Seer Poets

APPENDIX

Wordsworth

I did not come to appreciate the poetry of Wordsworth in my school days, it happened in college, and to a large extent thanks to Professor Manmohan Ghose. In our school days, the mind and heart of Bengali students were saturated with the poetry of Tagore:

In the bower of my youth the love-bird sings,

Wake up, O darling, wake;

Opening thy lids lazy with love,

Wake up, O darling, wake...

This poetry belongs to the type once characterised as follows by our humorous novelist Prabhat Mukherji through one of his characters, a sādhu, describing the charms of the Divine Name:

It has the sweetness and the sugar

of sandesh and rasogulla.

It is needless to say that to young hearts enraptured by such language and feeling, Wordsworth's

Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray!

And when I crossed the wild,

I chanced to see at break of day

The solitary child...

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would appear rather dull and dreary, tasteless almost.

Let me in this connection tell you a story. We were then in college. The Swadeshi movement was in full flood, carrying everything before it. We the young generation of students had been swept off our feet. One day, an elder among us whom I used to consider personally as my friend, philosopher and guide, happened to pass a remark which rather made me lose my bearings a little. He was listing the misdeeds of the British in India. "This nation of shopkeepers!" he was saying, "There is no end to their trickeries to cheat us. Take, for instance, this question of education. The system they have set up with the high-sounding title of "University" and "the advancement of learning" is nothing more than a machine for creating a band of inexpensive clerks and slaves to serve them. They have been throwing dust into our eyes by easily passing off useless Brummagem ware with the label of the real thing. One such eminently useless stuff is their poet Wordsworth, whom they have tried to foist on our young boys to their immense detriment." This remark was no doubt a testimony to his inordinate love of country. But it remains to be seen how far it would bear scrutiny, as being based on truth.

For us in India, especially to Bengalis, the first and foremost obstacle to accepting Wordsworth as a poet would be his simple, artless and homely manner:

Behold her single in the field

Yon solitary Highland lass.

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And, as a classic instance of that famous homely diction, the line that follows:

Can anyone tell me what she sings?

Who would be moved by lines such as these?

On the gates of entry to the poetic world of Wordsworth is engraved this motto:

The Gods approve

The depth and not the tumult of the soul.

It is as if the hermitage of old, an abode of peace and quiet, śānta-rasāspadam-āśramam-idam. All here is calm and unhurried, simple and natural and transparent, there is no muddy current of tempestuous upheavals. That is why the poet feels in his heart as if he were

quiet as a nun

Breathless in adoration,

or else

The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

Here is an easy, natural, limpid flow, undisturbed in its movement and yet with a pleasant charm and filled with an underlying sweetness. But perhaps one has to listen intently to get at the sweetness and beauty of such lines. They do not strike the outer ear for they set up no eddies there; the inner hearing is their base.

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She was a Phantom of Delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight:

Is this not a silent opening of the divine gates of vision?

Ethereal minstrel, pilgrim of the sky.

Do not these words bear us far away on some unknown wings?

Tranquillity and a pleasant sweetness are then the first doors of entry. Through the second doors we come to a wide intimacy, an all-pervading unity, where man and nature have fused into one. This unity and universality breathe through and inspire such simple yet startling words:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

Or,

And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face;

Or else, this easy and natural yet deep-serious utterance carrying the burden of a mantra:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.

Once we cross beyond these second gates we reach an inner region, a secluded apartment of the soul where

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poetry assumes the garb of magic, a transcendent skill leads to words the supernatural beauty and grace of a magician's art. How often we have read these lines and heard them repeated and yet they have not grown stale:

A voice so thrilling never was heard...

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides

Or,

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

This magic has no parallel, except perhaps in Shakespeare's

Daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim

(The Winter's Tale, Act IV, Scene 4)

Sri Aurobindo has referred to another point of greatness in Wordsworth, where the poetic mind has soared still higher, opening itself not merely to an intimacy but to the voice of a highest infinity:

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone

(Prelude, III. II, 62-63)

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Thus, with this poet we gain admittance to the very heart, the innermost sanctuary of poetry where we fully realise what our old Indian critics had laid down as their final verdict, namely, that the poetic delight is akin to the Delight of Brahman.

But even the moon has its spots, and in Wordsworth the spots are of a fairly considerable magnitude. Manmohan Ghose too had mentioned to us these defects. Much of Wordsworth is didactic and rhetoric, that is, of the nature of preaching, hence prosaic and non-poetical although couched in verse. Ghose used to say that even the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality which is so universally admired is mainly didactic and is by and large rhetoric, with very little real poetry in it. I must confess however that to me personally, some of its passages have a particular charm, like

Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar...

But trailing clouds of glory do we come...

Atul Gupta had seen perhaps only the adverse side of Wordsworth. He had marked the heavy hand of the logician, sthūla-hastāvalepa, but omitted to see the delicate workmanship of the artist. But a man's true quality has to be judged by his best performance, and the best work of Wordsworth is indeed of a very high order.

Matthew Arnold brings out very well the nature of

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Wordsworth's best work. Wordsworth at his peak, he says, seems to have surpassed even Shakespeare. He is then no longer in his own self. Mother Nature herself has taken her seat there and she goes on writing herself through the hands of the poet.

Breaking the silence of the seas

Among the farthest Hebrides,

or else,

Or hear old Triton blow his wrèathed horn

are indeed the highest peaks of English poetry.

Sri Aurobindo has said that Vyasa is the most masculine of poets. Echoing his words we may say that Wordsworth is the most masculine of English poets. This classification of poets into "masculine" and "feminine" was made by the poet Coleridge. "Masculine" means in the first place, shorn of ornament, whereas the "feminine" loves ornament. Secondly, the masculine has intellectuality and the feminine emotionalism. Then again, femininity is sweetness and charm, masculinity implies hard restraint; the feminine has movement, like the flow of a stream, the play of melody, while the masculine has immobility, like the stillness of sculpture, the stability of a rock. This is the difference between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, between the styles of Vyasa and Valmiki. This too is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley. The Ramayana has always been recognised

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for its poetic beauty; Valmiki is our first great poet, ādi-kavi. In the Mahabharata we appreciate not so much the beauty of poetic form as a treasury of knowledge, on polity and ethics, culture and spirituality. We consider the Gita primarily as a work of philosophy, not of poetry. In the same way, Wordsworth has not been able to capture the mind and heart of India or Bengal as Shelley has done. In order truly to appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, one must be something of a meditative ascetic, dhyānī, tapasvī, indeed,

Quiet as a nun

Breathless in adoration...

(Translated by Sanat K. Banerji from the original Bengali)

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