accent. What adds to the suggestive metrical architecture is that the two anti-bacchiuses with their differing psychological burdens are balanced against each other by being made to stand as the second foot from either end of the line.
Art alone cannot introduce such technical subtleties: it is the afflatus, the poetic frenzy which mostly bears art with it to felicitous goals. An awareness, however, of technical resources is needed when handling a difficult measure. The anti-bacchius is a very natural substitute for a dactyl and is likely to be the most frequent — the artist can depend upon the poet to employ it almost automatically at the dictate of inspiration. The cretic (— ⌣ —) is not so easy to throw in and the artist has to aid the poet in giving it birth successfully. In
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it stands with a special ferocity after a delicate trochee: a relentless and unescapable force is felt in it as though the devastation in wait for delicate and beautiful things were exemplified in that hemming in of a short syllable between two emphatic longs. The line —
has a suddenness in its opening cretic perfectly in tune with the meaning. The green darkness discovers that light comes in through the spaces between tree and tree, branch and branch, spaces the night seemed to efface with its obscurity. The surprise of the discovery draws the sight upward through those forgotten spaces and the suddenness of that upward look is caught in the stressed syllable occurring where an unstressed one was expected to finish a dactyl.
The entire passage teems with technical felicities. Nowhere do they appear mechanical They are fused indissolubly with the poetic urge. Even the initial tribrach in
And, at a | distance | followed by the | golden | herds
of the | sun-god,
justifies itself as it rarely does in past experiments with the English hexameter. Now the three shorts coming close together before the first stress-long produces precisely the impression of an unfilled gap, a distance, between Aurora and the sungod's golden herds. How well also is the rest of the line "footed"! The words "followed by the" form what is known as the ionic a majore (- - ⌣ ⌣). The extreme length of the foot with its equal division into two longs and two shorts hints to the ear the massed herds crowding forward from afar to the empty air-fields ahead.
A level of inspiration and technique like that of the prelude of Ilion is beyond the compass of any poet to maintain over hundreds of lines. But it is not beyond the compass of the truly
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great to link up such heights by verse sufficiently strong and rhythmic in between. In Sri Aurobindo's hexameters there is never a drop into flatness and atony. Fresh and happy effects are never lacking and from them he soars again and again to climaxes. Perhaps a typical passage showing the small variations of his poetic level is the one in which he prepares the coming of the herald from Argos to Troy in the first daylight. After a memorable line which says that when a mighty moment loaded with a catastrophic future arrives,
Only its face and its feet are seen, not the burden it
carries,
there is a patch of slightly mixed inspiration about the significance of coming events being hidden from us by life's superficial clamour, for which the second line has a superb metaphor — hidden to such a degree that at times "least knows the messenger chosen for the summons":
Only he listens to the voice of his thoughts, his heart's
ignorant whisper.
Whistle of winds in the tree-tops of Time and the
rustle of Nature.
Now too the messenger hastened driving the car of the
errand:
Even while dawn was a gleam in the East, he had cried
to his coursers.
Half yet awake in light's turrets started the scouts of
the morning.
Hearing the jar of the wheels and the throb of the
hooves' exultation,
Hooves of the horses of Greece as they galloped to
Phrygian Troya.
Proudly they trampled through Xanthus thwarting the
foam of his anger,
Whinnying high as in scorn crossed Simois' tangled
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Xanthus' reed-girdled twin, the gentle and sluggard
river.
Then comes a high peak of poetry — not so brilliant as the Dawn-description but austerely effective with its few bold antithetical strokes. A momentous picture is drawn before our eyes:
One and unarmed in the car was the driver; grey was
he, shrunken,
Worn with his decades. To Pergama cinctured with
strength Cyclopean, Old and alone he arrived, insignificant, feeblest of
Carrying Fate in his helpless hands and the doom of
an empire.
The picture is authentic Homer, the same directness and the same depth. The rhythm has a full vitality whether in its curbed or its sweeping form. The pauses are varied in each line, their number and position determined by an inspiration that knows how to match the outer with the inner movement. The next line is as fine in suggestion and as Homeric:
Ilion, couchant, saw him arrive from the sea and the
darkness.
With the mention of Ilion, the picture shifts to the city itself and to the faint slow stirrings of life in it. The news that Tal-thybius the herald stands parleying at the Trojan gates goes to Deiphobus, one of Priam's sons. He is wrapt in "scenes of a vivider world", the grandiose dreams natural to the slumber of a warrior-soul, but suddenly he is drawn back from them by the high and insistent call of the warders. The lines which show him awaking to "the pull of the conscious thread of the earth-bond" throw up by a masterly final phrase the whole figure and being of Deiphobus:
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Warned by his body, Deiphobus, reached in that splendid
remoteness.
Touched through the nerve-ways of life that branch to the
brain of the dreamer,
Heard the terrestrial call and slumber startled receded
Sliding like dew from the mane of a lion.
The effect of this Shakespearian simile1 is reinforced a little later by a line wholly trochaic save for the opening foot. The row of trochees here is not as in Clough a crude meaningless modulation: it is significant of the big bulk of Deiphobus, after the first rapid and energetic bestirring, firmly yet gradually leaving his royal bed:
He from the carven couch upreared his giant stature.
The aptness of this metrical movement is rivalled by a line at almost the close of Ilion. There it is Aeneas who is spoken of, called out to attend the assembly planned by Deiphobus for hearing the secret message which Talthybius bears. There it is three spondees in succession, representing the movement of Aeneas' s powerful body filled with heavy brooding on high matters — and then the three consecutive trochees, showing an easier and more self-possessed yet still resolute pace:
Fate-weighed up Troys slope strode musing strong
Aeneas.
Sri Aurobindo is expert at wedding his metrical rhythm no less than his language to the substance of his thought. The physical and the psychological are also a unity with him or else they run suggestively parallel as when
1. Cf. Troilus and Cressida, Act III, Scene 3, Patroclus tells how Cupid will unloose his "amorous fold" from Achilles's neck
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air.
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Deiphobus slowly,
Measuring Fate with his thoughts in the troubled vasts
of his spirit,
Back through the stir of the city returned to the house
of his fathers,
Taming his mighty stride to the pace infirm of the
Argive.
The second line where the long and large-breath'd delivery of the hexameter is sublimely utilised to describe the rnind of Deiphobus finds a sort of paradoxical correspondence in the last where the inner process of measuring Fate seems carried to the outer act of walking in step with the frail Talthybius who is the messenger of unknown destiny.
Not only the acts of human beings but the appearances of places too Sri Aurobindo can press to psychological ends. Thrasymachus, "the fleetest of foot in the gateway", is commissioned by Deiphobus to bring Aeneas: reaching Aeneas's house,
on the threshold Thrasymachus halted
Looking for servant or guard, but felt only a loneness
of slumber
Drawing the soul's sight within away from its life and
things human;
Soundless, unheeding, the vacant corridors fled into
A symbol poetically arresting and yet most naturally arising in the course of the narrative is created here, making concrete to the most material point of outwardness a mental state. Nor could anything except the spirit and sound of the hexameter have caught so well the symbolic substance of that closing line. The extensive corridors' unheeding flight into the unseen could not have been given its inevitable word-value and sound-value in a shorter span of line and another foot-pattenx It is the length of the hexameter and the characteristic motion
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of it towards that final trochee's indefinite dying away on an unstressed syllable — it is these qualities alone that have captured in one single revealing line the precise sense and psychological atmosphere Sri Aurobindo had in view. This verse like several others in Ilion is proof of Sri Aurobindo's bringing forth his hexameters from a genuine seizing of the very soul of that measure. When we feel that no form but the one adopted could have been adequate we have a disclosure of the poet/s absolute intimacy with the essence of his medium.
The psychological subtlety which, without the least trace of the involved or the ingenious, pervades Sri Aurobindo's hexameters widens and deepens into a mystical seerhood when he speaks of the invisible hands pressing the balance of war between the Greeks and the Trojans. The Gods of Hellas stand now in the full glory of their occult presences — occult but still concrete, held in a living poetic realisation. The passage about them equals the Dawn-prelude by an afflatus sustained through most of it on a supreme height. There are three movements in this symphony. First the superhuman beings are pictured in their dynamic forms and outward activities: from the peaks of Olympus and Ida,
Gleaming and clanging the gods of the antique ages
descended.
Hidden from human knowledge the brilliant shapes of
the Immortals
Mingled unseen in the mellay, or sometimes, marvellous,
maskless,
Forms of undying beauty and power that made tremble
the heart-strings
Parting their deathless secrecy crossed through the
borders of vision,
Plain as of old to the demigods out of their glory
emerging
Heard by mortal ears and seen by the eyeballs that
perish.
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Then the inner consciousness which these shapes symbolise and focus is evoked, with all its tremendous breadth and plunge:
Mighty they came from their spaces of freedom and
sorrowless splendour.
Sea-vast, trailing the azure hem of his clamorous waters,
Blue-lidded, maned with the Night, Poseidon smote
for the future,
Earth-shaker who with his trident releases the coils of
the Dragon,
Freeing the forces unborn that are locked in the caverns
of Nature.
Calm and unmoved, upholding the Word that is Fate
and the order
Fixed in the sight of a Will foreknowing and silent and
changeless,
Hera sent by Zeus and Athene lifting his aagis Guarded the hidden decree. But for Ilion, loud as the
surges,
Ares impetuous called to the fire in men's hearts, and
his passion
Woke in the shadowy depths the forms of the Titan and
demon;
Dumb and coerced by the grip of the gods in the abyss
of the being,
Formidable, veiled they sit in the grey subconscient
darkness
Watching the sleep of the snake-haired Erinnys.
Miracled, haloed,
Seer and magician and prophet who beholds what the
thought cannot witness, Lifting the godhead within us to more than a human
endeavour,
Slayer and saviour, thinker and mystic, leaped from his
sun-peaks
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Guarding in Ilion the wall of his mysteries Delphic
Apollo.
Heaven's strengths divided swayed in the whirl of the
Earth-force.
The first five lines lift the hexameter to a ne plus ultra of poetically intense as well as mystically vivid grandeur. An ether, immense and luminous, seems to draw near and envelop us, bringing the God-forms closer and closer, with Poseidon looming large in the forefront and growing more and more clear both to the outer eye and the inner perception until we enter into his very self and discover the strange dynamic of him and at the same moment the unknown regions of our own psychology and of world-consciousness break open to our occult senses. The subliminal of Freud and Jung is lit up, the weird enormous potencies of the primitive and the elemental are touched, by a might and a majesty out of some supraliminal undreamt-of by our psycho-analysts. A revelation as powerful and profoundly realistic but of a different realm of the subliminal is upon us in the poetry that seizes the secret of Ares. Each word, each phrase, each line is packed with the occult life and the hidden hungers below our day-to-day normal mind, volcanic secrets at a tension within us waiting to snap the bonds of reason and fling up their wild lava. Sri Aurobindo is at his most overwhelming in these wide yet accurate plumbings of the psycho-analyst's domain by means of a poetry kindled as if on an altitude that sees things from beyond the mind's imagination and sends down rhythmic reflections of them with a moving and penetrating power impossible except to a Yogi. Here we have Homeric figures driven with a Homeric energy to an Aurobindonian goal. Less Yogic, however, is the light thrown on Hera and Athene and Apollo. The tone and texture of the language presentingthem is in keeping with their call to and contact with more evolved strata of our consciousness: it is not the dense and dreadful subliminal that is wakened but the brighter parts of our nature, the high and subtle thought, the
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keen and ecstatic heart-impulse. Still, one cannot help wishing that an intenser vision from a mystical standpoint had brought those deific presences home to these parts. No criticism can be made of the poetry: the sole regret we can allow ourselves is that though the poetry is Homeric enough it is not sufficiently Aurobindonian.
The third movement of the apocalypse gives us the occult reason why the siege of Troy lasted all those ten long years. Long for the human participants, not for "heaven's strengths" dividing themselves between Greece and Troy. No issue seemed forthcoming for the human fighters, since the divine forces were working out their own play:
All went backwards and forwards tossed in the swing
of the death-game.
Vain was the toil of the heroes, the blood of the mighty
was squandered,
Spray as of surf on the cliffs when it moans unappeased,
unrequited
Age after fruitless age. Day hunted the steps of the
nightfall;
Joy succeeded to grief; defeat only greatened the
vanquished.
Victory offered an empty delight without guerdon or
profit.
End there was none of the effort and end there was
none of the failure.
Triumph and agony changing hands in a desperate
measure
Faced and turned as a man and a maiden trampling the
grasses
Face and turn and they laugh in their joy of the dance
and each other.
These were gods and they trampled lives.
The simile at the close is at once charming and sinister. The beautifully radiant and yet, from the human angle, heartless
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omnipotence of the gods gets perfectly embodied and becomes all the more striking by contrast with the dubious perplexing aspect of the war presented in the first half of the passage.
Fine as this simile is, it is not the top of Sri Aurobindo's figurative bent. The magnitude his imagery can attain is best laid bare when he tells us of Deiphobus as seen by the Immortals after they had stopped their play with Troy and withdrawn from the battle, the issue already decided by them, the heroes "slain in their minds, Troy burned, Greece left to her glory and downfall". The protagonists on both sides felt a respite from the burden of the Gods, a relief from the tireless energy goading them on, but the old zest went out, the support of the divine content departed. Wearily now the combat swayed and a sullenness hung on the besieging tents:
But not alone on the Achaians the steps of the moments
fell heavy;
Slowly the shadow deepened on Ilion mighty and
scornful:
Dragging her days went by; in the rear of the hearts of
her people
Something that knew what they dared not know and
the mind would not utter,
Something that smote at her soul of defiance and beauty
and laughter,
Darkened the hours. For Doom in her sombre and giant
uprising
Neared, assailing the skies: the sense of her lived in all
pastimes;
Time was pursued by unease and a terror woke in the
midnight:
Even the ramparts felt her, stones that the gods had
erected.
Now no longer she dallied and played, but bounded
and hastened,
Seeing before her the end, and imagining massacre
calmly,
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Laughed and admired the flames and rejoiced in the
cry of the captives.
Under her, dead to the watching immortals, Deiphobus
hastened
Clanging in arms through the streets of the beautiful
insolent city,
Brilliant, a gleaming husk but empty and left by the
daemon.
Even as a star long extinguished whose light still
travels the spaces,
Seen in its form by men, but itself goes phantom-like
fleeting
Void and null and dark through the uncaring infinite
vastness,
So now he seemed to the sight that sees all things from
the Real.
Timeless its vision of Time creates the hour by things
coming.
Borne on a force from the past and no more by a power
for the future
Mighty and bright was his body, but shadowy the
shape of his spirit
Only an eidolon seemed of the being that had lived in
him, fleeting
Vague like a phantom seen by the dim Acherontian
waters.
It is a question whether in the entire range of similes there has been one so grandly apt and penetrating so cosmic in its beauty and its glimpse of the supra-terrestrial. Elaborated in true Homeric style the comparing of the extinct star, still visible because of the years taken by light for reaching us, to Deiphobus as viewed by the Gods and as viewed by men fills us not only with its own sublimity but also with a sense of the far stretch and clairvoyant depth of a time-transcending Consciousness beyond the human. Francis Thompson in Sister Songs has an
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analogous astronomical figure to suggest the poet being survived by his poetry. A moving use, this, yet not equal to Sri Aurobindo's in aura and overtone of imagination. What Sri Aurobindo conveys is a profounder meaning than Art's effective continuity in men's remembrance and in their lives after the artist's personal disappearance from the earth; some deathless Artist Power that has fashioned the whole universe is conjured up in its immense supremacy. And how inevitably the spacious speed of the hexameter rolls into our mind all the suggestions! Every help the peculiarity and uniqueness of the medium can give is taken. The line, for instance, in which the simile is stated would not be so impressive and expressive if it were not a running on and on for seventeen syllables and if it did not scan with a most felicitous variety:
What is called the first paeon (—\ \ \ ) is the opening foot; its initial long pushes upon us through three consecutive short syllables a suggestion of nullity and vacuity which the next few words bear out. The second foot, an anti-bacchius, provides metrically the magnitude and length needed by the meaning and leads significantly by its last unobtrusive syllable to the idea of effacement and extinction. The third foot is a cretic in quantity: a dactyl would have emphasised simply the effacement and extinction, without preparing the next idea which qualifies this — the idea of the light still living on in spite of its source being dead and obscured: the long "whose" does that preparation. Then comes a spondee in which the living prolongation of that light-is caught by the two stress-weighted lengths. The next dactyl echoes the plunge of light through the unresisting ether, while the last trochee has the subtle onomatopoeia of indefinite wideness. Of course it is not the mere
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metrical pattern that works upon our aesthetic perception: the word-rhythm has a creative quality of its own and there is an effective harmony of vowels and consonants, but without the structure provided by this precise manipulation of the metre they would not embody so perfecdy the poetic stuff of the line. And it is worth noting that none of the departures from the base mars the typical hexameter flow: every foot starts with the impulsion of a distinct long and all of them combined keep time with the lines before and after.
It would be purblind to inveigh on a theoretical score against taking liberties with the mould handed down from Greece and Rome. Ilion seems to present once for all the authentically inspired model in English of that august measure. A Homerophile like H. B. Cotterill might deem his own translation of the Odyssey a truer equivalent. But the equivalence goes a very little way in reality. The unstressed long syllable which Professor Gilbert Murray considers one of the characteristics of the ancient hexameter does not get its entire value realised in a strict accentual system. Also, the demand innate to English poetry for diverse modulation is ignored. Hence Cotterill's work which is perhaps the most gigantic undertaken in the accentual hexameter remains thin and monotonous, in spite of a lively use of pause and enjambment. Something of Homer's impetuous nobility is conveyed in brief moments of brilliant inspiration; at other moments something of Homer's structure imparts the music of his movement even though the Olympian speech be lacking. But the majority of the verse has missed the soul of Homer's language as well as rhythm. And the fault is not confined merely to an imperfect base; it extends to the very quality of the mind by which the base is used. Numberless lines of Sri Aurobindo's can be scanned on purely the accentual count and they are just as "noble" as those that need a quantitative scansion. A line with no unconventional modulation is not bound to be tame or blunt or heavy. If Cotterill had been more of a poet he would not have taken Homer's majestically natural
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*Zenos men pais ea Kronionos autar oixun
Eikhon apeiresien,
and knocked half of the world-cry out of it by a somewhat pompous and ill-balanced turn at the end:
Son of Cronion, of Zeus the Almighty was I — but
afflictions
Ever-unending I knew.
Surely it was nothing save defect of the poetic afflatus that could not strike upon a more moving approximation like
I was the child of Zeus Cronion, yet have I suffered
Infinite pain.
Sri Aurobindo's sovereign mark is his unfailing inspiration. Unconventionally modulated or no, his lines have the conquering nobility of Homer's hexameter. It is, for instance, hard to imagine anyone except the Bard of Scio in the tone of Deiphobus's query to Talthybius, beginning with
Messenger, voice of Achaia, wherefore confronting the
daybreak
Comest thou driving thy car from the sleep of the tents
that besiege us?
and closing with the equally elevated, the equally rhythmical and at the same time simple and direct
What in the dawning bringst thou to Troya the mighty
and dateless
Now in the ending of Time, when the gods are weary
of struggle?
*The sign - has been used here to show certain long vowel values which might be lost in the English transliteration.
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Sends Agamemnon challenge or courtesy, Greek, to the
Trojans?
Even more Homeric is the reply of Talthybius:
High like the northwind answered the voice of the
doom from Achaia:
"Trojan Deiphobus, daybreak, silence of night and the
evening
Sink and arise and even the strong sun rests from his
splendour.
Not for the servant is rest nor Time is his, only his
death-pyre.
I have not come from the monarch of men or the
armoured assembly Held on the wind-swept marge of the thunder and
laughter of ocean.
I am a voice out of Phthia, I am the will of the
Hellene.
Peace in my right I bring to you, death in my left hand.
Trojan,
Proudly receive them, honour the gifts of the mighty
Achilles.
Death accept if Ate deceives you and Doom is your
lover,
Peace if your fate can turn and the god in you chooses
to hearken."
Here at least the substance is charged with momentousness, but see how even the most common stuff of thought is transfigured and woven without any seam into the general poetic texture. What can be less abnormal in idea and language than the envoy's
Full is my heart and my lips are impatient with speech
undelivered
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or Deiphobus's
Vain is the offer of peace that sets out with a threat for
its prelude
and yet the same lifting musical breath is in them as at its strongest renders Olympian the words with which Thrasymachus greets Aeneas with the news that Deiphobus has sent him:
Hero Aeneas, swift be thy stride to the Ilian hill-top.
Dardanid, haste! for the gods are at work; they have
risen with the morning,
Each from his starry couch, and they labour. Doom, we
can see it,
Glows on their anvils of destiny, clang we can hear of
their hammers.
Something they forge there, sitting unknown in the
silence eternal,
Whether of evil or good it is they who shall choose
who are masters
Calm, unopposed; they are gods and they work out
their iron caprices,
Troy is their stage and Argos their background; we are
their puppets.
Always our voices are prompted to speech for an end
that we know not,
Always we think that we drive but are driven. Action
and impulse.
Yearning and thought are their engines, our will is
their shadow and helper.
Now too, deeming he comes with a purpose framed by
a mortal,
Shaft of their will they have shot from the bow of the
Grecian leaguer,
Lashing themselves at his steeds, Talthybius sent by
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It would be interesting to analyse the masterly technique turning each line unlike any other and binding all into a single swaying music. But what would mere technique of construction be if the creative fire were not behind it? What catches us immediately in Sri Aurobindo's Ilion is the burning breath. We would not even feel the dexterous swing of the lines and their unwearying variety if we did not primarily stir to the elan vital that glorifies the metrical medium. Artistic devices are dead things by themselves, the finest words can become garish inanities. Neither structural skill nor choice locution is the stuff of poetry: that stuff is drawn from the inner heart and the inner eye. To adapt the figures of a line already cited from Sri Aurobindo, those are but the face and feet of the poetic moment and all can see them, while the invisible burden which it carries and which alone confers meaning as well as magic on them are these inner forces of creation. These give the glowing pulse to what would otherwise be just an ingenious machine. All that Sri Aurobindo expounds in his theory of the hexameter would be wasted unless the poetic soul of the ancient measure be gripped from within. Homer and Virgil must reincarnate in us before we can write like them. Command of words and manipulation of pauses cannot suffice to supply the complex concentrated energy that tells us how dire were the eyes of Talthybius on the beauty of Troy:
All Greece gazed in them, hated, admired, grew afraid,
grew relentless
or the felicitous glamour that calls Paris
Ever a child of the dawn at play near a turn of the sun-
roads,
Facing destiny's look with the careless laugh of a
comrade.
Sri Aurobindo has succeeded in making his conception of true English quantity and his vision of the hexameter a force for the
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future because he has built them out of deep oneness with the spirit of poetry both classical and English. No "brilliant husk" empty of the daemon, like the body of Deiphobus when the Gods withdrew from him, is here. Sri Aurobindo has taken up the hexameter with a consciousness unfettered by the labourer brain, a consciousness wholeheartedly given in all its intricate potency to his sense of secret superhuman rulers of art no less than life. Without contacting their unknown depths, and feeling that
Silent they toil, they are hid in the clouds, they are
wrapped with the midnight
the poet, especially one who seeks to revive a medium steeped in antiquity's "high seriousness" and its instinct of the deific, will always find it difficult to sustain in his speech the fire and the light that waken to rapture our "infinite pain".
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