The Thinking Corner

Sight and Insight

TWO WORKINGS OF THE POET'S EYE

To write poetry one must go with one's subject into one's heart and imagination and identify it with them so that what one expresses of it may come out intimately vibrant and visible. But one can express either the surface of one's subject or the depth of it, create either an outward glory or an inward splendour.

The Eagles of Robinson Jeffers and D. H. Lawrence

All poetry is an inward way of speaking: still, it may not always speak of the inward stuff of its subject. And this in spite of the subject being what is called "subjective": for instance, a statement about love may provide us with the delicacy or power of that emotion without penetrating these aspects and getting, however passingly, at secret sources and hidden nuances. Similarly, an objective theme - a scene, situation, inanimate thing or living creature - may be treated. Even then the poetry can be indeed great, as in that picture by an American writer, Robinson Jeffers:

An eagle

Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,

Insolent and gorged, clothed in the folded storms of his

shoulders.

And yet something in us remains unsatisfied: we miss profound significances. When they are supplied us, we feel that the greatest poetry is created, as in D. H. Lawrence's apostrophe to the eagle of New Mexico:

Sun-breaster,

Staring two ways at once, to right and left;

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Masked one

Dark-visaged

Sickle-masked

With iron between your two eyes;

You feather-gloved

To the feet;

Foot-fierce;

Erect one;

The God-thrust entering you steadily from below,

You never look at the sun with your two eyes.

Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast

Looks straight at the sun.

Here we have a seeing that captures most intensely the psychology of the bird. Robinson Jeffers did not go beyond an audacious intensity of "gross" description - with some suggestive strokes pointing to the "subtle" but without the direct revelatory keenness with which Lawrence plucked the aquiline soul through the aquiline body.

Prof. Dhingra's Day and Night

Vision that is insight and not mere sight - there is the ideal formula, provided of course genuine feeling is present to bring the insight home to our pulses. In view of this formula I am set questioning whether a poem I read recently of Professor Baldoon Dhingra's fulfils wholly the promise it holds forth in four stanzas out of its five. It is an excellent piece of work, the words warm and felicitous, the rhythm appropriately supporting the sense - everything truly poetic with the activity of the heart and imagination. It is called Day and Night:

Day is a golden grain of corn

Which the sun sows:

Night is the crow that eats the corn

Before it grows.

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Around, around that field the world

Ever the crow

Follows the sower as he walks

Still to and fro.

O look behind you, sun, to see

Who follows black -

Ironic and laconic - on

Your patient track.

He will not turn, he will not see -

Or does not care;

Ever he flings his seeds to be

Night's golden fare.

And if some day the sun should tire,

With dark wings furled

The crow of night would pause and perch

Upon the world.

When undeniable beauty and power of sight confront us, it may seem cantankerous to suggest that the concluding four lines merely pack up the poem in an impressive manner instead of impressively completing it. The sower's rich generosity and persistence, the crow's sinister pursuit and attack appear to lead us on to some disclosure of the depth of their continual drama. A phrase like "Your patient track", in a poem whose style is simple yet pregnant, hints some secret purpose the sun may be waiting to accomplish and not only a good-natured tolerance or a quiet endurance. The fourth stanza is a wondering if the sun is deliberately not stopping the night-crow from spoiling his work or just being careless with a mechanical bounty. A living interest is shown in the riddle - but the conclusion has only a memorable surface vision accompanied by effective sound, rather than any "pointer" to a possible solution. No doubt, the tone and turn of what has preceded it do not allow of a definite answer -

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nothing except a probability of intention can be conjured up. But I feel that some probability or other of intention must be offered us and not simply the supposition, however vividly presented, that if the sun should get weary, night would be triumphant. The contrary supposition - namely, that if the crow should give up following the sun there would be a victory of day - might just as well have been stated. Why did Professor Dhingra choose the former? Is there any vital inevitability about it? He seems to have preferred a dark supposition to a bright one - the ominous design seems to have appealed to his fancy more than the happy pattern. But his inspired whim, so to speak, does not carry with it a touch of inward finality. If I were he, the last stanza would run:

Perhaps he dreams the luminous corn

Eaten by night

Will make at last the sable flesh

Break into light.

A Liberty with Keats

To attempt correcting a poet is a "ticklish" job. Often, while one may get a more meaningful rounding-off one cannot be sure that one has kept an equal amount of poetry. But I am in a somewhat reckless mood and from this adventure I will pass to a more dangerous liberty - a slight modification in a passage that has become famous. I refer to the grand finale of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty", - that is all

Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Critics have noted that the entire concluding phrase after the

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closing quotation-marks sticks out with a personal didactic vehemence. Such a quivering and thrusting after-thought is considered by some of them inartistic. In my opinion, it is not inartistic so much as artistic in a violent fashion - violent because of the use of the word "ye". That word is abrupt and is brought in unprepared without any overpowering necessity. If Keats was desirous of shaping a statement and lesson that should break out of the closed contemplative world he had built around the Urn, why did he not say "we" instead of "ye"? That would have been more in tune with the turn of his language in this very stanza where he had already the first-person plural pronoun:

Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity.

as well as:

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man.

The "us" and the "ours" introduce an element outside the Urn and the reverie it evokes, but theirs is a natural function: they generalise the observing consciousness, they make humanity co-witness with the poet - and if there were "we" in the last line it would continue that element and serve the essence of Keats's purpose of special direct and didactic emphasis on the Urn's message, without a sudden shooting off at a tangent of pronoun and bringing in a certain uncontrolled note.

Does the poetic effect really get less? I doubt it. If it does, I have another emendment up my sleeve to retain "ye" and yet avoid its hurried sharpness: we must shift the closing quotes to the very end of the stanza, so that the two "ye"s would connote man, to whom the Urn addresses its message. The argument that "man" is singular and "ye" plural has little weight. We are inclined to believe that "you" is

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singular as well as plural, while "ye" is plural only: but were not both of them originally plural and interchangeable while the singular was "thou"? When "you" began to be employed in the singular, "ye" also became applicable in the same sense though it was more common in the plural. Even today it substitutes the singular "you" in familiar phrases like: How d'ye do? What d'ye think? Thank ye, I tell ye. If Keats himself had put the closing quotes where I have, his semi-Spenserian proclivities would have prevented him from saying "you": it would have been too prosaic for his taste. He would certainly have liked to say "thou", but that would have started quite a confusion since he had already faced the Urn with "thou". So the sole alternative for him would have been "ye".

It can be averred that Keats omitted to use "we" or else to change the place of the closing quotes, because he exercised only sight, he perceived the outside, as it were, of the inspired call he had heard to lay an emphasis and impart a lesson; he did not quicken with insight, a perceiving of the inner conditions of that call, the subtle as distinguished from the gross harmony to be expressed.

A Puzzle in Yeats

This perhaps may look a somewhat strained application of the difference between sight and insight. But a general application of that difference should cover various cases -verbal and technical - where suggestions are followed which, though inspired enough, do not arise from levels below the immediately realisable. Sometimes, however, a puzzle is set us - we are unable easily to determine what is true insight verbally and technically. Thus in a poem of his early "dreamy" period Yeats had written:

Then slowly answered he whose hand held hers.

Later he corrected the line:

Then slowly he whose hand held hers replied.

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Here more appears to be done than to avoid an inversion: the sense of a slow answer seems enforced by delaying the word "replied" as much as possible. Our first impression is of insight replacing sight. Yes, our first impression and not our final one. For a little thought should make us ask: Is not "replied" the wrong kind of word at the end of a line in a dreamy context? Has it not, where it stands, a clinching sound of a somewhat lively matter-of-factness? It has no sufficient subtle in-tone of wistful feeling and sense of graduality. The first version of the line did not have in word-arrangement a very apparent sense of a slow response, yet it did have a word - namely, "answered" - which itself has not only the necessary in-tome but also a slower movement than "replied". Besides, the inversion adds by its delicate delaying of "he" a further touch of suspense. Yeats's seeming change from sight to insight in the second version is therefore a deceptive phenomenon: real insight is in what he originally wrote.

Three Poets on Death

Reverting to the straightforward shade given to the terms "sight" and "insight" at the beginning of this causerie, let me wind up by quoting again the poet I commenced with -Robinson Jeffers. I shall put a passage by him side by side with one from Swinburne and another from Spenser. In a well-known poem Swinburne asks us to be thankful

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never,

And even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

The verses are fine sight - with a faint attempt in the last line at probing by the word "safe" the subject of death's desirability. Take now Spenser's picture of Despair tempting man to self-destruction by the subtle lure of peace:

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He there does now enjoy eternall rest

And happie ease, which thou doest want and crave,

And further from it daily wanderest:

What if some little paine the passage have,

That makes fraile flesh to feare the bitter wave?

Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease,

And layes the soule to sleepe in quiet grave?

Sleep after toyle, port after stormic seas,

Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

Here is sight passing into insight - a little in the first three lines, considerably in the remainder. Exquisiteness of image and melody is at its acme in conveying to us the strange deathward feeling that exists in us as a sort of natural opposite or complement to our desire for more and more life and through that feeling some tranquil beatitude which is immortally alive is "insighted" in an indirect yet haunting manner. A similar revelation is wafted to us, as it were, on the breath of the yearning for cessation and repose in Robinson Jeffers' poem Night:

O passionately at peace when will the tide draw

shoreward?

Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,

Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think

of silence.

The striding winter giant Orion shines, and dreams

darkness.

And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on

the hill.

Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding,

passionately

Remaking itself upon its mates remembers deep inward

The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,

The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory

Prophesies, prophecy that remembers the charm of

the dark.

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And I and my people, we are willing to love the

four-score years

Heartily: but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is

for harbour.

This is grand, with a sweep of imagery to which the varied American continent and the Pacific coast where the poet lives make suggestive contributions. A wider and more complex mind than Spenser's is at work, and though the Spenserian poetry is not less perfect in picture and cadence and its insight is essentially the same, our response now is more mysterious and churned out of depths more distant. The intuition of some immortal tranquillity and beatitude invades us still indirectly through the deathward feeling: but the vast theme of Night touches it to what I may call a more Nirvanic issue while the expressions at the end of the seventh line and in the whole of the eighth and at the opening of the ninth give a more transcendental sense to death's withdrawal of us from world-activity. Just one step further and we should be in the midst of an insight into the mahasamadhi spoken of by ancient spiritual India - the flight at last and for ever into an Eternity motionless and featureless by the soul that has liberated itself through Yoga from attachment to earthly things. The final step is not taken of visioning the Vedantic or Buddhist "primal and latter silences": short of it the poet treats his subject with masterly imaginative penetration.

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