The Secret Splendour

Poetry and the Poet

A Self-Searching Introduction

Whoever hopes to publish a volume of "Collected Poems" - that is, poetic work in fair bulk - is expected to have formed some idea of what poetry is. A stray piece of verse now and then may not call for any understanding of the art at play in it. But a serious and sustained resort to this art is bound to evoke a sense of insight into it, meeting two basic questions. First, how do imagination, feeling, thought, language and rhythm combine in a living whole? Next, what is the general suggestion they spark off about the source of that totality?

As answering these questions, I cannot do better than consider in some detail a well-known example of the poetic art in action. When Keats made the first draft of his Endymion, his friend Henry Stephens remarked about the opening line -

A thing of beauty is a constant joy -

that it was good but still "wanting something". Evidently the fine sentiment correctly metred was not enough for him. Keats weighed the criticism for a few minutes, then cried out, "I have it", and rewrote:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

All readers of Keats would agree that here, as Abb6 Bremond once commented, "the current passes". But what exactly has brought about the difference between the original version and the revised one?

To begin with: the former sounded like a truth needing to be pressed upon our attention rather than going home to us in its own right with an innate power. This power endows the revised version with a ring of spontaneity, an air of immediate creativity, whereas the earlier bore the look of a built-up effect, a striking construction, even though it may have been written without effort. As Keats had to work for the revision, he cannot be called spontaneous in the ordinary sense. But in poetry the quality of the end-product alone counts. It does not matter how that quality is reached - at first blush or after labour. And only such spontaneity as consists in a straight shaping by the life within, swiftly or slowly,

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and not a moulding by any sort of surface skill is what Keats, whose MSS witness to various changes, had in mind when he laid down in a letter to John Taylor that "if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all."¹

Technically we may say that the passage between us and the poetic vision in Keats's final wording has been quite cleared by the removal of that cluster of consonants in the epithet "constant" so that the voice runs more smoothly from the fact of "beauty" perceived to the fact of "joy" felt. A further triumph of technique is that the substitute - "for ever" - stands precisely where it does. The aptness of its position will be realised if we compare the line with one in which, though all the words are the same, the position is reversed:

A thing of beauty is for ever a joy.

Here we get a special excitement woven into the declaration. Now there are no impeding consonants but the voice slightly jumps instead of finding an even sweep of moved significance. Another difference is that no syllable hangs over from the ten-syllabled five-foot pattern. The exceeding of the pentametrical scheme by the second syllable of "ever" in Keats's final version is a small hint of the breaking of limits by the joy. It provides a faint yet unescapable inkling of an indefinite beyond.

At a level subtler than the technical we may pronounce that Keats's rejection of his first draft has delicately deepened the sense. The sense has glided from an implicit to an explicit indication of perpetuity as though the joy given by loveliness were not such as to persist steadily - be "constant" - from moment to moment by some kind of push from the past but is, in its very essence, termless - proceeds "for ever" - by a pull from the whole future. In the final version the joy itself is presented as being by its own nature imperishable and this presentation depends appreciably on "for ever" following the word it qualifies instead of preceding it as in the alternative we have considered. The precedence would not quite convince us that "for ever" shows an

¹ The most famous changes were those which resulted in that two-line master-piece of inexhaustible enchantment:

... magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

The first draft had "windows" for "casements" and "keelless" for "perilous"

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in-built quality of the happiness involved. The line as it stands speaks not only of a joy we can experience termlessly because of a capacity in us but also of a joy that is objectively and per se interminable. And such an impression of intrinsic freedom from termination by time is bound up with just one particular verbal turn - namely, "for ever" - selected for the close of the line. No other will do. The line would miss its mark if it ran, for instance:

A thing of beauty is a joy unending.

Keats has achieved his exquisite credo by means of an expression which signals specifically the temporal process as knowing no end. So, upon the flow of time which bears "a thing of beauty" onward endlessly as "a joy", there seems to fall with a quiet assurance the shadow of some archetypal permanence, as it were. The loveliness spoken of appears no longer to be earth-born in the course of the years but rather earth's echo of a hidden eternity, a remote ideality.

Within our own minds too a strange stir is experienced. Receiving the line's felicitous pointer to a mysterious Platonic realm of flawless existences immune from transience, we are vaguely led to figure something detached from the hold of time in the depths of our being. No philosophy is formulated, yet what Aristotle and, long before him, the seers of the Rigveda called "the immortal in the mortal" gets imagined as opening secret eyes to appreciate the visionary drift of Keats's assertion.

Along with this inmost response, the sensitive reader cannot help recognising that Keats's assertion applies to every poetic act at its climax, whether or not the act brings, as here, in its very content a glimmer of the permanent and the archetypal. For, each consummate piece of poetry is "a thing of beauty" by the perfection of its meaningful form, the absolute of expression which we feel in its significant word-order. The subject may be anything - the ruins of ancient Petra in the Near East as seen by Burgon -

A rose-red city half as old as time -or Antony's impassioned final gesture to Cleopatra in Shakespeare -

I am dying, Egypt, dying; only

I here importune death awhile, until

Of many thousand kisses the poor last

I lay upon thy lips -

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or the profound tragedy Wordsworth sums up:

And mighty poets in their misery dead.
 

As with Keats's line, the absolute of expression in Wordsworth's phrase may be thrown into relief by a slight change in the verbal sequence:

And mighty poets dead in their misery.

Then the phrase is no more a perfection of meaningful form. The extremity of the situation, the finality of the doom are lost by the word "dead" losing its end-place.

Wherever poetry has the accent which we may distinguish as "inevitable", the simple or complex light and delight it conveys give us the sense of the writer being the mouthpiece of some more-than-human agency. Here I may revert to the theme of "spontaneity" on which I have already touched. The truly spontaneous is not necessarily, though it can surely be at times, what springs up at once, no matter how forceful or ingenious it may be. Spontaneity carries a certain freshness fused with intensity, a speech coming as if direct from an intimacy with the heart of a subject. It is not a product of the mere mind. But this mind may serve to dig a channel, by trying out various versions, for the inmost to spring forth on a sudden. Yeats, one of the most authentic poets of our day, speaks on behalf of the practitioners of his craft:

A line will take us hours maybe:

Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought.

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Reached in any way, the appearance of being "a moment's thought" defines poetic spontaneity and it points to an enigmatic inward presence uttering its native supra-intellectual tongue, inherently magical, through the poet's personality. The ancients recognised, without any cavil, the bard's extraordinary state by speaking of his "inspiration" - of his being the mouthpiece of the "Muse" - and there is no poet who has not known in his best hours a sovereign power beyond himself, breathing into him the works he creates. Moderns tend to shy away from mystical notions about their art because of so-called scientific views, though the story of science itself is full of what have come to be labelled as "intuitive" flashes or leaps behind its logical or mathematical structures from

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sense-data. Superficial fashions often prevent our poets from probing sufficiently their own subtle sources. But, whether they avow an attitude of mysticism or not, the pulse of the godlike in their highest productions is unavoidably their guide. Instinctively they are Platonists in their art, serving the mission of some faultless model of word-music. It is because of this unescapable idealism that even one who by intellectual persuasion is a sceptic or an atheist can still create great poetry through the keen artistic conscience in him and feel as if immortal presences were moving from one perfect poise to another in his verse. Did not Elizabeth Browning refer to the Roman poet Lucretius as denying divinely the Divine?

Marking how adaptable to the genuine poet's tirelessly corrective passion for perfection in his work is that faith of Hamlet -

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we may -

we might be right to think: "If one consciously puts oneself in tune with a mystical realm one is likely to be more receptive of the afflatus." But we should guard against the glib belief that merely a spiritual subject and a religious articulation would make the deepest layers in us vocal. For there is a most important proviso. We have to bring to our task the true poetic turn. Even though we may breathe of God with every syllable properly significant, we shall serve ill whatever deity there may be unless we have the art to make our words winged.

It is by his artistic instinct that Lucretius the scoffer and materialist could raise his verse to rare heights. Stupendous indeed on occasion is the godlike movement of his Latin lines. Take those phrases where he describes the philosopher Epicurus, of whom he was a disciple, as triumphing over the crude superstitions of popular religion that blocked the path of rational investigation, and as pressing his intelligence upon the secret ways of things:

Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra

Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi

Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque.

Somewhat freely one may attempt to english these grand hexameters:

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Therefore his vivid vigour of mind stood everywhere victor: Forward afar beyond the world's flaming walls he ventured, Crossing all the immensities led by his thought and his longing.

Here, from the largeness and audacity of both imagination and language, we would be inclined to see conjured up, beyond any philosopher, some high figure of spiritual history - the Upani-shadic Yajnavalkya compassing the Self of selves, the Plotinus of "the flight of the alone to the Alone", the wide-searching Eckhart, the manifold adept Ramakrishna or, best of all, our own day's Master of the Integral Yoga that would divinise all earth-life: Sri Aurobindo.

With the name of Sri Aurobindo I may appropriately close this mystic-minded introduction to my collected poems; for, versatile poet and broad-based literary critic no less than supreme Yogi, he has been the end of my quest for a life-transforming spirituality as well as a poetry seeking a new intensity of vision and emotion, an illumined inwardness that would catch alive in words the deepest rhythms of the human soul evolving towards infinite beauty and eternal joy.

18.6.93

K. D. SETHNA (AMAL KIRAN)

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