The Thinking Corner

Some Matters of the Muse

Knowing that I have been enamoured of the Muse for quite a long time, a reader who is anxious to absorb her influence has asked me some questions about the appreciation of poetic quality, rhythm-values, mystical tones, the inevitable form.

The questions are far from easy to answer, because the analytic mind is not the prime judge in poetry. The critical intelligence can distinguish shades, elucidate imagery, point out technical effects, but all this after something else has felt and recognised inspiration, the divine afflatus. Vision, word, rhythm - these three are so closely related, so charged with one another's essence, that the act of poetic recognition is immediate, single, instinctive and cannot be replaced by mental analysis. When I say 'immediate', I do not mean that one feels at once the inspiration of a poem: often a greater familiarity is required and the first impression fails to carry home the rhythmic rapture. What I mean is that, whenever the thrill of poetry is experienced, it is a direct thrill, and not indirectly determined or constructed by a process of thoughtful observation. Of course, thoughtful observation must come and make the qualities of a poem clear and lead one's instinct to the details, as a magnifying glass reveals points the normal sight does not catch. But even the magnifying glass rests for its effectiveness on the direct sense of sight and the first recognition of poetic stuff is also like an act of sight, the seeing as of a lovely face and dazzling with the ecstasy thereof, before one has had even the time to differentiate the Greek, Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Indian shape of the nose, the brown, hazel, blue, or black colour of the eyes or any other particulars which do not constitute beauty but merely serve to classify it.

The classification, the minute study, the understanding of how the parts are held together - all this, as I have said, are fine things and give one's instinct an ever wider field. If, however, the instinct is not ready with its tongue of flame to

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taste the nectar, all that the analytic mind can do is like feeding with delicacies a person whose palate has been rendered insensitive by a roaring cold! I do not wish to declare that the very fact of having a normal palate is sufficient to assure the epicure's thrill or (to pick up the old image) the fact of having a pair of eyes is a guarantee that one will respond to every impact of facial beauty. One's receptivity, whether of palate or vision, needs often to be cultivated: one must live with finenesses in order to develop a sharp recognition - but what one develops is an instinct, a quick sensation, a living 'aesthesis', and no amount of intellectual explanation can create it or understanding substitute it. Live among finenesses, dwell with a large variety of them, try to savour what is their general essence, let their particular thrills come to you side by side - until you get an ever-wakeful, many-sided keenness which knows at a touch that the Gods are here and this is Indra and that is Agni and the lordliest of them is Surya!

As to rhythm-values, I do not know exactly what my correspondent wants me to say. Surely he is able to mark out power from delicacy, the sound that seizes him by its grandeur from that which steals into him and holds him spellbound, the swift sweeping music from the subtle and melodious and haunting air. Perhaps he means the sifting of the rhythms native to the different planes of inspiration. That is not a difficult job so long as the planes are not above the mind or in the occult back-spaces - a little acquaintance with the vivid quivering nerve-poignancy and passion that is Shakespeare's is enough for noting the less vibrant play with one's guts and more resounding impact on one's grey cells which Milton offers. Other intensities, too, are within the reach of one's instinctive recognition. Shelley's or Keats's or Swinburne's, since we have plenty of them. Not that the plenty renders them cheap but it has been possible to the poet and perceptible in its peculiarity to the reader because the centres of consciousness from which it was showered or irradiated are not far removed from the life we know in our

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finest or keenest moments. It is only when the treasure that lies deep within or high above is brought to us that the trouble begins. The 'overhead' rhythms, as Sri Aurobindo calls the poetry that in spiritual experience seems to descend from some vastness above the brain-centred mind, need expert sensibility on our part for their nuances and stages to be distinguished and I dare say a good bit of Yoga. What, however, is not so hard to acquire is the sense that a rhythm in question is 'overhead' or no: for this we must have, together with the essential aesthetic touch, a glimmer of spiritual aspiration, an intuiting of the wideness beyond the intellect or the depth behind the heart of emotion or preferably both combined. I think a very faint intuiting of this sort most of us have and especially those of us who have the aesthetic bent, but we are likely to be confused often and to mistake the mental sweep for the spiritual spaciousness if we do not keep company a long while with the authentic 'overhead'. I know of no better method of absorbing the specific 'overhead' quality than the constant repetition of lines that bear it, the incessant intoning of them until they vibrate through the being.

In this connection it may be helpful to look at a poem once submitted to Sri Aurobindo for comment. Sri Aurobindo found it to be charged with sheer spiritual inspiration in its first five lines but, in its last five, effective with thought-expression of the Spirit instead of powerful in the 'overhead' way. The poet had hammered out these concluding lines very carefully, making them hold his full meaning in a suggestive form. Yet he had felt a vague uneasiness which woke into realisation the moment Sri Aurobindo pointed out the change of plane. The poet had not been able to distinguish the mental sweep from the spiritual spaciousness; their difference he recognised immediately when the word of criticism came from Sri Aurobindo. The poem, of course, could have stood as it was - but the gadfly had been let loose and the poet could not rest till the rarer note was completely caught. Here is the work as it stood at first:

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Thank God for all this wretchedness of love -

The close apocalypt fires that only prove

The shutting of some golden gate in the face!

Not here beside us burning a brief space

Of time is ecstasy. Immense, above,

An ageless womb calls like a blue abyss

Hung over the pale mind; there, by the grace

Of a heart pain-broken into widenesses,

Life like a burst of pinion-beats can move

Through a glowing gap of sun to infinite bliss!

Read the opening part now with the rewritten ending - the only change in the former being the replacement of the word 'time' in the fifth line by 'life' since 'time' gets more appropriately used towards the close -

...Immense, above,

The shining core of a divine abyss

Awaits the earth-unglamoured lonely gaze,

The tense heart broken into widenesses.

All quiver and cry of time is splendoured there

By an ageless alchemy smiling everywhere!

How is one to say what is mentally mystical and what is spiritually so? Before one can analyse the particular modes of expression in all their details, one gets the impression of word and rhythm as a single unit, the movement of the style; to feel this is to know in the first place whether a line or a passage is inspired or not, and, in the second, whether it derives from this plane or that. I do not think the version that is mental betrays any marked defect of inspiration. As far as mental style goes, the idea is completely and harmoniously and effectively embodied in language - the requisite degree of vividness and colour is there, the right kind of suggestive mould of speech, and the mot juste too is in evidence, as will be admitted on considering the consistent import of terms like 'broken', 'burst', 'gap', and the way a word like 'burst'

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connects up that import with the sense of freedom suggested by 'widenesses' and sustained by 'pinion-beats' and, again, the natural agreement between the word 'beats' and the word 'heart'. But in spite of admitting the felicity of the phrases, one perceives that an attempt is made to represent a mystical or spiritual event or experience instead of that experience-event taking possession of the language and becoming one with it. A couple of turns of speech confirm this perception: 'like a blue abyss' somehow strikes one as an indirect way of suggesting the Spirit, while 'by the grace' is almost a logical explanatory construction and is deficient in sheer real-sense, if I may so call the right kind of feeling we must get of the content or theme-stuff of mystical poetry. 'Pain-broken' has also a similar air of semi-directness, semi-explanation. Nothing of this effective a peu pres, this forceful approximation, is present in the second version: the spiritual reality speaks its own language, moves at its own pace and exercises its limbs, as it were, in utter freedom, cutting whatever figure it chooses and revealing any colour it finds natural to itself. All this one feels as an undifferentiated single impression if one takes to the two versions an alert aesthesis. Afterwards the critical mind brings out its magnifying glass to enlarge the aesthetic field.

At this point I may say a few words on the place rhythm has in inspiration - one of the queries put me by my correspondent. Rhythm has three technical aspects: it is the mode in which stressed and unstressed syllables are combined, it is the arrangement of vowel-sounds and consonant-sounds, it is the disposition of quantitatively long and short syllables. In the classical tongues, quantity played a very prominent role: in English it has become a minor factor owing to the preponderance of accent, but in all good writing and especially in poetry it adds a subtle effect which cannot be neglected if the meaning is to be supported phonetically or at least if proper weight is to be given to words without making them heavy and if they are to move without getting too light and feathery. Stress and non-stress must so occur that a

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metrical base is preserved and yet an obvious monotony avoided - a lot of variation either marked or delicate must come in and not arbitrarily but in accordance with the sense and emotion of each line. The vowels and the consonants have to fit in with one another and not run confusedly in an inharmonious hurry, except for deliberate effects as they do at times in Browning. All these elements viewed externally form what Carlyle would have called the mechanism of rhythm as contrasted with its organism - with the living natural process which is the inspired afflatus taking sound as its medium, its expressive body. No amount of mere skill or mechanical adjustment of words will create inspiration: the outer rhythm cannot live unless there is an inner rhythm, a vibration in the being, caused by the indescribable something which rushes through the consciousness. The true rhythm, therefore, is a play of stress, assonance and quantity under the shaping life-breath of the inner self, a response made by word-sounds to the subtle pulsation of soul-excitement. Mind you, I am not saying 'words' but 'word sounds', for, though the rhythm is fused with the language, it has a power beyond the mere significance of words, a power of profound suggestion by sounds reproducing the quiver of consciousness that seeks self-expression through articulate language. It is because of this power that every writer and all the more a poet arranges his words in a certain way in preference to another, although both the ways may convey the same mental meaning and even when the rejected pattern expresses more precisely the thought from a logical standpoint. The poet permits himself liberties with the ordinary construction of the language and observes metrical form because of the sound-suggestion exceeding in a magic manner the sense-suggestion and possessing the potency to create more than a state of understanding - that is, a state of being, an experience of the soul. Hence, in poetry which is after all an art and concerned with soul-states rather than with logical processes, rhythm is more than anything the essence of inspiration and, to an expert ear, the surest mark of dif-

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ference between the various planes from which inspiration makes its glowing assault upon us.

Now some remarks about the inevitable form. To know what it is, we must be extremely sensitive to the texture, the order and the rhythm of words. Perhaps the texture is most easily appreciated. Take a line like the following from Sri Aurobindo, which suggests some divine presence at work in the phenomenon of dawning day -

A slow miraculous gesture dimly came.

I need not rub in the fact that none of the parts can be replaced: each is the right one in significance and atmosphere. It also goes without much emphasis that a substitute like

Miraculous, slow, a gesture dimly came

not only gives, by changing the places of the epithets, a suddenness that runs counter to the graduality to be suggested, but also seems absurdly to make slowness either the explanation, the essence, of the miracle or just a tagged-on afterthought weak and watery behind the rich import of 'miraculous'. What may not be realised at once is that even to alter the word-order chosen by Sri Aurobindo to

A gesture, slow, miraculous, dimly came

or

Dimly a slow miraculous gesture came

would spoil the effect. Though the very order of the epithets is retained, the revelatory suspense is diminished by either the noun 'gesture' or the adverb 'dimly' being introduced too soon. Further, both the variants tamper with the spontaneous single impression by the epithets and noun on the one

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hand and the adverb and verb on the other. That impression is most vital, and no separate prominence must be given to one part of the combination by thrusting the noun markedly in front or suspending the adverb too much in advance. Finally, the rhythm is slid out of its correct tempo by such manipulation: the lingering though ample tone, the large power calmly drawn out are lost in a somewhat flat narrowness in the first alternative and in a rather abrupt jump in the second. The subtle undertone and overtone, the secret sound-significance which creates in our intuitive being the actual feel and thrill of the divine act described are diluted if not completely abolished. This modification is the most damaging of all. But, I am afraid its blow to the inevitable form is the hardest to appraise, because the analytic mind which is never the prime judge in poetry is more helpless here than anywhere else. To appreciate what has happened, one must be long enamoured of the Muse, one must meet her with the surrendered aesthetic heart.

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