The Sun and The Rainbow

"A POET'S SINCERITY"

A LETTER IN ANSWER TO A CRITICISM

I have kept you hanging for quite a time, I I am sorry, but couldn't help it, for I had a Himalaya of work on my hands.

Having written this, I am visited by a scruple. Could I have justifiably penned a line of poetry like:

A Himalaya of work on my frail hands?

How would such a line fare face to face with the two criteria of AE's, which you endorse but which I have considered insufficient for "a poet's sincerity" if not even irrelevant in essence? Is my line prompted by "a passionate desire for truth" and can it pass the test: "Do I really believe this? Is this truly what I

Neither you nor I really believe that Everest, Kanchanjanga, Gaurishanker and Nanga Parbat were weighing down on my five fingers, nor even that the mass of work my hands had to deal with was anywhere comparable in quantity to India's northern mountain-range of 800 miles' length and 5 miles' height. Here is evidently an exaggeration: literal truth has been sacrificed to significant effect. Again, to think of the Himalaya is to visualise endless snow, perpetual solitude, eternal immobility. What have these things to do with my work? Surely I am letting fantasy run riot. My words cannot possibly answer to my actual feeling. Yet I think some sort of genuine poetry has been struck upon.

And, when I let my mind brood a little on what I have said,

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I discover that there are suggestions in it which I did not at all entertain when I framed it. Here is not merely a contrast between a huge labour and a small capacity: here is also a figuration of something that to the Indian mind looms with a superhuman grandeur, something rapt and remote, something ineffably godlike, and this deific presence is brought into relation with striving finitude. Further, a divine infinity of calm is converted into values of force, the immutable Vast has become vibrant with activity and laid its command on a poor mortal's weak and faltering instruments to dare and do creative work. In addition the very nature of this work is shadowed forth: besides being massive, it has to be snow-white in motive, it has to uplift men's thought, it has to convey through its power a peace that exceeds conception.

Yes, all this significance can be read into my line — and it is certainly hiding in it and glimmering out of it. But it belongs to the poetry achieved, not to the poet intending to say no more than that he was too busy with his monthly review of culture, Mother India, and with other occupations to reply to his friend's critical letter in due time. If the poet's intention was this alone, the achieved poetry is undoubtedly insincere. From its first step it betrayed fact and falsified truth — and in doing so it betrayed even its own betrayal and falsified even its falsehood itself, without knowing what it was up to, for it brought in spiritual nuances unconsciously, it played the poet's humanly busy hands into the unseen hands of some visionary agency by means of a moment's contact with a world of inspiration or revelation beyond him, a contact through his happy sip of what I may term the wine of words, his sudden heady thrill with the possibility of imaginative and rhythmic beauty, his heart's response to the call of art from some domain of perfect name and form.

The dramatist in the poet has taken charge, he has broken loose from the immediate situation, introduced an expressive metaphor from a different universe of discourse, fused disparate elements in a single act of vision and become the channel

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of a super-dramatisation outside even his dream.

This is al] that in my essay I have tried to say the poet is always doing in one manner or another. Of course, a passionate desire for truth in a certain sense operates through the poet, but this truth cannot be tied down to his tangible personality or to his measurable feeling. The poet himself is not essentially a truth-teller, he is an image-maker and sound-fashioner and suggestion-shaper - in short, an artist — but he ever strains beyond himself and therefore beyond his own "truth" too and puts his being in tune with some archetypal li!a (world-play) and becomes by his role of dramatist (lila-lover) the direct or indirect mouthpiece of the beautiful Truth that is Krishna.

A poet is sincere and rings true to the extent that he, as an artist, in dramatising his experience, responds to what we may traditionally term Krishna's flute-call. Neither religion nor morality nor any particular psychological value is here involved. I would submit that the line I happened to write has poetic sincerity, while a substitute like

An Alp of work upon my fragile hands

would fall short in spite of holding the same surface significance. It is fair verse, but the subtle, finely fitting and justly disposed qualities that create reverberations of inner meaning and evoke a perfect presence, so to speak, behind the expression are wanting. Here the technique — the structural design of word, sound and metre — has a pointed say. The original line's alliteration of the h-sound in the long word "Himalaya" at the start and in the short one "hands" at the close, its consecutive stresses on the two end-words "frail hands" as if there were a relentless weighing down of the objects meant — where are such qualities in the substitute line? It lacks in what we may define as "artistic truth". Poetry is primarily concerned with truth of art, the precise dramatic communication of a secret sustaining substance of flawlessness by means of name and

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form. The diverse manifestations of that substance may be designated the various Avatars of Krishna in poetry.

Are you still dissatisfied with me and my essay?

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