The Thinking Corner

Critics' Complaints

Not all can sup with satisfaction on poetry and when poetry is mystical the stomach and the palate are still more disgruntled. Even good critics come out with various complaints. I happen to be addicted to the mystical Muse and have received quite an assortment of criticisms, a part of which it might be of interest to consider in brief for the literary or psychological questions raised.

The Regret About "Preciousness"

There was the English professor who, though giving high praise, regretted "the tendency to be precious and not simple enough". But can mystical and spiritual poetry that is deeply dyed in the unknown be ever simple? No matter how bare and straightforward the style and ordinary and current the words, will not a certain lack of simplicity result from the very nature of the experience embodied - an experience which is a play of figures and values remote from ordinary vision, rare and elusive to normal thought, sublime or subtle in a way that is not seizable by common perception? The precision of mystical and spiritual poetry is intuitive and not intellectual, its exactitude is "revelatory" and does not make always a clear-cut mental picture. Even where a directness is practised and images are subdued, a difficulty will be felt not so much in understanding the meaning of individual words or phrases as in grasping in a living manner the insight that is uttered. The difficulty grows when imaged spiritual poetry is written - and spiritual poetry has to be imaged and symbolic if the veiled opulence of mystical realisation is to be caught in speech. To suit that opulence and be faithful to the atmosphere and light and contents of the strange inner "planes" a particular type of artistry is demanded, words with a certain aura or suggestive glow are required. This brings, on top of lack of simplicity, an element of preciousness. I for one have

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found both unavoidable - especially when I have tried to write with a word-vision and word-vibration drawn straight from what I have called inner planes without the normal poetic intelligence serving as paraphraser or interpreter. Sometimes an interpretative light may be present, but it is not the light of imaginative thought: it is something that appears like imaginative thought when really it is another mode of consciousness of which swift and wide-flashing thought is an imitator. That mode of consciousness acts even more by a suggestive quality in the rhythm-tone than by cast of vision or mould of speech; but in any case it does not yield its significance immediately to the mind and tends in its cumulative effect to produce an impression of "preciousness" because it has an aloofness, a rarity, a far-away flame calling for a style that must be at once vivid and fastidious.

The Charge of Being Vague and Abstract

Then there was another professor, an Indian, who too showed admirable comprehension of several points connected with mystical verse and who also absolved me from a probable charge of preciousness and said that words like "gloriole", "sidereal", "alchemy", "nectarous" were consistent with the atmosphere of my inspiration and with the nature of the experience I sought to embody. But he suggested that the kind of vision I brought was vague and that I was inclined to be abstract. I should think that abstractness does not arise, as my critic declared, by the use of expressions like 'vastnesses', 'omnipotence', 'agelessness' - so long as the poetry is profoundly felt, and especially when there are touches of vision accompanying the emotion. Nor is vision necessarily vague because it is too unfamiliar to be quickly grasped. My critic offered me phrases from Francis Thompson as examples of vivid mystical vision. But to be authentic mysticism, one's images and metaphors have to be alive with a subtle inner reality. Francis Thompson has that "aliveness" in many of his poems, but I am afraid the

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phrases quoted to me were poor mysticism: theirs is a vividness that holds nothing subjective or subtle. To call the stars "the burning fruitage of the sky" is to convey no spiritual height or depth, no hint of the Divine - it is only a beautiful and concrete image, a vision no doubt, yet not any glimmer of the beatific vision - it is merely a poetising of the ordinary man's wonder without even an appreciable quiver of the ordinary man's worship. "Tellurian galleon" and "coerule pampas" belong to the same category. A mystical vision of "the Infinite with its associations of grandeur and awe" calls for a different style: sight, sense, sound, all these have to be brought from deeper centres of one's being than the imaginative intelligence, as Vaughan does in

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright.

Here a profound metaphor is used and the rhythm is mystically "inward". But there is no need of direct metaphors even, provided that that tense "in-tone" is present. The suggestion of true mystical and spiritual states is in such lines as Wordsworth's

The silence that is in the starry sky.

The sleep that is among the lonely hills

or

The light that never was on sea or land.

In directly imaged verse, a rare mystical and spiritual atmosphere is reached in his

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep

and the very acme of it in

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Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,

There is here something in the way of seeing and feeling, in the mould of phrase and above all in the stir of the rhythm, that goes deeper than the imaginative intelligence, the verses plunge to the rapt psyche within us and break it open to the amplitudes of the Divine. In the last two instances the metaphors are perhaps clear enough, but in this type of poetry the basic suggestions are very often of a wideness and a lordly light or else an immense masterful mystery that are not easily vivid to the normal imagination and cannot etch a picture immediately on the mind. The consciousness has to train itself to receive the unusual impact, the uncommon vibration before a "certain abstract quality in the tone" reveals itself as a subtle concreteness, a living intensity. Warmth there is, but not always drawn from "nature and human life"; rather, I should say that the warmth is drawn from nature and human life but is not invariably directed to familiar objects, it moves out into unknown ethers and there envelops realities and not abstractions, but realities which are not generally felt by the reader at the first blush. Mystical and spiritual poetry of this kind is not intrinsically bare or even as a rule austere, though its style tends to compactness: it is an exploration of undiscovered countries and both eye and ear have to get accustomed for the hues and harmonies of those regions to come home to the heart.

The Censure on Compound Words

Another censure passed on mystical poetry such as I had attempted was on the repeated employment of compound words. Particularly the compound of abstract nouns was condemned. Well, even such compounds may be quite living in their context but appear half-dead when torn out of it. The concrete is preferable on the whole to the abstract; yet all words in poetry cannot and need not be concrete in connotation. Abstract compounds must not be judged by a

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comparison with concrete ones nor must they be asked to impart by themselves any colour to the poetry - they must be taken sui generis, and in their own class what counts is point, power, sonority, rhythmic subtlety. Although a frigidity, a vitreous quality may be a possible danger, the frigid and the vitreous is frequently felt on first impression and dissolves in the general flow of vision and emotion and remains only when the compound is exhibited in vacuo. "Passion-prayer", for instance, has an intensity of significance as well as sound in a context where two peaks lifted like two hands in prayer are spoken of - prayer that is passionate not only because it is keen but also because those two peaks are regarded as "companion-crests" of "a mystic parenthood", and their combination, their union, which is figured within one halo formed for both of them by a full and perfect moon behind them, is seen as an act of spiritual passion that is occultly creative. Again, "truth-glory" may not appeal if looked at in isolation, but take it in the phrase:

Truth-glory naked in the immortal Mind -

and the word "naked" gives at once a concrete and visual suggestion to the compound noun and evokes the suppressed "sight", the implication of brightness, of light, in the word "glory".

Some compound epithets from Keats and Thompson were quoted by my critic as of the right poetic sort. They were fine; but Thompson's "tawny-coloured" though poetic enough, does not strike me as anything subtle when applied to a desert - it belongs to the effective outward style of poetry and even so it brings out vividly and precisely what everybody sees about a desert and does not lay bare a new aspect: there is no surprise of significance in it as perhaps there would be, say, in a compound of noun and epithet like "lion-coloured" or "tiger-tawny". A compound of any kind must not only represent, it must reveal, in order to be of paramount quality. A fair example is in a line I read the other day:

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The tiger with his fire-whipped hide,

where the urgent ferocity of the tiger is suggested no less than his tawny colour and striped appearance. In mystical poetry the subtle nuance is all the more requisite in a compound. And so long as it is there, either in the paired words themselves or by association with their context, the frequency of compounds must not be objected to. Of course a plethora of them is hardly advisable, but it is not always easy to cry "Too much!" with justification when one is confronted by a poetry where elaborateness of expression, however beautiful, might be less true to its spirit than a running revelation of many brief lights or else a quick piling up of restrained richnesses.

The Suspicion of Heavy Ornamentation

There was criticism also of a certain way of putting things. The line,

Roses of heaven rooted in sapphire hush,

indicating what we, despite our soul being "a paradise blown down", have the potentiality to surpass, was said to limn no picture in the reader's mind and to be not more beautiful than a simpler locution like: "the shining stars in the stillness of the blue sky". The defect of this criticism is that the raison d'etre of the line is missed. I admit there is not greater beauty here - but there is certainly more force running through the beauty. It is not, however, for its force as such that the expression is moulded thus: it is for its appropriateness, its organic place in the poem where it stands, its verbal point. The chief mistake in judgment is that the line is taken to be merely about stars. These roses of heaven are not shining stars nor is the sapphire hush the still blue sky. I was not rhetorically referring to the constellations and saying that the fully realised human spirit will be greater than all the lights of

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the firmament. I am speaking of an order of spiritual existence - the unfallen high powers of the supernatural world, call them Gods or angels or seraphs or what you will. Unlike the human soul which is like "a sun deflowered, a leprosy of light", these are suns or stars in full bloom, unwithered uncrumbling splendours that have not got dislodged from the quiet and fathomless heiht of divine bliss but are still "rooted" there. The word "rooted" is extremely significant and also most apt when throughout the poem the imagery has been of flowers of fire. "Roses" also is therefore organic and is no decorative term: it suggests a glowing plenitude of beauty and bliss as no other word would in this particular context of spiritual symbolism. The epithet "sapphire" too holds a sense of richness, a glowing preciousness, that is in tune with the terms used in another line:

The shredded silver and the shrunken gold.

It is absurd to suspect a stiff, heavy, roundabout, recondite ornamentation here.

The Misconception About Mysticism

Each of the critical opinions I have so far referred to errs in one respect or another in its bearing on the values of mystical poetry. None, however, betrays a serious lack of the soul's subtle senses. But there was one critic who found himself utterly at a loss in a domain where Nature and Supernature fuse in vision, familiar shapes and colours are moulded by unknown modes of being. And though he talked of the unconquerable will that could keep the Spirit alive even when the body was battered and broken, it was only in connection with the poetry that could be written about the heroism shown in the desperate writhing warfare recently ended between the forces of freedom and those of tyranny. He did not realise that if the Spirit could be a burning beauty even when the physical form was overwhelmed it must be a

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substance and a power greater and more lasting than what we commonly look upon as the concrete world and that a poetry which penetrates into the deeper places of the Spirit touches reality in an intenser and more perdurable form, brings forth images and archetypes out of spheres of consciousness that are a finer harmony of shape and significance than the data of experience offered us by the outer mind. The Spirit is more substantial, more concrete than Matter which is one of its aspects and all that is in the so-called real world is but a poor reflection of what is dynamic in the Spirit, waiting there to be released upon earth. The Spirit is not a dream or an abstraction: it is the prime stuff, the basic world into which the mystic enters and out of which he brings creative light through the doors of worship, self-surrender, concentration, meditative vision, Yogic practice. Not only is the critic in question unaware of the Spirit's depths and heights that are more real than "the grimness and horror of the war as waged in Europe and China" but he is also unaware that if the Spirit is the prime stuff and the supreme Archetype it is not a denial of things that are here but their essential truth, not an ascetic emptiness or a passionless purity but living light, throbbing colour, intense shape, rich movement, concrete ecstasy. Sense and emotion do not die in it, vista and vision are not lost in it: the Divine is not a remote inanity, the Divine is both personal and impersonal, coming to us in various ways, meeting us as the indefinable yet most living Vast at one time and at another as a personal centre of that vastness, the Lord, the Lover, the Avatar, the Guru.

Mysticism is not "morbid" or "neurotic" or "erotic" if it speaks in terms of love and passion and sensuousness; rather, what is ordinarily felt as sensuous and passionate love is only the outer, incomplete, fragmentary form of the deep heart's intensity that turns to the Divine and touches it everywhere. Emotional and sensuous love of God is not repressed sex breaking out in a region where it has no place: it is the basic urge in man for ideal beauty and perfection finding its true and illumined outlet - all through the ages the

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human heart has found its fulfilment in a Krishna, a Buddha, a Christ or in the worship of the supreme Creatrix, the Virgin Mother, the Goddess Kwannon. Face and figure are not strangers in the realm of Spirit - the Divine is heard, seen, touched, and if any Yoga is to be fruitful it must yearn with sense as well as soul, the whole complex of human nature must be bent on the Divine, for then only can the Divine be experienced in its fullness and its luminous substantiality. Unless the Spirit is loved concretely as if it were physical and material without the imperfections of such things, there can be no mystical LIFE and no mystical ART. No mystic has loved or written poetry without that concrete full-blooded love; for this alone can contact and incarnate the stuff of Spirit - all else floats as mere concept and speculation. It may be clever to call it "the irrepressible copulative urge camouflaged" and to see in its literary expression thwarted desire finding "an outlet in a neurotic love-poetry in which the object of true worship which the poet dare not name openly is masked by a philosophical concept of Ultimate Reality". May I point out that the mystical urge is neither dry philosophy nor ascetic puritanism? It is a leap of the soul, a whole-hearted desire for union with Eternal Beauty, a kind of sexless sex, a passion based on continence. Nothing arid or barren here - everything a fire that purifies without destroying the senses and the emotions. Until one understands this fire burning intensely in an atmosphere of peace, one will understand neither mysticism nor mystical poetry.

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