The Thinking Corner

The Process of Great Poetry

No lover of poetry but feels during its spell over him that he is granted the contact of a deeper and higher state of consciousness than the ordinary. Poetry at such moments is not a mere conspiracy by Dante and Shakespeare and Tagore to crown colourful invention king of our hearts: no doubt, we recognise that its primary work is to bring delight by vision and emotion and not offer demonstrable or verifiable truth, but the delight breathes a superhuman air and is no outcome of transfigured fantasy. Why then should we later look upon these moments with diffidence in their revelatory touch on our being? At times poets themselves shirk in retrospect a mystical explanation of their art; but such an attitude is a curious attempt to blindfold thought because of a "rationalistic" prejudice and to stand wonderingly agape without seeing what plainly stares one in the face.

Poetry attains the highest excellence possible to it through a twofold process of super-normal perception. In the first place, the poet, whether his vehicle of expression be the passionate life-gusto, the visionary thought-urge or the mystic elan, becomes a conscious power of self-identification with anything and everything. Our normal mind-stuff is being constantly moulded into sense-data and images; the sea beyond my window is caught by me through my mind-stuff taking a certain form representative of the object it contacts -a manifold form resulting from the various sense-instruments through which my mind-stuff works. When the object is not directly present, I can still recover its form by means of an image, a memory-representation. But both in immediate sensation and after-image, the form into which the consciousness is projected is something held as other than the very self of the knower; I do not feel one entity with the billows and, so long as I do not, I can only describe them in various general terms, scientific, practical, reflective or aesthetic. If I go beyond this manner of experience and feel

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their nature with a strange intimacy as if for the time being we were not separate but somehow identified, I shall be knowing them by what psychologists call empathy, "in-feeling" as distinguished from mere sympathy or "with-feeling". Total empathy is a rare phenomenon; what occurs more frequently is partial interfusion; and if at the interfused moment words could express my experience I should have at least the stuff of fine poetry: it would be as though the object sprang into eloquent self-awareness within me. If the awareness lived in a peculiar rhythm of subtly recurrent sound, I would have the pattern of fine poetry as well as its stuff. For poetic descriptions of a high value are based on various degrees of metrically rhythmed empathy: genuine poetry can never come without at least a spark of it, since its function is to give us a vivid and harmonious intuition of things, a language which reveals their hidden modes and their vibrant laws of existence.

Thus, Arnold seems to lay bare the very spirit of wide waters in a certain wasteful aspect, when he writes:

The unplumbed salt estranging sea,

or Yeats in his equally empathic line:

The murderous innocence of the sea.

Now, this faculty of blending one's self with an object in an intimate revealing way, or with a psychological situation so as to catch the inner throb of its significance as done by the words and rhythm of Sri Aurobindo's exquisitely pathetic

O my sweet flower!

Art thou too whelmed in this fierce wailing flood?

- this intuitive faculty, however exercised, has its root in the fact that the world is at bottom one single consciousness in diverse states. Any given state is, of course, experienced by

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the poet not in its utter purity but in association with his own temperament and mood: Aeschylus, viewing the foam-flecked shine and leap of the Aegean, heard unlike Arnold and Yeats

The innumerable laughter of the waves.

All the same, the flash of knowledge and the shock of feeling by identity are there, a brief transcendence of outward limits in order to merge in some intimate awareness behind the veil, implying that below the surface demarcations all things exist as moments of one universal Spirit whose sudden point of contact provides the poet's language with the common base of self and consciousness necessary for experiencing from the inside what seems normally outside him and foreign to his own being.

A further indication of the universal Spirit is given by the resort to simile and metaphor, perhaps the most characteristic turn which poetic empathy takes. No doubt, all figurative language limps, because everything has its uniqueness as well as its resemblances to other things, but in a successful figurative phrase the poet packs his vision of the same essence in two different objects. William Watson, interpreting a sea-scape -

And I beheld the waters in their might

Writhe as a serpent by some great spell curbed

And foiled -

or Shakespeare expressing how the mast-climbing shipboy's eyes are sealed up in a drowse and his brains rocked

In cradle of the rude imperious surge

conveys to us an extremely vivid perception of the hidden sameness between phenomena that in ordinary appearance are unrelated: two experiences are intermingled, two objects

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reveal the same significance, the same reality, the same fundamental oneness. The world, to the poetic vision, is a splendid scheme of mutually interpretative symbols which can be caught by intuition's plunge beneath the superficial limits and separatenesses. Each time a fine simile or metaphor is found, the poet's soul becomes a fiery focus wherein some light of the world-spirit's underlying multiple unity is brought to conscious prominence.

Nor is this all that constitutes the sovereign poetic process. It is just one side, the outflow of

An elemental life deep down within.

The other is a mirroring of an absolute beauty in the elemental vision. The great poetic phrase does not photograph: it transmutes the external appearance by displaying to us on any level of awareness the concealed core of actuality; it opens in us eyes other than the physical, the immediately extravert; it brings out a power or a delicacy which is the central stuff of a thing, the central quality of a situation, and which partakes of some intrinsic beauty whose thrill is the true life of the universe. It brings out this miracle by carrying its vision in a word-form and a rhythm-movement that have a sense of utter and inevitable perfection: the vision glimmers in a body of significant sound which converts whatever it echoes of sublime or grotesque, blissful or tragic, into a shape of loveliness irreproachable. There is an extreme of beauty felt in each true poetic creation, as though some divine archetype were embodied. The poetic insight into the common world-soul throws up interpretative values which have to be caught in a speech-form of ideal beauty: the proof of success is a certain completeness, a sheer aesthetic finality of expression. There is a hidden spiritual tone in all genuine inspiration, even though, on the surface, things ordinary are spoken of; but it is a tone which is conveyed through perfect aesthesis: the meaning is not directly mystical, only the art discloses by a complete and unimpeachable form of word

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and music some arch-image, some high absolute vibration whose broken shadows and vague quivers we contact in the time-world. What impregnates a line of verse with its sovereign tone is this ultimate presence. The urge to release it in word-music is what made Keats write about his poetic moods: "There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality."

One with a mystical bent of mind can disengage through the words and the rhythm of each fine poetic moment a Platonic ideality. The thought and the emotion deal with human or natural phenomena, but together with their overt appeal there can float to us, because of the utter perfection of form, a suggestion of transcendental values. I recollect how that line of Shakespeare's where he speaks of wintry boughs -

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang -

set me wondering with its flawless music what supreme beauty of chaste aloofness it was that had worn the disguise of those chill and empty branches while hinting itself through words so magical. Tennyson's

Let the wild

Lean-headed eagles yelp alone

moved me in an analogous way, though here the allusion seemed to be of some highest beauty of intense and solitary power shining out in a symbol of fierce remote bird-life. That vision of suttee - remarkably un-Hudibrastic - by Butler,

Like Indian widows gone to bed,

In flaming curtains, with the dead,

changed to a spectacular leap of amor dei through an all-exceeding and self-consuming human gesture; while the wooing cadences in which Christabel's preparation for night is traced,

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Her gentle limbs did she undress

And lay down in her loveliness,

sounded to my imagination like a response to some exquisite Beyond of mystery. Seumas O'Sullivan's

And many rivers murmuring in the dark

came, again, sub specie aeternitatis — the evocative art filled the rivers and the murmuring and the dark with attributes above themselves, attributes of a plenary Creative Process by which some primeval chaos is vivified. When, however, I read in Wordsworth,

The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,

I had a sort of inner awakening as if the language struck with a direct breath of the transcendental, uplifting or in-drawing the imagination to a mystic rapture. I thought that this kind of poetry I myself would most desire to write because of the rarity of its rhythm as well as its revelation and the satisfying glow it kindled in something that was the root and core of me and by means of which alone I had strained always to draw from the sense of absolute aesthesis a secret religion.

In general, the poetic process requires no direct mysticism. For the universal consciousness can be touched by any faculty in us and the Archetype can set glowing the hues of a million moods. In art, beauty is all - though we must understand by the term a beauty of substance no less than style if we are to have poetic passion at the highest pitch. Not substance of this particular kind or that, but a sufficient subtlety or weight of meaning mated with music. And the poet who would prove a master in his own psychological domain - life-desire, thought-thrill or spirit-surge - must see that poetry dives and soars beyond the labouring brain and that the more quick the imaginative soul in him through a faithful self-consecration to his art, the larger the kingdom he will rule of magic sea and miraculous sky.

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