The Sun and The Rainbow

The Fount of Poetry

The Roman poet Horace has the dictum: "No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water-drinkers."

Horace touches a sympathetic chord in me with his winy nature, but I cannot echo his thought on poetry-writing. I should rather say: "There can be no long-pleasing or living poems by those who need to be wine-drinkers in order to be drunk." And I would add: "No man can be a poet who, in order to be drunk, needs to give up water-drinking." But a caveat must be entered: "It one is such as to make a fetish of water-drinking, one can't be a poet."

A bit of complexity here. May 1 explain a little? According to me, a poet is one who is always intoxicated —by the very fact of his over-sensitive aesthetic consciousness. This consciousness puts him in contact with an eternal Bliss endlessly expressing itself in various harmonies of interrelated structures catching in the flux of time something of the splendours and mysteries that are at play in an Ideal World beyond ours, where the Divine is perfectly manifest. To the poet, all that the earthly day brings is shot with those supernal splendours, all that the earthly night holds is charged with those lofty mysteries. Not that he lives in a fool's paradise: he is quite aware of the delusive gleams that mislead one in the day and of the treacherous glooms that make one stumble at night. But even there he can seize an artistic pattern, a dramatic propriety and reflect them in accurate words building a flawless form of significance and sound: beauty, shimmering beauty, is the end-product, no matter what perceptions and experiences have gone into the process.

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With a soul and a sensorium born astir with a creative delight, how should a poet require the fillip of any Falernian to impart to his work the flush and fire of immortality? It is not poets but mere versifiers who have to be artificially stimulated to carry them in some lucky moments beyond their own dull hearts and labouring minds. Perhaps we may say that even a true poet has his versifier-spells when the genius in him withdraws for some reason or other. Possibly then the aid of Bacchus would be fruitful — but just to sparkle up the versifying intelligence and quicken it to call out the hiding poetic intuition.

That intuition itself comes with its own bubbling store of the Vedic Soma and borrows no singing strength from the wine-cup. When its power is active in the forefront and has not receded into the background, draughts of water are enough to keep the life of song going. The poet has just to live in order to sing — and aqua pura is all he needs to keep existing as a perennially dream-drunk wanderer through this world of God's evolution with its swift stabs of magic and its slow difficult sorceries.

Now a word explaining my caveat. If a man makes it a point always to drink water and avoid wine, thinking that wine would be a distraction and that water alone can keep him in poetic fitness, he commits an error, for the poet is not dependent on water any more than on wine for the wonder-flow of his language. The poetry wells from a self-supplied source — and it calls for a constant alertness and plasticity in the human medium and for a sense in that medium of the utter independence the creative fount possesses. To be caught in any fixity, in any fad, in any narrowing belief would come in the way of the freedom, the many-sidedness, the expectation of the unexpected which go with the creation of worlds and with the creation of words aspiring to reflect cosmic harmonies.

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